Keep the Baby, Faith Read online

“A week. Six days.”

  “You should have come to me to begin with, dope.” That was inadvertent. Older brothers always refer to high-school-age sisters and their friends as “dope.” Faith had obviously been through a few changes since I’d seen her last (about three and a half years ago), but I was falling immediately into the old habit. I resolved to watch myself.

  Faith didn’t even notice. “It wouldn’t have been fair,” she said. “It still isn’t. You have no idea what I might be letting you in for. If I had anywhere else to go, I would. I even thought of taking the train to Scarsdale and calling on your mother, but when she wouldn’t give me your address, I got all paranoid. I’ve been paranoid a lot, lately.”

  I said, “Even paranoids have enemies,” but Faith didn’t laugh. “What I don’t understand, is why my mother put you off.”

  “She got paranoid, too. Didn’t believe I was me. I think my big mistake was asking for Sue.”

  Sue is my sister. She’s majoring in petroleum chemistry at Syracuse University, which is a big shock for a girl who spent her childhood trying to decide whether to be Sylvia Plath, and commit poetic suicide, or to take the world of ballet by storm. I’m going to go on spelling it “Sue.” My sister changes. First, she made it “Su,” which probably influenced her choice of college. Then she decided there might be other Susans out there spelling it that way, so she decided on “Soo.” That, however, wasn’t dignified enough for a potential Nobel Prize winner, so lately, she’s been trying “Sioux.” It might help her get a job, if somebody has a minority-hiring policy.

  “She’s at school at the moment, though she should be home for Thanksgiving pretty soon.”

  Faith nodded, then winced. She held her hand up against her shoulder. I figured I ought to go rig up a sling for her or something.

  She wanted to talk. “Tomorrow. Your mother told me that much. Then I asked where I could find you—I figured I was in Manhattan, and the last I’d heard you were just about to move to Manhattan, and I really needed to see a friendly face, you know?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m glad you did.”

  “Well, your mother apparently thought this was some kind of scam, I was fronting for some white slave ring or something, out to get Sue. Maybe she figured the gang would kidnap you and hold you for a swap or something. Your mother said it was nothing personal, but she didn’t like your being in New York, and didn’t trust people looking for you there. So she gave me your phone number and said she’d leave it up to you. She said since they hadn’t heard from me in three years—”

  “Who has? Two weeks after graduation you ran off to Europe, and nobody has seen you since. Sue talks about you all the time. She wouldn’t admit it, but I think you kind of hurt her.”

  “You know why, Harry. I’d just turned eighteen, I got hold of that thirty thousand dollars my father left me, and I’d had just about enough of Scarsdale. I took the money and ran.”

  “I know,” I said. “Sue showed me your postcard. Hell, with thirty thousand bucks and an income—you had an income, right? With that kind of money you could have phoned.”

  “Things happened.”

  For the first time, I looked significantly at Faith’s stomach. “I can see that.”

  “I’m married. This is a legitimate baby. This is a special baby. It’s the only baby I’ll ever have. It’s Paul’s baby.” She said it the way the Virgin Mary might have said, “it’s God’s baby.”

  Under normal circumstances, I would have been all over Faith with questions about this Paul character. Like, where the hell was he when his pregnant wife was wandering around New York late at night, accosting doormen, scaring pizza-laden old friends to death. With every second that went by, though, I could see the circumstances were getting farther and farther from normal. All right, Faith had been my sister’s best friend, almost like another kid sister to me, but I hadn’t seen her in over three years. A lot could happen in three years. Apparently, a lot had happened in three years.

  Faith was sitting in the straight-back chair in the corner of the room, near the front door, with her head thrown over the back of the chair in utter weariness. There was a perfectly comfortable overstuffed armchair in front of the window, but Faith was having none of it. She liked to sit with her back to the wall, she said. Now she had her right arm across her stomach, and her left elbow planted on the arm of the chair, with her forearm straight up, supporting her injured hand like an unwanted burden.

  I could see that she had really wracked it up. The thumb was the worst, huge and discolored the way it was, but her whole hand was swollen. I hadn’t noticed the wedding ring before because the gold band had nearly been swallowed in flesh. It was, I must admit, a test of macho to look at.

  “You must be hungry,” I said. It was all I could think of. “Do you want some pizza? I could pop a slice into the microwave and heat it up.”

  “God, no,” Faith said. “I couldn’t keep it down. I haven’t been able to keep anything in my stomach for days.”

  “You’d better eat something.” Somewhere in Scarsdale, Helen Ross was smiling.

  Faith was smiling, too, leaning back in the chair with her eyes closed. “My father used to talk like that.”

  “I’ll feed you something when we get back from the hospital,” I said.

  Faith’s eyes came open. “Hospital?”

  “Yes, hospital. We’re going to have that hand looked at. We’re going to make sure you’re okay. We’re going to make sure the baby is okay.”

  “The baby is fine,” Faith said. “Thank God. I can feel him kicking.”

  “He’s kicking you because you haven’t fed him in three days. And you are going to the hospital. Right now. It’s great to see you again and all, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and watch you put creases in your face trying not to wince.”

  “I—I’ll be all right.”

  “You’ll be all right because you’re getting medical attention.”

  “Harry, no!”

  “Faith, don’t be ridiculous—”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “There’s no boogeyman out there, just muggers. Which we will avoid by taking a cab. Are you ashamed or something? Because you fell down? It’s pretty silly if you are. I mean, everybody takes a bad fall every once in a while.”

  Faith sprang to her feet. Her brown eyes were blazing, the damaged hand forgotten. “I didn’t fall! I jumped! They’re after the baby! They’re trying to kill Paul’s baby!” Then the fire in the eyes went out. She swayed and collapsed. I sprang from the sofa and got to her just in time to catch her before she crashed baby-first onto my fancy sealed-wood floor.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I WAS SITTING ON a slippery plastic chair not-looking at a black and white movie on a TV set mounted out of reach high above the doorway to the emergency room. With an impartiality commendable in a journalist, I was also not-looking at a worn and ancient copy of Newsweek, thereby avoiding a rehearsal of the details of another crisis that had somehow failed to destroy us. These crises are always going to destroy us. You’d think no journalist (or better yet, no reader they aim this stuff at) had ever heard of World War II. If the German and Japanese didn’t destroy us with their armies, I doubt they’ll be able to do it with a few million compact cars.

  Even if I harbored those kinds of fears, I wouldn’t have been worried about them, then. I was too busy wondering what I was getting into. I was raised to know you should always be ready to help a friend, even a sister’s friend. But all this was a little strange.

  It was inevitable, I supposed, that Sue’s best friend would turn out to be somebody like Faith. In appearance, they were a good example of what I like to call the Betty-and-Veronica syndrome. Same height, and they’d be about the same weight if Faith weren’t pregnant. The differences were all superficial, designed to make it easier to tell them apart in a newspaper comic section. Sue had curly blond hair, round blue eyes, and glasses. Faith’s hair was straight and brown. She had brow
n sloe eyes, no glasses. Sue was bubbly, full of ideas, good and otherwise, as her constant name changes demonstrate. Faith had always been reserved. I couldn’t remember now if by reserved I meant serene, or eerily quiet. The evidence tonight was all for the latter, though that could be a reaction to the injury, or silent rebuke of me for hauling her off to the hospital in spite of protests (delivered while she was still woozy from her faint) that she was fine, really, don’t go to all this fuss.

  They kept her in there a long time. I was just about to go find out if she’d skipped out on me when she rejoined me. They’d done a job on her thumb—you would have thought she’d fractured her arm or something. There was a splint, an Ace bandage running halfway up her arm, and a sling.

  “Feeling better?” I asked.

  Faith showed me a shy smile. “Lots. They did a good job. I’m glad you brought me here, after I made such a fuss. You’ve been very kind,” she said.

  “You act like you’re surprised. Who was always driving you and Sue around town to shop? Who loaned you two money, and didn’t make a snotty remark when it got paid back?”

  “I didn’t mean that, Harry. Sue will kill me for telling you this, but she always used to say how lucky she was to have you for a brother, considering what idiots most boys were.”

  “That sounds like her.”

  “And I used to have a crush on you myself.”

  I looked to heaven. “If I’d only known!”

  “Oh, I knew nothing could come of it. I mean, you were three years older than we were, and you were going out with Helen Wasser…”

  Helen Wasser. My girlfriend all through high school. We spent the week before we went away to our various colleges losing—hell, squandering our respective virginities. Once we’d done that, we realized that our relationship had been based on the tension of the delay, and we drifted apart. By second term, we weren’t even writing to each other anymore.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m glad I—or at least my family—was what you thought of when you got ready to make a return appearance. And now you’re going to come back to my place—”

  “Could I?” she said. Her voice held a mixture of equal parts gratitude and relief. “Thanks, Harry. I wouldn’t put you through this, but I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “You can tell me all about who’s trying to get you.”

  Faith said, “No. That’s impossible.”

  I shrugged. I was so casual, I amazed myself, especially since I knew I would eat a live caterpillar to learn Faith’s story. A lot of it was vulgar curiosity (who would want to kill a nice Catholic girl from Scarsdale?), but a lot of it was also a determination to find out if Faith was nuts before I let my sister rush to her side, as she undoubtedly would as soon as she got home from school tomorrow.

  “If you don’t trust me…”

  “It’s not that,” she protested. “If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t have asked you to help.”

  “Then there’s no problem,” I said. I smiled, and somehow failed to see the look of chagrin on Faith’s face.

  We went outside into the cold damp air, and headed west to York Avenue to get a cab.

  Faith said, “Oh!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I just realized what you must be thinking.”

  “I’m not thinking anything, I’m just curious.”

  “You haven’t said a word about my being pregnant. And I told you I’m in trouble…” She blushed. “Well, I am, but not that kind of trouble. It’s much worse than anything like that. I mean, I’m married. Really. I have been for two years. That’s not the problem. Well, actually, I guess it is. But it’s not a problem with the baby. It’s my husband’s baby. There’s no legitimacy question or anything. It’s just that—”

  So much for eerily quiet. Now it was nonstop talking, with no real information imparted. She’d told me all this already. I stepped to the curb to hail a taxi. I let a couple go by—with the size Faith was, we needed a Checker. New York would eventually be sorry the company had stopped making those things.

  Finally, one came by with its light on. I hailed it, then ushered Faith to the curb. She was still a little shaky, and I didn’t want her keeling over on a dirty sidewalk.

  As I held the door for her, Faith tossed this one over her shoulder: “… and you may have heard of my husband. He’s been in the papers, though he hates to be. Paul Letron?”

  It occurred to me that I might have to take Faith to a different kind of doctor before I was through with her. I’d heard of Paul Letron, all right. The Grayness was full of stuff about the billionaire playboy-turned-recluse and his equally reclusive family, with all sorts of unlikely speculations about why he’d dropped out of sight about three years ago, and scholarly predictions about what his continuing absence from the public eye would do to his company, and to the cosmetics industry in general.

  Right, I thought. I was supposed to believe, apparently, that Paul Letron had dropped out of sight in order to marry my sister’s best friend from high school. Mmm hmm. Right. He’d dropped Amelia Earhart for her, no doubt.

  I got in the cab and closed the door. The partition that separated the driver from the passengers was closed, but it had holes in it. God only knew what the hackie was making of it all.

  Especially the part at the end. Faith was still talking. “That’s why I need help. It’s the family; Robert and Louis and Peter and Lucille and Alma. Especially Alma.”

  “What about them?” I asked. I was thinking, soft rooms and plastic spoons, no loud noises, and pills to make you feel better, Faith, dear. I tried to make my voice sound as if I were taking all this seriously.

  “What can I do?” Faith asked rhetorically. “They’ve got power, and connections, and right now, they have all the money in the world. It’s Paul’s money, and they’re using it trying to kill me.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE PIZZA HAD BEEN sitting on the kitchen table, congealing, all the time we’d been at the hospital. I no longer needed it to drown my sorrows, but by now, I was ravenous. Thank God for microwave ovens. I put a couple of slices on a paper plate and asked Faith if she wanted something. She tried to refuse, but I was staunch.

  Finally, I induced her to try a cold broiled chicken breast. She needed it, despite her protests. She sat at a chrome-and-butcher-block table (from Bloomingdale’s, as featured in the Living Section of The Grayness—a housewarming gift from Mom) and munched the chicken as if it were the last of the breed.

  “The baby doesn’t like anchovies,” she explained. “I learned that the hard way. Did you know in Paris they don’t slice pizza? In all of France, I guess. They serve it to you on a plate with a knife and fork, and you have to guess where to cut into it.”

  “You’ve been to Paris,” I said inanely.

  Faith showed class. She had every right to tell me, no, I read about it in a book called Pizza Habits of the World, Volume 6, but she didn’t. All she did was say yes, and add, “I know you were there. Sue used to show me your postcards.”

  I had been there. Junior year abroad, Paris, then London. I liked London better by a lot. I know that’s a minority opinion, but there it is.

  Still, there were some things about Paris that were really terrific. I went to the kitchen and started making hot chocolate from scratch. Faith finished her chicken, went to the sofa, and lowered herself with enough care for a space shuttle landing.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Preparing to relive my favorite memory of Paris,” I told her. Hot chocolate wouldn’t go especially well with the anchovies, but what the hell. Also, I wanted to get a little more nourishment into the expectant mother.

  It took a while, but Faith waited patiently. Finally, I was done, and I brought her a mug. She took a quiet sip and said this was the best hot chocolate in the world, next to what they served at Aux Deux Magots on the Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris. I won’t pretend I wasn’t pleased. I explained how I had personally made fortunes for dairy f
armers and investors in cocoa futures in attempts to duplicate the flavor, and the rich, almost syrupy consistency of the famous cafe’s blend without making the whole mess cloy.

  “I hit on this combination about a month ago. I was pretty sure this was it, but it had been so long since I tasted the real thing, I wasn’t positive.”

  Faith took another sip. “No,” she said, “you’ve got it. It would be absolutely perfect, but you just can’t get milk here as good as the milk in France.” She looked into her cup like a fortuneteller. “Still, I can’t tell you what a nice surprise this is. I hadn’t expected anything so good until I was able to get back there.”

  “You expect to go back, then.” One of my major assets as a journalist is that I check all statements, seconds after they are made.

  “Oh,” Faith said. “Of course I’m going back. I have to. As soon as the baby’s born. When the baby comes, everything will be all right. I can go back then. I really never should have left, I know, but the baby is more important than anything. As soon as the baby comes, I can go back to Paris.” She said it like a litany, rephrasing from time to time. She concluded with, “After all, that’s where Paul is. And he needs me too.”

  Faith hugged the mug to her, maybe for warmth, maybe for memories. She looked at me, and began to tell her story.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  GRADUATION DAY HAD NOT been especially happy for Faith. The whole year had been a trial. Her father had died just before Christmas, after a long, messy illness. She had watched him waste away until there was nothing left.

  Faith’s mother had been dead for years, since before she could remember, and there were no other relatives. Still, there had been a lot of people at the funeral. Her father had been an honest and well-liked businessman, and of course people felt sorry for her for being alone.

  My mother (and Sue) wanted her to come live with us, but Faith decided she’d bring us down instead of us bringing her up, and spent the remainder of the school year living with the principal of the high school and his family. They were considerate and understanding, and had only the best of motives. They made her life a misery for six months. If they weren’t after her to “put it behind her and start living again,” they were telling other people (never Faith; they were too smart to mention this to Faith) that it was really a mercy, the poor man had been sick such a long time.