Dear Doctor Lily (15 page)

By the time she finally received the green card which entitled her to work, she had year-old baby Isobel, and was four months pregnant with Cathy. They had left the apartment with the partition walls that cut across the pattern of the moulded plaster ceiling, and moved all the plants into a small pleasant house in the suburb of Newton, with Paul's easy-chair from Barbara's house, and his piano, since Terry refused to practise or take any more lessons.

On Easter Saturday, during the time when Lily was working for the Day-Nite Answering Service, Paul took her to Cape Cod to look for a cottage to rent for two weeks in the summer.

They would have liked to take Terry with them for the day, but Barbara said, ‘I thought he was supposed to go with you to your parents' on Sunday, for the great ham dinner with all the fixin's.'

‘Everybody has ham at Easter,' Paul said. ‘Don't jeer. If Terry came on Saturday, he could sleep over and come to Dedham next day.'

‘It's not even his statutory weekend,' Barbara said. ‘Sunday was a concession.'

‘Thanks.' Paul made fierce doodles on his desk, stabbing at the paper so he wouldn't stab at her. He had learned long ago when they lived together to pretend to be cheerful when Barbara dragged him into moroseness, and to keep quiet when she tried to stir him to anger. If she railed at him, he did not answer, a technique known in the navy as dumb insolence, which infuriated her.

‘Look, Paul.' Barbara suddenly sounded quite warm and sympathetic. ‘I know you like to give Terry a good time, but why don't you and Lily go to the Cape by yourselves, hunh? This first time. I know what it means to you.'

‘She's up to something,' was Lily's opinion.

‘No, she can be really nice and understanding, like that, she always used to be, when we were first married.'

Lily did not want to hear. She did try to be fair about Barbara, but, being a wholesale sort of person, it was hard for her to see all sides. She really only wanted to hear the rotten things, to reassure herself: ‘He never loved her like he loves me.'

The sun was as warm as early summer. The sky was a clear primeval blue. The green haze that had been softening the trees for the last two weeks had uncurled into the beginning of leaves. Slender white birches were bent this way and that from the winter's snow. The oaks were still brown, but the pines were tipped with fresh bright needles. A Plymouth motel had a newly painted sign. Children making gross faces in the back windows of station-wagons wore shorts and summer tops. Everyone was heading to the Cape.

Closer to the canal, which made the peninsula of Cape Cod an island, the air warmed to a soft breeze, carrying the scents of salt and seaweed.

‘Roll your window down, Lily. Smell it, do you smell it? Put your head out.'

Paul slowed down, and dozens of cars swept past them, obliterating the seacoast fragrance.

Paul desperately wanted Lily to love the Cape, as he did. His dream was, as it had been with Barbara, only she dismissed it, to belong to this enchanted sandbar, and not be just a visitor. One day, if things went well, he and Lily would have a small cottage, near a beach, by a marsh, on a village street, in the woods, anywhere, with coloured beach stones and broken shells hanging about on the sandy porch from summer to summer. One day. A dream closer to reality now, if his lucky Tack Rack went on selling as it had begun.

During the hell of the divorce, work had been the only thing that kept him in one piece. The long hours on the road or in the store, in his office or out on the floor with customers, being friendly Mr Stephens, made sense. Heating frozen chicken pies in the apartment, and calling up the few friends who had not been friends of both of them to see if they would come and have a stir-fry, did not.

One day, an impatient woman who was hard to please came into Turnbull's and bought some bridle hangers made of burnished horseshoes, very elegant, very expensive, then changed her mind after they were wrapped, because they were the wrong size. She was a top rider and a good customer, so friendly Mr Stephens came out to see if he could order something for her.

‘I don't know what I want.' She complained about the inconvenience of her tack room, how there was never enough room for everything, and nobody made the right kind of equipment any more.

Back at the apartment, Paul was putting up units of adjustable book shelves and cabinets, when a great idea hit him. Without telling anyone at Turnbull's, he roughed out the modular Tack Rack on paper and got a friend who was a talented woodworker to make a prototype. His employer bought the Tack Rack for a few thousand dollars and ten per cent of all sales to Paul. Turnbull's had it manufactured in blow-moulded plastic and sold it expensively, since rich or poor, horse people don't want bargains.
If the Tack Rack became
the
gadget that everybody wouldn't be seen dead without, then one day … maybe.

On a rising tide of excited pleasure, he drove his darling Lily along the landward side of the Cape Cod canal, which, where the road rose above a steep, wooded slope, looked for an illusory moment like the Rhine, and over the arched bridge that soared high enough across the water to let the big ships pass underneath. On the seaward side, the railroad drawbridge was hoisted up between its elegant Victorian iron towers. Paul had thrummed over that lowered bridge as a boy, but there were hardly any trains now. All cars and trucks and vans and campers. Too many of them. The Cape was getting ruined, visitors said, as they poured across the two canal bridges to add to the ruin.

But off the road, the little villages of the unfashionable Upper Cape pottered along more or less undisturbed in a peaceful dapple of sunshine and shade, and not all the elms had been accused of disease and executed. Roomy white houses with black shutters, low shingled cottages with steep roofs, an archaic post office, ponies in a field, haphazardly fenced, grey weathered houses with curly gingerbread trim under the roof and pillared porches looking to the west above short curving beaches.

Paul showed Lily the house his parents used to rent when he was a boy. The same woman was in the real estate office, still pretending to be at her wits' end, still off-handedly efficient.

‘Two weeks in July? For that money? What's this craziness? Look, there's going to be dozens of clients coming in and out of here all weekend, and I don't have a thing to show them. What am I supposed to do? Wait now, you only want one bedroom and a rollaway, so let's see.'

She sent them off with a cheerful young woman, who showed them two possible houses and one perfect one.

It was tiny, not much more than an elaborate whitewashed shed, off the road down a sandy track that ended in a hump of rough grass and a broken fence crushed down by clambering rose briars. Through a miniature kitchen, they stepped up into an odd-shaped living-room, barely furnished, and full of light. Lily made for the big window that was the end wall, and cried out when she saw the marsh which lay like a carpet below the sandy
mound on to which the house had been fitted. Paul stood close behind, holding her.

The marsh, half land, half water, stirred in the breeze, the grass and bog plants all shades through grey to green, an insignificant stream glinting yellow where its curves emerged. A flock of geese headed over the flat wet expanse to where, between two distant houses on the low dunes, shone the sea.

‘Can we live here for ever?' Lily's face was vulnerable with delight. She had grown up a lot since Iceland, but sometimes she still looked like that eager child who had cast herself, with such reckless joy, headlong towards disappointment.

‘For a coupla weeks anyway, Saturday to Saturday,' the agent said.

She took them back to her office, and then they drove to the long sweep of Old Silver beach, which had a big hotel at its edge. Although it was colder here than in Boston, quite a few people were lying in the sun or picnicking or walking or wading, as Paul and Lily did with their pants rolled up, far out in the low tide water towards the blurred line of the New Bedford shore across the bay.

‘In July, we'll hardly find a space to sit on this beach,' Paul said. Terry and I came last year, and everybody else had come too. When I was a kid with a pail and shovel, there was almost nobody. We were outraged if another family sat down within fifty yards. In the good old days.'

‘Don't talk as if you're middle-aged.'

‘I'm thirty-five.'

‘Rubbish, that's nothing.' Lily would never talk about the difference in their ages.

They raced each other down the long beach to the line of breakwater rocks, scrambled over them and fell into the soft sand of a private beach below a sturdy shuttered house, where no one could see them.

Before going into Falmouth for lunch, they went back to their shed house to glory in the view again and look in through the windows. Still barefoot, they explored down one of the other narrow tracks which branched off to other houses. It turned back through some trees and wound about, soft with old pine needles,
until it came out on a small road of sand and sea-grass tufts that ran along the edge of an inlet. At the inner end, the tiled roof of a big house showed above thick trees. At the outer end, they found a steep mound of smooth sand at the inlet's opening, and across the road where the trees ended in coarse grass and thorny bushes, a narrow beach backed by a groin of huge stones that ran out and fell into the sea. The edges of the sheltered water lapped quietly at glossy pebbles, more like a lake than an ocean. It was a bay within a bay within the broad horseshoe of Buzzard's Bay, secret, untrodden. The distant Massachusetts shore and a nearer headland dotted with houses were worlds away. Five dark cormorants stood motionless on a lone rock, waiting for the tide to turn.

‘I never saw this,' Paul said. ‘I don't remember this beach being here.'

‘You invented it for me.'

‘You love it all, don't you?'

‘You know I do. Especially because today … well, specially because.'

It wasn't worth asking, ‘What?' When Lily stopped in the middle of a sentence and her eyes stilled and looked inward, she did not want to be probed or coaxed. She wanted to be left alone.

After lunch, they went into a greenhouse store to buy an Easter lily for Paul's mother. There were dozens of them, white madonna lilies, flaunting their loud sweet scent. Lily said it looked like a funeral.

‘Everybody has to have lilies on Easter,' Paul explained. ‘Like the ham with all the fixin's.'

‘Dead right.' A square, crew-cut man was waiting at the counter with them to get their lilies wrapped. ‘Why do we do it? It's a heck of a bore.'

‘Oh, no.' Lily, ardent immigrant, was shocked. ‘I'm fairly new here – oh, this is my husband.' She always introduced Paul to everybody she talked to in stores, restaurants, the subway, waiting in line to get into the movie theatre. ‘I love all of it. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. It's so – so, sort of,
sumptuous.'

‘And unnecessary.'

‘Oh, don't feel like that.'

She looked so concerned that the man told her, ‘It's senseless this year, because there's one less of us.'

‘Far away?'

‘My young son was burned to death two months ago. In a play hut he had in the woods. The other boy got out.'

Paul could say nothing. He could not even look at the man. Lily put her hand on his arm and said, ‘Oh, my
God,
I'm so sorry.'

‘Oh well.' The woman in the green overall was putting stiff paper round the man's plant. He gave a small snort, between a laugh and a moan. ‘C'est la vie.' He put some money on the counter, picked up his funeral lily and went out.

In the car, Lily cried, not so much for the man, as for her own guilt at having said too much, not enough, the wrong things.

‘I should have run after him.'

‘What would you have said?'

‘I don't know. Anything. Asked him to bring the rest of his family to have Easter with us.'

‘All the way to Dedham?'

‘Oh,
I
don't know, but I should have done something.'

‘What could you do? You couldn't bring his boy back. Don't lash yourself, darling. It's like with that girl, Anna. You couldn't bring her boyfriend back or make her parents suddenly dote on her.'

‘I couldn't even find her. And now that man … how can he bear it? C'est
not
la vie.'

‘He told you. That's something.'

‘Not enough.'

‘Don't cry, Lily. Don't spoil our lovely day.'

‘I'm a mess.' Paul's mother's favourite statement when she met you, fussing at her hair and clothes, straightening ornaments, bashing a cushion.

‘I didn't want to tell you till I'd had a test, because it's bad luck, but now I've got to. Because I really do feel …'

Paul stopped the car on grass at the side of the road. Lily shed a few more tears, and dug back into the self-indulgent guilt.

‘Me with a child, and that man without one. Do you suppose he tried to get the boy out? Suppose he couldn't get into the hut, and heard him screaming.'

‘Hush, Lily. Stop that.'

‘I'm homesick, Paul. I want my mum.'

‘That proves it,' he said. ‘It can take women that way. Barbara never liked her mother, but when she was carrying Terry – ' He shut up. Luckily, Lily had her head buried in his arms and could not hear.

‘I'm a mess, Lily dear.' Paul's mother opened the door of her house, a Dedham miniature baronial Tudor, in her apron, pushing at her soft, faded yellow hair. ‘Oh, a lily from Lily! Aren't you a doll?'

‘Paul bought it,' Lily said honestly.

‘He always buys me an Easter lily. Hello there, Terry, come on in. Your Grandpa can't wait to see you.'

Terry walked in wordlessly, with his shoulders hunched. He and the Judge greeted each other soberly. Lily never knew whether to kiss her father-in-law, or what to call him. Paul had told her, ‘Kiss him and call him Steven. He'll like that.'