Fortunate Lives (14 page)

“Moonflower knew that silver is the color I like best. Netta wouldn’t let me be a silver fairy on Halloween. I went as a California
Raisin. I wore a brown paper bag that Netta wrinkled up.” By now Dinah was paying full attention, and Anna Tyson looked at
her solemnly for a moment without saying anything, and then she continued. “But I wanted to get the silver princess costume
they had at the store.”

Dinah smiled delightedly at Anna Tyson. The little girl had developed the logic of one of life’s survivors, Dinah thought,
remembering the pathetic Reynolds Wrap crown with
A
NNA
written on it in red glitter, so shabby compared to the gilded, sequined, gold crowns she had found for the other children.
Nevertheless, she couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t in some way legitimize Moonflower and therefore countermand
Netta’s instructions to her daughter about how to view the whole phenomenon of the party the night before. Anna Tyson gazed
back at Dinah soberly and then smiled, too, leaning back and swinging her feet separately beneath her straight-legged chair
in a rhythm that
established a sort of skittering, satisfactory rocking motion as the chair creaked with her movement and inched minutely back
and forth on the tiled floor.

Dinah was entirely satisfied for the first time in two days, and she swung her crossed leg from the knee to match the rhythm
Anna Tyson had established. The two of them looked at each other and laughed at Dinah’s silliness. And Dinah continued to
swing her leg without even realizing it as she watched David and Netta across the room dealing with the beets. The counters,
the chopping board, Netta’s palms and fingertips, and David’s T-shirt were stained with the oozing, beautifully rosy beet
juice. The two of them looked harassed, and David seemed to be personally affronted. Netta made that gesture once again of
shaking her hair back, and some of Dinah’s contentment evaporated. It would be a terrible chore to remove the red stains from
the Formica countertop, and it would be she who would do it. And the cutting board would retain the splotchy beet color until
the surface wore away.

Franklin M. Mount

Dean of Freshmen

Harvard College

12 Truscott Street

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Dear Mr. Mount,

David had an amazing imagination when he was a child. He and Toby, and eventually their sister Sarah, lived whole imaginary
lifetimes every day after school and all through the summers in their own backyard or in the basement, where they built forts
and cities with cardboard boxes and old rug samples if it was too cold outside.

I tried hard not to destroy the days’ fantasy. I
really made an effort not to blunder into the amazingly detailed and ordered world they created, and I pretended to whatever
role they needed me to pretend. Sometimes I was an evil witch who made them come to dinner and turned their macaroni and cheese
into worms and their salads into man-eating plants. Sometimes I was a creature called Sweet Penelope, with a cotton candy
voice, so stupid in my naïve good-heartedness that David and Toby had to rescue me from the various hazards and traps the
monsters in that afternoon’s world had constructed.

But I always, always knew to stop the game if, at age four or five, or even six and seven, the children’s fantasy edged toward
conviction. Well, you see, I always understood that the children were enchanted and excited by the
possibility
of their mother transmogrified, but that they would have been terrified had they believed in the reality of it.

But you know, I don’t know what happens to the imagination of young children. By the time David was about eleven, if he had
one of his friends home after school, he wouldn’t play those games with Toby anymore. Sometimes, though, if he was just with
his brother, he would still throw himself into the whole thing.

By the time he was twelve, it seemed to me that he didn’t even believe he had ever invented a world for himself. Don’t you
think that’s odd? I mean, it happened to all my children, but it must be that the energy that fired so much creative thought
was just
diverted
somehow. I have no idea, these days, what either one of my children imagines.

Netta turned when she felt Dinah’s glance on them,
and she smiled in a way that transformed her face. She held up a clear bowl of diced beets. “They’re really
beautiful
, aren’t they?” she said to Dinah. “There’s such sensual pleasure in something so simple as this, isn’t there? I’ve always
thought that there’s genuine beauty in something intrinsically basic.” She turned back to dicing the beets that David was
peeling, and David was less tense all of a sudden. He looked at her and smiled. “I mean, just this simple root vegetable,”
she said. “Domesticity has its own… oh…
elegance
….”

Dinah watched Netta inexpertly cut up the remaining beets, now and then repeating that little habitual shake of her head.
“You must have had your hair cut recently, Netta?” she said pleasantly enough. “I bet you had very long hair. I know how odd
it felt when I had mine cut after college. It’s like taking off skates after an hour or so of skating, don’t you think? You
still feel elevated. I had let mine grow below my waist….”

Netta looked over her shoulder at Dinah, surprised. “No,” she said. “My hair has always been short. It would be so much trouble
to wear long hair.”

The kitchen was quiet, and Dinah made no more attempts at conversation. She had that rather light-headed feeling that follows
a night of intermittent insomnia. She merely sat idly, just resting, until she would have to rouse herself to clean up the
kitchen when Netta was done with her soup. Suddenly she had a horribly intimate but vivid fantasy of Netta and her life before
she came to West Bradford. She could see Netta’s friend Celia and Netta’s husband, Bill—both of whom had slowly taken shape
in her imagination as those sort of wispy, grayish, thin people with stringy hair. He would have that long-limbed, hollow-chested,
saintlike look, and Celia would have that starved look of knobby knees and elbows. The two of them had retired to the bedroom
to have the kind of listless, sweatless sex that Dinah always assumed those passionless-looking
people must have, while poor Netta earnestly battled the beets in some tiny kitchen in Cambridge.

The astonishing vision was gone in an instant, but Dinah felt absolutely convinced that that was why no one had eaten any
of that soup—whenever it was that Netta had first made it—except Anna Tyson, who would have been so young that not much that
happened would have affected her appetite.

T
OWARD THE MIDDLE OF
this past spring semester, Professor Charles Beck’s ten-month-old male cairn terrier had developed an incurable lust for
Anton Vrabel’s medium-sized mixed breed. Professor Vrabel’s mutt appeared to be distressed and baffled whenever the tenacious
little terrier attempted to mount her. She shook him off, dropped her ears, and slunk away, leaving the frustrated cairn to
attach himself to whatever was nearby—someone’s pants leg, a box of computer paper stacked against the wall, the newel post
that turned the corner of the stairwell on the second floor of Jesse Hall. Several of Chip Beck’s colleagues suggested gently
to him that it was an unkindness to bring the lovesick cairn with him to the office, at which point Professor Beck approached
Anton Vrabel in the beautiful old lounge in Jesse Hall during coffee hour and demanded that Anton leave
his
dog at home.

“You know the saying we had in Austria, Anton? ‘You coop your chicks, mamma! My rooster runs free.’”

Like many of its faculty, Chip Beck was a man of some stature beyond the confines of Bradford and Welbern College. He had
taken a prolonged leave several decades before to chair the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, and more recently he
had served as an adviser to a presidential candidate and done a brief stint in the Health and Human Services Department. He
was a tall, bony, kindly-looking man who gave up his jovial tone in the face of Professor Vrabel’s blank-faced refusal to
agree that they had a mutual problem. There in Jesse lounge, beneath the portraits of deceased dignitaries of Bradford and
Welbern College, he accused Anton Vrabel of harboring in his office “an ill-bred slut of a dog!”

Professor Vrabel was instantly enraged and accused his former friend of being no better than all the other “robotlike, cold-blooded
economists who have done more to dismantle any decent social programs over the past years than any one of a half-dozen monster
capitalist conglomerates would have dared to hope for!” In one moment amenities between two old friends ceased, and each aired
all his long held hostile views of the other—their philosophical disagreements, their political antipathy.

Other faculty members, who were standing in clusters around the book-lined, paneled room or were sitting together on the dark
red leather couches with coffee and doughnuts that the Jesse Hall receptionist, Mrs. LaPlante, set out each afternoon at three
o’clock, fell into embarrassed silence when they could no longer ignore the raised voices of those two dignified, elderly
men who were saying unforgivable things to each other, venting frustrations that had lain dormant for years under the weight
of their mutual respect and the long-standing friendship of their families.

Three years previously, in fact, Katherine Vrabel—although suffering herself from rheumatoid arthritis—had taken Marie Beck
out for long drives three or four times a
week during the last year of her life when she knew she was dying but was forced, in Chip’s presence, to assume a ghastly
facade of wellness, because the thought of her death was unbearable to him. It was Katherine who eventually sorted through
and disposed of all of Marie’s clothes, straightened her neglected closets and cupboards, and rearranged Marie’s house with
sensitivity and great sorrow for its surviving occupant. “For God’s sake, Katherine,” Marie had said, “please don’t let Chip
sell that house when I die! He loves that house. He designed it during all those years when we lived in those terrible, sterile,
box-like houses on the outskirts of Washington. I know he’ll be lonely. Oh, God! I can’t tell you how much I wish now that
we’d decided to have children! But make him get a cat, or something.”

Katherine had agreed to do all these things, even though the slow death of this closest of friends was a singularly debilitating
torment to her, and she was careful to hide from Marie the signs of her own distress and deteriorating health. While Katherine
cleared and cleaned the modest, modern cedar-and-glass house, Anton drove Chip up to spend several days sorting out and arranging
the sale of the Becks’ cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee in Moultonboro, New Hampshire. But that was some years ago and apparently
all forgotten—or perhaps their sorrowful intimacy had been so wounding all around that it was too well remembered. In any
case, the fury that mounted between the two men that afternoon last spring in Jesse lounge was terrible and absolute.

Three days after the disagreement, Larry Croft, who was Chip Beck’s physician, had called Martin—breaking the time-honored
doctor-patient confidence—to say that he had hospitalized Professor Beck for observation after an unnerving spell of irregular
heartbeat, and to ask Martin if there was any way at all to resolve tactfully the question of whose dogs were to be allowed
in Jesse Hall. Dr. Croft was
concerned about Chip Beck’s angry belaboring of the subject. He was worried on several counts—it did not bode well for what
Dr. Croft was beginning to suspect was his patient’s deteriorating mental state since his wife’s death, although he didn’t
mention that concern to Martin. He explained arrhythmia to Martin in general terms, and he expressed his worry over Professor
Beck’s excitability. Martin had gotten in touch with Jean Atwell, and on Monday of the following week the faculty found a
slip of paper in their mailboxes.

Memorandum

From: Jean Atwell, Chairperson, Jesse Hall Users’ Committee

To: All Faculty

It has come to the attention of this committee that several faculty members have complained of an infestation of fleas in
the hallways and in some offices. Please make plans to vacate your offices between Friday at 4:00
P.M.
through Monday at 7:00
A.M.
, removing any plants or other living things from the premises, so that the Buildings and Grounds Department can exterminate
these pests.

Since the Jesse Hall Users’ Committee deems it likely that these parasites are being carried into the building on pets accompanying
their owners, we formally request that hereafter no animals be allowed inside the building. An exception will be made in the
case of the fish and other marine life in the aquarium presented to Mrs. LaPlante by a student group from the class of ’82.

Otherwise, the committee asks all faculty and
staff to observe this restriction for the sake of our mutual comfort and health.