A Theory of Relativity by Jacquelyn Mitchard
The Cadys wouldn’t even talk to him, though Ray’s sisters did. Greg Katt was so excited about the story in Newsweek, he’d told Nora, that he’d subscribed.
Why should those Cadys talk, Nora thought, as she measured coffee? They had what they wanted.
She sometimes thought that all the calling and e-mailing might be wasted, and then they’d be sorry they hadn’t spent more time just cuddling Keefer and singing to her.
“Nory,” Hayes said then, interrupting her thoughts about the letter they were planning, with a color photo of Gordie and Keefer with Pearl’s newborn kittens, the heading on it “Do You Believe Adopted Children Have Equal Status with Biological Children?”
“Come and sit down, Nory, I want to talk to you.”
He had prostate. She knew it. He’d been to see their doctor the previous week, the new doctor, Eve Holly, Hayes griping about having a woman put her finger in his rump. Well. Prostate was curable.
“Nory, I want to talk to you about this business with Mark and Lorraine.”
Thank you, God. Nora let herself slump against the ladder back of her chair. “Hayes, you scared me to death. I thought you were going to say you had prostate cancer.”
“Prostate cancer? I just had the Eve Holly special, the big checkup.” He twirled one thick finger in the approximation of a spiral staircase.
“Well, I thought you were trying to keep it from me, with . . . the trouble and all.”
Hayes stood up from his chair like an old penknife opening. He was only ten years older than Nora, but he acted like ninety some days. Still, he did the work of a man of thirty. She leaned over and kissed his lower lip. Hayes blinked.
“Nory, I don’t know quite how to say this, because I don’t want to hurt your feelings in any way. I mean that, Nora.” He measured four sugars into his coffee. “Now, Mark is a good man. I’ve always liked Mark. And Georgia was the sweetest thing on earth, God rest her soul. But what’s done is done now. That judge is not a judge for no reason, Nora. She understands what’s best for that child.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nora, I can’t say that I disagree with her. Gordie is a good boy, a fine boy. But he’s a single man. He has no more business raising a baby girl than our Rob or our Marty. Can you imagine Marty raising a baby girl?”
“Hayes, he’s wonderful with Keefer. And, anyhow, what would you have done with our boys if I’d died?”
“Why, I’d have married Phyllis Cladley the first chance I got.”
“Well good for you, Hayes. Are you suggesting that the judge made that awful ruling because she thought the baby would be better off with those people from Madison, those cousins?”
“I’m not saying that’s all there is to it.”
“Well, what are you suggesting?”
“The bottom line of it is, I don’t want you involved.”
“With the appeal? With the law change? Why? This is our family, Hayes.”
“That’s just what I’m saying, Nory. I care about those kids same as you do, but the law is the law. Think if it were your own child. Your own farm, say. Would you want some kid no one knows where he came from to inherit our land? Would you want it to pass out of our family forever?” He gestured, as if to encompass the horizon. “Things should stay in the family they came from.”
“That’s ridiculous. What if all our boys were gone, God forbid. What if Georgia was the only one left, what if Georgia hadn’t died? Would you be upset if that land went to Georgia?”
“Yes,” Hayes told her firmly, “yes I would.” His eyes watered briefly, and then he said, “No. I wouldn’t.” He rose from the table slowly and blew his nose on one of the dish towels. “It was dirty anyway,” he said sheepishly, when she glared. “See, I’m putting it right in the hamper.”
“Well, you can take it right out of the hamper and wash it yourself, too.”
“Georgia was one of a kind, Nora. But those people in Madison are that baby’s kin. They’re her kin the same as Mark is kin to our boys. They’ll know things . . . about her. That we’d never know. They can give her a way of seeing where she came from.”
“She came from Tall Trees, Hayes. Just like you did and I did.”
“And there’s no way you’re going to convince any of those guys in Madison that they have to admit they’re wrong!”
“I think we will.”
“You can’t fight city hall, Nora.”
“I think you can, Hayes. If you couldn’t, there wouldn’t be a family farm left in Wisconsin.”
“Don’t mix apples and oranges, Nora.”
“Hayes, you saw them that day. It was like Georgia’d died all over again. That baby’s all they’re living for, the baby and Gordie.”
“But this is not about them, Nora. It’s about us. People are talking. Not everyone in this town appreciates being slapped all over the front page of the Milwaukee Journal. Newsweek. The Blood Relative Case. The Blood Relative Case. It’s all you see. Lorraine crying and saying, ‘They are my blood, they are my flesh and blood. The blood in my brain gave me the emotions to love them . . .’ I know she means well, but there are those who don’t think that kind of attention is . . . appropriate.”
“Who?”
“Lots of people.”
“Name one.”
“Well, the principal for one. The high school principal. You know he’s got a big mouth, Lorraine. He always has. Heard at Hubble’s the other day he’s considering writing a letter to the editor.”
“Have you seen the letters to the editor, Hayes? In the Messenger. They’re all in favor of us. They all say it was horrible, what Judge Sayward did. We got seventy e-mails, Hayes, on Mark’s laptop he brought home from the plant. Even parents who had their own children with no problem at all think this is awful. They’re all for Gordie.”
Hayes just stared at her, impassively. “Well, it’s going to ruin us, Nora. It’s going to ruin us, and you have your own family to think of.”
“Ruin us?”
“You out all hours of the night in town. Lorraine running up street and down alley. Gordon—Gordon’s a schoolteacher, Nora! Do you think people want their kids being taught by some guy in the middle of this ugly thing?”
“Stick to the point, Hayes. You said it would ruin us.”
“Well, you’re never here anymore. I’m likely to die from Bradie’s cooking.”
“You don’t look like you’re losing any flesh.”
“And the worst of it is—”
“Go on. Say all of it.”
“Well, this idea Marty has. And the farm going as good as it is. People are going to be pointing fingers, Nora. Saying, those are the ones stirring up all that stuff over that baby. And that young couple? The ones with the fancy sign?” She’d seen it, THE JOHNSTON-ENGLISH FARM. “They’re going to start a vegetable store and they’re going to have coffee there, too, and antiques, and who knows what all else.”
“So you’re worried they’re going to take away our business.”
“Selling to restaurants pretty soon. My clients.”
“You grow beautiful things, Hayes,” she said soothingly. “No one would want Sungolds or Yellow Pear tomatoes from anyone else. They’re just not like ours. Or Moons and Stars melons. Or the white asparagus—”
“I’m not the only one who thinks so. Your own son thinks the same way, Nora.”
“Marty?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Hayes, the day I start letting Marty Nordstrom run my life you can get out a shovel and—”
“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 h
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 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 Snowmounds, 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.
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-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.”
“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 g
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 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—”