Dear Doctor Lily (43 page)

She could not deny it. ‘You'll never die of work, Michael Baxlee.'

‘Aren't I on my way to the Manpower office? Why have I got my jacket on?'

They talked to each other in thrown questions.

‘What am I – a mind reader?'

One night Mike met a man called Laurence who wanted him to go home with him, and got him pretty drunk. Mike got away through the men's room window, and stumbled across the bridge and through the prim hostile streets to his mother's house, which had lace curtains in front that went up in an arch, so that she could peer out from the darkened room where she sat waiting for him.

When she opened the door, he pushed in past her, lurched to the end of the hall, and threw up in the kitchen.

She went out back and got the shovel and cleared up the mess,
with her elbows squared and her mouth set like an H, a thin line with two deep bars from cheeks to chin. It was very annoying to him, leaning against the wall, to see her going at it, as she had gone at it for his father without a word, tough little pioneer woman, doing her job, martyr to the beast in man.

He gave her his unemployment cheque, and she gave him a miserly allowance, cutting it down, week by week, to just a few dollars.

Corrigan was in town, and came looking for him. Mike pretended everything was fine, because Corrigan was in a delivery business in Hanover, south of Boston, and fat, with a decent car. They went out drinking. Before he left the house, Mike went into his mother's bedroom and took the small amount of money that was in her old sewing box. It played ‘Annie Laurie' when you lifted the lid, so he opened it, quick and neat, when she flushed the toilet.

When Corrigan dropped Mike off at home hours later, all his clothes were out on the porch in black plastic trash bags. Only two bags was all it took.

Corrigan leaned on the bell. The curtains moved infinitesimally – or did they? The bell shrilled through a house as empty as an old conch shell. Under the door knocker was a note.

‘You're out,' it said. ‘Yours truly, Grace Baxlee.'

Mike slept in Corrigan's motel room, and after Corrie left next morning, he walked down the hill towards the docks and spent the last of Yours truly, Grace Baxlee's money on a cut-throat deal for pills with the guy behind the bar at Henry's Lounge and Deli.

Ida and Shirley were watching television with Bernie. The other kids were in bed. They let Mike in and gave him a beer.

‘Long time no see,' Ida said. ‘You look rough. What's wrong?'

‘Tired and hungry, that's all.'

‘Go make yourself a sandwich,' Shirley said. ‘We want to see this programme.'

He was out of the room quite a long time. When he came back, with another can of beer, he looked worse. His hair was like brown seaweed. The knife scar was livid in his white face. He slumped in a chair facing away from the television, and fell asleep. Bernie caught the beer can just before it tipped on to the floor.

Mike slept heavily. His mouth fell open. He snored. His head tipped back over the top of the chair, then fell forward on his chest.

‘Shut up, Mike,' Shirley called to him. ‘Wake up, you'll crack the light bulbs.'

‘He's dead to the world,' Ida said.

Bernie got up and went to the kitchen. He came back with an empty pill bottle and what was left of Shirley's half pint of vodka.

They had some ipecacuanha in the house from the time that Maggie drank furniture polish by mistake for cough syrup. They woke Mike up and dosed him with that to make him throw up, and forced him to stand and walk, the two women holding him upright and dragging him up and down the hall. Good old Bernie, expert from the bad old Buddy days, was on the floor with the bowl and sponge and roll of paper towels.

When he could speak, Mike begged them not to take him to the Emergency Room, because he would be sent back to Bridge-water. They let him stay for the rest of the night, taking turns to keep him awake, and in the morning, he was well enough to call his friend Corrigan in Hanover, to see if he could help.

Corrigan said that Mike could stay at his place for a while, and he would give him a job driving a van.

‘But if things are this bad,' Ida told Mike severely before she put him on the bus, ‘you've got to do something about it. It's all right to be messed up for a while – we've all been – but you can't make a lifestyle of it. You've got to get some help.'

‘Not the hospital, Ida, you promised.'

‘Don't be so paranoid. I'll make some calls. Somebody's got to be able to do something for you.'

‘Let me stay with you and Shirl.' In a last gasp, Mike turned back to the car, although his bus was panting to leave, and the
driver had slung his trash bags into the baggage compartment underneath.

‘No way. Shirley and me has our lives to lead. You've got yours.'

Childish men. Ida rolled up the window and put the car in gear. No thanks. No more of that for me.

‘Hey, Lil! How you doing!'

‘Hey, Eye! How are you?'

‘Listen, girl. I've got a friend who needs help. You know all about people who screw up. Could you talk to this guy?'

‘Well, he could talk to anyone at Crisis. I'll give you our number.'

‘He'd never call. He needs an appointment to see someone. Why not you? It's Mike actually, my friend that I brought to the Cape.'

‘Oh.' Lily paused. Then she said cautiously, ‘I might not be the best person to help.'

‘You didn't like him,' Ida said quickly. ‘Some crisis worker! Choose who you help and who you don't.'

But I'd rather he saw Martha, or one of the counsellors. If I get him an appointment, will he keep it?'

‘He will, or else.'

‘Good girl, Ida. When am I going to see you? I'll be on the Cape all the time soon. We're going to sell the Newton house and winterize the Cape one. How are you, Eye? Bernie gave me all the news when he came to see Tony last summer. He told me about the contract with the new office building and you and Shirley taking on more cleaners. Sounds as if things are going really well for you.'

‘Never better.' Ida flexed the muscles of her personality. ‘My life amazes me.'

After Terry had gone to live with his grandfather, life looked up a bit, and he was peaceful and fairly content.

Pursuing his brilliant career in the catering business, which he pretended – though not to himself – was going to lead him one day into hotel or restaurant management, he had a job in the high-school kitchen, and was also doing a small weekly cartoon for a local paper.

The Judge had let him take up a big table to put by the window in his room, and Terry had invented a sarcastic character called Tiffin, who wore baggy pants and a shrunk sweater, and commented on neighbourhood events and people.

The drawings were good, although the humour was feeble and the pay even feebler, but working to a deadline was surprisingly satisfying. Terry began work on some designs he was going to submit to a greeting card company. He was getting alarmingly square. He left lunch ready for his grandfather before he went to the school kitchen, and cooked supper in the evening for both of them, and often for Amy, the dearest and simplest of his girls who was the only one he saw now. Visitors dropped in to visit quite often, and sometimes a legal friend to consult, and the old man was writing an article on ‘Evidentiary Problems in Child Abuse Cases' for the
Massachusetts Law Quarterly.

After the first heavy snowfall of the winter, the fire station hooter sounded, ‘No School'. Terry, who had hated and despised shovelling snow at home, spent a contented, sparkling blue and white morning making a beautiful job of the paths and driveway. He was ridiculously proud of it. That was probably why, when it snowed again two days later while he was at work, the Judge went out with a shovel and broom to restore the perfection of Terry's front path.

Terry found him collapsed in his leather chair by the unlit fire, breathing painfully and shaking, his faded eyes flat with panic.

Nothing lasts. I lose everything.

Terry stayed on in the house for a while after his grandfather died in hospital.

‘What are your plans?' his father asked. People seemed to have been asking him that since he was born. If you were content with no plans, they were not. If you had plans, it took the edge off to disclose them.

‘I'll be okay.'

‘Do you want to go back to college?'

‘God no. I'm too old.'

‘At twenty-two?'

‘I feel forty. Missed out and past it.'

‘You haven't even begun.' Sometimes his father lost patience with him. ‘I hope you stick with Amy, at least.'

Amy had come often to the hospital, bringing tiny gifts, gentle, loving to the old man, unobtrusive. ‘Better be good to her. She's a darling girl.'

‘Too good for me?'

‘Oh for God's sake. Don't be such a bore.'

When his father got angry, his fair face flushed and his eyes narrowed and concentrated to an intense blue within the white corner wrinkles that had been folded away from the sun.

‘Sorry, Dad,' Terry said, because poor guy, he was an orphan now, which must be hard, not being anybody's child any more.

While Amy was helping Terry to sort and pack books at the Dedham house, she sat back on the floor with her wide Peruvian skirt in coloured circles around her and asked sensibly, ‘Why don't you and I get married?'

‘And do what?'

‘I'm working. We could live at my place till we could get somewhere bigger. You could paint while I'm out. I'd love you.'

I'd love you too.
He didn't say anything.

Nothing lasts. I lose everything. Yes, because you let it go.

‘Well, all right.' Amy knelt up and began dusting books again. ‘It was just a thought.'

After the furniture was moved out, Terry went to Europe with a friend called Oliver who was researching folk music. They parted company in Scotland. Terry wandered about, coming south in spirals, and ended up without any money, staying with Jamspoon at the flint and brick cottage, and helping out at the Duke's Head.

Besides the Dedham property, there was more money in Paul's father's estate after taxes than he had expected. He invested something for Terry, sold the house in Newton, paid off the mortgage on the Cape Cod house and put in proper heating and plumbing, got free of Turnbull's at last, and set up his own business at one end of the big barn, converted for a tack shop. Eventually, he would improve the stabling and fence the new piece of land he had bought, and board horses for other people.

In the old farmhouse, he and Lily did the things they had planned for its future in the days when they had loved it just as it was. They knocked down the wall between the kitchen and the dining-table end of the living-room and made it all one long room, with the big fireplace at one end, and the piano, and a wood stove and comfortable chairs at the other, with the round oak table half in the living-room, half in the kitchen.

When they were packing, and Lily was laughing at Paul for rolling sweaters, as if he were still packing a navy duffle bag, she found at the back of a drawer the plastic spoon that she had kept, unwashed, from the Air Force coffee machines at Flekjavik almost twenty years ago.

Lily hung it on a nail near the wood stove, where she could see it from the deep wide chair Paul had bought her, to match his own old shabby one, over which he and Barbara had fought when he first set up house with Lily.

‘What's that?' Isobel asked. ‘It looks tacky.'

‘It is the spoon that stirred my heart.'

Lily had framed the crayon sketch that Terry had done of his father in the wooded hills above the Duke's Head. Now she hung it on the nail with the plastic spoon. On late summer afternoons, the low sun came through a small western window opposite and swept across the picture and the side of the man's light hair, just as a different sun, in England, had done when Terry had drawn it.

‘Best portrait I ever saw,' Harry told Paul.

‘The back of my head?'

‘A speaking likeness.'

Terry had said he was doing some caricatures in England, but it would be sad if he wasted his talent on things like Tiffin cartoons and greeting cards. Very rarely, he would dash off an extraordinary sketch like this, and then do nothing more for ages.

When Paul was alone, and not self-conscious about looking at the back of himself in the blue sweater, he would occasionally stand and stare at it, until the man with the light in his hair blurred outward into the guessed-at distance below and beyond, inward into the heart of the picture.

Isobel was almost fourteen when the new school year started. Everyone told her it would be traumatic to change schools, but apart from her two soul-mates, who would come to the Cape often for weekends, it was quite a relief to shake free of the assorted come-and-go Newton friends, and the hangers-on who had nothing better to do than call her up to talk about nothing when she wanted to be left alone.

At the new junior high school, she was not as far ahead as she had expected. Her class had the same lump of neanderthals, who didn't count, and didn't know they didn't count, and the same percentage of stars and leaders. Isobel had thought she would be more sophisticated than them, and it was a shock to find that some of these people who lived on the wrong side of the Cape Cod canal were ahead of her.

But she had Tony, and he was eighteen. These girls who took an hour to dress and do their hair before school were fooling around with fourteen- and fifteen-year-old hairless zombies, cratered with acne.

Tony had a soft line of moustache and a tiny clump of apprentice beard in the cleft of his chin. He was up at the house a lot, working for Isobel's father. Although they were free and easy with each other in the old way, she no longer thought of him as a childhood friend. Pretty soon, he noticed that. He scolded, ‘Bella, don't do that. Don't look like that.'