Black Diamond Page 11

  ‘Don’t they have any liquor over here?’ Gina asked.

  ‘Oh, it’s just aftershave and that kind of thing. But I don’t want it to spill all over everything.’

  They started off. The fat woman, behind Alan, spoke with approval of the wide, comfortable seats. ‘They should build things like this nowadays,’ she said.

  ‘Nancy,’ her husband told her, ‘that’s asking too much.’

  ‘Trains, buses, the subway – everything nowadays is plastic. And skimpy.’

  ‘It’s the times we live in,’ he said.

  Beth and Alan turned their heads and said hello. They exchanged names. Nancy’s husband was called Ed.

  The coach entered the pinewoods. All at once the world was darker, quieter. It was like going from daylight into night. Beth looked at her watch. What it said meant nothing to her. There were time-differences between countries; that could mix you up to begin with. On top of that, you got tired. She asked, ‘Does anybody know what time it is?’

  Gina said, ‘I always lose my sense of time when I’m on vacation.’

  ‘You find another way of measuring it, that’s all,’ Alan said.

  Nancy and Ed told a story about ordering breakfast in Mexico, but because they hadn’t specified whether it was to be at a.m. or p.m., the waiter brought it up at eight-thirty in the evening, while they were still drinking their cocktails on the balcony. ‘That was a different sense of time, all right,’ Ed said.

  Beth began to feel strange. She waited until it wouldn’t seem that she was spoiling Ed’s story, then she asked again if anyone knew what time it was. No one did. ‘Relax,’ Alan said to her.

  The carriage rolled on. The landscape around them seemed without sound. They were the only noise passing through, their chatter foreign to the place, the steady rhythm of the horses’ hoofs like the muffled pounding of a machine.

  Beth said, ‘Maybe this is that famous Scandinavian long night you read about.’

  ‘But this is the wrong time of year for it,’ Myrtle said over her shoulder. ‘That’s in the winters.’

  ‘It feels like winter.’

  ‘I didn’t get any information at all on this part of the trip. It’s all very mysterious. You know what would be fun? If it’s one of those mystery games – know what I mean? They give you characters to play, and then there’s a murder and you have to solve it. I had a couple of clients who wanted to go on one, but the price was too steep for them.’

  Horace said, ‘I heard about one of them they held in Venice. Somebody fell into the canal.’

  ‘We’re all tour operators, aren’t we?’ Alan asked.

  From the back seat Ed spoke up. He said, ‘What do you mean, Scandinavia? We were booked for Yugoslavia.’

  ‘Austria‚’ Horace said. ‘But it could be a lot of places. It sure looks foreign. That’s about all you can say.’

  ‘Well, where are we?’

  ‘Ask the coachman‚’ Nancy suggested.

  The coachman, sitting high up and beyond the barrier of his seat, was too far removed from them to be reached. They called out to him, but he didn’t turn around.

  They made conversation, stopped, started up again, and waited. At last the carriage came to a halt.

  They all got down, although they could see that they hadn’t arrived yet. They were at some kind of way-station. There was a small hut and a dim light in it. The passengers from the other carriage joined them.

  They tried to get some information out of the two drivers, who didn’t speak a language any of them could understand. By signs everyone was told that they were all to keep going.

  They got back into their seats and started off again. This time, they felt, they were on the last lap; they’d be welcomed with light and warmth, a drink of something: their host would give them explanations, facts, plans.

  They became talkative. As Alan and Beth’s carriage moved through the forest, they called out stories to each other, leaning over the seats and saying, ‘But this is the best part,’ and, ‘You aren’t going to believe what he said then.’ They talked about funny things that had happened in their businesses, swapped anecdotes about cities they’d been in, asked each other to describe the worst and best clients they’d ever had. And they all agreed that the brochure was a problem every year.

  The coachmen pulled up again at a spot so like the first one that for a moment the passengers were bewildered. ‘Isn’t this the same place?’ Myrtle asked. ‘Do you think that man knows the way?’

  ‘It isn’t the same‚’ Sonny told her. ‘I remember there was a log out of line up near the top there.’ He raised his arm. ‘It does look a lot like it, though.’

  Nancy said, ‘At the rate we’ve been traveling, they could have fixed the roof while we were gone.’

  Myron, the man in the frontier costume, came over to where they were parked. He suggested that since it was turning out to be such a long drive, they might switch around: that way, they could all be acquainted by the time they got to their destination.

  Alan was happy where he was. Somebody in the other carriage, he thought, must be a bore; but there was no polite way out of the invitation. ‘Sure,’ he said. Behind him, at the same time, Ed said uncertainly, ‘Well, I guess so.’

  On the third lap of the trip there was plenty of time to get to know Myron and his wife, Cora Bee. And after that, on the fourth stage, Sue and Greg, from Omaha. By the fifth and sixth times around, they all knew each other very well.

  They traded family histories, got to know about the children, ex-partners and in-laws. They sang songs, played wordgames, wondered about the existence of God; and they asked themselves whether a unifying set of physical laws in the universe might do just as well as a divine being if you didn’t want to take such things personally. They tried to remember lines from poems.

  Alan began to lose heart. That was another trouble with travelling: everything was out of your hands. Someone else was behind the information counter and on the telephone and at the controls of the plane. You had to wait, patiently, as if you’d given up being human and had become just a package to be transported. If you were used to doing your own organizing, it was difficult to put up with that. He always felt more confident when he was the one in charge.

  They ran out of things to say. Beth began to feel strange again. She whispered to Alan, ‘I’m getting a funny feeling about this. It’s weird.’

  ‘Just relax, like I told you,’ he said, ‘and enjoy the scenery.’

  She thought: What scenery? There was nothing but pine boughs, the darkness and silence, except for the creaking of the wheels and the sound of the horses’ hoofs on the dirt track. There were patches of leaves on the ground, then sandy soil and pine needles, but no other variation in the landscape. She tried to think about getting to their destination; her mind went blank. But they had to stop. They had to get somewhere, otherwise nothing made sense. She made a great effort to hold within her mind some picture of the place they were meant to find. If she concentrated hard enough, they might get there.

  They stopped again and changed around and started off once more. Alan looked up at the dark shapes of the trees that passed, in unceasing progression, above and around him. Everyone nowadays worried about conservation and the environment, yet it seemed that the forest they were in was limitlessly huge, its growth encompassing time as well as space – as if they were seeing all the trees that had ever been alive since the beginning of the world. It was – like the journey itself – unending. He changed his mind. He gave up.

  The two carriages continued to roll forward. The hoofbeats sounded on the track. The wheels kept turning. Eventually the others began to feel that something was wrong.

  ‘We’re never going to get there,’ Nancy stated. ‘This is it.’ Ed told her not to be silly: of course they were going to get there, in the end; it was just taking a long time. And if she started to complain, it was going to seem even longer.

  ‘I think she’s right,’ Alan said. There was no ot
her outcome he could imagine. They were going to keep traveling, forever. ‘You’d be kidding yourself to think anything else.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Beth told him. ‘We’ll get there pretty soon now. We’ve got to.’ She was too frightened to allow for doubt. There could no longer be any question. She’d come to believe, like her friend, Ella, that all events were a matter of faith. And anyway, she’d decided that this holiday was going to make up for everything else. She’d been looking forward to it too long to let herself be disappointed.

  She kept on believing. She never lost hope that if they continued to move ahead, somehow – all at once – they would reach the light. It would come upon them like a revelation of truth, a burst of sunlight. It would be amazing, overwhelming and out of this world – like the coming of spring, or like the sudden appearance of fire in the dream she and Alan had had, a long time ago, when they thought that they were dying in a plane crash.

  Sis and Bud

  Alma and Bruce were adopted. Their adoptive parents, Elton and Bess, had done the right thing and had told them the history of their adoption when they’d turned fourteen: Bruce first, and Alma the next year. Fourteen was the age the agencies had designated for the long, understanding talk that was to be administered with tact and kindness and which had to include at some point the phrase, ‘You know we love you, because we chose you.’ Fourteen might not have been the right age for one or the other, or both of them, to learn the facts; nor was it to be supposed that one fourteen-year-old was like another, nor that a girl would have the same attitudes as a boy. But you had to start somewhere.

  They each took it differently. Bruce was horrified, infuriated, offended and sickened. Alma was strangely pleased. She began to form the notion that perhaps her mother had been someone very important – maybe even a princess – who hadn’t been able to marry her lover for reasons of state, or something like that.

  To begin with, they both thought of the true parents as unreal and somehow theatrical or unusual. They didn’t feel less warmly towards Bess and Elton: on the contrary, when they’d been told how much their new parents had wanted children, how they’d been disappointed over and over again and how finally they’d been granted the great joy of two such wonderful children, Bruce had been deeply moved. And Alma had cried and had said she couldn’t imagine that her biological parents would ever have been so good to her, even if they were actually the real ones: and she was glad that she’d had the luck to be adopted.

  But she began to daydream about the people she now thought of as her real parents: the ones from whose bodies she came in a way that she didn’t yet fully understand – the way that was secret, shocking, delicious, immoral, full of pleasures, terrifying and – so everyone kept saying, even though you weren’t supposed to do it – natural.

  The natural part of parenthood was simply physical. What Bess and Elton had contributed and what their years of patient care had created, was social and cultural. Alma loved them, of course. Yet there was that other element – the mysterious origins that had to do with bodily love and passion. She wondered about the two lost parents: their characters, how long they had known each other. She didn’t doubt that they’d been in love. They must have had parents, too; there would be two whole families from whom she had come, not just the two main actors.

  As Alma made up stories about this other family of hers, she became increasingly curious about them. Her own imagination supplied the information, as it had invented the questions. She herself was the source and purpose of the drama. In the early stages genuine knowledge would have upset her. She definitely didn’t want to find out the truth. There were only two facts that she recognized; the first was that she was now on a different footing with Bess and Elton, so that they seemed more like friends than relatives. And the second was that Bruce was not her real brother, so that therefore there was no reason why they shouldn’t get married some day. She’d always loved him. Now she fell in love with him in another way.

  Bruce had had a year to think over the subject without her. When Bess and Elton had had the talk with him, they’d asked him not to tell Alma yet. And he didn’t tell. He hadn’t told her about Santa Claus, either. Unlike so many older brothers who grow up bullying their sisters and being jealous of them, he’d always tried to shield her. The difference in their size might have had something to do with the development of his protective instincts; she’d been a small, elflike child. Another factor in his response could have been Elton, who entertained a high, idealized opinion of womanhood, and had taken care to guide Bruce towards a desire for the same, rigorous certainty. Elton would have thought of it as one of the treasures of his son’s upbringing.

  During the year in which he had the time to think about his adoption, Bruce decided: his plan came all at once, not piece by piece. It seemed to him that he’d had a shock and that it had pushed him towards the need to force everything back to the way it had been. As far as he was concerned, his purest and most private feelings had been desecrated. And Elton, whom he’d always thought of as his real father, was not only unrelated but had obviously lied to him about women.

  After he’d been told that first time, Bruce never raised the topic again. He thought that it might hurt his adoptive parents’ feelings to see him express too much curiosity about the others – as if he hoped that the real ones might have been better or more interesting. He also knew what they’d say. If he asked Elton, ‘What kind of a woman do you think my real mother was?’ what could Elton tell him? That she was the kind of woman who went with a man when she wasn’t married: who had had an illegitimate child; and that she was the kind of woman who gave her child away to other people.

  Up to the age of fourteen Bruce’s best subject in school had been history, which had filled his mind with pictures of romantic adventure. All at once he knew what history really was – not just the battles and buildings and heroes, but all the families and how they felt about each other, and how they carried with them distorted versions of each other’s lives. He realized that there was private as well as public history. Only the great names lived in such a way that the two merged, but everyone participated somehow in the large, public sweep of historical event. Everyone was influenced, willing or not. He didn’t want to be the passive victim of his own life. If you knew where you stood and what you were doing, he thought, you could direct events yourself. He intended to take action, and to run things.

  As soon as Alma too had been told, he felt better. He regarded her as an ally in his struggle to come to terms with history. He didn’t want to say anything to make her feel crushed, as he had been, but he couldn’t understand her gullibility or her willingness to think well of the people who had reneged on their parenthood.

  ‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘I guess they could be any kind of people at all.’

  ‘She could have been some drunken whore off the waterfront.’

  ‘Oh no, the adoption agencies are very careful about who they allow in.’

  He laughed.

  She said, ‘I think if the mothers don’t fulfill certain conditions, the babies have to go into an institution. We’ve been pretty lucky, haven’t we?’

  ‘The hell we have.’

  ‘But you’ll feel just as close to me, won’t you? Even though we aren’t really brother and sister now?’

  ‘Who knows? How can you be sure we aren’t related? We might be, you know. A man that’s had one bastard could have thousands.’

  ‘But not a woman.’

  ‘No. They only need to have one. That makes them whores.’

  ‘How can you say that? Especially nowadays. Nowadays that’s all changed. Women can keep their children and bring them up. It used to be impossible. For everybody. Maybe she couldn’t marry. Maybe he wasn’t free. He could have been already married to somebody else, or he could have died before she knew she was going to have a baby.’

  ‘Sure, maybe. Maybe there’s icebergs in Africa.’

  ‘And maybe she didn’t want
to get married – have you thought about that? Maybe she was one of those independent career women who just got caught.’

  ‘Then she could have had an abortion, couldn’t she?’

  ‘That might have been against her religion. It’s possible. Maybe the idea of an abortion was worse than going through with the birth.’

  ‘No. If you’re going to have the baby, you don’t give it away.’

  ‘Maybe she couldn’t afford to keep it. It costs a lot to bring up a child. And if you don’t have a job, or some man to support you –’

  ‘Cut it out,’ he said.

  ‘Well, the way I look at it, I just feel they must have been all right.’

  ‘Both of them? Him and her? She might have been some girl your age who was raped by her own father. Or by a whole gang of people.’

  ‘Don’t say those things. I don’t want to think of her like that. And anyway, what about him?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that doesn’t matter.’

  Alma was already beginning to incorporate her new knowledge into her life. At Christmas she’d been taken to see a ballet about a transformed maiden, brought up by strangers, who had a sister-double who was her moral opposite. And although Alma was the one who was adopted, she had immediately identified the heroine as a character who must resemble her mother: an innocent beauty, preyed upon by evil influences, but in her heart shining and lovely, like a swan. ‘We might as well think nice things about them,’ she said, ‘since we’re never going to know.’

  ‘We can find out.’

  ‘No, we can’t. The adoption people never give out information.’

  ‘They don’t give it out to the real mother. That’s so she can’t come back and try to squeeze money out of the new family or upset the child by pulling it both ways. But if you’re the child, they let you find out about the mother as soon as you’re of age. You’ve got a right to that information. In the state Bess and Elton went to, and according to the adoption place, the age is eighteen, not twenty-one.’