Fortunate Lives (2 page)

Dinah, of course, had taken Duchess home. But the dog seemed to have absorbed some idea of the precarious nature of her continued
existence. She was a coward, racing around the rooms to find Dinah whenever the doorbell rang and forever agonizing over the
possibility that the cats were more favored than she. They often appropriated her dog bed, ate chunks of her dog meal, and
so subtly harassed
her that she would even drink every drop of water poured out for her until she was bloated with the effort as the cats sat
on the windowsills watching. Dinah had learned never to fill Duchess’s bowl more than half full.

Taffy padded after Dinah wherever she went in the house, and Bob, in his furtive cat life, directed his cautious gray attention
toward her, too, and yet he kept his distance. He shadowed her from room to room, materializing only after she had settled
somewhere, and even then he regarded her obliquely, out of range; it had been the tortoise-shell who had studied her every
move, kept tabs on her, made her his business.

Dinah always had the animals in mind, one way or another—just as unconsciously she kept account of the seasons, the months,
the days, and the hours—but they had come into her life spontaneously, and she had never thought of them as hers any more
than it would have occurred to her to feel proprietary about all that time slipping by.

She turned her head toward the last of the sun. Beyond the tall windows of her room she could see all the way across the wide
space of lawn, down the far slope of the yard behind the kitchen. She watched her children moving through the garden. David
had borrowed a Rototiller and turned the soil for a garden early in the spring, and he spent hours reading gardening books
and catalogues. It was his current enthusiasm.

Now he moved deliberately among the rows, turning a leaf here or there for inspection and snapping off dead blooms, and Sarah
followed slowly along behind him. She dawdled among the flowers in the syrupy golden air as though she were mesmerized by
the late afternoon heat, and her brother stooped to cut an armful of tall gladiolas for the hall vase and gave them over to
her to hold while he moved along to the rows of vegetables. Sarah accepted the flowers and stood with her arms slightly raised
and
cupped around the long stems, and she suddenly seemed to Dinah to be a girl entirely unlike the everyday person Dinah thought
of as her daughter. In the waning afternoon Sarah was a lovely and romantic figure, as mysterious and intriguing as a painting.
As Dinah watched Sarah and David intently, she marveled that any parents were able to sum up all that they knew about one
of their children in a short letter to Mr. Franklin M. Mount, Dean of Freshmen, Harvard College.

David stood up, shaking the earth from two heads of lettuce, holding them aloft to get Sarah’s attention as she turned away
to carry the flowers up to the house. Dinah had unconsciously leaned toward the window, and she breathed a long sigh and fell
back against the pillows. If she were Sarah’s age, the days would accrue slowly, each one likely to be overwhelming in its
drama. Dinah let her neck go limp against the headboard, relieved that at age forty she was past the point of anticipation
of a whole life to be shaped and lived, measured and judged.

She stayed exactly where she was in that moment of the late summer afternoon that is suspended on the verge of twilight. Mourning
doves bobbed and fluttered on the telephone lines along the street, sobbing into the deep light; the hearty spears of brilliant
gladiolas and the soft purple phlox glowed vibrantly among the thin-petaled, palely drooping day lilies, until it seemed that
the taller flowers, spiking into the dimming afternoon, were themselves a source of illumination. When the view of the garden
grew hazy in the fading light, she roused herself and went downstairs to organize dinner. Martin came in to put away the tools
he had used to mend this and that around the house, and Sarah wandered in to set the table. David dashed up the lawn to see
how much time there was before they ate and to be sure she would have the water boiling before he picked the corn.

“I can husk it in a second. It’s better just picked,” he said.

“Okay, David. Let’s have it last. I’ll put the water on when I take the chicken out. We can have the corn for dessert.”

When they were all four seated at the table and Martin was carving the chicken, Duchess joined them for dinner. “God! That
dog is disgusting,” Sarah said. Duchess patiently picked up mouthfuls of dog meal from her bowl in the corner and dropped
all the nuggets on the rug under their feet, where she lay down and munched along companionably. She knew Sarah was irritated,
though, and her ears went flat in apology. Sarah bent over and gave her a pat.

“Sarah, don’t pet the dog when you’re eating your dinner,” Dinah said. “It’s just not clean.” This was only what she said
because she was Sarah’s mother; there was no conviction in the words.

Sarah took little notice. “I’m going over to Elise’s after dinner, Mom,” she said. “Is that okay? Could you drive me?”

Dinah turned to answer her daughter, who was sitting where Toby had once sat. It
was
Sarah, fair and fine-boned as Toby had been, approximately the same age and size as Toby was six years ago when he had last
sat in that very chair—restless, fidgeting with his food, anxious to be done. It was Sarah, but for a split second Dinah clearly
registered the image of her second son, as though he were a visual echo. “It’ll still be light, Sarah. Why don’t you walk
over and maybe David can pick you up later if he has the car?” And there was no dissension between them as there would have
been if Toby had made the same request; Sarah was accommodating and perfectly amenable.

When Toby was alive, dinner had so often been a turbulent affair—the time of day Dinah dreaded most. Stranded between his
two siblings, he had been defensive
in every direction. He had believed that David got more respect and Sarah got more attention. He and Dinah had frequently
been locked in a brooding combat, although away from the table they could at least retreat from one another. But they were
unyielding at dinner, Dinah brisk and Toby sullen. He had been able to sense any criticism she did not speak, and even now
she wondered if sometimes she had intended her expression, her tone of voice, to reveal her irritation.

Once, when he had slammed away from the table and out the back door, Dinah had leaped up and followed him. She had stood just
outside the screen and shouted after him. “Goddammit! Goddammit! If you
won’t
be happy, damn it, you’ll ruin my life! My whole life. You don’t have the right to do that, Toby! You don’t have the
right
to make me so miserable!”

And she had turned back to the table to be shocked by her children’s bleak faces. Sarah, only about four or five years old,
had sat paralyzed on her booster seat, truly frightened by so much anger, and David wouldn’t meet her eyes. But her husband’s
expression had been flat with grief, his fine mouth slackened in a pained grimace and his voice oddly without fervor. “Sometimes,
Dinah…” Martin said. “Jesus Christ! Sometimes you say the most terrible things!”

It was true. She and Toby had said the worst things they could say to each other. She had believed they were equals; with
Toby she had always lost her grip on the fact of her own adulthood. Nothing slipped by him, not one injustice, not the smallest
inequity. There were other times when even Martin had said, “That kid’s a real clubhouse lawyer! You can’t win with him! There’s
no way to make him listen!”

But Toby
had
listened to them; he had listened all the time. He had simply never been sure of what he heard. On his fourth Thanksgiving,
when Dinah was pregnant with
Sarah, they had decided to have a formal meal in the dining room. Over the course of the preceding week, Dinah had impressed
on them that this was a grave event—the first year that they would not eat casually in the kitchen, or at the local Howard
Johnson for the sake of quick service to small children.

As Martin carved the turkey at the table, the children grew restive, and Dinah became cross at his perfectionism as he painstakingly
cut away nearly transparent slices from the breast. She urged him on. Everything else was getting cold. In exasperation he
had finally severed the drumsticks, one for each child. Toby had recoiled in astonishment when his father had deposited the
huge drumstick on his plate with a flourish of the silver-handled carving fork, and Martin had laughed. “That’s the part I
always wanted at every Thanksgiving,” he said. “You get the whole thing, Toby,” he said. “The best of the dark meat.”

Toby sat stoically through the meal until Dinah noticed that he hadn’t eaten any turkey at all. “Sweetie, don’t you like that?
Do you want some gravy?” He had looked up at her doubtfully for a moment, not replying.

“Can I have some turkey?”

“Well, honey, there’s plenty of turkey. Don’t you like what you have?”

“Daddy said he gave me the dog meat. I don’t want it. I just want some turkey.” He was not accusing them; he had always been
generous in his forgiveness. He just wasn’t sure how he stood in the family; he didn’t trust his hold on them. When he was
seven and went off to camp for two weeks, he signed his letters: “Your son, Toby Howells.”

He had believed completely in right and wrong, and after a daylong battle with his mother, if he finally did think that her
argument had merit, he would say so. He was willing to make amends, to say he was sorry. If he and she had been edgy together,
their attachment was fervent. They had
violently disapproved of any trait in the other that they loathed in themselves.

The summer following Toby’s death, David had come across the two orphaned cats. Dinah had taken David with her when she went
shopping. She had asked him to come along and help with all the grocery bags, but it was a time when she could scarcely bear
to be without one of her children.

In the parking lot in the summer’s heat she had thought at first that she was hearing the squeak of her grocery cart as it
rocked slightly every time David hefted another sack of groceries from the basket to the back of her station wagon. But David
recognized the tiny mewling sound for what it was. He had lain down flat on the graveled asphalt and maneuvered himself all
the way under the bronze-flecked Trans Am, which was parked next to their own car.

Dinah had stood looking down at David’s long legs emerging from beneath the car and realized with surprise that they could
have been connected to an adult body. David was just thirteen, and, still, that was Dinah’s most vivid memory of that day—gazing
down at her son’s darkly haired, muscular legs.

“I need something to bribe it with,” he had called out to her from beneath the car, and she had torn open a package of raw
hamburger.

A little crowd gathered, three middle-aged women and an elderly man, drawing their carts into a semicircle and watching David
in silence. One of the women had moved forward abruptly when David emerged far enough to hold a kitten out to them. The woman
swooped toward him and grabbed it in a peculiar, greedy lunge, and Dinah had not interfered. David had disappeared again beneath
the car, and when he finally wriggled out, he held a second kitten, grease-spotted and clutching at his arm in panic.

“Twins,” he announced with a real grin, unselfconscious and slightly quizzical, his dark eyebrows lifted. Dinah had been so
smitten with him—momentarily at ease and handsome in the sunlight, ready for any small irony that might come his way, and
with his beautiful, beautiful smile—that for a moment she had been dazzled right out of her grieving.

But none of the onlookers smiled back. They just gazed at him blankly as he sat propped up on one hand in the parking lot
and extended the other kitten to them for their inspection. Dinah took the tiny cat, and David scrambled up by himself, still
smiling with satisfaction at the people who stood around him.

“I don’t want this cat,” said the woman who had taken the first kitten from David’s hand. She seemed to mean that she would
have kept it if it had proved to be something else, but now she turned and deposited the kitten inside one of the grocery
bags in Dinah’s station wagon. The poor cat sprawled miserably over a netted bag of oranges.

And the elderly man who had been standing on the outskirts of their small assembly became quite upset. He rose up on his toes
for a moment in agitation, rocking back and forth. “Those cats belong to the people who have this car. Now, that’s what I
think. You could go in the store, okay? They would announce it over the loudspeaker right in the store if you go to the office.”

But Dinah cast her eye doubtfully over the car, obscenely canted up at the rear on a raised axle. “Would you go get a box
from the manager, please?” she said to David. “One that’s pretty deep.” He had loped off, brushing bits of sand and gravel
from his nylon running shorts.

The three women had wheeled their shopping carts away to find their own cars in the wide lot. One woman turned back for a
moment. “Well, bye-bye,” she said, “and good luck.” The woman who had taken the first cat from David’s hand moved off, though,
without a word. The man
stood there a little longer, still agitated, still rocking back and forth from heel to toe. But Dinah didn’t feel the slightest
qualm about the propriety of taking the kittens away with her. The shiny car that had produced them looked to her as if it
were still at the height of its mating season. She merely nodded at the elderly little man who was filled with alarm at this
unnerving turn of events in his day. But he finally calmed himself and had gone on his way before David returned.

On the drive home the two kittens had shat pitifully, terrified in the high-sided box, filling the front seat with the scent
of their mother’s milk, so Dinah reasoned that they hadn’t been weaned. “Let’s name them Bob and Ray,” David said. “I’ll give
them a bath when we get home.”

David was enamored that year of Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding—all their old records that Martin had and their program on public
radio. Dinah glanced over at him as she drove and had been entirely happy at that moment that she was connected to her own
son. Now and then, in that first year of paralyzing grief after Toby’s death, she had been granted a few moments like that—rare
occasions when she was startled out of her preoccupying sorrow by a resonating glimpse of one of her other children who was
absolutely filled up with his or her own personality.