Dale Loves Sophie to Death (27 page)

“Oh, I don’t know,” Toby had said, as Martin had hugged him in greeting. Toby had turned his head away slightly, with a smile.

Almost at once, Martin had turned to Dinah, even before he had given her a quick embrace, and said with pleasure, “He looked so much like you, just then.” He had said that with a voice full of delight and a smug satisfaction. She had been absorbed by other things then, but now Dinah was overwhelmed in the dark, thinking about it. All at once, she felt that the only people she
did
know, and the only people who had, in fact, known her all her life, were Martin and her own three children.

Chapter Twelve

Taking Leave

D
inah and Martin didn’t get to spend a night together until Toby was out of the hospital, because in spite of the assurances of everyone on the Pediatrics floor that Toby would be perfectly well looked after, his parents didn’t believe it for a minute. There was never any question in their minds that they should be there. They had noticed that the hospital was an unhealthy place for sick people, and especially for children and old people, who weren’t listened to and couldn’t fend for themselves. The nurses crept in at night, meaning to administer a shot to Toby without awakening him first and giving him a warning. Dinah knew they thought he would cause them more trouble awake than asleep, although she had noticed with a pathetic and misdirected pride that on Toby’s chart, which was clipped to the door, he was checked off as a “good” patient. Toby was a stoic patient; he didn’t argue with whatever he realized was inevitable. But Dinah insisted they wake him, and Martin was even angrier at such a self-serving trick on the part of those very tired nurses.

The two of them did leave him alone for an hour or so during his lunch while they went together to the snack bar to get sandwiches and drinks from the machines. But for five days they saw each other only in the company of other people. They unwrapped their sandwiches at one of the round white plastic tables in the concession area and sat trying to make conversation. There was no lack of tenderness between them, and there was no more irritation, but they had scarcely even touched each other, and it was a little as though they were still speaking over a distance of a thousand miles on the phone. They were very polite and fond and considerate, and that was all they could be.

Toby was not terribly ill, and so he had become restless and querulous. He was homesick and made to feel lonely, since no matter which parent was with him,
he
was the only one subject to the imperiousness of the regimental order of the hospital. He was still in the hospital now just to keep him entirely off his leg. The IV had been removed the morning of the second day of his stay, and the reason for his ever having had it was entirely too vague from Dinah’s point of view. But she didn’t argue with anyone. She didn’t intend to alienate Toby’s doctor. After all, Toby was entirely in his power.

Toby had recovered from his flu, although at home Sarah and David both came down with it simultaneously. This made for an exhausting and demoralizing several days for Martin and Dinah. There was no real rest to be had at the hospital, because one always had to be on guard against the bureaucracy. And at home there was no leisure at all. When the other two children were not actively sick, either Dinah or Martin had to make an attempt to beat back the disorder that built up when their normal routine was so violently interrupted. Laundry, dishes, shopping, garbage. But the two of them got through those tiresome days without any keenness of mind. It was a good thing to be a trifle anesthetized; they didn’t fall into the frenzied irritability that might have overtaken them. By the time Toby came home, the household was relatively serene, and the weather had hit that wonderful spate of glory before the days begin seriously to promise the coming of fall. The sun shone all day, but the humidity was so low that Dinah’s hair crackled when she brushed it, and the temperature stayed in the seventies. It was the best weather possible; it was the weather that, in the deepest part of winter, Dinah always remembered as the essence of summer.

When Martin brought Toby back to Enfield after lunch one day for his first evening at home, the late afternoon was very nice, in part because they prized this familial euphoria that couldn’t last. David and Sarah had made signs to hang on the door, welcoming Toby, and for that first evening the three children were so glad to have normalcy restored that Toby’s celebrity was acceptable enough.

Martin and Dinah exchanged glances now and then, because they knew that in the next week various resentments and jealousies would break out. But each of them found it pleasant to be a benevolent conspirator once again; they were so glad to find themselves realigned.

Toby had to be carried wherever he went, until his hip improved. Martin placed him on the chaise longue outside on the grass, under the trees, and he was content while the rest of the family went about their business. The sky that had hung low in the summer heat now soared in a cloudless pale-blue sphere so high above them that the lush lawns of Enfield looked blue-green, and the green leaves of the trees and shrubs, thoroughly washed by several days of rain, glistened blackly. The buildings, too, were washed clean, and in the clarified air their precision of line arrested the eye. The atmosphere was pure and sweet. Toby sat quietly on his lawn chair, almost drowsy from the wash of fresh air.

Martin was grilling hamburgers for dinner, and Dinah was in and out of the house with plates and salad. She was boiling water on the stove for corn on the cob. Sarah and David sat beside Toby for a while, talking with him with a rather unctuous kindness; they meant well. They had missed their brother, but the novelty of exhibiting such ostentatious goodwill soon wore off, and David went to ride his bike with some other boys on the street, while Sarah rode her Big Wheels up and down the sidewalk in front of the house. Toby seemed glad to be able to sit quietly, and Dinah noticed that in just five days he had lost weight and developed shadows under his eyes. She knew that in the next few weeks his temporary decrepitude would turn into crankiness while his body devoted its full energy to restoration. She knew she would find herself having to remember that he was in some pain in order to be patient with him, but this evening everything contributed to their communal but quiet exhilaration. They had a lovely meal out under the trees; the clear air that had moved over the region had absolved them personally, it seemed, from the pressure of their own anxieties.

When the children were in bed, Dinah and Martin sat up drinking wine in the study, with the television turned on to the news, which Martin was watching alertly, leaning slightly forward toward the screen. Dinah meant to attend to it; she would have liked to move from all the immediate concerns that kept her poor brain busy with a circling around of reassessments and reevaluations, but tonight she couldn’t redirect her attention. Now that she was unoccupied with dinner and the children, she was repossessed by all her minute and petty worries. She longed for them to evaporate.

Martin, on the other hand, was uncomfortable with his own absorption in these events he watched with depressing fascination. The short evening with his family had held him fast in the moment, but now his thoughts soared again, bounding out into the terrifying universe. Even in the hospital with Toby, he had kept careful track of current events; his summer fears had not been allayed. Tonight, both Dinah and Martin were too tired to rechannel the currents of their thinking. They had no choice but to be washed along with their separate thoughts.

But later, when they finally settled themselves in the same bed, they were both made easier by their instinctive inclination to turn toward the other. Each one had expected that the other would be too tired to make love. In fact, they made love with a gentle and slow pleasure, because their energy was not great. Their passion was not ragged or insistent, and Dinah was glad that her body was allowing her this great enjoyment; she wasn’t hindered by vanity and self-evaluation; she was not being judged. The two of them were such good and comfortable partners; their instincts were always reliable, so that they lay in bed after making love, satisfied and no longer needful in any way, for the time being. Dinah was thinking that sex can be the sweetest, kindest way finally to overcome reticence. They both felt at ease at last, and in the morning they were fond and affectionate with each other and with the children. Their physical isolation from the other had made them forget how to be familiar, and now they remembered.

T
he Howells’ summer residence became a way station of sorts now that Toby was immobile and required attention, if not for his own sake, then for the sake of social custom. The weather held in its clear, translucent beneficence, and the doors stayed open all day. People came and went with such frequency that it was soon a habit—to drop in, to have some coffee, to chat with Toby and lean against the walls talking with whoever else came by. The days after Toby’s homecoming took on the quality of a running celebration.

Isobel was a great treat. She was most beguiling in her role as Toby’s godmother, and she brought great style to the playing out of it. Dinah thought this was unusually generous, because Isobel wasn’t particularly interested in, and certainly was not entranced by, children. She seemed to like Dinah’s children, but Dinah had already found out that it really isn’t possible for most people to be devoted to any children but their own. Isobel made a good job of whatever attachment she did feel. She arrived daily with treats and presents; she whirled in and out, but the children had the impression, because of her intense charm, that she spent a great deal of time with them. One day she brought sacks tied with ribbon—one for each child—filled with every imaginable forbidden fruit of her own and Dinah’s childhood. There were handfuls of bubble gum, whistles, harmonicas, jujubes and malt balls, grotesque wax lips and teeth that could be either worn or chewed for their sickly-sweet flavoring. She had even found some castanets, which she and Dinah had longed for, and which were sold, for some reason, at the Fort Lyman Trailways bus station along with other Mexican souvenirs—hammered metal ashtrays, beaded belts, and so forth. She had packed Slinkys in each sack, and Silly Putty. Dinah was just as pleased as the children for a while; she was flattered that Isobel remembered these things, too.

One afternoon Isobel brought Toby a magnificent marionette, and she spent longer than usual with him, explaining the working of it, but it was so intricate that as soon as she left, it became hopelessly tangled, and several days later Dinah cut off all the strings and gave it back to Toby to use as a jointed wooden doll.

Isobel was irresistible, but when she took her leave the children were left with an expectation of even more excitement, more stimulating and inventive ideas and diversions. They retained a jagged feeling of anticipation that couldn’t be satisfied. Of all the guests, Pam was the best. She knew exactly what would be the most useful entertainment for Toby. She never brought dramatic gifts; in fact, she never brought gifts at all. But she arrived most afternoons, just in the nick of time, when Dinah and Martin’s good intentions of the morning were showing themselves to be impracticable. She came calmly into the house, trailed by her son, Mark, who was a docile little boy, and settled down with all the children to devote two hours or so to playing with them. She would come in and play a game of Sorry, or help them put together a jigsaw puzzle, and this was the most therapeutic sort of kindness—extended to the whole family, really. It gave Dinah and Martin a respite, and they had regained their good nature by the time she left.

With all this, though, Dinah was bothered by the fact that she was not fonder of Pam. Pam possessed such a genuine charity of intention, and yet Dinah only admired her. Dinah puzzled over this and finally came to a hesitant conclusion. She decided that it was because she could never possess even a trifle of Pam. In little ways, it seemed to Dinah, people need to cling to each other, and Pam, in her self-possession and perfect assurance, didn’t offer a handhold. When Dinah proffered a little of herself—“I can’t stand the children another minute! Lord, I need an hour!”—she really meant to be presented with some desperation of Pam’s in return. But Pam would say, “Of course you do, Dinah. Look, why don’t I take all the kids to get an ice-cream cone.” Then Dinah would feel unworthy of being the mother of her own children, and she would spend those free moments lurking in the kitchen, not pleasantly, eating something unhealthy, and being no less irritable when the children were returned. It came down to the fact that Pam needed nothing from Dinah, nothing at all. If there had been any aid to Pam that Dinah could have supplied, she might have liked Pam very much.

One afternoon Dinah’s father rang the bell, although the door stood open. He had not been a visitor since Toby’s return, so he didn’t enter casually. He had done no more than briefly speak to Martin and shake hands with him in a formal greeting in one of the times they had passed in the village. Dinah let him in, and he was accompanied by one of the many workmen who loitered about his yard digging idly at a plant here or there. The man was carrying a sizable box, and Dr. Briggs asked Dinah if she would mind calling the other two children into the house.

They all gathered in the small study where Toby spent his days lying on the couch, watching television or looking out the window at the pale sky. Martin and Dinah hung back at the doorway, because neither of them felt that they had been invited in. Dr. Briggs opened the box with elaborate and dramatic heedfulness; inside were three Siamese kittens, who cocked their batlike ears and began bleating in their piercing voices the moment they perceived a crack of light. The children were awed and surprisingly quiet.

“Now, Toby gets first choice, since this is what I had planned for his birthday present,” her father said, and Dinah watched with an immense welling-up of ill-defined sorrow when he lifted each cat from the high-sided box with such caution. Their legs straggled over the large palm of his hand, because they had reached that ugly-duckling stage through which Siamese cats pass before they become their sinuous, swanlike selves. His affection for these animals was so apparent that the children caught on to it right away. They reached out to pet the kittens, but they didn’t pick them up. Dinah remembered all the cats her family had had over the years, dozens of cats trailing through Polly’s house, sitting on windowsills, and she remembered, of course, Jimmy, the most recent Briggs’s cat. All at once, too, she remembered her father saying on some occasion during her childhood, “It was the hardest part of medical school—those experiments on cats. You see, they had all been done before a thousand times. We all knew there was no reason for them. There’s great contempt for cats, you know.”