So as he’d wiped the tears from his face, pretending they were the laughing kind, making half-moons of streaky black in old motor oil beneath his eyes, he said only, “I still don’t know why, but I really liked that old lady.”
“Well, I get your point, but I can’t imagine what she was thinking. It’s a small fortune, any way you look at it.”
“I think she liked people to be able to do what they wanted to do,” he’d finally told Mr. Foster at the garage.
“Well, that just isn’t the way the world works,” Craig Foster had said.
This isn’t the way the world works, Skip thought to himself as he got off the rider mower, went back upstairs, and looked into the boxes again. That much money didn’t look real somehow, the way money in the movies never did, or that trick money they’d sold in the five-and-dime when they were kids, that you were supposed to leave on the sidewalk and jerk away when someone bent to pick it up. Maybe that was why he kept leaving and coming back, because he was waiting for the jerking-away part. Dusk was slowly coming down on the back end of the property, the automatic outdoor light had snapped itself on, and the edges of everything in the attic were blurred, so that the opened boxes looked like they contained nothing but gray shadows, their promise evaporating with the light. The only thing still clear in the room was an old straw hat that sat atop a bureau, so pale gold it almost seemed alight in the gloom, like the little boat on the surface of the pond that he could see from the attic dormer, Mrs. Fox sitting in it in the center of the pond with the oars splayed on either side.
He heard a sound, the sound of a car door slamming, and Mrs. Fox’s head came up slowly, as though she’d been sitting in the boat thinking and been brought back to life by the sharp noise. When he got to the foot of the apartment steps there was a figure he didn’t recognize at first, her back to the day’s last light outside, and then he saw that it was that girl. That bitch, that witch, that things-so-bad-I-can’t-put-them-into-words girl, that girl Paula, that he swore he would never call a mother in his mind. Paula Benichek, pulling at a strand of hair along her face and looking down at her shoes, then up at him, then down again. His heart swelled and then dropped again as he saw her empty arms.
“I remember those steps outside,” she said.
He felt foolish being kind to her, but he couldn’t figure any other way to be, and he couldn’t figure anything she could possibly be there for except for kindness. He’d built her up into something so bad over the last few days, and then she was just a girl, aimless, quiet, a little lost. He showed her the room in which he had slept with Faith, and the wagon hookup to the mower in which he’d laid her down, and the front pack in which she’d slept while he mowed the lawn. It wasn’t much to show, really, and it made him realize how little of the baby’s life had been lived with him. He had a book that said they couldn’t even tell the difference between you and other people before eight months. That’s what he told the girl now, and as he said it he felt himself becoming invisible in the child’s life, like the dawn mist on the pond that burned off by full morning.
She was wearing silver hoop earrings and she played with them nervously, as though she had come for something but it was not what he was giving her. She had a small nose with a bump on the bridge, and her eyes were a little far apart, and she was growing out one of those ill-considered hair colorings he was always surprised girls undertook, so that she had pale brown roots and slightly reddish ends. He wondered if Mrs. Blessing had noticed that. She wouldn’t have liked that much. Her nails were bitten, too.
“I never actually had the chance to say thank you,” she finally said, sitting in the chair in his living room, looking out over the pond, its outlines soft in the light of a half-moon.
“Anybody would have done the same.”
“I still can’t believe I really did it. It was such a stupid thing to do. It just seemed at the time—like, I don’t know, like we could undo what was done.”
“I guess not,” he said.
“My mother is so into her. She’s thinking of working part-time so she can be home with her more. And I’m staying home and just taking a couple of classes for a year or two. Or whatever. I’m not sure yet.”
“What about her father?”
She made a small disdainful pained sound. “Don’t ask,” she said.
“Jerk.”
“Asshole.”
“It’ll be okay. She’s a really good baby. Everybody said so.” He couldn’t believe he was being so nice, and then he realized that that, too, was his only choice. This was Faith’s mother. This was Faith’s future. He felt a shiver through his shoulders.
The girl didn’t notice. She was picking at a cuticle. Mrs. Blessing wouldn’t have liked that, either. “It’s just a lot of work, you know,” she finally said. “I don’t think my friends really get that. Like, you can’t just get in the car and go to the mall. There’s the car seat, and the diaper bag, and then you have to bring the stroller. You can’t just go wherever you want, you know? Yeah, I guess you do know. I guess I sound incredibly stupid and selfish saying all this stuff to you, of all people.”
“You’ll get used to it. It’s only been a couple of weeks.”
“I guess. My mother keeps bugging me about names. I think I’m going to call her Samantha.”
“That’s one of those soap-opera names.”
“Well, what did you call her?”
“They didn’t tell you that? Faith. Her name is Faith.”
“I never even heard of anyone named Faith.”
“That’s her name,” he said, and his voice was harder now.
He walked her back downstairs. Upstairs in the closet was the box, and the flannel shirt, and the barrette, and a T-shirt that said “Daddy’s Girl” that Jennifer had gotten at the mall, and a dried piece of clover Faith had pulled from the lawn with her fist, and six disposable cameras full of pictures. And he realized that he wasn’t going to give any of it away. It was little enough for him to have. Soon the smell would wash out of his shirts, the feel evaporate from his hands. And it would be all he would have left. Maybe from the beginning he’d always known that. Maybe every picture was a way of saying click click, bye bye. I will love you forever.
Outside she turned, a little breathless, and said, “I didn’t really come to unload all my problems on you. I just wanted to tell you that I’ll come by and see you sometimes and bring her with me. Like visitation, you know, maybe once or twice a month. You guys could hang out. She could play with you. I could even leave her with you so I wouldn’t be in the way.”
“You’ll be all right.”
“So can I bring her by soon? Just for a visit?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. It might confuse her. Kids need to understand who’s who, you know?”
“But if I were around here anyway?”
He shook his head. “I won’t be here much longer.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think I’m going to buy myself a little house somewhere.” And as he said it he knew that it was true. He had money. He would buy himself a house. Maybe he’d start a business. Landscaping. That would be good. He could do what he’d done here, mow and prune and trim and keep things alive and thriving. Cuddy Landscaping. No tree too tall. No lawn too wide.
“What?” he said to Paula Benichek, and in his head he heard a voice say, “Charles, the phrase is ‘pardon me?’ ”
“I said, where are you going to buy a house? Like in California someplace? Or Florida? A lot of my friends want to move to Florida.”
He shook his head. “Somewhere around here. I like it here.”
She looked sullen when she got in the car, as though things hadn’t turned out the way she wanted. Maybe she was one of those girls who always looked that way. Skip had known a lot of them. He hoped Faith didn’t turn out to be one. A year ago he would have taken the turned-down set of this girl’s mouth, her ragged nails a
nd narrowed eyes, as an omen, a prediction of the future, sure as Boatwrights begat more Boatwrights. But look at Jennifer Foster, or Meredith Fox. Look at Skip Cuddy, who’d managed to do for four months with a baby he found in a box what his father, as far as he knew, hadn’t managed in his whole life. Most people turned out the way you would expect. But not all. Not by a long shot.
“Just look at her, you know?” he said, leaning in the car window. “Look at her like she’s not yours, like you’ve never seen her before. She does all these amazing things. And they change all the time. I mean, watching her just move her arms and legs is one of the coolest things you can do.”
She shrugged. “So if you cared about her so much, why did you give her up?”
“I didn’t give her up. You gave her up. I gave her back.”
In the late afternoon of November 2 Meredith Fox sat on the front porch of the big house at Blessings. She had asked Skip to leave the two rockers on either side of the front door, and she used her heel to push herself back and forth in one of them now, in a rhythm that still, after all these years, she found disproportionately soothing. The rocker creaked monotonously. The black walnut trees had dropped all their leaves, and the oak trees were following. The yellow and gold mums around the pathways were browning slightly now.
When the real estate agent arrived Meredith would have to go inside the house, but she would not do so until then. She had been inside empty houses in the past. She had walked through the big house near the water in Newport after her Carton grandparents had died within six months of each other. There was a weight to the emptiness of rooms in which you had once lived that was more fearsome than anything she had ever encountered in life, not because they were haunted, as she had joked with Skip Cuddy, but because they were not. The conversations, the quarrels, the long fraught silences, the tears: they had disappeared utterly and completely. A cemetery was a place intended to be still. It was here, where once there had been life, that death was felt most profoundly.
She remembered that once she had asked her mother why she had stopped her nightly circuit around the pond, down the back drive, to the barn and through the fields. And when she heard herself mention the barn and saw the set of her mother’s chin she had understood, and had said softly, “It’s been more than ten years, Mother. I doubt very much that Uncle Sunny would haunt you.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” her mother had replied, with both a chill and a tremor in her voice.
Now she knew what her mother had meant. The dead deserted you; there were ghosts only among the living. Meredith was a knowing person, had always been. As a child she had been so well behaved that adults often forgot she was in the next room, and in this way she had known a good many things that she realized later in life her mother had assumed were a mystery to her. She had known that the parents of some of her friends at school were disdainful of her Blessing relations and she had known that the parents of her few friends in Mount Mason were awestruck by them. She had heard her uncle called a pansy in various conversations, and her mother a recluse. Mrs. Foster had let her slip upstairs to the attic above the garage when her mother was in a temper, and it was there, in a box filled with silk and satin dresses with long narrow skirts, that she had found her parents’ marriage license and later worked out that her mother must have already been pregnant when the two of them had married before her father went overseas. Her husband said there was a secret at the heart of every family. In his it had been that there was no money, that the enormous house in Winnetka in which he’d grown up had nine bedrooms and five of them had not a stick of furniture within. If someone wandered into one of those rooms at a party his mother had always explained that she had been unable to stand the wallpaper, the dust skirt, the bed, and the dresser one moment more and had ordered the room redecorated. “I don’t think she fooled a soul,” he’d said to Meredith with a laugh.
She supposed she’d always known that part of her secret was her parents’ marriage, that it was a ghost in the house. “Nana, do you think my mother and father loved each other very very much?” she had asked her grandmother Carton one day, and the woman’s eyes had filled and she had taken her onto her lap, although she was really too big to sit there any longer.
“Has your mother ever married again? Does she go into town and dine with men? Has she had anyone come to the house to stay?”
When she shook her head her grandmother’s scent, a perfume called Arpege that Meredith wore herself now on special occasions, had risen faintly around them, like a memory.
“Well, then, my love, you have your answer, don’t you?”
There was the lesson of her life: fidelity was all. She had realized later that it was not really the answer to her question, that her grandmother had made certain that she did not answer it directly, but addressed only a larger, apparently more important theme. Her mother had been the most faithful of daughters, wives, sisters, frozen in the amber of this beautiful hidden forgotten place.
“One of the girls at school asked why my name is Carton and your name is Blessing,” she had said at lunch one day with her mother’s friend Jess and two of her daughters. Chicken salad, iced tea, pound cake. Her mother’s company lunch. Fidelity.
“I am amazed at the way in which people think they can comment on one another’s business,” her mother had replied.
“Oh, Lydia, for heaven’s sake,” Jess had said. “What sort of an answer is that? Here’s the truth, Merry: this house has been called Blessings and your mother has been Lydia Blessing for so many years that a place like Mount Mason simply can’t master the change. And it’s not just her. There are still shopkeepers in town who call me Jessie Thornton, and I haven’t been Jessie Thornton in fifteen years. And I would bet you if my house were called Thorntons I’d never get called anything else. Tell your friend at school that your mother has taken up permanent residence in a place where absolutely nothing ever changes.”
“She’s not really my friend,” Meredith had said.
“I would imagine not,” her mother had replied.
Oh, yes, there were ghosts in the house then: the ghost of her grandmother’s palpable disdain for her grandfather, the ghost of her grandfather’s prep-school bonhomie, the nameless faceless spirits of her father and the marriage and Uncle Sunny’s moods and her mother’s disapproval. She remembered when the guests had come and gone, and the ghosts of their whisperings and their grunts and moans. It had been a peculiar place to be a child.
“Marry that man!” Jess had said the Friday after the Thanksgiving she had brought Eric home, when he was out shooting clays by the creek with Jess’s husband and sons.
“That’s a hasty judgment,” her mother had said coolly.
“Oh, Lydie, for pity’s sake. Have you looked at her face when she’s looking at him?”
“Oh, that.” How had she known exactly what her mother meant in just those two words? Was it because she remembered the date on that marriage license, the counting of the months on her fingers, the effort of trying to imagine Lydia Blessing trapped into doing something that, perhaps, she had not wanted to do, or compelled to do something messy and undignified? Meredith’s face had pinked up hotly beneath her auburn hair, mainly because, on the warmish November night when they’d arrived, she and Eric had done the deed, as the girls at college called it, on the back bank of the pond on an old blanket. He had wanted to go to the hayloft of the barn. “Not there,” Meredith had told him.
Sometimes she thought her marriage had saved her. There were no ghosts within it, and great peace, and passion, too. She had not meant it to be childless, but she did not mourn the children she had never had, perhaps because, almost without knowing it, she had spent so much time mourning the mother she had never had, and the father, too.
When she had come to stay at her mother’s house, when her mother had had that first stroke, she had gone looking for something to read in one of the back bedrooms and found an old set of books called The Mother’s Encyclopedia. S
he had pulled them out at random, sitting on the window seat by the shelves, reading homely admonitions about cereal and fresh air and high shoes. Three books in, she had found one section heavily underlined in pencil, a part of “Mother’s Job” entitled “Can Love Be Compelled?” She could almost remember the words, could surely remember the sense: “for the mother, poor girl, is frightened at herself for not wanting the baby; she feels that she is a criminal and no one else was ever like her; perhaps she has even wished that it might die, and here it is now, rosy and sweet, kicking its heels and making funny amiable noises at her.”
So there it was, the ghost of her mother and herself, the enforced mother, the unwanted child. The sadness she had felt after that day had prepared her for the sadness she felt now, as though she had lost something by inches. After the funeral she had arranged for all the books in that room to be sent to a used-book store in New York.
The real estate agent’s car came slowly down the drive. It was a nice car, nicer than Meredith’s, which was designed for dragging horse trailers and edging up a snowy drive. They always had nice cars, real estate agents, in the same way the prettiest house in town was always turned into the funeral home. The pond was illuminated now, and the windows so clear that the glare was terrible when the car lights struck it. Skip and Nadine had worked for a week together to leave the place like this. Even the garage was empty now. Eric had helped Skip with the logistics of having a great deal of cash and no knowledge of where to put it or invest it. It was more difficult than you might imagine, to bank that much money in old bills without someone making a fuss.