A Boy

Theron

"I shall curtsy," said Constance.

"You will not."

"I shall. I've decided. It is the only appropriate gesture. She is, after all, a woman who has refused two and a half million dollars. One does not shake the hand of such a person. One acknowledges her."

"Mother, we are in a car."

"Then I shall curtsy in the car."

"You will crush your hat."

"My hat has survived worse." She sat in the rear seat of the Bentley, in a dove-gray wool coat and a small velvet toque, with her gloved hands folded on top of a black leather handbag and her spine ramrod straight. It was a Wednesday in the first week of February, a quarter past ten, and they were crossing the Mount Hope Bridge in a thin cold sun, with the bay spread out beneath them like hammered pewter. She had not eaten breakfast. She had changed her gloves twice. She had asked Dell, three times, whether he thought the toque was too much. "Is it too much?"

"It is perfectly right, Mrs. Wexcombe," said Dell, from the front.

"You're a flatterer."

"I'm a driver, ma'am. I'm barred from opinions."

"You've offered four in as many months, I'm told."

"They were all short ones."

She almost smiled. Theron, sitting beside her, felt it: a small loosening of the stiffness in the air. She was frightened. He had not seen her frightened since the night of the funeral, and the sight of it did something to him that he could not afford to examine, a sort of tender, helpless, protective vertigo, as if he had turned a corner on his own staircase and found it very steep.

"Mother," he said. "She is not a person to be afraid of."

"I am not afraid."

"You are holding your handbag as if it might be seized."

"It is a good bag."

"She is kind."

"You have told me. At length." Constance's gaze was fixed on the water. "You've told me that she is kind, and careful, and proud, and that she keeps a ledger. You have told me about the soup. You have told me about a lemon. I have heard the name of a cat. But you have not told me one thing."

"What?"

"Whether she will like me."

He did not answer.

The bridge ended. The car swung down onto the highway, and the long gray ribbon of the road unspooled before them between bare trees and the white stubble of snow-covered fields. After some time, Constance turned her head.

"You do not say," she observed.

"I do not know."

"You do not know."

"She does not like many people." He picked his words with care. "She is not a woman who gives it easily. It must be earned. And it must be earned through an act, not a word. She has been, I think, a great deal disappointed by the sort of persons who talk."

"I am a person who talks."

"You are a person who chooses her words."

"That's not the same."

"It is the same to her." He glanced at his mother's profile, the sharp pale line of it against the gray window. "Be yourself. Be truthful. And be, if you can, a trifle less formal than you are."

"I have never in my life been less formal."

"I know."

"I should not know where to begin."

"Begin with the hat," said Theron. "Take it off."

…

She stood waiting in the lobby of the Women's Pavilion at St. Brendan's, under a banner that said WELCOME TO THE WORLD, LITTLE ONES, with her hands in the pockets of her long blue coat.

She looked small. That was the first thing he saw. In a room full of huge tropical plants and beaming murals of storks, she looked small and very upright and slightly pale, with her dark hair pulled back in the severe knot she wore for the courtroom, and her chin lifted a fraction too high. A hand rested on the curve of her coat, low on the left. She was twenty weeks and five days, he knew; she was just beginning to show; and in the clean winter light that fell from the skylight she looked, to him, so entirely real that the breath caught in his chest.

Beside her stood Joelle, in green scrubs and a Santa-red parka, arms folded, wearing the expression of a bouncer at a nightclub with a very restrictive dress code.

"They're here," said Joelle, under her breath.

"I see."

"Be nice."

"I'm always nice."

"You're always polite. It's a different thing." Joelle dropped her arms and stepped back, a fraction, in a gesture of withdrawal. "I'll be in the corner. If it goes wrong I'll pretend to be a plant."

Dess did not answer. She was looking at the door.

It opened on a gust of cold.

Constance Wexcombe came through it like a ship coming through a gap in a harbor wall: slowly, with great care, sailing at the pace of something much heavier and older than the wind. She had not removed the toque. She held her handbag in front of her in both hands. Her face, under the little velvet brim, was white as paper, and her lips were pressed tight, and the light of the skylight struck the thin silver of her hair.

She stopped three yards short of Dess.

Neither of them spoke.

He had imagined this meeting in a hundred versions: the polite, the awkward, the frosty, the effusive. He had rehearsed his own part in each. He had not imagined that the two of them would simply stand, in the middle of a hospital lobby, a woman of sixty-two and a woman of thirty, and look at one another with two pairs of gray-and-hazel eyes, in a silence so deep that he could hear the water running down the wall of the atrium fountain.

"Mrs. Wexcombe," said Dess.

"Ms. Rourke."

"I'm told you wrote the offer."

A tiny, appalled intake of breath from somewhere near the plants.

"I did," said Constance.

"Seventeen pages."

"Yes."

"With the clause about the twenty-five miles."

"Yes."

"And the trustee that you selected, and could remove, and could replace."

"Yes."

"And two and a half million dollars, which is the price of a house on Bellevue Avenue in 1985."

"It was," said Constance, "a very good house."

A pause.

"You wrote it for me to refuse," said Dess.

For a moment the old woman's face did not change. Then, slowly, with an extraordinary effect, as if a lamp had been turned up inside a stained-glass window, she smiled.

"I did," she said. "And you didn't disappoint."

Dess stared at her.

And then, to Theron's complete astonishment, she laughed. It was not a polite laugh. It was a short loud helpless crack of a laugh, like a branch breaking in the cold, and she clapped her hand over her mouth and her eyes shone, and Joelle, in the corner, said "Oh, thank God," under her breath.

"I'm sorry," said Dess, through her fingers. "I'm so sorry. I had a whole speech."

"I should like to hear it."

"It was very angry."

"I would expect nothing less." Constance took one step forward. "I owe you an apology. You were quite correct about every clause. I should not have asked it of you. I wished to find out what sort of person you were, and I used a seventeen-page instrument to do it, which was vulgar, and beneath my family. I beg your pardon."

"Oh— Mrs. Wexcombe, you don't—"

"I do. It is the done thing." She extended her hand. "And I have decided, my dear, that I shall not curtsy. Theron said I was not to."

"I'd like to see you try."

"Another time."

Dess took the hand.

It lay in hers, thin and gloved and trembling. They stood there, clasped, for a long moment, and Theron saw his mother's eyes go from Dess's face, slowly, down, to the rounded curve beneath the blue coat, and stay there.

"May I?" said Constance.

Her voice was a thread.

"Yes," said Dess.

She did not move her hand. She simply held it out, and Constance laid it, in its soft gray glove, against the swell of her belly, and held it there with her head bowed, and shut her eyes.

No one in the lobby spoke.

The fountain ran. A nurse went by with a cart and checked, and slowed, and turned away. In the silence, a very small thump sounded, soft as a mouse behind the wainscot, and Theron saw his mother's shoulders jerk.

She made no noise. She did not weep. She stood with her palm on a stranger's body, in a dove-gray coat and a velvet hat, with her eyes closed and her mouth set, and a single tear ran down the side of her nose, and dropped, and splashed on the toe of Dess's shoe.

"Hello, darling," whispered Constance.

The baby kicked again.

"There," said Dess, softly. "He says hi."

Constance's eyes flew open.

"I'm sorry," said Dess. "That's just— I say he. I don't know why. I keep saying it. It's just a feeling. I don't know what it is."

"You don't know?"

"We don't know yet. We're about to find out." Her voice wavered. "Do you—would you like to come in? I mean, to the scan. I know it's not usual. But Theron said you'd want to, and I thought, it's his— it's your—" She stopped. "I'd like you to be there."

Constance did not answer.

She stood with her hand on Dess's stomach and her face turned up, and Theron saw, with a stab of astonishment and pure love, that his mother was weeping now. It was not the quiet, controlled, upright weeping of the funeral. It was the helpless, wrenching, tearing grief of a woman who has been standing on a cliff for four months, with her hands over her ears, and has just heard a voice calling her name.

"Oh, my dear," said Constance. "Oh, my dear girl."

And then she did something Theron would remember for the rest of his life.

She put her arms round Dess.

She did it quite awkwardly, as one does a thing not done for forty years, and the toque slid sideways on her head. She was the taller by two inches. She bent, and pressed her face into Dess's shoulder, and the thin old back shook beneath the gray coat. And Dess, after the barest instant of rigid startlement, closed her arms round her and held on.

They stood together under the stork banner.

"It's all right," murmured Dess. "It's all right. I've got you."

"I'm so sorry."

"Don't be."

"I'm so sorry. I've been such a— I have been so frightened. I could not bear to think that there might be nothing, that he would be gone and there'd be nothing, and then there was you, and I could hardly—"

"I know."

"He was my baby."

"I know he was."

"He was my baby."

"I know," said Dess. She was crying now too, silently, with her cheek on the velvet toque. She was looking over Constance's shoulder, directly at Theron, and what was in her eyes he could not read. It was not pain, exactly. It was recognition. It was something he would not have words for until long afterward, lying awake in the dark: the sight of a girl who had spent her entire life watching a mother be left, and who now held in her arms a mother who had been left by death, and knew in her bones the weight of them both. "I know. I've got you. It's okay. He's okay. He's going to be okay."

…

It was a boy.

Dr. Pratt announced it in the dry flat tone of a woman reading a weather forecast, after forty minutes of measurement, with her glasses pushed up into her cropped gray hair. "Four chambers of the heart, all present. Brain, normal. Kidneys, spine, stomach, all present and accounted for. Femur length, appropriate. Placenta, anterior, healthy. Cord, three vessels. And—" She tilted the monitor. "Unless I am very much mistaken, and I never am, you have a son."

"A son," said Constance.

"A boy, yes."

"A grandson."

"Congratulations, Mrs. Wexcombe."

Constance was seated on the stool in the corner, where the technician had put her, with her handbag in her lap and her face wet. She did not make a sound. She merely sat, and looked at the screen, at the grainy gray shape of a small curled human being sleeping with its fist beside its cheek, and her lips moved.

Christopher, said her lips.

Dess saw. Theron saw her see it. He saw her go still on the table, with the paper crackling under her, and the gel cold on her ribs. Her eyes went to him. A small crease appeared between her brows.

"Dr. Pratt," said Dess. "Can you print me a picture? Of the face?"

"Of course."

"A few. Please. For a— For a lot of people."

"I'll make you a dozen." Pratt hit a key. "He's very cooperative. He's practically posing. I wouldn't be surprised if he were going to be a politician."

"God forbid."

"God forbid," said Pratt, dryly. "We have enough."

The prints came out in a long glossy strip, and Dess, sitting up, tore off the first and held it out to Constance.

The old woman took it in both hands.

She looked at it for a very long time. At the high round forehead, the button of a nose, the chin that jutted out with such insolent determination. Her thumb moved over the glossy surface. The tear fell on the paper and she dabbed it, carefully, with the corner of her glove.

"He has Christopher's chin," she said.

"Everybody says so."

"It's the very chin. One could draw it from memory." She lifted her eyes. "My dear. I want to say something. And I want you to feel under no obligation to reply."

"Okay."

"You have given me back a thing I did not think I would ever be given. I do not know how to thank you. I'm not certain there is a way." Her voice was low and clear. "But I want you to know, as plainly as I can say it, that I shall never ask you for anything. Not a day. Not an hour. Not a photograph. I shall take whatever you choose to give. And I shall consider it a gift."

"Mrs. Wexcombe—"

"Constance."

"Constance." Dess's voice shook. "That's— It's a very kind thing to say. But you don't have to promise. It's fine. I want you in his life."

"You do?"

"I do." She wiped her cheek on her wrist. "I just want it to be my choice. And his. When he's old enough. I don't want it to be a debt. I don't want him to grow up owing anybody."

"He shall owe no one."

"Good."

"That, my dear, is the first rule of our house." The ghost of a smile touched the corner of Constance's mouth. "We have always been terrible creditors. It would be a pleasure to be, for once, in arrears."

…

They had lunch at a diner on Hope Street.

It was Dess's choice. She had marched them there, Constance in the toque and Theron in the long dark coat, with Joelle trailing behind in her red parka, to a narrow aluminum-sided place called The Blue Plate, which had a counter, eleven stools, and a menu printed on a placemat. A waitress named Dolores took their order with a pencil behind her ear and a look of knowing amusement. Constance asked for a cup of tea and was brought something brown. She drank it without a flicker. Theron ordered a grilled cheese, and a bowl of tomato soup, and found that for the first time in four months he was actually hungry.

It was a small, ridiculous, perfect meal.

They sat in a booth by the window, in a bar of cold gold sunlight: Dess and Joelle on one side, Constance and Theron on the other. The table was Formica. The coffee was dreadful. There was a pie case, with a rotating shelf, and a jukebox in the corner playing, very softly, something by Patsy Cline. And somewhere between the second cup of tea and the arrival of a piece of lemon meringue that Dess had ordered "for the table" and then consumed in its entirety, the conversation changed.

"Tell me about him," said Dess.

"Who?"

"Kit. Not what he did. Not his accomplishments. Tell me what he was like on a Tuesday."

Constance set down her cup.

She was silent a moment. Her eyes went to the window, to the cold bright street, the passing cars, a man on a bicycle with a scarf. When she spoke her voice was soft and slow and curiously young.

"He was late," she said. "Always. For everything. Dinner, school, church, the dentist. He would arrive at the door, flushed and apologetic, with a smear of grease on his cheek and a bit of cedar in his hair, and he would say: Mother, you'll never believe what I saw. And it would always be something. A heron. A cracked keel. A man on the ferry who could play two flutes at once." She smiled. "I'd have been so cross. I'd have prepared a speech. And he would say that, and I would forget it."

"He said it to everyone," said Theron.

"To the headmaster. To the police. To the priest at his own confirmation, who was holding the water."

"He wasn't sorry," said Joelle.

"He was never sorry. He was delighted." Constance laughed, a small cracked sound. "That was the thing. You could not stay angry. He took such joy in being alive. It was an affront. It was like being scolded by the sun."

Dess was crying, laughing, with her napkin to her mouth.

"I'd have liked him," she said.

"You'd have adored him."

"I think I do. A little. Already."

"He would have been appalled," said Theron, "at the idea that anyone should."

"He would've been thrilled," said Constance, "and then he'd have been late to the party."

They laughed. It was a strange, delicate, fragile laughter, like a thing found in a drawer and held up to the light. The waitress came and refilled their cups without a word. The Patsy Cline song ended, and another began.

"I want to say something," said Dess.

She had set down her fork. She sat very straight in the booth, with her hands flat on the table, and her face had changed. The softness had gone out of it. It was the face of the woman in the navy blazer, composed and clear and a trifle formidable. She reached into her purse and withdrew, with a flourish, a paper napkin and a pencil.

"Oh, dear," said Joelle.

"What?" said Constance.

"She's going to do the thing."

"What thing?"

"The napkin."

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's a technique," said Theron. "Dess records terms. On napkins. It's quite binding. I have signed one."

"I have signed one," said Constance faintly, "of seventeen pages."

"This is better," said Dess. She unfolded the napkin and smoothed it flat. "I'm doing it now because we're all here, and I'm happy, and I think it's the best time. If I wait until I'm angry, I'll write a different set."

She began to write.

She did it in her small, quick, clear capitals, saying the words aloud as she went, in the voice she used to read terms to claimants.

"'One. The mother decides all medical and legal matters concerning the child.'"

"Agreed," said Constance at once.

"'Two. The Wexcombe family may see the child at the mother's invitation. Any invitation may be withdrawn. No reason need be given.'"

"Agreed."

"'Three. No money. Not as a gift, a trust, a loan, a scholarship, or a toy that costs more than twenty dollars.'"

"What if he wants a boat?" said Theron.

"Then he can build one."

"With what lumber?"

"With whatever he finds on the beach." She wrote. "'Four. Everything is asked first. Everything. Even a hat.'"

Constance blinked. "A hat?"

"There's a story," murmured Theron.

"'Five. The child is not a replacement for any other person.'" Dess's pencil stopped. She looked up. Her eyes went from Constance to Theron and back, and rested there, quietly. "I need you both to say that one aloud."

There was a silence.

"I shall say it," said Constance. Her voice was not quite steady. "He is not a replacement. He is himself. He may become anything he chooses. I shall not lay a single expectation upon him."

"Theron?"

"He is not a replacement," said Theron. "I have been told it before. I am learning."

"Good." Dess bent her head and wrote it. "'Six. Nobody gets to be the bad guy in front of him.'"

"What does that mean?" said Constance.

"It means that if we fight, which we will, we don't do it in front of him. And we don't badmouth each other to him. Not ever. Not even if one of us deserves it." Dess looked up. "My mother's second boyfriend used to tell me my mother was stupid. In front of her. At dinner. I'd like my son to grow up in a house where nobody does that."

"It is the soundest rule I have ever heard," said Constance.

"Thank you."

"And seven?"

"Seven—" Dess hesitated. She looked at the napkin. She drew a breath. "Seven's the hard one. Seven is: Nobody lies to me. About anything. Large or small. Ever."

The diner was very quiet.

Theron sat motionless, with his hand around his cup. He felt the whole weight of it come down on him, the silence, the pencil, the three faces turned his way, and he thought, with a lurch of nausea: She is saying it to me. She does not know it. She thinks she is saying it to the world.

"I would be glad," said Constance, "to accept that."

"Theron?"

"Yes."

"You have to say it."

"I accept it."

"Out loud. The whole thing."

He swallowed.

"Nobody lies to you," said Theron, "about anything."

"Large or small."

"Large or small."

"Ever."

"Ever."

She looked at him for a moment. Her eyes were warm, grave, trusting. And then she nodded, and wrote, and turned the napkin around and slid it across the table.

"Sign it."

Constance signed it first, in a spidery copperplate: Constance A. Wexcombe. Then Dess. Then Joelle, as witness, in a big loopy scrawl with a star over the i. Then the napkin came to Theron.

He took the pen.

His hand was very steady. It was the steadiest in the world. It had been steady for weeks, ever since a certain night in a certain kitchen. He bent his head over the paper, over the neat black capitals, over the words NOBODY LIES TO ME, and began, slowly, to write his name.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

It buzzed once, twice, and fell silent. He ignored it. He wrote the T, and the dot, and the C. He wrote the W of Wexcombe. His pen was halfway down the stroke of the x when it buzzed again, a longer, harder, urgent vibration against his thigh, like a trapped insect.

"You'd better get that," said Dess.

"It is nothing."

"It's been ringing for a minute."

"I shall deal with it after—"

"Theron. It could be Ansel."

He finished the name. He laid down the pen. His hand, he noticed, had begun to shake.

He took out the phone.

It was a text. It was from Ansel Pryor. It had been sent at 12:41 p.m., and it consisted of three lines, in the formal clipped telegraphic style of a man who had never learned to use an abbreviation.

Theron. HALE HAS READ ARTICLE FOUR. Today. He has retained Kessler and is petitioning to contest. He has been seen at the courthouse.

I told you I would speak to her myself. I shall give you until tomorrow evening. Tell her tonight.

I am so sorry.

He read it.

He read it again, with the sunlight on the Formica, and the smell of lemon meringue in his nose, and the sound of Patsy Cline singing, very low and slow, about walking after midnight. He read it while the faces around him blurred and swam. He read it while the napkin lay on the table in front of him with his own name freshly signed in black, beneath a sentence that said that nobody would lie.

"Theron?" said Dess.

He looked up.

She was watching him across the booth, with her head tilted a little to one side. Her face was open and warm and slightly flushed with lemon and light and the joyful exhaustion of a day. A smear of meringue clung to the corner of her mouth. On the table beside her hand lay a strip of glossy photographs, twelve small gray squares, in each of which a sleeping boy turned a stubborn chin to the dark.

"Is it bad?" she said.

He thought of his mother's hand on her stomach. He thought of an old woman weeping in a velvet toque under a stork banner. He thought of a kitchen floor, and a hand pressed to a kick, and I'm waiving it. It's my kick. He thought of the long cold pale-blue window of a Newport library, and a voice saying, Do not let Hale have that child.

He thought: If I tell her now, today, in a diner, in front of Mother, with this napkin on the table, she will think I have been lying through every one of the seven. She will turn the picture over and see only the back. It will be the end.

He thought: Tonight. Not here. I will find the words.

He thought: Ansel said tomorrow evening. I have a day.

"It is nothing," said Theron, and put the phone away. "A matter of the drydock."

She smiled.

"You're hopeless," she said. "You work on a day like this."

"I am aware."

"Come on, eat your soup. It's going cold."

He picked up his spoon.

Across the table, his mother had not moved. She was sitting very still in her toque, with her gloved hands folded on the Formica, looking at him. She had not looked away since the phone rang. Her eyes were gray and steady and extremely clear, and in them he saw, with a sick drop of the heart, that she had read every flicker of his face, as she had read it since he was a child, and that she knew.

She did not speak.

She lowered her eyes, slowly, and took a sip of the dreadful brown tea.

And then, so gently that only he could have seen it, she moved her foot under the table and pressed it, once, lightly, against his ankle.

Tell her, said the foot.

He ate the soup.

It tasted of nothing at all.