THE FIRST TIME VANESSA Evans née Adams began to suspect there might be something wrong with her, she was eight years old and feared she might be allergic to lemons. This made her melancholy because she loved all things lemon: lemonade, lemon meringue pie, lemon bars, lemon ices.
She loved lemons so much that the mere possibility of being unable to enjoy the food she loved best made her distraught. This in turn made her determined to prove that she was not allergic to her favorite thing. So she continued eating lemons and distracted herself from feeling unwell by thinking about something else so she wouldn’t have to acknowledge the gnawing pain in the middle of her body. First, she tried thinking about something else, and then she began doing something else. When she was eight, she systematically and fastidiously pulled the petals off all the daisies in their garden.
That’s how it began.
That was twenty-two years ago.
Now there was no going back. For the most part, she had led an idyllic, charmed, protected life. Which was appropriate for someone who looked like her. She was the ideal of female beauty. She wore clothes well, had a pleasing smile, slight hands, a kind demeanor, and a great sense of fashion. There was nothing wrong. All her life, her mother and father told her so: the perfect child with perfect manners, the perfect daughter, sister, student, friend, and dancer, Vanessa deserved nothing less than to make someone a perfect wife and continue to live a perfect life.
She met Finn when she was eighteen and he was nineteen. He was in his junior year at Harvard. They had a whirl of a summer together, but in November 1917, he went off to war. He was gone eighteen months, and when he came back, he was a different man. Vanessa didn’t know how or why. But the silly happy romantic boy she had danced with and walked through the Public Garden with was no longer present in the wounded and decorated serious man who returned to her. Some secret burden cast a shadow on Finn’s every smile and every stride.
Their previous talk of marriage stopped. He wanted to take his time, focus on his education. If they were going to be married, he wanted to make sure he could provide for his family. That was the most important thing to him, he said. Not to let her down.
The happiest day of Vanessa’s life was when Finn finally proposed. The second happiest was their wedding day.
Vanessa gave him two girls, one after the other, born a year apart. Afterward, she had a little trouble coping. There was nothing specific she struggled with, just an acidic malaise, a little burning in the gut that made it difficult to get things done.
Finn never questioned it. When Vanessa said to him, dear one, I could use a little help, he sprang to action, finding her Edith, a professional and conscientious governess, if slightly long in her years.
This Friday evening, while Vanessa waited for Finn to come home, she was washing all the sponges in the house. Also all the rags, towels, and cloth napkins she could find in the cupboards. She set them into the tub of hot water and washed them all, scrubbing them with her soft milk-white hands.
On the surface, it was a good and proper thing for the woman of the house to do. It meant she liked to keep things clean.
But just under the surface was the plain truth that Vanessa had a full-time staff to perform these tasks. What no one else could do was be a proper hostess to her family, most of whom were sitting out on her balcony at that very moment, waiting for her to join them. What she needed to do was her hair and makeup, what she needed to do was put on a summer dress, and join her family for canapés.
Vanessa needed to be on top of different things today.
Instead she was exhaustively washing the rags in the scrub room off the kitchen on the lowest level of their multi-level manse.
Everything was fine. There was nothing to worry about.
But Vanessa couldn’t stop washing the rags.
Not only couldn’t stop, but didn’t want to.
She was thinking about their eighth anniversary celebration last week.
First the blessings: Finn had such a way of smiling at her, such an open way of showing his frank affection. Also: Finn’s occasional salty word, his occasional saucy way with her. Much to be thankful for there.
More blessings: the girls looked like her, flaxen-haired and slight, and not like Finn, who was handsome and shaggy-haired but had a broadness of body and ruggedness of face that served men much better than it served women.
There were two tiny black marks on Vanessa’s otherwise shiny existence. The first was the continued consequence of the long-ago suspected allergy to lemons. It had seemed so insignificant once, especially from a child’s point of view: to quiet your mind by focusing on something else.
And the second blemish: Finn wanted to have another baby. He wanted a boy. As if he cared nothing for her two difficult pregnancies or for her subsequent miscarriage. The specter of the baby they had lost cast a pall over the Elysian Fields that was their life.
“But Finn,” Vanessa said to him the night of their celebration last week. It was late when they got home, and they sat in their drawing room before turning in after a fantastic evening. Then he had to go and ruin things by bringing it up again. “You’re not serious about having another baby, are you? If we have one more, why, that will make three.”
“Yes,” he said in his resonant male voice. Usually, Vanessa loved his voice. It was so protective and comforting. But not that night. She wished she didn’t need to explain the starkly obvious. But he sipped his tea in their state-of-the-art drawing room with the fire burning and the candles flickering, as if he were waiting for just such an explanation.
“Finn, what if it’s another girl?”
He beamed. “How lucky—three girls.”
“And then?”
“Perhaps we can try for a boy after that.”
Vanessa wanted to faint. Then and now as she was remembering it, her hands immersed in the cooled soapy water, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing.
“Try for a boy after a third baby?” The tips of her nails quivered with the impossibilities. “Finn, no one we know has even three children,” Vanessa whispered. “Try for another? What are we, Catholics?”
She watched him take an almost imperceptible breath.
“I know many people,” Finn said, “who have more than three children.”
“Not people on the hill,” Vanessa said. “Maybe people you lend money to. Not our people.” Two children is what civilized human beings had, the kind of people who attended Park Street Church on Sundays. Two children at most. Sometimes Vanessa wished her parents had stopped with her and not gone on to have Eleanor. Her sister is what happened when parents unwisely decided to have more children.
“It’s late,” he said. “I’m turning in.” That’s all he said. But he didn’t kiss her head and didn’t smile at her as he bade her goodnight.
“You’re an only child, Finn,” Vanessa said to him before he went upstairs. “What do you know about having many children? If we were meant to have a boy, we would have.” Neither looked at the other when she spoke these words. “We have our precious girls. In so many ways, the hand we’ve been dealt has been a royal flush. No use complaining.”
“I’m not complaining,” Finn said. “I know better than anyone what I’ve been dealt.” That odd faint bitterness crept into his voice. “But if we don’t at least try again, my life will eventually feel to me less like a royal flush and more like a handful of queens.”
This, after their night at the Somerset Club when Mildred Bailey sang “The Man I Love,” and they danced with such abandon that Vanessa was certain that penumbras of lost and not yet created children were far from his heart.
Showed you what she knew.