Blessings (16 page)

Through the window he could see Jennifer Foster sitting at the piano playing, her face bent over the keys. Her hands rose and fell like pale birds balancing on a limb in the half-darkness that was always inside the house because of the trees and the deep striped awnings. He could see what would come next in the music, how the tempo or the mood would change, by the slight signals of her arms and head just a moment before. He stood for several minutes listening and watching, and then when she stopped playing he knocked softly on the screen door.

“Yes?” Mrs. Blessing called.

“It’s me.”

“Come in, Charles,” she replied.

“I can’t get used to the Charles thing,” Jennifer said, smiling.

“Nicknames are pernicious,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I was always grateful that your parents did not call you Jenny or Jen or one of those diminutive versions of Jennifer, which is a lovely name.”

“I never really heard you play the piano,” Skip said.

“I’m out of practice. The only place I play is here. It drives my mother crazy after all those years of piano lessons. Piano lessons, dance lessons, tap, jazz. You name it, I took it.”

“My daughter, Meredith, took piano,” Mrs. Blessing said. “She hated her lessons. Luckily one summer when she was with her grandparents in Newport she fell from a horse and broke two fingers
and that was that. She was always injuring herself, riding so much. She was like my brother in that regard. Both of them were accident-prone.” She looked at Jennifer. “Perhaps that’s hereditary. Although I’ve never injured myself at all.”

Skip wasn’t sure why, but she looked different this morning, older, grayer, and yet less tense at the same time. Her hands lay open in her lap instead of tightly folded, and her mouth was looser, too. He wondered if it was the music. When he told her about the trees, he thought for just a moment that she was going to smile. He had thought from the beginning that there was something almost virginal about her, as though nothing had ever happened to her, as though her entire life had been listening to piano music in the living room and making sure the nasturtiums around the walk didn’t have blight. All the women he’d known growing up, the ones with the suggestion of soft swaying skin beneath their dresses, or the ones like his aunt who were hard and wiry and lined, all of them had faces and bodies that spoke of hard work, childbirth, aging, heartaches. Maybe it was the way Mrs. Blessing’s clothes were pressed, or her hair always pulled back in the same bun, that made her seem so different from those others. Today her manner seemed oddly youthful.

“I’m glad you’re both in one place, and that Nadine has business elsewhere,” she finally said. “Charles, I think you should tell Jennifer about what’s been going on here.”

“What?”

“I hate that word. The phrase is ‘pardon me?’ You know exactly what I mean. I think we should be prepared for any eventuality, including illness, for example, or discovery. By being in my employ you’ve made this my business, too, and I think you need some assistance in making certain that there won’t be trouble in the years to come.”

Jennifer was looking at Mrs. Blessing with a line between her eyebrows. It was the same line that Nadine had between hers, permanently, a kind of tattoo of ill humor.

“Jennifer is entirely trustworthy,” Mrs. Blessing added. “I can
tell you that from long experience. What will you do if the child is sick? What about school immunization records? She may know more than either of us does about how to proceed here.”

“What child?” Jennifer said.

“He has a child,” said Mrs. Blessing, the soft line of her mouth gone now, its narrow band of probity back in place.

“Hey, hey,” cried Skip. “Wait a minute.”

“Oh, God,” said Jennifer Foster, looking away with disgust. “Not you, too. I am so tired of this. Doesn’t anyone take having kids seriously anymore? I remember at home how angry all the women were about the American soldiers who had gotten them pregnant and then just left, but here it’s exactly the same. Fathers who think it’s a big deal to let someone use their last name on a birth certificate.” The line between her brows deepened. “Oh, I know who it is. You knocked up that girl who used to work at the Red Lobster out on the pike. She was in my gym class freshman year. You can’t even let her live here with you so you can see your own kid?”

Skip could feel the color rise in his face as the shame and anger bloomed in his chest. He walked out the screen door and went over to the truck bed. Faith was awake, staring at the leaves on the copper beech overhead with a sleepy smile. Her eyebrows were still light as dandelion fuzz, and her eyes had faded from navy to a lighter blue, more like the sky. Something about her peach-pink face, and the smile, and the way she was, the way she was such a good baby and scarcely cried and didn’t get cradle cap or white-heads or diaper rash or all the other disgusting things he imagined Shelly’s baby got, made the shame disappear, and the anger rise in him along with the pride and love. He lifted her from the Portacrib and carried her into the house so that she was facing out, one hand around her chest, the other beneath her butt, with the kind of casual roughness he associated with a job a person knows how to do well.

“This is Faith,” he said. “She’s not mine. Or she’s kind of mine. Whatever. I’m her father. I found her by the garage in June, and
I’ve been taking care of her ever since. You might be trustworthy, but you’re too quick to judge people as far as I’m concerned.”

“Oh, my God,” Jennifer said, and reached out her hands like it was a cold night and Faith was a fire. “Oh, my God. You are so adorable. Look at you. Look at her. She’s smiling right at me. Look at her eyes, how blue her eyes are. Come over here. Come here and see me, sweetheart.” The baby made a noise, half-purr, half-growl, as Jennifer pushed forward on the piano bench and laid her down the length of her legs. Faith held on to Jennifer’s fingers with her fists.

“So you see the difficulty,” said Mrs. Blessing. “She needs her immunizations, and soon, as I recall. I’m confident that I can persuade Dr. Benjamin that she’s some relation and that he will do it.”

“Dr. Benjamin doesn’t practice anymore.” Jennifer looked down and pitched her voice higher. “No, he doesn’t, does he, sweetie. He doesn’t take care of babies anymore.”

“He will do it for me. But what about the mother? What if some young girl suddenly decides that she’s made a mistake? Although what counts as a mistake nowadays is beyond me. It seems there’s nothing that counts against you young people. No one seems to care about the old rules.”

“They just pretend they don’t care about them,” Skip said, reaching for Faith.

“Oh, let me hold her some more,” Jennifer said. “Who is your mommy, sweetie?” She tilted her head to the side and the baby grabbed her hair and pulled until Jennifer’s chin was bent low. It occurred to Skip that babies had a way of making people exactly what they were but more so. Faith had brought out the rectitude and responsibility in Mrs. Blessing, the warmth in Jennifer Foster, and the capability in him, so that she had made him think well of himself. And having a baby made all those people who were piss-poor humans more piss-poor than ever. “I can ask at the ER,” Jennifer said, “but I think I would have heard if anyone had come in postpartum with no child. There’s a girl on one of those big farms by the county line who’s only fourteen and got pregnant, but she
had her baby about three weeks ago and, from what I heard, her mother and grandmother went from calling her a whore to acting like she’s the greatest thing since sliced bread as soon as she delivered. There’s been a couple of girls I heard about who had babies without being married in the last couple of months, but that’s no big deal these days. I guess I shouldn’t talk. My parents didn’t get married until I was five, when we came over here. But that was a different situation.” Her head bent lower. “I need my hair back, sweetie,” she sang to the baby.

“She has a really tight grip, right?” Skip said. “Strong.”

“Does my mother know about this?” Jennifer asked.

Skip snorted. “Right,” he said. “Nobody was supposed to know, not even you. But someone found out, and now that someone has taken it upon herself to tell other people.”

“I have no intention of telling anyone except Jennifer,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I suspect we may need her help.”

“Well, don’t tell my mother,” said Jennifer. “She’s strange about things, especially things like this. You can’t be sure what she’ll do. Actually, I know what she’d say. She’d say it’s really yours and you just made this whole story up.”

“I’ve still got the box they left her in,” said Skip. “And the flannel shirt she was wrapped in.”

“So you know of no one who might claim this child?” Mrs. Blessing said, putting her hand on Jennifer’s arm.

“I don’t know of anyone who’s missing a baby, to tell the truth. I’ll nose around a bit, though.” Jennifer looked up at Skip. “I’m sorry I made you sound like a slime ball. Here’s all these guys walking away from their own kids, and you’re taking care of a baby that’s not even yours.”

“She’s mine.”

“Yeah, I get that. Can I play with her a little while longer?”

“She is a very good baby,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I must admit it. She’s no trouble at all.”

M
eredith was sawing away at her lamb chop. “Nadine told me that you had a lightning strike,” she said. “And a blackout. That must have been sort of scary.”

“Lightning is more dangerous than most people think,” Meredith’s husband, Eric, said.

Lydia scarcely listened to them. She watched Meredith’s knife go back and forth like a violinist’s bow. “Nadine,” she called. “This meat is tough.”

Sometimes, often, nearly all the time now, she felt as if she’d outlived her own life. Madame Guernaire’s no longer made the cotton blouses she liked so much. The
Times
no longer ran engagement announcements, and they put divorces in the wedding announcements, as though anyone would want to be reminded on their wedding day that their previous marriage had ended in divorce. And four years ago she had gotten a card from the butcher on Third Avenue who had been sending her meat for fifty years announcing that he was retiring and closing his business. Even the butcher in Mount Mason, who had been hugely and publicly bitter about the meat sent to Blessings from New York—“No difference from what I stock, except that she’s paying a premium, I can tell you that!”—was out of business now. Nadine had to buy meat at the Mount Mason supermarket. The chicken tasted like sponge. And not even like real sponge, the yellow misshapen kind that had once actually lain at the bottom of the ocean and that still could be sent to her, thank God, from the pharmacy on the corner of
Seventy-second Street and Lexington Avenue. The supermarket chicken tasted like that horrid manufactured sponge that Nadine used on the dishes.

“You can’t get good asparagus this late in the summer,” she said, picking up a spear with her fingers and then setting it down in disgust.

“Mother, you can get everything all the time now. You can get corn year-round. And tomatoes. Everything is shipped overnight from California or Florida.”

“I don’t call those things you can get in the supermarket tomatoes. I’m surprised you can, with the tomatoes we’ve always gotten here in the summer. Charles is taking good care of the vegetable garden. These are our own tomatoes and our own summer squash. I can’t imagine why Nadine thought we ought to have asparagus in September.”

Sometimes she thought that the world had lost its compass. Peaches were meant to be eaten in the summer, apples in the fall. Her mother had once seen a girl in dark shoes at a lawn party in June in Connecticut and turned away before she could be introduced. Miss Bertram had sent a senior home because she was wearing nail polish. It was clear nail polish, but nail polish nonetheless. Nail varnish, they called it then.

And sometimes now she wondered, improbably, whether the compass had been set askew to begin with. She looked at Faith sometimes, lying on the lawn in the growing dusk with a tent of mosquito netting around her and her Humpty Dumpty rattle in her hand, and wondered what all the old mores really meant. Lydia Blessing, who had been taught that illegitimacy was a curse and eavesdropping insidious, sometimes lay in bed with the baby monitor turned on on her bedside table and listened as though to chamber music to the faint sounds of the young man and the infant living happily together. Sometimes she forgot to turn it off as she fell asleep, and when the baby woke at three she woke, too, and heard the few irritated complaints and then the sound of Charles coming into the room. “Hungry again, huh?” he might croon.
“All right, all right, it’s coming. Hold your little horses. Hold your little horses, you little honey. You little honey, you.” It was the language of love, and it had shifted her made-up mind on its lifelong axis. What did it matter how you got to that moment, so long as you got there in time?

“You’re looking well, Meredith,” she said now, turning to her daughter, and she was faintly pained by the look of surprise on Meredith’s face. What did it matter what had led up to that moment? Meredith suddenly looked pleased. “Thank you, Mother,” she said, lifting a hand to her hair. “You, too.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Lydia said. “You haven’t had surgery, have you?”

Meredith’s smile fell a little. “No, Mother. No surgery.”

“Good. I think all that is nonsense. Grow old, and learn to like it. Or live with it, at the very least.” The three of them bent over their meals in silence. The lights in the dining room flickered.

“I’m glad you decided to have work done on the orchard,” Meredith said. “I always loved it there when I was a child.”

“Who says I’m doing work on the orchard?”

“Nadine did.”

“Nadine should mind her business.”

Lydia didn’t like it when Meredith behaved as though the place were already hers. Lydia’s father had hated that, too, had hated it when her mother had deeded Blessings over to Lydia five years after Meredith was born. It was after Lydia had had Mr. Foster, the second Mr. Foster, drive her to the city in the big Buick for Lucy Warren’s wedding. It was the first big wedding after the war. “Oh, Lydia,” Lucy had said when she’d seen her outside the church, “I never thought you’d come.”