Fortunate Lives (34 page)

In the kitchen she discovered she was the last one to come downstairs, even though it was only six-thirty. Martin had made
coffee, and Sarah was having a glass of orange juice at the table. Dinah had planned on preparing a grand meal to see David
off. She had bought beautiful cured bacon from a little store in Vermont that smoked its own meat, and blueberries at The
Whole Grain Elevator for pancakes, but everyone had eaten.
Martin and David were huddled over an enormous schefflera in a terra-cotta pot that Christie had given David for his dorm
room.

“There’s no way in the world we can fit that thing into the car, David. We’ll bring it on Parents’ Weekend.”

“I know I can fit it in. Scheffleras are probably the best plants to clean toxic substances out of the air. They work almost
like a scrubber.”

“Well, you’ll have to hold your breath until October, then. There’s not one inch of space left in that car.”

“Dad, don’t worry about it. I’ll get it in,” David said stonily, and went out the back door and around to the driveway, where
the car was parked, to survey the possibilities.

Dinah moved around the kitchen helplessly, collecting cereal bowls, putting things back in cabinets. “Doesn’t anyone want
some bacon and pancakes? I have beautiful huge blueberries that I bought yesterday.”

Martin finished his coffee and poured another cup. He was already dressed in khakis and an old plaid shirt, while Dinah had
only taken the time to search for and slip on her pink flannel winter robe. “I’d like to get going as soon as we can,” Martin
said. “If it takes us about three and a half hours, we’ll probably be earlier than most, and it won’t be so hard to unload
all this stuff. I don’t imagine I’ll get home before about four o’clock.”

“Don’t you think we all ought to sit down and go over this list one more time to be sure he’s got everything?” Dinah asked.
This was flying past her, this moment before David would be gone.

“God, no, Dinah. If he’s forgotten anything he’ll have to buy it in Cambridge. Or we can mail it to him, if it’s that important.”

Dinah was scanning the list when David came back into the room. “I can fit it in, Dad. There’s no problem.”

Martin was uneasy this morning, too, with a kind of
regret and tension that he hadn’t expected to feel. He wanted to get this over with. “Okay, then? Are you ready to hit the
road?”

“What did you do about the standing lamp, David?” Dinah asked. “Did you get it packed?” And David nodded in her direction,
but he avoided holding her glance.

“Yeah,” he said to his father, “I’m all set.”

Martin rinsed his coffee cup and headed out the door, and David and Sarah followed him, while Dinah still stood in the center
of the kitchen, running her eye down the carefully printed and now smudged list, each item having been crossed out, she presumed,
as it had been put in the car. She looked around at the empty room in bewilderment, and her eyes filled with tears that she
could not stop. She wiped them away quickly with her sleeve before she trailed after the rest of her family.

Martin was sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open, unsuccessfully trying to slide the seat back against the immovable
mass of David’s possessions. “I’ll have to sit closer in than I like until we unload,” he said to David, who was leaning against
the open door while Sarah stood by, holding the schefflera.

David straightened away from the driver’s side and made his way around the car. Then he stopped and turned to his mother,
who was standing in backless summer slippers on the cold, damp grass along the drive, fiddling with the sash of her robe.
He stopped just there in front of her, and when she met his eyes she saw that he, too, was near tears. She simply moved toward
him, and he embraced her fiercely, raising her up on tiptoe, wrapping his arms up around her shoulders, and putting his face
down against the top of her head.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, overcoming the break in her voice, “oh, sweetie! I hope everything is just perfect. I hope you have
a wonderful time and… I hope… well, I’m so excited for you! Harvard’s lucky to get you.”

David held on to her tightly. “I love you, Mom,” he said, almost brusquely, and then turned and climbed into the passenger
seat of the car. She followed him into the drive and stood beside the car while Sarah gave him the schefflera to balance in
his lap. Dinah bent down into the car and kissed him on the cheek. “I love you, too, sweetie. We’ll miss you.” She backed
away a bit so David could close the door. Then she bent forward again to say to Martin to be careful, and the car began to
back slowly into the U of the driveway to turn around. Martin put the gear in neutral while he twisted to shift several items
to one side so that he could see clearly from the rearview mirror, and then the car began to move slowly toward the end of
the drive.

“Wait, Martin,” Dinah called. “Wait a minute!” She waved the list at him frantically, and the car stopped and then slid back
toward her in reverse. She was standing on the passenger’s side, and David rolled down the window, looking more businesslike
now, more harried.

“David, look at this,” Dinah said, holding up the list to him and indicating an item that hadn’t been crossed out. “You didn’t
get this in! You forgot to pack a trash can for your room.”

“I don’t need a trash can. I can get one there.”

Dinah felt almost frantic at this omission, and David saw it on her face.

“All right, Mom. I’ll get the one from my room.” He was not a bit rude, not even impatient, but all the sentiment of a moment
ago was gone. He handed the schefflera to Sarah and dashed for the house, appearing again in moments with the blue metal wastebasket
in his hand. He opened the rear station wagon door and squeezed it in and then, with Sarah’s help, he quickly resettled himself
and the schefflera in the front seat.

“Have a safe trip,” Dinah said as the car moved slowly down the drive again, and David waved his hand up over
the roof at her and Sarah as the car passed by them.

Dinah watched as the car paused before turning onto Slade Road. The last thing she noticed before it disappeared from view
was David’s trash can, wedged against the tip of his skis and the rear window, mouth outward, still full to the brim with
trash.

473 Slade Road

West Bradford, MA

September 7, 1991

Franklin M. Mount

Dean of Freshmen

Harvard College

12 Truscott Street

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Dear Mr. Mount,

We appreciate the effort Harvard College makes to know its students, and we welcome the opportunity to offer you our own insights
and reflections concerning our son David, who will enter the freshman class this September. It seems to us that David will
have very little trouble becoming acclimated to his new academic environment, and we don’t expect he will have a great deal
of difficulty establishing a comfortable social life for himself in fairly short order. He has always been a good student,
a person of integrity, and he has dealt successfully with the tragedy of the loss of his younger brother when the two of them
were twelve and thirteen years old. We think, quite frankly, that he would be happy in any challenging situation and that
Harvard is lucky to have him.

David has no medical problems that require
special attention and has never suffered an allergic reaction to any medication. We think he has a wonderful year ahead of
him, as we hope all the Harvard community will enjoy.

Thank you for your attention and your interest. We look forward to visiting Cambridge and seeing David during Parents’ Weekend
in October.

Sincerely,

Mr. and Mrs. Martin Howells

Dinah decided to accompany Martin when he took Duchess for her afternoon walks. For the first few weeks after David’s departure,
she had been reluctant to leave the house in case her son might phone. In fact, he had called only once, and nothing he had
said had appeased the longing that his brisk, busy voice evoked. He had needed to ask her advice about setting up a bank account,
and then he had said he was fine. His classes were fine. He liked his roommate, and his room was fine. She hung up the phone,
assuring herself that she was delighted he was content, but she had been momentarily shattered with yearning.

As she and Martin cut across the front yard to reach the sidewalk, Duchess kept circling back on her leash, tangling herself
around their legs, wagging her tail, and bobbing in a little prance of her front feet in her excitement and delight at having
Dinah with them. “This will be a good thing,” Dinah said. “I mean, to take a walk in the afternoons. I never get any exercise.”

“Walking with Duchess isn’t very invigorating,” Martin said.

“Maybe we can train her to heel,” Dinah mused, but they both looked doubtfully at the shambling dog, and
Dinah realized Duchess’s muzzle was almost completely gray.

Once they reached the museum grounds, Duchess calmed down, taking Dinah’s presence for granted and on the alert for squirrels.
The tourist season was over. Although the students were back, they never minded if there were dogs loose on campus, and Martin
stopped at the foot of Bell’s Hill and let Duchess off her lead. Dinah had paused by the small markers at the edge of the
parking lot and was bending over to make out the words, rubbing her fingers over the engravings to feel the letters. Martin
went a little distance up the trail to be sure that Duchess hadn’t strayed too far, and then he stopped and waited for Dinah
to reach him. They made their way along the path fairly briskly, Martin leading the way and Duchess crashing through the brush
behind them.

When they reached a natural summit, Dinah’s face was flushed and she was out of breath. She sank down to sit on the ground,
bracing herself against the trunk of an enormous spruce, and looked out on the valley. She hadn’t climbed this hill, she realized,
in five or six years. “This seems pretty invigorating to me,” she said to Martin, who hadn’t sat down, and she looked up at
him. “Can we stop for a little while?” she asked. “Or you can go ahead. This is a wonderful view, and I’m out of shape. I
need to catch my breath.” She was apologetic, because Martin seemed to be impatient to go on. He probably had work to do.

He lowered himself to the ground beside her, his back against the tree, and the powerful scent of evergreens enveloped them.
Dinah was always amazed, whenever she paid attention to this landscape, at the notion of the violent ages of geological activity
that had resulted in the sanguine rolling hills and modest-sized but ancient mountains. It astounded her to remember that
these gentle hills had been thrust violently from five miles beneath
the earth’s surface twenty thousand years ago, their spires and peaks sculpted and softened by glaciers and fifteen thousand
years of erosion and weather. Now they undulated in benign waves of hills and valleys under a furze of brilliant green grass
where black-and-white-spotted Holsteins grazed over the landscape like little wooden child’s toys spread out on green felt.

“You were thinking about Toby, weren’t you?” Martin asked her. “In the parking lot?”

She looked at him in surprise. “No, not really.” She didn’t want to talk about Toby’s death. She thought that with David’s
recent departure they were both susceptible to opportunistic sorrow, as if a flu had been going around and their white counts
were low.

“Well, you were.” Martin was insistent.

“Not only Toby… Those two children… the dates on the gravestones. I’d never read them before. They were both about two and
a half years old. I was wondering if it was any easier—if it was a different kind of grief, somehow—to lose such a young child.”

Martin was silent. They both kept their eyes on the landscape, and Duchess came loping down the slope and sank down next to
Martin, panting even in the cool weather.

Dinah said, “I don’t think it would make any difference. It would be just as terrible.”

Martin nodded. He thought so, too. “You know,” he said, “I still keep wondering if there wasn’t some way I could have avoided
that wreck. I’ve gone over it and over it. I was so distracted….”

“If you could have avoided it?” Dinah’s voice rose a little in consternation. “Don’t even think about that, Martin. Of course
you couldn’t have avoided it. That’s not fair to yourself—it’s not even fair to me—for you to try to… oh… take on the responsibility.”
Dinah knew that the wreck that killed Toby was nobody’s fault, but in spite of herself
she held
herself
accountable. She constantly fought off this absurd idea, but nevertheless she had been his mother.

“I know. I know. But I can’t help it. If I had checked my rearview mirror…”

“What could you have done?” Dinah stood up and brushed the spruce needles off her slacks. “There was a car in
front
of you. You were caught. It was just bad luck. That’s all.”

Martin stood up, too, but Duchess lay there looking at them imploringly. “God, luck,” and he bent to pick up a stick, waving
it at Duchess to tempt her along. When he tossed it far ahead of them, Duchess rose and went lumbering after it. “But I
was
distracted, Dinah. Toby was so excited. He kept leaning forward, grabbing the back of my seat. It made me…
cross
. You remember how he sometimes would get so carried away? How he just didn’t pick up on when to stop.” They were walking
side by side on the level ground, and Martin put his hand to his forehead and brought it down across his face, as though it
were unbearable to have vision, as though he were pulling a shade. “He was so excited about scoring that goal in the scrimmage.”