Melancholy Baby Read online

  “Will you have coffee?” Mrs. Markham said.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Or some tea?”

  “No,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Spring water?”

  I smiled and shook my head.

  “I think we have some V8 juice,” she said.

  Jesus Christ!

  “Nothing, thank you,” I said. “You understand that I am here as your daughter’s representative.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Markham said.

  I looked at Mister.

  “Yes,” he said. “Certainly.”

  “She has employed me to locate her birth parents.”

  They both smiled and nodded.

  “What can you tell me about that?” I said.

  Mister and Missus looked at each other.

  “Oh, my, I’m sorry,” George said. “But we really don’t know what to say.”

  “Because?”

  “Well, I . . .” he looked at his wife. “We . . . I don’t wish to be offensive. But we are her birth parents.”

  “She doesn’t think so.”

  “I know. We feel so sad about that. We’ve told her and told her.”

  Mrs. Markham chimed in. “We have, we’ve told her, and she still doesn’t believe us. What can we do?”

  “Allow your DNA to be tested.”

  Neither of them said anything.

  “Sarah tells me that you’ve declined to do that.”

  “We just, we . . . it isn’t something we can do,” Mrs. Markham said. “Is it, George?”

  “No, we can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  Neither of them said anything. Both of them looked at the floor. I waited. The air was thick with silence. Both of them kept shaking their heads.

  “Are you uncomfortable with your daughter feeling she’s adopted, when in fact she isn’t?”

  They both nodded.

  “Wouldn’t DNA testing make all this go away?”

  Neither of them appeared to hear me.

  “Or if she were adopted, what would be so bad about that?” I said.

  “She’s not adopted,” Mrs. Markham said to the floor.

  “Then why not undergo a simple procedure to prove it?”

  Nothing.

  “Sarah tells me she was born in Chicago and moved here to Andover as an infant.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Markham said.

  “When would that have been?”

  Mrs. Markham looked at Mr. Markham and he looked back. They both frowned thoughtfully.

  Then Mrs. Markham said, “1982. The fall of 1982.”

  I smiled charmingly and said, “Why did you move?”

  “We didn’t want our daughter raised in the city.”

  “We wanted a more exclusive environment for her,” Mr. Markham said.

  “Why here?”

  “We hoped perhaps she could go to the Academy when she got older.”

  “Did she?”

  “No.”

  “The best-laid plans,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Mrs. Markham said.

  “I was being literary,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “Any other reason for moving here?”

  “We had friends, I think.” She smiled at me so I wouldn’t be mad. “It’s so long ago, but I think some friends had lived here and said it was nice.”

  “Good, solid New England values,” Mr. Markham said.

  People said things like that—it was so long ago. But in fact twenty-one years isn’t so long ago. Most people can remember most things of any importance from twenty-one years ago. Twenty-one years ago, after a high-school dance, I was making out in the back of a car with Bruce McBride and trying to decide how far to let him go. I was wearing a blue spaghetti-strap dress, and high heels that made walking difficult. My mother thought the outfit looked cheap, but my father had said if I was old enough to have a date, I was old enough to decide how I wanted to look.

  “Probably can’t remember their name,” I said.

  “No, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Markham said. “Can you remember, George?”

  He shook his head.

  “Have you always lived in this house?”

  “Yes. All Sarah’s life.”

  “Except for the few months in Chicago.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do in Chicago?” I said.

  “Do?”

  “For a living?”

  “Oh, I was at home,” Mrs. Markham said.

  “How about you, Mr. Markham?”

  “I worked in radio,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. “On air?”

  “Yes. I was the studio announcer.”

  “At a station in Chicago?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you remember the station?”

  “No, not really,” Mr. Markham boomed. “I worked at several.”

  “You don’t remember where you worked?”

  He smiled sadly and shook his head.

  “I, we, neither of us has much of a memory for things. I’m sure we must seem stupid to you.”

  They didn’t seem stupid. They seemed dishonest. But I knew if I stuck at it, all I would get was endless reaffirmation of their dishonesty. I smiled at them both.

  “And since Chicago?” I said. “What have you been working at since Chicago?”

  “Oh, I work from home.”

  “Really,” I said. “What kind of work?”

  “I manage our portfolio,” he said. “The Internet makes it so much easier to do.”

  “You live on your investments?”

  “Yes. I made some wise”—he chuckled—“perhaps lucky, investments when we were in Chicago and . . .” He shrugged modestly.

  “And you’ve lived off it ever since?”

  “George is very good at investing,” Mrs. Markham said.

  “I’ll bet he is,” I said.

  We stood. We walked to the door. We shook hands. They stood in the doorway as I walked down the front walk toward my car.

  They looked entirely forlorn.

  George is very good at investing, I thought, my ass!

  8

  Dr. Copeland had abandoned me to a female shrink in Cambridge, and now, looking for a parking space on Linnaean Street, I was on my way to my first appointment. I was carefully dressed for the event in a Donna Karan pinstriped suit. Nothing flashy. We were going to be two professionals, talking.

  Like everywhere else in Cambridge, it is hard to park on Linnaean Street, and like every other appointment I ever had, I was late. I finally squeezed my car in near a hydrant and walked very fast. Her office was on the first floor of a big white Victorian with a porch. I had all the instructions. Enter without knocking, take a seat in the waiting room on the left.

  There was a white-sound machine in the waiting room. And a stack of New Yorker magazines. The room had probably once been a parlor, and a big green-tiled fireplace took up much of one wall. There was a mirror above the fireplace, and I made sure my hair was neat and my lipgloss wasn’t too glossy. Then I sat and picked up an issue of The New Yorker and opened it in my lap so I could avoid eye contact with any client that might go past me.

  A door across the hall opened, and then the front door opened and closed, and then I heard a voice.

  “Miss Randall?”

  I stood up quickly.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Hi,” the voice said, “I’m Dr. Silverman.”

  I put my magazine down on the table. She gave me a little beckoning gesture and led me into her office, gestured me to a chair, closed the office door firmly, and went around her desk and sat. The first thing I noticed was how good-lookin
g she was, and how subtly well dressed she was. How understated but careful her makeup was. She seemed like a woman. I felt like a girl.

  “Tell me why you’re here,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “My husband, my former husband, is remarrying.”

  Dr. Silverman nodded.

  “Has it happened?”

  “It’s about to.”

  “And you feel bad?”

  “It is breaking my heart,” I said.

  “Are you suicidal?” she said.

  I paused and thought about it.

  “No,” I said. “I’m just very, very unhappy.”

  “We should be able to improve that,” she said.

  I nodded. I could feel the tears again. Isn’t this wonderful—go to see a new shrink and start to cry thirty seconds after you meet her.

  “What is your former husband’s name,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Richie.”

  “Tell me about you and Richie,” she said.

  I began. Halfway through, I started to cry. I tried to swallow it. I couldn’t. Dr. Silverman pushed a box of Kleenex across the desk to me. I used them and talked and cried and talked until Dr. Silverman said gently, “We’ve run out of time for today.”

  I nodded and made a weak attempt at pulling myself together.

  “Do you see any hope for me, doctor?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Dr. Silverman said.

  The cliché annoyed me.

  “No,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “Next week, then?” she said. “Same time?”

  “Would it be better if I came more than once a week?” I said.

  “Would you like to?” Dr. Silverman said.

  “I am not going to continue to be the sniveling reject I feel like right now,” I said. “I am going to beat this thing. I am going to get well.”

  “Why don’t you come in on Monday, then,” Dr. Silverman said. “And Thursday.”

  “I will.”

  She wrote out a little appointment card for me. I took it and put it in my purse with my gun.

  “We’ve been divorced five years,” I said. “We’ve both had other relationships. Why is this so hard?”

  “We’ll see if we can find out,” Dr. Silverman said and stood and walked me to the door.

  9

  I was feeling a little less disintegrated as I went out to Taft to talk with Sarah. It wasn’t that Dr. Silverman had done anything much but listen and say noncommittal things. But I felt, somehow, a little safer.

  Sarah was wearing multicolored tights today with a short tank top and a lot of bare belly. She was slim enough to get away with it. But even though it was flat, her belly looked soft, and so did her spandex-squeezed butt. We sat on a stone bench outside the main entrance to the library, so Sarah could smoke.

  “So tell me your earliest memory.” I said.

  Sarah shrugged.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do,” I said. “Everyone has an early memory.”

  “But how do you know it’s your earliest?”

  I took in some of the fall air, trying not to get cigarette smoke in there with it.

  “Good point,” I said. “Let me rephrase. Tell me something you remember from when you were very young.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you remember anything before you moved to Andover?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember ever living anywhere else but the house where your parents live now.”

  “Adopted parents,” Sarah said.

  “Well, if we’re going to be exact,” I said, “they would be your adoptive parents, you would be their adopted child.”

  “Whatever,” Sarah said.

  “So what do you remember?” I was positively perky.

  “Nothing much,” Sarah said.

  My perkiness slipped a little.

  “Oh, fuck you,” I said.

  She actually rocked back a little on the bench.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “You hire me to do a tough job, and you won’t help me do it.”

  “I’m not getting paid.”

  “No, you idiot,” I said. “You’re paying me to find out something that you’re preventing me from finding out.”

  “Huh?”

  “You don’t want to work or think. You want to sit there like a lump and wait for me to hand you the solution.”

  “Lump?”

  “Lump,” I said. “If I’m going to help you, you have to pitch in.”

  “You’re supposed to be the fucking detective,” she said.

  “Well, at least we speak the same language,” I said. “The only place I have to start is you and your possibly adoptive parents. And they’re much more helpful than you are.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “But you said . . . oh, I get it.”

  “Dynamite,” I said. “Tell me the name of one of your friends when you were little.”

  “You don’t have to get all pissed off about it.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t. I choose to. Tell me something or I quit.”

  She started to speak and stopped and took a long, movieish drag on her cigarette.

  “I used to hang around with Bobby O’Brien,” she said.

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Boy.”

  “You know where he lives now?”

  “No.”

  “Did you go to school together.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you remain friends.”

  “Until high school,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “He got a girlfriend.”

  “And you couldn’t remain friends?”

  Sarah shrugged. She dropped her cigarette on the ground and rubbed it out with her foot. There was a sand bucket for cigarette butts next to her.

  “But he graduated in your class?”

  “I guess.”

  She took out another cigarette and tried to light it in the faint breeze. It took four matches. My father, when he had smoked, used to be able to cup the match in his hand and light the cigarette on the first try. None of the few women I knew who smoked could get one going in any outdoor setting. I wondered why. I was pretty sure if I smoked cigarettes I’d learn how to get one lit even in the wind. I was pretty sure it didn’t have to be a guy thing.

  “Parents still live in your neighborhood?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anyone else you used to play with as a kid?”

  “Judy Boudreau.”

  “Do you know where she is now?”

  “No.”

  “Graduate from high school with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone else?”

  We went through this exercise for about twenty minutes, and I ended with a list of maybe twelve names. All of them racked out of her as though they were sworn secrets.

  “So,” Sarah said. “You happy now?”

  “It’s a start,” I said.

  “So why do you want those names?”

  “Because I want to talk with them.”

  “Why?”

  “In hopes it will help me find out who your biological parents are,” I said.

  “How would they know?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Being a detective is mostly about not knowing, and asking and looking until you do know, at least something.”

  “You got a gun?” Sarah said.

  “Yes.”

  “You got it with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I see it?”

 
“No.”

  “I bet you don’t really have one,” Sarah said.

  I nodded.

  “Who was your pediatrician?” I said.

  “See, you’re changing the subject.”

  “No, I’m getting back to it. Pediatrician?”

  “Dr. Marks,” she said.

  “As in Karl?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “How do you spell it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was he in Andover?”

  “Yes. I’ll bet you don’t have a gun.”

  There was no real reason not to show it to her, except that she had no need to see it, and I’d had a bad week, and expected to have a bad month, and I didn’t feel like showing it to her.

  “Anything else you can remember that might be useful?”

  “If you had it you’d show it,” Sarah said. “You don’t have one.”

  I stood.

  “Do you know what your father does for a living?”

  “Stepfather.”

  “How does he make money?” I said.

  “He buys and sells stocks and stuff.”

  “Where’d the original investment come from?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Of course you don’t,” I said.

  “Well, you don’t have to give me attitude about it.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “If you think of anything, call me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Have a nice day,” I said.

  I walked down the center of the library quadrangle and across the street to the lot where I’d parked. When I drove out of the lot I could see her up there, where I’d left her. Sitting on the bench, hunched a little against the coolness. Smoking.

  10

  You’ve heard me speak of Tony Gault,” I said to Dr. Silverman.

  “Yes.”

  “He was in town again last week.”

  Dr. Silverman nodded.

  “We weren’t intimate.”

  “Though you have been in the past?”

  “Yes. Several times.”

  Dr. Silverman nodded.

  “In the past, did you enjoy intimacy?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not this time.”

  “This time I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dr. Silverman smiled and waited.