Benny said, “I’d marry you. I’d be happy to marry you.”
Now Meredith said, “The landscaping is looking lovely, Mother.”
Lydia’s head came up slowly, like one of the water birds fishing around the pond that tried to pretend that they weren’t there, that they were really a rock or a stick or a part of the dock. She hadn’t been following the conversation. Her head hurt. “I need aspirin,” she said.
“I’ll get some,” Meredith said. “Nadine? Can you bring two aspirin and some fresh water? Are you all right, Mother?”
“Don’t fuss, Meredith. It’s only a headache.”
“You have the healthiest pink dogwoods I’ve ever seen, Lydia,” said Eric, whom she’d never grown to like, although to his credit he was always respectful and never slobbered much, unlike Jess’s oldest son-in-law, the one who’d called Jess “Mama.” Not Ed, who was married to Jeanne, but Brian, who’d been married to Marian, the one who died of cancer of the pancreas. That was how she remembered people now: heart, stroke, cancer of the pancreas. She swallowed the aspirin slowly.
Meredith looked so much like her father that anyone who saw the two of them together would have been amazed by the resemblance. No one ever had seen the two of them together. When Meredith traveled to town as a child it was to go to the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show or the Plaza for tea with her grandparents and then to come back to Mount Mason again. After Lucy Warren’s wedding Mrs. Blessing had gone back herself only three other times. During her pregnancy, and then when the baby was small, she had sustained herself with the knowledge that before long the war would be over, and she would leave Mount Mason and go back to the city. Not leave for good, of course: Blessings would always be her second home, for weekends and holidays. But the city was where she belonged. When Benny’s mother had first mentioned that long-ago aunt with the red hair and Mr. Carton had written the will that left Meredith everything, it had given her hope that everyone would be as publicly credulous as Benny’s parents were, even the people who had been in the hallways when she and Frank Askew had emerged, never together, always one at a time, from certain unused rooms at certain apartments and clubs.
She had not counted on her mother. The week after Lucy Warren’s wedding her parents had come for the weekend. While her father danced Meredith around the living room, singing, “Let me call you sweetheart,” her mother had taken her out onto the porch and handed her the deed to the property. “Ethel Simpson Blessing to Lydia Blessing Carton.” That was how the transference read. Her father had built the barn, added the porch, planted the trees around the pond, put up the fences, landscaped the terrace gardens, laid out the orchard. All of it had been owned by his wife.
“Ah, Lyds, my love,” he’d sighed over dinner, his hands shaking as he lifted his coffee cup, the whites of his eyes gone yellow, “I miss this place terribly.”
The past danced again with the present in her mind. Meredith was talking, using the flat of her hand to smooth back her hair. Lydia had named her after Benny’s grandmother. The Cartons had liked that. They’d sent a monogrammed locket from Tiffany. Her mother had handed her the deed and said, “Now you’ll always have a place to live.”
Two months later her parents moved into a small apartment at a residential hotel on Fifth Avenue. Then there was no place for Lydia in New York, and no money for her to buy a place of her own. Her mother gave her an allowance to run Blessings, and her parents stayed at the house one weekend a month, and during the month in the summer when Meredith was in Newport. “I’d rather be here with the little girl,” her father complained, but that was how Ethel Blessing arranged things.
Her father had seemed to get smaller and grayer, and afterward Lydia thought that maybe he’d been sick for years before he died. Or maybe he was just exhausted from the unacknowledged drama of his life. Sunny had betrayed him. He had gone into advertising and made a huge success of a slogan for a pen that read, “He’s got the prettiest penmanship at Princeton—and he uses a Papermate!” When Sunny spoke of their father, when he came out to Blessings alone for the weekend, circling the pond with his head lowered and his cigarette trailing a plume of gray smoke, it was with amused contempt. On the patio one evening he had said, “Have you ever noticed that Father has never said anything of moment in his entire life?”
“You’re so hard on him, Sunny,” she had said.
“Ah, Lyds my love,” Sunny had replied, imitating their father. “If only I were.”
Their mother had given Sunny an allowance, too. Perhaps, Lydia had thought, she even put their father on an allowance. Maybe that accounted for the boxes. From time to time her father had sent Lydia a box at Blessings by mail, so that the postman had to send a boy to drive it out. “Simpson’s Fine Textiles,” it said on each of the boxes, and when she had opened the first one there was a bolt of heavy green brocade, the color of new leaves, and a note from her father on his personal stationery. “Put this away for a rainy day,” it said. “Love and kisses, Papa.” The boxes came two or three times a year, always with the same message, always with a bolt of fabric.
Beneath the fabric was money, lots of money, in big packages encircled with paper bands, like the money in kidnap scenes in movies. She estimated that the first box contained four thousand dollars, and then there was a second, and a third, and by the time her father died there were stacks of boxes in the garage attic, most of them unopened. It seemed dirty, that money, the green faded to gray, the paper soft from the hands that had touched it. To have money in her world had been to go to the right schools, live in a proper apartment, furnish it in the old style. It was not to have boxes of bills, like some old miser with a mattress full. They never spoke of it, she and her father, or her mother, either, or even Sunny. Sometimes she almost forgot it was there; sometimes she wondered whether the mice had gotten to it. By the time Meredith was starting school there was enough money over the garage to buy herself a place in the city. But for some reason she had had the guest rooms painted instead, and had stayed put.
“Do you want tea with your rice pudding?” Meredith asked.
“We’ll have tea on the porch,” Lydia said.
“Whatever you say, Mother.”
“Those are beautiful delphiniums,” Eric said heartily, pulling out her chair as she rose slowly.
“Staking,” she said. “If you want delphiniums you must keep them staked.” There were still some things of which she was absolutely certain.
Skip heard Jennifer Foster arrive before the roofers or Nadine did, while Mrs. Blessing’s daughter and son-in-law were at the club playing golf. The idle on her car had been fixed; Skip could hear it as she pulled up and into one of the bays of the garage. When he put Faith in her arms the baby pushed back and stared her in the face. The books said Faith wouldn’t have stranger anxiety until she was ten months old. Maybe by then she wouldn’t consider Jennifer or Mrs. Blessing strangers.
“Good morning, pretty girl,” Jennifer said in that high voice people always used for babies. “How are you? Did you sleep good last night?”
“She did,” Skip said. “If I put her down at midnight now she goes straight through until six. I weighed her on the feed scale in the back of the garage and she’s up to fourteen pounds, which I think is pretty big.”
“Are you pretty big? Are you? You don’t look so big to me.” Jennifer looked up at him and smiled. “Mr. Mom,” she said.
“That’s me.”
“You have my stuff?”
He closed the garage door over her little car and turned to watch her lope across the lawn with the sling across her chest and a backpack filled with bottles and diapers on her back. Jennifer had come the day before to say hello to Mrs. Blessing’s daughter, whose name was Mrs. Fox. “Charles,” Mrs. Blessing had called as Jennifer was leaving, and she came down the back steps slowly and carefully to join the two of them. “I told Jennifer there’s too much activity here in the next day or two,” she said quietly. “It might be useful for Faith
to stay with her away from here.”
“I can hear the rumors now,” Skip said.
“I won’t leave the property,” Jennifer said. “I know how you feel about that. I can take her way back by the stream, where nobody comes. Otherwise, between Mr. and Mrs. Fox and the roofing crew, somebody’s going to figure out she’s here. Speaking of rumors, there aren’t any. There was a girl at the hospital about six months ago who had a baby and gave it up for adoption, but these people came from Chicago and picked it up. Tracy at the pharmacy on Main Street says the girl’s even gotten pictures from them since. One of the Boatwright girls had twins in June, but they were both boys and she has them both home in the trailer and complains to anyone who’ll listen about how hard it is to have two. And some couple who live in the Foxwoods development had a baby girl near the end of June, but she was born with some terrible birth defects and died the next day.”
“Oh, man,” Skip said.
“So Faith fell from the sky, I guess, right down to Mr. Mom.”
“Mr. Mom.” That was what she called him now. He didn’t kid himself that it meant more than a nice person being nice. Watching her disappear behind the line of tall cedars, her stride springy and sure, Skip thought that Faith would have a nice long day and he would merely have a long one, ripping shingles from an old roof on a clear blue morning with a full sun beating down.
There was one honest roofer in Mount Mason, the rest being beer-drinking thieves who took a couple of thousand dollars and slapped shingles haphazardly along the roofline. Luckily the one honest roofer was Ed’s father, Jim. “Mr. Salzano,” Skip had called him when he hired him, which maybe wasn’t the best way to begin a professional relationship in which he was supposed to be the boss. But he needed the barn reroofed badly now. The lightning had hit the rod, that was for sure, but it had ricocheted onto the asphalt shingles and the wood beneath and feasted, delighted, on the dry wood and gummy roof cement for at least a few minutes before the rain had doused it. The rain that had poured in over the weeks since then was beginning to rot the timbers and the floor of the hayloft.
“There’s not a whole lot of point in doing this unless we rip it down to the roofline and start over again,” Jim Salzano had said when he came out to look at it the first time. “There’s a lot of rot along the gutters. Nobody’s done anything to this roof for maybe thirty years.”
“Go ahead,” Skip said.
“Big job.”
“I’ll get up there with you. Might as well.”
“That’ll help, then.”
Mrs. Blessing’s daughter came down to watch them work while she was visiting. She was a tall woman, too, in a big hat that kept the sun off her face. He had heard Mrs. Blessing calling from the house, demanding that she come back inside and get something on her head so she would not freckle. By the time she and her husband came back from playing golf and having lunch, old shingles were scattered in heaps around the grass, and a pile of them were on a big flatbed to be taken away. The two lightning rods lay on their sides. She nudged one with the toe of her shoe, then put out her hand to Skip. He could feel the calluses as he shook it.
“It’s criminal, the way this building has been allowed to degenerate,” she said.
“It’s not used for anything.”
“I know. If I had it down at our farm, I’d use it. It’s a wonderful barn, actually, built the way buildings aren’t built anymore.” She laughed, a low unamused chuckle. “I sound like my mother. Nothing is the same as it was. Do you like working for her?”
“She pays a decent wage.”
“I very much doubt that. Maybe a decent wage by the standards of 1955. How does she seem to you?”
“I couldn’t really say. I haven’t known her that long. Did you ask Nadine?”
Mrs. Blessing’s daughter laughed again. Meredith Fox, her name was. That’s what Jennifer had told him. “Nadine tells me a good deal, but only when I don’t ask a direct question. When I asked how Mother was, I believe Nadine said, ‘Ha!’ ” She looked up at the barn. “Four-by-fours instead of two-by-fours.”
“You don’t see that anymore,” Mr. Salzano said from atop a ladder.
She nodded. “We kept horses here all through my childhood. You should have seen my mother ride. What a seat she had. You should have seen her swim, for that matter. She’d go off the dock and do the breaststroke from one end to the other and then back again. She’d swim like a fish for half an hour. Golf, too. And tennis, doubles, mostly. She stopped almost twenty years ago. Her best friend died and she was never the same.”
“She seems okay to me,” said Skip, thinking about the way Mrs. Blessing barked Nadine’s name when she wanted her, the way she kept watch with her binoculars as though she were on the lookout for some enemy incursion down the driveway, the way she held the baby now and ran her long fingers over Faith’s face. He wished he could tell all this to Mrs. Fox, who seemed so nice, how her mother sat on the porch at night and sometimes commanded him to lift Faith into her arms so that she could rock back and forth in one of the old porch rockers until Faith’s lids dropped, her mouth fell open, and she breathed the slow sibilant baby breath of sleep.
“She needs to get out more, travel,” Mrs. Fox said. “She can afford it. She lives in the past too much. It’s not healthy.”
“I guess it depends on how good the past was,” Skip said, thinking of his bedroom with the bucking bronco on the quilt.
She tilted her head a bit, and Skip flushed because it occurred to him that for an older lady she was really good-looking. Her eyes were the same color as the pond, and they tilted at the corner even more than Jennifer Foster’s.
“May I ask you a personal question?” she said.
“Shoot.”
“Were you really in prison for armed robbery?”
“No, ma’am. I pled to a burglary charge and got less than a year in county. County jail, I mean.”
“Anything else?”
“No, ma’am. I just happened one time to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I can second that,” Mr. Salzano called down from the top of the ladder. “Absolutely. With the wrong bunch of guys, too.” He looked at Skip. “I may be dumb, Skipper, but I’m not stupid.”
“Your reputation is far worse than the reality, then,” Meredith Fox said seriously.
“That’s sort of the way, isn’t it?” Skip replied.
Mrs. Blessing’s daughter took the back path to the pond then, a groundhog and its plump kits scattering in her wake. When he went to the garage to get a crowbar he saw her out in the little boat, rowing hard from one end of the pond to another. He figured the horses must keep her in better shape than most women her age, and he was glad he’d washed down the boat with the hose so she hadn’t found it dusty, full of tattered webs and dead flies. He stopped for a moment to look at her, at the rise of the mountain around the valley, at the slope of the valley around the pond and the house, at the small wooden boat at its center. It was probably tough to buy a wooden boat these days. Fiberglass, aluminum, that’s what they made now. He liked the wood.
“Man,” he said under his breath, thinking there couldn’t be greater happiness than to own a place like this.
Mrs. Fox pulled the boat onto the bare patch of lawn by the dock and went to the garage for one of the old fly-casting rods. Her arm moved back and forth as though she were drawing in the air with the line. A hairy yellow lure flew up and across, then set down solidly on the surface of the water. Skip thought he saw the dark shadow of a trout move toward it below the water. She looked toward him and smiled.
“I could dig you some night crawlers if you’d rather have an easier time of it,” Skip called, walking toward her.
She shook her head. “I like fly casting. I don’t particularly like catching fish. And Nadine won’t clean them. Apparently she put her foot down about two things: a uniform, and cleaning fish. The uniform was almost the end of it as far as my mother was concerned.”
“
I’ll clean fish for you if you want.”
“If I catch anything I’ll take you up on the offer. But I don’t think I’m likely to.”
Skip squinted toward the surface of the pond. At the far end a pair of green herons were hunched over the water, heads low between their folded wings, waiting for slow sunfish to edge into the warm water close to shore. One heron jabbed suddenly, hoisted a wriggling twist of silver aloft, let it slide down his frantically working craw, settled back into position. Mrs. Blessing’s daughter cast out again.
“That lure’s actually for big fish. Shad, maybe, or pike.”
She laughed again. Skip wondered where she’d learned to laugh so easily. So far he’d never heard Mrs. Blessing laugh.
“Well, I said I wouldn’t catch anything.”
“Meredith,” called a man’s voice from the house. “Do you want to have a drink at the club before dinner?”
“Not much,” she called back as a small trout broke the water and leaped into the air a foot from her moving lure. “I’m very contented at the moment.”
Skip liked the sound of that. “I’d better get to work,” he said. “I want to powerwash the inside of the barn before we go any further. But I can stop to clean fish. Or get you bait if you want.”
“When I was a little girl I used to watch those fish jump out of the water, and I used to think they were jumping for joy,” Meredith said. “And then one day when I was older I was walking around the pond and I noticed how they swam back and forth, back and forth. I suppose I finally noticed how small the pond was. And one of them jumped, and all I could think was that he was trying to escape. Except that he would die outside.”
“You’ve got a fish on there,” Skip said, watching her lure disappear.
By the next evening she and her husband were gone, the Chevy Suburban with the horse trailer pull disappearing down the long drive while the lens of the binoculars flashed in the fading light from the upstairs sleeping porch. The old barn roof was ripped off, the new shingles packed in blocks around it ready for the next day. Jennifer had put in two days with Faith and come back to the house, slightly grubby, only minutes after the Foxes’ car, the roofer’s truck, and Nadine’s little compact had all pulled away. Rain was beginning to fall, making a pale gray haze over the pond. “I’m in love,” Jennifer said, lifting Faith’s slack little body from the sling on the back steps.