Blessings (27 page)

Maybe that was what her mother was trying to hide, and not just for her own sake but for Lydia’s, too: not the pregnancy by a married man, but the marriage to the boy who was really in love with Lydia’s brother instead. Up in the garage attic her first thought had been that her union with Benny had been a sham, and then she had been shamed by the hypocrisy of her outrage, since the sham had not seemed so egregious when she was the sole perpetrator. It was like a French farce, in one door and out the other. And where just a few years ago she would have been disgusted and bitter, now she was merely sad at the dumb show.

She tried to imagine a world in which the two of them sat by the pond, she and Sunny, and she told her secrets and he told his. But it was not the world in which the two of them had grown up, and grown older. Perhaps he had known about her and Frank Askew. Perhaps everyone had known. But order was maintained by silence.

Looking at that young woman sitting in the living room bookended by her uncomprehending parents, waiting for her fate to find her, the notion that that thought was simply a relic of her youth fell away. She wondered if it would always be so, and if the coda of that silence was always regret, so that she would give anything now to cry out to Sunny, in the same ragged voice as the cry that kept sounding in the dark night, “Tell me the secrets of your heart.” But if she had said that, she knew what his reply would be, could almost hear him all these years after she’d found him on the floor of the barn sprawled amid the blood and hay, hear him drawl, “Lydie, love, don’t be so dramatic.”

So much had come back to her after she found the wallet. She remembered one night seventy years ago when she had lain in bed in the narrow room at the end of the hallway with the blue walls and the white counterpane that had been hers until her marriage.
A truck had driven into the driveway with the tearing sound of tires and gears coming to a sudden halt, a door had slammed, and she had heard her father’s low voice and another man, higher, distraught, finally crying, “You keep your goddamned boy away from my son!” She remembered how many times Sunny had come home bruised or with broken bones, and how the family legend had grown about how accident-prone he was. “I don’t mind the taste of blood so much,” he said one morning after a split lip, and she had shuddered, knowing and not knowing both at the same time.

The little light cast a circle of gold on the pages of the old book, its margins set wide and the edges deckled in the fashion of long ago. She had called Meredith to tell her what had happened, about the burglary and Charles and the baby. “That’s dreadful,” Meredith had said. “He seemed like such a nice man. So good with that baby, too, in the way so few men are. My goodness, Mother, you have had a time of it.” Something about the way in which Meredith had said that last sentence reminded Lydia of something. She realized that it was exactly the sort of remark she herself might have made to cut off a certain sort of conversation. Perhaps the next time Meredith came she would sit with her by the pond, sit in the old Adirondack chairs and say, my dear, tell me what you know and what you suspect and what you fear. And I will tell you what is true and what is not.

But on the phone she had said only, “I am still not myself.” Her arm hurt, and she shifted the book from one hand to the other, and the sound outside was louder. She pushed back the covers. She had turned ten pages without reading one, she thought as she put the book down on her bedside table, beside the ugly cut-crystal water carafe. It had been so like her mother to think that it would be grand for every room to have one and to ship them from the city, but to save on the cost by buying something square and graceless. The right instincts, the wrong execution. Lydia sighed. How deep the training of a lifetime, that she could still note something so mean and unimportant.

She opened the front door and the breeze blew back against her, warm for an October night. The clouds had blown away and there was a full moon throwing a great blocky house shadow across the grass and turning the surface of the water into a mirror reflecting the willow trees. She pulled on her father’s old shooting jacket, tied a scarf around her hair against the wind, and walked slowly across the grass in her house slippers until she was standing by the little boat and could hear the cry echoing off the mountains. It was human, she was certain of it now, and when she considered that that wretched girl, who hadn’t even had a tissue to mop her streaming nose, might have brought the baby back yet again, she was filled not with the disapproval she ought to have felt but with happiness that things might be as they had been, the occasional picnic, the well-groomed lawn, her coffee made, her days fuller.

“Jennifer,” she would say, “find Charles and tell him I have a surprise for him.”

She picked her way around the ragged edges of the pond, a few frogs unafraid of early frost leaping from beneath her feet in terror, but the more she followed the sound the farther away it seemed. The fat grass carp moved darkly just beneath the surface, their backs breaking the water, and she could hear the whispery night noises that came from nocturnal animals crouched low and moving through the high grasses in the fields.

By the time she had gotten to the far end of the pond, there was a roaring sound in her ears, like the inside of the old pink conch her mother had used for a doorstop on the long screened porch, and she could no longer be certain from which direction the crying came. There were the two old Adirondack chairs in the spot where the spring came in, so that her father could sit when he was tired from fly casting. “Lyds,” he would say, patting the one beside him, “come keep an old boy company.” Those chairs had been in this same spot for nearly seventy-five years; one set would rot, their nails giving way, the slats bowing, and be replaced by another that was exactly the same, and it would no more occur to her to change this arrangement than it had occurred to her that she could leave Blessings
whenever she wanted to and start fresh. She dropped into one of the chairs heavily.

Overhead the moon was a bright silver disk. “Like a new dime,” Sunny had said one night when they were floating in the little boat. “The moon is so much better than the sun.” She had never again known anyone who would think to say such a thing. The moon is so much better than the sun. She wished she could climb into the boat now and feel the almost imperceptible landlocked tide of the Blessings pond. She had loved it so as a child, the little village steeped in deep green: the trout glowing like stained glass with their colored scales, the turtles floating spread-eagled in the shelter of the plants, the carp pulling weed free and munching like cows, the curious goggle-eyed bass. All of them were there now yet she could see nothing but black and silver reflections, hear nothing but that inchoate cry, feel nothing but an ache in her heart. She would rest and then she would find the child and all would be well again. She would arrange things so they would be as they had been. She tilted her head back to the new dime above her, her eyes dazzled. It was better than the sun because you could stare it in the face. A fish broke the surface, a bat swooped low by the dock, and an hour later the loon that had been crying insistently all night from the fen behind her flew low over the chair where she sat, but she could no longer see him.

M
eredith Fox had been sitting in one of the old Adirondack chairs when Skip came down the driveway. She was so still, so settled, that he wondered for a moment if she’d been in that exact same spot ever since the funeral. Well, not a funeral exactly, the way he thought of a funeral. There had been no hearse, and no limousine, and no cemetery, just Meredith and her husband in the old Cadillac. A parade of dark sedans had pulled up to the old stone church, and from the cars had emerged a parade of small wizened women in black suits, women who had borne some ineffable resemblance to Mrs. Blessing herself. He had heard them murmuring to Meredith on the sidewalk afterward, parsing family trees: this one was the sister of a boy who had gone to school with Meredith’s father, that one had been at someplace called Bertram’s a year ahead of Mrs. Blessing. Afterward they had come to the house for sandwiches and iced tea. He had not gone to the lunch. It didn’t feel right. But Mrs. Fox had called him at work after the lunch and asked him to come over.

“You,” said Nadine, coming out of the kitchen door to stand on the back steps as he parked the truck.

“Yep,” he said.

“She out there,” she said, pointing, wiping her hands on a faded dish towel. He supposed Mrs. Fox was the
she
around Blessings now.

Coming at her head-on down the lawn he could see all the ways in which Meredith Fox was like her mother, not so much the facial features, which were softer, less sharp, but the upright posture,
the way she laid her hands on the armrests of the chair, the set of her squared shoulders. She smiled at him, squinting against the sun, and rose to shake his hand.

“Sit,” she said, not in that familiar peremptory way but as though they had known each other a long time.

“This is where Nadine found her,” Meredith said, looking out over the pond. “I can only imagine the scene. Nadine says she called Dr. Benjamin right away, but I’m assuming she yelled at her for a while to get her to get up.”

“People say it was a stroke.”

Meredith shrugged and smoothed her hair back from the deep V at the center of her forehead. “I suppose. It doesn’t really mean much to me, one way or another. She was eighty years old, and she’d outlived everyone she loved. Her father, her brother, her best friend. She still had all her faculties. I never had to try to discuss a retirement home with her. Actually I never would have dared to try to discuss a retirement home with her. And she seemed happier these last few months than she had been in ages.”

“I feel really bad. I was so mad about what happened, the police and Faith and all the other stuff. I wouldn’t talk to her the last time I saw her. I blamed her for everything.”

“I used to do that, too, but I got over it,” Meredith said. “Don’t torture yourself. You brought her a lot of happiness. And she probably understood how you felt better than you did yourself. No one understood righteous indignation better than Mother. She was in a temper the entire time I knew her. If it wasn’t a broken storm window, it was a blown fuse in the garage. And of course she was always outraged that a person painted the house, and then twenty years later you had to paint it again. I couldn’t get over how you persuaded her to fix the roof of the barn.”

“I didn’t have to do much.”

“She liked you.”

“I don’t know. I think she liked keeping the place up.”

“No, she liked you. You got her out of herself for the first time in years. Since her friend Jess died, I think. She liked you, and she
liked Nadine’s daughter. Is it all over town, what she did for that girl?”

“Pretty much.”

“She was furious that Nadine wanted to keep her here in Mount Mason. She said the girl wanted to be a doctor, and that her mother was standing in her way, trying to keep her prisoner here in town. I suppose one of the primary obstacles was money. So Mother left Jennifer the money to go to medical school. Mother told me about it last year. I couldn’t figure out whether it was a gesture designed to provide a better life for that young woman, or whether she just wanted to spite Nadine.”

“I think maybe it was a little bit of both. She sure succeeded on the Nadine front.”

“Nadine cried at the funeral. Sometimes it’s difficult to figure people out, isn’t it.” She sighed. “I’m so sorry about your baby,” she added, patting Skip’s hand.

“I’m so sorry about your mother.”

“She was sorry about you, too, about what happened. She called to tell me and I’ve never heard her so regretful. And my mother scarcely ever expressed regret. I’m still not certain why she seemed to have gotten such a kick out of that baby. I’ve never known her to show the slightest affinity for babies.”

“I think it just made a change, you know? She sort of liked the drama. We had to keep it a secret, from Nadine, and I think she liked that. And from you, too, for as long as we could. Sorry about that.”

“It’s all right. Of course you didn’t succeed on either count. Nadine knew almost from the beginning. She used to call me all the time. She said she knew about the baby in the beginning because when you carried her around strapped to your chest you looked just like she’d looked when she carried Jennifer around her village when Jennifer was born. I suppose it wasn’t popular to get pregnant by an American soldier, so she tried to hide her child in the beginning, until apparently she decided she just didn’t give a damn.”

“Whoa. Whoa. We thought we’d fooled her the whole time. Jennifer did, too. Whoa. That is so strange.”

“No, she knew. And she heard you on the baby monitor one day when my mother left it on by her bed. Some people like to keep secrets. My mother was one of them. Speaking of which, did Mr. Patton call you?”

Skip shook his head. Mrs. Fox smiled. “Well, then, here’s a nice surprise. She left you a life interest in the garage.”

“The garage?”

“I know, it’s crazy, isn’t it? She left you all its contents and the right to live there for the rest of your life. She had Lester Patton work out the language a couple of weeks ago.” She looked over at him with her eyebrows raised. “I have to admit, it’s going to make it good and hard to sell this place.”

“You’re not going to keep it?”

“For what?”

“For you. For the family.”

Meredith Fox looked back over the pond. “The family is gone. I’m the last,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that. I remember now that she told us you didn’t have any children.”

“I’m sure she did,” she said with a tight smile, and then he saw her mother in her face, and in her eyes, blue marbles with a rim of steel gray. Then she shrugged and grinned and that look was gone. “My husband and I had dogs and horses and it seemed to be enough. And we have a place in Virginia that is perfectly situated for both the dogs and the horses. I don’t want to live here. It doesn’t feel right to me. I remember my grandfather with this place. The whole enterprise had an air of unreality, and of failure, somehow. He bought cows. What in the world did he know about cows? Or the corn he had somebody plant one summer? I was only a child when he died, and I went away to school when I was young. I don’t think I spent more than a month at a time here after that. I can’t imagine who will want a place this large. There are eight bedrooms, and the furnace must be fifty years old. Maybe someone
who wants to open a bed-and-breakfast, who will be haunted by my mother for putting samplers and stencils in the kitchen. Maybe someone like my grandfather, who wants to come out from the city on weekends and play gentleman farmer. Or a big family that likes privacy. I suppose I would like someone to be happy here.”