Daybreak (9 page)

“I remembered that you’re a chocoholic,” he said, looking at the wall behind the bed.

Immediately she understood that he had not wanted to come, that he was afraid. He should have had sense enough to make an excuse, she thought angrily.

A terrible physical shame prickled all up and down her skin; she would have been glad to pull the covers over her head and hide; this was like one of those
dreams in which you have forgotten your clothes and, out on the street in your underwear, you are looking in panic for cover. This man who stood uncertainly in the center of the room had brought with him so much more than a box of chocolates! He had brought recollections: There again was that idiotic sofa pillow with which she had run into the bathroom; there the shock, the disbelief and the sickness in the dingy bathroom with the summer afternoon outside.

“Your aunts tell me you have a beautiful boy.”

She must retrieve her poise.… Let him know. Let him know that she was not destroyed. Torn apart, yes, but now recovered in full.

“Yes,” she said, making her voice easy and light. “I can’t argue with that. He is. He is like his father.” And she raised her eyes for Francis to see that there was pride in them.

But he was still gazing at the wall behind her. She thought he looked humble. And this humbleness, which was almost unmistakable, did restore her poise, so that she lifted herself against the pillows with her head high. He would see that she was established in the world, a cherished woman in a pink satin robe, in a room filled with flowers.

Good manners required now that she ask him to sit down. Yet why should she care? And he probably didn’t want to stay.

“Do sit down,” she heard herself say.

“Thank you.”

His glance wandered around the room, settling nowhere. Still he could not fail to see how her hair shone, how lavishly it spread about her shoulders. Even against his will, he must be aware of it. Perhaps he was making a comparison. He had a wife, Isabel, a woman
he had not wanted to hurt. How did she look, talk, act? How much did he love her?
It should have been you, Laura
, he had told her that day. And now he slept with Isabel.

Do they sleep entwined in one bed? Bud Rice, a man desired by women, lies close to me every night. His words are muffled into my neck:
your warm, sweet-smelling hair, you are the loveliest
. “Gentle Laura,” he calls me. “You know so much, you do everything so well, where did I find you?” And he laughs. “I remember. On the library steps.”

“Your aunts told me I must be sure to look at your boy,” said Francis.

“You don’t have to be so polite.” She was gracious, magnanimous. “I know you have plenty to do right now at home, things more important than looking at a baby.”

“I’m not being polite. I want to.”

Then she remembered, and was embarrassed because it had taken her so long to remember, what had brought Francis home.

“We are all so sorry about your father. So many, many people loved him.”

“Yes. He died too young.” He paused. “Will you still give lessons now that you have a baby?”

As if he cared one way or the other! This stilted dialogue was absurd. They were not saying what they were thinking, that was sure. If Francis could have read her mind, he would have read defiance:
I suppose you thought I would never get over you
. The conceit of men! Every night I am loved, passionately loved, or when he is tired, loved with tenderness. And this baby, this marvel of a boy, is the result.

“I shall make time for both,” she replied, and added
then, “Your parents have told us how well you’re doing.”

Francis had written a textbook that had drawn praise. He was making a name for himself, and she was complimenting him as if he were a child who has brought home a nice report card. So, flushing with this realization, she added more. “But then, it was always expected of you.”

“You try your best,” he said simply, and stood up. “I mustn’t tire you. New mothers need their rest.”

Swift thoughts flashed. Was Isabel also a new mother? Probably not. It would be natural for him to say, if he had one, that he, too, had a child. And still, perhaps it would not be natural. This whole visit was unnatural, ridiculous, a passage of trivial words without substance. He should never have come here.

He went on making conversation. “My mother plans to sell the house and move west. She has a lot of relatives there.”

“So much upheaval for her and for you! Really, it’s so good of you to visit me at a hard time like this.”

“I wanted to. I was thinking how my father would have enjoyed the sight of your boy. And he missed it by a couple of hours.”

His departing footsteps made a lonely, hollow sound in the corridor. And suddenly Laura was aware of a tightening in her throat, a lump of pity or pain or loss, or maybe some of all. Yes, Francis, my baby could have been your father’s grandchild. And isn’t it curious, Francis, that I should be here in this bed while Bud Rice’s baby is in his crib down the hall because of you?

Curious, too, all the little things, the trivial things, you remember, like the fried chicken and shortcake that Betty Lee made for dinner on the day they
brought Tom home, or the giant stuffed panda that Bud had waiting for the baby in his room.

“Good Lord,” Lillian said, “he’ll be five years old before he grows up to the thing.”

The aunts were moving out, leaving the house to the new family. Bud was doing so well at the business that they were able to foresee retirement before too long.

“You’re on your own now,” Lillian told them. “It’s time for us to slacken off. I’ve been wanting to see some more of the world, anyway, and Cecile—I kind of think she may have some plans of her own.”

Cecile had met a man, retired from the navy in Pensacola, an interesting man who was interested in her.

   So there came another phase, the beginning of real adulthood for Laura Rice, responsible for a husband, a child, a house, and a burgeoning career. In the afternoons when piano pupils came, Betty Lee took care of Tom as she did on evenings when Laura and Bud went out.

He loved going out with his wife beside him, shining in her best clothes. A convivial man, he liked to dine and dance; a competitive man, he wanted the world to admire the woman he had won. And his pleasure warmed the atmosphere in which she moved.

It was a good life then in those first years, so busy that there was no time, let alone inclination, for introspection concerning the nature of true “happiness,” or true marital compatibility.

In the bedroom, a lovely space enclosed like a garden by millefleur wallpaper, there in the grand bed with its airy white embroidered tester, they were together.

Always and exactly, Bud knew what to do. He knew
how to hold a kiss, a soft, moist pleasure, never detaching no matter how their bodies twisted together. Never over too soon was this union, nor was it prolonged so far that the height of pleasure could be bypassed. His hands knew where and how to touch. Eagerly, she wound about him, all vigor, all desire flowing, giving and receiving.

It really was queer when you considered it. For those few minutes of total union, your mind literally left you. You were one force and one urge, so that whatever had pained your thoughts beforehand was obliterated in a total mindless bliss.

The business throve, for Bud worked hard; the roster of piano pupils grew so that the house seemed to ring all day with music. And most of all there was Tom, darling Tom.

“He’s the image of your father,” the aunts used to tell Laura when Bud was out of hearing. “So much emotion, with the temper and the kisses five minutes later. And the silky black hair—he’s the black Irish all over.”

The child was Bud’s treasure. “A man’s boy,” he used to say as Tom grew and followed him around at his chores, watching while Bud hammered a loose board or mended a hose.

He was a mother’s boy, too, as he leaned on her lap, listening with all ears and great, wide-open eyes to the tales of Winnie-the-Pooh. There was a sweetness in him; predictions of jealousy when a new baby arrived just did not come true.

“It’s a question of intelligence,” Laura told Bud. “I don’t think most, or many, little boys would understand so much.”

“Why does Timmy have to go back to the hospital?”
asked Tom, for fair-haired, pretty Timmy had been sick from the moment they had brought him home. Ail night he cried; Bud and Laura took turns with him through exhausting hours. He did not gain. He caught one cold after the other, turning blue in the face as he struggled to breathe through his tiny stuffed nose.

“I told you I had no confidence in a woman pediatrician,” Bud grumbled and snorted. “Women! Women doctors don’t know which side is up. But you insisted.”

Laura let this idiocy go unchallenged. The poor frightened man had to let off steam somewhere, had to blame somebody.

When they changed doctors, they fared no better. Some said it was colic, some said allergies. Before Timmy was eighteen months old, he had been twice in the local hospital with pneumonia. And meanwhile, Tom went off to school in his jeans and cowboy shirt, the tallest and strongest in the class. The contrast was poignant.

“There has to be a doctor on this planet who can tell us what’s wrong with Timmy,” Laura insisted.

And so, one bright winter day they got in the car with their baby, drove across the state to a teaching hospital, and there found someone who did finally tell them what was wrong.

The doctor was kind but blunt, for Laura had asked him not to spare them.

“Cystic fibrosis,” he said, “is a fatal disease. With care and love, a patient can live into his twenties. But more usually—” He stopped because Bud’s eyes had filled with tears, and Laura, too shocked to cry, was trembling.

When she was able to speak, she said softly, “Maybe we shouldn’t have asked you for the truth.”

With equal softness, the doctor replied, “I would have had to tell you most of it, and in time you would have found out the rest for yourselves.”

Stunned in their grief, they had sat there trying to absorb instructions numerous enough to fill a thick booklet—which was handed to them anyway along with their delicate baby, wrapped for the journey home in his blue blanket that Aunt Cecile, with loving care, had embroidered with white rabbits.

So there began another phase, and here she was, eleven years later, lying on the sofa with her memory racing and the monotonous downpouring rain drumming on the windowpane.

In the kitchen Betty Lee was talking to Earl, Timmy’s beloved mongrel, with a cocker spaniel’s truthful gaze and the feisty spunk of a terrier. Timmy had chosen him at the pound to celebrate recovery from one of his worst sieges, that time his lungs had filled up and he had come so close to death.

“I don’t want to call him ‘Prince’ or ‘King,’ ” Timmy had said. “I want something different, but something noble.” He had been nine years old, and very serious, his small face wrinkled in thought.

“How about ‘Earl’?” Tom had suggested.

A less aristocratic dog would be hard to find, Laura thought now, a little rueful smile on her lips.

“Oh,” said Betty Lee, coming in from the hall, “I didn’t know you were asleep. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. I wasn’t.”

“I forgot to tell you that your lesson’s been canceled. There’s no one to drive, and the child can’t walk over in all this rain.”

Right now a cancellation was welcome. These foggy moods came rarely, but when they did, they sapped not
only the spirit but the physical body, too. It would take real effort to get up now and go to the piano.

Still standing in the doorway, Betty Lee hesitated. “Is something wrong? You never lie down in the afternoon.”

Well, sometimes she did. Betty Lee, who came only three days a week now—after forty-two years with this family, she was not yet willing to sever the connection—did not know everything that happened anymore.

“You worry too much,” she warned, although Laura had not replied.

An unexpected crash and crack of thunder rocked the house, and the two women looked at each other in alarm.

“Timmy’s picnic,” Laura said.

“I’m sure they’ll find shelter someplace.”

“But if they’ve had to run for it? You know he mustn’t! Oh,” Laura lamented, “it’s so hard to draw the line between coddling him and letting him live like other boys! ‘Let him have as normal a life as possible,’ they tell us. But what’s ‘normal’? Watch out for pneumonia, and diabetes, too. He must not be too hot, mustn’t sweat because he’ll get dehydrated and vomit. Be sure to keep salt tablets in his pocket. ‘Let him have as much exercise as his condition allows, but don’t let him over-exercise.’ What on earth does that mean when a boy is crazy about baseball?”

“Don’t you think he’s improving, though? I know he’s a little small for his age, but lately to me he looks healthier—”

“Oh Betty Lee, God bless you for trying, but you do know better.”

“Well, well.” The soft voice attempted to encourage. “Worry won’t help, as your aunt Lillian used to say.
And there’s a car now, coming up the drive. See what I mean?”

A harried-looking woman came rushing to the door with Timmy. Both of them were soaked through, and Timmy was weary.

“He isn’t feeling well. I’m sick over it, Mrs. Rice,” she apologized. “But the storm came without warning, and we had to run for shelter. I know he isn’t supposed to run. I don’t know how to tell you—”

Laura had to interrupt. “Go upstairs, dry yourself thoroughly, put on pajamas, and get into bed. I’ll be up in a minute,” she commanded, and Timmy obeyed. These were the rules.

“I hope he won’t be sick because of this. He’s such a dear little boy.”

At eleven, he could still be called a “dear little boy.” Laura winced. Would she ever get used to it? People were always so kind to Timmy. They were so thoughtful and tactful because they knew he was going to die.

“Please. It’s not your fault,” she said. “You didn’t know it was going to pour. And it was so good of you to invite him in the first place. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

Timmy was already in bed, leaning against pillows. Laura pushed the damp hair back from his perspiring forehead.