Fortunate Lives (19 page)

He gazed levelly at her for a moment, and then spoke with pained elaboration. “For God’s sake, Dinah. Of course I don’t mean
that. I
mean
that it’s her body, her choice whether to tell us anything about it. It may turn out that she’s fine, and she might be mortified
that we had ever known anything about it. And not only that, it seems to me that
you
would normally be saying exactly the same thing.”

“Normally! Oh, right! Well, normally David hasn’t gotten anybody pregnant! Sweetheart, Christie might be pregnant with
David’s
baby.” Her anger had turned into a sort of pleading. “How can you not care about that? I can’t think about anything else!
I wouldn’t even know what to suggest they do about it. Oh, Martin, I can’t believe you’re not on my side. At least you could
talk to him!”

“He knows we know about it,” he said to her reasonably, “and my whole point is that I don’t think you and I
have
a side. David’s eighteen years old. I don’t think we have the right to make this our business.”

“How can you possibly believe that?” She was truly astonished. “Christie’s
not
eighteen, you know. She’s only sixteen. But Martin, no matter how old he is, David’s still our son! We still owe him some
sort of guidance… or… protection!”

“David is like an explosion getting ready to happen this summer. We’ve got to give him his privacy, too,” Martin said. “And
we owe him some dignity. He knows he can come to us if he needs help. I think Christie knows the same thing. I mean, I think
she would come to us if she wanted us to help! Or if she wanted us to know about it.”

To her own frustration Dinah had started crying. “God damn you, Martin! Goddammit! You have so much trust in
reason
! In
logic
! This is too much for anyone to handle in some sort of orderly way you seem to think exists in the world! You are so
stupid
sometimes that I can hardly believe you’re smart!”

“Dinah.” He sounded worn out. “Why don’t you talk to him if you want, but I think…”

“God! That’s the whole point, dammit! I can’t talk to him anymore about anything.
You
need to find out what’s going on!” She hadn’t been able to stop crying, and she wiped her eyes repeatedly with Kleenex, dropping
them in scrunched puffs into her lap. Martin put his arm around her and they simply sat leaning against each other for a while,
Dinah waiting to see what Martin would come up with. But Martin hadn’t replied. He had hugged her toward him comfortingly,
and within half an hour or so, when she had let her head fall back against the headboard and had closed her eyes, he had reached
over and flicked the game back on, keeping the volume low.

And in the kitchen on Sarah’s birthday, as he did nothing to stop the celebration from slipping through the cracks, she had
wanted to turn to him and say that he had been loved too well for all of his life and it had left him diminished. Today, for
the first time, that’s what she believed. It was not so much that he lacked empathy, but she thought he misdirected it; he
never
considered
, he refused to be reflective. With Netta’s presence this morning and almost constantly over these summer weeks, Dinah had
been too constrained ever to get anything sorted out within her family, and time was suddenly out of control, flying by, her
family separating from her as though she were the whirling center pushing them away by centrifugal force.

But in that exact moment, when a new way of knowing her husband had clicked into place, Martin looked over at David and spoke
calmly and in a reasonable voice. “David, I can’t believe you expect us to give up what we’ve planned for Sarah’s birthday.
I don’t understand how you could be that thoughtless. I really don’t.” He was sincere and rational in the wake of Dinah’s
impassioned outburst. She began to clear away the mixing bowl and baking powder from the counter. Martin spoke between
bites of pancake, which he alone seemed maddeningly determined to finish. “Netta, you need to get this settled with Bill….”

David’s brows drew down, and he tucked his chin into his chest, his shoulders lifting and falling in a long, resigned sigh
as he rocked back on the legs of his chair. Sarah watched him carefully; she was attuned to every nuance, and she was overcome
with sorrow at his frustration—she felt a kind of grief that she was too inexperienced to name; she was only able to translate
it into anger.

“My birthday is not a big deal! Okay?” Sarah said, each word deliberate, her tone scornful, a verbal sneer, her fists knotted
alongside her plate. “It’s only a big deal to you! You’re the one who made all the plans!” she said across the room to her
mother.

Dinah was startled. “What? But Sarah, I asked you what you wanted….”

“I know. But I didn’t really care what we did. I know you and Dad like to go to Tanglewood. I mean, it was fine with me whatever
we did, but obviously this is much more important.” Dinah settled back against the kitchen counter and crossed her own arms
in an unconscious but exact replication of her son’s posture, cocking her head at her daughter and staring her down in the
face of the huge injustice of what she was saying. Sarah was hoping to intern at Tanglewood in voice when she was sixteen,
and it was for her sake that Dinah always bought box-seat tickets—so that Sarah could see the stage.

And Sarah did flinch away from her mother’s gaze and back down a little. “I mean, I really think this is great. These pancakes
and everything. But this is just more important!” She looked to her mother for a signal, but Dinah didn’t give an inch, and
Sarah’s own anger flared. “And, besides, wouldn’t we really all have a great time with you in the mood you’re in! I’ll baby-sit
with Anna Tyson, Netta, if that would help!” She left the table abruptly, her pancakes
uneaten, her presents unopened, and her face far less defiant than her words had been.

Martin sat still, with his elbows on the table bracketing his plate of neatly partitioned pancakes, miserable at the unpleasantness
that suddenly pervaded the room. David straightened in his chair, all at once evasive and uncertain. Netta remained oblivious,
her face glazed with exhaustion. Dinah was bewildered, wondering how, once again, her championship of her children was so
unacceptable to them.

Generally New Englanders believe that their favorite time of year is summer, when the days are long and gentle and the mountains
are verdant. But as the days lengthened, Dinah felt a sort of frantic distress when confronted by the abundance of green,
the warmth, the excessiveness of everything growing. By late July, she was overwhelmed by the cloud of seasonal expectations
as persistent and bothersome as gnats.

Martin said that she resented enjoying herself, and Dinah thought that it was quite possible that her disposition simply wasn’t
suited to it, but it irritated her that Martin had so easily categorized her.

“I
do
enjoy summer, Martin. I just don’t think I should
have
to. But you’re right. I resent it. I do resent having to be so cheerful all the time! I hate the…
forced
spontaneity in the summer. The articles in any magazine you pick up at the dentist’s on how to have ‘your pantry stocked
for that unexpected guest.’ My God! I’d have to hang a side of beef and keep a poultry farm and plant an orchard.” This was
what she had said to him in her own defense on the day that Netta had dropped by to make soup. Dinah wasn’t always so cranky,
but by midsummer she was in the midst of her worst emotional season.

Now and then she consoled herself with the fact that at least she hadn’t grown up in California, where there wasn’t
any weather at all according to Ellen. Just sunshine and eternal flowers, or so Ellen recounted frequently. Dinah didn’t think
that she herself could make it through the year without January and February, with their severe clarity, their freedom of
non
-celebration, and their confirmation of the fact that fluctuations of mood were necessary, were natural.

But, to her surprise, this day that had begun so inauspiciously had come together quite nicely, genuinely spontaneous, and
Dinah luxuriated in her lack of responsibility for the success of the rest of the afternoon. Wandering through the beautiful
grounds of Tanglewood, she was delighted with the summer air and the crowds of people spreading over the lawn with their picnic
baskets and folding chairs. One couple had set up a little table with candles and flowers and china plates arrayed with avocado
and shrimp, varied lettuces, and pale white cucumber fans. It was a bit of showing off they were doing, of course, but they
were delighting in the attention they received from passersby, the acknowledgment of their unabashed romanticism.

The mood of the afternoon was buoyant. Dinah was caught up in it all around, and she thought with pity rather than disdain
of those friends of hers who were such purists that they wouldn’t come to Tanglewood but waited to go to Boston to hear the
orchestra in Symphony Hall.

Dinah loved the tourists who enthusiastically applauded between movements, who always leaped to their feet during Handel’s
Messiah
for the “Hallelujah” Chorus, despite the tactful plea in the program guide not to do so. It was clear that many of them had
never seen a major orchestra before, and it delighted Dinah to spot someone in the audience who was as overwhelmed as she
had once been at witnessing the astonishing mutual effort of all the disparate elements of an orchestra and the chorus to
produce a miraculous sound. It was newly breathtaking to Dinah every time despite twenty years of acquiring a little musical
sophistication. After every
performance, she was angry the next morning at Matthew Bardwell, whose reviews in the paper pointed out inadequacies she hadn’t
noticed, and whose dour recounting of a concert diminished the memory of her pleasure. She had privately decided that Matthew
Bardwell had no capacity for joy.

At the end of the school year one of David’s closest friends, who had been away for his freshman year at Harvard, had unexpectedly
joined Dinah in the auditorium at West Bradford High School while she was waiting for the seniors’ musical recital to begin.
“Jay!” Dinah had exclaimed. “How brave of you to come back and sit through two hours of this just to hear David play.”

“Oh, great!” Jay had replied. “Actually I didn’t know David was playing. I really wanted to hear the xylophone player. She’s
great!”

Dinah had laughed and hugged him, and gone on to ask him about Harvard, about what David could expect
his
freshman year. Jay was one of David’s friends whom she dearly loved. He was interested in everything, sophisticated but never
smug. She was delighted to be in his company. And she was astonished when, indeed, a xylophone was wheeled onto the stage
midway during the evening, and a girl she didn’t recognize approached it with seeming trepidation and played quite a complicated
piece. Dinah had thought Jay was kidding, but she clapped loudly along with him when the girl stepped forward to take a bow.

“Isn’t she terrific? God!” he said. “Isn’t that fantastic? She didn’t miss hitting a single note!” He was jubilant, and Dinah
had remembered his pleasure and recognized it in herself every time she watched a singer, a quartet, a choir, or an orchestra.
She and Jay shared the disproportionate admiration of the musically nongifted for any of these performers.

This afternoon, with the concert still ahead of her, as
she and Ellen and Sarah and Anna Tyson made their way across the Tanglewood grounds, she was even feeling sorry for Martin
and David and Vic, who had taken Martin’s car and the Hofstatters’ van into Cambridge to help Netta pack up whatever she needed
from her apartment.

Dinah and Ellen spread a blanket under a tree near the building in which the chorus was rehearsing. Ellen had taken charge
of unpacking their picnic, and Dinah walked over to the hedge surrounding the grounds to peer out at the landscape, which
fell away down the steep sides of the Stockbridge Bowl where a lake glimmered flatly, like a pewter plate, unshadowed by clouds,
before the mountains rose again in gentle folds until they met the horizon. She stood for a bit in mindless and entirely pleasurable
contemplation of the view, and then she came back to their blanket and began to open out the webbed lawn chairs they had brought.

“Okay, tell me the truth, now, Ellen! Don’t you
really
think”—and her voice was light and sweetly teasing—“in your heart of hearts, at the core of your being, that Sarah is absolutely
the
loveliest
girl in the world?” Dinah pulled her daughter to her in an amiable hug. “And the most
pleasant
company!” Ellen was sitting on the blanket arranging plates, and she smiled up at them, but Sarah pulled away, with Anna
Tyson still attached to one hand, and Dinah grinned an indulgent apology toward her daughter for having embarrassed her with
a public display of affection.

“I’m going to take Anna Tyson to get a T-shirt at the gift shop,” Sarah said, and only when she was well away from her mother
did she suddenly feel the pressure of tears behind her eyes and a long aching in her throat. She was sorrowful all at once
at not having responded to her mother just now, and she was also overcome with some amorphous disappointment that was almost
like being homesick. At the Glass House, where souvenirs were sold, she bought a T-shirt for Anna Tyson, and before she turned
away from the
salesgirl, Sarah asked for a Tanglewood poster and bought it for her mother.

When she finished arranging the plates of sandwiches and fruit and cheese, Ellen leaned back on her elbows on the blanket
with her eyes closed, her face tipped up toward the sun. Her thick hair fell in loose waves just above her shoulders. Ellen
was the adult Dinah knew better than any other except Martin, and she studied her with admiration and then hazarded a soft
comment.

“You know, I don’t know what to do about David these days, Ellen. What to say to him. He can hardly stand to be in the same
room with me.” She spoke matter-of-factly; she wasn’t even sure Ellen was listening to her. “And now Sarah… Well… Oh, God,
Ellen, you can’t imagine how painful it is to realize that sometimes your own children really don’t
like
you!”