A very inconvenient scan.., p.25
A Very Inconvenient Scandal, page 25
“What has this got to do with my birth father?”
Sailor said, “I wish he could have been there for you when Carlotta disappeared. I wish he could have been there for your high-school prom. I wish he could have walked you down the aisle.”
“How do you even know him? Did you...did you work with him or for his family or something?” Ariel asked.
“No,” Sailor said. “Let me explain. I was in the navy for many years, until I was injured—”
“Frankie?” Ariel said, her anxiety suddenly like the sound of glass breaking. “What is going on?”
“I was home on leave, and well, your mother and I were sort of seeing each other and... I’m your birth father, Ariel,” Sailor said. “I wish I had told you years ago.”
“You’re my...you’re my...” Ariel said. “Let me see that.”
She unfolded and perused the paper, while Frankie took Ben into her arms. “This is my birth certificate. Okay, father... Santiago Alexander Madeira. Is that you?” Sailor nodded. “But so what? She could have written down anyone’s name.”
“There’s the other paper. That’s a paternity test.”
“She made you take a paternity test? So you didn’t...you were just like the boy from Princeton... Was there ever really a boy from Princeton? You didn’t want anything to do with me either.”
“Wait—no, wait, Ariel. I was the one who pushed for the paternity test.”
“You... Wait, what?”
“I wanted proof that you were mine if it ever came to that, so that Carlotta would accept support for you. I thought I would have to get a lawyer because she didn’t want you to know. She fought that tooth and nail.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know why. You would have to ask her. I hope you do ask her. I suspected it was because I didn’t love her. I loved you, and I wanted to be your dad, but she knew that I cared about her, but I didn’t love her.”
“Because you loved Beatrice.”
“I loved Beatrice. And I was still in the navy when I found out about you.”
“And you didn’t want to interrupt your life...”
“That’s not true. I did want to. I wanted to marry Carlotta.”
“But you just said that you didn’t love her.” Ariel slapped the papers down and climbed off the bed. “You were just willing to do the right thing by her. Am I correct? You got her pregnant and then...”
Sailor got up and approached Ariel, but she raised both hands palm out, to her shoulders, warning him off. “You can put it that way. That’s one way to put it. But it makes me sound like a bad man. I’m not a bad man. She’s not a bad woman.” When Ariel turned away, Sailor almost reached out for her, then stepped back. “The only way that she would agree to let me give her money for you is if I didn’t tell you the truth.”
“That’s insane,” Ariel said, and Frankie found herself nodding over and over, as if there were a string attached to her chin. “Why did she make up the boy from Princeton?” She added, “I’ve seen my birth certificate. I have a copy of it. It says that the father is unknown. Why would she do that?’
“I can’t guess, and I won’t speak for her,” Sailor said. “You will have to ask her that. Maybe she thought a Princeton scholar sounded impressive.”
“You went to Annapolis,” Frankie said. “That is pretty impressive.” She thought, but did not say, maybe it fit the narrative of the callous rich and Carlotta as the plucky downtrodden. What about Carlotta ate away at Frankie so reliably? Was it more than the abandonment? Was it that she now knew about Carlotta’s liaison with Mack?
“How did she get that birth certificate?”
“I’m guessing either she got an amended birth certificate, the way you do when you adopt a child and substitute the name of the adoptive parents for the birth parents...or it’s some kind of fake birth certificate.”
“What? Just to make sure I wouldn’t find out about you? That makes no sense,” Ariel said. “Okay, so you weren’t trying to avoid responsibility. I’m sorry that I suggested that you were. I’m just so surprised. So much makes sense now. The things you did for me. The groceries you brought.”
“I tried, Ariel. I paid every bill I could, for twenty years. I paid into a bank account and some administrator sent me a statement, every month. I made sure you and she had health insurance. A college fund, that Birdy took care of. I’m not hoping for any credit here. That’s not what this is about, Ariel.”
“What is it about, then? Some of this just makes me crazy. You did all these secret things, and thank you very much for letting me grow up with Sherry, who was never sober for one single day of her life—”
“I told you, I have regrets. But Carlotta was around at first.”
“The big question is why didn’t you tell me? Recently? I’ve been a grown woman for a long time. Why, in all those years?”
“If I told you, Carlotta said she would take you away. Even after she left and you were grown-up, I still worried she’d come back or you would go with her, and I’d never see you again. I’d made her promise not to take you away, and so I never spoke to her about it again. I just made her sign a legal agreement that said if she ever took you away from here, all the money in trust would revert to me within one year.”
“So instead she left me.”
“That must have broken your heart, Ariel. I am so sorry. I don’t know if this was better or worse. But I’m glad you were in one place. This place. With Frankie. With Penn. With Birdy to watch over you. With me to keep an eye on you. Even with Mack, though he was never around, and when he was, he never paid any attention to you. Or even to Frankie, really. The only one he cared about was Penn.”
Frankie spoke up then, although she had intended to be a silent witness and that alone. “If you loved my mother, then why were you messing around with Carlotta?”
“We were both lonely.” Sailor added, “I couldn’t be with Beatrice, and I cared for Carlotta. It just wasn’t... It wasn’t enough.” Frankie remembered Ellabella saying that she and Ariel had a we of me and that she and Gil belonged together. She glanced at Ariel, grateful for whatever crisis had brought them back together, ashamed for the gratitude.
“That’s fine,” Frankie pushed on then. “But when it leads to a child no one—”
“She was a wanted child,” Sailor said. Ariel narrowed her eyes.
“I was going to say a child no one expected,” Frankie went on, although she was lying. She had been going to say a child no one wanted. She held Ben, who had fallen asleep, his thick hair damply curled against her neck. The facts kept echoing and rebounding. All of this, Beatrice had known. She had never said a single word of it to Frankie. Not a word, ever. Frankie didn’t know whether to hate or respect her mother for her magnificent reticence—a trait Frankie would never possess.
“You could have gone somewhere else and loved somebody else instead of staying in a place where there was one woman you loved who would never love you and one woman who loved you and you would never love her.”
“I could have. But this is also my home, Frankie. Birdy was my best friend. And if I went somewhere else, I wouldn’t have known anything about Ariel at all.”
Frankie nodded, somewhat remorseful. Plenty of people had done stupider things for reasons that were not as solid. This clearly was not the first time this had happened. Didn’t every Gothic novel in the world hinge on the unknown father?
“I asked one more thing of her,” Sailor told Ariel. “She would not allow you to have my last name. So I asked that some part of your name be from me. I knew I would tell you one day.”
Ariel glanced down at the paper in her hand. “Alexandra... So your middle name is Alexander and mine is Alexandra. Okay. I’m still not sure what... So then Carlotta came back, she’s been back for almost six months now,” Ariel said. “Did you ever think, maybe now is the time? Did you discuss it with her? I’m in my twenties now. I’m not a child.”
“She promised me that we could talk it over. Every time I tried, she postponed it. To be fair, there was so much going on—you had just gotten married, then you had the baby, then Christmas came and you were gone. When Ben got sick,” Sailor added, “I didn’t know what Carlotta would do. She’s always been unpredictable.”
“Right. Okay. Look. I mean this nicely, but why don’t you all just go away now?” Ariel said. “I need to think. I’m exhausted.”
Sailor and Frankie stood up. Frankie handed Ben to Ariel, and Ariel looked up at Sailor.
“No, on second thought, you stay, Sailor, if you can. You can...you can help me with Ben. I think I need a nap.” Sailor looked as though he’d been handed a bag of gold. “And I need to talk to you.”
“I’ll get you something nice to eat from the deli down the street,” Sailor said. “After you wake up.”
A we of me, thought Frankie. Ariel knows about Sailor for fifteen minutes, and she chooses him over me. That wasn’t at all the full context of what was going on, Frankie knew that. They needed time, private time, to get to know each other, to ask the questions that needed answering. But hadn’t she, Frankie, shared Beatrice with Ariel? And now Sailor too? Wasn’t she letting herself feel like a spoiled, jealous child, Frankie thought? She was. Yet the fact remained: she was shut out. And she was jealous.
12
“So now your part is over,” Gil said.
“Yes, my work here is done,” Frankie said. They were walking the baby up and down in Orleans, up and down from the Hot Chocolate Sparrow to the natural foods co-op, then across to the new store that featured Amish furniture, jams and jellies, luxurious lotions, and then repeating the four-block square. Frankie wanted the Amish brown-sugar scrub in the window, but was ideologically opposed to giving money to people who didn’t believe in dentistry. She confided this to Gil.
“That’s a lifestyle choice right?” Gil said.
“So’s pornography,” Frankie said.
“Not...not really in the same way? And probably you would be surprised at how many people you think are upstart professionals...”
“Upstanding professionals.”
“Yes, who look at pornography.”
“Do you?” Frankie asked.
“I have, especially when I would be alone out there for months. But the truth of pornography is how very, very boring it is.”
“I know! The exact opposite of what you think it will be. Literally, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” She checked sleeping Atty, and they trudged on. “I can’t wait for warm weather. I feel like I’m wearing a rubber fat suit.”
“I’m not going to touch that one with—”
“I know. The barge pole. Do you think I look fat?”
“Not at all. I thought you were too thin when I met you.”
“You are the most diplomatic husband.”
Gil took over pushing the stroller. It was laughable how quickly she tired these days from physical exercise—she who’d spent years burning through thousands of calories every day without ever thinking about whether what she ate was too much or too little, whether it was vegetable or animal, only that it was there. Now, she spent up to an hour every morning listening to recorded books and running on a little treadmill. Frankie thought she was getting soft; she weighed fifteen pounds more than she’d ever weighed, not counting while she was pregnant, and while she had no real objection to buying bigger jeans, her best wet suit wouldn’t even begin to zip. When she pictured herself over the past six or seven years, it was as though she were watching an animated cartoon sped up, of a woman who jumped in and out of the sea, jumped in and out of a van, jumped in and out of a plane. Her new satisfaction translated into a sort of languor in her everyday movements. She loved the new-mom life she was living, yet even those moments she’d spent lounging with Ellabella, talking about the past, talking about Ariel, talking about nothing, seemed like a violation of the action-hero creed she’d sworn herself to so long ago that she didn’t even remember how she’d learned the vows.
She still wanted to be that jumping, adventuring woman. Soon enough. Not yet.
Up and down they walked. Orleans was one of the few Cape Cod towns that actually had sidewalks. It was this or Hyannis, where all the identical boutique storefronts and beery bars recently made Frankie feel depressed, or a drive to Provincetown, still a ghost town in not-quite-spring.
“As for all the stuff with Carlotta,” Frankie said, “it all seems kind of silly in the light of day. The snooping and stuff. For no reason. I guess she had her reasons for the things she did.”
“You don’t have to agree with them,” Gil reminded Frankie. “If I had to venture a guess, it would be that she was honteux...”
“I don’t know that word.”
“Ummm, timide...ashamed maybe?”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? I still don’t get her reasons for concealing so much stuff,” Frankie said. “I mean, who needs multiple passports? And how did she get them all? And I definitely don’t know why she took off and left Ariel. That’s really at the bottom of it. And why Ari just accepts it.”
“Like Sailor said, she was always a—What do you call people who don’t want to stop? To settle down?”
“Like a vagabond,” Frankie said and smiled. “Like I used to be.”
“You see?”
“But if she wanted a child...why would she leave that child? It bugs me. It just bugs me.”
“Maybe she didn’t realize how much it would require of her,” Gil said.
Frankie could empathize. Not long before, she’d been writing in her book—which she now visualized as a linked series of essays about light, about all kinds of light, not just the kind that pertained to photography—how one morning she was just drifting off to sleep, during what she called the stolen hours, between five and eight, universally recognized as the time many insomniacs, shift workers, and other troubled sleepers finally receive the golden blessing of unbroken sleep. It was then that she realized that the sun was coming up sooner every day and that sunrise might send a shaft of light around the corner of a drawn shade and somehow rouse her sleeping son. The emotion she had (What are you really feeling? that professor had asked) wasn’t concern or even irritation. It was terror.
I was looking at some paintings in books. There was Raphael’s Aldobrandini Madonna and also of Botticelli’s Virgin and Child with Two Angels. Whenever I saw paintings like that, I would wonder why the Madonna was always pictured with such heavy lidded eyes and such a sorrowful expression. Now I know: it was because she was the mother of a newborn, so she wasn’t getting any sleep at all.
“I didn’t realize how much work being a mother would be...”
“Frankie, of course, you’re a different kind of person. And you’re not single either. And you don’t have a disabled parent.”
“Still, there has to be a reason why I wonder about this so much. Ellabella does too. About those reasons.” Frankie began to count up the steps once again. Carlotta cared more for Sailor than he cared for her. And yet, it was Mack she really loved? She wanted a child, but she didn’t want Ariel to know the identity of a perfectly good father.
Gil made puffing noises, as if blowing out a recalcitrant candle. “You wonder because you’re nosy. They’re none of your business.”
“Oh, shut up, Gil. I’m tired of you always being the soul of reason.”
“You just complimented me for being the soul of reason,” Gil reminded her. “The important thing is that you got Ariel and Sailor together. That seems to be working out well.”
It was working out well. Better than well. Now that Ben was out of the hospital, home again and thriving, the tests again having turned up nothing except some stomach inflammation with no apparent source, with allergies the exclusionary diagnosis, Sailor was constantly visiting his newfound daughter and new grandson. Mack was entirely on board (probably, Frankie thought without much charity, because it took some of the pressure off him), welcoming Sailor as someone for whom Beatrice had always had the greatest respect, Ariel said (and again, Frankie thought covertly, respect didn’t begin to cover it...). Sailor took Ben on long seashore walks in his front pack and even stayed with him while Ariel and Mack went out for a big dinner in Boston with some influential Saltwater donors. The baby turned to him, thrilled, whenever Sailor walked in the door. Sailor did the same with Atty, freeing Frankie and Gil for some time alone to write and also for an evening out. Atty was too little to be very demonstrative, but he delighted Sailor by windmilling his fat little arms whenever the older man approached. Ever careful of her feelings, Sailor told Frankie, “I went from zero to two grandsons in a couple of months!”
Carlotta had not yet returned, nor had she sent word.
One morning when she woke up, Frankie realized what part of the whole tale had put her on high alert: it was the stupid dognapping scam. It was the way that Carlotta seemed to take advantage of the weaknesses of other people. Maybe it wasn’t just pet owners. Whether or not she did it for reasons she considered morally defensible was a factor, but not a reason. Maybe it was bigger than that.
Weeks passed.
Increasingly, the light was fuller and benign, not the coldly compelling lux brumalis, the light of winter, for which there was no English word, the light that sharply defined every stick and feather.
Though she said Mack discouraged it, Ariel kept coming to see Frankie and bringing Ben, meeting Sailor at Gil and Frankie’s house for dinners which, thankfully, Sailor cooked. Gil and Sailor discussed EnGarde’s pilot plan for a sort of environmental navy. It would be a seagoing force, separate from the numerous land-based conservation efforts across Canada, with two fully equipped research vessels entrusted to work for marine species preservation as well as intervene in the event of maritime ecological mishaps. Woods Hole and Scripps did something like this in Massachusetts, Sailor reminded Gil, but Gil, who was familiar with that program, pointed out that EnGarde would have a government-grant component so that volunteers would be paid and trained and then receive a lifelong pension based on their length of service, which could be anywhere from two to six years.
