Small Blessings (9 page)

“Damn!” Agnes said before she could stop herself.

Rose immediately looked up at Agnes and—wonder of wonders in this evening of stylized gloom—smiled. “I could leave. Or just promise not to talk. I'll bet you could use a break from talking.”

Agnes hesitated. Rose Callahan must have had one of the longest interactions with Marjory anyone had had in years—besides herself and Tom and Dr. Simms, of course. If Marjory were alive, the four of them might right now be eating dinner together. And there could have been a miracle, and Marjory might actually have been
enjoying
herself. “It's not talking I need a break from,” she said. “It's listening to claptrap.” She sat down on the top step and lit a Camel.

Rose smiled again and went back to eating. She ate vigorously, Agnes noticed, like someone who'd never heard of calories. Agnes took a generous sip of Scotch. She herself was not at all hungry, might never be hungry again, but she did think she might be a little tight. Just a little. Just tight enough not to mind quite as much. She would mind tomorrow. Tonight she had to endure all these chatty people, whose words drifted out to her now through the open windows at the back of the house. They seemed to have already put aside Marjory's death and be talking disdainfully about some new cost-cutting measures introduced at last week's faculty meeting. Agnes sniffed. Get a group of academics together for any reason, give them all a drink, and they would automatically begin bad-mouthing their administration—no matter who had just died. At least Rose Callahan had the sense to be quiet. It
was
nice to have someone around right now. Nicer still when that someone wasn't saying anything.

Agnes propped an elbow on a knee and contemplated what remained of the three fingers of Scotch she'd poured in her Foghorn Leghorn jelly glass. “My daughter gave me six of these things for Christmas last year. They're the same jelly glasses I threw away for years. Marjory paid a fortune for them on eBay. Said they reminded her of her childhood.”

“How very nice,” Rose said.

Agnes rolled on, talking not so much
to
someone as because someone was there. “The problem was that Marjory wasn't a happy child. Other children frightened her. I'd take her to the park, and she wouldn't want to get out of the car.” Agnes stared hard at Foghorn. Did she have
any
happy memories of Marjory after the age of about six? Any at
all
? “Why, in heaven's name, would someone say they wanted to remember a childhood like that? I'd have thought she was being ironic, except Marjory didn't have enough self-confidence to be ironic. That was my province.” She waved her cigarette at Rose's water glass. “Don't you drink?”

Rose shook her head. “Not often. I grew up around bars. It dims your enthusiasm for alcohol.”

“Does it bother you if I drink?”

“Nope. I liked growing up in bars.”

Agnes leaned sideways and eyed her. Rose Callahan was quite the Buddha, really, when you thought about it, sort of enigmatically happy. “You didn't have some kind of Gothic deprived childhood, did you?”

“Heavens, no. I had a happy childhood. Unusual, perhaps, by middle-class standards, but it was a lot of fun.”

“Then what were you doing hanging out in bars?”

“My mother was a bartender, and she kept me on a pretty tight leash.”

Agnes snorted. “Good for her!”

“Uh-huh. She always said she'd made all the mistakes, so I didn't have to.”

“And was she right?”

“In what sense?”

“Have you made mistakes?”

Rose grinned. “Certainly. How else would I have grown up?”

“Hmmm.” Agnes took a deep drag off her Camel and blew out a stream of smoke. “Marjory never deliberately made a mistake in her life.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Agnes watched the smoke from her Camel reach the blank blackness of the night sky. “My daughter never once disobeyed me that I can remember. I don't think she ever disobeyed anyone. I wish she had. If she'd been able to act on her own, she might have been happier.”

The protectiveness Rose had felt for Marjory came back in a rush. “She invited me to dinner. She did that on her own.”

Agnes's face contorted. “I know. I wish you'd come around earlier. You seemed to have reached something sturdy inside her that the rest of us couldn't. It made me quite hopeful. My daughter always had such a fragile heart.”

An unwanted thought came into Rose's head:
I, too, have a fragile heart …

A soft breeze stirred. The trees at the bottom of the yard moved about like great, dark, cloaked figures.

Agnes stared at the glowing tip of her cigarette. “This must be why I started to smoke again. It gives me something to look at when I don't want to think, and I certainly don't want to feel.” Her voice was bleak. “My daughter was damaged in ways nobody, including myself, could ever understand. I had no patience with her. I loved her, but I had no patience. She was always someone I found it difficult to be around. Even when she was a small child. Everything that came easily to me was hard work for her.”

“I think I might have liked her,” Rose said quietly.

Agnes waved her cigarette in the air. “How could you possibly think that? Marjory was so broken. Her own feelings frightened her. I don't know what possessed me to let Tom marry her. I should have stopped it, for his sake, but I let it happen because I was terribly sorry for myself in those days and wanted someone else to deal with Marjory for a while. The result was that Tom's been in prison for twenty years, and I never really got out of it. It's foolish to think you can ever run away from your own child.” She took another drag on her Camel, another swig of Scotch. “Have you had any real pain in your life?”

Rose hesitated. “Not really. I guess I've never stayed anywhere long enough.”

Agnes eyed the younger woman curiously, storing this information away. Then she turned back to the night sky and pushed up the sleeve of her sweater. It was an old, stretched-out one she'd had for years. The sleeves kept flopping down over her hands and irritating her. And she was irritated enough already. No, that was inaccurate. She wasn't irritated, she wasn't annoyed, she wasn't “out of spirits,” as her mother-in-law would have put it. She was flat-out, full-steam, blow-your-top
angry.
“Pain is an overrated experience. It's better to be happy.”

“I suppose so,” Rose said. “I have enough sense to know I've been lucky.” Which was true. Nothing awful had ever happened to her.

From inside the house, Rose heard her boss, Mr. Pitts, laugh and call out something about the Red Sox. It was the loudest anyone—except for Iris—had spoken since Rose had arrived.

“Perhaps,” Agnes said. “Or perhaps you're brave. It takes courage to be happy, you know—even when you keep moving. It takes guts to accept things as they really are and not blame life for being what it is.” She swept her hand fiercely across the backyard. Ice cubes sloshed against the edge of her glass. “Look at this goddamn place. No one's really happy here, but they cling to it like leeches because it looks pretty and pastoral, and they think it's safe. If any of them had any guts they'd get the hell out! And that includes me and my son-in-law. My son-in-law especially, since he's got a little life left.”

As if on cue, a neighbor, out walking his dog, passed by in the alley between the small backyard and the woods. He was careful not to look in their direction. In this tiny, enclosed world, it took discipline to maintain the illusion of privacy. The man's feet crunched loudly on last year's dead, dry leaves.

Agnes drained her Scotch. “Would you believe the one thing Marjory showed promise in was art? When she was little, she drew beautiful, expressive pictures. In the ninth grade, she won the city-wide art contest for high school students. In the ninth grade! She beat out kids who were years older than she was. It was the one time in her life she competed at something, and she won! I thought she was turning things around, finding herself. I framed that picture and hung it on the wall of my office and showed it off to everybody. But right after that Marjory folded up as though someone had let the air out of her. I took her to doctors all over the country. But nothing and nobody helped.”

“I'm sorry,” Rose said.

Agnes turned on her, ready to fend off any insincere sympathy, but something in Rose's face stopped her. “I believe you really are. Amazing.” She turned away again and stared up at the black, blank sky. There was too much light on that part of the campus for stars to penetrate.

“May I get you some more Scotch?” Rose asked.

Agnes hesitated, then shook her head decidedly. “No. I'm teetering on the edge of maudlin as it is. I hate maudlin drunks.”

“It beats argumentative ones.”

Agnes gave another snort. “I've argued enough without drinking.”

“Oh? How's that?”

“I was a lawyer. A divorce lawyer. A good one. I was a huge fan of alimony for a long time. There's many a woman holed up in Charlottesville living a bitter life on gigantic alimony checks thanks to me, when what she should have done is said good-bye to the past along with her bastard ex-husband and made a new start.” Agnes tossed her ice cubes out onto the ragged grass. “At the time, however, I thought I was God's gift to women.”

Rose Callahan was sitting close enough for Agnes's shin to brush her knee. The woman actually
felt
calm. Agnes found herself floating back and forth in her own life. It was a feeling she rarely experienced. Usually she was all
now.
“I'm going to tell you something,” she said softly. It felt as though some stranger were channeling through her, prepared to spill the beans.

“All right.”

There was the past. Right there. As present as anything within reach. “My husband was killed on a routine training run out of Laughlin Air Force Base. The last morning I saw him, I snapped at him. I'd just found out I was pregnant. I was sick as a dog, puking up soda crackers, and I took it out on him. Not badly, but enough. I wish I hadn't been such a bitch.”

Rose reached instinctively for the old lady's hand. It was such a small sin, being unfairly snappish with someone, but Mavis, the forthright mother confessor behind the bar, had always maintained it was people's small sins that, unshriven, became their damnation.

Agnes shook her off. She was all business again, back firmly in the present. “I don't want comfort. I wanted to tell someone, that's all. I didn't say a word about it as long as Marjory was alive, but now she's dead and I decided to spill the beans to you. Can you understand that?”

“Of course.” If there was one thing Rose was sure of, it was that the mysteries of the human heart must always speak for themselves.

Agnes stared hard at the woods and let out her breath. It felt as though she'd held it in for decades. “Good, because I sure as hell couldn't explain it to you.” Footsteps sounded again, and the neighbor walked by, heading home, the small dog trotting jauntily ahead, straining at its leash. Agnes stubbed her cigarette out on a step and tossed it out into the grass. “Goddamn mutt gets loose and craps in the yard,” she said, once the neighbor was safely out of earshot.

*   *   *

“You don't have a choice,” Russell said, trotting out his charm as a matter of course. He'd bumped into Rose Callahan in the foyer, both of them on their way out. “It's late, you're a lady, and I'm going to walk you home. It's the way southern men of my generation do things.”

“All right,” Rose said. “If you insist.”

“I
do
insist.” Russell gave her a little bow to hide the fact that he was not quite comfortable. He was leaving without saying good night to Tom, which left this dreadful evening feeling dreadfully unfinished. But Tom had disappeared, and no one seemed to know where he was or how long he might be. For a bad few moments, Russell had had the uncomfortable thought that Tom had gone somewhere private with Rose Callahan, but then here she was, so maybe Tom had just given up and gone to bed. He was fully capable of wandering off from a gathering in his own house, wasn't he?

Russell realized he was frowning at Rose. She seemed as unfinished as the evening, standing there in that ridiculously rumpled dress with her arms hanging down at her sides. “Don't you have a purse or anything like that you need to get?”

“No,” Rose said, looking up at him as though the question amused her, “I don't.”

Of course she wouldn't, now that he thought about it. Rose Callahan didn't wear makeup, didn't comb her hair every five minutes, probably hadn't even locked her front door. Why would she need a purse? “Well then, we're off.” Russell reached down for the umbrella he'd wedged between the wall and a stack of magazines. What a dunce he'd been to tote that thing along just because the Channel 13 weatherman had mentioned a slight possibility of late evening showers. When would he learn not to pay attention to
anything
said on TV? The sky had been cloudless all evening.

Tom Putnam appeared in the hall doorway. “You're leaving, then?” he said. His eyes, Russell noticed, were on Rose.

“Yes.” Russell tried hard not to sound too happy about it. My God, it had been a long evening, full of awkward moments—which was only appropriate, since the cause of the gathering was the death of poor, pathetic Marjory. Tom's wife had always made Russell extremely uncomfortable, as she'd taken him straight back to his own squalid, disordered childhood, which he'd spent his whole adult life trying not to think about. “We're off. I looked for you to say good night, but I couldn't find you,” he said.

Tom made a vague upward gesture with one hand. “I went upstairs for a moment to look for Agnes. I found her sitting in the hall chair with the lights off, so I sat down on the floor and chatted with her. You know, just to be sure she was all right.”