“A promise?”
“That you were never to be told about the Millses. That the buck stopped there.
“But nothing changed. And your mother was forced into a position people seldom find themselves in. She was forced, that is, to make plans.
“It is an astonishing fact, George, but the truest thing I know. Our lives happen to us. We don’t make them up. For every hero who means to cross an ocean on a raft, there are a hundred men fallen overboard, a thousand, who find themselves in the lifeboat by accident.
“Not Nancy. Nancy had plans. What she planned was a new life. She meant to take you and the baby — she was pregnant again — and to leave your father, to get as far from the apartments and basements of Milwaukee as possible, not to divorce him, because she didn’t want your father to know where you would be, and once she brought the law into it — separation agreements, court decrees, visitation formulas — there would be no hiding from him. She planned, you see, to disappear in America.
“ ‘Maybe it’s a good thing that I have no references, that I’m one of those for whom there is no record. Look at my husband. He is all references. The trouble is he believes them. They are all he believes. I will have to write home less often. One day I shall have to stop altogether. They don’t know yet I’m pregnant with Georgie’s sister. It was a mistake to tell them about Georgie. I didn’t know. Oh well. Live and learn. They won’t find out about baby Janet. Leaving George I leave them all.
“ ‘And if I meet a man? On my travels? Wherever it is I’m going. New Jersey! I shall go to New Jersey! If I meet a man in New Jersey and he wants to marry me and give me maids, what does it matter if he thinks me a widow? How would he ever find me out? My kind is free.’
“She found out the coach fare to New Jersey and began to save for it by not spending all the money George gave her for food. She hid what she was able to put aside in their storage locker off the laundry room in the basement of the apartment where they now lived. She hid it under the thin mattress at the bottom of the stroller you had now outgrown and which was being kept for your sister.
“The handwriting in her head now:
“Nancy. Nancy is a basically honest person. Forced by circumstance to deceive her husband by withholding money specifically budgeted for household expenses, she carefully saw to it that she and she alone did the stinting. This, incidentally, is evidence of her organizational abilities, her initiative and growing skill with detail. She planned nutritious, comprehensive menus, carefully subtracting from her own portions what would look to the casual observer like hearty enough breakfasts, quite appetizing lunches, full-course dinners. She knew down to the unpurchased potato and unsqueezed orange, she knew to the slice of toast, to the egg and very fraction of stew or knifeload of peanut butter, the exact cost of what she would not be eating that day. Her hunger was her bankbook, and if she carefully managed to set aside from seventy-five cents to a dollar or so a week toward the price of her railroad tickets, George her husband and George her son were not only none the wiser but not a bit less comfortable for it. (Nor did she, as some might, add to the nest egg by telling her husband that hen’s meat and produce were inferior and could she have a little more money — fifty cents a week would do it — in order to shop at Hilton’s.)
“She was trying to save three lives — hers, yours, your sister’s. By the sixth month she had socked away most of the cash for her tickets — the baby, of course, would ride free — and had even selected a place to go to, Paterson, a small industrial city in north-eastern New Jersey, about seventeen miles from New York. She had gone to the library. She even knew what they did there — textiles, cotton and silk. (She had always sewn, she knew material; she didn’t think the big treadles and looms of Paterson, New Jersey, would be that much more difficult to handle than the Singer she was already accustomed to.) So it was all planned out, not only where she would go and what she would do but — she got hold of the Paterson newspaper — where she would live. All this from a woman who when she had been fired, sent away a few years before, could think of nowhere farther off to go than just downstairs.
“It wasn’t just the money for your ticket, George, that gave her second thoughts.
“ ‘George can almost read now. He’ll be writing in a year. He knows his address. Suppose he wants to get in touch with his daddy? How could I stop him from writing a letter? If I can prevent that, how do I keep him from running back in three or four years with my address? And there’s his ticket. I’ll have put away only enough to pay for our fares. There’ll be nothing left to start over with when we get to Paterson.’ ”
“She was going to leave me? She was going to leave me?”
“Nancy. Nancy is devoted to her family. She is determined that her children remain with her no matter what. I should add that this is not a decision arrived at lightly, or reached on the basis of emotion alone. (Though a naturally warm and loving person, the young woman in question doesn’t allow her heart to interfere with the facts. Nancy can be depended upon to look at all sides of an issue and to take decisive action only after her judgment has been thoroughly consulted.)
“She counted the cost. She counted the cost as she had estimated not only the price of the meat the others would consume in a week but the value to the penny of the two and a half or three slices of red beef she would not.”
“She was going to leave me?”
“Forcing herself to post the debits and credits involved if she took you.
“ ‘Debit: He would have no father to play with or take him to ball games.
“ ‘Debit: He would want toys.
“ ‘Debit: These are hard times. With two extra children to provide for, a man would think twice before asking a woman to marry him.
“ ‘Debit: He’s so much like his father.
“ ‘Debit: He’d have to be told some story about why we left Milwaukee, why I no longer ever even talk about taking him to visit his relations there. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I’d have to lie. I’m basically an honest person. I’d probably tell bad lies.
“ ‘Debit: If I do meet someone George might blurt out that I’m still married to a man in Wisconsin.
“ ‘Credit: He’s my son, after all.’ ”
“She’s going to leave me.”
“No,” Wickland said. “The debits were chiefly contingency debits, things well into the future, things that might never happen. She might never meet anyone who would want a woman with even one child. She was a person who required maids for those references she had never stopped making up in her head. You could do things around the house, you could help with the baby. She wasn’t going to leave you. She was going to take you.”
“So she could watch me. So she could make up references for me.”
“It was almost the eighth month now. This pregnancy hadn’t been as easy as her first. She was frequently in pain. It was a first-floor apartment but she had difficulty with the stairs, feeling each step in her gut, a pregnancy like appendicitis. She couldn’t do laundry. She couldn’t cook or clean or make beds. She took to her bed.
“And now she had maids, all she could want. They were girls from the buildings, not just from the building they lived in now or from Mrs. Simon’s building or even the building where they had first lived, the one with the famous storage locker (retired now, withdrawn forever from the category of lease, freehold and shelter, vacated, vacant, not exactly condemned nor quite yet memorialized as lovers’ lane, bower, star-crossed grottic coze, but doing a brisk business in necking, heavy petting, nakedness, with the now almost adolescent kids whose bicycles and sleds your father had once pulled up the cellar steps, the flowered oilcloth walls still up, unfaded and still redolent of the mysterious janitor and the exiled maid), but from all Mindian’s buildings, girls out on loan not just from the tenants who had lived there during the glory but from those who had come later, who had only heard about the glory and who wanted a piece of the consequences, the promissory moral catastrophic denouement. And not just on Thursday afternoons either, but every day, practically around the clock, making the apartment shine, eagerly doing your mother’s bidding, anticipating that bidding, getting you ready for school, making breakfast, making lunch, making dinner, doing the shopping!