“And the baby?”
“She lost the baby quickly and cleanly.”
“That was a fetus in the Tupperware?”
“No, no, just some clots. She aborted spontaneously during the doctor’s examination. It was a typical, uncomplicated miscarriage. She’s going to be just fine. She may feel a little tired for the next couple of days and she’ll have some bleeding, but she’ll be fine. And the doctor told her there’s no reason she won’t be able to conceive again, and carry a baby to term.”
“I can think of a couple,” Sable said.
They were not interested in going out to lunch. Or going home, sending one of their number back to transport Beth. They all stayed in the surgical center’s waiting room. They hardly spoke to each other. Elly had to go outside often, of course, where there was an ashtray at the entrance.
Two more hours had passed when the doctor came to talk to them. He said basically the same things the nurse had said. He’d like to check Beth in six weeks. And one of them could go help her get dressed.
Sable looked immediately toward Barbara Ann. “Go ahead,” Barbara Ann said. “You’re not going to settle down until you see her.”
Beth was sitting on the edge of her bed, dangling her feet, her hospital gown open down the back under her long dark hair. Her head was bent as though she was looking at her feet. And idiotically, Sable’s first words were, “It’s going to be all right.”
Beth turned her moist eyes to her friend. “Maybe I’m not meant to have children,” she said.
Sable sat down beside her. “How can you come to that conclusion at this point in your life? You have another ten years for childbearing. Maybe more.”
“I’ll never get married again. It was only an accident I married Jack.”
“A bad accident….”
“I never met men. I never dated. I never knew what to say…or I said something stupid. I’ll end up being the old maid aunt in Kansas City. I’ll sit in some little apartment and type and only go out for family functions. I’ll—”
“That’s enough of that. What are you doing here—setting yourself up to be lonely? Beth, you’ve just spent seven years with a man who didn’t want you to have any friends. He kept you as isolated as he could so his power over you wouldn’t be threatened. You don’t have to live like that. You can change that pattern. Go out, meet people, enjoy your life—children or not.”
“It’s so hard for me to make friends,” she said softly.
“But those friendships you’ve made have been strong. Enduring. We’re not the only friends you have. You knew a lot of the writers at Gabby’s memorial.”
“Women,” she said. “I’m okay with women.”
“Look, you have four brothers and three sisters in Kansas City. You graduated from high school and college there. You know the town, you know more people than you realize. You—”
“I just wanted to have a baby. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted.”
“I know, I know. But you’re going to have to change your life, Beth. Look at me,” Sable said. She had to physically turn her to get her attention. “Maybe this was for the best.” The moisture in Beth’s eyes grew thicker. One tear spilled over. “You deserve so much more than this. You deserve to have a child that isn’t linked to Jack Mahoney, for one thing. It would be hell fighting him for years and years to come. Now you can make a clean break from him and his abuse and start over. Start fresh.”
“I could have started fresh with—”
“I know, I know, but listen to me for a second. It was really no way to have a baby, you know? You snuck it out of him and planned to take it away and raise it alone. If you think your life is going to be solitary typing speckled with a few family parties, then what kind of life is that for a child? Were you going to make your child as reclusive and shy as you are?”
Beth blinked and tears ran down her cheeks.
“I don’t think having a child without a father present is necessarily a big tragedy—lots of single moms do smashing jobs of raising kids. But growing up with a mom who doesn’t want to meet people, or go out, or take those social risks…that would be sad. You’re going to have to change that. You’re going to have to overcome some of that terrible shyness. You sure as hell aren’t shy once you know someone. I heard you tell Elly you thought she was a lesbian.”
“It just takes me such a long time. It’s so hard for me.”
“We all do hard things. That’s life. What’s the old saying? Pain is mandatory—suffering is optional. You’ll just have to find a way to do it even though it’s hard. Ask your brothers and sisters to include you in social events with their friends. Join a couple of groups. Do some volunteer work. Take some courses.”
Beth hung her head. She had surely read this much in Dear Abby. Undoubtedly, she had heard all this from her mother when she was a single, twenty-four-year-old virgin.
“You have to stop giving yourself so many negative messages. You have to stop saying ‘I’m so shy’ and start saying ‘I love people.’ You can be lonely forever if you want to, or you can change this about yourself. Beth, you’re doing a very sad thing to yourself. I would hate for you to do that to your children, when you have them.”
“When,” she said tiredly.
“Well, I’m not very wise about things like this,” Sable said. “But I do know one thing for sure. I got everything in life I ever thought I should have. If I just believed I should get it, that I deserved it, that I needed it to validate who I was, then I got it. That’s what I know to be true.”
“I don’t really want all that success and money and fame,” Beth said.
“I wasn’t talking about just that,” Sable said. “I was thinking further back. Like when I was getting punched in the chops.”
A few days after Beth’s miscarriage, Elly emerged from Gabby’s bedroom wearing a summer suit. “I have to leave for a while, I have a few errands that can’t wait, but I’ve invited company for dinner. A gentleman who has an interest in Gabby’s works. Would you all be so kind as to tidy up and lay a decent table?”
“Who, Elly?” Sable wanted to know.
“You’ll find out at five. Let’s have drinks and hors d’oeuvres.”
She left the room and them.
“Now that’s a strange one…Elly with a surprise?” Barbara mused.
“She hates surprises,” Beth added.
“It must be important if she’s playing this out,” Sable said.
Throughout the afternoon they speculated—agent, publisher, critic, academic? But none of them was even close. At 5:07 the doorbell rang and the only woman in residence who didn’t rush to that portal was Ceola.
Sable, Barbara and Beth stood in the opened door, regarding the handsome young man who stood there, and as a trio they gasped and covered their mouths. For all intents and purposes, Gabby’s late lover, John Shelby, stood on the stoop.
“That seems to be the only reaction I ever get from this house,” the young man said. He stuck out his hand and introduced himself. “Todd Shelby. John was my father.”
And they let out their breath as one.
The clopping of Elly’s shoes on the walk came up behind him. “Gave you a start, did he?” she asked. “The Shelby men must come from a strong gene pool. Well, let’s go inside.”
First over drinks and then over dinner, Todd Shelby told them the rest of the story. They knew the beginning only too well—having lived inside Gabby’s book throughout the summer. But they didn’t know the end, and the end was what they were struggling with.
“I was a boy of eighteen when my father, whom I secretly worshiped, returned to London from Ireland that last summer of his life. He wasted very little time getting reacquainted with the family before he called for a conference, a family discussion. My mother, Jane Shelby, seemed to have already been informed of my father’s request for a divorce. Together, they settled down to tell me and my sister.
“I was devastated by this,” Todd told them. “I ha
ted him thoroughly. He was painfully honest about the entire, sordid mess. He said that he and Mother hadn’t had much of a marriage, really, and that while they were good friends and had the utmost respect for one another, there was no romance in their lives and it was time, now that we children were adults and capable of understanding adult issues, that they separate, divorce and move along with their lives.
“That Mother seemed at peace with this was horrifying to me. And it made no difference. I couldn’t comprehend that Mother would be pleased to be divorced. It never occurred to me that perhaps she was glad about it. I saw my father as the most awful cad. He was crushing us with this terrible news. Children don’t really care whether their parents have romance. What good’s romance on the old folks anyway? They’re supposed to perform their duties as parents, stay together amicably no matter what troubles they might have to endure, and pretend…at the very least pretend that all is well.
“If it wasn’t terrible enough that my father was bringing this embarrassment on our household, he had to go still further and explain that there was another woman. A woman he loved. An American writer, of all things. Younger than our mother. And by implication, more beautiful, more daring, more of everything. He actually wanted to marry her! It wasn’t enough that he’d obviously been sleeping with her, he wanted to make an honest woman of her.”
“Was your sister equally outraged?” Sable asked him.
“My sister was bored. She was almost seventeen, going about with some long-haired mutt she’d met at school, more interested in clothes and parties and music than in the marriage of her parents. She wasn’t at all close to Father. At that point in her life, she wasn’t terribly close to our mother, either. She was close enough, though, to ask, ‘Is this all right with you, Mummy?’ To which Mother replied that it was, that we would all still see Father quite often and there was no real embarrassment in the fact that they’d grown apart.
“I told him I’d never forgive him if he went through with it, that he’d better drop this American tramp of his or he’d live to regret it. I think I was crying. Sobbing, perhaps. He came to my room later on that night and tried to reason with me. He was very kind about the whole thing, given the way I was carrying on. I threatened him and he consoled me. I delivered him ultimatums and he told me that one day I’d understand. I shouted that I hated him and he promised that he would see no less of me in his new circumstances.
“Of course, you know, he was killed on the train. The very next day. I buried my father when the last words between us were hateful.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Ceola told him. It was almost as though they had forgotten she was there, forgotten this story was about her daughter. “You were filled with anger, but your father understood and didn’t hold it against you. That’s a parent’s job, after all.”
“Perhaps, but it was quite a long time before I would see that. It was at my insistence, my outraged insistence, that no one was ever to speak of that conversation with Father. I wasn’t going to have that blight on our otherwise enviable family name when it wasn’t necessary. My mother urged me to see things in a more adult way, to allow that people change and come to crossroads in their lives that are unexpected. Not vengeful or wrathful, but simply unexpected. She, it appeared, had no hard feelings whatsoever. In fact, she remarried within a year.”
“When did you come to forgive your father?” Elly asked.
“Over the years, as I lived and was educated and married myself, I slowly began to understand that what I’d been feeling, fearing, was my father was abandoning me. Of course, he wasn’t at all, but I never believed all that blather about seeing me as often. I was too young. And, of course, I was able to watch my mother blossom in her second marriage. She thrived on the attention of a man who loved her in a truly romantic way—a man who didn’t keep running off to take pictures. They were tremendous grandparents to my stepfather’s grandchildren and would have been to my own.
“Ten years later my mother died. She had a short, difficult, but noble fight with cancer. My stepfather, who is with us still and a very close part of our family, turned over to me some of my father’s personal effects that my mother had saved all those years. She saved them for a time I might be mature enough to see him as a man, not some icon. Among them were letters from my father’s lover, Gabrielle Marshall. There were pictures and some of the stories she’d published along with the most complete collection of my father’s photos that exist to this day.
“When I read the letters, I had to meet her. Her passion for my father, for his work, his values and his courage, was a thing of purity. I found myself wishing that I’d managed a way to better appreciate all that he was, rather than wasting even a moment on any shortcoming I perceived. When she wrote to him, he came to life in my mind. When I saw the pictures of her, of him, of the two of them together, I could see why he loved her. They seemed to come to life with joy in those photos.
“But the letters were art. She was funny, warm, spontaneous. Sometimes she wrote of her love for him, sometimes she wrote furious epistles in which she maligned him for some misdeed he’d committed, most often the insensitivity of putting himself in mortal danger to snap a picture when the result might have been that she’d have to live on without him. She also wrote of daily events—her work, her children, her friends. Sometimes she used him as a sounding board for her dreams. Not just personal ambitions for herself, but rather some dream for the world, usually touched off by some heartbreaking foreign story she’d written.
“I had to know this woman,” Todd said. “I could already tell from her letters and articles why he was in love with her. But I had to know her for myself. At that time I was a twenty-eight-year-old man. A young solicitor, just starting out. My wife had given birth to our first child, a son—a son who I adored and who I hoped would love me through every dreadful mistake I would make in my life.”
“Gabby was then forty-five,” Elly calculated for them.
“Yes, that’s so. I struggled with letters, but hers were too intimidating in their greatness. I found I couldn’t write to her. I impetuously flew to California and went to her door. It was the end of May. As I pulled my rented coupe up to the curb, I saw a gathering of young people come bounding out of the house, jumping in cars, shouting and laughing, and off they rode. When I went to the door, terrified to make this confrontation, you can’t imagine what I found. Or perhaps you can, having known her. This tiny woman in rolled-up jeans, cotton shirt, hair all askew, feet bare came growling to the door as if she resented the intrusion. She had a wet rag in her hand—obviously she’d been cleaning.
“I had been so concerned about myself and how she might respond to me that I hadn’t even thought of the impact my mere presence could have on her. The resemblance, you know. She stared at me in shock for a few moments, and when I said my name was Todd Shelby, she swooned.”
“Gabby never said a word,” Elly said. “I never knew Todd and Gabby had met. I am still amazed by that.”
“I can’t imagine why she didn’t tell you. I assure you, our meeting was very nice. I found Gabby in the midst of absolute chaos—her daughter was graduating from high school that evening, her son was due home from college that very afternoon, her ex-husband’s parents were coming to dinner that evening, and two days hence was her daughter’s eighteenth birthday. She was cooking and cleaning, and planned to have a huge weekend full of parties and guests. It didn’t look to me that she was going to make it. The place was a-tumble, actually. She was a mess. But she was indeed a lovely mess. Lovely. Had I not been mad in love with my own wife and new baby son, I’m afraid I might have fallen for her.
“Time seemed to stop for a couple of hours. With her house collapsing around us—food in preparation on the counter, electric sweeper standing ready on the rug—we sat on the divan together and talked. I wanted to know all about my father, the side of him she knew, and I wanted to tell her all about the fiasco of his confession just hours before his death. I wa
nted her to know that it was I who’d insisted no one ever speak of his plans, else she might have been told about his talk with us. Else, she might have been consoled at the time of his death. We could have gone on for hours and hours, but it simply wasn’t possible.
“Gabby sent me on my way that day and told me to go back to London. She promised she would visit me there in the fall. And she told me I’d made her very, very happy. In her heart, she said, she had never really doubted John. He said his love for her would last forever. And indeed, it had.”
“I remember her visit to London,” Elly said. “I remember Sarah’s graduation and birthday. I was there for all the events. And I remember that Gabby was melancholy. Tearful. I thought it was because she was launching her baby into the world, for Gabby, then, would live as a woman alone for the first time in her life. I conceded that it would make anyone sentimental.”
“But I believe it was because, after all those years—ten years—she was finally vindicated,” Todd said. “My father had sworn his love for her and meant to fulfill his promises. But until I visited her that day, she was forever in doubt.”
“You say she never mentioned Todd’s visit, Elly?” Sable asked.
“Not once. Not even in passing. I’m not the kind of friend one talks to about romantic foibles or heartaches. Everyone, even Gabby, always considered me immune to love. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was something Gabby wanted all to herself. John had been dead for ten years, after all. She’d recovered from it. She didn’t pine after him day and night any longer.
“In my digging, I never ran across any letters from Todd because he’d never written any.”
“I was too intimidated by her wit and dash to write to Gabby, but she wrote to me. I have four years of letters—as artful and exciting as the ones she wrote my father. Only the romantic passion is missing, that’s all. She wrote me long stories about Father, about their travels and time together. I’ve made copies and brought them for you. You have my permission to publish them in any memoir you produce. There’s no longer any reason to keep John Shelby’s affair secret.”