That morning, he was sorting through more papers when he uncovered the folder of Georgia’s his mother had given him. The one he’d noticed in her apartment, containing a thick envelope from an organization called Families United. He shook out the contents, and began to read a letter referring to Georgia’s “initial inquiries” and “possible contact.” The research carried out by someone named Blair Bell, had, Georgia would be happy to learn, uncovered some very interesting possibilities about Georgia’s birth family. The last name “Kiss” was not uncommon in Hungary, but it was in the United States. It was the surname of cousins of her birth mother, for whom Blair Bell had no current address, only a work number from a hospital in San Diego. There, the personnel department had no record of future employment, but Georgia’s birth mother, whose name was Hannah, had been a physician’s assistant in 1988, and could well have married. Locating her would not prove difficult, should Georgia instruct Families United to authorize further inquiries. What was most compelling, the letter pointed out, was the ancestral surname, the name of cousins of her birth mother, and also the last name of her adoptive mother. The next steps should be exciting. The health information Georgia had initially requested would also be forthcoming. Blair Bell wished Georgia well as she contemplated her own path toward parenthood. There was an invoice, dated February 6, with the year of Keefer’s birth.
Georgia had been eight months’ pregnant then. Had she already felt sick? The head’s premonition of the body’s betrayal? Or had she simply, suffused with her own expectancy, longed for the ratification of the biological bond? Longed for deeper insights than her mirror’s messages about the heritable forces she had unleashed to build the being that would be her child? The name! Gordon ripped the letter once, and with difficulty because of the thickness of the stock, and folded it to rip again. What could it have meant to Georgia, the possibility that on some removed rung of ancestry, her beloved mother was her blood relative?
What could that possibility mean to Gordon?
He could dial the 800 number.
He tore the paper again, into fourths. He needed it gone. To live with it among his things was untenable. Why? He was ready to hear the correct multiple-choice plug-in, announced quickly, but shrank from an analysis. At last, he stuffed the fragments back into the envelope. For Keefer. This key was Keefer’s.
On the last day, he offered Judy Wilton his eggs and fresh vegetables, which she nodded at and received. Gruffly she told him, “I’m sorry about what happened last winter.”
“No, you’re not,” Gordon said easily. “But you were wrong. You were dead wrong.”
“I am sorry,” Judy Wilton said, and to his fascinated horror, began to weep, with a caliber of snorts he hadn’t heard since Mister Ed. “I really am sorry. I talked about it with my mother. And she said I don’t know a thing about how kids behave. She said my sister and I screamed all the time. We screamed so much she would put us in one crib and go out in the yard and smoke my dad’s cigars.”
Gordon could not help it. The snapshot of Helen Wilton puffing a stogie overcame him, and he laughed.
“It didn’t have anything to do with what happened, Judy,” he said.
“If it did, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Forgive yourself,” Gordon told her.
There was no need to say good-bye to Tim, who was planning to drive down with him Friday and help him tackle the fabled terrors of the piss-permeated farmhouse, and he had no heart for a mock-rousing mustering of his old friends. He’d had enough of gatherings to last him a decade, and he set his thoughts on the week he would have in Madison to paint and fumigate and make ready for a week from Thursday, when he would have Keefer for a full four days, a gift Delia had offered on a postcard she’d written him earlier in the week.
A few days after the postcard arrived, Craig Cady had left him a message on his machine. Their actual filing for the adoption would have to wait. Delia had been hospitalized, at least for a few days’ observation, and would probably be on bed rest for the duration of the pregnancy. He would have his hands full. They were both relieved, Craig’s bluff, uncomfortable message informed Gordon, that he would soon be in town.
A drive out to the farm would have taken more stuffing than Gordon had left. He expected that even the sight of the farm, where a brand-new sign now proudly proclaimed HORIZON PRODUCE, HAYES NORDSTROM AND SON, would provoke such a sentimental response that he would be unable to leave it, in case it should disappear when he turned his back. So he sent flowers to his aunt Nora—aware that this constituted sending a case of coals to Newcastle—six white roses, for each of the children she’d loved, and an orchid for no reason except that he knew how the color purple always lifted her spirits.
The daylight hours on Friday were crowded with securing a rental trailer and loading it, tying down his bike, securing his guitar with a bungee cord in the bunting of Keefer’s dog bed, wedging in his six raggedy boxes of books and pots, the same ones he’d packed to move from Florida to Tall Trees and from the slum to the Victorian—he was so green, Gordon congratulated himself wryly. He then made phone calls, to the biology department in Madison, to his mother and father—he knew she’d been at her water aerobics class; he’d timed the call to catch her out—letting them know what time he’d stop by, to the guys who were taking the sublet. He scoured the oven he’d never used and swept the floor. He sealed his keys in an envelope and closed the windows. Just before he closed the door, he looked back and noticed one last task and used his Swiss Army knife to pry the little plastic covers from all the outlets.
Just before six, he rattled up in front of his parents’ house on Cleveland Avenue. There was a note on the blue stationery he’d read from all his life, which featured an ink sketch that was something of a cross between an open poppy and a plat map of a river, the stem of which formed the L in “Lorraine K. McKenna.”
It read, “There are sandwich makings in the fridge. We are eating over at Nora’s. Come by if you want. You said this is not a good-bye, so we’re not treating it that way. P.S. Ray and Diane Nye have asked us to have dinner with them next Saturday at their palatial Madison estate. We are going, though they will probably poison our food. We will then visit you and Miss Keefer at your hovel. Be there, or you will be out of the will.” The note went on, “P.P.S. Gordie, do not put up any pest strips in that farmhouse. They are dangerous to breathe, no matter what the labels say.” It finished, “I love you.” She had inked out the “I” and replaced it with “We.”
She signed “Mom,” crossed it out, wrote “Mom” a second time, crossed that out, and wrote, “Mommy,” but let the y trail down into a deadly cruel caricature of him, all teeth and cowlicks. Gordon removed the tack, put it in his shirt pocket and held the blue sheet to his nose. Its smell was not of his mother. It smelled like the Sharpie she’d used to draw.
The grave had been decorated with an abundance of late-summer flowers, mums and stargazers and tiger lilies—Nora was relentless; he was surprised she hadn’t managed a UAW sticker for Labor Day. It was apparent, however, that no one had been around for days. The mums had been plucked featherless by the wind, and the lilies were parched in their empty Mason jar. Behind the stone, the scraggly small pine that had been wound with a sprinkling of white lights on a battery box had succumbed, the few remaining needles a toasty brown blanket on the ground. Georgia O’Keeffe McKenna. Raymond Jasper Nye.
Beloved Wife and Mother. Beloved Husband and Father.
Gordon easily uprooted the tiny, dead tree. It snapped in his hand. Under the needle drift there had been a litter of bulbs from the twinkle lights. He’d crushed them. They lay sparkling in the late-day rays alongside tatters of ribbons: yellow, violet, silver, which seemed bent on working their way into the earth, graftings for a bush that would bloom with memorial wreaths. All around the grave was festive, forgone litter. It looked like a fairground after the carnival had closed.
CHAPTER twenty-one
Tim called it the Hotel
California because you could check out anytime you liked, but you could never leave. The first time they tried to open the doors from the inside, they discovered the old wood had swollen so tightly it took two of them to budge them.
For all that, Gordon’s domain was not so bad. The appliances, set off in one corner behind a ridiculous red velvet drape, were startlingly out of keeping—a big, handsome fridge and a newer gas stove alongside a steel sink that roared like some subterranean beast whenever Gordon turned the faucet on. The kitchen and the shower wedged in under an unused attic staircase were surprisingly serviceable. All the appliances belonged to the damned hippie squatters, his father’s friend had informed Gordon, and he would be switched if he let them take a damned thing out of the house before he got a goddamned rent check. Gordon was welcome to use them so long as he paid the utility.
The view from the front porch made up for the hot and cold running ants. It was staggering, a hemisphere of sky and tree that stretched to the shadowy gray scalloped rim of the Blue Mounds more than ten miles distant. Bats krred and swallows crisscrossed in the twilight, while he and Tim sat nursing bottles of ale and sore shoulders, tipped back on a folding chair and a single orphaned recliner. They’d spent two hours in pitched battle with the doors.
Patting the arm of the pink velvet recliner the squatters had left behind, Tim said, “This chair belongs here, Gordo. It really sets the tone, porch-furniture wise. A real piece of resistance. Confirms you as trailer trash.”
Gordon agreed, “Right you are, my man. People will take me for an Upchurch.”
“Where do you think people actually go to deliberately buy things like this?”
“Tall Trees,” Gordon said.
Gordon’s mother blew her top when she later saw it. Overstuffed furniture on the outside porch? She insisted he let them buy him a simple wooden Adirondack chair, at least. “This is like . . . a redneck,” she told him.
“I like it, though. Probably the legacy of my blood relatives,” Gordon told her affably. Lorraine grimaced. Had she been twenty years younger, she’d have given him the finger.
He had let them buy him a set of plastic plates with sections. As a child, he had liked keeping his peas separate from his chicken, and he thought Keefer might like that, too.
As the weeks passed, he came to rely on two polestars, Keefer nights and the view.
He and Keefer liked to sit outside watching the hills disappear, singing the batty-bat song from Sesame Street. That peace alone, on a fall night, was worth the rent, which was the steady ache in Gordon’s back and arms from days—after he’d gotten work subbing—nights of scraping and sanding and painting walls thick with generations of gunk. It was archaeological, the layers of flocked fleur-de-lis, natty navy blue stripes, pink paint and white paint and paint the color of ripe pumpkins he unearthed as he tried to strike plaster without destroying it. Something had instructed his predecessors at the house in the doctrine of redecoration without regret. Even the exterior of the house had been sided insanely, blue aluminum right over the remnants of beige aluminum. When he thought about what might be under the beige, and suspected it might be asbestos, Gordon quaked. But asbestos was no danger to anyone unless it was disturbed. By the time anyone disturbed these walls, Gordon would be living in a sane, cheaply built apartment in some modern anonymous complex, where he would listen to the bathroom intimacies of people on the other side of his eighth-inch drywall, and they would listen to him having sex, if he ever did that. He did not expect it would be soon. He’d told Tim, only last week, he was sure that if he ever had sex again, he’d cry out his own name.
Four weeks melted. The walls were painted a serene, washable white Keefer could scribble on with her wax crayon sticks, something he allowed her to do without reproving her, fuck Delia’s wallpaper. The hardwood plank floor that had underlain the piss-perfumed shag could have been refinished, and he longed to see how it might have looked oiled and shining; but this was not his house. He settled for sweeping. His mattress on the floor faced the largest of the windows, and he’d calculated that the sun hit his face full, waking him, a few minutes past six. He could work every day he wanted to work, and the pay, though not a king’s ransom, would stand him well into a few months’ rent, if he put away something. By the time that ran out, his student loan checks would have begun to arrive. He’d been accepted into the three-year program that would lead directly from his bachelor’s to a capital P and a small h and a capital D behind his name. He had no idea whatsoever what he planned to do with his advanced degree once he had it. He trusted time to reveal. Substitute teaching had introduced him to morsels of everything, from leading self-conscious, complaining junior girls on a mile-long jog to grinning like a chimp at kids from Poland and Laos through four days of English as a second language.
What he missed was having students of his own, and he knew that he would have ample opportunity to teach, teach regularly, during grad school. He dreamed of resuming life as a student as well. He would welcome the routine of chapters and projects, labs and deadlines. It would make his days finite, predictable. From that imposed security, he planned to flex the muscles of his autonomy, to see how far they stretched before they caught.
Twice, and with utmost care, Gordon had written to Lindsay, breezy informational letters about his painting travails, about the entomological fauna that greeted him each night when he tried to sleep. When he came to the closing, he dithered. Love? Your friend? He’d finally settled on, “I’m thinking about you . . .” She had not written back, which saddened him. He checked his mail twice daily, hoping for a letter from her. Four times, he had lifted the telephone to call her, then replaced it after dialing the numbers. On nights when he woke chilled from a sudden turn in the weather, he ached for her clean, freckled, gently curving spine. Once, with a few beers in him, he had called Michelle Yu. But their first rush of greetings had subsided to empty air within a few minutes. He’d closed with a promise to look her up at Christmas, a promise that sounded halfhearted even as he spoke it.
He’d let Keefer color or build with blocks on the porch until darkness and the bugs drove them inside. He had no television, nor did he think one would work if he had one, and his library amounted to Georgia’s old copy of Wuthering Heights, Goodnight Moon, and Pat the Bunny, which Gordon tried to edit every time they began it, deleting the references that bruised him, to Daddy’s beard and Mummy’s wedding band, though Keefer invariably led him back, insistently pointing to the pages he skipped until he read them. They counted cars, his niece gravely holding up one finger, then two. It took forever to get to ten, the volume of traffic, even at five in the afternoon, on his quiet country road outside Oregon, Wisconsin, as bustling as a Sunday midnight in Tall Trees. “That’s a Dodge, Keefe,” he would tell her. “That’s an Audi.” Using her left hand, she would laboriously uncurl her stubborn ring finger to make three, then gleefully pop up her pinkie to make four, the goofy O of her generous mouth so like the signal face Georgia would make to mock an adult behind that adult’s back that Gordon nearly cried. It had given him hope, the easy relief he felt the first time he picked Keefer up at Craig and Delia’s. She had galloped out the front door, easily negotiating the steps with legs that seemed to have grown six inches since he last saw her, and leaped into his arms. She’d been out of sorts, lonely, Craig said, or so he supposed, with Delia in the hospital and Alex, who was now a sophomore, consumed with the rapture of her first real boyfriend and the chance to get away with almost anything she wanted to now that Craig had far more than Alex’s curfew on his mind.
Gently, that first time, so as not to alarm Craig, Gordon had suggested that Keefer spend more time with him. His place was no palace, but he would gladly refuse the occasional job to have her more often. Warming up to it, he’d told Craig about the barn kittens that wandered over from the working farm next door. Keefer would love chasing them. Something in Craig’s face warned him he’d gone too far. Craig’s mother had gone back home, but she was planning
on coming for a long stay soon. And Diane was usually free, between driving Big Ray back and forth to his cardiac rehab appointments. They were all fine, Craig assured Gordon. The baby, a boy, was due in two weeks. They were monitoring Delia closely, as her blood pressure was way up and the threat to the baby real. They could take the baby anytime, Craig said. He told Gordon that Keefer got a kick out of watching the heartbeat blips on Mommy’s monitor. Gordon had been able to suppress his wince and wait until they were back out at his house before pulling the Jesus Saves T-shirt off over Keefer’s head. The little shirts and pajamas he’d brought with him in Georgia’s old doll trunk were tight and short on Keefer. But his mother had made a power sweep at Target when she’d arrived, buying Keefer a season’s worth of clothing in forty minutes. They chose brightly colored waffle fabric mix-up-anyway tops and bottoms, like baby long johns, the kind Gordon favored, his laundry capacity now limited by his willingness to drive to the E-Wash coffee store, computer lair, and laundromat ten miles away on East Washington Avenue in Madison.
Over scallops, Diane Nye assured Lorraine and Mark were the good kind, flown in from her very own seafood merchant in Jupiter, Ray had made a stalwart apology for the pain his kin had caused Lorraine and Mark, and especially Gordie. Big Ray had aged ten years, the weight he’d piled on since the accident having deserted him since his heart troubles, leaving him looking more than ever like a sad hound whose jowls shuddered when he spoke, according to Lorraine’s report. Neither of them had known what to say about Delia’s dangerous condition, about the process of adoption Craig had suspended. They’d eaten hurriedly, nodded politely at the Nyes’ bizarre offer to give Gordie any kind of help he needed in Madison, murmured agreement with Ray’s vow to behave as grandparents should, stay out of the young folks’ way, thanked Diane for the copies she’d had made of Keefer’s recent baptism as a child of the Congregational Church. They had then joined hands and quickstepped for the door, rushing into the squalor of Gordon’s dilapidated farmhouse, staying late, even though they had available their own perfectly comfortable and air-conditioned hotel room. Mark had expressed some concern about Gordon’s locks, but was reassured when he realized that no one could get in or out except by main force. Lorraine had promised to mail Gordon a fire extinguisher. He had told his mother that such things were, indeed, available in Madison, too.