Now, clinging together like children in busy traffic, Lorraine and Gordon made their way to the Assembly chambers, where outside the chambers Phil Kay and a dozen other representatives quickly surrounded them, wishing them luck, expressing their support. Kay introduced them to one after another indistinguishable light-haired man. These were the legislators who had crafted the language of the original bill, onto which the Kay amendment was tacked. “And now, nobody cares about all those months of work,” Kay announced cheerfully. “All they care about is your family’s part!”
“We’ll make sure we never forget that the whole bill is meant to make families like ours easier,” Lorraine told him. Gordon thought, My mother should run for something.
And then, Phil Kay led Gordon into the Assembly chambers, up the center aisle to the front of the room; the microphone was adjusted for him, and terrified that he would belch, he waited for Phil Kay’s introduction and began, “My sister Georgia named her baby daughter after me, in a way. When I was a little kid, I knew my sister’s full name was Georgia O’Keeffe McKenna, with two fs, but I couldn’t pronounce her first name, for some reason, and so I . . .” He glanced at his mother, and saw her ghost of a nod, and continued, describing Georgia’s illness, Ray’s suffering, and the number of times Georgia had made him promise to look after Keefer and help Ray look after their baby. “I know she said that same thing to many of her friends and relatives. But it’s different . . .” He breathed, tried to right the wobble in his throat. “It’s different when someone is your big sister. I mean, you do what she says, right?” Faint laughter. “When it’s your only sibling who asks something like that of you, you take it seriously. And Georgia was my sister, no matter what any judge says. Or any law. I hope you find it in your hearts to make the language of the law plain, because this period of our lives has been . . . very hard. And it would frighten me to think that someday Keefer might have to go through something like this herself.
“Anyhow, nothing that happens here today is going to mean I will be more my parents’ son than I am right now. I’m Mark McKenna’s son. I’m Lorraine McKenna’s son. By law and by blood, too.” He sat down. Lorraine nudged him. Gordon shot back up. “Thank you,” he said.
Phil Kay pointed out the big light boards that dominated the two front corners of the chambers; each of the boards had all ninety-nine representatives’ names and a red and green light next to each of their names. Green, he told them, signified a yes vote, red . . . it was obvious. The Speaker of the House rose, and called for a vote on Assembly Bill 600, those in favor and those opposed. As they watched, the board came to life, with first one, then ten, then fifty, then what appeared to be hundreds of green lights.
And only one red.
Phil Kay was pumping his arm, and Lorraine leaned her cheek against Gordon’s chest. And they were engulfed by backslapping, as they attempted to make their way into the aisle, toward the exit. As they passed, one man stood and began to applaud. All of them stood, the sound of their hands like a hard rain. “Well done!” someone called.
“This is just the first step,” Phil Kay told them, as they emerged into the glittering street, “but it’s a good one. The Senate will take it up next. I don’t anticipate problems there. And I can assure you I will do everything in my power to urge the governor to act with the utmost speed. Merry Christmas, you guys!”
Driving through worsening weather on the interstate helped Gordon keep his anxiety quelled, but he caught himself wondering, as they passed the Dells, and Plainfield, and Stevens Point, what had happened at the appeal. Why hadn’t they called Dad? Finally, they were turning onto Cleveland Avenue. Gordon looked for the sounds of a celebration. Horns. Hats. Bells. But nothing moved except Mary Dwors, who waved hello as she poked her head out to grab her newspaper. His parents’ house was still, the blinds full drawn.
He almost wept with relief when Mark came to the door with Keefer in his arms. Someone—Nora he suspected—had wound her feathery hair into two pigtails secured with elastic ties. One red, one green ball on each. “I can tell by your faces,” Mark said wearily, “that it went great.”
And they could tell from his face that on this end, in Judge Sayward’s courtroom, it had not.
“The judge did grant a stay,” he told them, “but she refused to change the guardianship order. That means the Cadys are going to take her. Now, Lor,” he said as Lorraine made a grab for Keefer, “this isn’t all bad news. The judge ruled that they can’t move to adopt her until the appeals process is completed. And we get visits with her, one weekend a month.”
“When are they coming?” Lorraine asked.
“They should be here now,” Mark sighed. “Delia just phoned.”
“Not today,” Lorraine said, raising her voice to a wail. “Not today! Not today!”
“Gordie,” Mark said, “there’s a drawer up in our room. Bottles of pills. Bring them down.”
“Which ones, Dad?”
“Any ones, son.”
“They’re all gone, Mark. They’re not there anymore. Well, almost all. And anyway, I don’t need anything,” Lorraine said, patting Keefer, who was patting her grandmother’s back as well, and with her other hand gently scrubbing at the streaks of mascara on Lorraine’s cheeks. “Don’t worry, Keefer. Everything is all right.”
They watched the hands on the clock stutter, and jump. A quarter past three. Three-thirty. Gordon thought, with a surge of hope, that the weather might have impeded the Cadys’ progress. Perhaps they’d turned back.
They all heard the thumps of the car doors slamming, and Craig Cady stood on the porch.
“She won’t go to you,” Mark told him mildly.
“Yes, she will,” Craig said, offering his arms. Keefer cringed.
“Aren’t you going to put her into her snowsuit?” Lorraine asked. “Why would you take her out into a snowstorm without a snowsuit?”
“Okay,” Craig was florid, sweating, miserable. Gordon almost felt pity. Craig called back over his shoulder, “Alex! Alexis!”
It did the trick. Catching sight of the red-haired girl, Keefer began making patty-cakes, showing all her white tooth nubbings, blowing kisses. “Should I take her, Craig?” Alexis asked. “Should I take her, Mr. McKenna?” she asked Gordon.
Together, he and the girl teased Keefer into her snowsuit. He could hear, behind him in the kitchen, Lorraine’s voice, edgy, shrill, “Aren’t you going to take her bed? Aren’t you going to ask what her favorite toys are? What she eats, for God’s sake? Are you going to drive back to Madison in this weather, with this child you love so much?”
“She has everything she needs,” Craig said. “Don’t make this worse than it has to be. We aren’t trying to harm you people. We pray for you.”
“You pray for us!” Lorraine snapped.
“Alex,” Gordon whispered, “go out there for a moment and tell your . . . dad that I . . .”
“He’s my stepdad,” Alexis replied, also in a whisper.
“Well, tell Craig I want a moment with her, alone.”
“He’ll think you’re going to run away with her, like they did in Florida.”
“I’m not going to run away with her.”
He had not envisioned how he would do this, accomplish this, actually part with her. And he told himself that this was foolish; he was not giving up Keefer. Today, in victory, they had taken the first steps toward a change that would have to carry weight with the court of appeals, even though he knew the court’s members were charged with a challenge to the law as it existed at the time of the hearing, not as it might exist in the future. Regardless, he reminded himself, Georgia had regarded Delia highly enough to ask her to be her matron of honor. Surely, they would treasure Georgia’s child. Ray’s child.
Keefer was squirming, scrabbling at her snowsuit trying to scratch her itches. Gordon took one of her palms and kissed it. She pulled it away. He put his hands behind his back. “How many duckies back here?” he asked, first holding up one approximation
of a beak, quacking vigorously. Keefer pointed at the door where Alexis had gone. “Okay, Keefster,” Gordon said. Think now, right now, he told himself. “Now, I love you.”
“Dory,” Keefer said precisely.
“Dory loves you, so much.” The baby immediately raised both hands over her head and waggled her fingers. “That’s right. So big.”
He saw the Band-Aid, a tiny green strip in the shape of a crayon and remembered his father’s account of Keefer’s cut, the night before. “Let me see the boo-boo, Keef,” he said, and pulled the Band-Aid off. Keefer yelped.The cut had been significant, but had almost healed. Kids had the immune system of titans. But in the corner, where the scab had not quite congealed, one bright pinprick drop of blood welled.
Tenderly, Gordon lifted her tiny finger and placed it against his tongue.
CHAPTER fifteen
“Today, we mate,” said Gordon.
The class tittered appreciatively.
“You’re mine, Reilly,” Eddie Carlson cat-called. “You’re all mine!”
“I must have Kelly!” Kye Olstadt croaked.
Gordon mused, as Kelly Rafferty’s face crimsoned from the nose outward, whether Kye did have her, on a regular basis.
She looked exactly like her mother. Alicia had turned out to be one of the world’s kindliest friends. She had sent him, through Kelly, a thick bunch of Gerbera daisies, bright as parrots, when Senator Hammersmith offered to sponsor the bill in the state senate, where it had passed and not just passed, but unanimously. With any luck, the governor would sign the bill before the appeal was heard. Both the senator and Phil Kay had written the governor, urging him to quick action.
All the news was good.
As a result, he was wildly apprehensive.
In atonement, out of some arbitrary zeal, he’d tried to become Mr. Chips—patient, jovial, the complete teacher. A matching pledge grant, in effect, for his aunt’s novenas, his mother’s bonzai national and international correspondence, her festival of superstitious gestures. Lorraine avoided looking at the rind of the new moon over her shoulder through window glass, whisked hats off any bed, walked backward out of the house if she had to go back in for something she’d forgotten and made a parody of rapping her knuckles on wood and touching them to her lips. She was his Grandma Lena to the fourth power. But without Keefer, for all of them, there was nothing much else to do but be superstitious and brood. At night, strumming, Gordon worked on Eric Clapton and Phil Ochs songs, but would end up torturing himself by playing “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”
He had what he’d always craved, all the solitude in the world.
Though they had counted on having Keefer for Christmas, Delia had called on the morning before Christmas Eve and informed them tersely that Keefer had an ear infection. It was her opinion that she needed to stay “home.” Keefer was just beginning to grasp the idea that Christmas meant candy and toys. “Because we believe that Christ is the reason for the season,” Delia had told Gordon’s mother, “we don’t do Santa or very many presents or anything. But at least she’ll be able to go to the service, and it’s so wonderful, the children’s choir dressed as angels, it’s really glorious.” It would be acceptable, Delia had further told them, for the McKennas to take Keefer for a few days during the week after New Year’s Eve. Keefer needed to be home for the family New Year’s celebration, at church, in Madison.
Lorraine had—-politely, according to her own account—reminded Delia that classes resumed that week, so that she and Gordon would be working every day.
“Well, let’s just wait for next month, then,” Delia replied. “She can come in February.”
Furious, Lorraine had phoned Greg Katt. Lay low, he’d advised. Lay low and be cooperative. He said Stacey Kane and Charley Borchart were about to file the briefs for the appeal. No waves. Think ahead. Be the most easygoing people on earth.
So, Christmas had been subdued, to say the least. The piles of presents that customarily overwhelmed the tree and burgeoned out into the hall were diminished when they’d mailed Keefer’s packages to Madison, and her stocking at the fireplace, knitted at her birth by Nora, hung limp, compelling all their eyes, a palpable reproach. Gordon had always found his mother’s Christmas mania extreme and embarrassing as they grew older and passed the developmental phase of naked greed . . . past the age of, say, eleven. He’d longed for a time when his mother would not ask them to watch while she moved the three kings—Georgia, as a child, had called them “the wiseguys”—a fraction of an inch closer to the stable, hand-carved in Hungary and blessed by obscure holy Hungarians. He’d longed, during college, and after, for what he imagined a Manhattan type of Christmas, adults sipping expensive champagne and nibbling oysters, exchanging a few but very elite items made of chrome. But his mother and Georgia favored shirts silk-screened with unearthed family photos, stocking caps with jingle bells, enough sports equipment to outfit his own gym.
Of course, damned luck, he missed that now, that excess, and was thankful for the chance to drive through the woods and over the hill to Nora’s, where he and his male cousins had thrown a football around the side yard after consuming thirds of every class of cholesterol-enhancing cuisine. They had guzzled Labatts, sworn mightily, laughed at the dogs, behaved, in short, like people from Wisconsin, and Gordon was not pretending for one moment. Screw the chrome Christmas. He’d felt safe, counted in.
That night, he’d slept in his old bed at his parents’ and dreamed of Keefer as a grown girl, fitting long, strong fingers down the seams of the pigskin, his own hand helping her form the fit. When he awoke, he woke to thinking of how it was for her in the morning, how he’d turn from shaving to see her flipping Rice Chex out of his cereal bowl, using the spoon as a catapult, and how he’d no sooner clean up the Rice Chex then he’d catch her washing the windows with baby wipes, and he’d no sooner get those back into the box than she’d try to walk in his shoes and fall, wailing. Her face, when he dared tell her “No!” was pure opera; Keefer would collapse to her knees, hands on cheeks, mouth wide open in the silent cry, and for an hour later, even after he’d given back the wipes, she would refuse to look at him. Mark had called Keefer’s determined ignoring of her elders “shunning.” He said that defiance was the picture of Georgia.
Gordon’s place was his own now, but he’d lost the lazy luxury of bachelorhood. He’d once cleaned as a single guy cleans, to prevent the origin of species, not to pass the white glove test. Now, in the early days since Keefer’s departure, he found himself unable to stop making sure that all the surfaces two feet above the floor were spotless. Keefer had possessed the baby’s knack for finding subatomic particles on any surface to pluck up and ingest, and he eagle-eyed everything as if she were still there and vulnerable.
After a while, though, the second law of thermodynamics took over. Gordon was depressed. His tuner for the guitar occupied the middle of the coffee table, along with a six-pack of bottled water, along with the watch his parents had given him for Christmas, his electric screwdriver, a threaded needle and the rent shirt it was intended to mend, several sock bombs he rolled to pitch at the plastic hoop he’d desultorily mounted above his front door, a paper carton of grotesquely aged vegetable sub-gum, papers to grade—weighted with a can of antifungal powder. Laundry lived on the couch, clean to the left, dirty to the right. He no longer had to sweat the pixie rushing in the door to make joyous confetti out of his T-shirt and boxers. Rare, under-the-bed sweeps turned up wrenching relics, the tinkle bracelet that had belonged to his sister, one blue-and-green Baby Botte shoe, a sock with tweety birds marching around the ankle, the Barbie whose brittle blond hair they’d put in corn rows one Saturday night.
The energy he could muster he gave to his students. He’d given them a quarter of what they deserved.
“Everyone should have four cards,” Gordon told the class, a few days after they’d straggled back from winter break and recovered from vacation lag, “two marked big A, two marked little a. Shuffle the cards and p
lace them facedown.” He switched on the CD player, “Love Shack” by the B-52’s.
“Now, take the top card off your stack, and let’s breed. Select your mate,” Gordon instructed.
The boys lurched toward one another; the girls clustered instinctively. “Okay, okay,” Gordon said. “Pick your partners. And remember, no one can breed with the same person twice. It’s the experience that counts. Come on, people. This usually doesn’t take that long, especially at your age.” Over the boom of their released laughter, he told them, “As you know, each of these cards represents an allele. The genes that dictate a specific trait, such as brown eyes, can occur in two or more alternative forms, called alleles.”
“Proximity is the most dominant force in attraction,” Carlson said to Perry Kistler, “and we’ve lived on the same block for years, Kistler. I think we’re meant for each other.”
“Let’s reveal what you’ve produced—-or reproduced—here, scholars,” Gordon tried to joke. “Just looking around, I confess I feel a little concern . . .”
On the first round, the cards had distributed themselves fairly evenly, as he’d known they would. “What are we seeing here, Mr. Carlson?”
“Well, my offspring are big A, big A . . . that’s homozygous dominant,” the boy said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. . . . it’s just the way some people are.” More laughter.
They proceeded into the second round. Barry White on the CD player assured his sweetheart that they had the staying power.
“You got any Steppenwolf, Mr. McKenna?” one of the boys shouted. “I’m dying with this music.”
“No, it’s good,” another guy chided. “Soft rock reminds me of getting my braces off.”
“I don’t understand this,” Kathy Zurich mourned.
“That’s not what I heard!” the Woffling kid teased.
“No one understands it,” Gordon told them, during a pause. “The science of genetics is like the theory of relativity in that there are so many detours and apparent contradictions that it’s difficult even for biologists, and I hasten to point out I am not one, to get their minds around it. Even Gregor Mendel, who was the father of what remains the basis of all genetics, even Brother Mendel—”