Ladder of Years (47 page)

His bed was made, but like most men, he seemed unable to grasp the concept of tucking a fold of spread beneath the pillows. Instead, a straight line of fabric slanted dismally toward the headboard. Just for something to do, Delia set about fixing it. She turned down the spread and whacked both pillows into shape.

“I guess you think I’ve destroyed your father’s practice,” Sam told her.

“Pardon?”

“I’ve run it down to a shadow of its former glory, isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

“It’s not your fault if people die of old age,” Delia said.

“It’s my fault if no one new signs on, though,” he said. “I lack your father’s bedside manner, obviously. I tell people they have plain old indigestion; I don’t call it dyspepsia. I’ve never been the type to flatter and cosset my patients.”

Delia felt a familiar twinge of annoyance.
I would hardly consider “dyspepsia” flattery
, she could have said. And, I don?t
know why you have to use that bitter, biting tone of voice any time you talk about my father.
She stalked around to the other side of the bed.

But then Sam asked, “What is that limp you’ve got?”

“Limp?”

“It seems to me you’re favoring one foot.”

“Oh, that’s from a couple of months ago. It’s almost healed by now.”

“Sit down a minute.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, and he came over to kneel in front of her and slip her shoe off. His fingertips moved across the top of her foot with a knowledgeable, deft precision that shot directly to her groin.

In her softest voice, she told him, “Your patients never minded, that I was aware of. They always called you a saint.”

“They don’t anymore,” he said. He was gazing out the window while he traced a tendon, as if he expected to hear the injury rather than see it. “The other night Mrs. Maxwell phoned with one of her stomach problems, and I told her, ’If I let myself think about it, Mrs. Maxwell, I could list quite a few complaints of my own. My eyes burn and my head aches and my knee is acting up,’ I said. Which of course offended her. It seems I’ve lost my tolerance. Or maybe I was never all that tolerant
to begin with. I don’t have a very … wide nature. I’m short on, you might call it, jollity.”

The very word, in connection with Sam, made Delia smile, but he was prodding her ankle now, and he didn’t notice. “Does this hurt? This?” he asked.

“A little.”

She thought of how Joel had held her foot in exactly this way. But Joel’s touch had felt so foreign, so separate from her—not quite real, even, it seemed as she looked back.

“I suppose that’s why I married you,” Sam was saying. Had she missed something? “You were extremely jolly when we met,” he said. “Or more like … lighthearted. Now I see that I chose you for all the wrong reasons.”

She drew back slightly.

“There you sat on that couch,” he said, “next to your two scary sisters. Eliza preaching sea kelp and toxic doses of vitamins; Linda tossing off words like
louche and distingué.
But you were so shy and cute and fumbly, smiling down at your little glass eyecup of sherry. You were so wavery around the edges. You I’d be able to handle, I thought, and I never stopped to ask why I needed to believe that.”

He dropped her foot and sat back on his heels. “Stand up, please,” he told her. She stood. He narrowed his eyes. “It does seem there’s a bit of swelling,” he said. “I would guess you’ve torn a ligament. Ligaments can be very slow to mend. How’d you do it?”

She’d done it acting fumbly, acting wavery around the edges, but she didn’t want to say so. He was continuing, anyway, with his original train of thought.

“When you left,” he said, “the police were sympathetic at first. But then they figured out you’d left of your own accord, and I could see them beginning to wonder. Well, you can’t blame them. I was wondering myself. I asked Eliza, when she came back from seeing you: ’Was it me? Did I have any part in it?’ Maybe I hadn’t phrased it right about that man friend of yours. Or I nagged too much about sunblock, or you hated how my chest hair had grayed. Or the angina; I know the angina business must have gotten tedious.”

“What?” she said. “Now, that is just not fair!”

“No, no, I did go overboard for a while. Checking my pulse rate every two minutes. I think I had it in mind I was going to drop dead like
my father.” He rose, carefully brushing his knees even though they weren’t dusty. “But Eliza said it wasn’t any of those things. She said you were suffering from stress. I’m still not sure what she meant.”

Nor am I entirely clear
, he had written,
what “stresses” you are referring to.
Delia wished now she hadn’t thrown that letter away. Had its tone, perhaps, been less cold than she had imagined? She reflected on the deletions; she recalled how they had increased near the end and how the commas had fallen away, as if he had been hurtling headlong toward his final sentence. Which he had then crossed out so thoroughly that she hadn’t been able to read it.

The phone on the nightstand started ringing, but neither of them reached for it, and eventually it stopped.

“The thing of it is,” he said, “you ask yourself enough questions—was it this I did wrong, was it that?—and you get to believing you did it
all
wrong. Your whole damn life. But now that I’m nearing the end of it, I seem to be going too fast to stop and change. I’m just…
skidding
to the end of it.”

Susie called, “Mom?”

“It’s like that old Jackie Gleason show on TV,” Sam said. “The one that used to open with a zoom shot across a harbor toward a skyline. Was it Miami? Manhattan? That long glide across the glassy water: my picture exactly of dying. No brakes! No traction! No time to make a U-turn!”

“Mom, telephone!”

Delia didn’t take her eyes from Sam’s face, but Sam said, “You’d better get that.”

Still she didn’t move.

“The phone, Delia.”

After a moment, she picked up the receiver. “Hello?” she said.

“Delia?”

“Oh, Noah.”

Sam’s shoulders sagged. He turned toward the window.

“Haven’t you even started out yet?” Noah demanded.

“No,” she said, with her eyes on Sam. He was setting his forehead against the panes now, looking down into the yard. “I won’t know what my arrangements are till afternoon,” she told Noah.

“But it’s afternoon now, and I’m lonesome!” he said. Sickness, it seemed, had turned him into that open-faced child she’d first known.
“I’ve got no one taking care of me! Grandpa came but he wouldn’t stay, and now I’ve finished the cough drops.”

“Well, there’s another box in the … your grandpa? Came to Bay Borough?”

“For about a nanosecond.”

“What did he want?”

“He said he was just riding around, and then he left. I told him I was sick, but what did
he
care? And Dad claims I don’t even have a fever and Mom can’t come till after work and also something’s wrong with the television set.”

“Read a book, then,” she told him. “I’ll be home before long. Either this evening or maybe tomorrow; tell your father, will you?”

He was in the midst of a theatrical groan when she said goodbye.

“Sorry,” she told Sam. “That was just—”

But Sam said, “Well, it’s obvious you have things to attend to,” and he started toward the door.

“Sam?” she said.

He stopped and turned.

“It was just the little boy I’m taking care of,” she told him.

“So I gathered,” he said, somehow not moving his lips.

“He’s sick with a cold.”

“And you have to get ’home’ to him.”

His voice had that pinched, tight, steely quality that always made her shrivel inside, but she forced herself to say, calmly, “Well, it is where I happen to live.”

“I may not be perfect, Delia, but at least I don’t delude myself,” Sam said.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t go around trying to roll the clock back,” he said. “Shucking off my kids as soon as they turn difficult and hunting up a whole new, easy,
little
kid instead.”

Delia stared at him. “Well, of all the preposterous theories!” she said. “What do you know about it? Maybe he’s not easy at all! Maybe he’s just as difficult!”

“If that’s the case,” he said, “you can always shuck him off too.”

“I didn’t shuck him off!” she shouted. “I just came for Susie’s wedding and then I’m going back—and not a moment too soon, might I add. I have no intention of shucking him off!”

Sam studied her impassively. “Did I say you did?” he asked.
And while she was grabbing for words, he left the room.

One of Delia’s handicaps was that when she got angry, she got teary, which always made her angrier. So there she was, banging around the kitchen and fighting back tears as she washed the dishes, while Linda followed behind, trying to console her. “There, there,” she said. “We love you, Dee. Your blood kin loves you. Careful, that’s Grandma’s last soup bowl.
We’ll
stand by you.”

“I’m all right,” Delia said, dabbing her eyes impatiently with the heel of one hand. She ran water over a sponge. It had a horrible cilantro smell, as if it had soured in the had soured in the cupboard.

“You shouldn’t put up with him,” Linda said. “Give him the boot! Send him packing. This is our house, not Sam’s. It’s you who ought to be living here.”

Delia had to laugh at that. “Really? On what money?” she asked. “If not for Sam, we’d have lost this place long ago. Who do you think pays the property tax? And the maintenance, and the bills for all those improvements?”

“Well, if you call uprooting every last shrub an improvement,” Linda sniffed. “
I
call it high-handed! And did you know he’s got plans to paint the shutters red?”

“Red?”

“Fire-engine red, is what he told Eliza. Though she says he’s sort of petered out on his projects lately. But think of it! Like an old, old man with his hair dyed, that’s what red shutters would look like. You notice he only started doing this after his heart attack.”

“Chest pains,” Delia corrected her mechanically.

Susie wandered in, dressed in her jeans and a navy pullover of Carroll’s. “When’s lunch?” she asked Delia.

“Lunch! Well …”

“A gold digger’s what he is,” Linda said. “He had his eye on you from the moment Daddy hired him.”

“Who did?” Susie asked.

“Sam Grinstead; who do you think? He schemed to marry your mother before he ever laid eyes on her.”

“He did?”

“Oh, Linda,” Delia said. “If you get right down to it, I schemed to
marry him, too. I sat behind that desk just pining for someone to walk in and save me.”

“Save you from what?” Susie asked.

Delia ignored her. “Look at our own grandmother,” she told Linda. “Marrying Isaiah to escape TB. Look at the woodcutter’s honest son, marrying the princess for her kingdom!”

“Who was T.B.?” Susie demanded. “What woodcutter? What are you two
talking
about?”

Linda went over to Susie and draped an arm across her shoulders in a chummy, confiding way that made Delia feel excluded. “If your mother had half the sense you do,” she told Susie, “she would kick your father out and get herself a job and move back to Baltimore.”

“I already have a job,” Delia said. “I have a whole life, elsewhere!”

And Bay Borough seemed to float by just then like a tiny, bright, crowded blue bubble, at this distance so veiled and misty that she wondered if she had dreamed it.

“Here’s what I’m hoping,” Driscoll told Delia. “When Courtney hears somebody’s phoned her, she’ll know right off it’s got to be this guy she gave her number to. I mean, he did call you-all’s house three times. So you know he didn’t get the number from the phone book; he must have written it down wrong. Don’t you think?”

“Well, it’s possible, I suppose,” Delia said. In fact, it seemed very likely, but she couldn’t work up the energy to tell him so. For the past forty-five minutes they’d been standing out here in the cold. From time to time she sent a longing glance over her shoulder at Courtney’s white clapboard house, but they had already rung the doorbell and no one had answered. “Driscoll,” she said, “has it occurred to you that Courtney might have after-school sports? I mean, Susie used to come home in the dark, some days.”

“Then we’ll wait here till dark,” he said.

Other students were passing—Gilman boys in their shirts and ties, and teenage girls in Bryn Mawr aqua or Roland Park Country School blue. “We should be holding up one of those signs,” Delia said, “the way they do at airports.”

Driscoll scowled at her.

“Couldn’t you have brought Pearce for this instead?” Delia asked him.

“Who’s Pearce?”

“Your sister, for heaven’s sake!”

“You mean Spence?”

“Spence. Sorry.”

She gave a little laugh. He scowled harder.

“Spence is at work,” he told her. “But I doubt she’d have come anyhow. She doesn’t think I ought to get married.”

“She doesn’t!”

“Well, why is that such a shock?” he asked. “You’re not the only one who’s against this.”

“Did I say I was against it?”

“You sure act like you are. Dragging your heels every step of the way, wishing I’d brought someone else.”

“I’m just getting cold, is all,” Delia told him.

“For your information, my whole family claims I’d be better off single.”

Delia felt stung. She said, “Well, thanks a lot!”

“Oh, they like Susie,” he said. “But, you know … ‘Why get mixed up with those Grinsteads?’ my mom is always asking.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Grinsteads!”

“No, well, but …” He followed a knot of passing schoolgirls with his eyes. “You’ve got to admit,” he said, “you-all are so … you do things such a different way. Not mingling or taking part, living to yourselves like you do; and then you pretend like that’s normal. You pretend like
everything’s
normal; you’re so cagey and smooth; you gloss things over; you don’t explain.”

Delia breathed again. He could have named flaws much worse, she felt, although she didn’t know exactly what. “Well,” she said, “those sound to me like good qualities, not bad.”