Black Diamond Page 16

  Ernest said to her, ‘I never knew a girl who was so scared of getting pregnant.’

  ‘It’s what happened to my mother.’

  ‘It’s what happens to all mothers.’

  ‘I mean my real mother. That’s why I’m adopted.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I never understood how it could have happened if she hadn’t wanted it. But now I do. Because I did the same thing. I left it up to the man. When you said everything was all right, I believed you.’

  ‘It’s true. It’s all right.’

  ‘It better be.’

  ‘What would you do if it wasn’t?’

  ‘I’d rather be dead.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  She did mean it. She said so.

  ‘Don’t you want children?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure, but not yet.’ She had discovered that it was possible to live with someone, without love, as long as you were decent to each other. You could still have a good life. But to have the child of a man you didn’t love: that would be different. She wondered if that had been her inheritance – if her mother had carried her so unwillingly that every drop of blood going to the womb had helped to produce a creature that would look for ways to make itself miserable.

  For the moment, and as long as she didn’t get stuck in her thoughts about love and family, everything was all right. She was happy with Ernest. At the end of the summer he asked her to marry him. She said no. He told her that he’d been a fool to take her to bed so soon: if he’d waited, he’d have been able to win her over.

  ‘I could have had you for life,’ he said, ‘instead of just this summer. You aren’t really going way out to California, are you?’

  They sat in his kitchen: he talked and she drank coffee. He kept reaching over to take her hand. She couldn’t understand how it was that she should feel so queasy about breaking off with a man she didn’t love as much as she ought to. If she’d loved him better, she wouldn’t be feeling so bad. But, of course, if she’d loved him, she wouldn’t be going away. He wanted to know if he’d see her again. She said she hoped so. He told her that he should have gotten her pregnant after all. Even if he had, she thought, it wouldn’t have done any good. She was still in love with Bruce.

  She left for California at te weekend.

  *

  She’d spent hours writing letters. Dear Mrs Shelton. Dear Mother. Dear Rose Ellen. Maybe you don’t want to hear from me but … I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a few questions about yourself, just … My name is Alma. My mother’s name was Rose Ellen Parker. Do you think we could meet sometime, just to say hello?

  She hadn’t been able to finish any of them. She’d asked herself how she’d feel if a letter came to her out of the blue, eighteen years after the event that still must be one of the most dramatic, even if perhaps not the worst, in her life.

  Her mother might feel hunted and distressed. She might suspect blackmail, or that Alma was out to pay her back for making her illegitimate. She might hate Alma. Mrs Roberts had said that Rose Ellen went through a bad time after the birth. Maybe she’d want to hurt me, Alma thought. Maybe she’d think I really put her through it. Maybe she’d tried to get an abortion and couldn’t. The fact that Rose had later had two more children – and so, presumably, had been happy to become a mother again – might not contradict what had gone before. People always had room for all the emotions and they could change their minds at any time.

  She didn’t believe that she had the right to disturb the life her mother had made for herself. She decided not to say anything – just to get to know her for a little, and then move on.

  *

  Bruce met the two daughters at a dance. He danced with the older one first. She was called Mandy. The younger one was Didi. He didn’t feel for a single minute that there was anything sweet or sisterly about them. They were stuck-up, brainless egoists with rich-kid affectations. He hated them.

  He talked Mandy into going out with him later that same night, and Didi the week after. He could have laughed at how easy it was. They practically threw themselves at him.

  *

  Alma saw her mother, Rose, standing with two boys at the door of the school library. She knew that that was who the woman was. The younger child was looking up and holding out his hand while he talked – as if he might, babylike, tug at her clothing to hold her attention. The mother looked down and spoke. Alma saw with a pang that the woman had some gray hair. Surely she was still too young to start going gray. But perhaps it ran in the family. Maybe she too would go gray early. She felt shy in the presence of the two boys. It amazed her to think that they were her brothers. She wanted to back away.

  Rose laughed at something the older boy said, and looked up. She caught sight of Alma. She said, ‘Hi. Are you here about the Beatrix Potter?’

  ‘I’m here about the job,’ Alma said. She moved forward. She held out her hand. They introduced themselves. Rose told her the names of the children, Jerry and Toby, who said, ‘Hi,’ and ran off. She led the way back into the library. Alma couldn’t think of anything except how strange it was that she should be taller than either of her mothers.

  A few days later she met the husband, Tom. He walked over to pick up the boys from school. He was working at home that day; their house was only a few blocks away. As he approached, Jerry and Toby were asking Alma to show them how she could do the splits; she’d made a tremendous impression on them by kicking high into the air so that her foot was above her head.

  ‘I’m Tom Shelton,’ he said. ‘I guess you’re Alma, is that right?’

  They stood talking while the boys collected their sneakers and notebooks. Toby had to go back into his classroom to find a box of crayons he’d left behind.

  Tom was light-eyed and freckled and had a wiry build. His manner was friendly. He couldn’t stand still for long but bounced up and down on his toes or shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He looked younger than his wife. Rose had told Alma that he was at a good stage in his work. When things piled up, he got tense: his stomach would begin to bother him and he’d lose weight.

  ‘They’re nice boys,’ Alma told him.

  ‘Oh, they’re great,’ he said. ‘But Rose always wanted a daughter.’

  Was it possible that Rose had never said anything? No. She’d have had to tell her husband. It would be too big a risk if the truth ever came out. And besides, Alma thought, if a man didn’t love you enough to want to know that kind of thing about you, there wouldn’t be much point in getting married to him, especially after you’d been let down once already.

  Rose talked a lot about her family. She didn’t chatter – sometimes she wouldn’t say anything for a long time. And then she’d tell you something about herself, as if she’d known you for years. She likes me, Alma thought.

  One day while they were reshelving the nature and biology sections of the library, a floorboard creaked on the upper level, where the gallery was. Rose looked up. She ran her eye around the curve of the balustrade on the second story.

  Alma said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the ghost. It always makes me nervous.’

  ‘What ghost?’

  ‘I was in here one day, all alone, and I couldn’t stand it. I don’t believe in those things at all, but I had to leave.’

  ‘What ghost?’ Alma said again.

  The building they were in, Rose told her, had at one time been a large private house. Late in the last century, at about the turn of the century, the house had been bought by a man from San Francisco, who was newly married to a beautiful young wife. He and the wife had come up from town to move in. They were still on their honeymoon. As soon as they arrived, she started to unpack. She opened one of his suitcases that had a loaded pistol in it and the pistol went off and killed her instantly. Three people connected with the school had seen her ghost, standing up on the balcony in a long, dark dress.

  ‘Do you think it was really an accident?’ Alma asked.

  ‘Oh
, I’m sure it was. They’d just been married. They were happy. It was a terrible thing.’

  ‘It seems funny to pack a loaded pistol like that.’

  ‘Everybody carried guns in those days. It wouldn’t have been so unusual. And they’d always be loaded, in case you needed to use them.’

  ‘When she appears, is she unhappy?’

  ‘No. She’s just there. She’s drawn to the house.’

  ‘You really believe it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I only know I wasn’t able to stay here when I heard the boards starting to make noises. It went all the way around, like somebody walking.’

  ‘My mother used to tell me ghost stories,’ Alma said.

  ‘But this one is true.’

  ‘They’re all supposed to be true.’

  ‘Do you come from a big family?’

  ‘Just the two of us, me and my brother.’ Alma went back to the books. She added quickly, ‘We’re both adopted.’ There was a long pause. She kept her head turned away.

  Rose asked, ‘Do you ever think about your real mother?’

  Alma began to feel suffocated. She felt as if she were dying. She said, ‘Yes, a lot.’

  ‘Do you hate her?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She looked up, but Rose had moved; she was staring down at a book in her hand and her voice sounded muffled. ‘I just knew somebody once,’ she said, ‘who told me that that was how a lot of adopted children felt. They hated the real ones for letting them go. So, they never wanted to meet them.’

  ‘My brother feels that way. Full of hatred. But he’s a man. He isn’t ever going to get pregnant and not know what to do.’

  ‘But I guess it would be hard to forgive.’

  ‘Not for me.’

  She’s going to tell me now, Alma thought. But Rose didn’t say anything more: she sighed. She gave her attention to the books. All the science sections, she said, were in a mess.

  At the end of the day Alma went back to her room and lay down on the bed. She shut her eyes. The moment had been there and she’d missed it. She thought: I was the one who should have said something. Why didn’t I tell her? I ought to have. But I couldn’t. I ought to now. But I can’t. That was the time. And I let it go.

  *

  Bruce had the two girls exactly where he wanted them. They were frustrated and baffled. They’d been used to calling the tune. By the time they realized that he was going out with both of them, and each suspected that he might be sleeping with the other, he was entirely in control of the situation. He denied his complicity, while seeming to enjoy the flattery of accusation. He said, ‘Oh, she’s exaggerating. She’s making it up. She’s jealous. I take her out sometimes because she’s your sister. I feel sorry for her. She’s sort of got an obsession. She says it feels better to talk about it.’

  It was like being in a school play again, but doing half a dozen parts at the same time. He had to keep remembering what he’d said to which one.

  He was introduced to the parents. Ray made an effort to engage him in conversation about newspaper space and advertising. Joanna looked him up and down and smiled slyly. She flirted with him, though not so openly that her husband could see it. Bruce couldn’t make up his mind about whether she’d be an unfaithful wife. He guessed that maybe she would, if she thought she could get away with it, but she might be afraid of her husband. It was possible that Ray too was the type to have somebody else on the side, but if so, it wouldn’t be serious; you could see that he was crazy about Joanna. And he was full of plans and schemes and deals that kept him busy. He’d probably never had much time to spare for the daughters; he was proud of the way they both looked, but Bruce didn’t think he’d have any idea that they weren’t pure as lilies and actually hadn’t been that way for a couple of years.

  Bruce gave Joanna a sympathetic look as she complained about the state of the garden. He said that if she didn’t know what to do about the laurel bushes at the end of the path by the trees, he’d take a look at them: he wasn’t an expert, but he’d picked up quite a lot of information while he was working on people’s lawns.

  ‘Oh, we have a man for all that,’ she said dismissively.

  ‘Well, tell him they’re dying, then. It isn’t just the weather. The boxwood bushes don’t look too hot, either, and they’re American box, aren’t they?’

  Her eyebrows rose. She looked utterly disdainful. He didn’t know how he’d offended her, but he had. He’d also made her interested in him, he could tell. So, the other part didn’t matter.

  He smiled pleasantly and said, ‘Just a suggestion. It’s your garden.’

  *

  After closing time Alma went back to the library to look for a letter that she thought she’d left there. She searched all around the places where she’d been doing the reshelving downstairs, then she walked up to the gallery.

  The late afternoon sun threw a pattern of bars down from the upper railings to the stairs she was climbing. Her footsteps echoed in the empty building. She thought how strange sound was: a voice or a step could be soft, yet the effect of it was to touch everything. Even a breath could be heard, if you were listening for it, from one end of a building to the other.

  The stairs creaked. When she reached the top, she crossed to the point farthest away from the front door downstairs. From where she stood, she could see the two staircases leading down on either side and, beyond them, the opposite wall like the other half of an egg: built in a curve similar to the one she stood against. All the wall was lined with book-filled shelves, but in front of her and on the right-hand side, windows let the sun in. Motes moved soundlessly along the trails of light. Now that everything had been closed and locked for the night, the atmosphere was becoming slightly stuffy.

  She found it hard to imagine what would have been there a century before. Perhaps there had been a ballroom with a balcony. It seemed unlikely that a private gentleman would have made provision for such an extensive library.

  She turned to the wall, where she’d been standing earlier in the day. There were the three stray books she’d meant to check and, under them, the letter from Merle. She pulled the letter out from underneath. As she did so, the floorboards at the far end of the gallery began to squeal. She turned around, the letter in her hand. She stared across at the windows.

  There was nothing. But the wood continued to make intermittent, small noises. She put the letter into her pocket and waited. She was about to head for the stairs when the sounds changed from single, isolated noises to a pattern. Clusters of tapping came from the floorboards at the opposite end of the oval; they moved in bunches, like spurts of rain.

  Arnie Lodz, who taught science to the seventh graders, had a theory about the library and its ghost. Long before he’d been told what he might expect to see, he’d come across an apparition. Naturally, he wasn’t discounting the possibility that indirect influence had prepared him. First of all, he’d heard a regular step that sounded like someone walking in high-heeled boots or shoes. At the same time there had been a rustling and swishing sound as of a long skirt in motion. His explanation of the phenomenon cited temperature, displacement of weight, the drop and warp of timbers. He also suspected the proportions of the solid parts of the structure compared with the spaces in between. Everyone who had ever lived in an old house, he said, knew about the noises you could hear at night from the expansion or contraction of the wood.

  Arnie had taken measurements in the gallery, had removed samples of wood and plaster, had noted the temperature at different times of the day and night. He’d studied the moisture level and he’d rigged up an apparatus for detecting any airwaves that might be expelled from the walls or floorboards as changes took place within them. In addition to all that, he’d left a sensitive recorder in the building overnight. But none of his researches bore fruit. He’d never figured out where the manifestation – whatever it was – had its source, nor along what lines it proceeded. And he’d never encountered the ghost again. ‘If it weren’t for the fact th
at I’d actually seen the thing myself,’ he’d told Alma, ‘I’d say the origin of it is that people know it’s supposed to be there.’

  Her eye traveled from the windows to the floor and back to the extreme end of the gallery. She waited.

  The sounds began again. As before, they started next to the far windows, along the floor: the stepping, the whispering rustle and the patter of little creaks. But this time they seemed to be coordinated, so that as she listened, the uneven bursts fell into a forward-winding scheme almost like something that might issue from a slow, uncertain worker at a typewriter, but more akin to lines of music being tapped out with slight variations at every repeat.

  She was about to walk forward to investigate, when it was as if she’d been anticipated: the repetitive snapping and creaking moved from the end of the gallery and began to follow the curve of the bannisters along the right side of the oval. As they approached the place where she stood, they grew louder and faster, hammering. She turned her head to the right. She tried to trace the drumming course of the noise along the railing, but her eye was caught by something above – a movement in the air.

  It was in a hurry, coming at her fast, but she couldn’t understand what it was; it seemed to be a large smear or a wave or a knot of movement, or as if something had gone wrong with her eyes.

  Her mouth opened, her hands gripped the edge of the shelf to her right. The noises came straight up to her, almost to her feet and, as they stopped, the wavelike bundle of smudges unraveled and rolled away into nothing. It was as if the air were coming apart.

  The light in the library appeared to settle itself at a lower pitch. Everything looked normal. Whatever it was, had gone. And as soon as she realized that it was over, she knew that what had happened was so strange that it was impossible.

  God, she thought, what was it? It wasn’t a person, so it couldn’t have been a ghost. It was like seeing an eclipse, if you didn’t know what one was; if you didn’t realize that it was natural, you’d be frightened.