“It won’t be for a while,” Pauli said. “When Mother and Dad go at it, it takes them a while.”
Madison decided that she wasn’t going to continue to be a prude. “How lucky for your mother. She must tell me her secret.”
Turning, Pauli looked at her. “So what’s Thomas like in bed?”
But Pauli never got to hear Madison’s reply because he grabbed the girl by the ear and pulled while holding the screen door open. “Get inside and try to mind your manners.”
“How am I going to learn if I don’t ask?” Pauli whined after Thomas had closed the screen door, with her inside the house.
“There are some things that you have to learn from experience, not from what others tell you. Now go find your mother and tell her that we’re ready to eat.”
“Some doctor you’ll make,” Pauli muttered as she disappeared into the house.
“What an extraordinary child,” Madison said as she turned back to Thomas.
> “Spoiled. A late-in-life child and spoiled without mercy. Poor Alex got nothing but discipline, but that child has never had any discipline.”
“You love her madly, don’t you?” Madison said with a smile.
“Quite daffy about her,” Thomas said. “Now, back to you and me. I was saying that—”
But the door to the cabin opened and Mr. Barnett came out onto the porch, a beer in his hand, and soon afterward Alex came outside, and minutes later they all went in to dinner. After that she wasn’t alone with Thomas again. Even when they said good night and went to their separate rooms, there wasn’t a private moment between them. At one point during the evening, Madison thought that maybe Thomas was trying to convey a message to her to meet him outside later. But she looked through the windows at the moonlight and pretended that she had no idea that Thomas was trying to get her attention.
Thirteen
“Madison!” Ellie said in exasperation, “you’re driving me crazy! This all happened, what, fifteen, sixteen years ago and I know that you didn’t marry him, but why?! Whenever a man’s friends and relatives tell you, ‘You’re not like the other girls he dates,’ then you know you’re in. What happened?”
Looking down at her cigarette, Madison said nothing.
“Children,” Leslie said into the silence. “That was it, wasn’t it?”
When Madison looked up at Leslie, there was such pain in her eyes that Ellie had to turn away. To be a writer it helped to feel things deeply, and Ellie did. And what she was feeling now was Madison’s pain, still raw and bleeding after all these years.
“I see,” Ellie said after a while. “I thought maybe Roger had a relapse and begged you to stay. Or . . .” She trailed off, as the reality was worse than what she’d made up.
“What did you tell Thomas?” Leslie asked softly.
When Madison put her cigarette to her lips, her hand was trembling. “It was Pauli who brought up the subject of children. She said that she wasn’t going to have any, that she was going to be a free spirit and spend her life breaking men’s hearts. Then Mrs. Barnett said—”
Madison took another deep drag on her cigarette, then stubbed it out and lit another. “The consensus among Carol and Alex, Mr. and Mrs. Barnett, and . . . Thomas, was that there was nothing else in life, that only children really mattered. Thomas said something to the effect that a man could work all his life and achieve everything, but if he didn’t have children to pass it on to, then his life was without meaning. While he said this, he was giving me looks that said he wanted to have children with me.”
Neither Leslie nor Ellie could think of anything to say as they looked at Madison and thought of what she’d lost and how she’d lost it. If she hadn’t returned to Roger . . . If she’d stayed in New York . . . If . . .
“Now do I have the two of you feeling sorry for me?” Madison asked, trying to make light of what she’d just told.
But Leslie didn’t so much as smile. “What did you do? I mean, after you heard what they said, how did you hold it together?”
“Alex and Carol drove us back to Thomas’s house. I was trying to pretend that nothing had happened, but I didn’t do a very good job of it. Thomas knew that something was wrong. I told him it was difficult for me to think of breaking marriage vows. Of course it didn’t help that when we got back, it was about nine at night and Roger and Terri were skinny-dipping in the pool together.”
“Did you tell Alex and Carol that you were married?” Ellie asked.
“Thomas did. He was quite nonchalant about it as he stood by the pool and introduced Roger as my husband. I must say that neither Alex nor Carol so much as blinked. All of them had wonderful manners. Afterward, we walked back to the house and Carol took my arm and said she’d lend me all her bridal magazines so I could choose my dress to wear when I married Thomas.”
“Yeow!” Ellie said. “I can’t imagine how you must have felt, knowing what you did. Did you ever think of talking to Thomas about—”
“No!” Madison half shouted. “I did not consider talking to Thomas about my . . . my lack of a uterus. I couldn’t put him in the position of having to make a choice like that! Nor did I think of telling him that we could adopt. He was a whole man and I was only half of a woman. I wasn’t going to punish him for what had happened to me. He was a wonderful man, and I knew that he could—”
Madison broke off and calmed herself down. “It’s amazing how fresh this seems. It’s as though all these intervening years didn’t happen. But they did and it was all done a long, long time ago.”