After her outburst in the tiny courtroom, Rose stopped and looked around her. Meggy was up in Natalie’s lap, gripped tight, and both Natalie and Guy were staring at her as though she’d gone crazy.
The judge cleared his throat and studied Rose. An aunt did have a slightly better chance of gaining custody than someone unrelated, he said, but he was not allowed to rule according to his personal view of a case nor even according to common sense. Family law might be out of date; but without proof of behavior endangering the child’s survival, the law required him to protect the rights of the natural parent. Natalie’s rights.
So Rose had no claim either.
Beyond the laws governing music, she had never pondered law. She’d believed not in law, but in luck, something she thought one could make for oneself. She’d believed that something could be done about nearly anything. But nothing, it seemed, could be done here.
The judge concluded the hearing with what seemed to Rose to be a scolding directed at Natalie, not that a scolding could make any difference.
Keeping Meggy truant was illegal, he said, and he’d be checking that Meggy was back in school in September. Then he took up the visitation order. “I see that you are a strong-minded woman and determined to do things your way,” he told Natalie. “You’re the natural mother. We grant you that. You call the shots. You’re the only one who can say whether this girl will be allowed to know the man she considers her father.”
“She’ll forget him,” said Natalie. “I have.”
“I doubt that very much,” said the judge.
“How would you know? You aren’t god,” muttered Natalie.
“I’m not god, no—but I’ve seen quite a few families,” he replied.
Rose saw he couldn’t help. He couldn’t even enforce courtesy. If god was the sort who refused to help, who let things go on without lifting a hand, then the judge might as well have been god, holding lives to the tracks they had already taken, making sure that none derailed, condemning each to carry on exactly as they were: Meggy condemned to Natalie, Rose to solitude, and Guy to his hand-built house with its empty bed for a girl who never came.
Guy spoke, his voice trembling. “Natalie,” he said, “remember the day we met? All you wanted, you said, was to make a family. All you wanted was to share the upbringing with someone. And didn’t I jump in? Didn’t I jump in up to my neck?”
Natalie shrugged and looked away. It was over. She didn’t have to bother with him any more. She moved Meggy off her lap.
“Well,” she said. “I’ll leave you to your regrets and I to mine.”
“Listen, Ms. MacGregor,” said the judge. He moved his gaze to Natalie, to Meggy, to Guy, and then to Rose, and he was no longer exerting power over them, but merely looking at them. “I’ve seen quite a number of fathers and daughters in all stages of life. They don’t tend to forget each other. I’ve seen quite a number of aunts and nieces, and they don’t forget each other either.” Rose sat up straighter. “If you keep this girl from knowing other people, you’ll keep her from what she needs. She needs a larger world. That world is right in this room, if you can handle your differences.”
This was neither law nor luck; this was the common sense that could not defeat law, but Rose leapt at it. “We can do that,” she choked out. “We can make peace.”
“You’re unbelievable,” said Natalie.
Rose turned to her sister. She would apologize. Natalie had a terrible authority and Rose had been ignorant of that. To have misjudged Natalie’s power had put Rose in the wrong. She had done harm and would have to pay—Meggy wouldn’t look at her now.
“I’m sorry, Natalie,” she made herself say. “I’m truly, deeply sorry.”
“For what?”
Rose took a breath. “For trying to take your child from you.”
“Okay,” said Natalie in a strange little voice. It seemed to dawn on her that the ordeal was over. She gave a shuddering sigh and reached up with both hands and lifted her hair out of her face and smiled to herself, for an instant restored to the golden state she’d inhabited when she was pregnant and self-assured, overflowing Lila’s chair.
The judge and the recorder got up and went.
And then they were descending, Rose, Natalie, Meggy, and Guy, hurtling downward in the courthouse elevator. Guy stood heavy in his work boots. Natalie’s face was strangely mobile, now frowning, now grinning, as though her features were at war. Rose returned to Meggy the best of the treasures, the coin purse and the tiny ebony Pegasus, which had probably been ill chosen. In the pert spread of its dark wings was the fool’s dream of escape, of flying away. Looking neither at the horse and the purse nor at Rose, Meggy added them to her bulging pockets.
In the elevator, that tiny, falling room, Guy asked Natalie if he could talk to Meggy for a moment. Natalie nodded and looked away and he knelt, seeming to collapse his big frame around the girl. Rose thought he’d hug Meggy to him. Instead, whispering to her, he cupped her shoulders, his long fingers nearly meeting in the middle of her back. Rose tried to stop up her ears. She couldn’t bear to hear him say good-bye, to see him in defeat, this man she’d once so loved, this tall man with prematurely gray hair who had set out to build in stone.
Stepping off the elevator, she burst out ahead of them and turned and spread her arms to stop them. They would still eat together, wouldn’t they? Their table was waiting in the art museum, the table overlooking the river. Her treat?
They stared at her. People were trying to get onto the elevator; they were gumming up traffic. Hadn’t she made herself understood? She was taking them to lunch. She pointed. It was just a block away. She’d run ahead and claim the table. She dashed out into the blindingly bright day and grabbed a table, a big table, and sat.
If Guy had won custody, as she’d so foolishly expected, Natalie would have come to the table, clinging to Meggy as long as she could. Guy would have been diplomatic, saving his exultation for later, and then the Gilpins would have burst in and eased things.
The museum restaurant’s windows were cranked open all along a curved wall that faced the river, and barge horns blew, low and sick-sounding, below the noise of street traffic. After twenty minutes, the wait staff began to fuss and glare. Lunch rush was passing and the largest table stood empty except for the one woman, waiting.
Rose laid money on the table, the sixty dollars plus tip she’d expected to pay for the lunch, not to please the wait staff but to stave off the loss she could feel coming, as though by paying she could forfeit money instead of Meggy. Meggy wasn’t coming. No one was coming except the Gilpins, Frances and Alan and Max, and she couldn’t bear to see them just then.
It was hideous to be a MacGregor. Other families worked things out— betrayals, disappointments, anger—got over things and went on together. But not MacGregors. MacGregors got mad, stayed mad, struck to kill but ineffectually, tangled themselves up and pitched over cliffs, clawing and scratching, drawing blood as they fell, forever falling but never hitting bottom, never coming to the end of anything. This seemed to be their law. Her mother and father’s brief reunion, for instance, begun at her Com-poser’s Guild concert those years ago, had, within the night, ended in quarrel. It seemed her father seriously thought that if her mother was pleased to see him, she would follow him to his Christian commune. Rose wouldn’t be phoning either of them at their separate addresses about what had happened in court. They’d only be hot with opinion. It would not occur to them to offer comfort; they wouldn’t know how. The MacGregors had neither good times nor bad times; they just had times, relentless times.
For instance, Natalie was not quite finished with Rose that day. Once she’d gotten herself back to Tangletown, Rose would find her door standing open, wet towels on the floor, her shampoo bottle emptied out, and, on the table, a note in Meggy’s careful printing, obviously dictated by Natalie: “Aunt Rose, you meant well, but I cannot be bought,” and beside it, in a neat row, the feather, ring, coin purse, and tiny horse, plus Meggy’s spare set of keys—the keys they’d used to get in—surrendered with its tag labeled “Aunt Rose.” The coin purse, however, would be empty of dimes. A frail consolation: it had to be Meggy who’d taken the dimes and hidden them, maybe in her pocket, maybe in her shoes.
Later that night, Rose would drive over to Frogtown to find the room in the boarding house stripped and deserted.
Perhaps Rose sat so long at the table in the museum restaurant because she could feel all this coming. At length, she got to her feet. She couldn’t bear to have Alan and Frances and Max walk in to find her alone and helpless. She bolted, and just in time. Emerging on the street, she saw, at a distance, the Gilpins approaching, little Max in the middle, the three of them swinging along, hand in hand. But as she turned to go the other way, the dark-headed figure she had thought was Frances resolved itself into someone else, someone taller, dark-haired, dark-skinned, and male: James. It was undeniably James.
Did Frances know, then? Was it all out in the open now? It had been Frances’s idea that they should come to the museum restaurant to help bear up the sorry MacGregors. Were they, the Gilpins, so big-hearted and tolerant, so peaceable that they could go forward like this: Max swinging blithely between Alan and his lover, Frances alongside? But Frances didn’t appear. Where was she? What had they done with Frances?
Back at the condo in Tangletown, Frances was in her bed and threw her arms open wide when Rose, after picking up the wet towels, after put-ting away the ring, feather, horse, and coin purse where she wouldn’t have to see them, made her way upstairs.
While court was in session, Frances had gotten a last-minute appoint-ment with her doctor to confirm amazing news. She was pregnant—there would be a new baby in the house. She was out of her mind with joy. And apparently none the wiser about James. But she’d made her bargain, hadn’t she, pleading to Alan late at night that if he’d get her pregnant, she’d never ask anything of him again? Given that, how could Rose fail to rejoice with her? This was marriage, Gilpin-style, and who was Rose to judge, with her own life emptying out like a sack with a hole in the bottom?
Seattle and Stephen had dropped away; Natalie and Meggy were gone; and Guy? If Rose had let Guy come back to her, as he’d made clear he would that night they’d downed all the Mexican beer, might they possibly, together, have claimed Meggy? At least they’d be mourning together now, mourning losing her as they never had that little wisp of a child of theirs, the one who never was. For a week after the court date, she would try to reach him at his number in town, until she got a recorded message that the line was disconnected. And the letter she’d send up north, full of sorrow, would go unanswered.
Just why losing Meggy was like death, Rose could not explain. That she should lose people seemed to be her lot. Perhaps it was because of some inherent lack in her. What could she do but cling tighter to whomever was left: Max, Alan, and the pregnant Frances? To have people, any people, warm and breathing and nearby enough to speak to, might be all that Rose could hope.
Life with the Gilpins wasn’t nothing. Frances had a rare capacity to make Rose laugh. In the throes of early pregnancy, nibbling her way through packets, boxes, whole cases of saltines, Frances was prone to utter pronouncements so inane that Rose’s sorrow would, if only temporarily, crumble.
Frances now had everything she’d ever wanted of life, she said. She looked out on the world with a tenderness that encompassed Max, Alan, Rose, and probably the postman and the paper carrier. But no matter how silly she was, Frances knew how to comfort people. Frances made Rose laugh and let her cry. Her arms encircling Rose, Frances declared it all bad luck—the disaster with Meggy, the miserable business with the married conductor, the symphony “postponed” as tenure review loomed. Dreadful luck—no wonder Rose felt rotten. But Rose was to remember that luck could change.
Rose was tempted to retreat to this view, their long-held devotion to luck, good and bad. Perhaps her bad luck had nothing to do with who she was, or with what she did or failed to do, or with what she understood or failed to understand. Perhaps luck was impersonal.
“Exactly,” said Frances. Rose was not to worry about tenure, however. She, Frances, would be sitting at the nerve center, fielding departmental correspondence and phone calls and squelching or amplifying rumors. Frances ought to be able to rustle up some tenure.
“Like scrambled eggs?”
“Something like that,” agreed Frances.
Maybe this was true. It was dawning on Rose that she might have to fight for tenure and, if so, she was about to need Frances in a whole new way.
Frances cooed and clucked over her and, for an hour every afternoon, brought Max and his satchel of blocks down to Rose and went back upstairs to sit in the lotus position with a speaker set in front of her belly, playing the sound of the ocean to the unborn baby.
Max, likewise, was given to repetition. For his hour with Rose, he did one thing over and over. He built a high towered fortress of colored blocks, then knocked it down, roared and flung tears, and then picked up a block and set it atop another, cheerfully starting over. Rose wished she could spend her tears as quickly. She hated Max to see her sad.
She was his godmother, after all. Holding Max in her arms, swaddled in lace, five years earlier, she’d stepped forward with Alan and Frances and had promised in Max’s stead to renounce the wicked powers of the world and to trust entirely in grace and love. That wicked powers existed in the world was easy to see and acknowledge. She’d believed in making the most of what she had—her talent, her friendships, whatever love she found. Wickedness, it seemed to her, was taking any of it for granted. But relying entirely on grace and love was something she’d never seriously tried, then or now, and it was difficult to see how that could possibly work for her.
Even more than Max, Meggy had been entrusted to her, that first bath after the birth a sort of baptism. Hadn’t Rose been the one to take Meggy and wash her when she was fresh to the world and sticky, when Guy was too freaked out and Natalie was too dazed and exhausted? Hadn’t Rose been the one to meet Meggy’s gaze when the infant girl first opened her eyes? But where was Meggy now? Nowhere Rose could find her.
“There, there,” crooned Frances. The wonder was that Rose got herself up and dressed every day and off to teach summer school. After all she’d been through, nothing should be required of Rose except to sit in a high chair and be fed mashed bananas, according to Frances.
Rose laughed helplessly at this. She hoped she was still capable, at least, of chewing her own bananas. And although Frances was great at making her laugh, she couldn’t help notice that Frances never laughed with her but, rather, regarded her beatifically, with an odd sense of owning her that Rose found off-putting.
Wasn’t there, when things got bad, someone who used to laugh with Rose, someone with whom she could laugh herself silly? There was. There was Ursula. Rose was on the phone with Ursula every day about the wedding, but seemed to have forgotten how to talk to her about anything else.
“So much has been happening,” she told Ursula when she’d summoned her courage to confide, “but I haven’t wanted to burden you.”
“Whatever it is, please burden me,” said Ursula. She’d hoped they might be particularly close at the time of her wedding and had wondered why Rose was so remote.
There was no point in being proud. Rose launched in, starting with the wretched night in Seattle and moving on to the disaster at the courthouse, but Ursula was absolutely quiet at the other end.
“Is this too depressing?” Rose asked. “Maybe not the stuff to be telling a bride?”
“Oh, no,” said Ursula. “I’m fine. Really. Things are just about taken care of. And, Rose—this is so exciting. My dress arrived!”
The ivy-patterned cambric dress had come in an ivy-patterned box tied with wide white ribbons. Ursula had taken to untying the ribbons, opening the box, trying the dress on, and wearing it awhile every morning after her bath. “I like to walk around in it—I mean, just inside on the living-room carpet. You would not believe what it’s like to be a bride. You’ve got to do this, Rose—I mean, you’ve just got to do it.”
Rose agreed and let it go, whatever else she might have said, let it all be covered over by snowy white ivy-patterned cambric.
“You tell Frances she’s coming to the wedding,” said Ursula, “even if she’s pregnant. And we’ve got to get a date for you, Rose—you can’t just come all alone.”
Rose thought of her piano tuner. He’d been standing in the back of her mind ever since the night she had summoned him to collect his tuning fork. But then the thing in Seattle had happened—she’d let it happen—and it seemed wrong to phone him, at least while she still felt sullied, while a creeping pressure still rose from her belly to her throat whenever she thought of Stephen. And then there was her weepiness, her unpredictable self-command. Would she ask her piano tuner out, only to cry on his shoulder? Was his a shoulder to cry on? By her lights, she was not allowed to call him, not then and maybe not at all. But she did. She called him.
She got his answering machine and hung up. Off on a short trip, his message said. He took trips, then? He traveled? She would see him in the normal course of things the next time her piano was scheduled for tuning, but she wanted to put them in a different setting—out some-where, just as he’d suggested. But not at a big, public affair where people would look them over and ask questions. Not a wedding.
So she dialed him again and left a chaotic little message: she wasn’t calling because her piano needed tuning—she didn’t know if it did; she hadn’t been playing—but would he, when he got back, go out to lunch? She hung up and then dialed a third time because she hadn’t been sure she had left her last name and who knew what other Rose he might tune for.
“MacGregor,” she enunciated into the phone. “Rose MacGregor.” It hurt her to say her name—Natalie’s name, Meggy’s name. It was the only thing they still shared. And then, not even that.
A photo arrived in the mail, ten days after she and Natalie and Meggy and Guy had stepped out of the courthouse elevator together. Rose had to study the image to decide just what it was. Natalie was in the photo, and Meggy, and something that might be a wedding bouquet was clenched in Natalie’s hand. She wore a plain whitish shift but did not have the look of a bride. Her eyes were slightly bulging and her lips were pursed as though she had a mouthful of something bitter she was waiting to spit out. Their father, the other prominent presence in the photo, stood in the back, beaming triumphantly, wearing his one and only suit. His arms spread wide, he held Natalie on one side and, on the other, a shadow of a man standing far enough from Natalie that their father’s suit buttons could be counted, one-two-three, in the space between. The man was neither young nor old, and there seemed to be no division between his chin and his neck. Rose vaguely recognized him as Natalie’s rent payer, the Christian man of the no-strings-attached, Mr. Green. Greer, rather.
Rose turned the photo over to read, in the block letters of their father’s hand:
Mr. and Mrs. Greer on their wedding day, with their
daughter,Meggy Greer, and the proud father of the bride.
Meggy stood in front of them, leaning away, listing, lost.