Small Blessings (3 page)

“What was that you asked about Marjory?” Tom ignored her comment about the heat. She said the same thing every time she came up here. Tom liked his mother-in-law. She'd been molded by the lingering effects of the Depression and World War II with all their deprivations and opportunities for soldiering through. Oddly enough, she had graduated from this very college back in the mid-fifties, magna cum laude in mathematics of all things.

Agnes never complained about the big things—such as her daughter's chronic mental illness or her own considerable holdings in Enron—just the little ones, such as the location of his office. She had moved in with them when Marjory had gotten bad enough to need a keeper. Tom hadn't asked for her help. What would he have said—
your daughter's gone completely crazy at last
?
It's my fault because I had a stupid, three-week affair
,
but I still can't cope
? Nine years ago, Agnes had simply shown up with a suitcase and announced she was there to stay for a while. Tom would be eternally grateful to her, even though she had a bossy side that gave him one more reason to flee to his attic.

Agnes came a step or two into the low-ceilinged room, looking around as though she'd never been there before and didn't see any reason ever to come again, another ritual of visitation. “I said, ‘What the hell is wrong with Marjory?' She's down in the kitchen baking macaroons.”

Tom was not above enjoying a chance to shock. He leaned back in his chair, tented his hands, and carefully composed his face into its mildest expression. “Your daughter has invited company for dinner on Friday. The macaroons must be for dessert. If I remember right, they have to age for a day or two to reach their full potential.”

Agnes was satisfactorily bamboozled. She stared at her son-in-law openmouthed for perhaps ten seconds. Then she turned and very slowly removed a pile of books from the only other chair in the room and sat down. “What the hell is going on?”

Tom shrugged. “Got me,” he said, quite cheerfully. “Rose Callahan, the new assistant director of the Book Store, introduced herself this afternoon, and before you could say Jack Robinson, Marjory had asked her to dinner on Friday.”

“Was she drunk?” Agnes asked, leaning forward, still whispering. “I don't see how she could have been. I watched her all afternoon until you took her to the Book Store. As far as I could tell, she spent the whole time sitting at the table in the sunroom working on her goddamn scrapbooks.” Marjory's scrapbooks were picture books of her rampaging pathology. She bought and read piles of women's and self-help magazines, cutting out articles about such things as “How to Keep Your Long-Term Partner Interested in Your Mind” and “Ten Steps to Staying Young Forever” and pasted them into an endless succession of photo albums. Agnes had wanted to make her daughter give up such nonsense years ago, but Dr. Simms, her psychiatrist, had forbidden her to intervene. The updated scrapbooks went off with Marjory to Charlottesville for her twice-weekly appointments with the good doctor, her only allowed solo trips these days. Privately, Tom thought, his wife's psychiatrist must be bored out of his tree spending two hours a week with Marjory rehashing her husband's one, ten-year-old, three-week-long transgression. The scrapbooks at least gave him something new to look at.

Tom shook his head. “She seemed perfectly sober to me,” he said. “Maybe Dr. Simms changed her medication and found something that actually helps?”

“Nope,” Agnes said, sitting back. “No such luck.”

Tom shrugged again. “Well then,” he said, “the impetus for the invitation and the resulting macaroons remains a mystery.”

Agnes narrowed her eyes and looked at him. She was, Tom knew, his committed partner in this mess. They had these moments of closeness, when Tom felt, in some cockeyed way, that he and Agnes were man and wife, and Marjory was their hopelessly dependent child. Agnes Tattle was the only person he'd ever met who was strong enough to look life right in the eye and spit. It must be the mathematics in her background. Such courageous realism certainly didn't come from the study of English literature.

“Well, I'll be!” Agnes sighed and got up to go. At the door, she turned around and looked at him again. There really was nothing else for them to discuss. Marjory was a custodial issue between them, not a source of pleasant conversation. “I'm going to go down, unlock the Scotch, and have a drink. May I bring you one?”

“No thanks,” Tom said. Had Agnes noticed the roses he'd doodled? She was looking at him with her usual inscrutable glare. If anyone could read minds, it was Agnes Tattle.

“Well then, Professor. I'll leave you with your mail.”

The envelope Agnes withdrew from her reticule was small, lavender, and self-consciously feminine. It was addressed in brown ink, postmarked New Orleans, and the return address was confined to the initials R.T. Agnes looked Tom squarely in the eye as she handed it to him. “This came registered mail today. I beat Marjory to the door, which is probably just as well.”

And then, before Tom could so much as blink, she was gone.

*   *   *

There was no need to tear open the small envelope. He had all evening to revisit one of the most boneheaded mistakes he had ever made.

Tom Putnam's affair had been with a visiting poet, Retesia Turnball; another wispy, dreamy woman, much like Marjory when he'd first met her, barely connected enough to the here and now to grocery shop. Retesia, who had been quite a good poet, had written a lot about her Nordic ancestry. What Tom mainly remembered about her was how pale she was.

Retesia had been in residence at the college for exactly one month, laboring doggedly with a few overly self-involved students at turning angst into words. At the time, she had been newly widowed and grieving desperately, and Tom had just been desperate—desperate for life, for a meaningful connection with another human being—and so he'd ignored his usual overriding caution and had sex with Retesia a half-dozen times on the couch in her office. Then she was gone, never to be heard from again until now, and it had been he who was grieving—not so much for Retesia as for everything he'd wanted her to be.

Why, Tom wondered, had he been so attracted to unhappy women in those days? Unhappiness repelled him now. He'd had enough of it.

He'd written Retesia one letter, just a chatty compilation of college happenings, which he'd never mailed, but hadn't thrown away either. Marjory had found it a month later. Even though there was nothing in the letter that hinted he and Retesia had been lovers, his wife's decompensation, which had been proceeding for years at a sedate pace, had quickly accelerated.

Within two months she was officially Mad as a Hatter.

Tom hadn't had sex or a normal, intimate conversation with a woman since. His punishment for his transgression was to live life as a caged eunuch. Why hadn't he at least strayed with a woman who made him laugh? Why had he picked another struggling soul who, like Marjory, cried out for rescuing?

Marjory. His wife. What a sad woman she was and had probably always been. But when he'd married her, he was sure their marriage would make all the difference in her life. She was so lovely and so lost, this girl child of the emphatic Agnes and her flyboy husband, who had flown off into the skies of Del Rio on an air force training mission and never come back. Some kind of engine failure, the family was told. Just
pfft,
a fireball, and he was gone.

Agnes had evidently loved her flyboy passionately, for she'd remained fiercely single ever since. The flyboy had left her—his then just-pregnant wife—with a nice slice of family money, a pretty Charlottesville house, and an extended family of overbearing in-laws with stultifying ideas about femininity. Agnes had declined to join her mother-in-law's garden club and had instead taken herself off to the UVA law school, rising to be editor of the
Law Review
and graduating third in her class. According to Agnes, her mother-in-law had been appalled.

After graduation, Lawyer Tattle had quickly become the champion of middle-aged women who'd been dumped by their husbands, delighting in making the bastards pay through the nose for their disloyalty. Marjory—a physically frail child—had spent her formative years listening to her mother's tales of browbeating unfaithful men and prodding unassertive women to buck up and not take no for an answer. Tom had met his future wife during his first year in grad school at UVA. Marjory had been a lovely, pathologically shy graduate of this same women's college, already within shouting distance of thirty, back home living with Agnes, without an inkling of how to survive on her own. He'd been introduced to her at some Legal Aid shindig. What he was doing there, Tom could never remember, but he did remember meeting Marjory for the first time. She had stood before him shyly, lovely as spring's first daffodil, a dribble of punch spilled down her buttoned-up white blouse, while over the PA Fontella Bass had belted out “Rescue Me.”

What he'd learned most painfully over the next quarter of a century was that you cannot do that. One human being, with the best will and intentions in the world, cannot fix what is wrong with someone else. There was enough left of Marjory to cling, but not to connect. Tom picked up his pen and absently doodled another rose. The past was always there, wasn't it? Waiting to be sorted out and connected to the present. He must have been terribly lonely when he'd met Marjory—grad school had been so different from the easy, boys' club atmosphere of Amherst. He'd slept with a few women in college, but they were all from Mount Holyoke and could jolly well take care of themselves. His Achilles' heel, back in that lonely year, had been a wish to feel special, not just another likable Joe in the crowd. His collegiate longing to help save the world had somehow perverted itself into a longing to save another person.

Agnes had tried to tell him before the wedding that her daughter was not marriage material. She'd sat him down and—as direct in this as in everything—said there was something missing in Marjory that neither she nor the doctors seemed to be able to do anything about. With the accumulated wisdom of twenty years behind him, however, Tom had politely but firmly told Agnes and her advice to take a hike. The truth was—Tom could see this plainly now, sitting at his desk in this dim, hot attic—that he'd been a little lost himself in those days; another sheltered intellectual trying to figure out how to
live.
And so he'd constructed the convenient fantasy that two straws, if bound together, would make an adequate broom.

Agnes had been right, of course. The marriage had been a mess from the get-go. Marjory had been frightened of sex, frightened of being with people, frightened of being left alone and abandoned. Tom frowned and stabbed his latest rose with the point of his pen. It was so easy to see now that he should have gotten out during the first year when it was obvious to all—and most importantly to himself—that whatever was wrong with Marjory was not his fault. But she'd been so lovely and so desperate, she'd told him over and over again how hard she was trying, and so he'd stayed that year and the next and the next, and then it was hard not to feel that some of her troubles were indeed his fault.

Tom stared out the small, dark dormer window at the great blank sky.
Whatever,
as his current crop of students would say. There was no point in fuming now about the gods' need of a good black joke at humankind's expense. As Van Morrison had put it:
It ain't why, why, why, why, why; it just is.
If it weren't for Agnes, Tom sometimes thought—giving in to his latent penchant for melodrama after a couple of late-night Scotches—he would have hanged himself up here in the attic just to have done something different with his day. The truth was he had made a muddle of his life and there was nothing he could do about it.

The small square lavender envelope in his hand felt hot to the touch. What the hell. A letter was just a letter. Why not read it now and get on with it, whatever it was.

Dear Tom,

I know this will probably be a big surprise, but I hope it will not be an unwelcome one. You are the father of a ten-year-old boy named Henry. On his tenth birthday, which was three weeks ago, I informed Henry of this as well. He had long wanted to know who his father is, but I had held back the information to make it a kind of rite of passage for him when he turned ten.

My life has changed completely in the past few years, and is now much more satisfying and exciting. The change was triggered by my realization that poetry is for losers. I started writing romance novels instead and I have been extremely successful. I write under a pseudonym (which is now also my legal name) that you do not need to know.

Anyway, my agent and publisher have put together a three-month world “lecture” tour, and rather than coming with me, Henry has decided to come and live with you.

We both thought it would be best just to surprise you, so I'm putting your son on a train from New Orleans that will arrive in Charlottesville at 7:09
A.M
. on Monday, September 5.

Don't try to find me. I have most definitely moved on with my life. I will be in touch at the end of the tour or shortly thereafter.

Give my best to Marjory.

 

Affectionately,
Retesia

Tom gripped the small piece of paper and stared down at the hand that was doing the gripping. He'd taken in nothing after the second sentence, the one that announced he'd fathered a boy named Henry. It took tremendous effort for him to unstick his mind enough to spew forth anything, which naturally turned out to be a couple of comforting lines from Shakespeare.

It is a pretty mocking of the life. And nature must obey necessity.

Could Retesia possibly be making this up? Was there any reason to doubt this bombshell?

No, there really wasn't. For a poet, Retesia was strangely lacking in imagination. If she said he had a son, he had a son.