Blessings (12 page)

When Mrs. Blessing went back to the house she felt worn out, and as she breathed in concert with the breathing on the monitor she felt herself slip away and begin to doze. When the telephone rang she came awake, terrified, as though it were the security alarm again. But it was only Meredith, who made it a habit to call on Wednesdays just before dinner.

“How are you feeling, Mother?” she always said now, instead of a simple
hello.

“I’m fine.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“Of course not. Why in the world would I be sleeping? It isn’t six yet.”

“How are the flowers?”

“About as well as can be expected in this heat. This new man takes good care but the bugs have made a hash of the nasturtiums, and the lupines are terribly thin.”

“I’m so sorry,” Meredith said. “How is Nadine?”

“Don’t get me started on Nadine. If it were possible to find decent help, she’d be in Mount Mason looking for a job.”

“I’m so sorry,” Meredith said again, by rote, her voice breathy with boredom and impatience.

Two women long past their prime, talking about nothing, Mrs.
Blessing thought, that’s what she and her daughter had become. Mrs. Blessing wondered what Meredith would say if she told her about the baby in the box, and realized that she had no earthly idea, which seemed terrible. She should know her daughter better, and she knew that this must be at least partly her fault. The baby nurse, the nanny, the summers in Newport, the boarding schools. Meredith had made an early marriage and moved to the horse farm in Virginia, which she’d bought with the proceeds from the sale of the Carton grandparents’ house. The result was that they did not know each other very well. Mother and daughter had always to become reacquainted, like people who met from time to time at the same parties.

When she was younger Meredith had tried to talk to her sometimes when they were riding together, after school, before dinner, playing twenty questions to try to measure her young self and puzzle out what she was made of. What was your favorite food when you were my age, Mother? How many girls were in your class at Bertram’s? Tell me again about the time you and Uncle Sunny tobogganed onto the pond and broke through the ice. Tell me again about the party Nana and Papa had when you were coming out. Lydia Blessing had felt rather smug that at least she answered her daughter’s questions, not like her own mother, who often just had said, “Curiosity killed the cat.”

“How is your leg feeling?” Meredith said now.

When she had opened her eyes in the hospital two years ago she had been dreaming about that coming-out party. Or perhaps dreaming was not what it was called, when you had had a stroke. In the dream, she had been in the library of a club on Park Avenue; she was wearing a white faille dress that fell off her shoulders in big stiff pleats. The room was not very crowded; many of the guests her mother had invited had had other parties that evening, or at least that was what her mother had said. Across the room Lydia saw Frank Askew, whose daughter had been two years behind her at Bertram’s. He had a mustache and a widow’s peak. It had all been much as she remembered it, except that in the dream
he had come across the room to talk to her, which hadn’t happened until a drinks party several months later. And he had bent and kissed her neck, the mustache tickling, which had happened some weeks after the drinks party, in a stuffy back bedroom at the Askews’ apartment that smelled of Shalimar and laundry soap and lemon wax. In the dream she had wanted to turn and walk away, and yet had been unable to do so, as she had been unable to do so in life all those years ago. She had been paralyzed, and aroused, too, as she had been in life. Except that when she had looked down at Frank’s brilliantined red head, bent to the curve of her shoulder, she had seen above the low neckline of the white dress the blue veins, the ropy muscles, the semaphore of brown cast across the skin, and realized that it was her old and not her younger self that he was kissing in the dream.

Then everything had gone bright white, and she had opened her eyes and been still paralyzed, at least on one side, and still deeply stirred, although the feeling evaporated so quickly, in the glare of the hospital lights and the sudden attention of the nurses and Meredith’s guttural weeping, that she could convince herself that it had been something else, some medical condition.

There had been no private room available, and she had had to share a room with a woman from north of Mount Mason who had had her gallbladder removed. “She goes on and on about her grandchildren until you want to scream,” Mrs. Blessing had said, slurring her words slightly, since the stroke had been a minor one. She had not noticed the look on Meredith’s face. After so many years of living alone, she had to remind herself that part of saying the right thing was reading the face of the person to whom you were speaking. It was no wonder that her own mother, who had tended to look down at her own rings whenever she talked, had so often gotten things wrong.

“Come visit next weekend,” Mrs. Blessing said into the phone suddenly as the breathing on the baby monitor beside her rose and fell. She was certain as she said the words that she meant them as she never had before, and as certain that she would regret the offer
once it was made. There was only so much change in her routine that she could manage at any given time. She looked down at the monitor again.

“What’s wrong?” Meredith said.

“Nothing’s wrong. Need something be wrong for me to invite you to come to the house? Never mind. Never mind. Don’t put yourself out.”

“Mother, we’d love to come. But there’s a customer coming to look at that foal that was born last month. And an assessor. What about the end of the month?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Blessing said, as though she were studying her calendar. It always lay open on her desk: white, white, like the dress in her dream, the dress that covered her face like a cloud when Frank had thrown up the skirt. White except for here and there an appointment with the doctor, a note about a dinner. There was Jess’s birthday marked on July 18, Jess’s birthday but Jess now sixteen years dead. “I suppose that will have to do,” she said to Meredith.

“I could try to reschedule the assessor—”

“No, no, the end of the month is fine. I suppose Nadine can get some decent corn by then.”

Through the window she could see the lawns spread gray-green around the pond, the grass dry from lack of rain. Some small black birds picked at the foot of the dock and at the grass around the boat. For some reason that curve of bright white wood on the lawn gave her the sort of quiet feeling of contentment that she now found rather rare, and she realized that cupping the baby’s head for that brief moment had done the same. Those moments had always come rarely to her, and almost always about small creature comforts, never in times of great emotion. It was a feeling of peace accompanied by a kind of settling in her chest, her chest that was usually taut and thrown forward so that, when young, her breasts had been emphasized in a way men found suggestive and yielding and was really just the opposite. As a child, a pair of new shoes might bring the feeling on, and later a nice restaurant meal,
or the simple sight of a quartet of iced martini glasses atop a tray out on the patio. The sight of Sunny had given her that feeling, too, when he came home from prep school or out to the house in the country, those years he had visited her here. And when she was much younger she had had that feeling when her father entered the room.

Everyone had expected her to have it with Meredith. Such a beautiful baby, such a lovely child, such green eyes, tip-tilted like the accents in her French text at Bertram’s,
accent aigu, accent grave.
Of course her hair had been red, like a flame atop the long pale candle of her face. Red as Ethel Blessing had probably feared it would be when she sent Lydia away to the country, red as Frank Askew’s had been when he was a boy, although when Lydia had first met him his hair was faded to a rust color. Benny’s mother had dredged up an aunt who had had auburn hair whenever anyone thoughtlessly mentioned it. Now that it no longer mattered, Meredith’s hair was as silver as her own.

Sometimes when she was young Meredith had taken the boat out to the middle of the pond and sat with a book, an old straw hat of her grandfather’s pulled low on her head. She had a lovely widow’s peak, Meredith, clear and deep. She never wore hats now except for the black riding helmet, always wore her silver hair pulled straight back so that the widow’s peak stood out on her forehead like an arrowhead.

“Lyds, my love,” Edwin Blessing used to say, speaking in comfortably unoriginal aphorisms, “a gentleman wears a hat or he stays inside.”

“You girls will wrinkle dreadfully in this sun,” her mother had said, on those rare occasions, after Meredith was born, when she’d come to Blessings and watched Lydia and her friends dive off the dock.

Mrs. Blessing had told Nadine that her little girl could use the boat, too, the boat that sat there day after day upturned, abandoned, unused. But Nadine would not allow it. “No, no,” she had grumbled. “Not right.” Mrs. Blessing had been surprised to like
Nadine’s child. Like so much else in the world in which she found herself marooned, she had disapproved of the girl in theory. Men like Craig Foster should marry women from Mount Mason who went to the same church and knew the same people, not Korean women they had met somehow when they were soldiers stationed overseas. Nadine could not even be considered a war bride; Craig had been in Korea long after there had been an American war there. But his foreign wife and his foreign daughter had come to seem to Mount Mason more foreign still because some immigration regulations meant they had not been able to join the husband and father until three years after Craig Foster had come home. Legends had grown up about them during that time, like the legends about the man who lived on the dead end by the high school and never left his house.

Mrs. Blessing had met Jennifer for the first time twelve years ago, when the child was six, when Nadine had been working for her for six months and the little girl had had to stay home from school with an ear infection. She had perched on a stool in the corner of the kitchen all day long, so quiet that Mrs. Blessing knew she was there only because from time to time she heard, on the air, like a treble counterpoint to the atonal music of Nadine’s flat fractured English, a high lilt.

“I am very pleased to meet you, ma’am, and I am sorry that I have had to come with my mother today,” the child had said when Mrs. Blessing came into the kitchen, under the pretense of asking for a change in the lunch menu.

She had been tickled by the stiff little speech of a sentence, and the oddly outdated clothes the girl wore, what Mrs. Blessing still thought of as appropriate clothes, a plaid skirt, a wool sweater, knee socks, laced shoes. She had not recognized the clothes as Meredith’s castoffs, four decades old, preserved between tissue, silted with mothballs. Mrs. Blessing had asked Nadine to give the clothes to the Salvation Army when a new roof had had to be put on and the attic cleaned out as a result. “There’s obviously no point in keeping them for Meredith,” said Mrs. Blessing, who in
some inchoate way disapproved of her daughter’s childlessness. Nadine had picked out the hand-stitched monograms with a pair of scissors, ironed and ironed until the peaks and valleys where the stitches had lain were pressed out, and kept the clothes herself.

Meredith was talking about one of their horses. A pulled muscle, she said, visits from the vet. Mrs. Blessing was not listening. Now, at age eighty, the past so distant and yet so perfectly clear, like one of the dioramas in the natural history museum, her mind tended to drift. From the monitor she heard a series of thuds, and her heart beat fast until she realized it was the sound of footsteps going up the stairs of the apartment. It irritated her, that she had been so addled by sleep and the heat and the surprise of the phone and what her father had called woolgathering that she had not heard the truck return. Or perhaps he’d used the back drive, which came from the road around the barn. That was a sneaky sort of thing to do. On the monitor she heard the footsteps louder now, and a few notes of the mobile’s music box again.

“What’s that?” Meredith said.

“Nothing,” Lydia said. “I believe Nadine’s listening to the radio.”

“She’s there late today.”

What was Meredith saying? That she had hired a new housekeeper herself because the one she’d had had not suited. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Lydia could hear her father saying. She was growing tired of all these people speaking at once, the past, the present, perhaps even the future in the slow breathing of the baby. From the monitor she heard a voice whispering, “Hey, sweet pea. Hey, Faith. I’m home. I’m home.” Softly Skip began to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” He didn’t know all the words, and his voice was almost tuneless. For some reason she simply could not fathom, Lydia felt tears fill her eyes.

“I hope I haven’t made a mistake,” she said, interrupting Meredith, who was talking about a stallion in Middleburg who was available for stud.

“Pardon?” Meredith said.

“About this new man,” said Lydia.

“Oh, Mother, you’re never satisfied.”

“I’m perfectly satisfied when things are done correctly.”

“And does he do things correctly?”

“I suppose he does,” Lydia said.

T
he thing that amazed him, when he listened to her old-fashioned locutions, the
shalls
instead of
wills,
when he looked at her living room, that would have been faintly shabby and purely ridiculous if it had been in one of those big development houses down the hill, was that you couldn’t get loose from what you were born into. Everyone believed you could, in America, but it wasn’t true. One moment you were a Boatwright baby, with a crusty nose and a diaper that should have been changed two game shows ago, and then you were a Boatwright girl, giving hand jobs in pickup trucks and carting around a baby of your own. You weren’t ever a cheerleader, or a college girl, or one of the women who sat behind a desk at the First National Bank and said, “Can I help you?” and “Your mortgage approval should take approximately ten to fourteen working days.” Just like if you were Robert Bentemenn, and you ran your Corolla into a tree and got popped with hash in your pocket. Instead of going to jail, like Skip or Joe would, you wound up in rehab in Arizona, then at Arizona State, which would lead to law school, which is what your lawyer dad planned in the first place. Robert Bentemenn was a moron, and once burned a girl with a cigarette just for the hell of it, but thin blond girls with sweaters tied around their shoulders who would freeze Skip if he smiled at them sat at their desks in high school and wrote “Mrs. Robert Bentemenn” on the covers of their spiral notebooks.