A Reckoning (8 page)

“Come in, doggo, I’m sorry I forgot you. You shall have a cheese biscuit, and I shall have some breakfast.”

While the coffee perked, she considered what precious little thing she might give Laurie—Laurie just ten years old today. It seemed a great blessing that she had known this wild little granddaughter at least for ten years, and the pang she had felt for a moment had been subtly translated now into a special kind of joy, quite new to Laura, the joy of divesting herself of a treasure. It had to be her mother’s lapis necklace, passed on to her great-granddaughter. Sybille would like that. But would Laurie? She never wore a dress if she could help it and would probably much prefer a pair of cross-country skis! Nevertheless Laura ended by wrapping the necklace and wrote a card to accompany it: “a treasure for my treasure on her 10th birthday.” It was, she suddenly realized, exactly what her mother had written forty years before except that Sybille’s card had read, “for my treasure on her 21st birthday.”

Was I her treasure, Laura asked herself? And she knew that the answer was yes. Sybille had exalted her children in a special pantheon reserved for them. We were not exactly told, but we somehow got the idea that we were more beautiful, more intelligent, and gooder than any other children. But what barriers that idea had set up between them and their contemporaries!

Still, it had been intoxicating, Laura had to admit. The family temperature ran so high, they lived on the edge of a perpetual drama, the great and famous coming and going, and those wonderful balls in Genoa when they danced all night with Italian officers and young men on the staff, or leaned over the banisters to see their mother’s newest conquest taking off his coat in the hall, and deciding that whoever it was was far too ugly, not tall enough, or just plain too queer to be really the “great man” their mother searched for all her life as though for the holy grail.

Poor Pa, Laura thought, but had he suffered? Sybille’s marriage had been wrapped in such a gauze of illusions and self-deception on her part that it was impossible to extricate the truth from the play. There was the privately published book of passionate love poems that Sybille had written Dwight when he was in the air force in World War I and they had been separated for two years. There was really no doubt in anyone’s mind that they loved each other. They flirted outrageously across the dinner table, walked up and down the terrace before dinner talking so intently that the gong had sometimes to be sounded twice before they heard it, and wrote immense letters when they were apart. Yet Sybille had left her husband for two years to nurse Laura, an act that appeared to Cousin Hope and to their friends in general one of absolute, self-immolating heroism, and to Laura herself an imprisonment not only by illness but by something she dreaded even to think about, a kind of complete possession by her mother, as though she were a small infant. And what had Pa really thought about this? He drove to Davos whenever he could get away for a day or two, bringing them every luxury he could imagine—elegant bed jackets for Laura, gold slippers for Sybille, marrons glacés, a case of champagne once. But he never seemed quite at ease in their intensely feminine world, or for that matter, in the concentrated atmosphere of illness, the gossip about doctors, the implacable routines. Laura suspected that however much he had looked forward to seeing them, he was rather glad to get away again and to go back to his own world of diplomats and economic crises, and the sub rosa attempts to help the intellectuals and radicals whom Mussolini was relentlessly imprisoning when they could not be silenced. Laura suspected that her father, with her mother’s complete accord, took some risks.

But why had Sybille insisted on changing her whole life around this illness? That remained a mystery. Guilt, perhaps. Did she think she had neglected a beloved child? Or after the painful episode of Jo’s infatuation with Alicia, had she experienced a surge of over protectiveness? Must I always be critical of Sybille? Laura asked herself. If she turned to George Herbert now, it was because Sybille had read so much poetry aloud to her in those years, as well as Virginia Woolf, and, curiously enough, Trollope. She could hear at this instant her mother’s husky yet musical laugh. How they had laughed sometimes, laughed till tears streamed down their cheeks!

Her mother’s taste and acuity, passions and dreams were stamped on her consciousness. There was no denying that. A great “personality” as Jim Goodwin had called her did this to her children. Laura’s own children, at least, had not had to fit themselves into a heroic mold.

What she hoped she and Charles had done, what they had tried to do, was to create a safe, warm world in which their children could grow rather freely—but what parent ever succeeds? The very safety and usualness had created revolt.

Laura, invaded as she was these days by memory and a need to reckon with everything before it was too late, found these ruminations tiring. It was really a good idea to be pulled out of them into the immediate present of little Laurie and a tenth birthday.

She drove up to the brightly lit house that evening full of joy and expectation.

Ann opened the door. “Come in, come in, dear Laura,” she said and kissed her. “It’s ages since we’ve seen you!”

Laurie flung her arms around Laura’s waist and hugged her so hard Laura nearly lost her balance.

“Happy birthday, my treasure! This is a happy day!”

“Guess what?” Laurie said, pulling her into the living room where they were attacked by the two golden retrievers. Laura, to escape their attentions, sat down quickly. “I got a real goose-down jacket—and snow-shoes—and look, Grammie, a parakeet! His name is Aucassin.” The parakeet was in a cage on a small table. “Daddy’s going to make me a hanger in my room, right at the window.”

“May I interrupt?” Brooks said, coming in from the kitchen. “What will you have to drink, Mother? How about a glass of champagne? I have some good and cold.”

“Darling, that would be lovely.”

“Someone gave it to us for Christmas,” Ann explained.

“How does it feel to be ten, Laurie?”

Laurie had sat down on the floor with the two dogs. She was looking into the fire and stroking one big dog-head with her right hand.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I guess.”

“You don’t sound overenthusiastic.”

“I’m still not allowed to do anything I really want to do.”

“Where’s Charley?” Laura asked.

“I sent him up to put on a clean shirt,” Ann said.

“He got very dirty painting my birthday present. See!” Laurie pointed to the mantel, where a large red and blue whale—was it a whale?—on a large piece of paper had been tacked up.

“It’s the story of Jonah only you can’t tell very well because Jonah is inside the whale.”

“He seems to have decided on a present rather late in the day.” Laura smiled.

“He didn’t want to give me anything. He only did it because I told him I wouldn’t give him anything for his birthday unless he did.”

There was a loud pop from the kitchen, and Laurie sprang to her feet. “What’s that? A gun?”

“Just your father,” Brooks’s voice called from the kitchen, “opening a bottle of champagne. Come and watch it fizz.”

“I’m going to sit down for five minutes even if dinner is late,” Ann announced, and dropped down beside Laura on the tattered sofa. “Charley’s been a handful. He really doesn’t feel well. He’s had an awful cold.”

And there was Charley, flushed and bright-eyed under his shock of fair hair, floundering about with one arm in the air, his shirt half on and half off. “Help me, Mummy. I’m all mixed up in this shirt.”

“There, darling.” Ann thrust the lost arm into the sleeve where it belonged and buttoned up the shirt. “Now say good evening to Grammie.”

Brooks came in with a tray of glasses. “Here you are, Mother.”

“May I have one? It’s my birthday,” Laurie begged.

“Of course, this one is just for you.” And Brooks bowed gravely to his daughter as he handed her a half-filled glass. They really did look amazingly alike, each with the very dark eyes and straight black eye brows they had inherited from Charles. It occurred to Laura, and she was entertained by the idea, that Laurie in her tight jeans and turtle neck might as well have been a boy, whereas fair little Charley sitting on the floor with his teddy bear might have been a girl. Of course, as the eldest, Laurie had always done things with her father: skied with him since she was eight, always insisted on shoveling snow when Brooks shoveled.

“Where’s mine?” Charley demanded, frowning.

“As soon as I’ve given your mother hers I’ll get yours—we must have a toast!”

“There,” said Brooks, handing his son a juice glass with, Laura presumed, ginger ale in it. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I want to propose a toast to Laurie. May it be a very good year in every way, lots of snow to ski on, 100 on her math papers every time, no quarrels with her brother, and—what else?” he looked down smiling at Laurie, who was drinking in every word.

“That’s impossible. The last is impossible,” she said. “You could say, an improved brother, I suppose. I’m awfully tired of Charley,” she told Laura.

“I’m tired of you,” said Charley, not to be outdone.

“Quiet, children. Grammie has a present for Laurie. Let’s call a truce and open it.”

Laurie sat down on the floor at Laura’s feet and turned the little box in her hands, listening to what might be inside. “I can’t think what it is,” she said. Then she tore off the paper and gold string and opened it.

“Oh, it’s a necklace—” for a moment she held it in her hands, feeling the smooth blue stones. “It’s blue.” She looked up at her father, as though for help.

“Your great-grandmother gave it to me for my twenty-first birthday,” Laura said. “It’s lapis lazuli.”

“It’s beautiful,” Ann said, “let me see. You shouldn’t have parted with it, Laura—you’re too generous.”

“Thank you, Gramma,” Laurie said solemnly.

“It doesn’t exactly go with jeans, but maybe you could wear it for dinner.” Ann suggested.

“No,” said Laurie, “I’ll just keep it in my secret drawer, and I’ll take it out sometimes and feel it.”

“I want to wear it,” said Charley. “I love it,” and he reached out to take it from his mother. “It’s a jewel.” He lay on his stomach reaching up toward his mother, full of mischievous avidity and delight.

“No,” Laurie shouted. “He can’t wear it, Mummy, it’s mine!”

“Listen, creeps, go into the study and look at TV for a half-hour while I get supper onto the table, then Brooks and Laura can have a few moments’ peace.”

“Come on, Charley!” Laura pulled him up. And, surprisingly enough, they disappeared into the study together.

“What do parents do who don’t allow TV?” Ann asked as she put the necklace back into its box and laid it on the mantelpiece.

“They go quietly out of their minds,” Brooks answered, coming back with the bottle to refill their glasses.

“I won’t be long,” Ann said, at the kitchen door. “Enjoy yourselves.”

Alone with her son, who was standing at the mantelpiece, looking down at her with smiling approval, Laura felt suddenly shy.

“It wasn’t the right present,” she said. “Laurie is too young, but I won’t live forever and maybe it’s time to …”

“Nonsense, she loves it. Didn’t you see the way she handled it?” Then he came and sat down beside her on the sofa. Laura felt his eyes on her face though she was looking down. “You look fairly beat up by that bug you had. You’ve lost weight.”

“And a very good thing, I was much too fat.”

“What did Goodwin have to say? He’s a nice man, but I always have the feeling that he relies on God rather than on medicine. You look to me as though you needed some shots of B-12.”

“I’m all right, Brooks, don’t badger me.”

“Badgering, am I?”

“A glass of champagne and being with you and Ann and the children is far better medicine than B-12 could possibly be,” Laura said. “Now tell me all the news.”

“Well, I’m deep in local politics, you know. We’re meeting a lot of opposition to putting up a really good disposal unit like the one in Wellesley. It recycles cans, even glass, paper of course. But it’s expensive and taxes will go up. You can’t imagine how fierce people are when their pocketbooks are involved.”

Laura sighed. Since Dr. Goodwin’s verdict she found it difficult to concentrate on future plans about almost anything. “You’re marvelous, Brooks. How do you ever find time?”

“Conservation just seems to me the single most important thing I can do, I guess. I want there still to be an earth to support Laurie and Charley, and sometimes I really worry. I mean, time is running out. The ocean is polluted right out to the middle of the Atlantic.”

Laura drank a swallow of champagne, and then out of nowhere had a terrible attack of coughing.

“Get me a kleenex, Brooks,” she managed to whisper.

He came back in a second with a box and laid it beside her, then put his arm around her and held her fast. She was simply torn to pieces by the cough.

“This is no joke,” Brooks said. “That’s blood you just threw up.”

“It’s nothing, just an infection.”

“Jim Goodwin had better put his mind on this,” said Brooks. “Did he take X-rays?”

At last the spasm stopped. Sweat was pouring down Laura’s face. She made a gesture with her hand that Brooks interpreted as a wish to be left alone, and he went in to Ann. She could hear them talking in low voices. Tell them now? It couldn’t be a worse time, but what would be a good time? Laura wished she could just go home to Grindle and Sasha and be left alone. And maybe that was the thing to do.

Then Ann and Brooks came back together.

“Dear, there’s plenty of time. The potatoes aren’t quite done. The children are watching a basketball game, glory be. So just take it easy, will you?” Ann sat down beside her this time and gently squeezed her hand. Laura did not want to be touched. She was afraid of weeping.

“I’m working on quite an interesting first novel,” she managed to say, sitting up straight, though it was an effort.

“No, Mother,” Brooks said with quiet authority. “We want to know what this is all about, and you’re not going to put us off.”