Blessings (21 page)

“I can’t imagine,” Jennifer Foster said, smiling.

“She said, ‘No snapping turtle would come near me.’ And she was right. Of course, there was that one man from someplace, Boston was it, when we were younger.”

“That was entirely his own fault,” Mrs. Blessing said. “A mucky-bottomed pond is not designed for standing up.”

“My predecessor took care of him,” Dr. Benjamin said, packing up his bag. “Not much he could do back then. Maybe today they’d put the toe on ice, send him along to the big medical center in Bessemer. Back then there was nothing.”

“A snapper bit off his toe?” said Jennifer.

“It was completely his own fault,” Mrs. Blessing said.

“Now, here’s something that was Lydia’s fault. One day she comes home from the club and she’s in a temper because she’d lost in a doubles round.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Paul, this old story.”

“You don’t like hearing that one, do you? Who were you playing with, Jessie?”

“I always played doubles with Jess, and she always played deplorably. And laughed about it.”

“That was a girl, Jessie. In any event, Lydia here comes home in a temper, hops out of the car, strips down, and jumps in the pond. And what do you think is waiting for her in the water by the dock when she swims back?”

“Oh, for pity’s sake.”

“Her Cadillac! In four feet of water! She’d been in such a temper she left the engine running and didn’t engage the parking brake. Oh, that was a pretty feat of engineering Foster had getting that car to run again. And the upholstery smelled like fish for a year.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Blessing said.

“Put that baby down for a nap after her bottle,” the doctor added. “She’ll sleep awhile after this. I didn’t truly hurt her. She was just aggravated at the pinch. But she may have a fever in a day or two.” He looked at Jennifer. “You tell that young man. She may have a slight fever and some crankiness. It’s perfectly normal.”

Mrs. Blessing walked him out to his car, taking his arm as the two of them came down the steps. “Who’s holding up who?” he said. “Or whom.”

“Thank you, Paul. I’ll send that paper by return mail when it arrives. I’d prefer it if you didn’t mention this visit to anyone.” He shrugged and sighed and she wondered whether he believed what she had told him after all.

“You’ve always been a terror, it’s true,” he said. “And I’m too old now to lose my license, whatever you’re up to.” They stood together at the car and he looked out over the pond to the line of cedar trees along the creek, and his big sad eyes, which had always reminded her of the eyes of one of the hunting dogs, filled slightly.

“This is a beautiful spot, Lydia. I remember the first time I ever came out here. I was a teenaged boy and Dr. Brown brought me along for the ride. Do you remember? It almost did me out of being a doctor for good.” And suddenly she did. It was the day she and Sunny and Benny had gone along the creek on a picnic. Mrs. Foster had made them bacon sandwiches and peanut butter cookies and packed the food in a basket with a big Ball jar of lemonade.
The two boys had walked across the fields swinging the basket between them, and she had walked behind. They were all wearing Wellington boots over their bare feet, and Lydia had snuck out of the house in an old pair of Sunny’s shorts. The three of them were wearing cast-off shirts with Ed Blessing’s monogram on the cuffs, shirts that had gotten shabby or stained or torn at the elbow or neck. Sunny’s hair shone in the light and the back of Benny’s neck was sunburned. They had set out lunch at a little grassy knob that sat above the creek just around the turn from a big natural pool in which brown trout sometimes darted from beneath the dark banks to the glittering center. It was funny to her that things like this were so real and so detailed, when the things done as adults were reduced to a few gestures, a laying down of the fork here, a winning hand of bridge there.

They had all three fallen asleep on the old quilt, Lydia dozing off with the sounds of mosquitoes and Benny’s hoarse breathing in her ear. And then she woke to find herself stiff and sweaty and alone, one of her Wellies tumbled over the edge into the water. She climbed down to get it, and just around the corner in the pool she could see the two boys from behind. Both of them were naked. They looked like the golden trout that had lasted in the pond only one summer because their tremulous glow had been such an easy target for predators. Lydia had stared at the shining pale flesh, her feet unsteady on the pebbles at the bottom of the stream, and then she scrambled back up the bank toward the quilt, dragging her thigh across a piece of slate so sharp that she felt nothing for a moment, saw only the puffy lips of her own ripped skin, the reds and pinks of muscle in that stop-time moment before blood rushed into the gap.

“How in heaven’s name did you do this, Miss Lydia?” Mrs. Foster asked when the boys brought her home held aloft in a cat’s cradle made of their thin arms. But she could scarcely remember the feeling of the stone slicing through her, could only remember that just before she scrambled up the bank Sunny had turned his head in the late-day sun coming lacy through the trees and had smiled
at her with his eyes half-shut, smiled at her in a way that came to her in her dreams for years later, gloriously happy.

“It wasn’t the size of that gash that scared the hell out of me,” Paul Benjamin said. “It was the way you sat on the edge of that kitchen table and didn’t make a sound. Without being numbed up, too. Doctor poured a shot glass of gin in that wound, and that was all.”

“I still have the scar,” Lydia said.

“I’d imagine so.”

L
ydia Blessing had never come close to remarrying. It was not so much that she covertly saw the physical side of things as the purview of the young, although she did, and found the imagined fumblings of her older friends ridiculous and demeaning. It was just that she could not imagine what it would be like to share her life. She could not imagine not being able to switch on the reading lamp next to her bed if she could not sleep at midnight, or having to ask someone else’s opinion on dinner plans or weekend guests. She had had her ways from the time she was young, and she had never had to change them.

The closest she had ever come to a love affair was with Bill Stapleton, who had lived just outside of Mount Mason on an old horse farm for as long as she had been at Blessings. He had been a childhood friend of Jessie’s, and she had been seated next to him at an Easter dinner just after the war was over. He was quiet and thoughtful, letting her do all the talking until she would reach one of her acerbic pitches and he would murmur, “You don’t really mean that.” But he had never seemed put off. He had brought Meredith a Chutes and Ladders game once, and a little hat with a feather when he took a trip to London. “That’s a ridiculous gift for a little girl,” she had said, but she had been secretly pleased, although she would have been more pleased if he had brought the hat for her.

“Such sad news,” Jess’s daughter Jeanne said when she called just as the rain was tapering off, and then she told her that Bill was dead.

That was the sort of deaths they had now: such sad news. Once there had been the unthinkable deaths, like Benny’s and Sunny’s, deaths mercifully obliterated by sleep so that each morning, as her mind surfaced from dreaming, she would have to accept them all over again. Then there were the deaths that changed the world, that broke it in two: her mother, her father. There had been Jess’s death, which had left her feeling as though she had stiffened her spine and her shoulders for the funeral and had never again let them go. The first had been the unthinkable deaths of youth, the second the wrenching losses of middle age. Now there were the inevitable deaths of old age, which one after another prefigured her own. Such sad news.

“I’ll be there by dinner,” Meredith said on the phone. “Eric can’t get away. But I’ll get in the car right after lunch.”

“There’s no need,” Lydia said.

And yet it was a comfort now to have her daughter on one side of her in the pew and Jeanne on the other, as though Jessie were somehow with her, too. “You drive people away, Lulu,” Jess had told her after Bill married that nice woman from Philadelphia, who had been at Vassar with one of Frank Askew’s daughters. “What’s the saying—no man is an island. You’ve made an island out of yourself. Benny wouldn’t have wanted that.”

Thank goodness she had that photograph of Benny on the drop-leaf table. Sometimes she could no longer see his face. Jess had always liked him. When they were younger there were times when she had thought it was Jess he would marry, when she would watch the two of them making clover wreaths by the pond. She thought Sunny had thought so, too, but Jessie had made a face when she had asked once. “Benny’s like a brother,” Jess had said. And of course he had been like a brother to Lydia, too, until he had become like a husband.

Sunny had not wanted her to marry again. Perhaps that was what had decided her. “What’s the point, Lyds?” he said one evening on the porch when she was telling him about Bill, and Bill’s marriage. Or perhaps it was that trip to Paris, when she had run into Frank Askew in the lobby of the hotel. His wife had invited
her to lunch, almost dared her to come, and Lydia had felt ashamed as she watched him eat, fast and loudly. Of course she had never eaten with him before; the most they had ever done was drink together, while a gaggle of complicit onlookers stood by. She’d been forty on that Paris trip, and Frank over sixty, and his dentures clicked like a piece of machinery. His wife called him “old fellow” and said he should slow down or he’d be up all night with heartburn. Later he had called her room, and she had agreed to meet him in the Tuileries and then had not gone. It made her think that she had bad judgment where men were concerned. It made her think his wife had been wiser than she’d ever credited.

The young minister eulogizing Bill was a kind of rebuke, with his pale sideburns and ruddy face. He took as his text the poem “Death Be Not Proud,” and Lydia wondered if it was because he was more conversant with literature than with Scripture. Bill’s two sons, surrounded by their own children, were in the front pews, along with his widow, who had been a college friend of Bill’s first wife. Paul Benjamin nodded to her in the nave. “All well at home?” he murmured, and Lydia nodded. Frank Askew’s daughter was on the other side of the church, and outside on the pavement she came to Lydia and embraced her, which was just the sort of thing she hated. “I knew your father,” she said to Meredith, and Lydia realized with a kind of light-headedness that she no longer cared what Harriet Askew meant by that. I have outlived my sins, she thought gleefully.

“You can find a priest of a more appropriate age to bury me, Meredith,” she said in the car on the way to the cemetery.

“It would probably have been difficult to find a priest Bill’s age, Mother. He was ninety, after all.”

“Ninety-two in September,” Lydia said, adjusting her black felt hat. “And I assume there is at least one priest at St. Anselm’s who is not young enough to be my great-grandchild and doesn’t look as though he spends all his off-hours golfing.”

The cemetery rattled her more than she would have expected. There were all those names she knew on the monuments, all the men and women who had come to the house for cocktails and
played mixed doubles at the club. On a knoll in one corner she could see the edge of the square stone that marked the spot where Jess was buried between her first husband and her second, and as the car came around a curve there was the obelisk in front of her that her mother had insisted upon, with the one word at its base,
BLESSING.

The plot beneath was like her house, big and empty. Her father had purchased it the same year he bought Blessings, as though to show his faith in a future in Mount Mason that even transcended mortality. There were eight spaces. Perhaps he had expected that he and his wife would have more children. Certainly he had believed that Lydia would have more than just the one. Surely he had not expected that his own two children would not want to join their parents in eternal rest. But one weekend when Sunny had come to stay, the two of them had walked around the pond, and he had flicked his cigarette into the water and said lazily, “Don’t you dare put me in the ground after I’m gone, Lyds. No box for this boy.” They’d had quite a lot of wine at dinner, and she’d made a face and said, “Don’t be morbid,” but he would not be put off. “I mean it,” he said. “I can’t face the dark. Toast me to a cinder and set me free as a bird. Promise.”

“Sunny, are you ill? Tell me if you’re ill.”

“I’m just the same as always, dear heart,” he’d said, and he’d kissed her on the forehead and waited almost six months to die on the dirt floor of the barn.

“I’m thinking of your uncle, Meredith,” she said as the car wended its way through the shady cemetery drives.

“Are you? So was I. He told me after Grannie’s funeral that he would have preferred a kneeling angel with an armful of roses as the monument. I thought he was serious.”

“What a dreadful thing to say to a child. You were—what? Ten? Eleven?”

“I was sixteen when Grannie died, almost twenty when he did. He always made me feel so grown up. And loved, too. There was no one like Uncle Sunny for making you feel loved.”

That was his gift, Lydia thought. If he loved you he made you
feel all wrapped up in it, like ribbons or a blanket. If not, not. The minister had given a grudging little sermon about their brother Lazarus at Sunny’s funeral, and she had never known why. Jess had said she thought Sunny had mocked him once about the cut of his cassock, and Lydia thought it might be the cremation that had done it. A whole carload of Sunny’s friends had come from New York, several of them in light-colored suits, and gotten quite drunk at the house. “He was godfather to our daughter,” one woman told her several times during the course of the afternoon. “We never considered anyone else. Even my brother. No one else.” She had found one of the men curled up in Sunny’s single bed, weeping with the pillow held close to his face. All she could think was that her mother would have had a fit.