A Gate at the Stairs Read online

  She reshouldered her bag and pulled her coat tighter. “Oh, let’s just go,” she said, car key and map in hand. Her features had fallen but I saw her lift them again, one by one, the way one rights light porch furniture after a wind. I wondered what her marriage could possibly be like. Made up as it went along, no doubt. Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around. They were like the poor that way, perhaps. What sense did anything they were being told possibly make, given the scarcity of their world?

  We found the car, a shale-colored Ford Escort, in the far end of the lot. I got in and felt how clean it was, cleaner and tidier perhaps than any car I’d ever been in. Sarah handed me the map. “Mind being the navigator?” she asked, or sort of asked.

  “Not at all.” I opened the map, knowing it would never again be folded back correctly, at least not by me. I had map skills, but not that kind.

  Out the windshield the busy grid of a small mill city full of bridges stared back at me. The giant sports arena with its glistening white top on the horizon, or the big bowl of the stadium, all this took up a good portion of the sky. I navigated as well as I could. I remembered that once on a Miss America broadcast Miss Wisconsin, when asked by one of the judges, hadn’t known what “the Bay of Pigs” referred to and had said anxiously, “Green Bay?” The fire hydrants were painted lime—it was strange to see green in winter at all—and there were green trolley buses, as if this were all some hilarious tourist town where one came to visit the Jolly Green Giant himself. I’m sure some people came looking but found only Vince Lombardi, the pope of Green Bay, in statue form. Plus factory after factory slipping waste into the river. “I wonder if there’s a high incidence of cancer here,” Sarah ventured out loud. “Or birth defects …”

  “I know there’s a high incidence of football,” I said. In the distance I could still see the light roof of the arena and the new high boxes of the stadium, in a ring of towers like castle lookouts. Sarah fiddled with the radio until she found the soul station and the snake-rattle opening of “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Her left foot tapped the car floor, and I thought I saw her shoulders shimmy through her coat. A car passed us with a BEARS STINK bumper sticker.

  “Is that referring to football or actual bears?”

  “Football,” I said.

  The lawyer’s office was in a creepy old hotel downtown. We circled the parking lot, looking for spaces. “When trying to park I tend to go into fortune-teller mode,” Sarah said. “As in I have a hunch there’s a spot right around this corner. Or else into defense attorney mode, where I argue with the signs: Why aren’t I an authorized vehicle? I’m as authorized as the next guy, also as handicapped as the next guy, and as for the hour limitations, well, on the East Coast, where I’m from, it’s four o’clock right now. Crap like that. Sometimes I will vibe and seize the intent of a rule and go with that—rather than with the rule itself.”

  There was only a tight space next to a black sedan that had parked jauntily—much space on the right, none on the left. Nonetheless, we pulled up on the left to see the driver was still there, slumped down, waiting for someone, a Packers cap pulled down over his brow. He rolled down his window. “Lady, why don’t you find some other place to park,” he said.

  Sarah muttered, “Why on earth should I?” then turned off the engine, opened the window on my side, and shouted, “If you could move over a few inches there would be room for everyone. This is the only spot left in the lot.”

  “I was here first,” he shouted indignantly.

  “What on earth difference does that make?”

  “Lady, you’ve put me in a tight spot. I’d hate to see your car all banged up and scratched.”

  She got out and slammed her door. “Yes, sir, and I’d hate to see the air let out of all four of your tires.” I got out carefully, and we walked quickly toward the building entrance. “The rental insurance covers everything, I do believe,” she said to me with great confidence. “Or else the credit card. I once murdered someone and American Express covered everything!”

  I smiled. The lobby was dark with faded scarlet and maroon. The elevator was brass and tarnished, and it wheezed and shuddered slowly to the third floor. When its doors crashed open, I stepped out quickly before the contraption changed its mind altogether and swiftly shot its way to the basement in a jangle of steel. “Suite Three D,” said Sarah, reading from a business card that said Roberta Marshall, Attorney-at-Law, and soon we were in a large sunlit room, decorated in green and pink. The wallpaper was olive with great swirling blossoms of lilies and roses ballooning and bursting or mating and probing and flipping out, in repetition, across the walls.

  “We’re here to see Roberta Marshall,” said Sarah to the receptionist, a large woman with hair dyed a tarnished gold hue and gelled into a stiff hood.

  “Your name?” said the receptionist.

  “Oh, sorry. Sarah Brink.”

  The receptionist dialed three numbers and waited with the receiver against her ear. She moved her head back and forth, rolled her eyes a little, looked at her watch, looked at me and gave me a quick tight smile, then looked at her manicure, which seemed in need of new paint. “Sarah Brink is here,” she said. “Along with … I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  But as I was saying “Tassie Keltjin,” she was simultaneously repeating Sarah’s name into the phone so that the utterance of my name was wiped out by the utterance of hers. “Sarah Brink. Yes. Brink.” Then she slammed the phone down and sighed. “She’ll be with you in a minute.”

  We sat down and waited. It was hard to tell where we were or what year it was. It could have been anywhere, anything.

  Roberta Marshall burst through the door but then shut it closely, secretly, behind her. She was a small, dark-haired woman with a wide smile that had long ago given her marionette lines and crow’s-feet. Though it was daytime she wore a tailored black velveteen jacket with a notched lapel that cut in and out in a way that gave her angles and flattered her, and which she probably hoped made her look rich. I was already becoming a woman who sized up another one fast—I was becoming typical.

  We all stood, we shook hands, and then we sat back down. Roberta looked at me and smiled her big cracked-open smile. “Sarah told me you’d be coming,” she said approvingly. “No Edward?” she asked, looking around, knitting her brow.

  “Next time,” said Sarah. Still, she had a bit of happy hope in her face. Roberta Marshall opened a manila envelope. “So here’s our little girl,” she said, pulling out some Polaroids. “Just barely still a baby,” she added. “She’s been sitting in the foster care of Catholic Social Services awaiting an African-American couple.” This was the same story I’d just heard. “They did find one, but then the couple changed their minds: said they had prayed to their God and their God had advised against it. So they turned the baby down. And then the birth mother, who is white, finally left Catholic Social Services and came to us.”

  “Well, then, just as well,” said Sarah with her happy confidence still working her gaze, which cast itself eagerly toward the snapshots that Roberta was holding.

  “I don’t know who ‘their God’ was that it was so different from the rest of ours,” said Roberta, rolling her eyes; you could see she had no truck with ditherers. “Once I did an international, and the couple spent two weeks in a Santiago hotel and flew back childless because they said they ‘couldn’t bond with the baby.’ So, just as well; yes, just as well.” She was still hanging on to the photos for some reason. “The birth father is African-American, or at least part African-American, though he seems to have skipped town. We have put in the ads we’re supposed to before we sever his rights.”

  “What ads?”

  “The ones telling him to show up or else. But this happens a lot. Even if we find these guys, we usually can meet with them at McDonald’s, buy them a burger, and let them know that giving up their rights is the bes
t thing. Even if they’re in prison we go and talk to them, though that’s a little harder. A guy in prison won’t give up anything. He’s given up a lot already.” She paused, as if she thought that might sound brutal. “No one is coerced. They are convinced in completely compassionate and reasonable ways. Everything is legal. These are usually young guys who’ve come up from Milwaukee or Chicago for a job in the canning plant and one Friday night just had a couple beers, if you know what I mean.” Then she added, “The birth mother is white—did I say that already? She didn’t know the father for very long; Victor—we’re on a first-name-only basis here all around. But the birth mother is not romantic about motherhood: she would like to pull her life together and go back to school. She doesn’t have much.” She thrust the photos toward me. Uncertainly, I went to take them but she quickly pulled them back. “I’m sorry,” she said, touching her head as if she had a headache. “You,” she said to Sarah. “I meant to give them to you. Sorry.”

  Sarah took it in stride. She didn’t want to upset the applecart in any way. She gently took the photos as if they contained the baby herself. “Oh, look at her,” she said with pleasure. “She’s beautiful.”

  “She’ll darken up, of course,” Roberta Marshall said quickly.

  “Of course. It’s not as if that’s a problem!” Sarah arranged a look of benign indignation.

  “Well, I didn’t mean to suggest it was a problem. I just think people should understand. I have a biracial son myself. And he has been raised with a sense of total racial blindness. It’s a beautiful thing. He knows his adoption story by heart, how mommy’s tummy didn’t work, and he has completely embraced it.” The adoption business seemed to be full of women’s “broken tummies.” “When he was ten years old he was watching Gregory Hines dance on TV, and he said, ‘Look, Mom, that dancing man is adopted.’ It was the cutest thing.”

  It didn’t sound that cute. It sounded odd. It sounded like it had the sharp edge of a weird lie poking into it. Perhaps, as we said in Dellacrosse, the former home and hope of extraterrestrial visitation, she had her head up her hinder. I glanced over at Sarah, who was remaining tight-lipped and nodding. I always had the sense with her that she didn’t suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how. Although later I would hear her say, repeatedly, “Racial blindness—now there’s a very white idea,” right then she merely asked, “When were these pictures taken?”

  Roberta craned to look at them again. “They were taken by the birth mother the day before yesterday, I think.”

  “She’s healthy? The baby?”

  “Healthy. A little allergy to her formula, initially, but that all got worked out. She’s eating regular food now, I do believe. We’ll have to see what the foster family says. I have to warn you about the foster care from Catholic Social Services: it’s not the Pfister Hotel.”

  “And what else do we know about the birth parents?”

  “Well, the birth mother you’ll meet today—everyone on a first-name basis only. She needs to interview you and see if you are the right parents—right mother—in her mind. The birth father, well, we don’t know much. And there are privacy issues. She didn’t know him well. It was, I think, only a fling, of sorts. Possibly it was a—no, I take it back. I don’t think it was a date rape.”

  A dry quiet descended on the room like snow.

  Finally someone stirred stiffly, as if shucking off ice. Sarah. “Can we meet the baby?” she asked.

  Roberta grinned. “You’ve come all this way. Of course! But first you need to meet Bonnie. The birth mother.” And here she lowered her voice. “She’s just going to ask you a few questions. Her concern is religion. The baby’s already baptized, but Bonnie wants a promise that she’ll be confirmed.” And here Roberta lowered her head and her esses made a hiss: “Unenforcable, of course.” She then resumed a normal tone and what seemed to me an attorneylike posture. Broom up the back. “You wouldn’t have any problem with that, would you?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Sarah. “I have attended the Unitarian Church and often there they have ceremonies that—”

  Roberta did not like the word Unitarian. She interrupted with an ominous richness of voice. “This is a birth mother who spends her Saturday nights ice-skating with nuns. You wouldn’t have any problem with having the child confirmed and taking First Communion in a Catholic church.”

  “Uh, no, I wouldn’t,” said Sarah, on cue.

  “Good.” Roberta stood. “Now let’s meet Bonnie.” She opened the door to her office and signaled to someone inside. “We’re ready for you,” she said quietly, and then opened the door wide.

  Bonnie was not bonnie. She was dressed formally, in a beige knit suit, pantyhose, and brown flat shoes, to make her look professional, I supposed, which she wasn’t but wanted someday to be. She was heavy, perhaps still from the pregnancy. Her hair was thick and pale, the color of a wax bean, with roots of darker doorknocker blond. She was older than I was. Maybe she was even thirty. She wore glasses, and behind them I could see her eyebrows were shaved into a thin line—the stubble showing both above and below. The thin line was lengthened at the end with an eyebrow pencil, which looked about as natural as if she had just taped the pencils themselves over her eyes. I had always been told never to pluck above the brow, only below but never above, and never, ever shave them, and seeing her standing there, in the muck of her mistake, I finally knew why people had said all that stuff about plucking. I stood to greet her. She looked puffy and medicated. I wondered how it would be for her going back to school, inconveniently carrying around this ironic name—like the birth father, Victor. I wondered if she thought it mocked her. When everything else in her life probably was a source of sorrow, on the other hand, why would she care about the rhetorical mockery of her name?

  She walked toward us slowly, with the fibrous, brushing sound of pantyhose, and then she sat down on the sofa next to me, so I sat back down with her. Beneath her stiff composure and mask of a face she gave off a whiff of bacon grease and gum. The smell of spearmint grew, and I began to wonder whether she had a wad stashed in the back of her mouth to disguise a terrified breath. Close up the odd art of her eyebrows seemed more a mild madness than a mere miscalculation.

  I smiled at her, thinking she could see me in her peripheral vision—and she could. She turned and nodded but then focused her attention back on Sarah, who sat across from us.

  “Have you met my daughter yet?” she asked Sarah.

  All the words in that question felt wrong. There was an awkward pause, and Roberta jumped up. “I’m going to have Suzanne bring us some coffee.” She got up and went looking for Suzanne, who for some reason had left her receptionist’s desk and gone into Roberta’s office, as if they had traded places and it didn’t really matter who was who. That of course was what this whole adoption agency was about: women switching places.

  “No, I’ve only seen pictures,” said Sarah. “She looks very beautiful.”

  “Yes,” said Bonnie, her eyes suddenly welling. “She is.”

  “She looks like a little Irish Rose,” said Roberta, overhearing as she returned to the room, carrying a tray with two bowls: one piled with creamers and one jammed with yellow packets of sweetener that I’d learned from friends had been invented accidentally by chemists during a reformulation of insecticide. Death and dessert, sweetness and doom, lay side by side: I was coming to see that this was not uncommon. Such sugar, of course, was corrupt. Death, on the other hand, was pretty straightforward. I knew several kids who for money had been lab rats in pharmaceutical experiments, and they had secretly mucked up the data by doing things like eating doughnuts on the sly or getting high on glue. But after their blood was tested or their sleep observed, the results were sent out as science.

  “I don’t really believe in interracial relationships,” said Bonnie, looking in a kind of dead-faced way at Sarah.

  “The whole tragic mulatto thing?” said Sarah with a light, fluffy sarcasm that had flown
in from some other conversation entirely. “The whole what about the children thing?”

  “What?” Bonnie contorted her face as if in pain. She wanted to be respected for the gift she was giving the world and in this room she wanted to be in charge, but now it seemed clear she probably wasn’t.

  Roberta glared at Sarah. “Sorry,” said Sarah. Something gentler returned to her voice. “Sometimes other people’s cell phone conversations come in on my fillings.” She grinned.

  “Really?” asked Bonnie, confused.

  “Actually, that happens to me sometimes,” I chimed in. “I swear to God. It’s very weird.”

  Sarah tried to make her way back to Bonnie, whom she’d lost. “But, Bonnie, I just wanted to ask you: Isn’t the baby half African-American?” Sarah recrossed her legs. She had winced a little at Roberta’s “little Irish Rose.” I could see she was torn between not wanting to seem confrontational and wanting to know just what kind of racism was here in this room.

  “More like a quarter, I think. I don’t know. He—my daughter’s father—once asked me what I would think of having a child who had one black grandparent.”

  This did not sound like date-rape chat, or like fling chat. Or chat, really, of any sort at all. But perhaps I was learning a thing or two about chat. Where was Suzanne with the coffee?

  “Maybe he was Italian,” said Bonnie.

  No one laughed, which was excellent. No one laughed out loud.

  Suzanne at last came in with coffeepot and cups, and just as she was pouring and passing around the coffee the outside door cracked open. “Is this—” said a man’s voice. “Oh, yes, I see it is,” and the door opened wide. In stepped a distinguished-looking man: he had a balding head with pewter-hued hair grown long and wavy in the back; it was like he was wearing a head cape. His salt-and-pepper mustache was clipped neatly.

  “Edward!” Sarah jumped up.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said. His gaze, which had been on her, turned to his own paper cup of coffee, which he sipped from, as if it were not just delicious but urgent, and I could see he was showing us himself, his aquiline profile, his handsome objectness, so that for a minute he did not have to trouble himself to admire us but to soak up our appreciation of him. He had snapped in two the connecting gaze he’d quickly made, then unmade, with Sarah, but one could see it was his habit to almost imperceptibly dominate and insult.