Saint Maybe (12 page)

Once his mother asked, “Ian, you don’t suppose Danny was depressed or anything, do you?”

“Depressed?”

“Oh, but what am I saying? He had a new baby! And a lovely new wife, and a whole new ready-made family!”

“Right,” Ian said.

“Of course, there could have been
little
problems. Some minor snag at work, maybe, or a rocky patch in his marriage. But nothing out of the ordinary, don’t you agree?”

“Well, sure,” Ian told her.

Was that all it had been? A rocky patch? Had Ian overreacted?

He saw how young he was, how inexperienced, what a shallow, ignorant
boy
he was. He really had no idea what would be considered out of the ordinary in a marriage.

On Sundays when the family gathered, he sent Lucy sidelong glances. He noticed she was growing steadily paler, like one of his father’s old Polaroid photos. He wanted to believe Danny’s death hadn’t touched her, but there she sat with something still and stricken in her face. Her children quarreled shrilly with Claudia’s children, but Lucy just sat straight-backed, not appearing to hear, and smoothed her skirt over and over across her lap.

Privately Bee told the others, “I wish she had someone to go to. Relatives, I mean. Of course we’d miss her but … if she had someone to tend the children so she could get a job, for instance! I know I ought to offer—”

Doug said, “Don’t even consider it.”

“Well, I’m their grandma! Or one of them’s grandma. But lately I’ve been so tired and my knees are acting
up and I don’t see how I could handle it. I know I ought to, though.”

“Don’t give it a moment’s consideration.”

Did Lucy ever think,
If only I hadn’t gone out with Dot that night?
Did she think,
If only Dot’s car hadn’t broken down?

For it
was
Dot she’d gone out with. And the car
had
broken down, someplace on Ritchie Highway. That much emerged at the funeral, which Dot had attended all weepy and disbelieving.

Did Lucy ever think,
If only I had been a faithful wife?

No, probably not, for Ian couldn’t shake off the feeling that he was the one she blamed. (At the very least, he’d made Danny drive him home that night.) He was almost positive that she slid her eyes reproachfully in his direction as she smoothed her skirt across her lap. But Ian looked elsewhere. He made a point of looking elsewhere.

Only Cicely knew the whole story. He had told her after the first time they ever made love. Lying next to her in her bed (her parents had gone to a Memorial Day picnic, taking her little brother with them), he had thought,
Danny will never know I’ve finally slept with a girl
. His eyes had blurred with tears and he had turned abruptly and pressed his hot, wet face into Cicely’s neck. “I’m the one who caused Danny’s accident,” he blurted out. But the thing was, she wouldn’t accept it. It was like some physical object that she kept batting away. “Oh, no,” she kept saying. “No, that’s silly. You didn’t do anything. Lucy didn’t do anything. Lucy was a
perfect
wife. Danny knew you didn’t mean it.”

He should have said, “Listen. You have to believe this.” But her skin was so soft, and her neck smelled of baby powder, and instead of speaking he had started
making love again. He had felt ashamed even then at how easily he was diverted.

Or here was something more shameful than that: In the emergency room that awful night, when the doctors said there was no hope, Ian had thought,
At least now Cicely can’t stay mad at me for missing our dinner date
.

Despicable. Despicable. He ground his teeth together any time he recalled it.

That summer he worked again for Sid ’n’ Ed’s A-l Movers. Lou had been fired for bleeding all over some lady’s sofa after he sat on his own whiskey flask; but LeDon was still there, along with a new man named Brewster, a rough-and-tough, prune-colored type who didn’t have two words to say from one day to the next. That was fine with Ian. He felt grateful just for someplace to escape to, some hard labor to throw himself into.

One move he helped with was obviously upward, from a tiny house in Govans to a much nicer one in Cedarcroft. Workers were swarming around the new place, patching the roof and resodding the lawn and measuring for window screens. In the kitchen he found a man installing wooden cabinets, and he stood watching as one was fitted precisely into place. The man plucked nails out of nowhere. (Maybe he had a mouthful, like Bee with her sewing pins. His back was turned so Ian couldn’t tell.) He hammered them in with quick rat-a-tats. And he didn’t act the least self-conscious, not even when Ian said, “Looks good.” In fact, he didn’t bother answering. Or maybe he hadn’t heard. Ian said, loudly, “Nice piece of work.”

Then he understood that the man was deaf. It was something about his head—the way he held it so steady, not troubling to keep alert for any sounds. Ian stepped forward and the man glanced over at him. He had a
square-jawed, deeply lined face and a bristly gray crew-cut. “Looks good,” Ian repeated, and the man nodded briefly and returned to his hammering.

Ian felt a twist of envy. It wasn’t just the work he envied, although that was part of it—the all-consuming task that left no room for extraneous thoughts. It was the notion of a sealed-off world. A world where no one traded speech, and where even dreams, he supposed, were soundless.

He dreamed Danny stood in the doorway jingling a pocketful of change. “I nearly forgot,” he told Ian. “I owe you.”

Ian caught his breath. He said, “Owe me?”

“I never paid you for baby-sitting that evening. What was it—three dollars? Five?”

Ian said, “No, please,” and backed away, holding up his palms. He woke to hear his own voice saying, “No. No. Please.”

His parents drove him to school on a hot day in September. Cicely had already left for her own school, near Philadelphia, but since that was just an hour from Sumner College there had not been any big farewell scene. In fact, they were planning on meeting that weekend. And Andrew was close by too, at Temple. But none of Ian’s friends were attending Sumner, and he was glad. He liked the idea of making a new beginning. His mother said, “Oh, I hope you won’t be lonesome!” but Ian almost hoped he would be. He saw himself striding unaccompanied across the campus, a mysterious figure dressed all in black. “Who
is
that person?” girls would ask. Although he didn’t actually own anything black, come to think of it. Still, he had his plans.

They dropped his belongings at the freshman dorm, where the only sign of his roommate was a khaki duffel bag and a canvas butterfly chair printed to resemble a
gigantic hand. (At least Ian assumed the chair was his roommate’s. All the other furniture was blond oak.) Then they walked over to the Parents’ Reception. Ian was in favor of skipping the reception and so was his father, but his mother insisted.

At the college president’s house they were given three paper cups of 7-Up with orange sherbet floating foamily on top, and they stood in a clump by a blond oak table trying to make conversation with each other. “Quite a crowd,” his father said, and his mother said, “Yes, isn’t it!” Ian started eating spice cookies from a plate on the table. He ate one after the other, frowning and chewing intently as if he could have made many interesting comments if only his mouth weren’t full. “Are these all parents of freshmen, do you suppose?” his father asked. “Well, maybe some are transfers’ parents,” his mother said.

She stood among these ruffly people in her ordinary navy dress, and her shoes were plain flat pumps because of her knees. Without high heels she seemed downtrodden, Ian noticed, like somebody’s maid. And his father’s suit was rucked up around his calves with static cling or something. He had the crazy appearance of a formally attired man standing shin-deep in ocean breakers. Ian swallowed a sharp piece of cookie and felt it hurting all the way down his throat, all the way to his chest where it lodged and wouldn’t go away. He wanted to say, “Take me back to Baltimore! I’ll never complain again, I promise.” But instead he joined in the small talk, and he noticed that his voice had the same determined upward slant as his mother’s.

They left the reception without having spoken to another soul, and they walked together to the parking lot. The family car looked dusty and humble. Ian opened the door for his mother, but she was used to opening her own door and so she got in his way and he stepped
on her foot. “Sorry,” he said. “Well …”She kissed his cheek and slid hurriedly inside, not looking at him. His father gave him a wave across the roof of the car. “Take care of yourself, son.”

“Sure thing,” Ian said.

He stood with his palms clamped in his armpits and watched them drive off.

His roommate was a zany, hooting, clownish boy named Winston Mills. Not only was the hand-shaped chair his, but also a bedspread made from an American flag, and a beer stein that tinkled out “How Dry I Am” when you lifted it, and a poster for a movie called
Teenage Robots
. The other boys thought he was weird, but Ian liked him. He liked the fact that Winston never had a serious discussion or asked a serious question. Instead he told the entire plots of movies Ian had never heard of—werewolf movies and Japanese westerns and monster movies where the zippers showed clearly between the scales—or he read aloud in a falsetto voice from a collection of syrupy “love comics” he’d found at a garage sale, meanwhile lolling in his butterfly chair with the huge pink fingers curving up behind him.

Ian dreamed Danny drove onto the quad in his Chevy, which didn’t have so much as a dented fender. He leaned out his window and asked Ian, “Don’t you think I knew? Don’t you think I knew all along?” And Ian woke and thought maybe Danny
had
known. Sometimes people just chose not to admit a thing, not even to themselves. But then he realized that was immaterial. So what if he’d known? It wasn’t till he’d been told point-blank that he’d felt the need to take action.

As far as Ian could see, college was not much different from high school. Same old roots of Western civilization, same old single-cell organisms. He squinted through a microscope and watched an amoeba turn thin and branchy, curve two branches around a black dot,
thicken to a blob and drift on. His lab partner was a girl and he could tell she liked him, but she seemed too foreign. She came from someplace rural and said “ditten” instead of “didn’t.” Also “cooten”. “I cooten find my notebook anywhere.” He lived for the weekends, when Cicely rode out to Sumner on a tiny, rattling train and they hung around his dorm in the hope that Winston might leave for one of his movies at some point. Supposedly Cicely was bunking with the older sister of a girl she knew from home, but in fact she shared Ian’s narrow bed where late at night—silently, almost motionlessly, all but holding their breaths—they made love over and over again across the room from Winston’s snoring shape.

He called home collect every weekend; that was easier than his parents’ trying to call him. But the Wednesday before Halloween his mother phoned, reaching him purely by chance as he was passing through the dorm between classes. “I hate to bother you,” she said, “but I thought you’d want to know. Honey, it’s Lucy.”

“Lucy?”

“She died.”

He noticed that a sort of whirring silence seemed to be traveling down the corridor. He said, “She what?”

“We think it was pills.”

He swallowed.

“Ian?”

Oh, God
, he thought,
how long will I have to pay for just a handful of tossed-off words?

“Are you all right, Ian?”

“Sure,” he said.

“We got a call from Agatha last night. She told us, ‘Mama keeps sleeping and won’t wake up.’ Well, you know that could have meant anything. Of course I made plans to get right over there but I did say, ‘Oh, sweetie,
I bet she’s just tuckered out,’ and that’s when Agatha said, ‘She wouldn’t even wake for breakfast.’ I said, ‘Breakfast?’ I said, ‘This morning?’ Ian, would you believe it, those children had been on their own since the night before when she put them to bed. Then she went to bed herself and just, I don’t know, I mean there’s no sign she did it on purpose but when we walked in she was flat on her back and breathing so slowly, just a breath here and another breath there, and this pill bottle sat on her nightstand totally empty. There wasn’t any letter though or anything like that. So it
couldn’t
have been on purpose, right? But why would she take even one of those pills? Our family’s never held with sleeping pills. I always say, get up and scrub the floors if you can’t sleep! Do some reading! Improve your mind! Anyhow, we called the ambulance and they took her to Union Memorial. She had gone on too long, though. If they’d got to her right away, well, maybe; but she’d been lying there a whole night and a day and there wasn’t much they could do. She died this noon without ever regaining consciousness.”

Can’t we just back up and start over? Couldn’t I have one more chance?

“Ian?” his mother was saying. “Listen, don’t breathe a word to the children.”

He found his voice from somewhere. He said, “They don’t know yet?”

“No, and we’re not ever going to tell them.”

Maybe the shock had sent her around the bend. He said, “They’re going to have to find out sometime. How will you explain it when she doesn’t come home from the hospital?”

Or when she fails to show up for Thomas’s high-school graduation or Agatha’s wedding
, he thought wildly, and he almost laughed.

“I mean we’re not going to tell them they might have
saved her,” his mother said. “If they’d phoned earlier, I mean. They’d feel so guilty.”

He leaned against the wall and briefly closed his eyes.

“So we’ve set the funeral for Friday,” his mother said, “assuming her people agree to it. Did she ever happen to tell you who her people were?”

“She didn’t have any.
You
know that.”

“Well, distant relatives, though. Isn’t it odd? I don’t believe she once mentioned her maiden name.”

“Lucy … Dean,” Ian said. “Dean was her name.”

“No, Dean would have been her first husband’s name.”