Blessings (3 page)

He sharpened the clippers on the whetstone, and filled the bird feeder, and watched the watery early morning light get warmer, less pastel. He washed his hands at the deep soapstone sink. Both Mrs. Fosters had done the family laundry there, hung it way back on the line hidden behind the garage while their husbands were mending the furnace or dredging the viscous end of the pond. The old lady didn’t want anyone driving up and seeing laundry flapping in the breeze. Skip took his laundry to the Wash-N-Dry in town. He washed his hands again.

“Ah, hell, let’s get it over with,” he said, the same thing, in the same tone of voice, that his uncle had said as he took off his belt when he was going to whip Skip’s butt in the basement.

“I’m washing my hands of you,” his uncle had said when Skip got busted for the Quik-Stop holdup.

Skip went around to the side of the big house, to the basement door that gave out onto the drive. “This way,” Nadine, the housekeeper, had said to him, her mouth drawn up tight when she’d had to tell him what to do, and, more important, what not to do. Don’t use the front door. Don’t use the back door. Come up through the basement. Wipe your feet on the mat. Don’t make any noise. Don’t wake up Miz Blessing. That’s how she said it, Miz, like one of those old movies and Nadine was the mammy. Or maybe it was just that weird way Nadine talked, as though she were wearing a retainer like the one Skip had worn to pull his snaggled front teeth into line, the one he’d lost and his father said there was no money to replace. Nadine’s name had been something else once, and her language something else, too, that she still talked to herself, under her breath, when she was angry, which was often. But that had been when she still lived in Korea, before she came over with their little girl to marry Mr. Foster’s nephew Craig, who got her the job at Blessings.

“First grind beans,” Nadine had said. “Not too small, not too big. Just right. Consistency of cornmeal.” The old lady must have said that to Nadine. In a million years Nadine never would have thought to say that herself: “consistency of cornmeal.” The words themselves sounded more like “con me” in Nadine’s mouth. Skip didn’t think he’d ever actually seen cornmeal. When Nadine said “consistency,” it sounded like someone whistling with a toothpick in her teeth.

He thought he must be getting the hang of it. A cupful of black beans, shiny as onyx beads, sealed in brown bags with the name of someplace in New York City stamped in black on them. The growl of the little motor in the grinder, the slow hiccuping of the old percolator behind him as he went back down the cellar stairs.
He never knew what happened after he left. He never knew if Mrs. Blessing came downstairs herself as soon as she heard the cellar door close to pour a cup of coffee, or if she stayed in bed, sleeping the long satisfied sleep Skip imagined was the birthright of people who owned as much land as the whole town was built on and just let the land lie there, sleeping, too. Maybe she waited until Nadine came in at eight-thirty. Maybe Nadine brought her breakfast and coffee on a tray, and Mrs. Blessing took a sip and lifted those pale blue eyes to the sky that was the same color, the way she did when she was aggravated, and said, “Too weak” or “Too strong.” Maybe he was one bad pot of coffee away from sleeping back in Joe’s combination living room–dining room–kitchen and listening to Debbie yell “Oh, JoeJoeJoeJoe” through the particle-board wall.

He loved the goddamned job but he hated making the coffee every morning, and he couldn’t figure out why. Maybe it was because he didn’t understand the point of it. He could understand cleaning the pumps in the frog ponds, or spraying the paper wasps that set up noisy housekeeping in the corner of the porch and the boathouse roofs. If he could just work like that, outside from morning until night, sweaty, sunburned, fixing the screens, mulching the plants, keeping the lawn as smooth and even and green as the felt on the pool table at McGuire’s, his life would be perfect. He’d like somebody to sleep with, too, but he wasn’t going to make any more mistakes. And a washing machine. Maybe he’d buy himself a washer, once he’d saved enough money.

The big barn cat was sitting smugly outside the basement door, a mole on the ground at its feet. The cat followed him across the circular driveway that separated the big house from the garage. At the center of the circle was a maple tree four stories high. Maybe today Skip would trim the lower branches and prune the holly that flanked the flagstone path to the apartment door, the one he never used, that came out by the side of the pond. He looked toward it and saw a cardboard box lying at the foot of the steps.

That was just the kind of thing the old lady would see from the
upstairs back hallway window and give him hell about. Not give him hell directly, no, she’d tell Nadine, who would tell him, which would make him feel low, like a boy, like nobody, nothing. “Miz Blessing say …” Like he was too low for her to talk to directly. She talked to him directly only when she thought the task was too complicated to explain to Nadine, which probably made Nadine feel like nothing, too.

The cat bounded ahead, the mole dangling limply from the side of its mouth, and sniffed the corner of the box, and cried. Skip bent down to pick up the box and carried it to the tool bench in the garage. He could tell by the weight that there was something inside.

There were a couple of times in his life when he’d felt his mind slow down almost to a dead halt, when it seemed like his brain had to tell the rest of his body what was happening, slow, in words of one syllable, the way Mr. Keller had talked to them in American history when he was annoyed because too many of them had failed a test. When his father sat in the driveway, his head down on the steering wheel, just home from seeing his mother at the hospital, and Skip could see him out the window—that was one time. And when his uncle had come by to tell Skip that he was to move in with him and Aunt Betty, that his father’s trip to Florida had turned into a life in Florida—that was another. “It’s warm down here,” his father had said on the phone, as though that explained everything.

After that he’d learned to recognize the feeling, like moving underwater in the river when the current sucked you down and you had to push with your hands and kick with your feet, working with all your strength just to stay still. The time he’d broken his leg falling off his bike and seen the bone poking like a birch branch through the rent in the skin. The moment when he’d seen Chris pull on that ski mask on his way into the Quik-Stop. The day after he got out of the county jail in April and went to Shelly’s back door and saw her belly jutting out beneath the T-shirt and the half-sheepish, half-truculent look on her face. Counting out the
months he’d spent in jail in his head, trying to make ten months come out somehow to less than nine, turning around and walking without saying anything, Shelly calling to him, “It’s not like we were that serious, Skipper.” Which he guessed meant that she’d been screwing around even before he went to jail.

Skip felt that feeling when he opened the cardboard box and looked inside. “A baby,” he said, as though if he spoke it he’d believe it. He was an only child, the last healthy thing his mother had managed before she faltered and faded into a life of vague physical complaints that ended with the big finale of breast cancer. He’d been one of the few kids at the high school who didn’t have a first or second cousin in his class, one of the few who wasn’t from the kind of big Mount Mason family that meant you had to be real careful about who you felt up in the basement at a party. He knew a lot more about machinery than he did about babies, but even he could tell that the baby in the box was more or less newborn. Its maroon skin was streaked with a motley mask of dried blood and mucus, and its small fist pushed into its face as though it were trying to shield itself from the glare of even a half-lit garage.

“Eh-eh-eh,”
it was wheezing, its tiny, ugly baked apple of a face contorted by fear or frustration or hunger or something else that Skip couldn’t understand. The baby’s body was wrapped tight in an old flannel shirt, the sleeves wound round and tied beneath the chin. Swaddling clothes, Skip thought to himself. He’d never been able to figure out exactly what that meant. Swaddling clothes. It was hot outside, and there was a sheen of sweat on the skull, crystalline drops in the pale, colorless down that covered the baby’s head. The cat licked the down with its rough tongue. “Go away,” Skip said, knocking the animal off the bench. “Get. Get.”

Skip wiped his hands on his jeans and slid them under the baby. lifting it out of the box. There was a wet spot on the cardboard where the baby’s butt had been, and another about even with its mouth. Its head wobbled as he lifted it onto his shoulder the way he’d seen people do easily and effortlessly so many times. It was a lot harder than it looked; he wasn’t sure exactly where to put his
hands. The small head bounced forward, then back. The wheezing went on, then a bark of a cough.

“Oh, man,” he said as he started up the inside stairs to the apartment above the garage, the light weight somehow heavy against his shoulder. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” He didn’t know why, but halfway up he turned around and went back for the box.

L
ydia Blessing ate breakfast each morning in the summer months at a small drop-leaf table in one corner of the long porch overlooking the pond. In the winter the table went into a corner of the library, since the long porch was too cold after the first frost came to Mount Mason. Both locations had the advantage of allowing her to look out over a substantial swathe of her substantial property. Her father had begun the tradition, and more often than not, sometime during the meal, he would say happily, “Lord of all he surveys.” Her mother ate upstairs on a tray in bed.

Lydia had continued because she liked to think of herself as a person who honored tradition, and because from this vantage point she could usually keep a close eye on anyone working on the property. She could see her new caretaker on the rider mower in the back field. He was hunched forward over the seat and the steering wheel looking, as her father would have said, as though he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. She wondered why his posture was suddenly so poor. She was of the school that believed that the spine was a reflection of character, and that only the weak stooped. She had not noticed this young man’s poor posture when she had hired him, nor for the first month he had worked for her, but for the last few days he had gone about his tasks with the rounded shoulders of an old man. She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. A bad sign, for a young person to be so bowled over by the summer heat when it was only the first day of July.

“Now today the coffee is too strong,” Mrs. Blessing said, looking at the front page of the newspaper. “Yesterday it wasn’t strong enough.”

“Not my fault,” said Nadine, clearing the breakfast dishes from the small table onto a silver tray with the monogram of Mrs. Blessing’s mother at its center. Lydia had had half a grapefruit, a bowl of All-Bran with strawberries on top, and two cups of coffee, black. Bananas, she always said, had a tendency to bind her. Nadine hated it when she talked like that. “Keep herself to herself, the old wrinkled lady,” she said to her husband, Craig.

“That’s a nice way to talk,” Craig had said.

“You never mind,” said Nadine.

Mrs. Blessing wiped her mouth with a napkin that had her monogram on it in white, thread so very much the color of the linen upon which it had been placed that it was easier to feel the letters, as though they were in Braille, than it was to read them. This, too, drove Nadine nuts. The fabric and the floss had faded in tandem, so that both now were a pale ecru, the color of age. Mrs. Blessing herself was the same shade. So was the face of the watch her parents had given her for her graduation from Bertram’s. The white dial had become ivory, then the palest café au lait, the black letters brownish, then coffee-colored. The gold band had acquired a matte finish. It had had to be mended only six months after she had gotten it, when she had caught it on the edge of a rented gilt chair at her deb party, then again in 1946, when it had exploded from her wrist on the tennis court as she served, and sometime in the early 1960s, when one of Jess’s sons had carelessly trod on it on the dock while she was swimming the length of the pond.

Each time it had been returned to the jeweler on Madison Avenue from whom her father had bought it. She wound it every night before bed. For her seventieth birthday her daughter, Meredith, had given her a gold watch with a brown leather strap. “I don’t see how you can even read the dial of your old one,” Meredith had said. “This one never needs winding,” she added. The watch had been in its box in a drawer for a dozen years, next to several boxes of stockings from the old B. Altman’s store, closed
now. “I don’t know why I even bother to buy her things,” Meredith had said to her husband the next time she visited.

At the Bertram School they had learned that old was always better than new, that the past was always nicer than the present, that white was always more elegant than any other shade except for black, which was inappropriate for girls under age twenty-one. She’d graduated from Bertram’s when she was seventeen, in 1939, but there were long afternoons now, when she dozed off in the wing chair next to the fireplace in the living room, when Bertram’s seemed more real than the news in the paper she’d read that morning. The long linoleum hallways, the smell of starch in their uniform blouses, Miss Bertram’s lace-up shoes black against the red Turkish carpet in the head’s office when a girl was called in for insolence or bad temper or lack of charity or insufficient effort.

The sins of the past seemed so venial in light of what she now read each morning in the
Times
that Nadine fetched from the newsstand in Mount Mason, stories about girls who had sex for money and got sick and died because of it, who killed their friends and their parents and themselves. There had not been truly bad girls at Bertram’s, or at least not bad in ways that mattered or were openly discussed. There was in each class one girl who was clever and slightly profane and who had what Miss Bertram referred to as “errant ways.” It was always understood among them that these girls would come to a bad end, but Lydia Blessing had noticed that it somehow always happened that those girls did very well for themselves. The girl with the errant ways in Lydia’s class, Priscilla North, had become an ambassador to one of the smaller European countries after her husband died, and was often asked back to the school to talk about the new American woman.