As a side note, I’d like to say that I railed against all of this inside. I didn’t like the morbidity of it all, even while readily acknowledging its practicality. All that talk of death and inheritances and whatnot made me very unhappy. Mother, as always, kept calm and cool about the whole thing. She gently and lovingly instructed me on how Society liked to view things, specifically how it liked to see the worst in people, no matter what, as a default. So if we wanted to keep them off our backs and out of our business, we’d have to set up our fake marriage in such a way that no one could possibly see anything salacious about it. Just a younger man who fell in love with an older woman who couldn’t possibly gain anything from the marriage to begin with except love for its own sake. Remote living accommodations in a small house with no staff, no way to “cash in” on the marriage, no direct ties to family fortunes of any sort… in all respects, our marriage was an engineered fiction of complete and utter banality. Two people fell in love, big whoop.
And that’s pretty much how it was all received. The trick was that it was all done so quietly and subtly that no one hardly noticed, not even the county clerks. The mail, as they say, stayed right on time. Days before Mother was due to give birth to our daughter, we took a trip to Bethesda, Maryland, where Amity was born, again, far from prying eyes. Mother was given some time to recoup from the birth and, a few weeks later, the new Atwood family came back to roost in our Manor.
Coming back to our home, I must admit, was such a relief. We left it so infrequently that having to do so, even for a few weeks, was an odd mixture of thrilling and frightening. Everything was unfamiliar to us and we both longed for familiar stomping grounds. The sights and sounds of the big city, all the craziness of social activity in 1992, was somewhat deafening to us. We quickly learned that we didn’t like the world outside. When I was younger I remember thinking that I felt, sometimes, a bit like a prisoner, being so cut off from the rest of the world, but in my maturity I found that I felt safer and more comfortable without it. Too much could go wrong out there. Too many things can happen without warning. Things were too complicated.
But I learned a lot in those few weeks. Namely, I learned that knowing about the world in intellectual terms was far, far different from knowing about it in terms of experience. Without really meaning to, my upbringing had sheltered me TOO much. I spent a lot of time in the hospital by my mother’s side before, during and after the birth to our first and only daughter, but I did a lot of reading, too. And listening. I realized that I didn’t want my daughter to be as sheltered as I was. I wanted Amity to be familiar with the world in a way that I hadn’t been. Broaching the subject with my mother, I thought, would be difficult and painful. When we got home, when she noticed my brooding and she gently probed about it, I discovered that I couldn’t have been more wrong.
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