Dear Doctor Lily (24 page)

Immediately he wanted to say, ‘Sorry, forget that,' but Lily said, ‘I love it when you get severe with me. I want to do it right. I want to be the best at it.'

Paul left work early, and called in at his parents' house on his way to Cape Cod. He sat with them on the patio and drank Muriel's lemonade made from her grandmother's recipe in Indiana, and wished he did not have to join the Monday evening traffic of tourists starting their week.

‘But you always say you want to live year-round on the Cape,' his mother said. ‘The commuting would kill you.'

‘I suppose.' Paul closed his eyes and thought of his boyhood bed upstairs. Once you were married, you couldn't come home for a night in your old room. ‘What are you having for supper?'

‘Baked scrod. Want to stay and eat? There's plenty.'

‘No I'd better get back. I'll be glad when James and Nora go, and Lily and I are alone.'

‘You don't care for her folk? I thought they were darling.'

‘Oh, they are. But they're there.'

The Judge had had a cold, and Muriel worried at him.

‘He takes on other people's work. They all take time off, and pretend to be sick when they want to play in a golf match, but your father won't call in sick even when he is.'

‘I'm not. I'm never sick.'

‘You are so, Steven. I've had some anxious times with you, over all these years. He'll pass away before me,' she told Paul, when the Judge went into the house, ‘and that's the way it ought to be, because he'd be lost if I passed on first. I would manage all right. I wouldn't come and bother you.'

‘I'd want you to.'

‘No, I'd join a club, travel with some of the girls, take up reading or something. Go to Florida like Aunt Bessie. My family's full of widow women. I guess the men couldn't take it.'

Muriel stood at the edge of the patio and watched the red car until it was out of sight. There went a good man, her son, the best of the bunch, as far as her sisters and cousins had managed to produce, and their husbands certainly weren't a patch on Judge Steven. Right from the start, when she dated him at Anderson High in her pink and cream sweater she always loved, she had known he would go far.

How do I keep up with him? That had always been the point. People thought she was stupid, but she was smarter than most of them, because she had never tried to be what she was not, since Steven liked her the way she was, and that was all that counted. Maybe when he did go to his rest, she might branch out, if she wasn't too old and foolish by then, but not now.

She stepped off the flagstones on to the grass to turn off the sprinkler and pull some weeds while the ground was damp. Agh! I'm putting on weight. I get gas when I bend. Takes away your breath the way the pain goes right up into your teeth. The pain – oh no, please, oh no. A red car driven by Paul – she could see his darling good-natured face through the windshield – came at her and struck her in the chest and crashed her down.

When Paul got home at last, Lily came out of the screen door more slowly than usual.

His father had called. Paul's mother had been dead when the Judge came down from his study and found her.

‘She can't be dead.' Paul was so tired, he could have fallen
down at Lily's bare feet. ‘I was just with her.' They were talking about someone else, not him, not Muriel.

The dog Arthur, distantly related to a large pale poodle, greeted Paul with his shy smile, lifting one side of his lip above his teeth, and waited with forelegs lowered and apart, to jump in whichever direction Paul would go. He went upstairs to get night things and a razor, and then back to the car.

‘Stay and have something to eat, darling.'

‘I'll get something with Dad. I must go to him.'

‘You can't go alone. I'll just put on a skirt.'

‘No, you stay with the kids.'

Arthur, who was everyone's dog but considered himself Paul's, stood with his ears down and his eyes wounded, as if he had seen suitcases packed. Paul knelt and put his face against the dog, wiping off tears on the rough coat. Then he got back in the car and drove fast on the empty side of the road, against the crawling cars piled with families and bags and bicycles and beach-chairs.

When Terry and Brian came down off the mountain, they walked along a road, not bothering to get on to the verge, making cars go round them, into a shabby Vermont town, with a dead car or the hulk of a trailer in every side yard.

Brian had wanted to stay up in the hills, but three nights of sleeping out was enough for Terry, and they had no more food. In the top apartment of a tall narrow house, they found a room which they could only reach by walking through two other bedrooms. Outside their room, a balcony sloped crazily, with part of the railing missing.

‘Better not sleepwalk,' Brian said. The balcony was propped up by a slanting two-by-four in the backyard.

They left their back-packs, since the room had a lock and key, walked through a room full of odorous sleeping babies and another room with piles of dirty clothes on an unmade bed, and found a diner at the empty crossroads which was the heart of
town. They ate in silence, taking turns to get up and put a quarter into the juke-box. They had nothing to say. They had not fought, but they were already fed up with each other.

Brian was a health freak. He had been jogging and doing long hikes for years, and he outwalked Terry, who was much smaller than him.

Terry had finished growing, too soon. Boys were always taller than their mothers, but his mother was only five foot four. He used to choose smaller friends, like Eddie Waite. He had seen Eddie the other day in the shopping plaza.

‘Hi.'

‘Hi.'

Eddie had dropped out of school two years ago, lucky swine.

‘What's new?' Eddie had asked.

‘Hunhnyah.'

‘Want to go out some night?'

‘Nah.'

At this stage of his life, Terry often did not let himself do things he wanted, to prove that he never got anything he wanted. One of the reasons he went with Brian, who was half a head taller, was to prove that he was too small.

When Brian enthused about the view, Terry sat with his back to it. Some of the time, the mountains and the freedom and the gallons of oxygen put Terry into a great spirit of excitement and nervous energy that made him run down the slopes when Brian kept his steady pace, and needle Brian about the things he set store by: his body, his girl, his uncle's ski lodge at Dixville Notch. But then Terry would be sitting on a rock, throwing orange peel into the trickle of ice-cold stream in which his feet were soaking, and the inert spongy mass that was his soul inside him would fill up with poured concrete and the weight would drop him down with it, and none of all this was any use, any use at all, and he could not dredge up words to speak to Brian.

There was a pay phone at the end of the diner.

‘Gonna call your mother?' Brian asked.

Terry shook his head. His mother was the reason he was here. Since she married that zombie with the glossy beard and greedy white fangs, who hoped to revolutionize Terry's low-key life, he had kept out of the house as much as possible.

‘My mother is a tramp,' he instructed Brian.

‘Who says?' Brian had several big yellow teeth and a white one that had been put in after a football mishap, and one of those long noses that curl over and look as if they have a drip on the end, but it's a drip of cartilage.

‘I say.'

All those years he had put up with her during her camel-blanket depressions, and stood up for her when Paul and Lily made snide digs, while pretending to be so decent and fair. All those years of her lovers, and himself as ‘lover boy' when she was off men, and the last ghastly time when she had walked around the house in her underwear and then screamed about his filthy mind when he accused her of coming on to him. All those years, and then when things might have worked out, with the two of them at home and Terry getting some kind of dumb job when he graduated from high school, she went and married some guy he never even heard of. Drummond Blake, a tax accountant, a man with custody of a twelve-year-old daughter who looked like him, except she didn't have a beard yet.

Terry went to the wedding to be his usual sunny, devoted-son self. Afterwards, while he was staying with his North Shore grandparents, he sent his father a cartoon of Drummond Blake. Drum and Fife. He had him dressed as a revolutionary soldier, with a paunch and bandy legs and a gross head with legless things alive in the beard.

His cartoons were getting more cruel and far-out. He didn't do carefully drawn witty comic strips any more. He stabbed people on to the paper as grotesque caricatures. He had sent one of President Ford stumbling over a dead bag-lady to the
Washington Post.
He would make his fortune and give it all away to unworthy causes and live in embittered poverty.

Brian called home. His promise to do that had been one of the conditions for letting them come on this hike, although they would have come anyway.

‘Your father called my folks,' Brian said when he came back to the booth. ‘He wants you to call him.'

‘What for?'

‘How should I know? Just call him, is all.'

‘All right, all right.' If they were going to have a decent night's sleep together in the back room of the railroad apartment, there was no sense in getting Brian mad. ‘Lend me a dime.'

‘Call him at your grandfather's in Dedham, right?'

‘Why?'

‘Because that's where he is, dope.'

Terry received the news from his father in silence. He did not believe it anyway. Gramma wasn't that old. She was ironing tablecloths somewhere and spraying polish on the leaves of her houseplants.

‘I'm sorry,' his father said. ‘I know how you must feel. I feel like hell, but your grandfather is amazing. The funeral is Wednesday. Eleven o'clock. Come to the house first and you can go with us to the funeral home.'

‘I can't make it,' Terry said.

‘What do you mean, you can't make it?' His father's voice rose so high it broke. ‘Where are you, for God's sake? Get a bus, hitch, rent a car. I'll pay. Just be here.'

‘Sorry, Dad.' Terry looked round at the two girls who were sitting near the pay phone, and looked away again, their smirking eyes on his back. ‘I can't.'

Barbara turned up at the funeral home, without her new husband, thank God, although Paul was curious to see what he looked like, after getting Terry's caricature.

‘Did you talk to Terry?' Paul asked her.

‘I can't reach him.'

‘I did. He said he couldn't be here.'

‘Oh –
bad.'
Barbara curved up her mouth into her tight smile, with the lips sucked in. ‘Your wife is very lovely.'

‘Thank you,' Paul said stiffly. ‘And thank you for coming.'

‘I never had anything against your mother.'

Lily had no dark clothes on the Cape. She wore a grey dress with a lot of white on it. Barbara was in black, with the pearls
her parents had given her when she married Paul. She looked very elegant. Her long manicured nails brought back to him the hysteria when one of them broke. Her hair was a lighter yellow, still short, but fluffier. It reminded Paul of how her usually sleek head had looked if she washed her hair at night and woke with it wild, and would not go down to bring up coffee for them, in case she saw the paper-boy.

Muriel would have been amused that she came. ‘What in the world is she after?' she would have wanted to know.

Just before the service started, when everyone had been seated in the air-conditioned, flower-fragrant room where the casket was enthroned, Terry came in at the back.

Lily saw him and nudged Paul. Terry's brown curls were unwashed and uncut, and looked as if they might have bits of twig and leaves in them. Among the politely dressed mourners, he was insultingly ill-clad. But he was there, in hiking boots.

Paul put a hand on his father's arm.

‘Terry made it.'

‘Oh, good.' Even Steven smiled in a perfectly comfortable and natural way. He sat peacefully, with his knuckly brown-spotted hands in his lap, waiting for the service to begin, and prepared to give it his courteous attention.

The minister stepped up alongside the casket. He nodded to the Judge, and the Judge nodded back.

A service amid the textured wallpaper and thick grey carpet of a funeral home bore even less relationship to its subject than a service in a church. At other funerals, Paul had never been able to think about the dead person dutifully for a whole half hour, and he did not suppose all these people could either.

Some were known to him, some not. The Judge had greeted them all. Several colleagues were there, and people connected with the courts, including some defendants in whose favour he had found, after long hearings, and two of his greatest fans, a man and woman he had convicted two years ago, with an award of one of his humane Even Steven sentences.

This large insulated room with blinds drawn against the sun must be full of wandering private thoughts, drifts of other people's memories, a phrase of music, a commercial jingle,
pictures behind the eyes, philosophies: We've all got to die, but not yet. One down means it's not me.

This time it's part of me, though. It's my childhood gone. Paul's father was his adolescence and manhood. His mother had taken with her his childhood, in which to her he could eternally do no wrong. I am always a grown man now, Paul realized, while they were standing to sing a hymn. I never did enough for you, and the last thing I could have done, I didn't do, because I drove away towards Route 128 and left you to die alone.

Years ago, his mother had taught him that when you die, you go up to the gates and they let you in, whoever you are, whatever you've done – because it wouldn't be worth dying if there were winners and losers up there, same as down here – and gave you a job to do, like making guests feel at home by letting them set the table. If that was what she believed, that was how it would be for her, if we create our own life after death, as before it. Except that by now she might have realized that no tables would need to be set with her briar-rose silver pattern, as she moved faster than light away from the contented personality and neat body she had discarded in favour of whatever came next.