The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross Read Online Free PDF

Yeobright’s mother died, returned to the New England summer afternoon with difficulty. “What do you mean?” she is reported to have said, rather crossly. (The story had been retold so often that parts of it became “authentic,” as other parts continued to be debated.) She was dragged by her daughter to the window–after having returned her eyes to her book as though her daughter had merely said, “An elephant with wings has landed on the lawn”–where she witnessed the baby’s progress toward the house, its hands being held by two attentive boys.
    “Where did it come from?” she not unreasonably asked.
    “Just out of the bushes,” her daughter answered. The professor rushed downstairs and out onto the road: there was no sign of any car or person. Their house was at the end of a dirt road, and any car or person on the road was clearly visible.
    “Did you hear a car?” the professor asked. By this time she had reached the baby and held out her arms: the baby walked into them. The professor held and smelt the baby, and put its cheek to hers, as she had not done with her own children; there had been two, which had (as she admitted only to herself and the mother of the visiting twins) doubled the work while halving those intense moments of a mother and baby alone in the entire world.
    “We didn’t hear anything,” the children all said, jumping around her. “Of course we would have heard a car if there had been one.” This was so obviously true, the professor argued no further. Someone must somehow have crept along the side of the road, set the baby toddling toward the children, and crept away.
    “What did you think of when you saw the baby and heard that story?” the professor was often asked.
    “I thought of Moses,” she always answered. “And, of course, of Silas Marner.”
    This latter allusion turned out to be, on the whole, the more appropriate. The baby was a girl, as they discovered after the father, returning with his papers, had been immediately dispatched back to town for diapers and baby food. The mother with three of the children, the fourth being left downstairs with the baby, searched the attic for a portable crib that had been retained from earlier years, for the possible use of visiting young. When the father returned, and they had changed and fed the baby, they all sat down at the table, the parents with a stiff drink, and discussed the matter.
    “We could advertise,” one of the children said. “Or put up a notice. Like they do with lost cats and dogs.” Everyone laughed but, as the parents were quick to point out, no one had a better suggestion. And then the father looked at the professor and said: “Geraldine and Tom.”
    “Of course,” the mother and the home twins said. “But,” the children asked, “couldn’t we keep her?”
    “Our arms are full,” the professor said happily. “Besides,” she added, “if we’d wanted anyone else, we would have her by now. Our family is complete.”
    “Geraldine and Tom then,” the home twins said, not really disagreeing with their mother. “But,” the girl twin added, “she did seem to choose us.”
    “That’s because we were playing on the lawn,” her twin said. “It seems a good place where children are playing on the lawn.”
    “We’ll have to tell that to Geraldine and Tom,” the father said.
    And that was where the “once upon a time” part of the story ended. The professor went away to call Geraldine and Tom, who immediately drove up from New York and looked at the baby as though she had indeed dropped from the skies. “It was
much
better than that,” the children insisted. And they had to tell the story again, the first repeat of many. After that, it was courts and judges and social workers and the long, slow process of the law.
    GERALDINE AND TOM , who might as well be known as the Rayleys, were friends of the Grants. Tom was a corporate lawyer who had made partner five years ago, and was wildly successful