She’s sitting at the picnic table in the little pavilion, right where she said she’d be. Every blade of grass feels as high as a hollyhock while I’m crossing the park, thinking posture and poise, certain that I’ll trip and go splat right in front of her.
She stands up when I’m halfway there and comes toward me, arms reaching out and face crumpling. My own face crumples, and there we are, holding on before we’ve even properly seen each other’s eyes. Which are now shut while we hug and shake and cry.
Her hair is yellow, like in a kid’s drawing, springy and full, falling in loose, silky waves to her shoulders, not tied back like yesterday. Impossible hair. She must use Prell shampoo, the one from the magazines that doesn’t work for brown girls with frizz.
Her skin is smooth and golden, like she sits in a chair in the garden and lets the sun toast her skin. Her shoulders are bare and tanned, sticking out of a peach-colored top, and she has on white pedal pushers and sandals. Did she wake up wondering what to wear, like I did? Or did she just happen to put on these clothes that make her summery, head to toe? Even her toenails are painted the color of strawberry ice cream. I’m trying to see if any part of her looks like me, but I’m kind of blinded by the blondness and the creaminess. We sit at the table, one on each side, staring. I notice lines around her eyes and smudges under them, like maybe last night wasn’t so good for sleeping.
“What’s your name?” she says. Not much more than a whisper.
“Malou.” My voice comes out croaky too.
“Malou?”
“It started out Mary,” I tell her. “But there’s a song. Mrs. Hazelton, our matron in the Home, she used to sing it to all the babies.” I lick my lips. Should I sing? I start to sing. “Fly’s in the buttermilk, shoo, fly, shoo. Skip to my Lou, my darling. It has about ten verses.”
She’s smiling at me, like I warmed things up. “You have a pretty voice,” she says. “I know that song. My old nanny sang it to me too. “
She had a nanny?
A mother and a nanny?
“What do I call you?”
“Oh,” she says. “I hadn’t thought…I suppose we could start with Eve and see if that works.”
Start. Making it sound as if we’re going somewhere.
“Yesterday,” she says, “when that boy handed me your note…I nearly fell over. Really, my knees disappeared. It was my dream come true, you finding me.” Tears fill her eyes, and she blinks twice. “I swore I wasn’t going to cry!”
Suddenly, there’s a stone in my throat, hard and sharp-edged, not to be melted by her tears. What does she mean, her dream? Why didn’t she find me? And why did she—
“Why did you give me away?” I ask.
“It wasn’t me!” she cries. “It was my mother!” She gulps and steadies her voice. “I’d sworn to keep you, but my mother…she thought…she imagined she was somehow saving my life, correcting a mistake. She took you right out of my sleeping arms and carried you away to…wherever it was that she carried you. She never considered the pain she might be causing. She—”
Eve stops, and when she speaks again, her voice is flat. “But how can I criticize anyone for what kind of mother she might be? Look at me. What must you think of me?”
I’m not thinking anything. My throat feels like it might rip open with the furious heat I’m trying to swallow. Which she somehow must know, because she deflects it with a whisper.
“I called you Rosemarie,” she says. “For the hour that I had you, and all the years since.”
I pretend that Mrs. Hazelton is watching.
I pretend that Jumpin’ Joe is watching.
I pretend that Cady and Dot and Sara, all the other Sevens, are here, that Anne Shirley and Pollyanna and Jane Eyre are waiting for me to have the moment they never had. Mostly, orphans don’t. Mostly, orphans have dead parents, dead-forever parents. But here I am with a mother sitting right in front of me. I want to shout, Why didn’t you want me? But I sit up straighter and vow to myself, I absolutely will not say anything that will make me feel bad later.
“Rosemarie.” It’s pretty, I think. Rosemarie Delaney. Not exactly me though.
And then: “What are your…other children called?”
Her eyes fill up again.
“Oh!” she says. “There’s so much you deserve to know!”
“I have thought about you every single day of my life,” she says quietly. “That doesn’t fix anything, I know. But I want to tell you that you were never forgotten. A girl can’t have a baby and then forget.”
She doesn’t wait for me to respond. She takes a breath and plunges in, as if jumping into the icy bay.
“I was eighteen that summer, 1947. It was meant to be my last summer at home before I went to Victoria College in Toronto. My mother wasn’t keen on me going away, but my daddy believed that an educated girl is more likely to catch a smart husband. Someone with a big future. That’s why I was going to university.” She rolls her eyes as if we’re friends sharing a joke.
“My mother also wasn’t keen on me working. She had a notion that a job somehow sullied a girl. In those days, right after the war, lots of girls held on to the jobs they’d had while the boys were in the armed forces. And we all wanted to have fun. The war was over, and we’d lost so many young men. But my mother hated that. She wanted me to be dainty and nice, not getting big ideas or making choices she wouldn’t approve of.
“I had a job, though, to spite her, to get out of the house and be somewhere. I worked in a shop that printed wedding invitations. How ironic was that?”
Eve is talking quickly now. I have a million questions buzzing in my head, but I try to listen to every word so I can tell Jimmy and Abby later.
“My mother was the one who made me go that night—and didn’t she regret it later! But a dinner dance hosted by the hospital and full of unmarried doctors? She insisted. She was such a…thistle about meeting the right young man. I didn’t mind going; it was a lark to put on my best dress and climb into a boat. The party was at the hotel on Adanac Island, where every evening was another glamorous ‘do’, the whole summer long.
“All the girls were delighted that night, because of the new young men. Our mothers were more fluttery than we were, mine in particular. She must have pinched my cheeks nine times to bring up the color. Nothing could give her greater pleasure, she said, than to have her daughter attract the eye of a medical intern.” Eve laughs out loud.
It’s the first time I hear my mother laugh! It’s a merry laugh, slides right out—it’s easy to see her as a pretty teenager.
“What my mother did not expect,” she says, “is that I would meet the handsomest medical student in the room, with the best marks in his class and the most friends. And that he would be a Negro.”
Andy Bannerman.
“Andy Bannerman,” she whispers, “was beautiful.”
She stares off toward the treetops at the edge of the park. “I never saw anyone with such confidence! Especially a Negro man in a room full of white people staring at him sideways. He was a beauty guy! That’s what we said back then. Even my husband isn’t so good-looking.”
She looks at me, head tilted to one side. “Has it happened to you yet? Have you ever met a boy who makes your heart flip in your chest like a fish in a bucket?”
My mind flies to Frankie. She has described it perfectly.
“Oh!” She sees my face heat up. “You do know! Well then, you’ll understand, at least a little.”
She laughs again. “He was such forbidden fruit and I was a shameless flirt, provoking my mother on purpose. She tried to stop us dancing. Twice! She suddenly didn’t care that Andy was nearly a doctor, and smart as anything. He’d got himself from Jamaica to Ottawa for medical school and now up here for a residency. Being colored, he had to work twice as hard as anybody else.”
She sighs. “But there were bigots trying to stomp him down anywhere he went. What a crazy world. Not as bad as in the States,” she says. “No one tried to lynch him.”
Her face changes, like, Oops, she remembers who she’s talking to. She reaches over and puts her pale fingers around my brown wrist. “Do you know about any of that?” she says. “In Alabama and Arkansas, all over the States, how they have to fight just to drink from a damn water fountain?”
They?
I nod. I hear Jeff and Bender in my head. Your money’s as good as anybody’s, once we wash the dirt off.
In Canada too, I’m starting to realize.
And your friend is a painter?
You will never see how she shows herself to the world.
Or maybe you’re deaf and your sister is a singer.
You will never hear her voice.
Or what if you were born with white skin? And your daughter is the color of coffee with a splash of cream? How can you ever really know who she is?
“Anyway,” says Eve, “my mother hustled me out of that dance as quickly as she could, without making a scene that her friends might notice.” She grins. “But not quickly enough. It had already stopped being flirtation and turned into something else.”
I’m holding my breath. I can’t see how this has anything to do with donors or deposits or turkey basters. Eve is telling me a love story.
The telephone at Eve’s house was right there in the front hall, where anyone could listen. But she’d already asked Andy, in line for the cloakroom at the dance, bold as brass buttons, she said. Would he like to see her again? Could they meet for an ice cream? Looking straight into his bright gray eyes.
Yes, they met for milkshakes at the Creamery, for walks in the pinewoods, always in secret and ever more secretly as they became more…intimate.
“I was spinning with it,” says Eve. “I’d be doing the dishes or folding a towel and I’d start to laugh out loud, tickled with the power of loving a person who was so utterly wrong.” She sighs. “It was heaven.”
But their time together was dwindling. Eve was to leave for university in nine days on the afternoon when Andy arrived at their meeting place, his playful sweetness nowhere to be seen.
“He’d come to say goodbye,” whispers Eve. “There’d been inquiries at the hospital about some program he’d been involved in, questions about ethics or some such nonsense. The whole batch of interns was being disbanded and sent away. He’d be leaving the next morning, driving back to Ottawa in a Buick full of buddies. He only came to tell me.”
None of what Eve describes matches up with what I heard from Judy and Preesha. This is an entirely different story. Except for the leading man.
Eve keeps going.
“My mother assumed that my wailing woe was because I dreaded university,” she says. “She thought she’d won, that I would stay at home and help with her War Widows luncheons and forget any notion of ‘higher education.’ But somehow I managed to stifle my misery about Andy, and off I went. I wrote him long letters and ached to receive his. But I was determined that they would come to my own dormitory mailbox, where no one could snatch them away from me. Not that there were so many. Only two.”
Pink floods Eve’s cheeks.
“Escaping to university was the last time I took charge of anything.” Her thumb pins a mosquito to the table. “I’d only been in Toronto a week or two when I realized…In the busyness of moving and missing Andy, I hadn’t noticed that my…monthly visitor had not arrived. One morning I began to throw up before I’d even brushed my teeth. My roommate, Shelley, made a joke about having a bun in the oven. Suddenly, I knew what was happening.”
“Me,” I say.
“You.”
She recites the next bit quickly, eyes on the table, where her fingers rub the wood over and over in the same spot. She did not go to see a doctor, because what could he tell her beyond what she had figured out for herself? And hadn’t a doctor got her into this trouble? Why hadn’t Andy done something to prevent this from happening?
“Those were bleak days,” says Eve. “There were dozens of girls on my floor, but I was miserably alone, missing Andy and scared as hell.”
And then her mother arrived for a visit. Mrs. Delaney may have ignored her daughter’s dreams and belittled her opinions, but she certainly knew when Eve’s appearance had changed. She could see the shadowed eyes and the swollen breasts, the inability to eat anything other than soda crackers for breakfast.
“She had me packed up and withdrawn from school before I knew what hit me. She threatened to sue the college for allowing such an outrage to occur under what she assumed was their watch.”
Mrs. Delaney had driven the five hours north, white-lipped and unspeaking.
“I wouldn’t tell her who the daddy was. She was furious. She gave me the silent treatment for days. Which was a relief. But I should have known she was off managing things behind my back, deciding what would happen next.”
One thing they agreed on was that Eve’s father should not be told. They were conspirators in hiding the terrible truth.
“He died not knowing,” says Eve. “Bad enough now for a young girl to find herself in the family way, but then? Oh my goodness…the shame!” Her voice trails off as she closes her eyes for a moment. She explains how she bound her belly each morning and tried to be at the breakfast table before her father appeared so that she’d be sitting down already. Her reasons for leaving school remained unspecified, and he didn’t much care, after all. She was pretty enough to find a husband. As long as she didn’t wait too long.
“But what about—didn’t you tell Andy Bannerman?” My mind fills with pictures of a tall dark knight on horseback, galloping past the Georgian Bay Creamery, scooping up the gold-blond Eve Delaney (with one brown, muscled arm encircling her round tummy) and hauling her onto the saddle behind him.
“I never told him either,” says Eve. “I thought it would sound hysterical. Or that he’d think I was lying, trying to trap him somehow. I just stopped writing letters. That was the saddest of all, deciding to lose him on purpose.”
His secret is like a lively puppy that I’m hanging on to by the collar with all my might. I don’t want to tell Eve that he’d had—how many?—kids already by the time I came along. And how many since? Does he even know?
Since he has no idea that I existed, he has never spent a minute considering me. But what about my brothers and sisters? Did he realize back then which, um, deposits were successful? Jimmy and Abby and the twins and how many others that I haven’t met yet?
Judy and Preesha and Eve all say that he was kind and handsome and funny. But…but…is it kind to have a bunch of babies and not even know their names?
Is he sitting beside some window in Baltimore? I don't even know where that is. (My mind hops to the green leather atlas in the library at the Benevolent Home. I wish I could turn the pages to find the dot on a map where my father lives.) Is he at his desk, looking out at the rooftops, wondering about his children?
Did he keep a list for himself of the women he turned into mothers? Did he ever even know?
Was it kindness, what he did for ladies who needed help? Or was it a brand of showing off, a contest with himself or with the other nearly-doctors to see how many children one man could make?
I say it quietly, even though inside I’m at top volume. “Just to be absolutely clear…You had actual sex with Andy Bannerman?”
That silky laugh. Of course she did, more than once or twice.
“You are the incontestable proof.”
I know I can’t tell her about Jimmy or Abby or the twins. Not now anyway. If she doesn’t know what Andy Bannerman and maybe the other interns were doing, how could I be the one to tell her?
But I was different. I didn’t happen that way.
“I was an accident,” I blurt out. “You didn’t want me.”
“You were a surprise,” she says. “I maybe wouldn’t have chosen…I hardly knew, really, how it all worked. My mother certainly never discussed such things with me. Nobody talked about sex in those days. But once I realized? I wanted you more than anything. Please…never think otherwise.” She reaches a hand toward mine, but I pull away.
“Too late for that,” I say. “I’ve been in an orphanage for sixteen years.”
“That was my mother’s fault,” she says.
My hands curl into fists. “If you supposedly wanted me—more than anything—why didn’t you come to find me? Why didn’t you holler till she told you where I was?”
Silence.
“You can’t even look me in the eye!” I shout. “You blame everything on her, but you’re the one who sat there for sixteen years, doing nothing to find a person you claim you were thinking about every day!” I stand up so fast that my knees whack the underside of the picnic table. I jerk back down with a jolt of pain. “How can I trust a single thing you’ve said if you never even tried to look for me?”
I hope so.
It’s not kind, not poised or proper, but it’s the truth.
I feel like my throat is clogged with the bitterest herb in the garden. Horseradish, maybe, hot and spicy and mean.
But she doesn’t. She gazes at me for an extra-long minute, as if her focus is sharpening the whole time. My chest hurts like I’ve had hiccups all day. No way is she going to love me now. I’m the one who’s going to cry.
“You’re right,” she says. “I’ve spent my life believing that my mother ruined it.” She puts a hand up to stop me from saying anything. “And all along, I was ruining yours.”
“I thought you were dead,” I say. “That’s what makes an orphan. I never was mad at you until now—until I realized that you were alive and having your own cozy life, not caring one bit about what happened to me. So I can’t honestly say you ruined my life. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that you gave me a life without a mother in it.”
I’m still brimming with fury, but I’m also remembering how many questions I have, how there are whole fat chunks of the story that I don’t know yet.
Shut up, Malou, and listen.
“It seems to me,” says Eve, “that you must be a pretty amazing girl. You managed to put this together better than I ever did.”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened next?” I say.
Eve had intended to run away and have the baby—me—somewhere a million miles from Parry Sound and her mother. Or that was what she fantasized about. I don’t have the impression that she’d done much planning. She seems to be kind of a wimp, my mother.
Meanwhile, my grandmother had done some research and found a place in Montreal, called the Friendly Home, where wayward girls went to have their babies in secret. Isn’t Friendly strangely related to Benevolent? Why not just say the real word out loud: House of Shame. Instead of pretending that girls are going to some kind of jolly picnic?
Eve never ran away, and she never went to the Friendly Home either. A few days before she was meant to leave, she began to feel pains. Luckily, her father was in Hamilton at a conference, because the baby was coming sooner than expected.
“I won’t tell you how much it hurt,” she says with a crooked smile. “You might want your own some day.”
“My mother begged for a private room. She was spitting mad when there wasn’t one. Very rude to the nurses. Especially because the woman in the next bed, she’d been rushed in from the reservation, you know? An Indian. Some kind of emergency. But her baby was healthy—a boy, a little brown imp. My mother was awful. Dark babies popping out all over the place, she said. Like mildew.”
Eve shakes her head.
“I only held you once,” she says. “I fell asleep with you”—she crooks her arm to show a baby-sized space at her side—“right here next to me. And when I woke up…my mother had already taken you. Before I could even say goodbye. The nurses were stony-faced, packing up the little clothes I’d brought to take you home in. Better that way, they said.”
“Isn’t that kidnapping?” I say. “You could have gone to the police.”
Eve just shakes her head. “I was an unmarried white teenager with a brown baby. They only would have told me that my mother had done the right thing.”
The silence seems to grow thorns, all the things not said yet.
I still have a dictionary-thick pile of questions. But she is sliding painted toes back into sandals. She opens her purse and pulls out a gold tube and a compact shaped like a seashell.
“I must look a wreck,” she says. “All this crying.”
I shake my head. She looks beautiful.
“What happens now?” I say. Is she just going to roll berry-colored lipstick over her mouth and say goodbye?
She slips her things back into the purse and looks at her watch. “My mother took the children for ice cream,” she says. “They think I have a doctor’s appointment.”
That might be the worst thing that Eve has said yet. Confessing that her mother still runs the show.
“I do want to meet you again,” she says. “I’d like to get to know who you are.”
Rosemarie.
I hear the but before she says it.
“But,” she says, “my husband—”
“Mr. Beckwith,” I say.
“Doctor Beckwith,” says Eve.
“Oh. So your mother got her wish after all.” I nearly add “since he’s white this time,” but Eve might figure out that I’ve been spying on her family.
A minute of deadly quiet and then: “George was in the same class,” she says. “In Andy’s group of interns. He liked it here and came back to open a practice when the time came. I didn’t meet him until three or four years later. He knows I had a baby. That’s not an easy thing to keep hidden from a doctor.”
She runs her fingers through her hair, mussing the smoothness of it. “It’s better to tell your husband the truth about most things,” she says.
“Including your mistakes?”
“Let’s say past relationships.” Her fingers pick at the strap of her purse. “So he knows I had a baby. My mother would be appalled that he knows that much. But he understands. He had one or two girlfriends before I came along.”
And how many babies did George have, I wonder? How many little blond babies are on Pete’s hockey team or in Lucy’s band at school?
“But…” says Eve. A long pause while she shapes what to say. “This is not nice to admit. I’m sorry; it’s awful. But what I told him was that the baby had died.”
“And it’s not just that, is it?” I whisper. My being alive is bad enough. “You never told him it was Andy. Did you?”
She shakes her head, staring at her hands. I watch the red flush creep up her pale neck.
Forget the stupid husband for a second. The truth is clamped around my rib cage, making it hard to breathe. My skin is why. My being colored.
The thing you notice first is the real reason for hiding the biggest secret.
“How did I end up at the Home?”
“I don’t even really know,” says Eve. “I can only guess. The instant my mother saw you, she knew who your father was. Obviously. She had a conniption—that’s what we called it. She was beyond reason.”
Eve’s voice cracks on the last few words. “She stole you right out of my sleeping arms. She must have paid off the nurses and hired a driver—”
“She did,” I say. “The driver anyway.” Mrs. Hazelton’s story makes complete sense now. “She hired a colored driver. That’s who carried me to the door. How about that?”
Tears fill Eve’s eyes. “When she came back…she wouldn’t tell me where she’d taken you, just that we must never mention the baby again. And we haven’t. It was beyond imagining for her to be related to a Negro.”
I say.
She takes a deep, trembly breath.
“I never loved anyone the way I loved Andy Bannerman,” she says. “If you will give me a chance, I want to love you too.” Another breath. “I want Michael and Alexis to know their sister. And that means telling George.”
I wait. I’m pretty sure there’s more.
“Once George knows…” Eve smiles at me with a flash of mischief. “I think you’ve inspired me,” she says, “to tell my mother to go to hell.”
We walk across the grass together. She offers me a lift, and I say no, thank you. She gets into her car and rolls down the window because it’s baking inside, she says. Hotter than the devil’s pajamas.
And then we wave goodbye.