Adios, Scheherazade

Anyway, Hannah and Betsy got along like a house awater. Mom and Betsy were sort of cool to each other, I’m not sure why. It might have been a simple generational gap, or Mom might have had that mother thing about competition with the son’s girl friend, or maybe she just looked at Betsy and said to herself, At that girl’s age I was a swinger, and this one’s a bore. Whatever the reason, it was nervous-making to be around them, so for the two days that Mom and Hannah were up it tended to be Betsy and Hannah going off shopping together and Mom and me walking around town and the campus and all and looking at the sights.

Anyway, I graduated. I got the diploma, I shucked out of the black robe, I told Betsy I’d write every day I was in Albany and I would come up in August to see her, and I went away with Mom and Hannah and planned never to see Betsy again as long as I lived.

Because it was over. My lust had gradually worn itself out inside her, and once the lust was gone there wasn’t anything else to take its place. We had talked about marriage once or twice, or that is to say Betsy had brought the subject up, and every time I had talked about the unsettled state of both the world and my career, not knowing if I’d get to graduate school or not, and so on. And Betsy still had two years to go at Monequois, which I knew she would be only too glad to give up for a husband, but I refused to see things that way. I was trying to avoid the commitment without losing the steady lay, which was, I suppose, a sort of practice for fiction-writing. And my ultimate argument was that by August I’d know a lot more about what the future had in store for me, so I’d come back up to Monequois and we’d talk things over and decide our rosy tomorrows together.

Sure.

My mother and Hannah and I went back to Albany, to the house at 50 Slingerlands Street, and there was Hester, smoking cigarettes. She gave me a hello smile that was worth forty of Hannah’s dutiful trips, and she also right away arranged a double date for us, her with some football player she was screwing and me with a friend of hers called Charlotte, with whom I learned why the french kiss has become so popular. That was the first date. On the second date, Charlotte went down on me in the back seat of the football player’s Chevrolet while the football player and Hester were doing various obscure things up front, and Betsy receded in my mind like Smithville as seen from the observation car of the Twentieth Century Limited.

When the phone rang about suppertime one day and Hannah answered it and came out to the kitchen and said to me, “It’s for you,” and I walked into the living room and picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?” and this thin voice said, “Hi, Ed, how are you?” I had no idea at first who it could possibly be.

Then she said, “I know you have a lot of things to think over, Ed, and I wouldn’t have called you, but I thought it was important,” and then I knew who it was.

“Oh, hi, Betsy,” I said, trying for delight, and feeling very nervous because it hadn’t occurred to me it might be difficult to split from Betsy. It still hadn’t occurred to me it might be impossible.

But it very soon did, because the next thing she said was, “The thing is, Ed, I think I’m pregnant.”

We now have silence, the kind of silence that follows the last receding thud of a landslide that has just covered an Alpine town with several tons of rock and snow. No hope for survivors.

But hope doesn’t know there’s no hope. “Are you sure?” I said.

“Pretty sure,” she said.

All I could think of at first was her brothers. I knew Betsy had sort of broken with her family when she’d insisted on going to college, I knew none of them had looked upon her as being entirely respectable after that, but I didn’t know how deep this animosity ran. Would they decide that higher education had already so sufficiently ruined her that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was hardly worth considering, or would they decide she was still a Blake and family honor had been trampled in an affair that could only be settled with shotguns?

The silence ran on and on, and finally she said, in a very small and very thin voice, “I’m sorry.”

And my mind melted into my throat. I cleared it, and, “I’ll come up,” I said.

“Ed—” she said, and I knew she was going to give me an out, she was going to make a gesture and give me an opportunity to crawl through the letter slot and take off.

But I didn’t want it. Ten seconds earlier, yes. Ten minutes later, yes. But not then. I interrupted her. I said, “I’ll be there tonight.”

“All right,” she said.

We said a few more words, one at a time, and then we hung up and I went back to the kitchen and sat down and put some mashed potatoes in my mouth and they sat there on my tongue like a ball of mud. Mom was looking at me and Hannah was carefully not looking at me, both waiting to hear what the call had been, and Hester was drinking beer with dinner, which she said she was doing because she wanted to put a little weight on her hips.