Chez Cordelia (10 page)

Then the phone rang. It was May wanting Ray home, so he left in a hurry, as he always did when she called, as if she really were his mother.

The conversation agitated Danny. That's one reason I remember it so well. I always thought Ray's words had some bearing on Danny's disappearance, though I have no reason to think so except that he used to bring it up during those odd months before he left.

“Remember all that stuff Ray said about death that time?” he used to ask me, out of the blue. “The big adventure?” And then he'd pause, and his face would get sterner and bonier before my eyes, and then he'd say, with all the irony leached out of his voice, “I don't know, Delia. I just don't know.” And I would look back at him helplessly, not knowing what to say. When he left me, that October morning (a year and a month after our wedding), I thought at first he'd gone somewhere to die, until I realized that a dead person can't disappear with the thoroughness Danny had.

We had a year, though, before the oddness began which culminated in Danny's exit. But I'm beginning to dislike, now, the way this story rambles, the way it can only approximate what is to me so clear. Why all these friends and neighbors? Why put them in? Because they were so important to me, I suppose, and to give an idea of the life we led—the normality of it. Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Average, that was us—with our friends, our happy home, our hot dogs and Coca-Cola and Budweiser, the Vanish in our toilet, the Lux under our sink. I had no idea the friends we cultivated would sound so eccentric, become on paper such characters. It's the evil power of words again, with their false magic. Day to day, these people weren't peculiar, except maybe for Mr. Blenka, but even he—except for his phobia—was bland enough, a fat man, optimistic about human nature, generous with his cash, addicted to French bread, enamored of budgies. Even Harvey Sanderson was only a smart-mouthed young medical student with a grotesque sense of humor. And Danny—ah, my dear, lost Danny. On my twentieth birthday he gave me a pretty little gold wristwatch; on the back it was engraved, “For Delia, my dearly beloved wife—DHF, 1973.” It made me cry; it was so old-fashioned, so sincere, so sweet and typical, and far too extravagant. We were happy; the watch proves it. I wear it still. It keeps perfect time. I think of Danny, in Sommers State Prison, keeping time by bells. The watch is like our good year together, gentle and regular and somehow delicate—easily shattered.

Well, I ramble on. Let me get to the parents, and the shattering. Danny's mother and father were proud of us, thought we had done very well for ourselves. They often came to dinner on Sundays, when the market was closed. Claire especially liked the ice-cream-parlor chairs, and George used to stretch out on the tweed sofa after dinner and take a nap. “He feels right at home,” Claire said over her knitting the first couple of times he did it. “It's that kind of apartment,” she sometimes added, and I saw Danny, who pretended he didn't care about his parents' approval, beam.

Mine were another story. I could tell the apartment pained them deeply. They came over less often than the Frontenacs—every month or two, perhaps—and while they were there my father was in a state of perpetual wince. He never said anything to me, but he seemed to sit gingerly in the big armchair, unable to believe in the reality of any furniture but shabby old antiques. Once, when I was in the kitchenette, I overheard him say to my mother, “This is
living?
”—as if he were Jewish.

Another time, Ray Royal came in with a couple of guys from the shirt factory while my mother was visiting. It was summer, and Danny took them out on the balcony to drink beer and play poker. “Quite a little salon you have here,” my mother murmured to me. It was one of the few sarcastic things I ever heard her say. It disconcerted me, not so much because my mother disapproved of my life—
that
I expected—but because her view of it was false and would never get put right, no matter what anyone said or did. It was as if I was some intractable biography she'd been working on for twenty years. I
irritated
her. The howling beer drinkers on the balcony, the cheap new furniture, the baloney on white bread for lunch, the canned iced tea, the cat clock—all of it was wrong, if you were my mother. She would have liked to rip it up and start over. And still we loved each other. Mother and daughter, we looked at each other in mutual, affectionate, silent disappointment over the remains of the lunch, and when she left we hugged tighter than ever. But each on her own side of the door breathed with relief.

We used to visit the parents, too. Mine liked us to come for brunch. My mother's cooking was either negligent (once we had sardines, wholemeal biscuits, and imported brandy-soaked cherries for dinner) or elaborate, and for these brunches she used to outdo herself with kipper-stuffed crêpes and sausages flown over from England and odd bits of fish in sauce. Setting me an example, I suppose, of civilized entertaining. Danny couldn't get over my mothers' cooking. He ate it—he ate anything—but every time she brought out a slab of smelly Camembert for dessert he gaped.

Then we would go into town to the Frontenacs' for a large dinner, usually spaghetti and meatballs with lettuce salad and Italian bread, or pot roast, or turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes, with a regular dessert like a Sara Lee chocolate cake and chocolate chip ice cream. It was at one of those dinners, that summer we were both twenty, that George and Claire broke it to us about Hector's.

They had been talking retirement for years, and especially since Danny and I got married. George wanted to live in Florida, in the sun. Claire used to say, “I'm fifty years old, and I've worked every day of my life since I was seventeen.” It was true: she had quit school when her father died, and become a waitress. At twenty she married George and went to work at Hector's. “Enough is enough,” Claire said. It was always assumed that Danny would take over the store. In fact, he and I had talked tentatively of moving back into the village, maybe in the spring, and easing ourselves into Hector's. We'd planned to discuss this with his parents one Sunday soon. But that summer day, over the pot roast and boiled potatoes and Le Sueur baby peas, George told us he'd sold Hector's.

It is absolutely accurate to say Danny and I were stunned. I felt as if someone had taken a baseball bat to my head. Our lives, all we'd planned, spilled out on the table before us. There was nothing left. And our year of perfect happiness was up.

George elaborated. Hector's was no longer a money-making enterprise. The competition from the supermarket chains was doing in the mom-and-pop operations like Hector's.

“Hector's is a luxury,” George said. He'd had several drinks before dinner. His eyes pleaded with us (Don't hate me, don't hate me) as he recited his obviously well-rehearsed lines. “It would never support the two of you, Dan. Delia. It's in the red now and it'll only get worse.” His own red eyes sank to his plate.

They had had a substantial offer from a man who wanted to open an old-time general store there. “Herbs and spices in barrels, penny candy, tea cozies—all that junk,” George said bitterly. Claire put her hand over his, and all of a sudden I saw my father-in-law for what he was—a loser and a failure, a disappointed man. “I should have had the balls to get out years ago,” he said to Claire, confirming my impression, and his tone was briefly savage. I wondered if he blamed Claire for snuffing out, over the years, all the bright ideas that might have saved him—the remodeling, the expansion, the ramps. I didn't envy my in-laws their retirement years in Florida, with George's wounds bleeding in the sun and Claire trying to bind them up.

I pitied the two of them, but I was angry, too. They could have told us. They could have given us a chance to buy the store; we might have managed it. Danny said all this, and the reply infuriated him. “We didn't want to wish it on you kids, we didn't want to saddle you with it.”

Danny insisted we get up right then and leave, and of course I had no choice, though I felt awful leaving the Frontenacs there at the table with George's fifth drink before him and the roast sitting in its juice. I called Claire later that night. I had calmed down by then, but Danny stayed mad. He was hurt and he had been insulted. “They treat us like kids,” he kept saying. We
are
kids, I thought, but I didn't say anything. Part of the conflict was none of my business. It was between Danny and his parents, and it involved the long years of Hector's Market, of the tiny apartment upstairs with its diamond-paned windows, of only-childhood, of promises spoken and unspoken and now broken. I sympathized with everyone. I was on both sides at once. I could see that the Frontenacs were right, and also that Danny was right to feel cheated. And I was miserable; for me, the loss involved not pride but visions: of sunlight through diamond panes, of the warm, dim dustiness of the store with its plenty, of living my life as a grocer's wife. I'll never be able to explain the strange appeal of that poem.

The weeks went by, and in the fall George and Claire left. They had bought a condominium in Sarasota, Florida. They brought us boxes and boxes of groceries before they went—peace offerings, tokens of their love, bribes, bonds. Danny, stony-faced, helped carry the stuff in, all our favorites—canned pork and beans, Campbell's soup, Dinty Moore stews, Lipton onion soup mix, boxes of spaghetti and elbow macaroni, all kinds of cookies. Danny never said a word of thanks, and every night at dinner, he'd ask, “Any of this stuff from the market?” And when I said, “Yes, the peas,” or the corn or the steak sauce, his lips would wrinkle up in disgust. It was the first time he had ever really irked me. Sitting across from him and his prissy anger, I thought, if it offends you so much, why did you accept it? Finally I said as much, and the vehemence of his answer scared me: “They owe us this, and plenty more.”

He told Ray about the groceries one night when we were all eating a Hector's meal, and Ray just laughed. He slapped Danny on the shoulder and said in an exaggerated Southern accent, “When it rains corn pone, baby, hold out your dish.” Danny didn't laugh. When he gets angry his ears burn red, and they were flaming. But he kept on eating his pork and beans.

He never got over it. All that summer and fall he did nothing but go to work and, when he was home, sit out on the balcony, brooding until it got dark. Then he slumped in front of the TV. He didn't care what he watched. He just sat there, half watching, and making his angular doodles in the margins of
TV Guide
, until he got sleepy.

People stopped coming over, except for Ray once in a while. I still had coffee or Cokes with Lois Liebermann or Mrs. Smolover or Elisa or Mr. Blenka during the day. They never bothered me when Danny was home. I didn't tell any of them my troubles, although once in a while someone, usually Mr. Blenka, asked me if anything was wrong. I believe Mrs. Smolover thought I was pregnant, and then, when I didn't get bigger, that I had had an abortion and was depressed about it. She used to lean across the table and pat my hand and say, with a heavy sigh, “It's not an easy life, is it, honey?”

Danny put in a lot of overtime and often worked Saturdays. He asked me once if I'd mind if he went back on the night shift. I did mind, and I said so: our being together was more important than the extra money, the possible promotion. Not that we were together much any more. He avoided me as he avoided everyone. Only in bed at night, from time to time, was he tender and human; I kept expecting him to cry in my arms as he had over the war, and I wished he would, so that, comforting him, I could get a little comfort for myself. But he never did. And we never discussed the future. I didn't press him. I thought it would come, in time.

What came, though, was that October morning when I awoke, early, alone in our giant bed. It seems to me I was dreaming about when Danny used to work nights and I sometimes slept alone. What woke me, I don't know—perhaps the sudden chill of his absence, perhaps a noise. I called out, but there was no answer. I got out of bed and went over the whole apartment—bathroom, kitchen, and living room, even the closets. I opened the door into the hall and looked in both directions. In a panic of apprehension I ran to the balcony doors, opened them, went to the railing, and looked down.

I was just in time. A black Volkswagen pulled up in front of the building, and Danny, who had been standing on the curb, went right up to it, as if he had been waiting. He opened the door on the passenger side, and I saw him exchange a few words with the driver. Ten stories up I couldn't see who it was or hear what they said. There was a row of puny new maple trees planted between the sidewalk and the road. They were shedding their leaves, and as Danny stood there a light gust of wind swirled a jumble of red leaves around him. Then he got in and slammed the door, and the car drove away. He was in his pajamas, maroon-and-white-striped ones. His feet were bare. He carried a paper bag.

I stood on the balcony, shivering in my nightgown, for a long time, watching for Danny's return. The sun finished rising, revealing a gentle October morning—blue sky, red leaves. The cars on the street looked shiny, and the brick hospital buildings over across George Street to the south looked bright and clean, like a postcard.

Danny didn't return. A lot of black Volkswagens went by, but none of them stopped to let out a man in striped pajamas. Eventually I went inside and waited there. I didn't know what else to do. The apartment was unfamiliar and impersonal, the way a place can look when you've just come back from a long vacation. The cherry dresser looked dull, the ice-cream chairs tinny, the dog cookie jar corny. My reflection in the mirror had something missing from it, and it wasn't just Danny with his arm around me; it was part of me, gone away with him.

I wandered into the bedroom and made the bed, thinking how unnecessarily huge and silly-looking it was in that tiny room. I got dressed, in any old thing. In the kitchen the cat clock said 8:20 and made its whirring noise. I suppose I ate breakfast. Now and then there were voices in the hall—Elisa going out, the Liebermann kids leaving for school, Jeff dropping
Journal-Couriers
on doormats. These familiar noises comforted me until I remembered, and snapped back into my misery and confusion. I kept going to the terrace to look down at the street. I don't know what I expected. Some version of Danny's Perpetual Big Bang theory, perhaps: Danny would back out of the car, walk backward across the parking lot and come upstairs in the elevator, and our door would open behind him and he'd get into bed—and outside, the black Volkswagen would be backing down George Street and the sun would lower itself in the sky and the leaves fly back up to the trees …