Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed Page 32

  “He was a good student. He went to Dartmouth College. People at our high school were so excited about his going there. Ivy League colleges were a big deal in those days.”

  “They still are.” Claudia’s eyes remained on Joelle. “Did he have any talent? Was he musical?”

  Joelle realized Claudia was trying to figure out what gifts Drew’s genes might have bestowed upon her. “I don’t recall him playing any instruments,” she said. “He played tennis, though. I remember he played soccer, too. Our school had a team, but it wasn’t such a popular sport back then. Not the way it is now.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Joelle struggled to conjure a picture of a teenage Drew. Whatever memories she’d had of him from high school had been overtaken by his appearance inside her house a few days ago. He’d looked prosperous and middle-aged that morning, not like the boy she’d fallen for in high school. “I’ve got my Holmdell High School yearbook somewhere,” she said, swinging open the back door into the kitchen.

  Claudia followed her inside. The kitchen was pleasantly cool after the oppressive heat of the backyard. Joelle paused at the sink to wash her hands and face. She toweled herself dry, then headed for the basement door.

  Bobby had finished a rec room in the basement a few years after they’d bought the house, once he’d had the rest of the place in reasonable repair. The rec room was nothing fancy—Sheet-rock walls, cheap brown carpeting covering the concrete floor, built-in shelves and drop-ceiling fluorescent lighting. It had been a haven for the kids, a place for the boys to scatter their toys and play video games, a lair where Claudia and her teenage friends gathered for sleepover parties. By the time the boys were in high school, Joelle had added some style to the decor, painting the walls a cheerful yellow, spreading a few braided rugs on the floor and sewing new slipcovers for the sofa and chairs. Last year Bobby had splurged on a wide-screen TV. Joelle considered most TV shows just as inane in wide-screen as on the old set, but Bobby adored the oversize screen. So did Mike and Danny, who spent many Sundays in the fall watching football with their father. If the TV lured her kids home for visits, she was glad Bobby had bought it.

  The carton she was searching for was in the unfinished half of the basement, where the furnace and the hot-water tank, Bobby’s tool bench and a wall of steel storage shelves were located. The shelves were stacked with boxes of Christmas decorations, old athletic gear, luggage, tax records and junk that, for whatever reason, Joelle wasn’t yet ready to discard. She shoved a few boxes around until she located the carton at the back of one of the shelves.

  She lugged the carton into the rec room, Claudia shadowing her. After dropping the box onto the coffee table, Joelle settled on the couch. She wrinkled her nose at the sour scent of the dust that rose from the flaps as she pulled them apart.

  She hadn’t opened this carton since the family had moved to Gray Hill, and she told herself its contents no longer meant anything to her. But when she lifted out the polished marble egg Bobby had given her for Christmas so many years ago, in high school, she felt a pang so painful it brought tears to her eyes. “Oh, God,” she said, her hand molding to the smooth curves of the egg. “This was a present from your dad.”

  “My birth father?”

  Joelle started. “No. Your real father.” She held the egg up for Claudia to see.

  Claudia frowned. “What is that?”

  “An egg. A marble egg. There was this little head shop in town that sold them.”

  Claudia took the egg from her and studied it, her frown deepening. “What were you supposed to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. Display it. Hold it.” She sighed. “There was no ‘supposed to’ about it. All I cared about was that Bobby DiFranco gave it to me.”

  “Even though you were in love with some other guy,” Claudia said, her tone laced with suspicion.

  “I always loved your father,” Joelle insisted, silencing the quaver in her voice. Last night when Bobby was lost in a drunken slumber, had she loved him? Had she loved him when she’d thrown away the ruined flowers and the broken glass and the dinner he’d never eaten? Why couldn’t he have stayed calm and reasonable and talked to her? Why, when they were both so sad, did he get to act out, while she got stuck cleaning up after him?

  Sighing, she reached back into the carton and pulled out her old jewelry box. She opened its lid. The box was empty—the few pieces of jewelry she’d owned before she left Holmdell with Bobby had since been moved to a much nicer jewelry box, which sat on her bedroom dresser. After all these years, she hadn’t really expected the old box to start playing “Edelweiss,” but the silence jolted her.

  She flipped the box over and cranked the key protruding from the underside. Then she righted the box and opened it again. The crystalline notes of the song emerged.

  “Hey.” Claudia’s eyes grew wide as she sank onto the sofa next to Joelle. “I know that song.”

  “It’s from The Sound of Music,” Joelle said.

  “No, I mean—I know it.” She eased the music box out of her mother’s hands and placed it on her knees, letting the music rise like a vapor in front of her. “I know this music box.”

  “It’s been stored away forever,” Joelle said, gesturing toward the carton.

  Claudia frowned, shook her head and twisted the key to make the music continue. “When I was really little, before we lived here, Daddy would play this music box for me. He’d sit me on his knee and open the lid. I thought it was magic, the way the music just rose out of the box like that.”

  Daddy. Claudia wasn’t referring to Drew Foster now. Her daddy was Bobby, the man who’d raised her, who’d made her believe in the magic of a music box.

  Joelle didn’t remember Bobby playing the music box for Claudia, but the early years of their marriage had been filled with a lot of tag-team parenting. She’d worked while he was in physical therapy. Or she’d brought Claudia with her to the preschool where she was employed. Or he’d cared for Claudia in the evenings while Joelle attended college. Those first few years after Bobby came home from the war were a blur of exhaustion, determination and discovery. They’d had to learn how to be a husband and wife at the same time they were learning how to be parents. They’d had to learn how to create a family while actually doing it.

  Apparently during those times when Bobby and Claudia were on their own, Bobby had amused his daughter with the music box. Together they’d experienced things that Joelle had never been a part of.

  If Claudia could remember “Edelweiss,” her relationship with Bobby couldn’t be torn apart by the intrusion of Drew Foster into their lives. It simply couldn’t.

  While Claudia opened and shut the music box, lost in her own memories, Joelle dug deeper into the carton. There was her old childhood piggy bank, long empty. There was her teddy bear, which she’d let Claudia keep until she’d had enough money to buy her a brand-new stuffed animal. And there, underneath the black plastic folder holding her high-school diploma, was her yearbook.

  She hoisted out the heavy album and nudged the carton away so it wouldn’t cast a shadow on the glossy pages. Claudia set down the jewelry box and lifted the yearbook onto her own lap. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this,” she said, spreading the book open across her thighs. She sped through the first part of the book, full of candid shots and faculty photos, and then slowed when she reached the portraits of Joelle’s classmates. “Foster,” Claudia murmured, flipping past the As, the Bs, the Ds so quickly Joelle didn’t even glimpse Bobby’s picture.

  Claudia halted at Drew’s page. The photo resembled him as much as any yearbook photo would: a black-and-white portrait of a young man gazing dreamily just past the photographer’s shoulder, his eyes aimed at some supposedly glorious future. His hair was neatly combed and not particularly long for 1970. He wore a dark blazer, a white shirt and a dark tie. His face was smooth and boyish.

  “That’s him?” Claudia asked, her voice a whisper.

  “Yes.”

/>   She scrutinized the picture, as if trying to discern his character from that one artificial pose. She traced the photo with her fingertips, as if she could feel the shape of his nose, the curve of his chin. She stared, sighed, drank him in.

  “He doesn’t look like that now,” Joelle reminded her. “He was eighteen when that photo was taken.”

  “I know, but…It would have been right around when you became—I mean, this is what he looked like when you conceived me.”

  Unsure what to say, Joelle remained silent. Claudia seemed both horrified and enthralled by the photograph. Joelle was mostly just horrified by it. She’d believed she loved that boy—a boy so selfish, his way of dealing with his pregnant girlfriend was to send her a check and the name of a doctor. Why had she agreed to help him now? He’d been a son of a bitch, just as Bobby said.

  His son, she remembered. She was doing this for his son.

  For her daughter, too. Observing the intensity of Claudia’s expression as she studied the man whose sperm had created her, Joelle had to believe she’d been right to tell her daughter the truth. She couldn’t let herself believe anything else.

  After several long minutes, Claudia thumbed back a few pages, into the Ds, until she found Bobby’s photo. Unlike all the other students on the page, Bobby lacked the traditional tentative yearbook smile, and he stared directly at the camera, not at some goal hovering just above the photographer’s right shoulder. His dark hair was long and wild with waves, his eyes dark and burning, his mouth set firmly. He wore a blazer—a corduroy blazer, Joelle realized as she leaned in to study the photo. His father’s jacket, the one he’d stolen when he and Joelle had fled to New Jersey and gotten married.

  Claudia had wedged her finger into the book to hold Drew’s page, and now she turned back to that page. She inspected Drew’s photo, then flipped back to Bobby’s page and grimaced. “Dad was so cool. Why didn’t you go out with him?”

  Studying Bobby’s photo, Joelle had to agree that he’d been handsome. But she’d known him so long, she’d hardly even seen him by the time they were high-school seniors. When she’d looked at him, she’d seen their shared history. She’d seen his wicked grin, his sense of humor, the smell of his cigarettes, the grief darkening his eyes at moments when he didn’t realize she was watching him. Grief over his mother’s death, she’d assumed, or over his father’s drinking, or over the fact that kids like him were denied the opportunity to escape their fate. No wonder he wasn’t gazing into the future in his yearbook photo. The future he’d imagined for himself back then wasn’t one he’d wanted.

  Objectively, though, he’d been gorgeous. His hair, his eyes, the stubborn set of his jaw, the fierce defiance in his gaze…Definitely gorgeous.

  “I didn’t date your father because he never asked me out,” she answered.

  Claudia eyed her dubiously.

  “We were friends, but he dated other girls.”

  “Who?” Claudia began thumbing through the pages. “Who did he date?”

  Quite a few, Joelle recalled. Bobby had made the rounds of available Tubtown girls throughout their high-school years. He’d always been popular. He’d dated one in particular toward the end; he’d been going with her when he’d asked Joelle to marry him. “Margie something,” she recollected. “I think her last name began with an N. Newland, maybe?”

  Amid the Ns, Claudia found Marjorie Noonan’s photo. “Her?” She scowled in disapproval.

  Claudia looked at Margie’s photo. Joelle looked, too. She’d forgotten how beautiful Margie was, with her long black hair, her round cheeks and her large, almond-shaped eyes framed in thick eyelashes. Her lips shaped a perfect pout as she focused on the space beyond the photographer. Why hadn’t Bobby stayed with her? She was much prettier than Joelle.

  “She was nice,” Joelle told Claudia.

  “She’s tarty. He could have gone out with you.”

  “He wanted to go out with her,” Joelle said simply. The emotion that welled up inside her wasn’t simple, though. Bobby had gone out with Margie and other girls because he’d wanted to—and he hadn’t wanted to go out with Joelle. Surely if he had, he would have asked her out. Surely if he had, she would have said yes.

  But he hadn’t loved her, not that way. She’d been his pal. Not the girl of his heart. Even when he’d married her, she’d been aware of that.

  And it hurt. After all these years, it still hurt to admit that Bobby hadn’t loved her the way he’d loved all the girls he’d been involved with in Holmdell. He’d married her out of friendship and charity, nothing more. Crazy though it was, she suffered a pang of jealousy for all those girls he’d dated, all the girls he’d chosen. He’d never really chosen her. She’d been his good deed, nothing more.

  “So he was dating her, and you were dating…” Claudia returned to Drew’s photo amid the Fs. “Drew Foster.”

  “Drew was very nice,” Joelle defended him. “He was smart and handsome and considerate.” Until the end, she added silently. Until he found out I was pregnant and sent me money.

  “He looks rich.”

  “He was.”

  Claudia raised her eyes to Joelle. “Is that why you dated him?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” Joelle said automatically, then pressed her lips together. Hadn’t she told her daughter enough lies for one lifetime? “I didn’t mind the fact that he was rich,” she confessed. “He lived in a neighborhood called the Hill, where all the rich people lived. It’s been so long since you’ve been in Holmdell, maybe you don’t remember. But the part of town where Dad and I grew up, where Grandma Wanda lives and Papa Louie used to live, was where all the poor kids lived. And Drew lived up on the Hill, on the other side of town, in a big house on two acres, with cars and a huge allowance and a membership in the country club. I was dazzled, Claudia. I couldn’t believe a boy like him would be interested in a girl like me.”

  “Did you love him?”

  Joelle lowered her gaze back to the yearbook page. “At the time, I thought I did,” she conceded. She had thought she loved him, and not because he was rich. Because he had confidence. Because he had two parents. Because he knew who he was and where he belonged and what he was entitled to. To a bastard child from Tubtown, his life seemed like a fantasy.

  Claudia continued to study Drew’s photo, as if trying to memorize it. “You had sex with him?” she finally asked, her gaze trained on the yearbook.

  “Obviously.”

  Claudia sighed. “Why didn’t you marry him?”

  “He…” It pained Joelle to admit the truth, almost as much as it pained her to acknowledge that Bobby hadn’t loved her like a girlfriend. “He wasn’t ready for marriage and fatherhood. He was in college. He sent me money to get an abortion.”

  Claudia shrank from Drew’s photo. “God.”

  “He was frightened,” Joelle said, although she had no good reason to defend him. “He wasn’t ready to be a father.”

  “And you were ready to be a mother?”

  Joelle laughed sadly. “I was so unready. But I wanted you, Claudia. In spite of how young I was, and how unprepared, I wanted you. And your father—your real father—wanted you, too. So we got married.”

  “Dad’s name is on my birth certificate,” Claudia said. At Joelle’s nod, she asked, “You lied on the birth certificate? Is that legal?”

  “You’re the one married to a lawyer,” Joelle reminded her. “You’d have to ask him. I guess we figured that as long as no one probed, what difference did it make? Your father loves you, Claudia. You are his daughter. The reason I never told you about all this—” she gestured toward Drew’s yearbook photo “—is that I was afraid it might make you feel differently toward him. Maybe you’d stop loving him. That would kill him, Claudia. If he lost you, he would die.” Or at least, he would drink and break things and stop being the man he was.

  Claudia digested this, then steered her attention back to the yearbook. Her face registered revulsion as she stared at Drew’s photo. “So
this boy wanted you to get rid of me. And now, all these years later, he comes back into your life and says he’s my father?”

  “He’s grown up, Claudia. He’s not the kid he once was.” Joelle sighed. “God knows, he could have found me years ago and insisted on being a part of your life.”

  “But he wanted me dead,” Claudia argued, still staring at Drew’s photo, as if trying to imagine him capable of wishing such a terrible thing. “He wanted you to get rid of me. And now he claims he has a right to—to what? My bone marrow?”

  “I don’t think he believes he has a right to anything, Claudia. He only has hope.”

  “And you kept all this from me because you didn’t want me to stop loving Dad.” She shut the yearbook and shoved it off her lap, onto the coffee table. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I ought to know who my father is?”

  “Yes.” Joelle sighed and rubbed her face with her hands. “Claudia, Dad and I were so young then. We were only trying to do what was best. It wasn’t like we sat down and said, ‘Let’s keep this secret from Claudia. She doesn’t need the truth.’ We only wanted you to grow up happy and loved, with two parents who were crazy about you. Who never, ever wanted you dead.”

  Claudia’s shoulders trembled, as if she were shaking off a chill. “I feel cheated.”

  “I’m sorry.” Those words sounded so feeble falling from Joelle’s mouth. “It’s my fault, Claudia. I made a mistake. I got into trouble. Your father rescued me. I was a fool and he was a saint. If you want to hate someone, hate me. Your father…” Her voice faltered and she cleared her throat. “He’s afraid he’s lost you, Claudia, and he doesn’t deserve that. Please don’t hate him.” Tears beaded along her lashes. She ducked her head so Claudia wouldn’t see.

  “I don’t hate him.” She sighed. “I hate this man, this Drew Foster…but he’s my father. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think, how I’m supposed to feel.”

  Once again Joelle ached to touch her daughter, to wrap her arms around her and heal her pain with a kiss, the way she used to use mommy kisses to heal Claudia’s childhood scrapes and mosquito bites. But Claudia was an adult, and what was troubling her now couldn’t be kissed away.