Absolution, p.26
Absolution, page 26
Minh-Linh was shouting at them to stop. I didn’t know the words, but I knew her meaning. Patting Suzie’s back I asked her, “Is she their sister?”
“No,” Minh-Linh said. Now she was indeed gesturing with the bamboo tray. Lifting it by one handle as if she’d whack every one of us. I’d never seen her so angry. I don’t suppose I’d ever seen her angry at all.
“They’re lying. She has no sister. Her mother is dead.” She raised the tray toward Suzie. “No one wants this ugly child. You take her out of here. Give her a good chance.” And then, as if to clarify something, “These are bad kids.”
Added to all this agitation was my awareness that Peter might at any minute come upon this scene, the chaotic din. Proof positive, I thought, of my ineptitude, my childishness. What kind of mother I was going to make.
I heard myself shouting, “Stop it. Stop it. All of you.” Which had the only real effect of transforming Suzie’s whimper into a howl.
Once again Minh-Linh turned her back on me, stormed away.
I patted the child, moved her again to my lap. Brushed her tears from her cheek, her long birthmark, the edge of her chubby chin. Now that the shouting had stopped, the other children’s tears seemed merely companionable, as if their sobbing were simply a language I didn’t understand.
I asked the tall girl, “She is your sister?” And the girl nodded. I looked at the little boy on her lap. “Sister?” I asked him, but he only stared back. I turned to the two little girls squeezed together in the chair on my right. “Your sister?” I asked, and saw them both glance at their tall companion. Slowly, they, too, nodded, clearly with no real sense of what they were agreeing to. Their tears had made long trails along their dirty cheeks, rivulets in a sandy stream. I turned to the other two, who had their arms around each other. They were nodding already.
They were so painfully thin, all of them. Bone-thin arms and wrists and narrow hips sharing a single chair. Their shirts and dresses and shorts were, it seemed to me, cobweb thin as well. And yet my little Suzie was plump, well-fed. She had been bathed and powdered and presented to me in her frilly American dress—irresistible despite the stain that marked her as an ugly child.
For the first time I wondered how long it had taken Charlene to arrange this; how long ago had she set her eyes on this little girl, directed the women to fatten her up for me. Dress her up. I wondered if the pink party dress itself had perhaps been procured by Charlene’s clever sister.
Or if Charlene and our doctor friend had paid the mother a good price.
She had bypassed me completely in her scheme. Minh-Linh was in on it, the women in the wide room were in on it, even these children—the taxi driver, for all I knew—but I had been left in the dark. What kind of logic had Charlene employed to leave me so out of it? Don’t ask Tricia to decide. Tricia will never decide. Tell her, Here you are. All your heart’s desires in a fait accompli.
I indicated to the children that they should drink their lemonade, using words I knew they didn’t understand. “We’ll figure something out,” I said. “Don’t cry,” I said. “All will be well.” I indicated again that they should drink up. I asked them if they were hungry. Gestured the question. They merely looked at me, sucking in their tears, glancing at the tall girl.
Suzie began to settle a bit, hiccuping, swallowing air, although once again she was clasping her own plump fingers, hand in hand with herself, understanding, I suppose, that no surer comfort would arrive. I ran my fingertips along her little spine.
If I made a decision, I made it then, although I had no awareness of it. As if I had no more volition here than I had had all along, in all of Charlene’s planning.
Standing slowly, I lifted the baby, the children’s eyes on us both, and then lowered her, without a word, into the lap of the tall girl, right beside the little boy she already held on her knee. They both moved quickly to accommodate the child.
And then I held out my hand, as you would to a pack of dogs, newly, precariously, trained.
“You stay right here, please,” I said. “You stay. I will send out some food.” Once again, I made an eating gesture.
And then I turned my back on them and went into the house. I suppose I was fully aware that they might all, Suzie included, be gone by the time I returned.
I called to Minh-Linh. She came from the kitchen. “Bring those kids something to eat,” I said. “And fill their glasses to the top, for God’s sake.”
Upstairs, I pulled a pillowcase from the linen cupboard in the hall. I stuffed it, quickly, with the little wardrobe Minh-Linh had produced, the diapers and the plastic pants and the small T-shirts. There really wasn’t much. And then I added the Saigon Barbie that Charlene had given me, a souvenir of our efforts.
I tossed the pillowcase into the market basket Minh-Linh had made into a bassinet, and then lifted the thing by its rope handles. Carrying it all out of our room, I paused at the dresser, considered, and then reached for my little stone bodhisattva beside the pail of sand and ash, tossed it into the mix as well.
I grabbed what money was left in my wooden box carved with the Xa Loi Pagoda—dollars and piastres both.
I made my way downstairs.
When I try to recount what was going through my mind in all this, I can think only of hot and cold—hot with anger, at Charlene, at Peter, at everyone in my life who had considered my opinions inconsequential, who had lied to me or ignored me or manipulated me for what they considered my own benefit. Hot to think of those who’d set out to do good on my behalf.
But cold, too. I would not allow myself to consider what I would lose in giving up this lovely child. My insurance against childlessness.
Minh-Linh had set out on the table—was it in spite?—a bowl of potato chips, another of pretzels, a plate of Oreos. She had dumped a few tins of Vienna sausages—Peter’s favorite—into a shallow dish. American food, straight from the PX. The children were making a feast of it. The little boy had taken my chair and was reaching happily for everything spread before him. The crying had stopped. Little Suzie was sitting contentedly beneath the tall girl’s chin. There were potato chip crumbs in her dark hair.
Once again, I looked warily toward the gate, imagined Peter’s astonished entrance onto this scene.
I waited, watching them all, holding the bassinet before me with both hands, like a schoolgirl with her satchel.
My thoughts were hot and cold, and the unreality of it all—the heat, the noise of the street, these strange creatures around my little table—left me both disoriented and bitterly impatient.
I wanted this whole sojourn to be over. I wanted to go home. I wanted another kind of life, my own life. My own baby.
Suddenly, I cried out, “Home.” I barely recognized my own voice. “Home,” I said again and moved toward our gate. The children paused, looked at me warily. I said, “Now. Go home,” and moved the wide basket toward the gate. “Take your sister home.”
If I had been on the precipice of something just seconds ago, I was, surely, free-falling now.
The tall girl was the first to stand, and I saw how she struggled a bit to get up with Suzie still in her lap. I knew—my mind both hot and cold—that were I to take the child from her skinny arms, if I were to hold that plump child against my heart, I would have no choice but to keep her. I would, once again, have no choice in the matter. I would be bound forever to what had been arranged for me.
And so I held back, the rope handles of the market basket clutched in my hands, binding my wrists.
One by one, the children got up from the table and followed my command. Or, more accurately, they followed their tall sister, who was now moving warily, Suzie on her hip. I saw how each of these smaller children grabbed a few more cookies, stacked them in their little hands, and palmed them against their thin chests, like shoplifters, tiny smugglers, greedy and inept.
I recalled my kindergarteners back home. It was the same sneaky gesture I had seen among them at snack time—or at least among those who knew, innately perhaps, or perhaps from some experience of want, never to ask permission.
I opened the gate and let them file out in front of me, the stolen cookies clutched to their hearts.
I followed them onto the sidewalk, hailed a cab. The tall girl ducked in first with Suzie in her arms, and the others quickly scrambled in as well, stacking themselves one over the other. There was childish laughter, as if the day had transformed itself into a grand adventure. Only the tall girl turned her head toward the window, away from me.
I had stopped her tantrum by handing her her heart’s desire. I do believe she was stunned by her achievement.
With some bizarre, maybe cruel, indifference, I squeezed the bassinet into the back seat, on top of them all, as if merely stacking goods, stuffing it in. The children grabbed at the basket, at the tumbling little baby clothes, giggling. There were broken Oreos scattered among them, over their limbs, and on the floor of the cab.
I handed them as well the wad of cash, the dollars and piastres I had taken from my jewelry box.
When I turned away, Peter was approaching on the sidewalk behind me.
He had taken to going to work in just a short-sleeved shirt and dress pants—ties and jackets had been abandoned by the American workforce at some point during our stay. In retrospect I guess you could say it was an indication of our settling in.
The new informality made him seem so boyish. He might have been a thin Catholic schoolkid with his white shirt and his leather satchel. He might have been that puzzled young man who had called to me out of the rushing crowds on a cold afternoon in midtown Manhattan.
“What was that all about?” he asked.
I shrugged. “One of Charlene’s projects,” I said.
He looked beyond me, although the cab had already turned the far corner. “Was she here?”
I shrugged. “You know Charlene,” I said. “Everywhere and nowhere.”
We exchanged our usual quick homecoming kiss, and I said, “You’re later than you promised.”
He looked again into the middle distance where the taxi was long gone. “I was needed,” he said with a smile. “You know how it is. Everywhere and nowhere.”
“Oh, I know,” I told him. “I know how it is.”
As we went back inside the gate together, Peter paused to consider the iron bars, narrowly spaced. He could fit his fingers through them, but not his whole hand.
“I’m thinking some chicken wire here,” he said, wiggling his fingers to demonstrate. “Might be safer. With all that’s going on.”
We walked together across the path. Under the veranda, Minh-Linh, fury in her every gesture, was now cleaning off the little table.
I said—hot and cold in my voice and my heart—“What does it matter now? Charlene tells me we’re going home.”
INCONSEQUENTIAL GOOD, you said, describing your mother’s life, all her little efforts.
A phrase less pertinent, less painful, to us, I think, since neither one of us, as far as I can tell, has claimed any gift for altruism, no outsized generosity, no impulse to shout back at the gobbling whirlwind—no furious ambition, for that matter, to do more than is reasonable about the chaos in the world. The awfulness.
We hoped only, I think, you and I, to stay safe: to close as tightly as we could the circle of our affection—blood-deep, insistent affection for our own, for the few we could bear to love.
* * *
ONE MORE THING to tell you about those days.
Although, as I said, I begged off, Lily—I never learned to call her Ly—returned to the leprosarium with Charlene and the lovely clothes. Charlene told me later how remarkable it was that so few adjustments had to be made: every ao dai fit so beautifully. I wasn’t surprised and knew it had little to do with my careful note-taking. I had my memory, even then, of sweet Lily wielding those comically large scissors, her concentration and her skill as she bent over the tiny bit of white silk.
You needn’t apologize for the dizzying delight you felt, finding the doll on Dominic’s shelf, seeing again Lily’s careful handiwork. I would have felt the same. Something to take home. Something to preserve. Something of the girl in every small bit of thread, who she was, may still be.
Lily returned a third time when she and Charlene brought the silk tunics for the men. She’d made silk pillow slips, too, Charlene told me in a letter. A gift for the Sisters.
“Something cool for their cheeks at the end of the day,” she said in her inimitable way. “You know, after they’ve shed those hair shirts.”
I do believe Charlene envied them, those confident Sisters with their circumscribed, industrious, single-minded lives. Women who, as Dom said, were on everybody’s side.
On this third trip, Lily stayed behind.
She would not be parted from her twin, your mother said. Her heart. Her own. And the Sisters gave up trying to dissuade her.
Marcia Case, your mother wrote, is absolutely furious with me. Lily was her favorite girl.
ALSO BY ALICE MCDERMOTT
FICTION
The Ninth Hour
Someone
After This
Child of My Heart
Charming Billy
At Weddings and Wakes
That Night
A Bigamist’s Daughter
NONFICTION
What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction
A Note About the Author
Alice McDermott is the author of eight previous novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, D.C. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Part I
Part II
Part III
Also by Alice McDermott
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2023 by Alice McDermott
All rights reserved
First edition, 2023
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-61049-4
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Alice McDermott, Absolution
