Chapter 14 #2
I told her the truth, which was that I was sure Leonard meant the proposal at the time, but there was a chance that all he’d really wanted was a way to get out from under his parents.
Now that the army had given him that, he might have no more use for me.
I tried to sound accepting, and matter-of-fact.
But the whole time I was talking, I was hoping Carol would tell me that it sounded to her as if he’d truly loved me, and it didn’t make sense that he would just stop.
Instead, she said, “I’m sorry.” As if that was the end of that, too bad for me.
“But he wasn’t like that,” I said. “If you knew him, you’d understand. I still can’t believe it, that he’s just not writing back at all, when he knows I’m up here about to have a baby. His baby. Carol, honestly, he just wasn’t that kind of person.”
She exhaled a stream of smoke. “But Nora, you’re naive.”
I flinched at the pain of it, how that hit me.
“I’m just telling you, that’s how you strike me.
Old Kilgore may be wrong about your motivation, but she’s right that you’d believe just about anything.
It’s sort of endearing. Actually, it’s quite endearing.
You’re such a straight shooter, you assume everyone else is, too.
But you wouldn’t be the first girl to be promised the moon and then let down. ”
“I know that,” I said. But I was thinking she didn’t know Leonard. She didn’t know him as I did.
“Well,” she said. “Maybe he truly felt love for you at the time, but these things happen. He probably met somebody over there.” She shook her cigarette until the burning tip went dark.
“My brother had a friend stationed in Japan, and he said Japanese women were the most beautiful women in the world. And generally more sophisticated.”
“Okay.” I held up my palm, a worthless shield.
“Or they might still have USO girls, or what-have-you.” She laughed a little. “You said he was nineteen?”
“My God, Carol. Shut up.” I surprised myself, saying that.
I never said shut up to anyone, even Bobby.
But my already-tormented head did not need the suggestion of Leonard staring dreamily at the beautiful Japanese woman who taught him to make paper swans, or some USO girl, lithe and laughing, cute in her uniform and right there in front of him, not eight months pregnant with a runny nose, wearing a stinky coat in New Jersey.
“Sometimes a girl needs to hear the truth,” she said. “I tend to say what other people are thinking. At least to people I like. I think it’s kinder, in the end.”
I closed the coat around me and heaved myself up from the bench. “Then you’ve done your good deed for the day. You can get a nurse to help you up the stairs.”
“Nora. Don’t go.”
“Too late,” I said. “I’m going.”
“I’ll tell you a secret.”
I told her I didn’t want any more of her secrets. I was tired of her blabbing about other girls. I realized I’d believed every story she’d told me about them. Hook, line, and sinker. I really was naive. Dumb as a rock.
“This secret is about me. About my plans.”
“I won’t believe you anyway,” I said. “I’ve wised up.” I wasn’t about to sit down again. It was a lot of work to get myself up out of a chair, and I didn’t want to have to do it all over again. “It’s cold out,” I said. “What is it?”
“We’re alone?”
“Of course we’re alone. I wouldn’t do that.”
“No,” she agreed. “You wouldn’t.” She beckoned for me to lean down, then cupped my ear to her smoky breath. “I’m keeping my baby,” she whispered.
I almost laughed. I should have felt free to. Tit for tat. I didn’t think she could possibly mean it. Then I wondered if she was testing me, to see if I’d believe anything.
“How are you going to work that out?” I asked. I would have asked this of any girl who wasn’t married, but Carol keeping her baby seemed the most unimaginable of all. I couldn’t guess how she would change a diaper. I pictured her pushing a stroller with one hand, tapping her cane with the other.
“I’ll figure it out,” she said.
“You said he was married.”
“He is.”
“You’ll marry someone else?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Then I did laugh. I couldn’t help it, though I could see from Carol’s face, the set of her jaw, she wasn’t kidding.
“You’re just going to go home with a baby, and not be married? I don’t know, Carol. Maybe things are different where you’re from. But they can’t be that different.”
“Money makes things different. And I came into mine two months ago.”
Came into mine. I’d never heard this phrase. I pictured Carol walking into a room knee-deep in cash. She’d spoken as if this were something that would happen to everyone eventually, if they could just find the right room.
“What are you talking about?”
“On my birthday. I turned twenty-one. My grandmother left a trust.” She lifted the ashtray and gestured to her belly.
“You tell me who better to be a mother to this child, if it’s anything like me?
Assuming it inherits my heart? Or my mind?
It’d be a crime to leave it with some milquetoast simpleton who won’t understand it.
” She paused to take another drag. “If it’s a boy, I’ll name him David, and there won’t be any of this Davey business. David. If it’s a girl, Brenda.”
She said these names with confidence, the way she said everything.
For all I knew, she really could keep her baby.
If she grew up riding horses and living in a place where even the trash wasn’t trash, she could probably afford help.
If anyone helping her said anything about her low morals, I suppose she could just fire them.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she said. She didn’t seem particularly concerned that I would. “They can’t make me do what I don’t want to do, but they’ll put up a fight. I’d rather put it off.”
“Who?” I asked. “You mean the nurses will put up a fight? Or your parents?”
“All of them. And Miss Berry, that busy bee. You’ll see when you meet her. She seems quite invested, to say the least.”
“Lucy liked her,” I said.
“Everyone likes Miss Berry. I myself find her perfectly pleasant. She just doesn’t know what I know.” Carol smiled again, tapping out ash. “You understand? I know best. It’s me.”
—
In early December, the nurses put up Christmas stockings for us in the common room.
I thought that was nice of them, though we could tell they’d used the same stockings in previous years, as each girl’s name was just written on a piece of paper fastened to the top with a safety pin.
One girl peeked in hers, and then all of them, and let us know we were each getting a hairbrush and a pocket-size New Testament.
The general feeling was disappointment. But the head nurse’s jolly husband helped her carry in a real tree, which we got to decorate with donated ornaments and strung popcorn.
A nativity scene sat at the center of the dining room table.
The manger and the figurines were made of a silvery metal that reflected the chandelier’s light, and somebody surrounded the whole thing with fluffed sewing batting, meant to look like a heavenly cloud.
Mae sent Santa-themed gift tags for me to fill out and return so she could attach them to the presents she’d already purchased and wrapped on my behalf.
You got both Bobby and Janet water guns, she wrote.
I worried Bobby was too old, but he’ll be glad to have it once Janet’s armed.
And I can tell you now, I’ll love what you got me.
But my goodness, Nora! You shouldn’t have spent all that money!
She made no mention of my father except to tell me I’d gotten him a gift certificate to the bowling alley he liked.
On his gift tag, I only wrote, Merry Christmas, Dad, and then my own name, printed small.
Every time I wrote to Mae, I asked if she’d heard from the Liftons. Every time she wrote back, she didn’t mention Leonard or his parents at all.
Mrs. Kilgore congratulated me for my growing maturity. “You’re no longer talking about that young man coming to rescue you,” she said. “That’s good. Because he isn’t. He’s made his priorities clear.”
I didn’t argue with her, mostly because of Lucy’s advice.