Back When We Were Grownups (27 page)

Poppy said, “Why am I not finding Joycie? That picture of her when we met. I hope it isn’t lost.”

“And after all,” Rebecca told Will, “these are photographs. You don’t usually photograph people reading books or playing chess, although we do those things too.”

Poppy looked up from the album. “Chess?” he asked. “We don’t play chess.”

“Well, Dixon does, sometimes.”

“I see your point,” Will said. “It’s just . . . maybe you have an unusual
number
of parties, don’t you think? Why, any time you and I try to get together, we have to work around all your social events.”

“Social? Those are professional!”

“Yes, but . . . it seems you’re the social
type,
you know? Hobnobbing with your mechanic, for instance; sharing a stranger’s marital secrets.”

“Aldo’s not a stranger!”

“Ah. Well. Truthfully, I must say I’m not sure I find the man as laudable as you do. To me, his attitude toward his wife shows a lack of responsibility.”

“Responsibility for what?” Rebecca asked.

“He had a duty, in my opinion, to set some standards. Both for his children’s sake and his own. And he neglected that duty.”

“Oh, piffle,” Rebecca said.

She may have been more forceful than she intended, because Will drew back slightly. Rebecca drew back too, and pressed her fingers to her lips.

“Here we go!” Poppy said. “Joycie when we met.” He slid the album closer to Will.

“Ah, yes. Very attractive,” Will said, hunching over it.

“She was a cutie, all right.”

Will’s right hand rested on the top of the page, his thumb rubbing the corner with a repetitive, whiskery sound. Rebecca remembered him, all at once, seated at the library table: his papers laid out just so, his books in stacks, his colored pencils in rows.

With a little stretch of the imagination, she could have glanced toward the dark kitchen window and seen Joe Davitch’s laughing face.

Poppy tugged at the album till Will released it, and then he studied Joyce’s picture. “She had the brownest eyes,” he said. “You think the Davitches’ eyes are brown; you should have seen Joyce’s. Hers were more like black.”

He picked up his mug and drank off the last of his milk. “Well,” he said. “I’m beat. I’d better haul myself off to bed.”

Rebecca slid her chair back and stood up. She said, “I should say good night too, I guess.”

“Oh,” Will said. “All right.”

He stumbled to his feet. He stood waiting while she went around to Poppy’s chair and helped him up, handed him his cane, placed an arm round his waist; and then he followed them down the kitchen passageway.

“Feet ache, ankles ache, knees ache . . .” Poppy intoned. In the foyer, he turned to Will. “Good seeing you,” he said. “Don’t forget my birthday party.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Will told him.

Poppy started up the stairs. Rebecca crossed to the front door and opened it. “When
is
his party?” Will asked her.

“Well,” she said, “it’s December.”

“What date in December?”

She faced forward, gazing out. In the light from the streetlamps, everything had a soft, gray, blurry look, like a memory. She felt she had been through all this before; she
knew
she had been through it: that dampening of her spirit; that tamped-down, boxed-in feeling; that sense she had in Will’s presence that she was a little too loud and too brightly colored. And now she recollected that he was the one who had brought things to a halt that long-ago night on the sofa. She had been rushing ahead, ready to fling herself recklessly over the edge, and then he had pulled away and suggested they show more restraint.

She said, “I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other in December.”

Even the distant traffic sounds seemed to come to a stop.

“Or before then, either,” she said.

He took a ragged breath.

“Why?” he asked her.

And when she didn’t answer, he said, “Was it something I did?”

“No, Will, you didn’t do anything.”

“Was it your family? Did they not like me?”

She felt a stab of pity. She said, “Oh, I’m sure they liked you!”

“Or Zeb, then?”

“Zeb?”

“He’s obviously my competition.”

The pity faded. “The fact of the matter is,” she said, “this just won’t work, Will. I’m sorry.”

Then she stepped forward and pressed her cheek against his. He stood woodenly, not responding. “Goodbye,” she told him.

He said, “Well. Yes. All right. Goodbye, Rebecca.”

She watched his ungainly, angular figure set off down the front walk, and she waited until he’d climbed into his car before she shut the door.

The house had a muffled sound that seemed lonelier than silence. Coffee cups sat abandoned in the parlors, and the dining room looked half stripped and disheveled, and Aunt Joyce smiled wistfully from the album on the kitchen table.

It turned out that Rebecca was the one who was still in mourning.

Ten

A
woman named Mrs. Mink called to organize a baby shower. “My friend Paulina Garrett recommended you,” she said. “I told her I wanted someplace elegant. Someplace like a mansion.”

Rebecca said, “Well, the Open Arms is just a row house.”

“It doesn’t have to be
really
a mansion, but it should have that atmosphere. That upper-class, elegant atmosphere. And then I’ll want it decorated in baby blue and white, with a cloudlike effect in the dining room.”

“Cloudlike?”

“Yes, ethereal; know what I mean?”

“We can decorate however you like,” Rebecca said, “but our dining room is papered in a maroon-and-gold stripe and the furniture is some dark kind of wood; walnut, I believe. So I’m not sure—”

“Oh, you can do it! I know you can! Paulina Garrett told me their party last spring was wonderful. Everything so joyous, she said; you made it such an occasion that nobody wanted to leave.”

Rebecca remembered the Garrett party all too well. A torrential thunderstorm had sprung up and somehow, by some process that she still didn’t quite understand, caused the front-parlor chandelier to start raining on the guests. Nice to hear that the Garretts didn’t hold it against her.

“The reason I want blue and white,” Mrs. Mink was saying, “is we know this will be a boy. They’ve had that special test. And we know he’s not going to live very long.”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s got some kind of disease they can diagnose in the womb.”

“Oh, that’s terrible!” Rebecca said.

“So I want this party to be perfect, don’t you see? Every last detail. I want his
life
to be perfect. Because he gets to experience it for such a little while.”

“Well, of course,” Rebecca said.

But while she was discussing the fine points—the folding paper parasol, the white-clouded blue cotton tablecloth she’d seen advertised at Lust for Linens—she was reflecting that really, this baby’s story was just a shortened version of everybody’s story. Get born; die. Nothing more to it than that.

“And flowers?” Mrs. Mink was asking. “Paulina tells me you can recommend a florist.”

“Yes, NoNo,” Rebecca said.

“Pardon?”

“My stepdaughter, NoNo Sanborn. She could set out white asters and those pale-blue flowers, those what-do-you-call-them . . .”

In fact, Rebecca couldn’t think offhand of any flowers that were blue, except for those chicory blossoms that grew wild along the highways and closed up in tight little winces if you picked them. She said, “I can’t remember. I don’t know. I don’t have any idea.”

“Well, that’s all right, we’ll just ask your—”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’ll have to call you back,” Rebecca said, and she replaced the receiver, which all of a sudden weighed too much to hold on to any longer.

*  *  *

Lately, she’d been feeling so . . . What was the word? Blank. Low in spirit, flat as a desert; and now she grew more so every day. Getting up in the morning was like hauling a dead body. Food lost its flavor. Conversation required calling upon every muscle, summoning her last particle of strength. She kept noticing how very little there was in this world to talk about. It was turning into a beautiful fall—clear and mild, the leaves staying on the trees much later than usual—but the brilliant colors hurt her eyes, and the meditation center’s banner flapping in the breeze made a sinister, leathery sound, like bat wings.

Not a person in the family asked where Will had disappeared to. Well, except for her mother. (“Oh, Rebecca,” she said sadly, once she’d heard the facts, “you were a fool thirty-three years ago and you’re a fool today.”) But the girls behaved as if he had never existed. She suspected they were trying to spare her feelings—taking it for granted, no doubt, that she had been jilted.

One night when she had nothing to do she got in her car and drove to Macadam. She parked in front of Mrs. Flick’s house and gazed up at the second-floor windows. All of them were dark, though. Which was lucky, she supposed, because really it was the romance she missed; not Will himself. Still, she sat there a long, long time before she started her engine and drove home again.

She told Zeb, in one of their bedtime phone talks, that she thought the human life span was too long. “Really, I’ve finished my life,” she said. “I finished it when the girls got grown. But here I am, just hanging around, marking time, waiting for things to wind down.”

Zeb said, “Rebecca? Are you all
right
?”

“Define ‘all right,’” she told him.

“Where is your man friend?” he asked.

“He’s gone.”

“You ditched him?”

“Yes, but that’s not the problem. The problem is, I’ve outlived myself.”

“Well,” he told her, “remember what George Eliot said.”

“What did George Eliot say?”

“Or maybe it wasn’t George Eliot. At any rate: ‘It’s never too late to do what you want to do.’ Remember that.”

“What?” Rebecca said. “Well, of all the—Why, that’s just plain
wrong
! Suppose I wanted to . . . I don’t know; suppose I wanted to get pregnant! That’s just plain
ridiculous
!”

She was so outraged that she hung up, not knowing she was planning to. Then she regretted it. When the phone rang a few seconds later, she lifted the receiver and said, “Sorry.”

“I just remembered,” Zeb said. “It wasn’t ‘do what you want to do.’ It was ‘be what you want to be.’ I think.”

“I’m just feeling a little tired,” Rebecca told him.

“And I don’t even know for sure that it was George Eliot.”

She said, “Thanks for trying, Zeb.”

*  *  *

She might have thrown herself into work, but business was very slow these days. Three different people had called to ask if the Open Arms was in a safe neighborhood, and although she had assured them it was—with reasonable precautions, she said; using normal common sense—they told her they would have to think it over and get back to her.

Besides, how often could a person celebrate? How many weddings, christenings, birthdays could she applaud, for heaven’s sake? What was the
purpose
of it all?

Her
New York Times
collected in stacks and gradually turned yellow, untouched. Her
New Yorker
s drifted to Poppy’s room and she never asked for them back. She passed her
New York Review
s on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.

One morning the library phoned to say that her interlibrary loan was in, and she made herself walk over to collect it. But it turned out the book was so rare—a crumbly brown leather volume edged in flaking gold—that she was not allowed to take it home with her. She had to read it there in the reading room, the librarian told her. (This was the same librarian who’d arranged the loan in the first place, but she issued her edict in such a disapproving voice, with such a humorless, raisin face, that Rebecca couldn’t imagine why she’d once seemed a kindred spirit.)

She did try. She did settle at a table and pluck the cover open with the very tips of her fingers and leaf obediently through the brittle ivory pages.
A Baltimorean’s Experience of the War for Southern Independence,
the book was called. The author was a lawyer named Nathaniel Q. Furlong, Esq., who claimed to have known Robert E. Lee when Lee was still a private citizen. Years before the War, Mr. Furlong maintained, Lee had confided to him that he could never support a cause that would allow the slaves—the “heathen Africans,” in his words—to return to their native land and forfeit their one chance for Christian salvation. But when Rebecca managed to locate this passage (which was, she saw for the first time, of dubious credibility, written by a man whose boastful, unreliable nature revealed itself in every line), she wondered why she had found it so momentous back in college. She had just wanted to believe, she supposed, that there were grander motivations in history than mere family and friends, mere domestic happenstance.

She returned the book to the librarian, and she brushed the crumbs of leather off her hands and left the building.

*  *  *

Everything struck her as unutterably sad—even the squirrel with half a tail she saw bustling cheerfully down the sidewalk. Even Poppy’s daily routine: his ritual round of activities, straightening his room and brushing his hat and tuning in his TV shows, all intended to keep himself from sinking into hopelessness.

She knew her mood had something to do with the season. Autumn was when Joe had died. She couldn’t look at the poplar outside her bedroom window—the leaves so yellow that she would think she had left a light on, some cloudy days in mid- or late October—without recalling that shattered morning when she had emerged from the hospital in a stupor and taken forever finding her car and then driven bleakly, numbly down streets lined with radiant trees in every shade of red and gold and orange.

As a girl she had often said, about some potential disaster, “Oh, that can’t happen; it’s too
bad
to happen.” But Joe’s death had been too bad to happen, and it had happened even so. She had felt stunned by that all through his funeral—through the thready whine of the organ and the uncertain, off-key hymns and the peculiar poem Zeb had read called “Not Waving but Drowning.” She had sat through that funeral white-faced with shock. It appeared that nothing was too bad to happen. How had she ever thought otherwise?

Grieving had turned out to be not unlike falling in love. She had pored over Joe’s photographs, searched for the innermost meanings of his calendar notations, traced his dear signature on canceled checks. She had found any excuse to mention his name: “Joe always felt . . .” and, “Joe used to say . . .” It had troubled her that she could summon up no specific, start-to-finish memory of their lovemaking; only generalities. (He was a morning man. He liked to kiss her eyelids. He had a way of almost purring when she touched him.) She prayed for random moments to resurface. Once, driving along in her car, she was thrilled to recollect that he used to talk to the mirror while he was shaving. (“Ah, there you are, Joe. Ready for another glorious day of helping strangers get drunk together.”) She received this image like a gift, and clung to it, and waited greedily for more.

Her life, as she saw it back then, had begun on an April evening when she had stood on the sidewalk peering at the sign overhead:
The Open Arms, Est. 1951.
And now her life was finished, but here she was, still circulating among the guests, a solitary splinter of a woman in the crowd.

“Well, you know what they say,” Zeb had told her. (Zeb at twenty-two, full of callow assurance.) “God never gives you more than you can handle.”

“Who says that? Who?” she had asked in a fury. “Who would dare to say that?”

“
I
don’t know,” he had said, taken aback. “God, maybe?”

Causing her to start laughing, even while the tears were streaming down her face.

Joe’s November dental appointment, noted in his own jaunty hand with his stubby-nibbed fountain pen, came and went without him. His battery-run watch went on ticking in his drawer.

The worst days had been the ones where she had time enough to think. She thought,
What am I going to do with all the years ahead of me?
The easier days were the chaotic ones, where she proceeded from minute to minute just dealing with demands. Soothing the children, cooking their meals, helping with their homework. Standing stolid and expressionless when NoNo pushed her away and ran sobbing to her room, or when Patch asked, “Why couldn’t
you
have died, and Daddy gone on living?”

Some people, she often noticed, had experiences in their pasts that defined them forever after, that they felt compelled to divulge to any casual acquaintance at the outset. The loss of a child, for example: almost anyone who had been through that had to mention it first thing; and no wonder. With Rebecca, it was the fact of her instant motherhood. That had been the most profound change in her life; it had made her understand that this
was
her life, for real, and not some story floating past. Which may have been the true reason that she still used the term
stepdaughter
long after the girls themselves, come to think of it, might have allowed her to drop it. And when she had become their one and only parent (for no one seemed to count Tina), she was all the more aware of the unpredictable, unimaginable shape her life had taken.

Once, introducing “my stepdaughters,” she had happened to include Min Foo with a thoughtless wave of her hand. Min Foo had never let her forget it. “I’m sorry! It was an accident!” Rebecca told her, but privately, she had suspected that it revealed something significant. Min Foo was just as much her own separate self, just as different from Rebecca, as the other three were. And in some ways, she was less of a comfort, because she was the youngest and her memories of Joe were fewer. As the years went by, the older girls would reminisce with Rebecca—“Do you remember the time we all got on the train to D.C. and just as we were pulling out, we saw Dad standing there on the platform with the pretzels he’d gone to buy?” Rebecca would nod and laugh, and Min Foo would look from one face to another like someone seeking admission. “Did he ever sing to me?” she asked once. “I think he did. I seem to remember him singing to me while I was lying in bed.”

“I don’t believe so,” Rebecca said, “but I know he read to you.”

“What did he read?”

“Oh, just the usual.
Winnie-the-Pooh
. . .”

But you couldn’t reconstruct a person from bald facts. Min Foo would never experience the details of him—the fine-grained skin on the backs of his hands and the curly corners of his eyes when he smiled. (One time a man invited Rebecca out, a year or two after Joe’s death, and she accepted but then was filled with despair at the sight of the wiry red hairs on his forearms. He wasn’t Joe, was the problem. He was a perfectly nice man, but he wasn’t Joe.) And to the grandchildren, Joe was no more distinct than those names you see on nineteenth-century headstones. Joseph Aaron Davitch. He used to exist, was all. And now did not.