Fortunate Lives (7 page)

David had been quiet and hurt, at first, because he had never thought he felt superior to, and certainly not any smarter than,
Ethan or Sam or Christie herself. But even as he was offended he was bored, and the boredom was quickly translated into anger.
He didn’t have any way of knowing that what Christie perceived as his sense of superiority was really a kind of emotional
stinginess, a protective reserve peculiar in someone his age. Usually when David was angry he kept it to himself; he merely
left the room. And last night he had not yelled back at Christie, but his voice had somehow expanded in volume so that it
had a hollow, desperate sound even to his own ears, and he had slammed his fist against the dashboard. “I can’t
do
all this at once, Christie! I can’t be
nice
to everyone all the time anymore!”

She had sat back and simply studied him for a moment while she wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. Then she had smiled
weakly. “God, David!” And at last she had
laughed a little. “You’re not as nice as you think you are, anyway.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” she answered.

“Are you coming over tomorrow night? For the party?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, but then her words became exact, as though they occurred to her for the first time as
she spoke. “Your house is probably my favorite place to be in the world,” she said with no hint of sarcasm, and he turned
then to look at her face, which was composed. “It’s like a visit with the world’s last happy family,” she added, while she
took her brush out of her purse and began pulling it through her curly hair, smoothing it as best she could away from her
face. But that last remark had irritated him more than anything else she had said the whole night.

In the early gray of the morning damp, as David carefully weeded between the rows, it made her seem stupid to have said such
a thing. In his remembrance of that one sentence he thought he heard a false note, a way Christie thought she should sound.
What could be happening to him that lately he scarcely liked any of the people he loved? Why was it that no one he knew possessed
any quirk of personality, any point of view about which he was the least bit curious? It frightened him that the world to
which he was so accustomed had taken on the flattened aspect of a badly animated cartoon.

And, as he worked painstakingly down one row and into the next under the rising sun, he became more and more agitated, more
irritated, although now his disgruntlement was amorphous, as though it shrouded him from without rather than springing from
within. Nothing except this little plot of ground seemed to be right in the world just at the moment.

Dinah was able to walk up and down the stairs of her house, and in and out of the rooms, and think of it as a spare, clean,
crisp apple of a place—a perfect thing. The
building was a simple one, an old gray farmhouse with good bones and a plain face, and the interior was not
decorated
, but she had thought about the color of the paint, the fabric of the curtains, the arrangement of the chairs and sofas and
lamps and rugs very carefully. It seemed to her legitimately beautiful, like an original Shaker box, austere but not contrived.
But, in fact, this view of her house was a product of her own selective vision; her household burgeoned with the collected
detritus of the lives of the people who lived in it.

The mantelpieces in the dining room and living room were crowded with a variety of things the children had brought home from
school over the years—a lumpish blue candlestick Sarah had made in fifth grade, a varnished wooden plaque with “Howells” etched
into it by Toby with the woodburning kit he had gotten for his eighth birthday, an overlarge white mug emblazoned in gilt
script
“Mother… A Mother Is Love,”
which David had given to her one Christmas as a joke because of its inherent ugliness and its silly sentimentality. After
unwrapping it, though, she had put it on the mantel to get it out of the way, and it had been there ever since, a receptacle
for pencils, felt-tipped pens, paper clips, rubber bands, Chap Sticks, and safety pins.

The handsome glass coffee table in the living room, the little desk in the hall, the sideboard in the dining room, even the
wide sills of the old windows were crowded, if not actually cluttered, with oddments—old
National Geographics
; empty eyeglass cases; dried, shedding flower arrangements that Sarah had made in a summer crafts class; scraggly plants
potted from cuttings. The windowsills were liberally scattered with deep baskets because whenever Dinah perceived that here
was a place in which objects were inevitably bound to collect, she stopped at Farrell’s Store and bought a nice, roomy basket
and merely swept everything into it. Tiny, smudged price tags were still suspended from the
handles of several of those baskets by little interlooped white strings.

Her house did not encompass the crisp asceticism she believed it did—it had the rich fullness of a ripe plum—but she was happy
with her notion of the pleasant austerity of her surroundings. Although Dinah loathed the idea of materialism, she had an
almost visceral connection to the place in which she lived. For her it represented a victory over chaos, over despair and
disorder. She both enjoyed having guests and begrudged their sharing any part of her hard-earned grace.

In any case, she always thought of their annual Fourth of July party with a shadowy sense of martyrdom, a vague feeling of
self-sacrifice that had in the past always proven to be worth the end result. When twilight came, she would create a bit of
fantasy for all the smaller children, bringing the magical fairy Moonflower to earth, provided Martin took care to check the
pulley mechanism he and Vic Hofstatter had rigged over the porch roof almost fifteen years ago.

Martin and Vic had founded a small literary magazine,
The Review
, soon after the Howellses moved to West Bradford. As a result, the Hofstatters and the Howellses spent so much time at each
other’s houses, while Martin and Vic argued over solicited manuscripts and sorted through unsolicited ones, that Ellen and
Dinah had fallen into a necessarily informal relationship. Dinah would see to the children, while Ellen might take it upon
herself to peruse the refrigerator and start dinner for them all.

The Hofstatters lived almost twenty miles out of town, and in the first few years of the venture,
The Review’s
offices had taken over the Howellses’ living room during the school year. Dinah was running the local Artists’ Guild then,
and Ellen would often arrive early in the day with wine or groceries for the evening’s meal and work at her own writing in
an unused bedroom while
the children kept out of her way unless there was an emergency. It saved the cost of a baby-sitter, and in those days all
four adults got involved with the makeup of the quarterly magazine, sitting at the kitchen table long into the night. By now,
The Review
had become respectable and mainstream, and some years ago the college had allotted office space and even the salary for part-time
help in sorting through the three thousand or so submissions and dealing with the heavy correspondence.

The advent of Moonflower had begun as a diversion for the children when they were small, conceived one evening when Dinah
and Martin and Vic and Ellen had grown tired of debating the merits or lack of them of an essay that Martin wanted to publish
in the magazine. They had fallen into reminiscences, and Martin had described his great-aunt’s wonderful invention and customary
presentation of the magical fairy that he had marveled at each year when he was very young in Sheridan, Mississippi.

The Hofstatters had become contagiously enthused about re-creating the whole experience for the Howellses’ own children, and
they had stayed on later than usual, elaborating on the idea and planning how to carry it out. When David and Toby, and eventually
Sarah, had become too old for such make-believe, Dinah and Martin had integrated it into what had become an annual party,
and they had invited younger faculty and friends to join them and bring along their small children. The occasion had grown
into a buffet supper for about forty-five adults and, sometimes, as many as fifteen children aged six and under. This year
only nine young children were expected, and Dinah had prepared for them with care.

On the night of the third, she had eventually realized that she wouldn’t sleep as she lay in bed anticipating the pleasure
of the smaller children and her own corresponding satisfaction and Martin’s and Sarah’s and David’s.
After all, this was David’s last Moonflower summer before he left for school. And Sarah had asked if she could have two friends
join them, which was proof that the party remained special to her, a celebration that had been shaped over the years into
a unique festivity of her own family.

Dinah counted on rituals, the reassurance of them, and she believed it was especially important for David, in this last official
summer of his youth, that the party go off well. She had a hazy idea of how she wanted David to think about his family—literally,
how he would imagine them when he might be walking across campus or sitting in his dorm room reading, with his feet propped
on the window-sill. If he was pushing his tray through the cafeteria line and happened to let his mind drift and began to
wonder what his family was doing, she wanted him to picture them on the wide screened porch among so many friends and excited
small children.

To Dinah, the appearance of Moonflower—having become a conspiracy among them—was part and parcel of their undeclared conspiracy
to live together as a family, to continue to love each other in spite of anything at all, to be bound, as families are, by
an absolute and unbreachable loyalty. Before Toby’s death, their association had merely been a condition of each one’s life;
now it was an unacknowledged decision. Sometimes it seemed to Dinah that her family was becoming a unit too fragilely joined,
and she was overwhelmed with anxiety these days that they were about to break apart like Humpty Dumpty—never to be put together
again.

These past few months had baffled and troubled her. Although she didn’t expect the anguish of the loss of Toby ever to leave
her, she had recovered from the initial preoccupation with the pure, terrible grief of it. These days, though, she often found
herself flooded with shockingly intense sorrow and an unwarranted feeling of desolation and
loneliness. Every aspect of life had become perilous to Dinah, and all she knew how to do was to hang on to her life exactly
as it was, to let routine and necessity direct her days. And now she was especially anxious to give David a gift of this final
ritual, to give him a perfect picture of his family that would be his defense against any feeling of isolation that might
overcome him once he had departed a safe harbor.

The night before the party her restlessness had propelled her through the rooms of the house, as it often did, and finally
outside, since it was warm, with the cats following her at a distance. The long yard was enclosed by tall cedar hedges, and
Dinah often strolled across the grass in her nightgown, trailing silently along the narrow white ribbons of cat-worn paths
crisscrossing the lawn or following the slate steps down to the garden.

She had passed at least two hours roving about the yard, pausing and musing, infused with and overstimulated by anticipation
of the next day. She no longer battled the images that kept her awake—the detailing of party plans, mental lists of things
to be done and the sequence in which she would do them. On any sleepless night she had learned that she had to wear out her
own sensibilities; she had never managed to medicate or meditate them into submission. But last night at least she had managed,
as she sometimes did, to trick herself by settling in an odd corner, where sleep had overtaken her absolutely. She had awakened
abruptly at dawn, huddled into the wicker swing on the screened porch, cramped and chilled but pleased to have weaseled a
bit of sleep out of the dark.

By ten-thirty in the morning Dinah had nearly finished preparing the garnishes for the cold supper she would serve buffet
style that evening. While Sarah joined her in the kitchen to assemble the children’s prizes, Dinah had frosted several branches
of lemon leaves with egg white and kosher salt and left them to dry beside the frosted cherry
tomatoes. She stuffed the hard-boiled eggs and refrigerated them under dampened paper towels and plastic wrap, and she did
the same with the freshly sliced breads, alternating dark and light slices in shallow wicker baskets. The day before, she
had spent almost eight hours cooking, which had made her sweaty and cross even in the mild heat, but now she was enjoying
herself.

She stood at the sink looking out the window as she washed her hands and rinsed and dried the knives. David was in his garden,
and she thought she would take a break and go chat with him for a few minutes. She could find out if he wanted to entertain
the smaller children while the festivity was being arranged. She could simply join him in the beautiful day and gather the
lettuces and basil and dill flowers and parsley she needed for the last-minute embellishment of the various platters filled
with food.

She was delighted this morning at the sight of him glazed with pale sunlight that lit his blue shirt and his fair hair under
the fragile-looking sky. She often joined David in the garden on summer afternoons when he got home from work; it seemed to
her a sociable time without any need to make small talk. Usually she busied herself with weeding and didn’t interfere with
the design of the garden, although she was uneasy with the order her son had imposed on the little plot of land. He had planted
not only the vegetables but the flowers, too, in militant rows according to species.

She put her basket down and smiled over at him. “Isn’t it lucky that we’ve gotten such beautiful weather for tonight?” she
said idly, but he didn’t look up from his careful job of transplanting seedlings. “I don’t know if you want to distract the
children—you could play the guitar. You could do the songs. That always mesmerizes them. Especially if you let them try playing
the guitar themselves. Or maybe you want to set up the prizes?”