Blessings by Belva Plain Page A

turned the key again and the wipers stopped.
    “What are we going to do?” she repeated.
    “I don’t know.” He was staring out at the rain.
    Gloom seeped into the car. Her swift, furious outburst had left her tired. If I could just go to sleep, she thought, just sleep and wake up with all of this gone away. And she, too, stared out onto the black, wet street. The walls of the houses that faced one another on either side made a tunnel out of the street, a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end.
    Peter spoke into the silence. “If you would have the abortion, it would solve everything.”
    She had that picture again, the red picture, the color of blood, the sharp, steely flash, the destruction. She gasped.
    “Is it that you’re afraid?” he asked, gently now.
    “Afraid of pain? You know it’s not that.”
    A few years ago she’d had a compound fracture of the arm and had borne the pain bravely, they told her. She knew she had. Besides, giving birth was hardly painless.
    “What, then? Can you really tell me?”
    “I have told you as best I can.”
    “It’s done all the time. Quite safely. Even though it’s illegal. There are safe places. Competent doctors.”
    Wearily she repeated, “Maybe it’s the way I was brought up. I can’t do it. My parents are Orthodox—”
    Now Peter interrupted. It was his turn to be angry. “Your parents! You can’t even talk to them about it! You’re afraid to talk to them. At least I was able to talk to mine.”
    “I’ve told you that too.”
    Mom in the kitchen, scooping the ice cream: “Everything we taught you, all thrown out like garbage.”
    Jennie’s anger rose again. “You don’t want to understand. I can’t talk about it to my parents. Why don’t we get married, Peter? We could manage somehow. Your father would have to help. He couldn’t let us starve. My parents would do something, too, some little something—”
    “My father would tell me to quit college and go to work.”
    “He wouldn’t!”
    “Wouldn’t he? You don’t know. He has principles.”
    “Principles! How can they possibly justify themselves?”
    “I’ll tell you. They’ll say that if a man is old enough to father a child, he’s old enough to support it.”
    “That’s what they did say, isn’t it? And you believed them.”
    “You have to admit it makes sense.”
    “Sense, yes, but no heart. There’s no heart. Cold, cold moneybags,” she said, clenching her teeth. “Yes, if my father didn’t own a delicatessen … You think I didn’t see your mother’s face when I told her? A face like a shark.”
    “Jennie, that’s far enough. Leave my mother out, please.”
    Loyalty, after all this. Loyalty to his mother. She felt choked.
    “How can I leave her out when she’s in control of my life?”
    “No, we were in control of our own lives, Jennie.”
    “How can you talk like that? What have they done, how did they brainwash you? Well, maybe they’ve managed to make you feel like dirt, but I don’t feel like dirt, I can tell you. I don’t, I won’t, and they can’t make me. Neither can you.”
    “This is a stupid conversation.” He started the engine. “You’re all wrought up, and we’re getting no place fast.”
    “Stupid is right. Take me back to the dorm.”
    She wanted to hit him. Was this Peter? Where were the strength and the smiling confidence? She had relied on him, but the soft, appealing opal eyes with which she had fallen in love were, perhaps, too soft. “Too obliging,” the old lady had said. He was only a scared boy… . And she was lost.
    Neither spoke until they drew up before the dorm. Then he laid his hand on her shoulder.
    “Jennie, take it easy. We’re both beside ourselves. That’s why we’re quarreling. I’m going to phone my father tonight and talk to him again.”
    She pulled away and opened the door. “Good luck,” she said bitterly.
    “Don’t be bitter. We’ll work out something. Please. Believe in me.”
    She mustered a small