BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
1979–1980
Thanks to Mrs. Spencer’s generosity, Laurel was able to prepay a year’s worth of rent in a building with a doorman and a guard. A week later, she enrolled at Wellesley.
Though she’d been a literature major, Laurel transferred all the credits she could and switched her concentration to finance. When she thought of novels and biographies and the great literature of the world, she thought of the duchess, and she thought of Win. She’d never graduate if she let herself get mired in the story of Pru. The season for burying herself in books had passed.
After she moved, Laurel tried calling Win. Twice. Both times a woman answered, identifying herself as Mrs. Seton. So much for “waiting forever,” she thought. Not that she truly expected he would.
Pregnant and fattening by the day, Laurel worked to finish her degree and also to formalize her break from Charlie. He refused to grant the divorce and took to harassing her, materializing on campus and appearing outside buildings late at night. Laurel lopped off her hair and dyed it brown, hoping the disguise might suffice, praying he’d eventually give up.
Former golden boy Charlie Haley soon became quite the adversary of campus security, who escorted him off the grounds on an almost daily basis. Charlie was by then a full-blown drunk, which meant he was mostly relegated to a wheelchair. The students who didn’t know Laurel would forever remember him as the homeless wino that terrorized the Wellesley girls.
Laurel never told Charlie that she was pregnant, even before she left, but suspected he knew. As her due date approached, he circled closer, tighter, like a shark around its prey. Laurel dressed in baggy, flowing clothes but at some point the wind would’ve blown and revealed the budding Annie hidden inside.
On August 31, 1979, on the fifth floor of Massachusetts General Hospital, Laurel Innamorati Haley gave birth to a bald-headed, blue-eyed, seven-pound baby girl named Annabelle. She was so delicious this girl, slept six hours a night straight out of the gates. She hardly ever cried.
The only witnesses to the birth were one doctor, two nurses, and an Eastern European woman named Blanka who sometimes cleaned Laurel’s apartment when she was too spent or sick to do it herself. On the birth certificate, Laurel wrote “unknown” in the place a father’s name would go.
Shortly after Annie’s arrival, Blanka, the maid who knew nothing about Charlie, told Laurel stories of a handicapped grifter who hung around the building’s lobby. One morning she watched him argue with the security guard, a well-heeled older couple standing behind him.
“That’s odd,” Laurel said, trying to hide her panic.
Charlie knew where she was and had the support and backing of his parents. The mere thought petrified Laurel. Bad dye jobs and ill-fitting clothes would serve no bulwark against the levels of wealth and fury Charlie’s family had.
Could his family assert any sort of claim on Laurel? Her apartment? The chubby, happy, rosy-cheeked babe of perfection? Laurel was technically still Charlie’s wife and Annie his child. Because of this, Laurel existed in a constant state of medium-grade fear, which was the very worst fear of all. You never knew when it might explode into full-blown terror.
One unusually warm winter morning, after a call to the admissions department at Georgetown Law, Laurel walked to the bank, baby Annie nestled in a wrap against her chest. She may not have been at Berkeley anymore, but she knew where to find all the good hippies, and therefore the best baby carriers.
Once at the bank, Laurel withdrew the sum of five hundred dollars and then chatted with the teller while another employee summoned the manager. He needed to speak with her, they said. Laurel braced herself as Annie wiggled against her chest.
“Is something wrong, Mr. Green?” she asked, heart thumping.
“I have a telegram for you, ma’am. Just came in this morning.”
“Oh, thank you,” Laurel said and took the paper.
She breathed in and started to read.
WESTERN UNION
TELEGRAM
1/7/1980
MRS LAUREL HALEY
C/O BANC OF BOSTON
10 BOYLSTON ST
BOSTON MA 02115
TO MRS HALEY
PLEASE COME RETRIEVE YOUR PAINTINGS FROM MY HOME AT QUAI DE BETHUNE PARIS. I AM WITH CHILD AND NEED SPACE. MUCH APPRECIATED YOURS TRULY MRS JAMES SETON.
Mrs. Seton. Mrs. James Seton. Is this who Laurel had heard on the line? The wife of Jamie, not of Win?
Maybe, she thought. Just maybe …
Giddy with a prospect she didn’t understand, Laurel took out two thousand more dollars and rushed home to pack. They were on winter break and classes would not resume for another few weeks.
The next morning she taxied to Logan Airport and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. As dusk draped across Boston, that so-called City of Notions, Laurel boarded a plane with only a backpack, a baby, and a head full of hope.