Ladder of Years (30 page)

“Not at all.”

Noah had this tea party every time he came here, then? Delia had imagined he was, oh, playing checkers or something. She looked over at his grandfather, who nodded gravely.

“Noah’s been taking tea with me since the days when he drank from a training mug,” he told her. “He’s the only boy in the family! We men have to stick together.”

Binky handed Delia her cup and said, “So how do you like keeping house for Noah’s father, Delia?”

“Oh, very much,” Delia said.

“Joel’s a good man,” Nat said placidly. “I make it a point not to choose sides in my daughters’ domestic disputes,” he told Delia. “Back when they were wee little girls, I swore an oath to myself I would approve of whoever they married.”

Enough of a pause hung after his words so that Delia felt pushed to ask, “And do you?”

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. His chuckle, filtered through his beard, had a wheezy sound. “I love my sons-in-law to death! And they think I’m just wonderful.”

“Well, you
are
wonderful,” Binky told him staunchly.

He bowed from the waist. “Thank you, madam.”

“Maybe not quite as wonderful as they imagine, mind you …”

He grimaced at her, and she gave Delia a mischievous wink.

Was this Binky a paid companion? Was she one of the daughters? But her merry face bore no resemblance to Nat’s. And she didn’t seem all that connected to his grandson. “Have some butter,” she was telling Noah, not noticing he had nothing to put it on.

“Have some low-cholesterol vegetable-oil spread,” Nat corrected her. “First I wolf down my I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,” he told Delia, “and then I go wash my hair in Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific.”

Delia found this remark mystifying, but Noah tittered. His grandfather glanced over at him; his lips twitched as if he were trying not to smile. Then he turned back to Delia. “You’re from Baltimore, I hear.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Got family there?”

“Some.”

He raised his eyebrows, but she offered nothing further.

“Ninety percent of the people in this building come from Baltimore,” he said finally.

“They do?”

“Rich folks, retiring to the Eastern Shore. Roland Park and Guilford folks.”

Delia kept her face blank, giving no sign she had ever heard of Roland Park or Guilford.

“You surely don’t suppose all those chichi ladies are locals,” he said. “Lord, no. I wouldn’t be here myself if I hadn’t married a Murray. That’s Murray as in Murray Crab Spice. You think a two-bit, hole-in-the-wall photographer could afford these exorbitant prices?”

“They’re going to raise the rates again in July, I hear,” Binky told him.

Delia was looking around the room. The mention of photography had alerted her to the pictures hanging everywhere—large black-and-white photos, professionally framed. “Are these your work?” she asked him.

“These? If only.”

He stood, this time reaching for his cane. “These were taken by the masters,” he said, stumping over to a study of a voluptuous green pepper. “Edward Weston, Margaret Bourke-White …” He pivoted to inspect the picture at his left—factory chimneys, lined up like notes of music. “Me, I photographed brides,” he said. “Forty-two years of brides. Few golden-anniversary couples thrown in from time to time. Then I started getting my, what I call, flashbacks.” He gave a downward jab with his beard. Delia thought at first he was indicating the rug. “Old boyhood polio came bouncing back on me,” he said. “Thelma—that was my wife—she’d passed on by then, but she had put our names on the waiting list when they first drew up the plans for Senior City. Just why, I couldn’t tell you, since she refused to budge from our big old house long after the girls were grown and gone. She always said, what if they wanted to
come back for any reason? And come back they did, you know they did: all four of them rushing home at every minor crisis, just because of the very fact they had a home to rush to, if you want my honest opinion. ‘Lord God, Thel,’ I told her, ‘we can’t be rearing those girls for all time! Look at how cats do,’ I told her. ‘Raise up their kittens, wean them, don’t know who the hell they are when they meet them in the alley a few months later. You think humans should be any different?’”

“Well, of course they should!” Binky protested, and she and Delia exchanged a smile.

But Nat hissed derisively behind his beard. “Hogwash,” he told Noah. Noah merely licked a dab of frosting from his thumb. “In any event,” Nat said, “I started getting these flashbacks. Times the one leg would clean give out on me, along about the end of day. Reached the point where I barely made it up the stairs some nights; I knew I couldn’t go on living where I was. So I phoned the people here and said, ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘didn’t my wife put our names on your waiting list once upon a time?’ And that’s how I happened to end up in Senior City. Senior City: God. Abominable name.”

“It seems very … well-organized, though,” Delia said.

“Precisely. Organized. That’s the word!” He spun around (there was something explosive, barely contained, about even his most painful movements) and returned to his chair. “Like files in a filing cabinet,” he said, reseating himself by degrees. “We’re organized on the vertical. Feebler we get, higher up we live. Floor below this one is the hale-and-hearty. Some people there go to work still, or clip their coupons or whatever it is they do; use the golf course and the Ping-Pong tables, travel south for Christmas. This floor here is for the moderately, er, challenged. Those of us who need wheelchair-height counters or perhaps a little help coping. Fourth floor is total care. Nurses, beds with railings … Everybody hopes to die before they’re sent to Four.”

“Oh, they do not!” Binky said indignantly. “It’s lovely up on Four! Have a cupcake, Noah.”

“‘Lovely’ isn’t the word that first comes to
my
mind,” Nat told Delia. “Not that I don’t applaud Senior City in theory, understand. It’s certainly preferable to burdening your children. But something about the whole setup strikes me as uncomfortably, shall we say, symbolic. See, I’ve always pictured life as one of those ladders you find on playground sliding boards—a sort of ladder of years where you climb higher and higher,
and then,
oops!
, you fall over the edge and others move up behind you. I keep asking myself: couldn’t Thelma have found us a place with a few more levels to it?”

Delia laughed, and Nat sat back in his chair and grinned at her. “Well,” he said, “don’t let me ramble on. I’m glad we finally got to meet you, Delia. Noah’s told me how much you’ve done for the two of them.”

She recognized her cue. “It was good to meet you too,” she said, rising.

“From now on, stop in and have tea whenever you come for Noah, why don’t you?”

“I’ll do that,” she promised.

She slid her arms into the coat Binky held for her, and Noah wrangled his jacket on. “Drive carefully, now,” Binky said as she opened the door. Her keyhole neckline showed a teardrop of plump, powdered pink, bisected by the tight crevice between her breasts. Was it that, or was it the memory of Nat’s roguish grin, that made Delia wonder suddenly whether Binky might in fact be his girlfriend?

Joel told her he had no idea who Binky was. He hadn’t realized she existed, even. “Binky? Binky who?” he asked. “What kind of a name is Binky?”

They were eating supper in the kitchen, just the two of them. Noah had accepted a last-minute invitation to the Mosses’. At first Delia had contrived to be on her feet most of the time, but finally Joel said, “Sit down, Delia,” in a kindly tone that made her feel he’d seen straight through her. “Tell me how you think Noah’s doing,” he said.

That took about three seconds. (Noah was doing fine.) Then they had to find a new topic, and so Delia thought to mention Binky.

“How old is she, would you guess?” Joel asked.

“Oh, thirty-five, thirty-six …”

“So: too young to be a fellow resident. And I doubt Nat needs a nurse. What did Noah say about her?”

“He said she’s just ‘around.’ I asked who she was, and he said, ‘I don’t know; someone who’s just around a lot.’”

“Hmm.”

“Well, anyhow,” Delia said. “It’s really none of my business. I can’t think why I brought it up.”

But then she remembered why, because they were back to an uneasy silence.

“His wife was a paragon of virtue,” Joel said while he was helping himself to another roll. “Noah’s grandma, that is.”

“Oh, really?”

“To hear
her
tell it.”

“Oh.”

“I never could abide that woman. Always interfering. Nudging into our lives. Inquiring after the welfare of her gifts. ‘Do you ever use the such and such?’ ‘How come I never see you in the so-and-so?’”

Delia laughed.

“So if this Binky is his mistress,” Joel said—the bald, bold word giving Delia a slight shock—“I say more power to him. He deserves a little happiness.”

“Well, I didn’t mean—”

“Why not? He’s only sixty-seven. If it weren’t for those damn flashbacks, he’d be out sailing his boat still.”

Delia hadn’t known that Nat sailed, but she could easily picture it: his spiky figure all over the deck, everywhere at once.

“She liked to say she was ‘there’ for people,” Joel was reminiscing. He must be on the subject of Noah’s grandma again. “First person I ever heard say that, though Lord knows it’s grown common enough since. ‘I’m always
there
for my daughters,’” he mocked. “You want to ask, ‘Where’s that, exactly?’ It’s one of my least favorite terms.”

Delia hoped she hadn’t used it herself. She was fairly sure she had not.

“That and ‘survivor,’” Joel said. “Well, unless it’s meant in the literal sense.”

“Survivor?”

“Nowadays you’re a survivor if all you did was make it through childhood.”

“Ah.”

“And another word I hate is …”

It was lucky he held so many strong opinions. Delia wouldn’t need to make conversation after all. Instead, she sat watching his mouth, that long, firm, fine-edged mouth with the distinctive notch at the center of the upper lip, and she reflected that for someone so absorbed in questions of language, he certainly didn’t reveal very much.

———

Now when she went to the gourmet food store after dropping Noah off on Wednesday afternoons, she chose some additional item—sour French cornichons, hot-pepper jelly—and paid for it with her own money and brought it to tea at Nat’s. “How did you guess I like such things?” Nat would ask. “Most people come with chocolates. Fruit preserves. Sweet stuff.”

She didn’t tell him it was because her father, too, had been fond of pickly foods, for something gallant and slightly flirtatious in Nat’s manner suggested he didn’t view himself as all that old. Often he poked fun at Senior City, as if to prove he didn’t really belong there. “House of the Living Dead,” he called it. He claimed to believe that the seagulls drifting above the building were vultures, and he spoke jocularly of the “poor dears” on floor Four. And then there was his romance with Binky.

For Binky
was
his girlfriend; Delia couldn’t doubt that. Three times Delia arrived for tea and found her perched on his couch, playing hostess. And the fourth time, when she was missing, Nat found it necessary to explain that she’d been called away at the last minute. Her son had chipped a tooth, he said.

“Binky has a son?” Delia asked.

“Two sons, in fact.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“So Noah has been doing the honors today.”

Delia settled on the couch, laying her coat over the arm. She watched Noah pour an unsteady stream of tea.

“I didn’t even know she was married,” she said.

She chose her words carefully; she didn’t say
had been
married, because it could be that Binky was married still. And Nat’s response left her none the wiser. “Oh, yes,” was all he said. “To a dentist.”

Inspired, she said, “Well, then, the chipped tooth should be no problem.”

“Correct,” Nat said. He sent her a glint of a look from under his tufted gray eyebrows. Then he relented. “Assuming she doesn’t mind flying her son to an office in Wyoming.”

“Oh.”

“They’re divorced.”

“Oh, I see.”

“
Bitterly
divorced,” Nat said with some relish. “Months in court,
lawyers and replacement lawyers, forty thousand dollars spent to win five thousand … you get the picture.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“She ended up almost penniless, had to take a job in the Senior City gift shop.”

“She works in the gift shop?”

“Well, for now.”

He glanced over at Noah, who was passing around a plate of brownies at a perilous tilt. “Fact is,” Nat said, “Binky and I are getting married.”

Noah let the plate tilt more sharply. Delia said, “Oh! Congratulations,” and bent to pick a brownie off the rug.

“Honest?” Noah asked his grandfather.

“Honest. But don’t mention it to the girls yet, will you? I should have told your mom and your aunts before anyone.”

“So then will you move out of here?” Noah asked.

“Afraid not, son.” Nat turned to Delia. “Noah liked my old place better,” he said.

“The old place had this real cool tree house out back,” Noah told her.

“However, it did not have an elevator. Or a handgrip above the bathtub. Or a physical-therapy room for ancient codgers.”

“You’re not an ancient codger!” Noah said.

“Plus there’s the little detail of my contract with Senior City,” Nat told Delia. “Bit of a problem with the board of directors, as you might imagine. All my life savings are sunk in this apartment, but the minimum age of entrance is sixty-five. Binky’s thirty-eight.”

“And how about her sons?” Delia asked.

“Yes, that
would
have been a poser! Rock music in the cafeteria, skateboards down the halls … However, her sons will stay on with her parents. One is already in college, and the other’s about to go. But even so, the board is having hissy fits, and then a few neighbors are mad at me too, because men are mighty scarce in these parts. Plan was, I would marry one of the residents, not some luscious babe in the gift shop.”