“My God!” Beth breathed softly. “He spoke of her so lovingly. As if it had all been forgiven, if not forgotten.”
“I suppose it has,” Jack said. “I suppose he’d like to find her again and patch things up.” His eyes were bright on her. “But it wouldn’t be a very good idea.”
“No? Why not?” Her mind flashed to the note she had mailed that very afternoon with Laura’s address and married name in it.
Jack shrugged. “Well, Laura’s happy now. We’re happy, I should say. And Landon never did anything but upset her. At least when they were together.”
“It’s been a long time. Maybe he deserves another chance,” Beth suggested.
“I think that’s up to Laura, don’t you?”
“Why not to him?”
“He wasn’t the aggrieved party,” Jack said. “Whatever was unhappy between them was his doing. It’s up to Laura to forgive, not Landon.”
“Oh.” She lowered her head, a small alarm inside herself. But Merrill Landon had given Beth his promise not to visit Laura, not to interfere with her life. He said it was because he had no right to bother her. All he wanted was a link, an address, a reassurance. And remembering him with confidence, even a sort of affection, her trust returned and she calmed herself.
Before she could ask Jack more a little girl about six years old burst out of a door behind him and said, “Daddy, will you fix the TV? The picture’s all crooked.”
“Sure. Come here, honey, we have company,” he said. “This is Mrs. Ayers.”
“Hello, Mrs. Ayers,” she murmured and came forward shyly, her hair long and blonde and floating like Laura’s, her features dainty and her face fair, though she wore glasses like her father. She was shy and unspeakably sweet and small, and Beth thought of Polly, her Polly…and of Laura and all Laura’s reflected beauty and reticence. And she held out her arms to Betsy with a full heart and full eyes and clasped the astonished child to her.
“Oh, you’re lovely!” she exclaimed. “You look just like your mommy.”
The little girl backed away, frightened at her strange behavior, but Beth caught her hands and said, “Don’t be afraid. You know, I have a little girl—” She stopped, suddenly wary. She meant to keep that part of her life separate and apart from this. “I was a good friend of your mommy’s years ago,” she said, brushing impatiently at a tear. “We went to school together. And I’m so happy to see she has a beautiful little daughter that looks so much like her.”
Betsy smiled. “You’re beautiful, too.”
Beth had to resist the impulse to hug her and probably scare her again. Jack had adjusted the television for Betsy in the meantime and he came to take her by the hand. “You go in and watch,” he said. “You can have another half hour,” he told her. “Then bedtime. School tomorrow.”
Beth watched her retreat across the living room and turn in her bedroom door to say again, with the same little dip of her head that Laura gave before people she didn’t know and was a bit shy with, “Good night, Mrs. Ayers.”
“Good night, Betsy,” Beth said solemnly.
Jack gave her a kiss and closed the door behind her. He looked up to see the tears in Beth’s eyes and, surprised, he said, “She’s just a kid like any other. Except to Laura and me. We’ve got her pegged for President of the United States, naturally.”
“I didn’t mean to be silly about it,” Beth said. “She—looks so much like Laura.”
“That’s nothing to cry about,” he smiled. “That’s something to be grateful for. Before she was born I had nightmares that she’d look just like me.”
“It wouldn’t have been that bad,” she said, forced to return his smile.
“Not for a boy, maybe,” he said. “A man can be ugly and nobody cares. But a woman can’t. Her whole life is twisted up if she is.”
Beth gazed at him with a new respect. His words recalled Vega’s shocking hidden ugliness to her and for a minute she was nearly overcome with the thought of her former lover. She concentrated on Jack for the sake of composure. He was a father, he had proved himself a man. He had a lovely child and a lovely home. He had Laura.
All Beth’s stereotyped ideas about homosexual men were getting a bad jumbling. He seemed as normal, as comfortable to be with as any man she knew. Only, he wasn’t normal, and it gave her an odd feeling inside. She asked herself how much he knew of her, and what he supposed she was doing there, trailing Laura after all these years.
They talked and the time passed quickly. He told her how he and Laura had met and how their love had grown and Beth thought, watching him, that Laura must love him very much to have let him marry her, to have taken his name and shared his home and borne his child. It amazed Beth that Laura could have done that, gone that far. Laura was not a selfish girl. She wouldn’t have objected to children on that ground. It was the mechanics of it, the necessary intimacy between a man and a woman that preceded children that Beth could hardly picture Laura accepting. But she had and with this man, Jack, who faced Beth now over a friendly nightcap and described his life with Laura.
“The one thing I never thought she could do,” she confessed to him, “was marry anybody.”
“I didn’t think she could, either,” he said. “Gave me some bad nights till she said yes.”
“I remember when we were in college together, how she used to talk about—about men.”
“She
