Fortunate Lives (27 page)

David had come into the room, and Anna Tyson had sidled over and was slouching against his legs while he rested his hand on
her shoulder. “Netta’s not going to eat with us?” David asked lightly, looking down at Anna Tyson for her nod of confirmation.
“Well, Anna Tyson and Netta can come with me and Sam to pick up the pizzas and you can follow us, Dad.”

People began to mill about, getting Diet Cokes or beer or wine, finding places to sit. Sarah and her friends appropriated
the table on the porch, and Vic got up and put napkins and plates on the kitchen table; but Dinah suggested that he and Ellen
and she have their dinner in the living room.

When the three of them were finally settled there, sitting on the floor around the coffee table, drinking wine and waiting
for David to return with their pizza, they didn’t worry much about keeping up a conversation. This gathering was familiar
and undemanding.

Ellen put her glass of wine down after taking a sip and sat back against the edge of the sofa, contemplating something. When
she spoke, her voice was careful, the way people speak to patients in hospitals.

“Dinah,” she said cautiously, pausing, “I know that it’s impossible for you to be openly rude to someone.” She stopped, considering,
and her voice was soft, not instructive. “But doesn’t it ever occur to you that you don’t have to be nice to every waif who
crosses your doorstep? I mean, Anna Tyson might as well just move in here.”

“I don’t mind Anna Tyson,” Dinah answered, mildly enough, but with the sudden hope that Ellen wouldn’t say anything more.

Ellen picked up her wine and swirled it gently, studying her glass with concentration. “Anna Tyson is hardly the problem though,
is she?”

A shadow of doubt about Martin and Netta crossed Dinah’s mind, but she held it off. She listened for the sound
of the car, wondering why David was taking so long to return with their pizza. She rose and went to the window, looking out
to see if he was in sight. She noticed the rather nasty aluminum aftertaste of the cheap red wine she bought in jugs and usually
mixed with orange juice and drank over ice.

“This wine’s awful,” she said to Vic and Ellen. “I’m going to dump mine and get a beer. Can I bring either of you one?” She
left the room when they both demurred, and she heard Vic ask Ellen something about their storm windows as she carried her
wineglass down the hall to the kitchen.

Franklin M. Mount

Dean of Freshmen

Harvard College

12 Truscott Street

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Dear Mr. Mount,

I’ve pretty much done all that I can do. I’m sending expensive sheets for David’s bed because I couldn’t find any reasonably
priced sheets that were extra long. How many parents do you think have these things lying around? It seems to me you would
think about the expense and inconvenience. I bet there’s not a single freshman coming to Harvard next year who has an extra-long
bed in his own house. And how many of us have an extra trash can, for instance? Or lamps?
Two
lamps?

The thing is, Mr. Mount, I’m losing too much. I’m having to let go of things that I need. I’m giving too much away. I’ve always
thought that in the long run—if you could look at the whole picture—I am a generous person, even a fatalistic person.
I’ve let a good many things go out of my life without bitterness, with no thought of revenge. But I’m being pressed to the
absolute limit, and it seems to me that Harvard College ought to take this into consideration in the future.

W
HEN
D
AVID PULLED IN
behind his father’s car along the curb in front of the pizza parlor, Netta was talkative and amused. “I can’t believe this
place,” she said, gesturing out the window in the mild evening. “It’s great, isn’t it? It could even have been Minuteman Pizza
and Sub
Shoppe
. With an extra
p e
. You know, like all those terrible
cute
places they’ve built out on Route Two.” She was delighted. “I hadn’t realized how provincial I’d become in Cambridge. I’d
forgotten that this kind of irony existed outside of Harvard.” She smiled in fleeting self-disparagement and grew pensive.
“In spite of everything—I mean, even living in a place like West Bradford—I think it’s been good for me to get away from the
whole Harvard thing.”

David and Sam exchanged a glance. The two of them and Socs Trangas’s youngest daughter, Irini, had waited tables for Socs
one summer, and he was a morose man who lacked any trace of a sense of irony. Neither Sam nor David had ever considered the
absurdity of the logo in the window,
which depicted a stalwart Minuteman in his tricornered hat, clasping his musket across his chest with one hand and with the
other holding aloft a steaming pizza. That same logo decorated the countless cardboard flats that Sam and David and Irini
had spent many hours folding into carry-out boxes.

In 1977, Socrates Trangas had moved his wife and three daughters from Greece to Albany, New York, where his older brother
Connie lived, then finally on to West Bradford in 1979, when he and Connie had a final falling-out. Socs hadn’t spoken to
his brother since. He had chosen to locate in West Bradford because it was a college town with no cheap restaurants, but when
his fledgling attempt to make a success of a modest place serving Greek food had failed, he had turned it into a pizza and
sub shop in 1982. It still rankled, though, the failure of his restaurant, and he avenged himself somewhat on his clientele,
all of whom were regulars since there was no other place to get a pizza in West Bradford. He begrudged and rationed each piece
of pepperoni, each chunk of green pepper, every slice of mushroom that he dealt out as fast as cards onto the waiting rounds
of fresh dough.

He rarely socialized with his customers while they waited at the counter for their orders, but he was fond of the Howellses,
who had expressed real regret when he had given up serving avgolemono soup, spanakopita, pastitsio, moussaka, and assorted
Greek pastries, and had built a long counter across the back of the room to facilitate carry-out orders of Italian subs and
pizzas.

The Howellses had been almost nightly customers in the fall and winter of 1983, when the renovations to their own kitchen
had taken two months longer than they had expected, and Socs always came out of the kitchen to chat with Dinah when she came
in to pick up an order. One evening she had listened with sympathetic attention when he told her about the disagreement with
his brother in Albany.
When he had looked down and realized that the box with her pizza in it had grown cool to the touch, he dropped the conversation
and handed it over to her at once. At the door she turned back, with a short wave.

“So long,” she had said, but he misheard her and hesitated uncertainly for a moment while she stood with her hand still raised
as she pushed sideways against the door.

“Right. Okay.” And he paused once again. “Shalom,” he replied, raising his own hand in a peaceful dismissal. When Martin Howells
came in to pick up an order in mid-December of that year, Socs had presented him with a bottle of Wild Turkey in its holiday
box and a card with Chanukah greetings. Neither of the Howellses could think of a tactful way to set the misunderstanding
straight, and it didn’t matter as long as they were careful not to order pizza on any of the Jewish holidays, when Socs would
invariably make a point of greeting them appropriately. They were uncomfortably trapped into false pretenses because they
had left it too long ever to explain.

Now Sam and David only exchanged a look; they didn’t want to appear foolish themselves by revealing to Netta their own innocence—that
the anachronism of a Revolutionary War pizza had never occurred to them. They followed her into the restaurant, where it took
a little while to get the order straightened out.

Netta came back to the car with them to be sure Anna Tyson was fastened into her seat belt in the back seat, and to give her
a quick kiss. Then she moved to the driver’s window and leaned in and kissed David lightly on the cheek. “Thanks for baby-sitting.
I’m sure I won’t be long,” she said, before going along to get into Martin’s car where he had pulled in ahead of them at the
curb.

Once Netta and Martin arrived at his office, Netta cleared a place on the desk and put the pizza box down between them. When
she discovered that the wedges hadn’t been sufficiently severed one from the other, she took up a
pair of scissors laid out on Martin’s blotter and snipped the gooey pie into neat triangles. He was unusually impressed; Netta
had always seemed so removed from practical concerns.

“That’s great,” he said. “You just cut along the dotted lines. We always use one of those roller things. It never works, though.
All the cheese runs together.” He was surprised, as he always was, when one of his family’s habits turned out not to be universal.
But as she stretched her arm across the desk, Martin noticed dark, smudged bruises where her short sleeve pulled away from
her upper arm, and another fading bruise along her collarbone. “Netta. What happened?”

She looked up from the pizza to see what he was talking about, and when she saw her arm exposed, she let it drop to her side,
the scissors in her hand falling against her skirt, where they left a smear of oil against the pale blue print. She sat as
she was without answering, and then she gestured with her free hand in a brushing-away sweep of her arm, as though she could
push the question back to Martin. When her eyes became glassy with tears, he realized that she was going to confide to him
so much more than he wanted to know.

She settled into the chair across from his and looked down at the scissors she was still holding, idly clicking them open
and shut. She let out a gentle exhalation of breath, not quite a sigh, and shook her head backward with her customary flick.
It was a preparatory gesture, Martin decided unhappily.

“It’s true,” she said, “that I’m not sure how to handle the whole thing anymore. I mean, I know I’ve done a lot of good, and
I’ve never met anyone who’s so… I don’t know…” And she paused to consider, and to gather her forces. “Owen’s so
needy
. So sad. I don’t think I’ve ever met a person as lost. I mean, there’s a lot of denial going on in that whole family, I think.
The Crofts are very controlling,
especially Judith. And they’ve refused to let him move home.” She snapped the scissors shut, putting them on the desk, where
the blades, resting on the absorbent blotter, left another feathery spear of oil.

Martin didn’t have anything to say; he was unmoved. What Vic had told him about
David
and Netta crossed his mind. The thought of Netta’s victimization, even possible brutalization, by Owen Croft offended a kind
of fastidiousness in Martin.

She looked directly at him in appeal, holding her hands out slightly, almost in supplication. “I didn’t want Owen to hurt
himself. I can see now that he just couldn’t stand it. He just couldn’t be hurt anymore by… by any sort of
censure
. Oh, God! He grabbed one of my knives down from that magnetic rack. We were standing right there in the kitchen.”

Her eyes filled with tears again, and she glanced away in an attempt to compose herself. “He’s just so emotionally injured,
and I’m the only one he can come to. At least, I can offer him a
moral
base. Do you see what I mean? He has to count on someone. I don’t think anyone can live in the world with… well… a total
absence
of trust. And I do think there’s a person there with so much value. But then
I
seemed not to trust him!” Tears were running down her face, and she wiped them away with the back of her hands the way a
small child would; she was clearly filled with regret at the memory of her own behavior. “And… well, we were both pretty drunk.
I should have just left him alone. He had his wrist over the sink. I don’t know if he really would have cut himself. I don’t
know. I just don’t know. But of course he didn’t mean…” and she gestured to the bruises on her arm. “He didn’t have any idea
what he was doing. He only wanted me to leave him alone.”

She had been bending forward toward Martin in an effort to make herself clear, and suddenly she seemed to deflate. She settled
back in her chair, and she was such a small
woman that she appeared to shrink within her clothes in an attitude of despair. Her downslanted eyes were swollen, the fragile
flesh beneath them was shadowed, and across her cheekbones and along the graceful stretch of bone from ear to jaw, her skin
was taut and luminous. She was so slight, so small and vulnerable, sunk deeply into her chair just across the desk from Martin.
She was utterly and obviously defenseless.

Martin was appalled. Martin was repelled. He hadn’t wanted to imagine the scene she described. He hadn’t wanted to get further
involved, and although he was rarely unkind, he knew he was about to be ungenerous to Netta after all she had revealed to
him. He sat there studying the pizza, noting that the cheese had gone cold and opaque, and closed the box, putting it aside.
He placed Netta’s manuscript squarely between them, shuffling through the pages to see where it was marked. When he finally
looked up at her, he smiled in apology. “Well,” he said, “be careful, Netta. Take care of yourself.”