Small Blessings (37 page)

“Russell, are you all right?” Luellen asked.

She stood in front of him, a little pinched-faced woman with a bad permanent. Whoever could have guessed that Luellen Mars would be the gatekeeper of his fate? Russell looked down at her and the stakes ratcheted skyward; he didn't want to be just Henry's
biological
father, he wanted to be Henry's
actual
father. He wanted Henry to occupy his life in much the same way he dreamed of Rose occupying it. He wanted—he needed—
somebody
to stage a takeover of his being; someone to force him to fess up, face up, start over, get it
real
this time. In a flash, Russell made his decision: He would have the test, and when it came back proving he was Henry's father, he would demand physical custody of the child. “I'm fine,” he said briskly.

“But you were talking to yourself just now,” Luellen said, real concern in her voice.

“No, I wasn't. You're imagining things.”

Luellen opened her mouth to argue, but something in Russell's face turned argument into concern, and instead she asked again if she could help him.

“Yes, actually you can.” Russell handed her the envelope. “There's hair in here from two different people. Could you run whatever tests are needed to determine whether they come from people who are biologically related?”

Luellen opened the envelope, fished around, and came up with several long, straight silver hairs and several other long, curly brown hairs. “Russell,” she said, obviously worried, “what are you up to?”

“The pursuit of truth. How long before you can do the test?”

“I
can't do the test. I'll have to send it to a lab. It'll cost a bundle.”

“I'll pay. How long?”

Luellen shrugged. “A few days. Unless you want to pay to messenger the hair to the lab and have it expedited?”

“I'll pay.” Russell thought again of those bottles of Wild Turkey. He'd been sober for years. Surely he could now have a couple of drinks, to help the time pass? Inside his head, AA Lewis began shouting something, but the sound was muffled and without its customary cautionary power.

Luellen put a hand on his arm. “I have no idea what you're doing, Russell, but are you absolutely one hundred percent sure you want to do it?”

Russell stared at her. What did this woman mean by “one hundred percent sure”? As far as Russell could remember, the last thing he'd been one hundred percent sure of was that he really liked good bourbon.

He turned and left without another word.

*   *   *

Henry came out carrying the soccer ball and walking beside Sam Driskell, the son of a French professor. Tom waved and walked over to the two boys. “Sam and I are best friends,” Henry announced. “Can he come over and play soccer?”

And so the invasion of small boys begins,
thought Tom.
We're not going to have just Henry thundering around, but Henry's friends as well.

Today, however, was not a good day. “Not today, I'm afraid,” Tom said. “You already have company.”

“Who?” Henry was immediately suspicious. “I don't
know
anybody else.”

Tom turned and gestured for Mason Brownlow to come forward. “Hello, Henry,” Mr. Brownlow said, with a cheerful little bow. “I'm delighted to see you again.”

Instantly, a Henry mask replaced Henry's face.
This,
Tom thought
, is what he will look like when he's old if his life hasn't gone well.
“Have you found my mother?” Henry asked, his voice as lifeless as his expression. “Do I have to go back?”

Mr. Brownlow stopped smiling immediately and glanced up at Tom. Tom shook his head:
No, he doesn't know his mother is dead.
“Only if you want to, Henry,” Mr. Brownlow said.

“You sure?” Henry's own brand of street smarts was out there, ready to mix it up with Mr. Brownlow or anyone else who might want to move him around again like a piece of furniture.

“I'm sure,” Mr. Brownlow said. “I just came up to see how you are doing. And as long as I'm satisfied that you're doing well, I don't see any reason why you can't stay. For a while, anyway.”

Tom felt the implied threat. Or was that too strong a word? If you thought about it, the little banker wouldn't be doing his job if he didn't view Henry's current situation with energetic skepticism.

Henry had no desire to pussyfoot politely around. “You didn't come about me,” he said mulishly. “You came about the money.”

Now it was Mason Brownlow's eyes that were unreadable. Abruptly there was something of steel about the round little man. “I was your grandparents' closest friend, Henry. Surely you understand what that means as far as the money goes.”

Surely not?
Tom thought.
At slightly under seven years old?

Sam Driskell shuffled his feet. “Uh, Henry, I better get going,” he said in his high-piping seven-year-old voice. “My mom worries if I don't get home or call before much after two thirty.”

“I'm sorry about today, Sam,” Tom said. “Perhaps you could come home with Henry tomorrow? If it's okay with Mr. Brownlow.”

“Of course it's okay,” Mr. Brownlow said quickly, back to his old cheerful self.

Sam looked at Henry. “Is it okay with you?”

Tom watched a whole short lifetime of disrupted longings parade through Henry's eyes. “Sure,” he said, in his guarded, old-man voice, “if I'm still here.”

*   *   *

Agnes cut right through the awkwardness and tension of the walk home from Ed House by stopping abruptly, kneeling down, looking Henry right in the eye, and saying, “See here, Henry. There's two separate legal issues here, and I think you're feeling bad because you're wopsing them up into one. Okay?”

Other parents and children drifted past, the children gawking, the parents determinedly not looking. “Okay,” Henry said doubtfully.

“All right, then.” Agnes plunged on. “Now, as I'm not only your sort-of grandmother, but your lawyer as well, you need to pay close attention to what I say. The first legal issue is where you are to live; the other is what to do about all that money you have stowed under your bed.”

“And the income from the sizable trust your grandparents left you,” Mr. Brownlow stuck in, uninvited, back to being the round little man of steel.

To Tom's surprise, Agnes didn't object to the interruption. “That, too,” she said.

Henry's thoughts were as easy to read as a Dick and Jane adventure.
Grown-ups do all this talking, and then—poof!—there you are, living somewhere else.

“Henry,” Agnes asked, “you following me here?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Okay, then. Here's the deal. Tom Putnam is legally your father. His name is on your birth certificate. If you want to live with him, no one can take you away. Not Mr. Brownlow; not anyone.”

“Well, I'm not sure it's quite that simple,” Mr. Brownlow said mildly. “But if you like living here and you want to stay, that certainly gives us a place to start.”

Henry eyed him no less suspiciously. “You used to say things like that about living with my mother. And then you'd take me away again.”

Mr. Brownlow looked truly stricken. “Your mother was struggling with an illness, Henry. I couldn't let you go on living with her if she couldn't take care of you, could I?”

Henry was becoming mulish again. “I can take care of myself. Ask Tom and Agnes how I got my own Cheerios this morning.”

“He did,” Tom felt compelled to add. “And he dressed himself as well.”

Agnes shot him a look. “Could we stick to the point at hand, please? Which is legal custody of Henry.”

“Of course,” Tom said.

“So, Henry,” Agnes said, “you understand that while you are here, no one can legally take you away, and that, furthermore, no one
wants
to take you away. Right?” She looked up at the three other grown-ups for confirmation.

“Right,” said Tom and Rose in chorus. Mr. Brownlow said nothing. Both Tom and Rose instinctively maneuvered themselves closer to the boy.

Henry looked up from beneath lowering small-boy brows. “So what about the money?”

“As far as the money goes,” Agnes said, “just as you are Tom's legal responsibility now, the money is Mr. Brownlow's legal responsibility until you are much older. Which is just fine with Tom and me. However, just because he can make decisions about the money does
not
mean he can make decisions about where you live.”

Henry looked over at Mr. Brownlow. “Is that for real?”

“Well,” Mr. Brownlow said. “It
is
true, Henry, that where you live is a completely different issue from the money. Ms. Tattle and I may come to have different views about where you should live, but she's right that when it comes to your grandparents' money, it's my legal and moral responsibility to see that it does the most good for you that it possibly can. Within the terms they specified, that is.”

“And,” Agnes cut in, “it's my job as your personal legal representative, Henry, to keep an eye on every move Mr. Brownlow makes to be sure he doesn't cheat you out of one single penny that's rightfully yours once you grow up.”

There was a collective intake of breath. Were battle lines being drawn?

But Mr. Brownlow appeared to be regarding Agnes with something very close to admiration. The battle, if joined, was going to be conducted civilly. On his part, at least. “Well, now,” he said, extending his hand. “It seems we all know where we stand. So shall we put our heads together and see what we can work out that is in Henry's best interests?”

Agnes hesitated, then held out her hand. Agnes Tattle, lawyer and fierce champion of the bullied and the oppressed, was on the case.

As for Henry, he'd marched over to Rose, collected her hand; turned to Tom, collected his. And there they were again, the three of them, a sort of family setting off for home before all the world and Mason Brownlow.

 

chapter 18

That afternoon, Tom had just gotten back to his office after teaching his three-fifteen section of RemWrite when someone knocked on his door. It wasn't Russ, Tom was sure of that. Russ, even in his current state, would have opened the door and walked in. Besides, there really was no need to knock, as the door was partially open.

The knock came again. “Come in,” Tom called.

The door opened slowly and Iris Benson's red head appeared. “I'm sorry to bother you,” she said with uncharacteristic politeness, “but do you have a moment?”

“Iris!” Tom shot out of his chair, took her hand, and drew her into his office. “How the hell are you? I've been worried about you.”

Iris wore tailored black slacks, black flats, and a green sweater—clothes that almost any woman on campus might have been seen in. “I guess I owe you an apology,” she said.

“You do?” Tom smiled. If Iris Benson owed him one apology, she owed him a thousand.

“Yes. For causing you trouble last Friday at Russell's. When … when I fainted.”

“Oh, don't worry about that.” Tom had never realized before what a tiny person Iris was. She couldn't be any more than five foot two or three at the most. It must have been all the bombast that had made her seem taller. For the bombast, he realized, was no longer there. “Iris,” he said, gently, “what's going on?”

“May I sit down?”

“Of course.” He indicated a chair.

Iris sat, her spine straight as a steel rod, her ankles crossed, her hands folded in her lap. The Iris Tom had known and been wary of for years was simply gone.

He sat down in his desk chair and swiveled around to face her.

“Could we close the door again?” Iris whispered. “Please?”

“Certainly.” Tom hopped up, closed the door, and sat down again. “What's up?”

On the rare times Tom's mother had been extremely upset, she'd had a way of clasping her hands together so tightly that the tips of her fingers turned pink, then white. Iris's fingertips, Tom noticed, had already progressed to white. “I've been in a kind of a … a resting place over the weekend,” she said, not looking at him.

Oh my. “Are you all right?”

“I'm okay, thank you,” she said quite primly. Then, as though an invisible hand had plucked out the steel support, Iris slumped in her chair. “It was a treatment place,” she whispered.

“Pardon?”

“A treatment place.” Iris looked up at him with a welcome trace of her old bravura. “For alcoholism, Tom. I'm a drunk. Making a fool of myself in front of you was the last straw. I realized, lying there in the emergency room, that you were the only person at the college I could possibly call a real friend. That morning, I'd already puked all over the Book Store, but falling down in front of you was even harder to think about than that. So for the last two days, I've been getting some help in trying to imagine life without alcohol.” She stopped and sat there looking at him with the great lost eyes of motherless Bambi.

Tom's brain had gotten stuck at “puke.” “You vomited all over the Book Store?”

“Yes.” Iris was looking at him rather as Henry had looked at Mr. Brownlow when he'd been expecting the worst. “I was drunk at nine o'clock in the morning. Russell was there, and he took me to his house. That's why I was at the Dean Dome when you showed up.”

Last Friday seemed far, far in the past. Trying to remember it felt like trying to remember his eighth birthday party. “I see.”

Iris's next words came out in a rush. “I'm not sure I can stay sober. It's hard being back at this place. Everybody looks at me so strangely. The dean said I can hang out in a day treatment thingee in town between classes, but that closes at six. There are AA meetings, which are dreadful, but at least they keep me from drinking while I'm in one. But the thing is, I'm scared to go home. There are bottles everywhere and lots of Valium. And I can't have either one.”