You'll Like My Mother, page 1
YOU’LL LIKE MY MOTHER
NAOMI A. HINTZE
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Dedication: For HSH
You’ll Like My Mother by Naomi A. Hintze
First published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1969
First Valancourt Books edition 2024
Copyright © 1969 by Naomi A. Hintze
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Cover by Roderick Brydon
Chapter One
I can remember biting my nails on the bus that afternoon, a habit I thought I had broken. I remember thinking about the way the map looked when I was trying to get up the courage to make this trip. I had bought the biggest map I could find and, crying, spread it out on that rickety little table in that terrible little room in Los Angeles.
The Ohio River had been a crooked blue line, followed faithfully by the red line of Route 52 until the place where, about two inches east of Cincinnati, the river made a jog southward. On that southward jog I had seen for the first time on any map the town that was Always, Ohio. The town whose existence I had almost come to doubt.
The letters I had sent there had never had an answer.
Until this Tuesday afternoon, my trip had been as unreal as the lines and dots on the map. But the single black line that the map showed spurring south from the main highway had now become a jolting reality of potholed macadam.
Air conditioning on the plane that had brought me to Cincinnati, on the bus that had brought me to the Ar-Kay Motel back there on 52, had cooled the air to a bearable, if flavorless, 72 degrees. But the open windows of this lumbering local let in the oppressive humidity of a June with too much rain; the reek of steaming barnyards; the cloying, ether type of sweetness of red clover.
Until today, all those who had helped me eastward were a faceless blur, because I hadn’t looked at one of them. This bus driver with the very dark red hair I would always remember. He was young, and he wore Army fatigues. Brown-eyed, he watched me in the rearview mirror. A few other passengers, some three or four, had gotten off at houses along the way, and now I was the only one left on the bus to Always.
In my twenty-one years I have had—forgive me—my share of glances, passes, what-have-you. But let me clue you in: I wore a tent dress, almost the same tan as my short hair; it was made of that marvelous material you can wash and wear in an hour unless the humidity is up around 100, the way it seemed to be today.
I had been washing and wearing this marvelous little tent almost every day for about four months now. In a little less than three weeks—if my doctor back in Los Angeles knew how to read that clever little thing he had consulted—I would be able to throw it away.
I was so pregnant I had forgotten all about how to be a girl, and although I supposed the time might come when I’d want to remember again, that time certainly was not now.
I had to keep changing my position so the baby would not kick so crossly. My feet had swollen a little; I wore canvas, rubber-soled sandals which I had bought yesterday in the rain in Cincinnati, a size larger than I usually wear. They were cheap, with ugly stripes (normally I am an awful shoe snob), but they, with this dress, would soon be thrown away. Or given if I could find somebody grindingly poor and with no taste whatever.
The driver said, “Why don’t you move up front where you’ll be more comfortable?”
He meant, Let’s talk.
“I’m fine here.” I put my head back and tried to look comfortable. As the airline stewardess said when she quit her job, “I’ve got straight teeth and a friendly manner, only I’m sick of smiling.”
“Nice people run that motel back there on 52 where I picked you up.”
“Yes.” I had spent last night there, but I hadn’t looked at anyone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone now in this half hour or so before we would get to Always. I needed to worry. I needed to rehearse the lines I would say and maybe change some of them.
“The Ar-Kay Motel. His name’s Arthur, and her name’s Kay.”
Clever. Beautiful. I didn’t say anything, just closed my eyes, pretending I thought I could sleep.
Matthew’s voice: You look so vulnerable when you are asleep. You look like the sort of girl somebody must always take care of. Francesca, Francesca. I never had liked my name until I heard Matthew say it. He used to whisper it over and over. The tires of the bus whispered it now. Francesca, Francesca . . .
I opened my eyes and sat up straighter and looked out at the bright, hot countryside with its distant glimpses of brimming river. The time was past for letting myself think about Math all the time, for the sick indulgence of letting myself listen to him whispering my name.
Maybe I ought to move up front, I thought. That nice young driver looked like Albert Finney in Tom Jones. (I had sat through so many movies in the past several months that now everybody looked like somebody I had seen in some movie.) The driver would ask a question or two, and I would say, I am on my way east to see my father. No, leave out my father. I am on my way east and am stopping by Always to call on my mother-in-law. You may know her. The name is Kinsolving. Mrs. Matthew Kinsolving, Senior.
It would not be necessary to tell him that I had never met her, had never had any answers to my letters to her. But it was quite possible that he would volunteer some information that would satisfactorily explain.
No. There could not be a satisfactory explanation. I stopped biting my nails, reminding myself that I had moved to a new plateau where I was not allowing myself to be swamped again by last fall’s feelings of total rejection, total despair.
When I first got the news last September telling of Matthew’s death en route to Vietnam, I had sent her a telegram, not knowing whether or not she would have been informed by military sources. I was all alone in L.A., but there had been many words of sympathy and explanation from those whose job it is to take care of such matters. On tape, they told me, somebody had caught the pilot’s last half-dozen words and these last sounds that meant forever over and out. Don’t hope, they said to me. You cannot get over this until you accept it.
I had sent another telegram to tell Matthew’s mother when the service would be, that bleak and empty service they have when there is nothing to send back. No dust; no dog tags; not even the gold wedding band that matched my own. There had been a man in uniform to stand beside me when they put the folded flag in my hands.
My first letter to my mother-in-law had been very long, full of grief and love. I knew that the rules of etiquette said she should have written to me when she first heard Matthew was marrying me, welcoming me into the family, but I threw all formality aside and told her how it had been for Matthew and me from the beginning.
I told her how, in July, he had found me there in that shack on the beach, not far from death with blood poisoning. How he had saved my life. How, late in August, he had married me, although I knew he had written her. “We wanted to do things properly, come to see you. But we had so little time. . . .”
There had been no answer. Nor had there been any answer to the shorter, more restrained letter I sent in November when I wrote her that I was having Matthew’s child.
Both telegrams had been delivered—by messenger since there was no telephone; I had checked on that. The letters, too, must have been delivered. I had talked to the mailman one day, and he told me that if she had died or moved away, the letters would have been returned to me, rubber-stamped with an appropriate checking of the reason for failure to deliver.
I sat on my hands so I would not bite my nails anymore and stared along the road that was taking me to Always. No, she is not dead. She is alive and living there in that big house on the river that Math told me about. And she hates me.
There were many mothers, I knew, who automatically hated the girls their sons married, under whatever circumstances. It seemed to be one of those cliché situations of which life is so full. Matthew was an only child, and his relationship with his mother had been a very close one. Add to that the fact that he had not gone back to spend his last leave with her before going to Vietnam but instead had married a girl he had known for a very short time. Wasn’t that, for a certain type of mother, enough?
Yes, it was enough, and I was not going to torture myself with any further wondering. I would not wonder if there might have been some way for Mrs. Kinsolving to find out why I was in that beach shack where her son found me, half dying, too far gone to care when a stranger walked in and saw me there in that faded bikini I hadn’t had off in five days. I would not let myself wonder if she might have found out about what happened at Merriam College. A thousand times I had said to myself, It’s a small world. Merriam College is well known. Girls from all over the country go there. What if—
Here on this bus today it was too late to wonder.
Matthew had told me I should forgive myself, put all that had happened behind me. All right, Math, I am trying. I want to like myself again. I want to do what is right for my peace of mind and for the baby. That’s why I am on this bus that’s taking me to Always. Scared to pieces. You know me.
Yesterday at the Agency in Cincinnati the woman sitting behind a big, glass-topped desk had listened very carefully to my reasons for giving up the baby for adoption. Her name was Miss Gee. She had small, real-looking pearls in her ears.
I had felt calm when I first started talking to her. “For the baby’s sake, I am trying to be very realistic about all this, to recognize my limits. I have had a lot of time to think in these last few months, and I believe I have begun to know myself.”
“It is good to know yourself.”
“I know, for instance, that I have never been a fighter. It would take a fighter, it seems to me, to bring up a child on the small allotment I will have from the government. I would have to leave the baby in a day nursery and get a job. I wouldn’t be able to get much of a job because I quit college before I was prepared to do anything that would pay me a decent salary.”
Miss Gee murmured, her eyes on my face, that it would probably be difficult.
“It’s not that I would mind working hard, but I feel very strongly that a child needs two parents. My own mother died when I was born. My father remarried when I was eleven, and . . . well, pretty soon they had their own family. I know from experience that a child needs two parents who love him.” I had steadied my hands, suddenly trembling, on the glass-topped desk.
Miss Gee nodded and said carefully, “That, of course, is the ideal situation.”
“But I know I have a tendency to look back on mistakes. I don’t want to make any more big mistakes that I’ll have to blame myself for. That’s why I feel that before I decide definitely to give up this child for adoption, I must go to see my mother-in-law.”
A flicker in her eyes made me think that until that moment she had not thought I was married.
“I understand that after a girl has given up her baby and a certain amount of time has gone by, there’s not anything she can do about it.”
“That’s usually true.”
“Well, there is a chance—” I forced a small laugh, “like one in a million—that my mother-in-law might want the baby. Or might need us both, or something.” I broke it off, not wanting my voice to betray me. I was sure Miss Gee had more than her share of self-pitying girls in this office.
“You should go to see her, of course. She knows you are coming?”
“No. She . . . it seems she doesn’t have a phone right now. I tried to look it up this morning before I came to see you, and her name wasn’t listed. But I am sure she still lives there.”
“I see,” she said, but not as if she did. She made a great show of straightening the few papers into a neat pile, as if it had to be done precisely before she looked up. “Everything may very well work out just beautifully. But if it should not, do you have a place where you can go?”
Could I say no?
“Oh, yes. I can go to my father in Massachusetts.” I smiled at her brightly, seeing myself going up the steps of that little red Cape Cod where Father lived with Allegra and their four children. It was the smallest house in the best section of the most exclusive Boston suburb. On my knees, that is.
Allegra. She had spit on her teeth when she laughed. That was the first thing I noticed about her when she first came into my life, that and the archly naughty way she would roll her eyes at my father and make with the double meanings so beloved by that generation and so sickening to me when I had known the terse Anglo-Saxon for everything for years. Allegra, now, with her four pale, perfect children, who won DAR medals which she wore on a chain around her fat wrist.
My father. The study of that little Cape Cod was crammed with genealogical records and copies of kings’ grants and notes for his book about the Cabbot family with two b’s. Never, said my father, forget who you are.
I had forgotten. It was not in him to forgive me for what I had done.
Miss Gee had her papers all straight, and she had opened and closed each drawer at least twice. She came out from behind her desk and held out her hand. “Good luck, my dear. Go to see your mother-in-law. I shall be thinking about you and hoping that things work out happily for everyone concerned.”
“Thank you. You might keep your fingers crossed.”
She laughed and held up crossed fingers. “We’ll be glad to help in any way we can. If you should decide in favor of adoption, you can come back and fill out the forms and all that. But I have a feeling that, one way or another, you’re going to be able to keep that baby.”
But I didn’t want to keep it. To myself now with a feeling of bleak inadequacy I could admit it. I didn’t think I was the type to be a good mother. I remembered Allegra, all toothy ecstasy over each advent, but I couldn’t seem to make myself feel any of that. At first it had bothered me, but my doctor hadn’t been the sort with whom I could discuss emotional hang-ups. A bored, George Sanders type, he always got the business of examination over quickly and then turned me over to his nurse.
On my first visit to the office she had given me a little booklet that showed me a picture of the bean that was growing inside me. It was shaped like a bean, curved over, thumb to nose, mostly head, and great places for eyes. A fetus. I had found it easy enough to resist loving something called a fetus.
Of course I knew that the baby looked different now that it was almost ready to be born. My date was for late in June if my reckoning was right. The baby could come two weeks early or two weeks late, my doctor had said. Lately I had noticed a tightening, a periodic drawing up of abdominal muscles, that I assumed was a practicing for the great effort needed for birth. But the bright, chatty little book never explained that nor told me much of anything else that was helpful.
Under Chapter Nine (the numeral drawn ever so humorously to represent a bulging female who could not see her feet) it said, “And now you, the producer, are almost ready! There is a hum of activity in the wings! The audience (your husband) is beginning to get restless. And the star, your baby. . . .”
I was glad the book was written that way. It was easy to reject such whimsy. The physical act of birth, I supposed, might result in some emotional change. And I knew that if I were ever to hold it in my arms, see Matthew’s eyes. . . .
But I did not intend to hold it in my arms. I did not intend to see it at all.
The brakes were applied suddenly. I grabbed the seat ahead of me to brace myself, and we hit a hole in the road. The driver was the one who groaned. “I’m sorry. Only, look—please. You’re sitting right over the back wheels. And the shock absorbers on this old crate. . . .”
“I know.” I met the brown eyes in the mirror. “Maybe I should move—”
“Wait. Don’t try to get up until I stop.” He slowed and moved the bus to the side of the road, then busied himself with lighting a cigarette.
All willowy grace, I made my way forward and edged into the seat just behind him.
He turned, offered me a cigarette.
“No, thanks.” I saw the way he looked at the ring on my left hand, and I thought: What is there about me that makes people wonder if I am an unmarried mother? Is there a dissolute look? An unprotected, unloved, no-husband look?
He drew on his cigarette and gave me a glance. “I bet if your husband knew what a rattletrap this bus is and how rough the road is, he’d pitch a fit.”
