Fortunate Lives
Authors: Robb Forman Dew
Fiction
The Evidence Against Her
The Time of Her Life
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
Nonfiction
The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out
A Southern Thanksgiving: Recipes and Musings
Copyright © 1992 by Robb Forman Dew
Reading Group Guide copyright © 2003 by Robb Forman Dew and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.
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Originally published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, 1992
First eBook Edition: October 2009
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and
not intended by the author.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use material in this book: “Puff the Magic Dragon” by Peter
Yarrow and Leonard Lipton. Copyright © 1963 by Pepemar Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The lines from
Half of Man Is Woman
by Zhang Xianliang, translated by Martha Avery, are reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Translation
copyright © 1986 by Martha Avery.
ISBN: 978-0-316-09034-6
Contents
Chapter Three: A Perfect Thing
Chapter Five: The Summer House
For Helen, for Dear, for Elizabeth,
and in memory of
Robert Edgar Rachal
GOD’S OWN CAT
I
N THE LATE AFTERNOON
Dinah retreated to her bedroom in that deadly time before the family had dinner. She had read that this was the time of day
when most people experience a drop in their blood sugar, but that notion struck her as only a useful rationalization. She
knew too well the hours from morning to night. They bobbled by like varicolored balloons, soft and round, like the word “hour”
itself. Except the hours between four and six of any day, before dawn or before dusk. Those are sinister moments in which
the spirit is endangered and deflated. She imagined those two hours drifting gray and close to the earth, flaccid and exhausted
of buoyancy.
And even though today she might reasonably allow herself to luxuriate in melancholy while that bit of time slid by, she knew
how easily she might fall into serious despair. She occupied herself, taking with her to the bedroom the white wicker-and-wood
lap desk that Martin had given her for Christmas. It was stocked with cream-colored monogrammed
stationery and embossed envelopes interlined with blue. She had requested the gift, and she thought of herself as someone
who used these things, although such correspondence as she carried on was likely to be scribbled out on a sheet of typing
paper at her desk, paper-clipped to a rumpled editorial cut out from the newspaper weeks before, or enclosed with a book review,
or a recipe and hastily folded into the flimsy, long envelopes she bought at the grocery store and kept on hand to pay bills.
She settled on the bed, kicking off her shoes and crossing her ankles, and pulled out the packet of booklets and informational
sheets that had come last week from the Freshmen Dean’s Office at Harvard College. She riffled through the pages of material
until she found the letter from Franklin M. Mount, Dean of Freshmen. Dinah’s huge orange cat had draped himself irritatingly
over her legs in the warm June weather, and she heaved him aside.
“Move, Taffy! Move over! Move over!” And the cat toppled over unresistingly onto his back right next to her, with his silky
white stomach exposed. He gazed backward at Dinah and tried to purr in his snuffling way until he fell asleep. Dinah relaxed
farther back into the pillows propped against the headboard and held the letter up before her at arm’s length, since she didn’t
have her glasses.
FRESHMEN DEAN’S OFFICE
HARVARD COLLEGE
12 Truscott Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Telephone (617) 459-1325
June 1, 1991
To the Parents of Members of the Class of 1995:
Each year, we ask parents of incoming freshmen to write us frankly and fully about their sons and daughters. Statements about
our students from those who know them best help us to assign them appropriate advisers, assign resident students to compatible
rooming groups, and anticipate the pleasures and the problems we will share. We would be grateful for detailed impressions
about your son’s or daughter’s strengths, weaknesses, and interests, and also for information about any medical problems we
ought to know of.
Once again she pondered the problem of the last sentence and that dangling preposition. Most likely it was unconsidered, merely
an example of the new flexibility of the written as well as the spoken word, the new language that encompassed peculiar uses
of such words as “impact.” On the other hand, it smacked of trickery to Dinah. It might be that the staff in the Freshmen
Dean’s Office had conferred about this. Suppose it was a calculated effort not to seem stuffy, or an attempt to elicit informal
and overly revealing replies?
She had read through all the other information sheets and pamphlets, trying to find out the intentions of the Freshmen Dean’s
Office, and had been truly alarmed by the cozy, conspiratorial tone of the last paragraph of a booklet called
Some Notes for Freshmen Parents:
Don’t try to hold the course you set and have been sailing together for seventeen years. It is hard to sail a ship with two
pilots. You should come along, but always keep in mind that it is a new voyage, someone else’s voyage. This way, college can
be the shared and happy embarkation it ought to be.
Martin refused to take it seriously. “This is great! I love this,” he had said when she insisted he read through the little
booklet. “We buy the ticket and David takes the cruise.” Of course, she understood the foolishness of all these communications,
but on the other hand, suppose there was something she did or did not write—an attitude and manner she did or did not adopt—that
might prejudice the Freshmen Dean’s Office against her own son. Suppose she unwittingly wrote something that condemned David
to a terrible roommate, or brought down upon his head the collective derision of the freshmen advisers. She had been struggling
for a week to draft an adequate reply to what seemed to her a daunting request, and had finally resorted to working out the
first draft on a yellow legal pad so as not to waste any more of the expensive Crane writing paper.
473 Slade Road
West Bradford, MA
June 8, 1991
Franklin M. Mount
Dean of Freshmen
Harvard College
12 Truscott Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Dear Mr. Mount,
I can only respond to your request for my and my husband’s impression of our son David Howells…
She turned the page back to start fresh. She couldn’t use the possessive “my and my husband’s,” since Harvard had declined
to use the prepositional construction “of which we ought to know.”
Dear Mr. Mount,
Of course, we’re biased, but we think Harvard is really lucky to be getting our son David Howells as a student and a member
of its community…
She reconsidered this immediately. The tone was altogether too jaunty, even arrogant. At the very least, she decided, she
would have to avoid using contractions and telling Harvard how lucky they were. Probably Mr. Mount was hoping for as succinct
a reply as possible, given the gravity of the task he had set for the parents of all the freshmen entering Harvard. But his
request was so provocative that Dinah closed her eyes briefly, trying to block out the images of her children that were rushing
through her mind. She turned to a fresh page and decided to get right to the heart of the matter, to illuminate for Mr. Mount
David’s character and personality, describe to Mr. Mount David’s whole life as he would live it up until the moment he entered
Harvard, and she would make every effort to do this in the space of one page:
Dear Mr. Mount,
Our son David Howells has a discerning intelligence, great love for and loyalty to his friends and his family, and a generous
spirit. He has always been a good student and is well liked by his peers, and we think that David will be a responsible and
productive member of the Harvard College community.
Perhaps what is most remarkable about David is his capacity for empathy. It is a quality he has possessed since early childhood,
but which was probably heightened by the death of his younger brother when David was thirteen years old.
She paused for a moment, gazing down at what she had written, and she realized that her fingers were clenched so tightly around
her pen that her words were nearly illegible. This was not the right day to attempt such a letter. The white sunshine of early
afternoon darkened into a thick yellow light that fell slantwise across the room, and she replaced the yellow pad, the sheets
of stationery, and the envelopes with their shiny blue lining inside the wicker compartment of the lap desk. She set the desk
to one side and rested her head against the pillows, letting her arms drop loosely to the quilt.
At the foot of the bed the dog had been listening anxiously to the scratching and rustling of Dinah’s endeavor, but when she
heard Dinah grow still, Duchess lay her head down comfortably between her paws and relaxed. Taffy didn’t stir, but the gray
cat, Bob, neatly perched on the wide, sunlighted windowsill, settled farther down on his turned-under paws and shifted his
gaze away from Dinah to the peak of the porch roof outside, where the sweet-eyed, round-breasted doves fluttering to a perch,
trekking poultry-fashion along the roof’s peak, made his muscles quiver under his rough coat and brought forth tiny anticipatory
chatterings of his teeth.
He was a cat who lived mostly along the perimeters of the rooms, and Dinah was sure he was only a first-generation domestic
cat. He had been one of the two tiny kittens David had rescued five years ago from underneath a car in the Price Chopper parking
lot. One gray-striped and the other a muddy tortoiseshell.
Neither of those two cats had ever acquired the glossy sheen, though, of Dinah’s big orange cat. Taffy was sanguine in his
golden glory of thick fur, and he was sweet-natured, although not especially intelligent. And unlike Bob, Taffy crossed all
the rooms of the house and even the yard outside with placid assurance, and stopped to sleep wherever he might be when the
urge overtook him.
Dinah and Martin had never sat down and discussed somberly whether or not to have children; they had merely stopped trying
not
to have them. It had been a decision too momentous to confront. And certainly with altogether lesser consequences, but in
much the same way, they had over the years become the custodians of these various animals. Duchess was the last of a litter
of long-haired German shepherd dogs—not fierce dogs under any circumstances and a strain, in fact, that breeders were trying
to eliminate from the genetic pool. Dinah had adopted Duchess as a favor to the receptionist at the Vet Clinic. Melissa knew
all the Howellses’ animals, and over the years she had become a friendly acquaintance of Dinah’s.
Dinah had arrived at the Vet Clinic one afternoon with Taffy, who needed shots, and found Melissa huddled in a chair in the
waiting room weeping while the dog looked on abashed. “I don’t know why her owners waited so long,” Melissa said when she
had composed herself a little. “Duchess is almost a year old! We’ve treated her at the clinic since she was a puppy. Now she’s
in heat, though, and they won’t keep her. I have two dogs at home already, and they’re both male. I’m not even supposed to
have pets in the apartment.” Melissa had been distraught. “I really despise those people! They just come in here and say,
‘Duke needs his rabies booster and we’re leaving Duchess to be destroyed.’
Destroyed
! I used to think it was awful to say you were going to put a dog to sleep when you just meant you were going to kill it.
But these people… I think they’re like Nazis!”