Excuse Me? Whose Baby?: Excuse Me? Whose Baby? / Follow That Baby!

She would miss her little apartment and her friendship with Marie Pipp, too, when she finished her dissertation and found a teaching job. There was practically no chance of landing one at De Lune U., which hired only experienced full-time teaching staff.

Her parents, on the occasions when they communicated with Dex, harped on the point that it was time to finish her dissertation and launch a stellar career in academe. They would agree, one-hundred percent, about putting Annie up for adoption.

What if I don’t want a stellar career in academe? What if what I really want is right here?

But she couldn’t have it. She was in no position to raise Annie herself, even if Jim would agree. As for the man who had breached her defenses without even trying, he was in love with someone else.

And wrong for her, anyway. Too smooth. Too rich. Too…everything.

Dex pedaled harder. She flew past the entrance to the campus and down University Avenue to Sirius Street, where she turned left into the middle-class residential area in which she lived.

She tried to focus on how good it would feel when she finished her dissertation. She could devote herself to teaching, research and writing professional articles. At last, she would make her own place in the world.

The bike zipped past a cozy bungalow. In the porch swing, a young mother rocked her baby while watching a toddler splash in a wading pool.

Dex’s heart swelled. Why did she keep torturing herself? It was inexplicable, yet since childhood, Dex had treasured forbidden dreams of domesticity.

She’d sneaked romance novels into her bedroom, and in the margins of school notes, invented elaborate baby names like Eldridge and Valeria. Isolated by the twin handicaps of insecurity and overweight, she’d found her greatest pleasure in reading and in babysitting.

But regardless of what her instincts told her, she wasn’t cut out to be a mother. And while Jim Bonderoff might make a decent enough father if he had the right wife, he didn’t, and he might never have. What kind of girlfriend hadn’t bothered to accept his proposal in three months?

What Dex wanted for her daughter was the one thing that had been denied to her: the chance to grow up loved and cherished and nurtured so she could pass those qualities on to her own children. And it was obvious that neither Jim nor his blundering staff members were equipped to give Annie this kind of upbringing.

She turned a corner and swooped down Forest Lane. Mrs. Zimpelman, who was leaning on her rake and listening on the phone, smiled when she spotted the bicycle. She began talking in animated fashion, no doubt boring a friend with the news of Dex’s arrival home.

Across the street, Dean Pipp knelt in the garden snipping herbs into a wicker basket. She wore a floppy black hat, a gingham apron over a shapeless gray dress and a pair of skaters’ pads on her knobby knees.

“Hello, there!” she called. “What did the lawyer want?”

Dex angled her bicycle around the side of the house and came to explain about Helene and Annie and Jim. By the time she finished, Marie had finished gathering her herbs and led the way into her book-filled house.

“I’ll certainly miss you.” The dean removed her apron and knee pads and hung them on a coatrack. “It’s only for a week, though, you say?”

“Or less, if I can persuade him that adoption is the best course.” Dex tried not to dwell on how difficult it was going to be to wrench her daughter away from one self-important father and a pair of no-holds-barred leathernecks.

The elderly woman frowned at a padded envelope lying on her hall table. “Oh, dear, I must have put the mail here and forgotten. What is this?”

Dex glanced at the envelope. It bore the return address of a rare books dealer. “Something you ordered?”

“Well, yes, of course,” said Dean Pipp. “Now I remember. I asked for everything they had about the Richard Grafton controversy. I’m afraid there isn’t much.”

Knowing that her landlady wrote papers about obscure literary matters, Dex tried to dredge the name Richard Grafton from her memory, but failed. “Was he a poet?”

“Oh, surely you remember Richard Grafton.” The dean rattled open a drawer, pulled out a sharp engraving knife and sliced open the envelope to reveal an aging volume. On the cover was imprinted Chronicles of England, by Richard Grafton. “He was a sixteenth-century writer.”

“Refresh my memory,” said Dex.

“It’s all in here.” Her landlady smiled and recited from memory, “‘Thirty dayes hath November, Aprill, June and September, February hath twenty-eight alone, and all the rest have thirty-one.”’

“He wrote that?” Dex asked.

“Yes, but did he write it first?” The dean cocked an eyebrow as if inviting Dex into a fascinating mystery. “There’s a similar poem by William Harrison, written at almost the same time, and rhymes of that nature pop up elsewhere in folklore.”

“I see. So there’s a controversy.” Dex regarded her landlady fondly. Hardly anyone was likely to care who really wrote that bit of doggerel, but she had no doubt that it would make a fascinating article.

“Oh!” Marie dropped the book on the table with a thump. “I nearly forgot! There’s a student in your apartment. She wanted to talk to you about something or other and insisted on waiting. Her name is, let’s see, Coreen or Cara or…”

“Cora Angle.” The student had asked to speak to Dex after receiving a D-plus on a paper. Dex had suggested she drop by so they could have some privacy, but they hadn’t specified a time. “I’d better hurry. She’s upset enough as it is.”

“See you later.” Clearly absorbed in her project, Dean Pipp wandered into the living room, reading the book out loud. She was still wearing her floppy hat.

Hoping that Cora hadn’t been waiting long, Dex let herself out of the house and loped toward the free-standing garage. From the driveway, a straight, weathered staircase led to the apartment. She clattered up and opened the door, which she left unlocked during the day.

The single room looked smaller and darker than usual, by contrast to the expansive scale of Jim’s house. Dex didn’t see anyone, but she heard a tuneless mumble coming from the tiny kitchen. She had to close the door to take a look, because the kitchen was behind it.

Cora Angle, her large frame cramped in the small space, was wiping a dish and carrying on a conversation with herself. “I shouldn’t hang around,” she muttered. “She’s obviously busy. She did promise to see you. I’ll only be in the way.”

One glance at the open cabinets showed Dex that her thrift-store dishes had been rearranged. They were stacked in an orderly manner, the plates and saucers on the lower shelf, cups and glasses on the upper one.

“Oh, hi!” The tall freshman stopped wiping and gave her a tentative smile. Pale blond hair straggled down Cora’s pudgy cheeks, and there was a dust smear on the shoulder of her tan smock.

“You’ve been working hard.” Dex decided not to point out that the new arrangement, while more efficient, put the cups too high for her to reach easily. She could always switch them back later.

“I like to organize things.” The chubby girl watched her apprehensively, as if expecting a rebuke. She reminded Dex of herself not many years ago.

“Well, thank you.” She indicated the half-full coffeemaker. “Care for something to drink?”

“Okay. Sure,” said her guest. “I’m sorry for just showing up. I mean, I know you weren’t expecting me.”

“It’s okay,” Dex assured her. “I told you to drop by, right?”

“Right.” Cora cleared her throat. “Listen, I just came to tell you I decided to drop out. I guess college is too hard for me.”

“If you were smart enough to get in, you’re smart enough to do the work.” Dex frowned as she poured the coffee. She hated to see anyone leave, especially after less than a year. “A lot of people have trouble adjusting. How are your other classes?”

Cora put two spoonfuls of sugar in her coffee and slouched in a seat at the counter. “Cs and a few Ds. College is costing my parents a lot of money, and I’m not doing well enough to justify it.”

“Do you want me to see if there’s financial help available?” Dex refused to give up easily. True, the young woman’s papers and tests had been mediocre and sometimes worse, but she might blossom.

“I’ve already got a partial scholarship.” The young woman shrugged. “Originally, my parents said I should just get a job, but when I won the scholarship, they agreed to help. The thing is, I knew from the first few days that I made a mistake by coming here, but I didn’t want to admit it.”

“What makes you think so?” Dex asked.

The freshman’s forehead wrinkled. “The other kids all seem so sure of themselves. I never know what the teachers expect. I keep trying to guess, and getting it wrong.”

With relief, Dex realized that she might be able to help. “Maybe that’s the problem. You’re too busy trying to second-guess the professors instead of expressing your own point of view.”

“But who would care what I think?” Cora nibbled at the split ends of her hair.

“I do,” Dex said. “Listen, I’ll make you a deal.”

“What kind of deal?” The young woman fiddled with her coffee cup.

“You promise to stay in college for the rest of the semester,” Dex said. “In exchange, I’ll critique your papers in advance for your other classes. I can’t in fairness help you prepare for Professor Bemling’s class, since I’ll be grading you, but what you learn should apply to everything.”

“I—I can’t afford to pay you much,” the freshman said.

“No charge,” said Dex.

“I can’t accept such generosity.” Cora pressed her lips together before continuing. “Besides, I’m sure there are more deserving students.”

I’m going to rescue you whether you want me to or not. “First of all, you deserve my help as much as anybody. Second, I’m not being generous. Consider this a loan,” Dex said. “Next year, you can tutor a freshman who’s having problems, and she can pass the favor on to someone else the following year, and so forth. How’s that?”

Reluctantly, the woman nodded. She must be eighteen or nineteen, and yet she seemed very young. At twenty-six, Dex had considered herself still a kid. Until today.

Now she was a mother. And a tutor. Next to Cora, she felt practically ancient.

Then she remembered that she was going to be staying at Jim’s. “Let me give you another address. I’ll be helping out a friend with some baby-sitting for a week. You can contact me there.”

She hated to hedge, but people gossiped like crazy around campus. The discovery that James Bonderoff had a daughter by Helene Saldivar, and that the biological mother was a mere teaching assistant, would fan the flames to wildfire proportions.

Cora accepted the slip of paper gratefully. “I can’t believe you’d do this for me.”

“That’s why I’m in the teaching field,” Dex said.

After the freshman left, she mulled over the conversation. Was she in education because she enjoyed helping people? That hadn’t been mentioned anywhere in her parents’ expectations.

She did enjoy her time in the classroom on those occasions when Hugh was ill or at a conference. The problem was that college-level instruction required researching and writing professional papers, which she did not enjoy. Also, the lectures were often delivered to large groups of students with little or no personal contact and the grading left to an assistant.

Well, it didn’t matter. She didn’t belong in any other world, so she had better make the best of this one.

After tucking a few changes of clothes and her personal care items into a backpack, Dex opened her desk drawers and flipped through the notes she’d accumulated for her dissertation. She really ought to finish it this coming summer, which was only a few months away.

She’d chosen to write about how the structure of Shakespeare’s plays prefigured movies and television. While watching Kenneth Branagh’s movie version of Henry V, Dex had been struck by how visual it was and how well the scenes, with little adaptation, worked on the screen.

Her parents had agreed that it was an interesting subject. Her mother had sent a long letter with suggestions for how to approach the matter, and her father had urged her to publish the thesis as soon as possible to gain critical attention.

That had been a year ago. Since then, Dex hadn’t been able to muster any interest in working on the dissertation. It seemed to belong more to her parents than to her.

Oh, grow up, she told herself. As soon as she returned from Jim’s, she would buckle down and get to work.

A short time later, she locked the door and set off with her backpack. En route, she stopped at a baby store and bought a bicycle seat for Annie. It was quite an extravagance, since she’d only be able to use it for a week, but perhaps she could give it to the adoptive parents.

Maybe Annie would stay in Clair De Lune. Maybe Dex would see her from time to time, riding in this very bicycle seat, whizzing around town behind some bearded man or long-haired woman.

Unexpectedly, tears pricked her eyes. It must have been the wind.

5

AFTER HIS LUNCH with Dex on Friday, Jim Bonderoff returned to his office for two hours. In that time, he made one hundred million dollars.

That was how much his stock went up when news was announced of a faster, smaller computer chip developed by researchers at Bonderoff Visionary Technologies. The company’s other investors became similarly enriched, and he declared a bonus for employees.

Word traveled fast. De Lune University President Wilson Martin was one of the first to call with congratulations and a hint about future donations.

Of course, he didn’t ask Jim for money directly. What he said was, “I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your past generosity to our school.”

“And I want to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed being an honorary Ph.D.” Jim, who’d never completed college, had been thrilled to receive the degree at graduation ceremonies last June. It honored his achievements in the fields of business and technology.

“You earned it, buddy!” Wilson Martin spoke with a gung-ho attitude more reminiscent of a car salesman than of a university president. Right now, he would be sitting at his desk, brushing back the thick hair that he dyed silver to disguise the fact that he was only forty-two years old. “By the way, did you hear the tragic news about Dr. Saldivar?”

“Something about an elephant, I gather.” Jim propped up his foot and retied one of his jogging shoes. He dressed comfortably whenever he didn’t have an important meeting.

“Tragic loss,” Wilson said. “It was her dream to someday see us establish a medical school on campus.”

It hadn’t taken the man long to work his way around to his longtime dream. Jim doubted it had also been Helene’s, but obviously she provided a convenient way of bringing up the subject.

Well, Jim was a hundred million dollars richer, minus taxes. Why not make a sizable donation? He was on the verge of proposing it when something occurred to him.

He had a daughter. This money was hers, too.

Not that he intended to spoil her. He considered it foolish to give young people huge amounts of money. Still, he felt for the first time as if he were the custodian of his wealth instead of its outright owner.

“I’d be happy to look at some cost projections,” he said.

“We’ll get right on them,” the president responded. “In any case, we’re always glad to see BVT prospering. It’s good for the community.”

Jim was glad when the man rang off. Not that he disliked Wilson Martin, but Jim had other things on his mind. One in particular, and she was waiting in his outer office.

He strode across the variegated carpet and went into the adjacent room. Between the fax machines, copiers and computers sat a portable playpen.

Five women stood, leaned and knelt around the playpen, making cooing noises. Jim assumed they had wandered over to enjoy the unexpected visitor. He couldn’t even spot the tiny figure inside until he got close enough to see over the women’s shoulders.

Ignoring a pile of stuffed animals and toys, Annie sat regarding the women around her with mingled interest and uncertainty. Someone had fixed tiny yellow ribbons in her hair, one of which had fallen out.

As he approached, the little girl plopped onto her knees and crawled toward the fallen ribbon. Her audience responded with encouraging cries of, “Go for it!” and “You can do it, honey!”

Jim cleared his throat. The response was electric. The five women swiveled, straightened, or—depending on their starting position—leaped to their feet. They weren’t afraid of him, but they did seem embarrassed to be caught making goo-goo eyes at a baby.

“Congratulations, Jim!”

“Way to go on the stock market!”

“I guess I’ll be getting my new house soon!” This last remark was a reference to BVT’s stock-option program, which extended to all employees.

Four of the women melted away and returned to their offices. Only his secretary, Lulu Lee, remained. “She’s so cute! I can’t believe how lucky you are!”

He hadn’t told anyone who the mother was, only that he’d recently learned he had a daughter. People would talk, of course, but that couldn’t be helped.

“I’m not sure those yellow ribbons are such a good idea,” Jim said. “Couldn’t she swallow one?”

“Oh!” Lulu leaned in and snatched the fallen ribbon from the playpen. Then she began removing the others from Annie’s hair. “Willa from accounting put them on her.”

Jim crouched next to the playpen. “How’s it going?” he asked the baby.

“Ga ga da da.” She hoisted herself to her feet, hanging onto the rim of the playpen.

He was lost. If there had been some other task Jim meant to accomplish today, he forgot it utterly.

“Look at her!” he said. “Nine months old and she’s standing up! She must be some kind of genius.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it.” Lulu gave him a teasing smile.

“You don’t seem surprised. Do they all do that?”

His secretary, who had long expressed a desire to have children if her boyfriend ever got around to popping the question, nodded sagely. “According to the books, they often stand by this age. Some children are even walking by now.”

“They must be freaks of nature,” Jim said. “If Annie isn’t doing it, it can’t be normal.”

“She’s a bright child,” Lulu said. “I wonder where she got that hair.”

It was as far as his secretary would go toward prying. Jim made a mental note never to let her catch a glimpse of Dex. Lulu’s hair was lustrously straight and black, bespeaking her Chinese heritage.

It was only natural for her to be curious about Annie’s mother, he reminded himself. “Must be a throw-back,” he said, in response to her statement. “I think my great-grandmother stuck her finger in a light socket once.”

Then he remembered that this little girl would someday inherit the company. It wasn’t too soon to prepare her for taking the reins of command. “I’m going to give her a tour of the facilities.”

“I’m sure she’ll enjoy that,” Lulu said.

Annie did. For the first five minutes, she took a keen interest in all the blinking computers and admiring employees.

Jim’s tale of how he’d started the company in a garage, moved to a leased plant and finally built this facility quickly bored the baby. She yawned. Then she drooped against his shoulder.

“Nap time,” said one of the women engineers.

Jim had forgotten that babies needed naps. No wonder this one was exhausted. She’d had a long day, and it wasn’t even five o’clock yet.

He took her out to his covered parking spot. This afternoon, he’d brought the European sedan with an infant seat installed in the back. Strapping a sleepy baby into it turned out to be a challenge, but he was getting used to manipulating her tiny limbs.

When his nose brushed her cheek, he discovered that she smelled like Dex and was startled to realize he missed the woman. Missed her mentally and physically.

Thinking about her was dangerous. For safety, Jim tried to focus on Nancy.

As always, the image of his calm, self-possessed pal soothed him. After his mother died of cancer when he was fourteen, she’d been the friend he turned to for comfort and advice while his father worked long hours selling insurance.

In the month following his rendezvous with Dex, Jim had felt restless and off-center. That was why he’d flown to Washington and proposed to Nancy. It had been, he told himself, a wise step toward his chosen future, and the fulfillment of long-cherished plans.

He wished she had accepted immediately. Instead, she’d murmured that things were up in the air at her university and that her career was at a turning point. Jim hadn’t wanted to press her, but for some reason, the knowledge that Dex would be living in his household made him more anxious than ever to set a wedding date.

Jim pulled the car out of the parking lot and glanced at Annie. She was dozing peacefully in the back seat as he halted for a red light. Impulsively, he dialed Nancy’s number on the car phone. It was about eight o’clock in D.C., so she ought to be home.

“Hi, this is Nancy,” purred her familiar voice. The sound was so smooth that he expected her to add that he should leave a message after the beep, but she didn’t.

“Are you there?” Jim said into the hands-free speaker. “In person, I mean?”

“Jim?” Nancy said. “It’s great to hear from you. What’s up?”

He’d last called her about a month ago. She’d told him how well her parents were doing and had brought him current on the activities of her six younger siblings.

The topic of his proposal hadn’t come up. Jim didn’t want to broach it too abruptly this time, either, nor did he wish to brag about his stock coup. There was, however, other news he needed to tell her. “I wanted to let you know that I have a baby.”

The silence lasted until the light turned green. Then she said, “A baby?”

As he accelerated north on Mercury Lane, he explained about Helene Saldivar. There seemed no point in mentioning Dex, so he didn’t.

When he was done, Nancy said, “A baby. Well, that is a surprise.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. “I know you spent a lot of time taking care of your younger brothers and sisters, but you like kids, right?”

“Of course.” Nancy sounded as if she were thinking things over. “You know, my current research involves babies.”

“What sort of research?”

“I’m investigating how infants acquire language,” she said.

“Annie says ‘da da’ quite clearly,” he boasted as he drove through the gates of Villa Bonderoff.

“Specifically, I’m investigating how some babies acquire multiple languages. In any case, she’s there and I’m here, so it’s irrelevant,” Nancy said briskly.

“How’s it going with your grant? You mentioned something about problems.”

“Nothing you need to worry about.” She always changed the subject if there were any possibility he might make a donation to benefit her. Nancy never coveted his money, even though it was thanks to her encouragement that he’d taken the first steps toward success.

She was a great friend and a beautiful woman. Even in high school, she’d had an air of sophistication, and she was always coolly in control of herself.

He wished they were already married. He wished they’d been married for years. Then he wouldn’t have to fight these confusing, maddening, tantalizing images of Dex, naked and eager, that kept sneaking into his mind.

He reached the main parking area in front of his garages. “I’ve got to go, Nancy. Just wondered if you’d given any more thought to our future.”

“Lots of it,” she said. “If things work out the way I plan, I should have everything settled within a week. We’ll talk again.”

The word settled could be taken in either of several ways. Would she settle matters in his favor or settle permanently somewhere else? “What do you mean by—”