“Sweetheart!” Frank sat down, spilling the tea all over his knee.
“I needed that tea!” she wailed. Frank practically ran, hobbling, back to get another, this one with a lid.
When he returned, he said softly, “Claudia, are you in pain?”
“No!”
“Do you not want the baby? Are you so disappointed? That you had to give up the honor of the Hillerand . . .”
“Of course not, Frank!”
What was wrong with her? She tried to take small swallows of the tea, but only cried harder. Finally, Frank hit on it.
“You wanted a girl. Claudia, I’m so sorry. That’s it.”
“I did want a girl!”
“But there’ll be another time. We don’t need to stop at three. The baby is healthy and, Claudia, I’m so happy . . .”
Her face swollen, she glanced up at him for the first time since they’d left the echoing clinic lobby. “Are you? Are you really happy? Do you mind?”
“Mind?”
“It’s all so sad and broken. You can still love him, even though your first baby was a boy, and he died?”
Frank set the tea on the bench and used his fingers to brush back the sweaty curls from Claudia’s cheeks. The day was shirtsleeve warm and bright as a shout, and all around them, there seemed to gather a sudden flash mob of parents strolling with children in push chairs and prams, curly-headed blond babies, babies with hair dark and straight as feathers, babies with a comic red frill sticking out of a cap. He could reach back, into the fastnesses of the dark, and wish he could hold the babe that was swept away before he could see the sky, but to let that shadow stand between them and the sun now would be a betrayal. He would betray Claudia, and, Frank now realized, himself, and everyone standing on the sturdy bridge they had built between them, trusting the soundness of the structure, of the future. “Claudia,” he said. “I can see why you wonder. But I love our boys, even though my first son died. And I love the baby. I’ll love our little girl, someday, even if she’s a boy, too. And if we have another child, and she’s a boy, too. That will also be fine. I’m in . . . I’m in awe.”
She hugged his neck then, uncharacteristically yielding, letting herself be pulled close to him, his arms around her shoulders, her occasional catch of breath a sough against his chest.
“Awe,” she said. “That is the word. I’ve never been pregnant. Not even a scare. I can’t believe how enormous this is. He’s just so real to me. He’s a person.”
On the way back, as promised, Frank phoned Hope. Then he and Claudia lingered for an hour over a big lunch of red curry and pad thai—Claudia noting that since her life roiled with ironies, this was the least nauseated she’d felt in weeks. When they pulled into the drive at Stone Pastures, the boys ran out. Hope trailed behind them and sat in the shade of the old chestnut, where Pat had built a wide plank seat encircling the trunk. Behind the boys’ backs, she gestured to her son and daughter-in-law, little warning motions that included placing two fingers across her lips.
“You didn’t really want a girl, Cloudy, did you?” Ian said. “They’re not as good. You already have us and you know how to be a boy’s mom.”
“They’ve made you something,” Hope added then, motioning Claudia and Frank to a large tray set down on the outdoor wooden trestle table where they sometimes ate their dinner.
The cookies were the pastry embodiment of paper dolls—the man huge, the woman curvaceous with frosting hair as luxuriant as a mermaid’s. The mother’s snow woman’s arms wrapped around a baby with golden balls for eyes and chocolate hair, a baby made in exactly the shape of a figure eight. Then there was a tall woman with a dab of white frosting for hair, and the children, three identical-sized vanilla males.
“These are great. These are stellar,” said Frank, and Claudia was off again on another rolling breaker of tears.
Frank said, “But who is that third boy? That one is you, there’s Collie, and then Arthur . . .”
Claudia said, “I want to point out that we’re not really naming him Arthur.”
“That one is Patrick, of course,” Colin said.
Crimson with suppressed mirth, Hope headed for the car. She had an appointment for tea at the nicer of the two small restaurants in Stead. Just a couple of weeks after Hope had visited the local Anglican church, the two-years-widowed priest, a few years younger, asked her to go to a local string quartet concert. Frank persisted in calling this a date. Hope persisted in telling him that he would have to think of other ways to get her to move out. One night, Colin told all of them that in service of the Packard that would soon be his own, he had decided to become an auto mechanic. He added, “Ian will just be a farmer. So there’s no reason we have to go back to school at all.”
All the adults, Patrick included, disabused them of that fact, and as September came and the weather at night occasionally swept the hills like a stiff broom, they took the bus to the consolidated school in Wherry. Colin joined the football team, part of the school’s structure even for fifth formers, and when he was found to be just as certainly an ace by British standards as he’d been in the United States, his dance card filled with suppers at friends’ houses and football matches. “It’s in my blood,” he told Frank solemnly.
“It’s not in my blood,” Ian said happily. “I hate games. I just like horses and TV.” His best friend, an Indian boy named Sanjay, brought a different tin of homemade cookies every time he came to play. They ate two dozen, every time, and still their ankles and wrists were as delicate as links of a lady’s fine chain, their ribs little xylophones, their knees belled out at the bottom of their flute-sized thighs.
Claudia began working part-time at Hope of the Moor, the plan to take up full-time duties a couple of months after the baby arrived. Although at first she assumed an air of slightly aggrieved sacrifice, Claudia quickly grew to love the power that came simply with listening to her neighbors’ travails—William’s drink, Janet’s spells of sadness, everyone’s fear that Alex’s attachment to the boy he met at the public school was more than a friendship. The questions that could only be answered by wait, accept, or walk away helped Claudia pick apart her own web of options. An academic, trained in nuance, she felt comforted, as the fall lengthened, knowing that she, too, could only wait, accept, or walk away. As it had done with Glory Bee, pregnancy relaxed her fierce grip on perfection. The bigger Arthur grew, the less eager Claudia became about having another go right away. She spoke of how it might be to adopt a little girl from Ethiopia, as a school friend of hers had just done. Frank reminded her how legally shifty they were, and would be until they were dead, or at least grandparents, and suggested it would be better to make a little girl from things they had lying around the house. Claudia protested. The older she was, the likelier she would gain thirty pounds and lose three teeth, Claudia told him. Frank promised her dentures and a girdle.
One night, he stood outside his own door and listened to gales of fifties music gusting out as far as the road and beyond. Hope was teaching Claudia the jive, and Colin was teaching Ian. They had done it, Frank thought, not daring to speak it aloud. They had come safe home.
THIRTY-ONE
ALL I WANT is cheese and onion, on the wheat bread,” Frank told Harry Aker. “Cheddar cheese is fine.”
Harry shook his head sorrowfully. “You’ll want Wensleydale on the dill bread, with a bit of chutney.”
“The Wensleydale is fine, but with just onion, Harry.”
“And it’s breakfast. You’ll need a fried egg.”
“I can feel my arteries hardening.”
“Well, now you say it, Frank, you don’t look good, and there’s the truth of it.”
Frank didn’t doubt that at all. He probably looked like death warmed up. He’d been awake for hours, in an agony of concern. He glanced over Harry Aker’s shoulder into the wavy greenish mirror, a reflection that would have made a runway model look like a fresh cadaver. His eyes were bloodshot and his beard, two days of it, grizzled wi
th new gray. “I’m beat. Up at two. My young mare, Glory Bee, was suddenly foaling, and . . . what do you know? Twins. The vet never left her side. We couldn’t believe it. The foal’s born, in twenty minutes. There was the vet cleaning off the little baby girl, and suddenly my son says, ‘Dad, there’s another baby horse there.’ It was all over within an hour, but what an hour.”
“Twin foals? I don’t think I’ve heard of that in years, at least ones that weren’t conjoined, you know, like Siamese twins. Must have been battle stations, eh?”
“You can imagine. The vet called her assistant, and he came running, and the Shepsons down the road and Thurman Ross from across the road and then all the Gerrick boys. It seemed like half the county showed up, all before the sun rose.”
“Be in the newspaper, as far as Leeds.”
“Maybe.”
“Those are good lads, the Gerricks. You know that Shipley Gerrick has those horses, well, draft horses, and those twins—boys, not horses, of course, but big as draft horses. Those two huge lads, giants, they’re twins.”
“Arthur and Lance,” Frank said. Both men paused for a moment, in mutual sadness over Grace Gerrick’s fascination with Camelot. The Gerrick twins, though built on the scale of redwoods, were biddable and bright. Frank had seen Lance heft a two-hundred-pound solid-oak door the way a man would lift a violin. The Gerrick twins did lift violins, in fact, because both were musicians of no small merit. “The foals, Harry. They are beautiful. Black as the mother, with not one white hair. That’s unusual in itself. They say healthy twin foals occur in one in ten thousand births. One in ten thousand, Harry.”
“You’re sure they’re okay?”
“Vet says the way they get up and walk and nurse is a better indication than any blood tests or what have you.”
“And you had no indication?” Harry said, slicing the dill bread with the precision of a diamond cutter.
“None at all. And we had a sonogram, because she was so big. We were frightened there might be . . . anything. A tumor. She’s a big animal, fourteen hundred pounds, eighteen hands tall. The vet only saw the one baby and said, it’s all good.” Frank sighed. “I can’t believe Glory Bee carried two babies for eleven months. A horse isn’t made to carry twins, thirty, forty pounds each. And then I thought she’d go berserk. But no, she was cleaning them off and nuzzling them, right away.”
“Tired, though.”
“We’re going to have to bottle-feed them part of the time. The vet’s bringing the things now. She did beautifully.”
“The horse or the vet?”
“Both. But it was hard. Glory Bee will lose too much flesh trying to nourish both of them. We’ve got to make sure she takes it easy.”
Frank knew he was talking way too much and way too fast, entirely unlike his quotidian self, but he could not believe the magnitude of the morning. He was the only cop he’d ever known who had never seen a birth, animal or human. It was some compensation for Glory Bee’s own promising career cut short. He knew he was babbling, but thought he might levitate with euphoria.
“Who’s with her?”
“Patrick, the fellow who . . . well, you know Patrick . . . but he had to follow the vet back to get supplies. Claudia’s there now, but I need to get back. It’s a workday for her. Cheese sandwich with onion. Jesus. I’m tired. I already said that. I sound like Ernest Hemingway.”
“He lives here?”
“No, Harry. He’s dead.”
“What will you call them? The babies?”
Frank sat down in the red chair that Harry kept near the door and bent over to tie his boots. He’d forgotten to do that before he left. “Well, we didn’t plan. We knew that the one, the little girl, would be Patrick’s. He decided to call her Gloria in Excelsis.”
“Is that sacrilege?”
“No,” Frank said. “Not without the ‘Deo’ on it.” He took a bite and complimented Harry on the sandwich. Then he went on: “And the male, my son Colin chose All Saints for his name. It’s All Saints today, after all, isn’t it? November first? Last night was Halloween. The boys went out with their grandmother in the pony cart around about to get treats and they came home and went to bed. Then, a couple of hours later, I went to check on Glory Bee and she was in labor, so I turned the boys out into their Muck Boots.” Harry had made a second sandwich, which he handed to Frank, who ate it in three bites, leaning against the counter. “I should have a pound of this cheese, Harry, too. And a gallon of milk. You were right about that bread. Is there a loaf? Any oranges? We won’t have any time today to go to the market. The boys will sleep until noon.”
Harry raised his eyebrows. He was eighty but proud to say that he never looked a day over seventy-six, and flirted so strenuously with Hope that she finally told him she was secretly engaged to the widowed pastor. “What about school? That won’t do.”
“Just this one day. They were up all night, too. They’ll want to watch the foals, and they should. It’s part of their lives. The vet says to keep checking to make sure they’re not jaundiced or weak.”
“School of life.”
“Sure. See you, Harry.”
Harry wrung out a hot cloth and began painstakingly to clean his slicer. Just as the bells signaled the door about to close behind Frank, Harry said quietly, “A fellow asked last week was there a Yank living around here now.”
Frank stopped.
“What did you say?”
“I told him yes. There was an American with his wife. A writer working on another book about the Brontës, a novel this one, because Christ knows the world needs yet one more book about those three. Twenty times as many books written about them as they ever wrote themselves.”
“You’re too hard, Harry. People are fascinated by those women, all alone out here, nothing but sheep and Yorkshire rednecks and their old dad for company, writing about love as well as anybody ever did, even if they never knew too much about it personally. If anybody ever does.” Exhaling deeply, Frank said, “Well, thank you, Harry.”
“How’s the lad?”
“Ian or Colin?”
“The little one Claudia brought to see to our Rosie.”
“He’s very well. How is Rosie?”
“She’ll never be a genius, Frank. You know that. But she’s right as rain now. Happy at her school. Happy at home when she’s home. Helping her mother. Doesn’t ever run off.” It was a relief to hear. After Harry’s older daughters married, Rose terrified her parents by running away repeatedly, getting drunk in pubs—where it was quite legal to serve her—but most horribly, appearing naked in the doorway when the food suppliers arrived. When Harry’s patient wife tried to bring her in, Rose socked her mother in the belly. “You know she lives at school now, there five days a week. She likes a boy who’s . . . like her. Nice lad. Drives a car.” Harry added, “And our Flora’s husband. He’s found a job. Laid off the pot.”
Frank turned back into the store, reaching for his pocket. “That’s good. I’m worn out, Harry. I just realized I was walking out of here without paying you.”
“Those are on the house, Frank.”
“Don’t be silly. I just stood here and ate six pounds’ worth of expensive cheese and bought another pound of it.”
“And my girl Flora can pay her light bill now. It’s all a great wheel, isn’t it?”
“Well,” Frank said.
The sun had risen higher, teasing out the wedges of fog in the dales while Frank was stuffing himself with the sandwiches that now literally distended his gut. He was, in fact, getting a gut. There in the cobbled street of Stead, before he climbed into the Rover, Frank vowed never to drive the car or ride one of the horses this mile or so to the pub or the little shops, ever again.
He would walk everywhere, the way an Englishman should.
Colin had never stopped lecturing him: farm work was not exercise. Frank dug up a boulder and shoved it into a wall, and then sat for ten minutes admiring the view. A city cop by choice, a farmer by birth, he had never, u
ntil he came to Stone Pastures, really felt the soil. It used to be something to be brushed off. Now he ran his hands over the contours of rocks as though they were skulls from an archaeological dig, and smelled the tang of the dirt rubbed between his fingers. The view still enthralled Frank. Down below, somewhere, there were plenty of sooty cities. But high up, the sheep, the provenance of this excellent cheese, wandered up lanes where once the only carts had wooden wheels. The old Rover that had belonged to Tura’s father still attacked the steep prows of those hills with geriatric vigor. Most of the time, Frank still drove the Tenacity truck. And most of the time, he drove. Gravely, Colin encouraged Frank to consider his heart. “Even you could do yoga or something, Dad. Lots of old people do.”
As he said this, he poked Frank gently above the belt. Patrick—who ate his weight in bacon rolls and puddings every day and still went a hundred and five pounds—stumbled off laughing. Colin’s small legs, slightly bowed, were now strapped with tiers of muscle, his back straight as a seam. Each afternoon, he set out alone up those sheep tracks, running for an hour before he came home, drenched and depleted. It was Claudia who told Frank to get Colin a good cell phone in a shockproof case and stock it with endless loops of music—both so that he could find solace in the music and so that he was always instantly ready to dial 411 if he should turn an ankle . . . or meet a stranger.
Frank let a shiver pass over him as he threw the packages into the backseat and pulled open his door. Then he stopped. A fox was crossing the road not ten feet in front of the Rover, and after her trotted three sleek kits. No one wanted a fox in a neighborhood filled with chicken coops. But he wasn’t going to disturb her fairytale progress this morning.
As he slipped into the front seat and pulled on the door, Frank heard a sound, nearly simultaneous, like an echo of the clapping shut of the car door. He twisted in his seat.
“Hello, Frank. Quite a morning,” Louis said.