“Come inside,” Mrs. Blessing called. “You, too, Charles.”
The kitchen was at the east end of the house, and after noon Skip had noticed that it was in a kind of perpetual twilight, although when he made the coffee in the morning the old white stove and yellow cabinets were warmed by the morning light. He looked around at the clean clear countertops, the shining stainless steel sink. A platter covered with a striped cloth was the only dish in sight. Nadine was the cleanest person he’d ever known. She confirmed a suspicion he’d always had that there was some kind of link between cleanliness and meanness. He bet Jennifer Foster wasn’t half as clean as her mother. Little pieces of hair were pulled loose from her ponytail now, and she had a big dirt stain on the seat of her pants.
“I wondered if you would care to join me for something to eat,” Mrs. Blessing said.
“I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” Jennifer said.
“I probably need to give the baby a bath,” Skip said, rubbing the curve of her back, warm and solid under his hand.
“I put her in the stream,” Jennifer said.
“The stream? It’s freezing!”
“Just her feet. She liked it. She sort of sucked in her breath, then she paddled.”
“Oh, man. You should have asked me about that first.”
“Excuse me,” said Mrs. Blessing, leaning on the counter by the platter and folding up the cloth over it. “I thought perhaps we could picnic by the pond. There are ham sandwiches and some coleslaw. I had Nadine leave a quilt and a basket on the hall table. I suspect she thinks I’m entering my dotage.”
Skip could hear the rain on the roof, a soft staccato but insistent. “It’s raining,” Jennifer said.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Blessing, cocking her head. “I didn’t notice.”
“What about the side porch?” Jennifer said.
Skip wondered what the hell Mount Mason would say if it could peek in the wall of windows and see them laying the quilt on the polished wood floor, putting Faith down in one corner on a small pink blanket Mrs. Blessing had had ready, sitting with a plate of sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade and a stack of gold-edged flowered plates so thin and fine that when one touched the other oh-so-lightly it chimed like a doorbell. Mrs. Blessing stayed in an old white wicker chair but he and Jennifer sat practically knee to knee on the quilt. Faith was sleeping on her stomach, smacking her lips from time to time.
“I’ve got a spare bottle left in that bag,” Jennifer said with her mouth full. “She just sucked down the other three. Don’t you think maybe she’s ready for some real food?”
“See, that’s another thing that I’m not sure about. Some of the books say four months, some say six. They’re not real specific about solid food. There’s a lot of stuff about breast-feeding.”
“I tried, but it didn’t work,” said Jennifer, laughing. “Uh-oh, I shocked Mrs. Blessing. Look at her.”
“I’m not sure I’m capable of being shocked at my age,” Mrs. Blessing said.
“You were shocked when you first saw Faith,” Skip said.
“Yes, I was. That’s absolutely true. I was shocked.”
“And delighted,” said Jennifer. “That’s the word. I picked that up from television or something when I was a little kid, and I used to use it all the time. Can you imagine what it was like in first grade when I said something was delightful? There was another word, too, I think. Zesty, that was it. That one I got from commercials. ‘This sandwich is very zesty,’ I used to say. My mother learned to speak English from American soldiers. Her big thing, when we first got here, was figuring out which words she’d learned that weren’t words you were supposed to say in polite company. And getting rid of ‘y’all.’ I guess a lot of the guys she knew were Southern. I used to say ‘y’all,’ too. I remember one of my father’s cousins getting a big laugh when he said we must be from South Korea.”
“It must have really been bad, coming here like that,” Skip said. “Mount Mason, especially. I mean, the city would have been different.”
“The prejudices in cities are the same as in small towns, Charles,” Mrs. Blessing said. “They are simply hidden a little better.”
“It was strange, coming here,” Jennifer said. “All those years I dreamed about coming to America and seeing my father and how it was going to be perfect. And then in one day I was here.”
“And it was completely different than you’d expected.”
Jennifer shook her head. “No. It was fantastic. I got off the plane and there was this big man, bigger than anyone I’d ever seen in my life, and he lifted me up and he held me and held me and I could feel him crying on my face and my hair. I’d never seen a man cry before, either. And he said, ‘I’m never going to put you down.’ He rocked me to sleep that night singing that mockingbird song, you know, ‘Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.’ I sang it to Faith today and I could remember all the words, or at least the ones my father knew. He sang to me and when I woke up in the morning he was sleeping on the floor next to my bed.”
“Whoa,” said Skip. He looked over at Faith and saw that she was up on her little arms, doing what he thought of as baby push-ups, staring at all of them.
“She’s awake,” he said, just to have something to say, to fill a silence that seemed to fill his heart.
“She gives you that same feeling, doesn’t she?” Jennifer said. “That feeling of absolute security, that everything’s going to be okay.” Faith’s head dropped, then came up again.
“She looks like a turtle,” Skip said.
“Charles, that’s a dreadful thing to say,” Mrs. Blessing said. “She most certainly does not.”
“She doesn’t really make me feel secure at all,” Skip said. “She makes me feel afraid. She makes me feel afraid that something will go wrong, that she’ll fall out of the crib or get some really bad disease or stop breathing or something.”
“You’re a pessimist.”
“I guess. I guess maybe I have to be.”
“I don’t see why,” Jennifer said, clearing the plates. “She’s yours. It’s been three months. She’s yours.”
“She really needs her shots,” Skip said.
“I have the doctor coming next week,” Mrs. Blessing said.
“Nothing bad will happen,” Jennifer said. “She’ll learn to walk and talk and we’ll make up some kind of story to get her into school and she’ll have this great place to live and these great people to live with. What could be bad? Right, honey?” Jennifer Foster turned with her hands full of dishes and there was Faith lying on her back, holding her feet in her hands. As if in answer to their question she arched her back and rolled back over onto her stomach.
“Faith Cuddy!” Jennifer cried. “You rolled over! You rolled over both ways, front to back and back to front.” She put down the dishes and clapped her hands. “You rolled over!”
“Has she done that before, Charles?” Mrs. Blessing said.
“Not that I know of,” Skip said. “Maybe she’s been doing it behind my back.” And Jennifer laughed, and Mrs. Blessing laughed, too, a dry laugh, out of practice. But Skip just kept thinking of Jennifer saying “Faith Cuddy.” It was the first time he’d ever thought of that name. Printed crooked on the top of lined paper. Typed in at the top of a report card. Underneath a yearbook picture. Faith Cuddy. Maybe Jennifer understood better than he did. Maybe things would be all right.
“There she goes again,” said Jennifer.
Nadine was more irritable on rainy days than she was the rest of the time. “I think it reminds her of home,” said Jennifer, who was sitting at the kitchen table sipping tea from the heavy mugs kept for the help, waiting around with the monitor turned down low in her pocket for Faith to wake up from her nap so she could give her a bottle. “I did a report in seventh grade that said Korea has three months of the year, I think, when all it does is rain. My dad asked her once if she wanted to go back to visit. She said he was crazy.”
Jennifer had a good strong vo
ice, which was useful since Nadine had the old dryer going and the vacuum running along with the sump pump banging away. Even though the walls seemed to be vibrating, Mrs. Blessing could hear Nadine slamming doors and heaving the old Hoover violently around in the upstairs rooms. It had been raining for four straight days, since the evening they’d picnicked on the porch.
“I can’t imagine she would care to go back,” Mrs. Blessing said. “It would probably be entirely different than she remembers it.” The last time Mrs. Blessing had gone to New York, for the funeral of Benny’s mother, she had not known the place. A man in rags had lurched at the car the Cartons had sent for her and pushed a paper cup full of change toward the window, and the house where she had lived as a small girl had been pulled down for a building that looked like an aluminum jack-in-the-box. Bertram’s itself had added an enormous gymnasium, like a horrible brick growth upon the old façade, and just inside the park three girls in the gray skirt and blue blazer with the familiar crest were smoking cigarettes. “At least it’s tobacco they’re smoking,” Meredith had said wearily as she complained.
Outside the wind blew suddenly, and the screens rattled in their frames. The spillway to the pond had become choked with leaves and branches, and Skip was out, in an old pair of waders of her father’s and a Barbour that Sunny had bought years ago in London, clearing out the tangle. From the kitchen window she could just make out the red John Deere cap he was wearing, and the flash of a yellow bucket. He’d been working out there most of the morning, sloshing from the lawn to the pond.
“Charles,” she cried from the kitchen door, a ghost behind the thick screen as he trotted toward the garage. “Come in here!”
“That baby is really sleeping,” Jennifer said.
“She’s in for her long nap,” Mrs. Blessing said as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the two of them to be keeping track of a baby’s schedule. “I hope he has her well wrapped up. It’s very chilly and damp.”
“You know he does.”
The workmen who were hired to put things right from time to time grumbled that, grand as it was, Blessings had been poorly sited. Or perhaps it was that it was placed in as good a spot as any when it had been a small farmhouse, two rooms up, two down, outhouse over the knoll, 150 years ago. But by the time Edwin Blessing had added on the library wing and the long porch, the guest suites and the new dining room with the stone fireplace made from the stones dug to make the foundation, the big garage on the high side and the pond on the lower lawn, the house was smack in the center of a downward flow of water in a heavy rain. It was the rainiest September in decades, pearl-gray sheets of water veiling the house and the hills, and the basement flooded.
One of Jess’s boys had persuaded Mrs. Blessing, thirty years before, to put in a sump pump, and as soon as the water crept to the level of the platform for the washer and dryer the pump clicked on and began to work with a sound like someone jackhammering the concrete just below the kitchen floor. Mrs. Blessing had always found the racket soothing, as though she knew she was getting her money’s worth; one of the reasons she’d been so disconcerted the night of the lightning strike was that the pump hadn’t come on with all the electrical lines down. She remembered some years ago, when she had given a small open house at Christmastime and it had been unseasonably warm. Instead of drifts of snow, there had been huge washes of water across the drive, and the pump had come on, and the guests had shouted at one another across their cut-crystal cups of eggnog.
Nadine shut off the vacuum upstairs and came down, her glossy black hair still damp on her forehead and the nape of her neck. “You still here?” she said to Jennifer, who had stopped at the post office and picked up a box, two nightgowns from Pettifleur on Seventy-ninth Street.
“I’m leaving soon, Mommy.”
“You here too much. You go to class now. Work.”
“I only have afternoon classes two days a week this term. And I’m working nights for a month. I’ll go soon.”
“Nonsense. You have lunch with me,” Mrs. Blessing said. “Tuna on toast.”
“Aye yi yi!” cried Nadine. The sump pump, thumping away, had disguised the sound of Skip pounding at the back door. He stepped inside, water rolling off his borrowed jacket and onto the checkerboard linoleum. “Outside,” Nadine yelled. “Outside.”
“Nonsense. Come in, Charles. Hang those things up and sit down.”
“Ay,” Nadine muttered, pulling the string mop from the broom closet.
“That’s right, Nadine. A little water never hurt anyone. Except your pants, Charles, which are soaked to the ankle, even with the waders.”
“It’s bad out there,” he said.
“My father installed that sluiceway when I was a child. He said it was foolproof.”
“It’s all choked up.”
“Bailing with a bucket hardly seems the best way to deal with the problem.”
“The bucket was for the fish. The fish and the frogs. The pond’s so far outside its banks that the lawn was all covered with trout and bass, flopping around. And about a hundred frogs. Snakes, too, but I’m not rescuing snakes. I just got everybody back in the pond with the bucket. There’s a few still out there that don’t look like they’re going to make it. Nadine, you want two or three trout for dinner?”
“No clean fish!”
Jennifer laughed.
“Miss Smarty,” Nadine said.
“That’s a good idea, Nadine. Jennifer and Charles will have lunch with me. Charles can bring in some fish, and you can sauté them. There are grapes in the icebox, and potato salad. Then you can take the rest of the day off.”
“Aye yi yi.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Blessing,” Jennifer said, standing and putting her cup in the sink. “My mother’s right. I have to get to class. I really wanted to stay longer, but in this weather it’s going to take me a while to get where I’m going.” She looked at Skip. “I wanted to tell you that I saw your friend at the hospital the other day. He messed himself up pretty bad.”
“Yeah?”
“I work in physical therapy part-time every once in a while. He’s going to have some job learning to walk again without a limp.”
“And the scars, right?”
“And the scars. Although he’s the kind of guy who seems like he’d like to have a scar or two.” This time it was she who colored. “Sorry. That sounded cruel.”
“You’re right. Not about how it sounded. You’re right that he’ll probably like having them. Tough guy and all that.” Skip ran his hands through his hair, and a drizzle scattered around him. “I got to go, too. I got stuff over in the garage, you know. Things to do over there.”
When they were both gone Mrs. Blessing settled herself at the table on the long porch and turned on the monitor. Bathtime, she thought, listening to the faint splashing sound of the water from the old faucet and the tuneless singing that rose above it. A vista of bent and flattened flowers in fuzzy daubs was faintly visible through the sheers at the windows. When she had first moved to Blessings, she had taken down the curtains, all of them, to let in the light and the sight of the outdoors. “Is this some modern invention?” her mother had said. And then slowly over the years she had ordered others and had them hung, until once again the house was veiled.
Jennifer was in some classroom smelling of chalk, its linoleum scuffed and torn, and Charles was in the bare garage apartment, which she’d been half ashamed to see when she’d gone to demand his help that night. And here she sat in solitary splendor with a tuna fish sandwich and two olives, as she had done for years and years, happily, or at least contentedly. All broken now, the happiness or contentment or resignation or whatever it was a person felt when the repeated customs of her life had become that life itself. For all around her was a shadow lunch, an imagined lunch, the one in which the aroma of butter and fresh fish filled the air, clinging slightly for a day or two to the brocade drapes, in which she listened to the two young people speak of people she did not know
, things she cared nothing for, the smell of carbolic soap from the man, the smell of some lemon shampoo from the girl, the air of unimportant everyday sociability about the meal. And the child at its center, crowing and smiling and waving her arms about. They had all made her want more than she had. The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility. She turned off the little machine that brought her the sounds of life from across the way.
Nadine came in to clear the plate, muttering to herself, and wiped the table with a series of grunts and groans, and Lydia Blessing sat without moving as the gray light of the rainy day grew even grayer with dusk. She had had a pain behind one eye for the last few days, and a pain in one arm, and she rubbed the arm and pressed her fingers to the spot above her brow, and instead of just this one lunch that seemed to have taken on an importance out of all proportion to its reality, she conjured up an entire life that might have been. Once again she imagined the apartment in the building on Park Avenue, the antique Oriental blue-and-white plates on stands on the sideboard, the floral prints on the drapes, the doorman who would hail a cab when she went to the club or to meet Meredith at the symphony, the gin and tonics on a silver tray as the sun set behind the building across the way.
And suddenly she knew in her bones, the way she knew the alphabet or the Lord’s Prayer or the piano fingering to “Clair de Lune,” that that was a life no better than the life she had had. The great grievance she had felt for so long, the sense of being done out of something, by her mother, by her daughter, by her class, by chance, by fate: it was a Potemkin village, a stage set, a papier-mâché thing that had lost its power. She had filled her days mourning that shadow life, and it had no more meaning than the chattering of monkeys. Instead, these last few weeks, she had seen what might have been had she not felt perpetually done out of something better. From the window Blessings was almost invisible in the heavy rain, but she knew that even in this terrible chill downpour it was no longer the claustrophobic prison she had styled it for so long. It was what it had always been, a refuge. And for some reason she remembered an argument she had had with Jessie one summer, when she had been preparing to send Meredith to boarding school. “This is the right thing for a girl in her situation,” she had said as she’d looked over a box of white uniform blouses.