Blessings (31 page)

She was considering this when the doorbell rang. She went to answer it.

Shirley’s glance swept over Jennie. “All better, are you?”

“Pretty much. A twenty-four-hour bug, I guess. Or just a touch of flu or something.”

“Good. Lucky for you your friend was here. He said you almost fainted.”

“It hit me hard.”

“Tough. Well, I’m taking the afternoon off. I’ll probably come home early, so if there’s anything you want, you’ll know where to find me.”

“Thanks so much, Shirley. But I’m all right. I really am.”

When Shirley left, Jennie poured a second cup of coffee and sat down again. Things in the tiny kitchen had been put back in the wrong places. The black-lacquer tray was on the top shelf instead of the bottom. It looked better on the top shelf next to the black-lacquer jar of Chinese tea. Peter had done that; he noticed such things. He was meticulous and perfection was important to him; he was, after all, the son of the house with the tall white pillars. The house where Jennie had been unwanted. And she had borne a grandchild for them! Her head dropped into her hands, and although she had been shivering a few minutes ago, she was overcome with the heat of her pounding blood.

Yet Peter had just been so good to her! And Shirley too. They’d wanted to help, and she must be grateful. She was. But the only one who could really help was Jay.

And the morning drifted past.

Early in the afternoon she became shockingly aware that, lost within herself, she had given no thought to George Cromwell. Under the frozen earth, the guileless,

kind old man lay in his new grave. Guilt brought a hot flush to her cheeks. She must at least send some flowers to his widow and drive up to see her soon. In her despair she had almost forgotten that other woman, and she frowned now, weighing that woman’s pain against her own. But they were too different to be weighed; they were at the opposite ends of life.

I’ll go now about the flowers, she thought. It’ll only take a few minutes, and if Jay comes and finds I’m not here, he will wait.

He will not come.

When she opened the door to the street, she saw with dismay that Peter was approaching the house. This was too much!

She had no need of him, and no wish for any heart-to-heart talks about themselves or Jill.

“So you’re going out!” he exclaimed. “Well, you look better than you did yesterday, anyway. How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine, as you see.”

He peered down at her. “I don’t know about ‘fine.’ But certainly improved. Going anywhere special?”

“Only to the florist on the avenue.”

“Mind if I walk with you?”

“No.” And she told him, “I know I said I’m fine, but I’m very tired. So please excuse me if I don’t say much.”

He made no answer. Few people were out on this raw afternoon, so that the nervous, rapid clack of Jennie’s heels was loud, and Peter’s silence, in consequence, was heavier and mournful. She felt oppressed by a strange sensation of distance, as if she had been away for a long time. At a drugstore on the avenue, next to the florist, she stopped as if to collect herself, and stood watching a boy arrange a little pyramid of perfume bottles, Nuit de Noel, Caleche, Shalimar—all the lilting names. Shalimar was sweet, like roses, sugar, and vanilla. Sweet candy, Jay always said, kissing her neck. And turning from the window, she was so blinded by her tears that she would have bumped into a man going past if Peter had not caught her arm.

In the flower shop she gave her order for roses to be telegraphed to Martha Cromwell, and went out again into a day grown blustery and heartless.

Peter broke the silence. “May I ask you just one thing? I won’t burden you, Jennie, but have you talked to him?”

“No.”

He winced. “Oh, God, it’s my fault.”

“It would have ended, anyway, in the circumstances.”

“Jill, you mean. It’s because of her, you’re saying.”

“Oh, Peter, I’m not saying anything. For God’s sake, don’t make me think anymore! I want to be empty forever.”

“Funny, that’s what Jill said about herself yesterday.”

“You’ve seen her again?”

“Yes, I had to be at Columbia, I told you. So we had lunch. I told her about you, told her everything. Do you mind that I did?”

“If I do, it’s too late, isn’t it? But no, I guess I don’t mind.”

“She cried, Jennie. She thinks she treated you harshly. She wouldn’t have been so insistent if she’d known how things were with you.”

“She didn’t mean to be harsh. Tell her I understand that. I don’t want her to feel guilty because of me.”

“It would be better if you would tell her all that yourself, Jennie.”

Jennie threw up her hands. “Don’t you know we’d only go over the same ground? It wouldn’t come to anything.”

“You can’t be sure of that. Isn’t it worth trying?”

Apologies, explanations, and probably more tears, she thought, and repeated, “It wouldn’t come to anything.”

“I’m not trying to force anything on you. But she is so young. Her childhood was yesterday. Please think about it.”

Jennie sighed. “All right. I’m thinking, and this is what I think.”

“Think about it some more, please.”

His voice was soothing. He was coaxing her, and she knew it. And he was probably right. No, he was surely right. Jill’s childhood … what do I know about it? But I know how it hurts not to be understood. As Jay to me, so I to Jill. All related, intertwined like a knot.

But I can’t unravel it now. I can’t.

And lowering her head against the wind, she hurried homeward. Halfway there, she stopped and held out her hand.

“Peter, I want to say good-bye here.”

“You don’t want me to go back to the house? That’s okay, Jennie. It makes sense. But will you do one thing? Will you really think about talking to Jill?”

“I’ll do my best, Peter.”

She was turning the key in the lock when Shirley’s door opened.

“Hey, where’ve you been, anyway? I thought you’d never get back.”

“What do you mean? I wasn’t out more than half an hour. Forty-five minutes, maybe.”

“Jay was here.”

Jennie’s heart shook. “And? Did you talk to him?”

“He rang my bell when you didn’t answer. I told him I’d seen you go down the street—I was just coming home then—with your friend, that doctor from Chicago.”

“You told him that?”

“Of course. Shouldn’t I have?”

How amazing that one’s heart can faint while one’s voice stays steady!

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. Just thanked me and left. He’s such a gentleman! Oh, I did tell him you were feeling better this morning, and that your doctor friend must have said it was all right to go out for a while.”

With a hopeless gaze Jennie’s eyes rested on her friend. Sophistication could be a surface quality, a flair for dress and a collection of worldly mannerisms; beneath all these, Shirley was only a good-hearted, thoughtless, garrulous child. Her chattering tongue, unknowing, had just now put the final seal on Jennie’s fate. With this second event, the return of her “Chicago friend,” there was no way at all Jay could trust her again.

“I think I’ll lie down awhile,” she said faintly.

“You shouldn’t have been out in this weather. You look positively white. I don’t care what anybody says, it doesn’t make sense to risk pneumonia—”

But Jennie had already gone in and closed the door.

Now she was numb. She sank onto a hard chair in the hall and stared at the floor. The little rug was marked in squares, four from side to side, seven up and down. Seven fours are twenty-eight… . Time bent, and her wandering mind began to spin, so that Peter, the young one and the present one, began to spin, merged with Jay, so that light merged with dark and fear overlaid them all. What should she do next with her life? What could she do next? And abruptly, as on a cold morning after long postponements one suddenly jumps out of bed, she went to the telephone and dialed Jay’s office number.

The secretary’s familiar voice was ever so slightly unsure, or embarrassed, or cool; whichever it was, Jennie knew at once that the response was untrue. No, Mr. Wolfe had not come in. As a matter of fact, he probably was not coming in at all today. No, she really didn’t know when he would be back or where he was. This from the friendly gray-haired woman who had always had a few words for Jennie and had even been promised an invitation to the wedding!

It was three o’clock. Three was a reminder: The children had come from school. Of course, she thought, this is what I must do. Emily and Sue will tell me if he’s at home. Her hand was poised above the telephone. If he was there, what would she say? How to begin? Oh, my dear, my dearest, hear me. Hear what? Yet her fingers dialed the number.

“Is this you, Sue?”

“No, it’s Emily.”

“How are you, darling? This is Jennie.”

“I know,” the child said.

“Tell me, is Daddy there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Darling, what do you mean, you ‘don’t know’?”

The child murmured unintelligibly.

“I can’t hear you, Emily. What did you say?”

“I said Nanny doesn’t want me to talk on the telephone now.”

“Does Nanny know you’re talking to me?”

“I think so. Yes.”

So Jennie knew well what had happened. Never, never would Jay have told his children anything ugly about her; certainly he never would tell them to be rude to her. He must simply have told Nanny that he didn’t want to speak to her, and Nanny had said something about it to the children.

And she saw Jay in the library, where he most often used the telephone. It stood on the desk, next to the statue of Lincoln on the chair in the memorial. The wing chair was dark green leather with brass nail heads. He might even be sitting there now, alone with his disillusionment.

She saw Emily answering the telephone in the hall. Emily always liked to run to the phone, which made Nanny angry. The woman was so rigid, and Jennie had been thinking how, after they were married, very tactfully she would convince Jay to find someone else.

“I’ve missed you, darling,” she said now.

“I’ve missed you, too, but Nanny say I’m not to talk anymore.”

“Good-bye, Emily,” Jennie answered quietly, replacing the receiver.

Suddenly she heard herself wail; a most terrible cry it was, an outburst of anguish and despair. When a knife cuts or a child dies, such cries are heard. She clamped her hand over her mouth to choke her sobs, which shook her body so that she was bent over in pain.

After a while, a long, long while, the sobs died away into a deep, exhausted sigh. She stood up. She reached into the cupboard and drew from the cereal box the Cartier’s box with the ring. Then she went to the bedroom and took the velvet box with the pearls from under a pile of sweaters. The ring had never belonged on her finger. Its cold diamond eye was aloof. The pearls, opulent as silk, slid through her hands; let them go back to be worn on the kind of neck to which they were accustomed. In the kitchen she packed both boxes into a small carton, wrapped it with heavy twine, and sealed it with heavy tape. All the time her teeth were clenched; she became aware of that when she had to telephone the post office for the
ZIP
code.

Writing, with a hand that had to be steadied, the name J. Wolfe, she thought, This is the last time I shall need to write his name.

At the post office it took all of her money, all she had had in the secret emergency cache at home, to pay for insurance on the package. It seemed to her as she handed it over to the man at the counter that this must be the feeling one had after surgery, pain and relief that it was over.

The way now lay ahead, she thought resolutely. Yet there came a flicker of doubt, a question: When have I said that before? And the answer came: You said that after your daughter was born. Don’t you remember?

Maybe I ought to move, she thought on the way home. This neighborhood, although it isn’t his, is too full of him. That store where we watched the angora kittens and almost bought one, our Italian dinners, the record shop where we stocked up on compact discs— Shall I remember every time I walk past?

The day was darkening toward night, and the wind was cutting. Discarded papers scooted along the dirty gutters of the iron-gray city. I must take hold of myself, she said silently. A mood like this mustn’t be allowed to last. It was too easy to slide into depression. She remembered those grim weeks before Jill’s birth, when she had sat staring out of a window into afternoons like this one, dirty, windy, and frozen.

At the front door of her building she passed a man hurrying down the steps. She thought his glance lasted a few seconds too long, as though he was taking notice of her. She thought perhaps she knew him and then thought he was the man with whom, earlier in the day, she had collided at the drugstore window. Yes, surely it was he. Nonsense. In her present state of mind she was apt to imagine anything. But maybe it was he. The tape, she thought. Oh, surely not!

Back upstairs, she found that she had left her door unlocked. “Nerves,” she said aloud and sternly. “You never did that before. You’re just not thinking.” She began to shiver. The temperature must have dropped very low. No, it wasn’t that. It was nerves again. She scolded herself. “Make some hot tea and eat. You’ve not had a mouthful since breakfast.”

Warming her hands around the cup, she sat staring out at the cold sky. Thin clouds scudded over the pale, sinking sun. The kitchen clock’s loud tick emphasized the silence and the emptiness. When she had drunk the tea, she stood up and began to walk up and down the living room. Her mind traveled through the day just past. There was something—wasn’t there something?—she was supposed to think about.

Yes. She was supposed to think about Jill. “She’s so young,” Peter had said. “Her childhood was only yesterday.”

That’s true. And now she grieves because of me. Why should she grieve so young? Time enough for that later when she’s older. Plenty of time … There’s no longer any reason why she can’t come here now. No reason at all.

Very subtly Jennie began to feel that an exchange was in the making: a lover, a husband lost and a daughter found. Plans erased and substituted by some gigantic finger in the sky, as if one’s own will didn’t count for anything. Well, it hasn’t counted, has it, Jennie? All the hope wasted, and all the energy gone down the drain! One has an image of another person, like mine of Jay, but how true is it? For that matter, can one’s image of one’s own self be true?