Dear Doctor Lily (11 page)

‘She says okay.'

He waited outside the house for his father to fetch him. He did not say anything about Eddie until they were upstairs in the apartment. It was at the top of an old bulbous-fronted yellow sandstone building at the outer end of a long avenue, that wandered through half a dozen jumbled neighbourhoods on its way into Boston.

His father's apartment had odd-shaped rooms with funny angles and windows at the end of walls instead of in the middle, because it had been cut up from a larger one. There was not much furniture, but a lot of light and a jungle of plants clamouring to get out of the big rounded bay window. Across the broad avenue were the high brick buildings of a small college, where students went up and down the wide red steps, and hung about in groups. Between, endless traffic and the green trolley-cars sliding by below.

Terry liked the apartment and this busy view. A good place to break his sensational news. He turned indoors, and with his back to the plant forest, he called to his father.

‘By the way, Dad, I want to tell you something.'

‘What's that?' His father came through from the small kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel.

‘I'm not seeing Eddie now.' Terry had his hands behind him on the edge of the windowsill, propping him up, because it was hard to say.

‘Why?' His father came forward and sat on the arm of the sofa.

‘Oh – I don't know. I guess I don't like him any more.'

‘But he's your best friend. You can't suddenly not like him.'

‘Well, I don't,' Terry lied, ‘so you don't have nothing to worry about no more.' He deliberately said it that way, as a secret tribute to Eddie, but his father let it go.

‘I worry about you dropping him, just like that.' He was not beaming and pleased, as Terry had planned. He was leaning forward crumpling the towel in his hands and looking serious. ‘A friend's a friend, and Eddie's been through a hard time, because he tried to get back at that Jukes woman for you. Okay, it was dumb and wrong, but you could say it was loyalty, I suppose. Where's your loyalty to him?'

‘I thought you didn't like Eddie.'

The conversation was going wildly wrong. Terry felt as if he'd been hit on the head.

‘Whether I do or I don't is not the point. I don't want you to be one of those fair-weather friends who takes people up and gets their trust, and then gets bored with them and skips off to the next person who beckons. Friendship is solid and real. You don't turn it on and off like tap water.'

A lecture was the last thing Terry had expected. How could he say, ‘I did it for you! I did it so you'd see I want you to come home'? He couldn't say anything.

He ate his steak and salad without tasting it, jaws, teeth, swallowing mechanism working by themselves, since the person who normally operated them had died. His father talked on about England, and the stuff he had bought for the store and the people he'd met and the horses he had seen, and didn't seem to notice that Terry was a mute who could hardly hear either.

At the end, he pushed his plate away and finished his beer.
Then he looked across the table at Terry and said determinedly, with a funny excited smile, not one of his wide amiable ones, ‘Now I have something important to tell you.'

‘Yeah?' Terry did not look at him, but out of the window, at the bookshelf, at the blank television.

‘I'm going to marry again.' Terry could feel his father watching his face. ‘Someone I met in England. Well, I'd met her before, some time ago. I'm sure this must be a shock to you, but you'll like her, I know.'

Terry looked down. He should not have eaten the ice-cream right on top of the steak. If he threw up now, all over the rough pine table, what good would that do?

‘It won't make any difference to you and me.' His father reached out a hand across the table, palm curved up, and left it there, in case. ‘We'll see just as much of each other. We'll go off on our own and fish and walk up hills and explore and go to the movies, maybe start some riding lessons for you, how about that? And you'll also have someone else here to have fun with. She's longing to meet you. Her name's Lily.'

‘Big deal.' Of all the things Terry might have said, that was the only one he could manage.

In the car on the way home, he said two things. ‘I don't want to have fun with her,' and, ‘Does Mom know?'

‘Not yet. I wanted to ask you about it first, of course.'

But he had not asked. He had told.

He would never come home again.

Up in his room, Terry dropped the framed photograph of his father on the floor, put an undershirt over it to muffle the sound, and smashed into it with his baseball bat.

Never make me look at you. In the intense pain of the betrayal, Terry was as ashamed of his father as he was of himself, for betraying Eddie.

He gave up his paper route. He threw all Friday's newspapers into Lion's pond on a raw day when no one was about, and watched them soggily rising, like dead, bloated corpses. He stopped trying to behave well, although he had no heart for dangerous exploits, and no one to do them with, and no one
to think up the great ideas, since Eddie, his leader, now had a bunch of other kids in tow at school, and was lost to him for ever.

Life was flat and shrivelled, like a burst balloon. His mother threatened to go into cyclical depression, and did. She gave up her part-time job and lay around a lot, or moved slowly about the house with a tan blanket over her shoulders, like a camel. Depression made her feel cold.

She hardly ever went out. She did not do her face or cook regular meals. That was okay. She gave Terry money to buy frozen dinners and french fries, but it wasn't okay that she expected him to do more around the house, because she was ‘sick'.

Whether she ordered him irritably to run the vacuum, or wheedled him, it was just as bad.

‘Come on, lover boy. Help me out. Poor Mommy's so sick.'

‘You're not sick. You just need to get off your dead ass.'

It was surprising what he could get away with when she was in a camel-blanket phase.

Terry was not invited to go to England for the wedding.

‘Why didn't he invite me?'

‘Well…' His mother put on that small cup-shaped smile with the lips sucked in that she used for thinking about Lily. ‘I suppose he didn't think you'd want to be asked. You wouldn't have gone anyway, would you?'

‘Maybe.' The actual wedding would be nothing, a lot of people in a church, dressed up, and Gramma mopping at her pale eyes. But he wanted to go to England. Everything he had heard about it attracted him; pictures he saw, old houses, greenness, weird-looking young people owning the streets of London.

‘Really, Ter? I thought you felt so terrible about it.'

‘Hunhnyah…' Now that she was out of the depression, although she kept it by for future use, Terry felt quite close to his mother at this time, as you would with anyone with whom you were abandoned on a desert island; but he never discussed anything about his father.

What with school, and his mother taking him away at Christmas
to her aunt in New York state, and then sticking rigidly to what she now called the Statutory Visiting Times, Terry did not meet Lily for quite a long time.

The apartment looked a bit different. All the plants were there, and Dad's pictures of horses and the cartoon sketch of Buster that Terry had drawn from memory a year ago, but it wasn't the same. There was more furniture and a rug in the living-room and some new ornaments and photographs of people Terry didn't know, and women's clothes hanging in the hall and on the back of the bathroom door. The bathroom smelled unfamiliar, and the whole place was much more untidy. His father's neat kitchen was a wreck. Sweaters and books lay about at random and phonograph records slid off each other on the floor. His father picked some things up automatically as he passed them, and rinsed out the coffee mugs, but he did not seem to mind. His smile was there all the time. His eyes were narrow and crinkly, always a sign of good times.

‘This is Terry,' he said quickly, when they came in. ‘Terry, this is Lily.'

Terry had imagined someone the size of his mother. A much taller woman unfolded herself from the low sofa, not fat, but quite large and solid. She was smiling widely, excited, a bit overpowering. Shaking her strong hand, Terry was aware that he was shorter than she expected. That had been one of the great things about Eddie. Although he was older, he was shorter than Terry.

People like his Dedham grandmother said comfortably, ‘You'll shoot up in your own time.' But now was now, and meanwhile he was small for his age, and Lily was as tall as his father.

She tried hard, and laughed a lot in a clear, English sort of way. Once Terry saw her reach to put her arms round his father, and then drop them self-consciously, and step back and stumble over a stool. She had brought Terry a set of carved wooden boxes from England. One fitted into another, and the smallest was about as big as a stamp.

She watched him take all the boxes out and range them on the coffee-table. He felt he had to do that. When he said nothing, she could not help asking, ‘Do you like them?'

‘Sure. Yeah.' He began to put the boxes inside each other again, which filled in some more time. They were all on their best behaviour. His father waited, but in the end he reminded Terry to say thank you.

‘I'm glad you like it. I had a lovely time choosing it. Look.' Lily squatted down to the low table. ‘I bought it because I like buying presents, not because I'm trying to bribe you to like me, all right?'

She knew what he was thinking. Some people's stepmothers bought them so much stuff, it was pathetic.

Terry could not play checkers with his father, or put on records, or talk back and forth as they usually did, because Lily was there, slopping his orange soda as she carried it in, hunting for potato chips, making coffee, making conversation, filling the apartment spaces. They were both watching her: Terry to see what her game was, his father because he wanted her to feel comfortable.

None of them could think what to do, so they went across the avenue to the park behind the college, and walked fast, because it was cold. Lily galloped about in new furry boots like a giant kid, because she was not used to so much snow. Terry galloped off with somebody's bounding dog, so he would not have to throw snowballs with her.

‘He liked you,' she said when the owner called away the dog, and Terry came back. ‘Have you got a dog at home?'

‘Not any more.' Terry and his father looked at each other.

‘Sorry, have I said the wrong thing?'. Lily banged the snow off her mittens.

‘Buster was more my dog,' his father said, to avoid it being known that Barbara would not let Terry keep the dog.

‘Yeah. He'd never sleep on my bed or pay attention to. me when Dad was home.'

When Dad was home.
Why did he have to say that? The words hung in the still cold air. The bright-coloured children on the sled slope stopped shrieking. Saturday traffic sounded miles away.

His father put an arm around him, but Terry jumped away. Playing with the dog had reminded him that he was still angry with his mother about Buster, so to hide that, he muttered to Lily, ‘We didn't want to keep him,' stamping about in his own snow footsteps.

‘Come on.' His father brushed snow off Lily's face. ‘Let's go get something to eat.'

They had lunch at a more expensive place than his father usually took him. Lily – he was to call her that, but he did not use her name – ate in a peculiar clumsy way, with two hands, and Dad reminded her to put the fork in her right hand, as if she were a child.

‘Oh, yes, sorry.' She changed over the fork and put the knife on the edge of the plate so that it fell on to the tablecloth. ‘I want to do everything the American way, Terry. You'll have to teach me words to use. They don't know what I mean in shops when I say things like cotton wool and tiss-yew.' She gave one of her loud spontaneous laughs.

Terry kept silent. He did not know what she was talking about.

They tried to get him going by making plans. ‘At Easter, let's do such and such… On your next weekend, why don't we…' Grown-ups did that to work you up into being pleased, and when it did not come off, they had some more plans to promise.

‘Lily and I are going down to the Cape pretty soon. Maybe look for a cottage to rent for a week this summer.'

‘Would you come and stay with us?' Lily asked.

‘I guess so.'

‘So could I, Mom?'

‘Cape Cod?' His mother raised her eyebrows, which were pencilled in again since she had stopped being depressed. ‘Your family and friends are on the North Shore.'

‘Dad likes the Cape better.'

‘I know.'

She was not going to say yes or no, so it would have to wait. She wanted Terry to talk about Lily, even though someone was there, a new guy called Silas.

‘What's she like, Ter?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Didn't you look at her?'

‘Not much.'

‘Tall? Short? Young and girlish? Funny accent?'

Terry shook his head. All that Saturday, he had been watching
out for attacks on his mother. Now he felt he had to defend Lily.

‘She was okay.'

‘You liked her?'

‘Hunhnyah.'

‘Not easy is it, feller, all these new things to deal with.' Silas got up. ‘Come on, I'll take you round the block in my new Corvette. See how you like it.'

Uh
-oh. Was this the new boyfriend, then, muscling his way into favour? He was quite old. His hair was going grey. His knowing face had a rogue's smile, with a sticking-out lower lip, very sure of himself.

‘Leave me alone.' Terry hunched his shoulders forward and scowled.

‘You see the way he is?' his mother said, as he headed for upstairs. ‘Don't take it personally, Silas. That's just the way he is.'