Feather on the Moon

  Feather on the Moon

  Phyllis A. Whitney

  For Sara Courant

  Director of Patchogue-Medford Library

  Affectionately, and with my thanks for wise advice

  and tireless help in my research—all given

  generously over many years.

  1

  I held the telephone tensely as I listened. The woman from the Center sounded compassionate, kind, considerate—all those good things that I’d needed so desperately in the past. Only now I dreaded the opening of old wounds. Seven years had gone by since Debbie was three, and the chances of finding my lost daughter grew slimmer all the time.

  “It’s a very long shot, Mrs. Blake,” the voice said, “but I know you want to follow up on the slightest lead, so perhaps you would talk to this woman in British Columbia. It isn’t a matter for the police yet, and she seems a responsible person with good credentials.”

  Clear across the continent in Canada! But then, Debbie could be anywhere.

  “Have you a pencil?” the voice on the phone asked.

  I always had pencil and paper ready by this telephone in my bedroom, and I wrote down-the name, Mrs. Corinthea Arles (it had to be spelled) and the phone number in Victoria. When I hung up, the shaking started, just as it used to do. I longed futilely for Larry to hold and comfort me. But Debbie’s father had died more than a year before our daughter was lost. I lived with my parents now, and in a few moments I would go to where they sat in the living room watching the closed-captioned television program they couldn’t hear. For a few moments, however, I stayed quietly where I was, remembering seven years ago—a scene I’d lived over again and again. Too many times.

  That Saturday morning I’d driven to a supermarket a few miles beyond the Connecticut town where we lived. Debbie was with me—a bright, happy little girl, with deeply blue eyes and long straight hair just a little darker than blond, caught back in a bouncy pony tail and tied with a green plaid ribbon. I remembered so many details—but never enough of the right ones.

  The usual weekend shoppers crowded the aisles and the store seemed as usual—a safe and friendly place. Debbie loved to ride in the grocery cart, often instructing me what to buy, and smiling at everyone. I’d finished my shopping and was pushing the loaded cart toward checkout when I remembered the cans of pineapple I’d overlooked on my list.

  Strange that I could still recall the item I’d missed that morning, and had gone back for in so happenstance a manner.

  “Deb honey,” I said, “stay right here in the cart and watch our groceries. Don’t get out. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She hadn’t minded. “I can watch the cart, Mommy,” she’d assured me. The independent threes!

  I hurried several aisles over and was reaching for two cans of pineapple when the woman in dark glasses spoke to me. Later the police said she was probably part of a team, her purpose to delay me. She must have been deliberately nondescript, with a faded scarf tied over her hair, so I couldn’t see its color, or the color of her eyes behind the glasses. She wore slacks—I recalled that—but not their color, or anything else she wore. I noticed that she had seemed timid and uncertain as she spoke to me—the sort of person one wanted to help.

  “Please, ma’am, I’m new around here. Can you tell me where I’ll find the mustard?” Her voice was so low and hesitant that I could hardly hear her, and there seemed no special accent. The “ma’am” could be Southern or Western—anything.

  I pointed the direction for her four aisles away and took down my cans of pineapple. She stayed where she was, blocking my path, apparently bewildered by the big, unfamiliar store. I felt sorry for her. Sorry for her!

  “Come along and I’ll show you,” I said.

  She tagged after me, and I left her staring at jars of mustard while I hurried back to Debbie. The cart was there with its load of groceries, but my small daughter was gone. That was the last time I had seen her.

  The rest was a miserable blur. I’d rushed about frantically, asking questions of strangers, looking down every aisle. I didn’t see the woman in dark glasses, or even think about her until later. The manager instituted a search and eventually called the police. No one remembered the woman who had spoken to me, and no one had seen Debbie lifted from the cart. Small children were going through the checkout stations with their mothers all the time, and no one had noticed Debbie.

  By the time the police arrived the Saturday throngs in the store had already changed. We found no one then or later who knew anything. Debbie might have called out or, in spite of the way I’d warned her not to talk to strangers, she might not have remembered. She’d been such a loving, trusting little girl. The only clue we ever had was when a woman brought the police a trampled green plaid ribbon she had found in the parking lot. But no one had seen that particular little girl carried away. This was Saturday and a small crying child wouldn’t be all that unusual.

  No ransom note ever came, no phone call. Debbie’s great-grandmother on my mother’s side was still alive and well to do, but she lived in Florida and the family name was no household word. All of which left me with the other, even more terrible reasons for child-snatching. The very fact that there seemed to have been a plan of sorts—with more than one person involved—was frightening. It was as though my child had been a special target, and these two had been watching us for an opportunity to take her. But why?

  For years I played the useless “if only” game that never changes anything, and my sense of guilt was part of what I had to endure. You think you can’t bear any more pain or loss. But you do. Time passes and the unbearable becomes something you can carry, after all. At least, my work helped.

  Because my parents were totally deaf, I’d always been interested in the problems of the hearing impaired, and since I was proficient in signing, I turned to the teaching of such children when I got out of college. I still taught in a private school for the deaf, giving affection to children who weren’t mine but who needed me.

  Sometimes I fantasized about marrying again, about having a home, a husband, and more children of my own. The longing was there—the hunger. But it was as though something in me had died with Debbie’s disappearance—something that men shied away from uneasily. So I’d formed no new close attachments. Perhaps my sense of a terrible, unfinished business still haunted me and blocked me from life.

  Now, without warning, had come this phone call that opened all the doors to hope once more, and all those doors to despair that might follow. I wasn’t sure I could go through that yo-yo course again.

  I turned off the bedroom lights and went into the living room to explain to my parents about the woman in Victoria who had called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. These days their telephone number appeared everywhere, as hadn’t been the case when Debbie was taken. There had even been a recent magazine piece that surveyed the types of places from which children had been kidnapped over the last ten years. I had been called by the writer, and Debbie’s picture had been used for the article. Perhaps the woman in British Columbia had seen this piece.

  In the living room my father sat on the sofa—a big man, tanned from his outdoor work, his hands idle in his lap for the moment, his eyes on the color TV picture. My mother sat in her small rocker with her usual book, glancing from its pages to the screen now and then. She always claimed that she could read and watch television at the same time and understand both—with no sounds to distract her.

  I stood in the doorway for a moment, regarding them with love, remembering how much they cared about Debbie, how much they’d suffered with me. They’d been so proud of the way she began to “chatter” to them with her hands almost as soon as she learned to talk. Sometimes I w
asn’t sure whether Ameslan, the American sign language, was her first or second language.

  Dad saw my face and nudged Mother. I sat down and began to speak to them with my hands, my face, my shoulders. As soon as I’d explained, Dad indicated that I must call Victoria right away, and Mother nodded and agreed. I understood very well the loving dynamics between these two, though sometimes when I was younger I’d resented the way my mother always allowed my father to make the decisions. It had taken years of growing up for me to understand how much he had needed the confidence she’d managed to instill in him. My mother had the advantage of having lived in a hearing world until she was seventeen, when a severe illness had deafened her. My father had been born that way, and he’d had no chance to form a normal English-language base, as young hearing children do by listening and imitating. Consequently he was still uncomfortable in a room full of hearing people.

  Mother spoke to me gently in her voice that wasn’t quite like other voices in my world, because she’d lost the sound of her own speech long ago. At the same time she moved her hands in her animated way, so that Dad would understand what she was saying and not feel shut out.

  “Yes, Jennifer. Your father is right. You must make the call. Then come and tell us, so we can consult about what should be done.”

  British Columbia time was three hours earlier than ours, so perhaps I could reach Mrs. Arles right away. I returned to my room and dialed the number.

  A man’s voice answered the ring, his words formal and courteous: “Mrs. Arles’s residence.” I asked to speak with her and said I was Jennifer Blake, calling from Connecticut. He said, “Please hold the line, madam. I will see if Mrs. Arles is in.”

  So it was like that—a butler, money?

  In a moment or two Corinthea Arles came on the phone, and I heard her firm, rather aristocratic tones for the first time. Her voice carried a no-nonsense authority that was reassuring, and it was not a young voice. The words were carefully, precisely spoken.

  “I told the people at the Center that this was only a slight chance,” she informed me. “But I insisted that I must talk with you as soon as possible. I came upon an article in an American magazine a few days ago, and the photograph of your daughter seemed to resemble a little girl of ten who is staying in my home at present. Of course the years from three to ten make for a great many changes, yet I had a curious flash of recognition when I first saw the picture. It was so strong an impression that I felt I must get in touch with you. I am sorry you live so far away.”

  I made up my mind instantly—something Larry had always cautioned me against. “I’ll come out there,” I said. “I don’t want to miss the slightest chance. I’ve always thought that I’d know Debbie immediately if I saw her again—no matter how many years have passed, or how much she may have changed.”

  “Wait a moment, Mrs. Blake.” Corinthea Arles’s voice was dry, faintly disapproving. “Don’t decide too quickly. You know nothing about me. I will have my attorney send you information, and it will be mailed at once if you’ll give me your address. Then you can take time to consider what you want to do. If you wish to come, you can let me know.”

  Her sensible approach was reassuring and made me all the more anxious to see this child. I suspected that Mrs. Arles wouldn’t move impulsively into anything, and I agreed to wait. “Can you tell me more about the little girl?” I asked. “Why do you have doubts about her?”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible to explain on the telephone,” Mrs. Arles told me. “The situation is too complex, and you will have to meet the persons involved before you can even begin to figure this out.”

  That sounded mysterious, but before I could say anything more she went on.

  “I must warn you that I hope this child will not prove to be yours. It is to my interest, Mrs. Blake, that she not be. But I must be sure, if that’s at all possible. Should you decide to fly out here, I will be grateful if you can stay for a few days’ visit in my home. I will say nothing about your purpose in coming—at least not at first. You will simply be the daughter of an old friend. I don’t want to get the wind up, as my grandson used to say. We must play it by ear. I hope everything may be decided quickly, but I’m not sure that your coming will make any difference. Could you get away conveniently?”

  The private school where I taught would give me leave, I was sure. I had an excellent rapport with the director, and she had always been understanding and sympathetic. At least the chance to take some decisive action had stopped my shaking. I gave Mrs. Arles my address, said good-bye, and hung up. Her words about “getting the wind up” had an ominous ring, but I could only put them aside until I reached Victoria.

  In the top drawer of my desk was a photograph—the last one taken of Debbie at her third birthday party. This was the picture that had been used in the magazine and that had caught Mrs. Arles’s attention. At first I used to look at Debbie’s smiling face every day, trying to bring her close to me, trying to project her safety, wherever she was. Praying a lot. Sometimes I talked to the photo, telling her about me, and willing her not to forget me. The plaid ribbon was in the drawer too, frayed from much handling, and I held it as I’d avoided doing in the last few years, not wanting to torment myself. Now the pain was there again, the wound open and aching.

  In the photograph Debbie wore a pony, tail on each side, and bangs across her forehead. Unfortunately, she had no particularly distinctive characteristics, no identifiable marks. She resembled too many other small girls her age, and she didn’t look much like me, or anyone else in the family. Nevertheless, Mrs. Arles had experienced that “flash”—which might mean anything.

  When I returned to the living room my father held out a hand to me, and I went to sit beside him, aware of how solid and dependable he was. My mother seemed in contrast slight and delicate, though always filled with light and hope, no matter what happened. I’d been told that I looked like her, but if I’d ever had her radiance I’d lost it years ago. Each of my parents was strong in a different way.

  I watched their faces as I signed what had happened. When they understood they sat quietly for a time. My mother reached over to take my father’s hand, cupping it around hers as her fingers spoke to him, spelling out private words I couldn’t watch. I remembered that she’d told me once how she could lie beside my father in the dark and they could “whisper” to each other, with no need to see or hear.

  I sat waiting, checking my impatience, my need for action, thinking about them both and of the marvel of how they came to be together.

  When Martin Thorne was twenty-two, he’d gone to work as gardener for my mother’s parents. Betty, at nineteen, was struggling with her own recent loss of hearing, and she found comfort in the presence of this strong, handsome young man who seemed so assured in the outdoors and so uncertain inside a house. She was learning to speechread—which was easier for her than for those born deaf, because she knew the form spoken words took. But she was also learning to sign, since she was eager for all forms of communication.

  Though Martin had been born deaf, as an orphan he’d gone very young to a children’s home, where his disability hadn’t been recognized at once. There had been a year of primitive communication, during which he was thought retarded. Finally, after a perceptive aide realized that he couldn’t hear, he was sent to a state school for the deaf. There he had been taught to sign. My mother persuaded him to help her learn Ameslan, and for the first time he had something he could give to another human being.

  When she discovered his wizardry with plants, she encouraged him to develop the magic his hands knew so well. He possessed the talent of a sculptor when it came to hedges and topiary, and my mother must have been a mind-expanding and totally loving experience for him. Perhaps the first he’d ever known.

  They had run off to be married, escaping the disapproval and shock of her parents, and it was my mother who had helped to turn Dad into the well-paid landscape artist he became. Words had little to do with those marvels h
e created. Plants and flowers seemed to thrive at his touch, and all the frustrations of being deaf disappeared while he worked in a garden. She had made herself a partner in the business end, able to speak for him, and by this time well able to read lips—which was a skill not every deaf person is able to achieve.

  My grandparents, after their first distress, had the heart and courage to learn understanding, and they came to love Martin as a son. We didn’t see them often now but kept in touch through letters and the telephone, on which I could reach them.

  My parents had no other children, and I was thankful over and over again that my mother had lived in the world of speech and books and writing, so that she could understand the subtleties that words could convey. Ameslan isn’t really English in its form. It is a beautiful, graceful, visual language, as difficult to learn as any other foreign language, and graphically expressive in its own right. I learned from both my parents and became a better teacher with the children in my charge as a result.

  Nevertheless, by the time I was eighteen I’d wanted to be more a part of the outside world where all my friends lived. My parents had never held me back, remembering their own escape, and I rushed headlong into love.

  What a chance I’d taken in marrying a man to whom mountain climbing was the most powerful passion in his life. Heights terrified me. Yet we’d had those few good years together, and Larry had loved me in his own way, and he’d adored Debbie. Until he fell down a mountain in Vermont that wasn’t all that high! The thought wasn’t as flip as it sounded. For a long time there was a deep anger in me because Larry had thrown his life away so senselessly. His was an obsession I’d never understood, and perhaps it was anger itself that helped to keep me going until the pain of his loss faded to some extent.

  Debbie had been the great reward of my marriage, and by this time it was as though Larry belonged to a more remote past than she did. She might be alive somewhere, and one of the hardest things for me to control had been my imaginings of a child molested, tortured, hurt psychologically and physically. Such thoughts were terrible to live with, and I’d needed counseling for a time to get by.