Ladder of Years

  There was a letter too, on Eleanor’s plain buff stationery:

  Dear Delia,

  This is just a little something I thought you might find helpful. On the few occasions when I’ve traveled myself, the reading light has generally been miserable. Perhaps you’re having the same experience. If not, just pass this along to your favorite charity. (Lately I’ve been most dissatisfied with Goodwill but continue to feel that Retarded Citizens is a worthwhile organization.)

  My best wishes for your birthday.

  Love, Eleanor

  Delia flipped it over, but all she found on the back was RECYCLED PAPER RECYCLED PAPER RECYCLED PAPER running across the bottom. She had expected indignation, or at least a few reproaches.

  She remembered how, when she and Sam were first engaged, she had entertained such high hopes for Eleanor. She had thought she was finally getting a mother of her own. But that was before they met. Eleanor came to supper at the Felsons’, arriving directly from the Home for Wayward Girls, where she volunteered as a typing teacher twice a week. Once the introductions were over, she hardly gave Delia a glance. All she talked about was the terrible, terrible poverty endured by the wayward girls and the staggering contrast of this meal—which, by the way, was merely pot roast sprinkled with onion-soup mix and an iceberg lettuce salad. “I asked this one poor child,” Eleanor said, “I asked, ‘Dear, could your people buy you a typewriter so you could work from your house after the baby arrives?’ And she said, ‘Miss, my family’s so poor they can’t even afford shampoo.’” A basket of rolls appeared before her. Eleanor gazed into it, looking puzzled, and passed it on. “I don’t know what made her choose that example, of all things,” she said. “Shampoo.”

  (Why was it that so many voices came wafting back to Delia these days? Sometimes as she fell asleep she heard them nattering on without her, as if everybody she’d ever known sat around her, conversing. Like people in a sickroom, she thought. Like people at a deathbed.)

  Another present Eleanor had once given her was a tiny electric steamer gadget to freshen clothes during trips. This was some years back; Delia couldn’t remember what she’d done with it. But the thing was, here in Bay Borough she could have put it to use. She could have touched up her office dresses, both of which had grown somewhat puckery at the seams after repeated hand laundering. It would certainly have been preferable to buying an iron and ironing board. Oh, why hadn’t she kept the steamer? Why hadn’t she brought it with her? How could she have been so shortsighted, and so ungrateful?

  She didn’t answer any of the birthday cards, but etiquette demanded a thank-you note to Eleanor. The little light is very convenient, she wrote. Much better than the goosenecked lamp I’ve been reading by up till now. So I’ve moved the lamp to the bureau which means I don’t have to use the ceiling bulb and therefore the room looks much softer. In this manner she contrived to cover the entire writing area of a U.S. postcard without really saying anything at all.

  The next morning, while she was dropping the card in the mailbox near the office, she was suddenly struck by the fact that Eleanor had once worked in an office. She had put her son through college on a high-school secretary’s salary—no small feat, as Delia could now appreciate. She wished she had thought to mention her job in her thank-you note. But maybe Eliza had said something. “Delia’s employed by a lawyer,” Eliza might have said. “She handles every detail for him. You should see her all dressed up for work; if you met her on the street, you wouldn’t know her.”

  “Is that so?” Sam would ask. (Somehow, the listener had changed from Eleanor to Sam.) “Handles everything, you say. Not mislaying important files? Not lounging around the waiting room, reading trashy novels?”

  Well, she’d spent more than half her life trying to win Sam’s approval. She supposed she couldn’t expect to break a habit like that overnight.

  October came, and the weather grew cooler. The square filled up with yellow leaves. Some nights, Delia had to shut her windows. She bought a flannel nightgown and two long-sleeved dresses—one gray pinstripe, one forest green—and she started keeping an eye out for a good secondhand coat. It was not yet cold enough for a coat, but she wanted to be prepared.

  On rainy days, now, she ate lunch at the Cue Stick ‘n’ Cola on Bay Street. She ordered coffee and a sandwich and watched the action at the one pool table. Vanessa often wheeled her stroller in to join her. While Greggie lurched among the chair legs like a brightly colored top, Vanessa would offer Delia thumbnail sketches of the players. “See the guy breaking? Buck Baxter. Moved here eight or ten years ago. Baxter as in Baxter Janitorial Supplies, but they say his father’s disowned him. No, Greggie, the man doesn’t want your cookie. Now, her I don’t know,” she said. She meant the diminutive, dark-haired young woman who was leaning across the pool table to shoot on tiptoe, her purple canvas pocketbook still slung over her shoulder. “Must be from outside. Leave him alone, Greggie. And the fellow in the cowboy boots, that’s Belle’s ex-boyfriend, Norton Grove. Belle was out of her mind to fall for him. Fickle? That man put fickle in the dictionary.”

  Delia was gathering an impression of Bay Borough as a town of misfits. Almost everybody here had run away from someplace else, or been run away from. And no longer did it seem so idyllic. Rick and Teensy Rackley were treated very coolly by some of the older citizens; the only two gay men she knew of seemed to walk about with no one but each other; there was talk of serious drug use in the consolidated high school; and Mr. Pomfret’s appointment book was crammed with people feuding over property lines and challenging drunk-driving arrests.

  Still, she felt contented here. She had her comfortable routine, her niche in the general scheme of things. Making her way from office to library, from library to café, she thought that her exterior self was instructing her interior self, much like someone closing his eyes and mimicking sleep in order to persuade sleep to come. It was not that her sadness had left her, but she seemed to operate on a smooth surface several inches above the sadness. She deposited her check each Saturday; she dined each Sunday at the Bay Arms Restaurant. People nodded now when they saw her, which she took not just for greeting but for confirmation: Ah, yes, there’s Miss Grinstead, exactly where she belongs.

  Although every so often something would stab her. A song from Ramsay’s Deadhead period about knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door, for instance. Or a mother and a little girl hugging each other in front of the house across the street. “She’s leaving me!” the mother called mock-plaintively to Delia. “Going off to her very first slumber party!”

  Maybe Delia could pretend to herself that she was back in the days before her marriage. That she didn’t miss her children at all because they hadn’t been born yet.

  But in retrospect it seemed she had missed them even then. Was it possible there had been a time when she hadn’t known her children?

  Dear Delia, Eleanor wrote. (She addressed her letter to 14 George Street this time.)

  I was so pleased to get your postcard. It’s good to know that my little gift came in handy, and I’m glad you’re doing some reading.

  I myself find it impossible to sleep if I don’t read at least a few pages first, preferably from something instructive like biography or current events. For a while after Sam’s father died I used to read the dictionary. It was the only thing with small enough divisions to fit my attention span. Also the information was so definite.

  Probably Sam has been marked by losing his father at such an early age. I meant to say that in my last note but I don’t believe I did. And his father never had a strong personality. He was the kind of man who let all the bathwater drain away before he got out of the tub. Maybe it would worry a boy to think he might grow up to do the same.

  I hope I haven’t overstepped.

  Love, Eleanor

  Delia didn’t know what to make of that. She understood it better when the next note came, some two weeks later. Please forgive me if you felt I sounded “mother-in-lawish” and that’s
why you didn’t answer my letter. I had no intention of offering excuses for my son. I’ve always said he was forty years old when he was born, and I realize that’s not easy to live with.

  Delia bought another postcard—this one the kind with a picture on it, a rectangle of unblemished white captioned Bay Day in Bay Borough, so there was even less space to write on. Dear Eleanor, she wrote. I’m not here because of Sam, so much. I’m here because

  Then she sat back, not knowing how to end the sentence. She considered starting over, but these postcards cost money, and so she settled, finally, for I’m here because I just like the thought of beginning again from scratch. She signed it, Love, Delia, and mailed it the following morning on her way to work.

  And after all, wasn’t that the true reason? Truer than she had realized when she wrote it, in fact. Her leaving had very little to do with any specific person.

  Unlocking the office door, she noticed the pleasure she took in the emptiness of the room. She raised the white window shades; she turned the calendar to a fresh page; she sat down and rolled a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter. It was possible to review her entire morning thus far and find not a single misstep.

  Mr. Pomfret sometimes employed a detective named Pete Murphy. This was not the swaggery character Delia would have envisioned, but a baby-faced fat boy from Easton. It seemed he was hired less often to locate people than to fail to locate them. Whenever a will or a title search required his services, Pete would plod in, whistling tunelessly, and trill his pudgy fingers at Delia and proceed to the inner office. He never spoke to her, and he probably didn’t know her name.

  One rainy afternoon, though, he arrived with something bulging and struggling inside the front of his windbreaker. “Got a present for you,” he told Delia.

  “For me?”

  “Found it out in the street.”

  He lowered his zipper, and a small, damp gray-and-black cat bounded to the floor and made a dash for the radiator. “Oh!” Delia said.

  Pete said, “Shoot. Come out of there, you little dickens.”

  Beneath the radiator, silence.

  “It’ll never come if you order it to,” Delia said. “You have to back away a bit. Turn your face away. Pretend you’re not looking.”

  “Well, I’ll let you see to that,” Pete decided. He brushed cat hairs off his sleeves and started for the office.

  “Me! But … wait! I can’t do this!” Delia said. She was speaking now to Mr. Pomfret; he had come to his door to see what all the fuss was about. “He’s brought a stray cat! I can’t take care of a cat!”

  “Now, now, I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Mr. Pomfret said genially. “Miss Grinstead was a cat in her last incarnation, you know,” he told Pete.

  “Is that a fact,” Pete said. They walked into the office, and Mr. Pomfret closed the door.

  For the next half hour, Delia worked with one eye on the radiator. She watched a gray-and-black tiger tail unfurl from behind a pipe, gradually fluffing as it dried. She had a sense of being under surveillance.

  When Pete reemerged, she said, “Maybe the cat belongs to someone. Have you thought of that?”

  “I doubt it,” he told her. “I didn’t see no collar.” He trilled his fingers and left. When the door slammed behind him, the tail gave a twitch.

  Delia rose and went to the office. “Excuse me,” she said.

  Mr. Pomfret said, “Hmm?” He was back at his computer already. This morning he had discovered something called Search-and-Replace that was apparently very exciting. Tap-tap, his fingers went, while he craned his sloping neck earnestly toward the screen.

  “Mr. Pomfret, that cat is still under the radiator and I can’t take it anywhere! I don’t even have a car!”

  “Maybe get a box from the supply closet,” he said. “Damn!” He hit several keys in succession. “Just see to it, will you, Miss Grinstead? There’s a good girl.”

  “I live in a boardinghouse!” Delia said.

  Mr. Pomfret reached for his computer manual and started thumbing through it. “Who wrote this damn thing, anyhow?” he asked. “No human being, that’s for sure. Look, Miss Grinstead, why don’t you leave early and take the kitty wherever you think best. I’ll lock up for you, how’s that?”

  Delia sighed and headed for the supply closet.

  Pet Heaven: they might help. She emptied a carton of manila envelopes and carried it to the other room. Kneeling in front of the radiator, she placed a palm on the floor. “Tsk-tsk!” she said. She waited. After a minute, she felt a tiny wince of cold on the back of her middle finger. “Tsk-tsk-tsk!” The cat peered out at her, only its whiskers and heart-shaped nose visible. Gently, Delia curved her hand around the frail body and drew it forward.

  This was hardly more than a kitten, she saw—a scrawny male with large feet and spindly legs. His fur was almost startlingly soft. It reminded her of milkweed. When she stroked him, he shrank beneath her hand, but he seemed to realize he had nowhere to run. She gathered him up and set him in the carton and folded the flaps shut. He gave a single woebegone mew before falling silent.

  It was still raining, and she didn’t have a free hand to open her umbrella, so she hurried along the sidewalk unprotected. The carton rocked in her arms as if it contained a bowling ball. For such a little thing, he certainly was heavy.

  She rounded the corner and burst through the door of Pet Heaven. A gray-haired woman stood behind the counter, checking off a list. “You wouldn’t happen to know if Bay Borough has an S.P.C.A.,” Delia said.

  The woman looked at her a moment, slowly refocusing vague blue eyes. Then she said, “No; the nearest one’s in Ashford.”

  “Or any other place that takes homeless animals?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Maybe you’d like a cat.”

  “Gracious! If I brought home another stray my husband would kill me.”

  So Delia gave up, for now, and bought a box of kibble and a sack of litter-box filler, the smallest size of each just to get her through one night. Then she lugged the cat home.

  Belle was there ahead of her, talking on the phone in the kitchen. Delia heard her laugh. She tiptoed up the stairs, unlocked the door of her room, set the carton on the floor, and shut the door behind her. In the mirror she looked like a crazy woman. Tendrils of wet hair were plastered to her forehead. The shoulders of her sweater were dark with rain, and her handbag was spotted and streaked.

  She bent over the carton and raised the flaps. Inside, the cat sat hunched in a snail shape, glaring up at her. Delia retreated, settled on the edge of her bed, looked pointedly in another direction. Eventually, the cat sprang out of the carton. He started sniffing around the baseboards. Delia stayed where she was. He ducked beneath the bureau and returned with linty whiskers. He approached the bed obliquely, gazing elsewhere. Delia turned her head away. A moment later she felt the delicate denting of the mattress as he landed on it. He passed behind her, lightly brushing the length of his body against her back as if by chance. Delia didn’t move a muscle. She felt they were performing a dance together, something courtly and elaborate and dignified.

  But she couldn’t possibly keep him.

  Then Belle’s clacky shoes started climbing the stairs. Belle almost never came upstairs. But she did today. Delia threw a glance at the cat, willing him to hide. All he did was freeze and direct a wide-eyed stare toward the door. Knock-knock. He was smack in the center of the pillow, with his bottle-brush tail standing vertical. You couldn’t overlook him if you tried.

  Delia scooped him up beneath his hot little downy armpits. She could feel the rapid patter of his heart. “Just a minute,” she called. She reached for the carton.

  But Belle must have misheard, for she breezed on in, caroling, “Delia, here’s a—” Then she said, “Why!”

  Delia straightened. “I’m just trying to find a home for him,” she said.

  “Aww. What a honey!”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not keeping him.”


  “Oh, why not? Er, that is … he is housebroken, isn’t he?”

  “All cats are housebroken,” Delia said. “For goodness’ sake!”

  “Well, then! Not keep this little socky-paws? This dinky little pookums?” Belle was bending over the cat now and offering him her polished fingernails to sniff. “Is it a prinky-nose,” she crooned. “Is it a frowzy-head. Is it a fluffer-bunch.”

  “Mr. Pomfret’s detective found him out in the rain,” Delia said. “He just dumped him on me; nothing I could do. I mean, I knew I couldn’t keep him myself. Where would I put a litter box, for one thing?”

  “In the bathroom?” Belle asked. She started scratching behind the cat’s ears.

  “But how would he get out to use it?”

  “You could leave your door cracked open, let him go in and out as he likes,” Belle said. “Ooh, feel how soft! I don’t know why you ever lock it, anyhow. Little town like this, who do you think’s going to rob you? Who’s going to creep in and ravish you?”

  “Well …”

  “Believe me, Mr. Lamb couldn’t gather up the enthusiasm.”

  Belle stroked beneath the cat’s chin, and the cat tipped his head back blissfully. He had one of those putt-putt purrs, like a Model T Ford.

  “I don’t know if I want my life to get that complicated,” Delia said.

  “Is he a complication. Is he a bundle of trouble.”

  Belle was holding an envelope in her free hand, Delia saw. That must be what had brought her upstairs. Eleanor’s stalky print marched across the front. Delia felt suddenly overburdened. Things were crowding in on her so!

  But when Belle said, “Are you going to keep this itty-bitty, or am I?” Delia said, “I am, I guess.”

  “Well, good. Let’s call him Puffball, what do you say?”

  “Hmm,” Delia said, pretending to consider it.

  But she had never approved of cutesy names for cats. And besides, it seemed that at some point she had already started thinking of him as George.