A Theory of Relativity (31 page)

“What about me? I’ve been your husband for twenty-nine years. Oh yes, you don’t think I remember how many. But I do. And I say it stops.

Now. It’s not that I don’t wish them well. Hell, I wish them all the good in the world. They’ve suffered enough. And I’m not saying you can’t help out with Keefer . . .”

Nora felt as though she’d been blown back by a great wind, blown back through the open window over the sink, up the meadow where their Holstein had grazed with her bull calf last spring, so reminding her of Georgia and Keefer, the little bull wide-eyed and gawky, over the thistled ridge down to the pond where the river birches seemed to brace themselves like delicate elderly ladies making their way down to wade.

This was her home. Every April, she took the big rake and ventured out into that mucky water and drew the mustard-colored fans of water lily, festooned with algae, toward her, filling her wheelbarrow, spreading that rich, wet vegetative paste around her perennials, her irises, and Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 204

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her ferns, hostas and lilies of the valley, which sprang up gratefully weeks before her neighbors’ did. She cooked and canned and hoed and chased the flies and rubbed liniment into Hayes’s hands and her own, beat the ridged mud from boots and overalls, hung them on the carousel in the sideyard to dry. She wrote out the disheartening checks to the bank and the water utility, fed the cats and caught and held them to give them their shots, taught Bradie how to use two knives to cut butter into flour for a crust, sliced the cool green stems of tulips and wrapped them in wet newspaper for the urns on the altar at church. In her mind, she was blown up onto the rise they called Deer Park, because the does nested there with their newborns—Nora would cook venison but would never allow Hayes or the boys to shoot a deer on their own land—where the boys had flung themselves on their sleds when they were little, where you could stand concealed among the evergreens and watch the lights punctuate the dusk, count them out like musical notes: the Romans, the Cladleys, the Zurichs, the Rooneys, the Wofflings. Where on a lucid day, you could see all the way to Snow-mounds, the misty glaciated hills hunched in a ring. She and Hayes planned to build a cabin up there one day, and take their ease, while Dan and Marty ran the place. They planned a porch that wrapped around the cabin like an apron, with Adirondack chairs in a row.

In the decades since Father Barry had pronounced them husband and wife, Nora could not recall a time she had overtly disagreed with Hayes. He had never raised a hand to her, or to the boys, no matter what kind of loony stunts they pulled. He had never belittled Rob for his sorry grades, or rebuked Marty for starving himself practically to death that one summer over the Rooney girl, and it was he who insisted they set aside something every month for all the boys to get on their feet when they were older. She had not told Hayes in so many words that she loved him for . . . since their silver wedding. But she loved him as she loved her flowers and her mated cherry trees and Easter mass, not with the sharp, anguishing delight she felt for her own boys and Georgia, but with the enduring appreciation only refuge could provide.

She could not imagine living without Hayes any more than she could imagine standing on thin air.

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And so it was with a heaviness in her chest that she said, “I’m going to do this, Hayes, and it isn’t that I don’t care about your feelings. I’m sorry that you feel like you do. But I’m going to do this whether you like it or not. And I do not think it will have any effect on our farm. But if it does, that would not stop me, either.” He’d said nothing. He gripped his coffee cup in both hands, and Nora could see his knuckles bulge.

“You’re set on this,” he said finally.

“If I did not do everything I could to right this wrong, I could not face Georgia. God hates a coward, Hayes.”

“God hates a fool, Nora.”

“Are you suggesting I’m a fool?”

“Yes,” he answered slowly, “but I will not say a word against you.” Gratitude filled her so that she could not speak. She touched his hand, then his thick arm, and they clung together.

Later, Nora pulled open the drawer where she kept her wedding nightgown and her slips and slid out Georgia’s sweatshirt, which she folded against her belly and rocked and rocked. They could not stop now.

There was no way to stop now. They’d come too far.

She wished she could have been there at the courthouse.

When they heard the news, she and Lindsay Snow knelt next to the dog bed where Keefer lay sleeping with her shirt pillow. Mad things had zigzagged through Nora’s brain, like she and Lindsay should just pack up the baby and get on an airplane, fly to Hawaii. When Lindsay got up and locked the door, Nora didn’t even have to ask why. Menace seemed to prowl the innocent snow-dusted street outside the Victorian. They stood at the window, waiting for Lorraine and Mark to come home, and when that hatchet-faced Wilton woman, the one who’d sicced the sheriff on Gordie, glanced up, they drew back, pressing themselves against the wall. Mark and Gordie drove up a few minutes later, saying Lorraine had gone to get her hair cut.

Nora thought Lorraine had finally lost her mind.

But when she showed up, two hours later, having marched into the Style Inn and demanded a blunt cut, Nora had to admit her sister-in-Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 206

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law looked different, freshened, somehow stronger. Ready for battle.

The next day and the next, when the reporters converged and photos were taken, Nora thought, Lorraine’s no fool. In her blazer and checked wool slacks, Lorraine was proper, precise, businesslike, like a model from the Land’s End catalogue, not a banshee in a shawl, all straggles and loose pins. The kind of person you’d trust, just from seeing her, as she distributed copies of a picture of Ray and Georgia holding Keefer, copies she’d had printed up overnight at the Sam’s Club.

The man from
Newsweek
came on Saturday, and
CBS News
on Sunday, and she and Marty and Dan watched in awe that night as Dan Rather spoke the McKennas’ names, though, of course, not Keefer’s.

A machine that ground on under its own power seemed to have been set in motion by that first phone call. Nora had actually been the one to suggest calling their state representative. Lorraine and Mark, who’d voted only in presidential years, had no idea who he was. But Nora knew not only Phil Kay’s name, but where he lived. They’d phoned him at home, and Lorraine recounted the conversation. “I’m shocked,” he’d said. “That’s practically impossible.” He promised to search out the history of the statute first thing Monday and determine whether the legislative intent had been to discriminate between family members who were adopted and those who were not. He’d been headed out the door when the phone rang, he told them later, and would ordinarily have allowed the machine to pick up, but something had told him he needed to take the call himself.

Lorraine, who looked to Nora as if she did not sleep a minute that first weekend, drafted a letter she said she intended to send to every newspaper she could think of, in Wisconsin and beyond, to TV stations and the National Organization of Adoptive Families and the president of the United States. They all toiled over it, striking those phrases that Lorraine liked but Mark considered inflammatory, including “hideous injustice” and “corrupt judicial system” and “people Keefer scarcely knows.”

“It’s not true that she scarcely knows them,” he said. “She knows them well. And you have to keep in mind, they are acting on what they believe is right. They weren’t attempting to pull the rug out from under us.” Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 207

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“I think they were,” Lorraine insisted. “If they were so determined to keep Keefer in the family, why didn’t one of the Nye girls want her?”

“I know that much,” Gordon spoke up. “Caroline’s getting a divorce. And Alison . . . I think she pretty much does what her husband says.”

“But you don’t know for sure,” Mark reminded him.

“I don’t know anything for sure,” Gordon had answered meekly,

“not anymore.”

Where else would they post their message? Lindsay Snow suggested adoption agencies and the windows of stores. Hadn’t they done just that with the golf outing to raise funds for cancer research? Natalie Chaptman brought an updated list of parishioners from Father Barry’s secretary, and those were added to the list. And in church that Sunday, Father Barry read a portion of the letter from the pulpit. “Gordon is determined to affirm that he and all adopted children are proud of their heritage and consider themselves an equal part of their family units. As it stands, this law not only denigrates one family, but also the caring, nurturing institution of the creation of families through adoption, a bond that goes deeper than blood.” He asked for prayers for the McKennas, the Nyes, and the Cadys, and for Judge Sayward, “who must be guided by conscience.”

After the service, the Soderbergs’ oldest boy, the one they called Corky, came up and said that the monks and several others had approached the bank where he worked with contributions for, as he put it, “the defense.” Should these checks be sent to the McKennas? Did they prefer to set up a fund?

The Monday after her set-to with Hayes, Nora had shown up at Mark and Lorraine’s at dawn. An hour later, Gordie, his eyelids raw and puffed, came in carrying Keefer. Painfully, reluctantly, Lorraine and Gordie got ready to drive to school. Both of them considered calling in sick. Mark had reminded them it might cast them in a bad light, if they didn’t carry on as usual.

Nora was alone, with a phone in one hand and Keefer on her hip, when Phil Kay called.

The lawmaker said that his office had turned up no reason to Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 208

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believe that the law, written in 1959, had intentionally discriminated against adopted children. Kay then explained that similar cases from around the same period all agreed in substance that upon adoption, the rights of an adopted and a biological child converged. And so he would propose an amendment, so that the law would read “by blood or by adoption.” It was his feeling that the language had been an oversight, that legislators assumed, as the McKennas had, that once a child had been adopted, that child became a full, blood relative, even if not literally.

They could expect the legislature to consider it within a year, or at the most, two.

“A year?” Nora gasped. “But we only have six or seven months until they actually adopt Keefer.”

“I know,” Kay said miserably, “but if you could get a stay—”

“The judge isn’t going to give us the time of day,” Nora told him.

“I’ll do the best I can,” the assemblyman told her. “I’ll think this over every which way.”

She thanked him. And she thought, it can’t take years. Laws were changed all the time over tragedies. In California, it seemed like they changed laws once a day. Phil Kay wasn’t the only representative in the world. She’d call the senator. . . . What was his name? Hammersmith?

Nora was full of refreshed zeal when Gordon and the others came home, but actually speaking Phil Kay’s words—a year, two years at most—punched a hole in her enthusiasm. They all looked shrunken.

Gordon lifted Keefer out of her high chair and carried her out into the hall, holding her against himself while he slipped her feet through the legs of her purple snowsuit and into her bumblebee boots. “Mama,” Keefer said, waving to her grandmother and aunt.

“She means they’re going to the cemetery,” Lorraine told Nora.

“Good Lord,” Nora breathed, “you think that’s okay for her?” Lorraine shrugged, “No, I guess it’ll scar her for life. But I probably don’t care about that, because I’m the hysterical old woman who’s determined to put her own greed ahead of her grandchild’s welfare.”

“That was one letter, Lorraine. Which they didn’t even have the guts to sign their names to.”

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“Maybe it is better for her. Maybe we’re all so warped by the grief . . .

maybe she needs a new start.”

“Well, I don’t think you should give up. The worst thing that could happen is that another family will never have to go through this.”

“Nora,” Lorraine sighed. “You’re a better person than I am.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You are. Because I guess I’m not thinking of all the other families who could go through this. I’m only thinking of her. And I’m not even really thinking of her so much as I’m thinking of us. That letter writer, whoever she was, said Georgia asked
every
person who came to see her to take care of Keefer. I never thought she wanted anyone to do that but Gordie.”

“Look at them,” Nora mused.

Snow had begun to fall, huge, wet flakes tatting against the front window. The only speck of color against a milky sky was Keefer’s bobbing snowsuit.“Isn’t she just the picture of Georgia? That tough little way she walks.” Prickles like a bolt of electrical current shot up her forearms when Lorraine pushed the drift of envelopes they were stuffing onto the floor.

“That’s just it!” she said. “That’s just it, Nora. No one ever thinks of family any way but that very way!”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“She looks like her. He looks like him. You’re the picture of your father. Mark’s the image of his grandmother!” Lorraine ranted, “Don’t you hear yourselves?” Nora was struck speechless. “Every time Mike’s boy Matt walks in the door, one of you says, ‘There’s little Mike, right there!’ And then someone says, ‘But Pete’s got Debbie’s eyes.’ And then someone else will say, ‘No, really he looks more like Debbie’s sister.’ It’s like this is an endlessly fascinating subject. Even if you saw them the week before, someone has to comment on how much more they look like someone in the precious family . . .” Did she do that? Nora tried to collect herself.