The After Party (25 page)

“And this is the man you invited back into your life?”

“It wasn't Sid's fault. It was my fault. I was no better than a whore. But I had never been better than that, Cece. I had never been anything more than a girl whose entire life had been paid for by men.”

“That's ridiculous,” I said. My cheeks felt hot. “You were eighteen years old. You didn't have a choice.”

“Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. Either way, I took Sid's money.”

She tried never to think of David, but she thought of little else. The way he tried, and failed, to lift his head when he lay on her shoulder. The sucking motion he made with his mouth, though he was fed through a tube. The way she, and only she, could calm him when he was beside himself. He did not want Dorie. He wanted her.

Despair. She said it was her purest feeling, in those days, when she thought of David at the home, crying, nobody there to tend to him. Nobody there who understood him.

“I had wanted to leave. And I had done it. But in Hereford, all
I wanted was David. If I'd had a normal child, I would have given him up and when I thought of him I would have pictured a happy child, living a happy life.”

“You would have missed that child, too,” I said. “You were someone's mother.”

“No,” Joan said. “No. I don't think so. You're a mother, Cece. You were meant to be someone's mother. I wasn't. But I couldn't quite get rid of the guilt. I hadn't fought for my son. I imagined the woman who would take care of him at the home. She was strong, sturdy. Capable. Everything I was not. But in my mind she wasn't kind to David, because he wasn't hers. She didn't let him float in the tub for hours, to distract him from his pain. She didn't hold him while he sobbed, his hot head burning her forearm.
I
would have done that. I did do that. Because I was his mother.”

“It was your instinct,” I said. “To make him safe. To soothe him.”

“Yes. It was. But it was also my instinct to abandon. To leave.” She gave me a sideways glance. “I'm good at leaving. You know that best of all. At first, David made me more than I was before. And then I left. And it made me less.”

I thought of what Idie had told me, that I'd stopped being a child when my mother fell ill. Joan had stopped being a child when David was born.

“You regretted it,” I said. “You made a mistake.”

She ignored me. “I can't fathom how he felt. All that was familiar to him: gone. I know nothing about where I sent my child.” She brushed her hair from her forehead. “I couldn't live with him. And I couldn't live without him. When I allowed
myself to think about what I had done, I wanted to die. And when I felt that way,” she said, “I took a pill. Or a drink. The drink worked faster, but the pill lasted longer. It was simple. Days passed. Months. I moved into Sid's room. I turned nineteen. I waited for Sid all day. I didn't read anymore, but it didn't matter. I could wait forever. There was no future there, no past. And then my mother found me. I don't know how. But she came to see me and I gave everything up.”

Mary told Joan her plan. David would live with Dorie in Galveston. First the beach house, while a more suitable house, without stairs, was built nearby. Dorie's husband, a large man, would live with them. He could lift David as he grew, carry him from room to room. Joan could see David whenever she wanted. On two conditions. She would return to Houston, to live her life as if nothing had happened. And she could never tell another living soul about him.

“And then she told me something that made me say yes. Dorie had told her David loved the water. And in Galveston, of course, he would always have the beach.

“Houston,” Joan said. “She got me back where she wanted me. I would have done anything for David, at that point. Gone anywhere.”

She had been paralyzed in Hereford. Sometimes she woke in the middle of the night and wondered if she was dead; she knew she would die soon. And then Mary came and offered her another chance. Joan realized, as her mother spoke, that she would do whatever her mother asked of her. If it meant seeing her child again. If it meant that David would not live in a home. If he could
have the beach. Dorie had loved Joan. Dorie would love David, too. She already did.

Maybe, if Joan had had her wits about her, she would have refused. Would have demanded money, and then she could have taken David somewhere else. But where would she have gone, with a boy like David? What corner of the earth? Perhaps she would have told Mary that David was not to be hidden away, that she was not ashamed. But Joan could not conceive of what concealing her child would mean, how it would change her. She could not foresee the shame.

Joan would never know, what she could have gotten if she had pressed Mary. She would always wonder. She would always understand that she'd had one chance, in that tiny room in Hereford, Texas.

“And I lost it. But I didn't even know what I wanted. And I had already failed David once. I thought if I argued, if I tried to negotiate, Mama might just disappear.”

“That's when you came back.”

“Yes.”

“But you kept in touch with Sid.”

“Yes,” she said. She lifted her hair from the back of her neck, sighed as the air hit her sweaty, salty skin. I felt it, too. “He took care of me, when I couldn't. We kept in touch. He's the only person besides Mama who knows everything.”

I was always here
, I wanted to say.
I was always waiting, wanting to know you.

“And then David died, this May. In his sleep. Dorie found him late at night, when she went to check on him. I was out, with
you and the girls and your husbands. I didn't know he was dead until hours later.”

The gravestone read
May 10
. I tried to place it but could not. We had been out, probably at the Cork Club. Ray had been with me. Ray, whose presence meant that I would never have to endure what Joan had endured. He would endure with me. For me. Joan had been alone.

“The doctors were wrong. They said he wouldn't live to see his first birthday.” She smiled, proudly, and I thought of Tommy, and I felt a pure, deep sadness. “He didn't walk, or talk. But he knew who I was. I like to think he loved me.”

“Of course he loved you.”

“When he died I called Sid. Because he knows me.”

This hurt, but my feelings were the least of Joan's problems.

“Joan,” I said. “What did he look like?”

“Oh,” she said, and put her hand on her throat. “Just like me. He was a beautiful boy.”

We sat awhile longer on the hard-packed ground. I felt some inexplicable combination of dread and giddiness. Joan had told me, had finally trusted me. But her story—for a brief moment, I wished she hadn't told me anything at all.

“Do you blame me?”

“For what?” I asked, though I knew perfectly well what she meant.

“For leaving David.”

“No,” I said, and it was true, I did not. I took her hand. Joan stared at it, then up at me. It felt like the first time she had looked at me in years. “I feel sorry for you.”

Joan smiled, a sad smile. “Don't,” she said.

But that was impossible. I always would.

“Your mother let you bury him . . .” I gestured at the grave. “Here?”

“My one victory. I told her if she denied me this I would leave and never come back. She allowed it. She probably thought no one would notice. What's one more grave, in a cemetery full of them. I'll be buried here, one day.” She touched the earth. “Here. With him.”

The sky was changing from black to gray. We would need to leave soon, before Ray noticed my absence.

I wanted to ask Joan how she had borne it, when I'd had my own child. Also a boy, a boy who must have, despite his lack of speech, seemed perfect to Joan. She had come to the hospital, and held him. What that must have cost her. I wanted to ask how she'd done it, all these years, how she'd kept such a secret, how she'd denied herself her child's love, day after day after day.

“I don't think I ever really knew you,” I said suddenly.

“You knew me,” she said, and I waited, and I could see she was deciding how to finish her sentence. “The best of anyone,” she said finally.

It might have been true, that I knew her the best of anyone. I was certainly persistent. I was certainly dogged. I knew Joan as well as she wanted to be known.

Joan stood. Her palms were covered with dirt. I wanted very badly to take her hands in mine, clean them. But I did not.

“I'm going to leave,” she said. “I have to.”

“Where are you going to go?” The news did not surprise me.
Joan would move away. Go somewhere she was not known. Somewhere cold. Busy.

“I'll tell you tomorrow night,” she said. “Let's go to the Cork Club. For old times' sake.”

•   •   •

F
red pulled over three houses before mine, in front of the Dempseys'.

“Ray,” I said, as an explanation to Joan, whose eyebrows were raised. I was embarrassed to tell her that Ray wouldn't approve.

But Joan didn't care about Ray. I saw, in that moment, what David had robbed her of: caring about anybody else in the world. She hadn't, since his birth. But now that he was gone, the life she had imagined, living in the home for unwed mothers: was it hers?

Her hair was completely dry by this point, and it fell in waves around her face. The plaid blanket was still wrapped around her shoulders, and she sat slumped in her seat, exhausted and swollen eyed.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” I said, and it seemed like such a strange thing to say: as if we were leaving a party, a club.

“Midnight,” Joan said. “I'll be there.”

I slipped back into our house just as I had hoped. It was five o'clock in the morning. Tommy wouldn't be up for another two hours. Ray wouldn't be up for one. Both of them sleeping: Ray on his back, just as I had left him, and Tommy with his head pushed into the corner of his crib, the corner of his blanket in his mouth.

I stood in his room for a long time without touching him. I
didn't smooth his hair away from his brow, which was, I knew, hot and moist, the way it always was at night. He slept fervently, had since he was a tiny infant. I tried to imagine my life had Tommy been absent from it—had he been raised by someone else, nearby but not with me—and could not. It seemed like a punishment handed down from God: having your child both near and unreachable. A child who was a terrible secret. I tried to imagine Joan's life, all these years without her child, and could not.

When Tommy was born, I had refused Ray's offer of a baby nurse. His mother had stayed away, perhaps sensing that I didn't want her help. I wanted no one's help. This infant was
mine
. In those first days, he was a collection of sounds and odors: His cry, which sounded more like a sad song than a wail. The vaguely eggy scent of his dirty diapers. The soft murmurs he made as he slept. The sweet smell that emerged from the red well of his mouth. But what I remember most is the hot weight of him, as he lay on top of me for hours, gently rising and falling according to my breath. Tommy made me feel needed, for the first time in my life. He could not survive without me. Then Ray would come home from work, and kiss Tommy's hand—he said he didn't want to kiss him on the forehead and chance making him sick—and I could tell he was proud of me, for loving his son. Loving Tommy was the most natural thing in the world.

Loving David had been an instinct for Joan, as well. But Tommy was an anchor. David had been a snare.

I'd spent so much time, years and years, trying to imagine my way into Joan's brain. Trying to see the world as she saw it. Trying to understand it as she understood it.

•   •   •

T
he next day I took Tommy to the park, went to Jamail's to pick up a few extra things instead of sending Maria. The day did not pass quickly, but it passed.

Ray and I were usually in bed by ten, ten thirty at the latest. Tonight was no different. We had eaten dinner outside—burgers on the grill, corn on the cob—put Tommy to bed, and had a glass of wine in the living room in companionable silence. I had lain beside Ray and listened to him fall asleep, one breath at a time.

At eleven o'clock I rose, went downstairs to the laundry room, where I had stashed an outfit.

For the rest of my life I would wonder about Joan's true motives. Did she want to meet at the Cork Club for sentimentality's sake? We had been happy there. She had been happy there, the queen of Houston. Or maybe she hadn't been happy there. Maybe this had all simply served as a distraction.

I was going to meet Joan tonight because I wanted a conclusion. I zipped my dress, applied lipstick by feel.

I envisioned our future in clear terms: She would move away, and I would see her a few times a year, when she came back to Houston to visit. We could write letters. We could talk on the telephone. Ray would be happy.

I patted my hair, straightened my dress, which was brand-new, silvery blue and off the shoulder, a dress I would not normally have wasted on a Wednesday night. I smoothed the fabric over my hips and flipped off the light switch before I opened the laundry room door.

Ray. Standing there in his striped pajamas, his hands balled into fists by his sides.

“Oh,” I said, and felt for the doorknob behind me, as if I could simply disappear back into the laundry room.

“Oh,” Ray said. “Oh.” He was mocking me, I realized. Ray rarely mocked me. It wasn't his style.

“I'm just going out to meet . . .” I trailed off.

“To meet Joan,” he finished for me.

I nodded.

“And you were with her last night, too?” He waited for me to answer. When I said nothing, he continued. “You weren't in bed. I'd hoped you were in my office, sipping scotch, being sad. I didn't get up to check because I didn't want to know. But I knew.” He looked away.