Carol questioned her, and she answered, though she did not want to talk about her mother. Her mother was not that important, not even one of the disappointments. Her father was. Her father was quite different. He had died when she was six--a lawyer of Czechoslovakian descent who all his life had wanted to be a painter. He had been quite different, gentle, sympathetic, never raising his voice in anger against the woman who had nagged at him, because he had been neither a good lawyer nor a good painter. He had never been strong, he had died of pneumonia, but in Therese’s mind, her mother had killed him. Carol questioned and questioned her, and Therese told of her mother’s bringing her to the school in Montclair when she was eight, of her mother’s infrequent visits afterward, for her mother had traveled a great deal around the country.
She had been a pianist--no, not a first-rate one, how could she be, but she had always found work because she was pushing. And when Therese was about ten, her mother had remarried. Therese had visited her mother’s house in Long Island in the Christmas holidays, and they had asked her to stay with them, but not as if they wanted her to stay. And Therese had not liked the husband, Nick, because he was exactly like her mother, big and dark haired, with a loud voice, and violent and passionate gestures.
Therese was sure their marriage would be perfect. Her mother had been pregnant even then, and now there were two children. After a week with them, Therese had returned to the Home. There had been perhaps three or four visits from her mother afterward, always with some present for her, a blouse, a book, once a cosmetic kit that Therese had loathed simply because it reminded her of her mother’s brittle, mascaraed eyelashes, presents handed her self-consciously by her mother, like hypocritical peace offerings. Once her mother had brought the little boy, her half brother, and then Therese had known she was an outsider. Her mother had not loved her father, had chosen to leave her at a school when she was eight, and why did she bother now even to visit her, to claim her at all?
Therese would have been happier to have no parents, like half the girls in the school. Finally, Therese had told her mother she did not want her to visit again, and her mother hadn’t, and the ashamed, resentful expression, the nervous sidewise glance of the brown eyes, the twitch of a smile and the silence--that was the last she remembered of her mother.
Then she had become fifteen. The sisters at the school had known her mother was not writing. They had asked her to write, and she had, but Therese had not answered. Then when graduation came, when she was seventeen, the school had asked her mother for two hundred dollars.
Therese hadn’t wanted any money from her, had half believed her mother wouldn’t give her any, but she had, and Therese had taken it.
“I’m sorry I took it. I never told anyone but you. Some day I want to give it back.”
“Nonsense,” Carol said softly. She was sitting on the arm of the chair, resting her chin in her hand, her eyes fixed on Therese, smiling. “You were still a child. When you forget about paying her back, then you’ll be an adult.”
Therese did not answer.
“Don’t you think you’ll ever want to see her again? Maybe in a few years from now?”
Therese shook her head. She smiled, but the tears still oozed out of her eyes. “I don’t want to talk any more about it.”
“Does Richard know all this?”
“No, just that she’s alive. Does it matter? This isn’t what matters.” She felt if she wept enough, it would all go out of her, the tiredness and the loneliness and the disappointment, as though it were in the tears themselves. And she was glad Carol left her alone to do it now. Carol was standing by the dressing table, her back to her. Therese lay rigid in the bed, propped up on her elbow, racked with the half-suppressed sobs.
“I’ll never cry again,” she said.
“Yes, you will.” And a match scraped.
Therese took another cleansing tissue from the bed table and blew her nose.
“Who else is in your life besides Richard?” Carol asked.
She had fled them all. There had been Lily, and Mr. and Mrs. Anderson in the house where she had first lived in New York. Frances Cotter and Tim at the Pelican Press. Lois Vavrica, a girl who had been at the Home in Montclair, too. Now who was there?