Fortunate Lives (33 page)

The third evening in one week that Arlie Davidson, down the road from the Howellses’, brought home a box of broasted chicken
and containers of cole slaw and potato salad, he put the cardboard boxes directly down on the dining room table. His wife,
Miriam, began to take serving platters out of the cupboard, but Arlie discouraged her. “Don’t bother,” he said. “It won’t
taste any different on a china plate.” She hesitated, but then she agreed and sat down across from him, taking up a drumstick
and nibbling at it listlessly. Similarly, Dinah brought home Chinese takeout and put the wire-handled paper cartons on the
kitchen counter. Sarah and David and Martin drifted in and out of the kitchen, serving themselves room-temperature sesame
noodles, or beef with broccoli, and taking it out to the table on the porch or to his or her own room. Martin rolled a pancake
of mushu pork and bent over the sink to eat it in order to save himself the effort of any cleanup.

It was not hot enough to cause tempers to flare or to precipitate passionate arguments within families or among the boys who
lounged in front of Minuteman Pizza in the evenings. The pervasive atmosphere that enclosed the town merely bred a sort of
frazzled indifference.

At last, a cold front that had stalled over the Great Lakes edged its way slowly eastward, bringing unusually heavy rain and
thunderstorms to the Berkshires for almost three days. The skies began to clear on the evening of the third day; and by the
time the sun set, it illuminated the scudding, gray-bottomed clouds that were moving toward the coast. The day before David
was to leave for college,
the weather turned to autumn, with a high of sixty degrees and an expected low in the forties.

Martin had reluctantly folded down the back seat of the Volvo station wagon to allow as much space as possible to pack everything
David needed for school, but leaving room enough for only the driver and one passenger. “We had all planned to drive you to
Cambridge tomorrow, David. I guess I’ll take you in so I can help you unload. Are you sure you need all this stuff?”

“Mom made out the list.” David held up a sheet of notepaper, and Dinah glanced across the top of the car and recognized her
careful list from five months back. But she knew she hadn’t suggested that David take his skis. She thought about the fact
that there wouldn’t be any room for her to go with them, to see David’s room, to get a picture of where he would be living,
to tell him good-bye. She was queasy with apprehension. She wouldn’t get a chance to see him until Parents’ Weekend in early
October. She went back into the house, where a mound of David’s possessions sat right inside the front door waiting to be
taken to the car; and she carried a gooseneck lamp and a long cardboard tube containing posters, she guessed, out to the driveway
and set them down on the gravel.

Martin was wrestling with the skis, trying to fit them in over the footlocker, while David reached into the car to adjust
them himself.

“David, you can’t put them in at that angle. If I have to stop suddenly, they’ll take my head off. You’re much more likely
to come home to ski.” When David didn’t respond, Martin continued to try to find a way to wedge the skis in.

“Maybe I can borrow Sam’s ski rack. We ought to have one, anyway,” David said. Martin scowled at him, and David didn’t make
any more suggestions, although he assumed an expression of pained tolerance, which Martin was too busy to notice.

Dinah was standing by just looking on, with her arms wrapped around herself, and when she realized there was nothing more
for her to do that would be helpful, she decided to leave them alone. “It’s too chilly out here for me. I’m going inside unless
you need me.”

Martin emerged from the rear of the station wagon and stood running his eye over the items on the lawn that were yet to be
packed. He didn’t seem to have heard her.

“What is this with the damned stereo?” he asked her. “My God, his room would have to be the size of an auditorium to do the
thing justice.” David had gone back to the house and was emerging with a large box that housed one of his stereo speakers
in its Styrofoam womb. He had saved the original packaging. Dinah simply shrugged, but Martin was aggrieved. “You know, his
roommate will probably bring his own stereo, too. It’s the new macho thing, I guess. The same way we were about our cars.
A
sound
system. Christ.”

“Well, at least no one can get pregnant in the back seat of it,” Dinah said, turning and making for the house, but by that
time Martin had already directed his attention to some other item that needed to be fit into the back of the car.

Dinah went inside and made reservations to have dinner that evening at their favorite restaurant. She wanted to be sure to
disperse the heightened climate of exasperation that David and Martin’s packing had generated. And besides, as she watched
the car slowly fill up with David’s belongings, she had decided that it was important to attempt a modest celebration to mark
the beginning of his college career.

When she announced that she had made reservations for seven o’clock that evening, however, David’s face registered slight
irritation, and Martin said that they were both tired, but Dinah was adamant.

“I need to see Christie tonight, Mom,” David said. “It’s my last night at home.”

“I’d love to have Christie come, sweetie. Vic and Ellen are going to meet us there, too. And, you know, we’d like to see a
little of you your last night at home,” she said lightly. “And we never did really celebrate Sarah’s birthday, anyway. This
is an occasion. It needs to be observed. But we won’t be that long over dinner. You and Christie will have the rest of the
evening. I know you’ll want to see some of your other friends, too.” She looked directly at him with an expression of huge
good humor that brooked no disagreement.

The Candlelight Inn was the first civilized restaurant to which they had ever taken David and Toby. At the time, Dinah had
been heavily pregnant with Sarah. Vic and Ellen had invited the four of them to meet there to celebrate Ellen’s birthday,
and Dinah had insisted the boys wear blazers and slacks, which she had still been hemming fifteen minutes before they left
the house. On the drive over to Lenox, Martin and Dinah had instructed the two little boys in a tone of deadly seriousness
about
not
behaving as though they were at McDonald’s.

“Absolutely no diving under the table if you drop your napkin,” Martin said. “Or for any other reason,” he added, remembering
how David and Toby could become giddy and silly at the Formica tables of McDonald’s while they waited for their parents to
finish a quick cup of coffee. The boys’ voices would become loud and excited, they would kneel at their places or slide under
the table to change seats, and Dinah and Martin would pretend to be surprised to find a different child sitting beside them
on the vinyl banquettes.

Dinah had remembered to explain on the drive over to the inn that if either one of them dropped a knife or a fork, they were
to let it lie. At home Toby so often forgot to keep his hands still, accidentally sweeping things
off the table, and being lectured for it, that, once seated inside the restaurant, he had nervously clasped his hands together
in his lap.

They had been in the East Room at a table in front of the fireplace. Toby and David were stiff and overdressed in their blazers,
and were amazingly subdued as they drank Cokes and listened to the four adults discuss the menu over their drinks. David had
opened his own menu and studied it solemnly, and when their waiter had come and taken Ellen’s and Dinah’s orders and then
had turned to David, he had looked up at the man and inquired, “How is the lamb tonight?” And without a blink of his eye,
the waiter had replied, “It’s very good, sir.”

Dinah’s and Martin’s eyes had met in amazement in one of those moments of revelation when one must acknowledge the individuality—the
utter separateness—of one’s children from oneself. And because of the absolute lack of hesitation on the part of that waiter,
The Candlelight Inn had been Dinah’s favorite restaurant in the world ever since. But she loved it anyway, as did the whole
family. The food was excellent and unpretentious, the service was discreet, the rooms were charming, and the Howellses had
fallen into the habit of celebrating the significant events of their lives there.

This evening, though, when Dinah looked down the table, she realized that eating dinner in public affected people as if they
were performing onstage, and she thought that in this case it was all to the good. Vic and Ellen hadn’t yet arrived, and conversation
flagged. Sarah launched into a long tale illustrating the unfairness of her field hockey coach, and Christie helped her out,
chiming in with remembered incidents from her past. If there had not been waiters coming and going, however, and diners at
other tables who glanced their way occasionally, the five of them would have sat silent in an atmosphere permeated with the
tension of David’s imminent departure.

Dinah opened her menu, and said down the table to Martin that they might as well go on and order a first course. David and
Christie studied a menu between the two of them. Christie thought she might only want to split a first course of the house
smoked salmon. “They have the best desserts here,” she explained, “but I always eat too much of everything else to have any.”

But before the waiter approached the table, Ellen swept in on a wave of dramatic euphoria, with Vic just behind her. Dinah
could see Ellen’s mood wash over everyone who glanced her way as she unwrapped a scarf from her luxurious hair, swept off
her cape and gave it to the young woman who greeted them, and shook out her hair, ruffling it with her fingers to bring back
its volume. Sometimes Dinah was put off by Ellen’s theatricality, but this evening she rejoiced as her friend blithely wove
her way among the tables, already initiating conversation, her voice swooping over the tables around them.

“We saw you, David. We weren’t that far behind you. I don’t know how you got here so much ahead of us. We saw you turn off
on Route Forty-three and then you simply disappeared!” She was seating herself with much fussing about, slinging the strap
of her purse over the back of her chair but removing it when it swung to and fro, nudging her hip. The hostess materialized
at her side, and Ellen beamed at her with approval. “Oh, yes, yes. Please put this with my cape! That will be wonderful. Just
wonderful.” And then she looked back to David. “You ought to lighten your foot on the accelerator, my dear.”

Dinah and Martin and Sarah had arrived together in Martin’s car, since there was only room for two in the fully packed Volvo.
David had picked up Christie and driven over on his own. Now David relaxed in his chair for the first time that evening, grinning
at Ellen, crossing his arms, and rocking gently against the chair back. He and Ellen had been good friends all his life. “Oh,
yeah. I really have to
watch it. A car like that Volvo wagon. I wouldn’t want it to get away from me. Four cylinders of Swedish lightning!” They
all laughed, and Dinah was glad to see that the meal would be a comfortable affair after all. David went on to explain. “There’s
a shortcut through Richmond. It saves about twenty minutes. That’s how we always go to Tanglewood.”

“It’s a terrible road, though, David,” Vic said, and the conversation became easy while they all began to look at their menus
and a waiter brought drinks to Vic and Ellen.

Sarah leaned around Christie to speak to David. “Do you remember when we tried to convince Mom that the next time we buy a
car it should be something besides another Volvo?” She glanced around the rest of the table, signaling amusement, but David
shook his head that he didn’t remember.

“Oh, David. You do. Don’t you remember? Mom was saying how safe they were, that we didn’t need to be able to go any faster.
That the ‘point of having a car at all is just to be able to get from one place to another.’” Sarah made her tone didactic.

David smiled. “Oh, yeah. We were at the mall?”

Sarah laughed and nodded, and Dinah smiled, too, knowing now where they were headed. “Yeah. At Cross-gates.” She paused, to
ensure the attention of these closest of her family’s friends. “And my mom pulled up at a stoplight and looked over at this
car next to us and she said, ‘Now, I can see that a car like that might be handy just for doing errands around town.’ And
David and I looked over at it, and it was this incredible white Porsche!”

Dinah shrugged and joined the general laughter, raising her hands in a gesture of resignation, of culpability, shaking her
head in a show of wry wonder at her own naïveté. She was glad to have Sarah and David reminiscing; she was pleased to be in
good company. She could hear the
fondness in her children’s voices, the affection in which they held her. But it was also as if the lovely, sharp, first chill
of fall had crept into her own spirit, because she came up hard against the fact that she no longer had any power to protect
the children from anything at all. She couldn’t, in fact, be sure they traveled only in safe cars—a phobia with her since
Toby’s death. She could no longer be sure that they wore their seat belts, put on life jackets if they went sailing. She was
virtually powerless; she could not keep them from harm. And all her efforts at having done so—“Be home before dark! Don’t
talk on the phone during a thunderstorm! Those plastic bags from the cleaners are
not
toys!”—would be relegated to the nostalgia of their youth. She and Martin had become anecdotes in the lives of their own
children.

Martin slept soundly, as usual, but Dinah heard David come in about two o’clock in the morning and move around the house,
opening the refrigerator door, running water. She stayed where she was, turning from one side to another in an attempt to
get comfortable. She was too hot under the down comforter and too cold without it, and she would have liked to go downstairs
and read, but she knew she should give David the solitary run of the nighttime rooms. When she did wake up early in the morning,
she had thrown the comforter off and was cold. She was surprised to see that Martin wasn’t asleep beside her. His side of
the bed was empty.