Black Diamond Page 2

  ‘I’ll see to all that,’ William said. He was still only seventeen. He wouldn’t be eighteen till the spring. He hadn’t told his own parents anything yet. Knowing them and their views about who was or wasn’t worthwhile, he’d prejudged their reactions and chosen, for the moment, not to speak out. In any case he’d wanted to be with Jean when she had to face her mother and father. The money he’d have when he was eighteen wasn’t much, but it was enough to start out on. If he had to, he could handle everything all by himself, though he’d rather have his parents’ help. He’d rather have them understand, too.

  He was still mulling over the wording of the speech that would overwhelm his parents, when he was beaten to the punch by Jean’s father.

  Her father had first of all let his daughter know what he thought of her. ‘This is all the thanks we get,’ he’d said. His wife backed him up. Jean ran upstairs, crying, and slammed her door, leaving her parents to talk about what should be done.

  Her father decided there ought to be a discussion between all four parents on the matter of financial arrangements. He telephoned William’s father. He assumed that the man knew what was going on.

  Jean’s father talked to William’s father for twelve minutes. He brought up the subjects of rent, food, clothes, the price of baby carriages, hospitals, and so on.

  William’s father didn’t say much, except that he’d remember all the points raised: he’d have to go over them with his wife before he could say anything definite. He left the office immediately. He went into conference at home with his wife. Together they greeted William on his return from school.

  He opened his heart to them. They closed theirs to him. They told him that he had no idea how difficult it could be for a young couple with a baby – especially hard for a girl, who would have to become a mother before learning how to be a wife.

  ‘We know that already‚’ William said. ‘What it means to be man and wife. We don’t need a piece of paper.’

  ‘Without the piece of paper, and without being the right age, the child may not be legally yours,’ his father told him. ‘Or hers.’

  ‘That can’t be true.’

  ‘You can prove you’re not the father of a child, but it’s impossible to prove that you are. You didn’t know that, did you?’

  ‘I guess so,’ William said. ‘Why does it matter?’

  ‘She’s still considered to be under the care of her parents. And now her father’s trying to get money out of us. He called me up at the office, started talking about hospital bills and the price of maternity clothes and everything. He seemed to think I knew all about it.’

  William was sorry about that, he said; he’d been racking his brains, wondering how to tell them: he’d known from the beginning that they didn’t like Jean.

  His parents denied it; they had nothing against the girl. Of course not. But as things stood now … Well, there were so many difficulties.

  If they wanted to, his father told him, her parents could get really nasty. She was still a minor. If William were one year older, they could charge him with rape on the mere fact of her age, and send him to jail. Even as it was, they could put her into some kind of reform school until she was eighteen. For immorality.

  ‘That’s crazy,’ William said. ‘And disgusting.’

  ‘It’s the law.’

  ‘Then the law is crazy. It ought to be changed.’

  ‘Maybe so. But it isn’t changed yet.’

  William wanted to know what people were doing, passing laws like that: were they all religious bigots? Even bigots went to bed with each other; or did they just want to stop everybody else from doing it?

  Laws, his father said, usually had some sense to them. This particular one was meant to protect people who had no defences: to prevent men from fooling around with young girls who didn’t know how to take care of themselves and who wouldn’t be able to raise a child on their own.

  ‘But this isn’t like that‚’ William said.

  ‘Nothing is ever like the textbook case till somebody takes it to court, and then it’s got to be argued like the book, because that’s the only way you can figure out how to deal with it.’

  ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with other people.’

  ‘Could you support a wife and child right now?’

  ‘Yes,’ William said, wanting to win the argument.

  His father didn’t tell him he was wrong. He simply pointed out how hard it would be, and added that the kind of salary and career available to a college graduate was a lot better than what a man could hope to work up to after five years of living from hand to mouth. William thought that over. He saw that he’d have to have his parents’ help. He knew he’d be able to count on them as long as he fell in with most of their advice.

  He began to believe he might have been wrong about the way he’d handled the talk with Jean’s parents. If that was the line they were going to take, they weren’t worth considering, but naturally Jean would want to think there was an excuse for them. He also felt ashamed of not having trusted his own parents, who both appeared so reasonable, and so worried; they weren’t angry at all.

  His parents worked on him, in perfect counterpoint, until he agreed that he wouldn’t see Jean for two weeks. It was an unsettling time for everybody, they said. Two weeks would be enough of a breathing-space to get everything straightened out. They asked him not to telephone Jean during that period; they wanted a free hand. They didn’t put a ban on letters, since his mother had long ago searched his room and found the letters Jean had written to him. Nowhere in them had there been a hint of the pregnancy, but in one letter Jean had written something about the ornamental stone jar in which the two of them had started to hide their more fervent correspondence: the jar stood at a corner of the crumbling terrace wall that bounded three sides of the old Sumner house. The house had been shut up for years. Weeks before she could have known that the letters would make any difference to her life, William’s mother knew the look of Jean’s handwriting. She knew it nearly as well as she knew her son’s.

  William wrote a letter to Jean. In it he told her about the talk he’d had with his parents. Things would turn out all right – there was nothing any parent could do to keep them apart for long, but he didn’t want her to imagine he’d stop thinking about her if they just didn’t see each other for a few days. They were always going to be together in their thoughts. And he hoped she’d stay certain; even though they were close in spirit, he was a little afraid of her parents’ influence. He was especially worried that she might be persuaded to think everything he and she had done together was bad.

  He put the letter inside the terrace urn. His mother retrieved it. She then made a surprisingly good forgery of Jean’s handwriting on paper she had bought that day. Each pale pink sheet was printed at the upper left-hand corner with a picture of forget-me-nots tied up in blue ribbon. The paper had been a lucky find: she’d bought a whole box; it was the same kind Jean wrote her letters on. William would never suspect his mother of using such paper.

  The forged letter asked why his parents couldn’t help out with the money, because her father was getting really mad about it and, actually, she was beginning to wonder, too; after all, he wasn’t the one who was going to have the baby. Anyway, her father had told her that William’s father had said something about her, something kind of insulting, so she realized that William had been discussing her with his parents. She thought that was a pretty cheap thing to do; in fact, it was measly.

  William’s mother was proud of her letter. She thought she’d hit the tone, the phrasing and the slang just right. Her pleasure was malicious, but her purpose wasn’t. She believed that William had been maneuvered into fatherhood by a girl from a family of no background; and that if events were allowed to take their course, he’d hate the girl in a few years. It would be better to break up the affair now.

  His father too was ready to protect William. He’d run across men like Jean’s father before. He telephoned back
and laid it on the line: he and his wife had no responsibility towards a girl who said she was pregnant by their son. Attempts to extort money out of their family – phoning him at his office, yes – could end in criminal prosecution. Naturally Jean’s father was free to try to prove that some compensation was owed. But if there were to be a legal battle, money would win it in the end.

  Jean’s father felt a deep sense of unfairness and injury after the phone call; he felt it more and more as he continued to brood about it. Every time you tried to make excuses for people like that, he thought, they turned around and ran true to type. They had no respect for other families. They considered themselves better than other people. He couldn’t quite bring himself to face the fact that it had been a disastrous move to raise the question of money, and that by doing so he had probably wrecked his daughter’s hopes of marriage. He’d never really had anything against William, only against the double sin of sexual trespass and pregnancy. But he’d been intimidated. He didn’t like the idea that somebody in his family could end up in a law court. They’d always been law-abiding – all of them.

  He told his wife that it wasn’t going to be the way they’d hoped; they couldn’t expect any help from the boy’s parents. They’d have to start thinking about those doctor and hospital bills, not to mention the embarrassment of having to go on living in the town afterwards. Jean’s mother got scared. She had never done anything underhand or shameful; she’d worked hard and made a good home for her family. And if Jean didn’t get married now, it would be her parents’ lives that would be destroyed, not hers.

  She had a little talk with her daughter. She told her that no matter how things went, Jean wasn’t to worry: it still wasn’t too late to do something about it.

  Jean pretended to be reassured. She wrote a long letter to William, asking him what was going on at his house, and telling him that her mother had changed, and wanted her to get rid of the baby. She had to talk to him, she said.

  She ran to the Sumner house, to the urn on the terrace. She left her note and hurried away with the letter she’d found addressed to her in an excellent facsimile of William’s handwriting.

  His mother saw her come and go. And she picked up the letter meant for William. If she or her husband had stopped to think, they might have said to themselves that many boys and young men will sleep with the wrong kind of girl because there’s nobody else around, but that this affair wasn’t like that: the two were in love. Traditionally, that was supposed to make all irregularities acceptable. Therefore, if the parents disapproved so violently, it might be because they actually wished to discourage the young from loving.

  William’s mother realized that she could keep up the letter game for only so long. It would be stupid to assume that one of them wouldn’t catch her at her substitution; or, they might come across her while trying – in spite of their promises, and against their parents’ wishes – to meet each other. Nor did she look forward to having her husband discover the exact extent of her interference. She could justify her actions if she had to: a mother has excuses not available to other people. But she’d rather not have to. All she had said in the beginning was that she was going to read the letters, in order to figure out the right way to approach William: as long as she was free to act on her own, everything would be fine. Of course, if her husband wanted to read their letters himself … No, he’d said; he didn’t think it was necessary to read anyone’s letters, but he’d leave the matter to her.

  She was excited, frightened, and should have been worried about her rapid heartbeat. The thrill of participating in William’s drama, of saving her son from making a mess of his life, kept her at fever-pitch. She was happy. She’d never had a real romance herself: the secret, stealthy, illicit going back and back again to temptation. She was having her romance now, fired by the heroic part she was playing – a woman rescuing her innocent son from ruin. She didn’t blame the girl especially; it was just that a girl like Jean wasn’t good enough. Girls like that wanted to get married. It didn’t usually matter who was picked out to marry them. Jean would have to release her hold on William and find someone else.

  Jean took her letter home and read it. She cried over it. Everything was going wrong: he was changing. If she could see him and try to talk to him, she wouldn’t know what to say. His letter almost sounded as if he didn’t love her any more. But that couldn’t be true.

  Her mother made an excuse to the school, to keep Jean at home for a while. She thought her daughter needed time to think. Besides, Jean was looking so unhappy that her classmates might start to ask her questions; or, she might just decide, out of a need to feel comforted, to talk to someone herself. Then, later, if she had to be sent away, everyone would know why. That wouldn’t do. And William was there at school, too. Although he wouldn’t be able to see Jean without cutting classes, he was there. He might wait around for her in the morning, or later in the afternoon.

  At the same time, William’s mother asked her husband to arrange for their son to take a break from school. She wanted to make sure that William and Jean didn’t get a chance to plan anything on their own. She made the first suggestion herself: that William might like a change of scene for a short while, to get things clear in his mind; how about a trip somewhere nice for a couple of weeks? Nassau, perhaps; with his Uncle Bertram. William said no. He couldn’t leave now. As soon as the time-limit was up, he’d get together with Jean. He already wished he hadn’t given his word.

  He couldn’t bear the thought that Jean had lost faith in him. He broke his promise to his parents and went over to her house at night. He stood under her window, where the light was out. He threw small stones up at the panes. If he’d had a long, black cloak, he’d have felt safely disguised: covered by darkness, the lover’s friend. On the other hand, it would have made throwing the stones even more difficult. It was impossible to hit anything in the dark. He might break the glass if he wasn’t careful. He began to get mad enough to risk it. Her light went on. Then other lights came on too, one near her window and another downstairs; her parents had heard. He retreated. Maybe she hadn’t even realized he’d been there.

  He looked for her at school. He asked one of the girls in her class: where was she? ‘She’s sick,’ the girl told him. But it wasn’t anything serious, she said. Just a bad cold.

  He stopped playing his records so often. He couldn’t concentrate on them. The most beautiful parts upset him; and everything in between made him impatient. He wrote a letter to Jean, though he knew she wouldn’t be able to go get it till she was better. He worried about her. She shouldn’t be sick if she was carrying a child. He put his letter in the urn and took out the one that was waiting there for him.

  His father had a long talk with him about money and compensation, college and law school. William was so distracted he could barely understand what was being said to him. The letter he had just read, and which he believed to be from Jean, told him in plain terms how little she thought of his conduct, said there were others who wouldn’t have treated her so badly, talked about his petty-mindedness on the subject of money, sneered at his mother’s fur coat, claimed she could sue him, and complained that he’d talked her into keeping the baby: now she was stuck with it while he was as free as a bird.

  His mother was just in time to intercept his desperate answer. In its place she put a letter containing a key to a box at the post office. The letter said that William was afraid he might be followed or sent away, so it was safer to use the post office.

  From then on, it was easy to deceive the young couple without danger. William protested when he was sent to the Caribbean, but he gave in; the fight was going out of him. He too had been given a key, to a post office box with a different number. His mother was therefore able to make her exchanges without fear that a letter would slip through. She could also use William’s stamped and cancelled envelopes sent genuinely from the West Indies; a single numeral altered the box number. And she brought the affair to an end quickly. She sent
Jean a letter that described William going to a party given by friends of his parents. These friends had a daughter he’d met years ago when they were children. He couldn’t believe now, the letter said, how much they had in common. Although he’d always be fond of Jean, he thought they’d better both admit everything between them had been a big mistake. He felt pretty upset, but he had to be honest and say he wanted to do lots of things in life – starting with college and law school – that wouldn’t be possible with a wife and child. He’d come to believe, from hearing some interesting theories on the subject recently, that it was better in every way not to start having children till you were about twenty-eight. He did realize, naturally, that in a certain sense he was to blame. But she couldn’t deny that she’d said yes in the first place, and nice girls didn’t – he knew that now: they just had strong principles about the right way to behave in life. You had to have those high standards in order to become a mature human being. Of course he still liked her, but he thought she’d better take her parents’ advice, except not about trying to get money out of his father, because that could land them in a lot of trouble, she’d better believe that.

  The letter ended, So I guess this is goodbye.

  Jean wrote back. She pleaded with him. She thought that he couldn’t have meant to send her a letter like that. She asked him to read it over, and to think about what he felt, and to try to remember the way he’d known her. She enclosed his letter. She said she loved him; she’d wait for an answer.

  He didn’t answer. He hadn’t seen her letter. She wrote again, almost immediately, telling him that her parents were taking her out of school for the rest of the year and sending her to live with her maiden aunt in the next state. She was going to have the baby there. She gave him the address and begged him to help her: if he didn’t help, they could take the baby away from her as soon as it was born. That was what they wanted – for the baby to be adopted by somebody, so then nobody would know she’d had an illegitimate child.