Back to the 80s novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Foundling

At the club engagement dinner Margaret toasts her 'foundling', and Lorna hands back the pearls with a bill for eighteen years in front of eighty guests, just as Vivian walks in.

The Greenwich Country Club put eighty people in its main dining room on Thursday night.

They had come to celebrate an engagement nobody had heard about until Tuesday.

I wore a green dress from Vivian's closet, taken in at the waist by a seamstress who didn't speak to me.

Margaret had picked it.

It was the color of a bruise going bad.

"Smile," she said, at the door. "And don't talk."

Russell was waiting by the bar in the good suit he hated.

He looked at the dress, then at my face, and said nothing at all.

His hand found the small of my back and stayed there.

It was warm through the thin green silk.

I did not tell it to move.

Dinner was lamb and a great deal of wine.

The women at our table looked me over.

"Is this the little foundling?" one of them said. "The one the nuns had?"

"She's very tall," said another.

"Vivian is so petite. I do hope the girl isn't a disappointment, Russell."

Russell put his fork down.

"Eat your lamb, ma'am," he said.

Under the table, I put my hand on his knee, so he wouldn't say more.

He looked at my hand.

Then he put his own over it, and left it there.

At nine o'clock, Margaret stood and tapped her glass with a spoon.

She had her best smile on, the one with all her teeth.

The room went quiet.

"Friends, we are so happy tonight," she said, "to welcome a good man into our family."

"We've been blessed with two daughters.

"One of our own.

"And one we took in from the doorstep of St. Agnes, a scrawny little foundling with nothing to her name."

Somebody said "aww."

"Lorna has been grateful for eighteen years of our roof, our table and our name."

"And now she is paying us back with a husband."

There was polite laughter.

She'd said it in front of eighty people, with the pearls glittering at her throat.

She wanted me to sit still and take it.

She had counted on me to.

The girl I had borrowed, the quiet one, would have.

I stood up.

"May I say something, Mother?"

Her smile cracked at one corner.

"Of course, dear."

"Thank you," I said, loud enough for the back tables. "Thank you for the roof."

"I want to give something back."

I reached up to the neckline of the green dress.

Under it lay Margaret's triple strand of pearls, which she had hung on me that afternoon "for pictures."

I undid the clasp and set them in her hand.

"These are yours. You lent them to me for photographs, and I wouldn't want anyone to think I kept them."

She went white around the mouth.

"I also did the arithmetic," I said.

"Eighteen years of room and board, school, shoes, and the dresses I wore to church. I make it forty-one thousand dollars."

The room had gone so still I could hear ice in somebody's glass.

"Mr. Dunleavy paid you forty thousand on Tuesday for the engagement costs."

"So you're short a thousand, Mother."

"I'll send it from my first month of housekeeping money."

Someone at the back snorted.

Then someone else laughed, an actual startled laugh.

Then the whole room was laughing, the kind of laughing that makes a person at the head table want to die.

My father looked at his plate.

Margaret stood with the pearls in her hand and her smile still on.

"Lorna," she said, very softly. "Sit down."

"I'm done," I said. "Thank you for dinner."

I sat.

Under the tablecloth, Russell's hand closed around mine hard enough to hurt.

When I looked at him, he wasn't laughing.

His eyes were dark and fixed on me, and the look in them was hungry.

"Where did you learn that?" he said, under the noise.

"A bank," I said.

"Which one?"

"A better one than my father's."

Something moved in the corner of his mouth.

He leaned closer.

"I'm going to want you to do that again," he said, "somewhere with fewer people."

My whole body went hot, from my neck to my knees.

I hadn't felt that way since long before the truck.

Then the dining room doors banged open.

A girl stood there in a soaked raincoat, with wet blonde hair plastered to her face and a pink suitcase in one hand.

She was small and pretty and furious.

Her eyes went from the pearls in Margaret's hand to the man beside me.

"Hello, Mother," said Vivian. "I'm home. Whose wedding is this?"

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