Fortunate Lives (20 page)

“Umm. No, you’re wrong. I imagine that it’s very hard. But you know, I was talking to Vic this morning. It seems to both of
us… well… you can’t
expect
so much from Sarah and especially from David. Frankly, I think you’re behaving very badly toward your children, Dinah.”

Dinah was astonished. She swiveled around to stare at her friend, but Ellen was still basking in the mild sunshine, eyes closed.
“I can’t even imagine what would make you say something like that to me when you have absolutely no idea…” Dinah didn’t raise
her voice; in fact, her tone was softly plaintive, but she was quite angry.

Ellen interrupted her, though, by a continual shaking of her head, her hair swinging behind her, her eyes still closed, and
her face tilted away from Dinah. “You’ve got to understand, Dinah, that you simply aren’t allowed to
need
anything from your children! It’s the greatest unkindness you can do them. And we probably shouldn’t even discuss it, because
you won’t get any pity from me.”

Dinah sat completely still with shock and anger, and
Ellen, who could not see her, mistook her silence for reluctant acquiescence, and she began to elaborate on the subject. “I
know the situation too well from the other side,” Ellen said. Her voice was soft with pained amusement. “My parents were impossible.
You know I was in therapy for years, of course. But you have no idea… I can’t tell you the enormous relief I feel whenever
I remember that my parents finally died. Oh, my God! The
freedom
! I started writing…. Well, I suppose I also feel guilty, too, in spite of myself, at feeling that relief. But still…”

Without opening her eyes, Ellen stretched full-out on the blanket and put her hands behind her head, turning her face to the
side slightly so that Dinah only gazed at her profile. Dinah was too dumbfounded to reply. No longer than three minutes ago
she had thought of herself as the mother of two children who sometimes, and in varying degrees, seemed to dislike her, but
now she saw quite clearly that she was a woman whose children—perhaps unwittingly—eagerly anticipated her death. It was quite
a lot to absorb in the soft air and under the gentle sky.

She glanced in appalled enlightenment at the clusters of picknickers around them. There was a woman nursing an infant, and
another mother in irritable pursuit of a gleefully fleeing toddler, but when she caught up to him and swung him into the air,
he crowed exultantly, and the woman laughed, too. Nearby an elegantly dressed couple talked between themselves while their
teenaged sons threw a Frisbee back and forth. Dinah studied the boys carefully, putting their ages between fourteen and sixteen.
As the younger boy ran backward several steps and raised his arm to grasp the lip of the descending Frisbee, Dinah saw, in
her mind’s eye, the slow, uncurling motion of his arm and a mighty and precise snap of his wrist, which sent the Frisbee in
a lethal path in his parents’
direction, striking them simultaneously where their heads were bent together in pleasant discussion. Without a sound the two
of them crumpled toward each other in a quick and painless death. Dinah experienced a reflexive recoiling from the blow in
the same way that one awakens with a start from a dream of falling. As she came back into the moment, the younger boy released
the Frisbee in a high, short arc in his brother’s direction, and they both moved farther away where there was more space and
fewer people. A taller boy in a Boston College sweatshirt called out to them, and the older brother sent the Frisbee spiraling
in his direction. A fourth boy joined them so that they formed a loose square. They were attractive young men, laughing and
calling to each other, and Dinah felt sure, all at once, that not one of them was brooding about the fact that his parents
were still alive. The idea gave her faint hope and renewed her anger at Ellen. The notion of Vic and Ellen discussing her
over their morning coffee flashed through her thoughts.

“Ellen! For God’s sake! What are you talking about? I don’t want
anyone’s
pity! That’s not the point at all. Of course I need things from my children. Every parent needs things… which, granted, is
not to say that I’ll
get
them.” She wanted to put an end to this discussion. She was amazed at herself for having taken it up with Ellen, who had
no children of her own, and who fancied that by occasionally borrowing the Howells children for an outing or a weekend that
she could comprehend parenthood. She had once explained to Dinah that she wanted to take the children into New York, that
it would be helpful to her poetry. Dinah had thought at the time that only someone with Ellen’s vanity could even imagine
such a thing. But because Dinah liked Ellen’s poetry very much, Dinah had decided that other people’s children might well
serve as triggers to Ellen’s own younger self.
The act of writing was mysterious to Dinah, and she had great respect for Ellen’s talent; but her arrogance, her presumption
this afternoon was galling. Dinah meant to speak patiently. “Every parent in the world needs at least the illusion of returned
affection….”

Ellen remained stretched out on the blanket with her arms crossed behind her head, but she opened her eyes very wide when
she recognized Dinah’s indignation. She seemed mildly amused. “No. Absolutely not. You can’t need anything!” She watched Dinah
alertly, and Dinah sputtered back at her, “Ellen, you don’t know anything about living with people you love unconditionally!
I need just what they need from me….”

“You don’t get to do that, you know,” Ellen said calmly, “especially if you’re anyone’s mother.”

“Of course you do. It’s not a question of
getting
to do it! It’s simply the way it is. I need affection…”

Ellen was shaking her head again, and Dinah’s voice rose imploringly.

“… and kindness. That’s just reasonable! Courtesy…”

“If you really need all those things—if you can’t survive without them—then you’ll become a monster,” Ellen said, closing
her eyes again, ending the discussion.

Dinah moved to one of the lawn chairs and sat gently massaging her neck, seeing no point in reminding Ellen of what she and
Martin—and Sarah and David, too—had already survived. She did not say that the murkiness and intricacies of family life sometimes
bewildered her with the things that could not be, were not under any conditions said to each other. Dinah would not admit
to her friend that sometimes she felt she held on to her humanity only by the very tips of her fingers.

Franklin M. Mount

Dean of Freshmen

Harvard College

12 Truscott Street

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Dear Mr. Mount,

Do you think it’s true that people don’t reach adulthood until the death of their parents? Erik Erikson said that, and I have
no idea how he meant to define adulthood. I don’t even remember where I learned it. Some people never become adults no matter
how old they are and even if both their parents are dead. I think other people are adults at age six or seven. But I’m trying
to understand what he was getting at. I wonder how old Erik Erikson was when he decided that. I wonder if his own parents
were still alive, and also if he was an only child. Is adulthood what we’re all striving for? Do you think it’s a particularly
desirable condition, or did he only mean that it was inevitable? He may have meant that adulthood is regrettable.

Our daughter Sarah just turned thirteen and still needs us, and I think that she probably knows it. I think that she needs
her father right now more than she needs me, but in some ways she would never recover if she lost either one of us at her
age. What I’ve been thinking, though, is that it seems possible to me that David could survive contentedly without either
one of us. I do know, of course, that in all sorts of ways he would feel grief at our absence, and he would miss us terribly,
but I’m no longer sure that our existence is necessary to his living a successful life. I guess it’s true that in the
ordinary way of the world it may be that parents simply live too long.

When Sarah and Anna Tyson reappeared, and all four of them were eating their lunch, Ellen told them about the problems she
was having with her writing.

“I worry and pace,” Ellen said. “I glance at the final poem and compare it with the
shape
of the copy I tape up across the room. It all seems wrong. The
real
poem—I mean, when it’s written out—seems to me to be only a sort of shadow of the literal shape I’ve intended. Oh, well…
but now that Owen Croft is in
The Review
office, Vic wants me to help weed through some of
those
poems. I don’t know if I can cope with the distraction.”

“What do you mean?” Dinah said. She was helping Anna Tyson slip the Tanglewood T-shirt over her dress. “What does Owen’s being
there have to do with your helping?”

But Ellen had lost the thread of what she was saying while Dinah was struggling with Anna Tyson’s puffed sleeves. Ellen had
turned to watch Sarah, who had taken off, then put back on, her wide-brimmed straw hat, arranging her hair with a toss so
that it fell across one shoulder. She had grown restless where they were sitting—at the far edge of the lawn. They had Shed
tickets and hadn’t needed to eat their lunch among the multitudes in order to establish a place on the lawn close to the orchestra.
Sarah would have much preferred to be in the middle of a crowd. She was covertly watching the boys who had been throwing the
Frisbee and wondering if they had noticed her and also wondering how old they thought she was. She absently fiddled with the
poster she had bought for her mother but had forgotten to give to her, unfurling it slightly and letting it snap to like a
spring.

“Aha, Sarah! We’ve succeeded in boring you to death!” Ellen said with seeming delight. “But that’s wonderful! Oh,
Sarah, you should be so bored by the two of us that you will simply trample us under your feet to get to what you believe
in, or to do what you have to do. Whenever it is. Whenever that happens!”

Dinah saw that her daughter was embarrassed at being caught out in inattention and also by Ellen’s drama, and perhaps even
by the fact that she
was
bored to death with this company on her thirteenth birthday. But Dinah couldn’t think of anything to say that would ameliorate
Sarah’s discomfort, and just then the first warning bell rang. They all turned their attention to gathering up the remnants
of their lunch.

Finally the four of them made their way to the Shed as the third warning bell began to sound, but they were stopped by an
usher, who reminded them that no child under six years old was allowed inside during a performance. Dinah felt a surge of
relief. “I’ll stay outside with Anna Tyson, Sarah. You and Ellen go on in. I’ll give these other two tickets to someone out
here.”

Sarah and Ellen both began to protest, but Dinah forestalled any objection.

“No, no. I’ve seen the BSO perform the
Magnificat
in Boston. I’d really rather be outside, anyway. It’s a beautiful day.”

Dinah threaded through the crowd with Anna Tyson in tow and exchanged the box-seat tickets with the couple who had set up
the lovely little luncheon for themselves just outside the Shed. She settled in one of their lawn chairs, and Anna Tyson climbed
exhaustedly onto her lap instead of sitting in the other chair. Dinah settled her comfortably, with Anna Tyson’s head against
her shoulder, and pushed the little girl’s damp hair away from her forehead. She didn’t happen to glance up and see an expression
of pure yearning cross Sarah’s face as she looked back at her mother through the crowds of people, and witnessed that
mindless caress as her mother’s hand brushed across Anna Tyson’s forehead.

In fact, Dinah didn’t see Ellen or Sarah at all. She was idly stroking Anna Tyson’s forehead and thinking of Ellen in that
beautifully austere room of her renovated farmhouse where she sat at a window and composed her poems, working anxiously, filled
with uncertainty. The picture of Ellen that Dinah conjured up embodied a high-level sort of anguish. Clean despair. It was
too bad, Dinah mused, that her writing cost Ellen so dearly. She had such talent, and she was almost belligerently honest,
for which Dinah could do nothing but admire her. It was also a shame, really, that she had let herself get so fat.

F
OR THE THIRD MORNING
in a row, Martin was awakened instantly and unnaturally early by the hammering of a woodpecker in the metal guttering at
the corner of the house. The first gray daylight only smudged the screens, and in the dusky bedroom the windows themselves
could scarcely be discerned except by the outlines of their white woodwork. He felt nearly tearful under the onslaught of
morning—the maddened woodpecker and all the rest of the wretched din of morning birdsong. He pushed aside the rumpled sheet
and lay still in the slight breeze produced by a careful and precarious arrangement of window and oscillating fans. Usually
once during the night a sudden wind or a wandering cat brought the box fan, balanced on the windowsill, crashing to the floor,
and by now its propeller was so askew that it tick-ticked with every rotation. The oscillating fan, which Martin had arranged
with careful deliberation on a chair placed strategically at the foot of the bed, whooshed and whirred as it made its slow
sweep back
and forth. All night he and Dinah slept fitfully with the sound, but not the feel, of rushing air. The artificial breeze was
teasing; it was very nearly a torment.