Ladder of Years

  “Not in the middle of the night,” Delia said. She clutched George more tightly and asked, “Are you coming to dinner, or aren’t you?”

  “What time?”

  “Um … now?”

  “Well, I suppose I could make it,” Mr. Lamb said.

  He looked down at what he was wearing—a limp T-shirt, baggy dark pants—and then sadly closed the door in her face.

  Delia wondered how a man so fond of nature programs could object to a harmless cat.

  Downstairs, Vanessa had finished setting everything on the table—turkey, brussels sprouts, cranberry relish, mashed sweet potatoes dotted with marshmallows, all in their original pans. Still wearing her leather blazer, she was spooning the stuffing out of the turkey. Greggie lolled on the stack of phone books, sucking his thumb and watching his mother with heavy-lidded eyes. It must be naptime.

  Belle was discussing Henry with the Hawsers. “What I can’t figure,” she was saying, “is when all this came about. Last night as of ten o’clock, everything was jim-dandy. Henry and I had a real nice dinner over in Ocean City. Then this noon on the phone—poof! He’s a totally changed man.”

  “So his wife showed up in the morning,” Donald Hawser said sagely. He had draped his coat over the back of his chair, and he was lighting the warped candles with a silver lighter. “She got out of bed this morning and, ‘Here I am,’ she must have said, ‘away from home on Thanksgiving. A family holiday,’ she said.”

  Delia placed the cat on the floor and sat down next to Donald. A family holiday, she thought, and I’m eating a store-cooked turkey with strangers. She felt madcap and adventurous.

  “‘Here I am with my mom when I ought to be with my husband,’ she said, and she packed her suitcase then and there and went back to him, but he couldn’t let you know till noon because what was he going to do—excuse himself and run phone you the minute she walked in?”

  “Donald has an expert opinion to offer on every subject,” his wife announced with a brittle laugh.

  She was sitting very tensely, her spine not touching the chair. Her hair was scrolled upward at the ends like the sound holes in a violin.

  “Yes; you might call it a gift,” Donald agreed, unruffled. “I’m able to envision. See, first there’s the business of settling her into the house. Don’t forget she has that baby with her, and a diaper bag no doubt and one of those infant car seats—”

  “But he could have just turned her away!” Belle exploded. “He doesn’t even love her! He told me he didn’t!”

  “Well, of course that’s what he would claim,” Donald said, leaning back expansively.

  By now Vanessa was carving the turkey. Delia began passing around the other foods. The brussels sprouts were barely warm, she discovered. The sweet potatoes were refrigerator cold, but everybody took some anyhow.

  “You’re right,” Belle said. “Oh, when will I learn? Seems this happens to me about every other week. Norton Grove was the only one who actually divorced his wife for me, and look how that ended up!”

  “How did it end up?” Delia asked.

  “He fell in love with a lady plumber who came to unstop our sink.”

  Donald nodded, implying he could have predicted as much.

  “It’s just the way Ann Landers keeps saying in her column,” Belle told them. “She says a man who would leave his wife will most likely leave you, too, by and by.”

  “Maybe you ought to look for someone who doesn’t have a wife,” Vanessa suggested, handing her son a turkey wing.

  “Yes, but it’s kind of like I lack imagination. I mean, I can’t seem to picture marrying a man till I see him married to someone else. Then I say, ‘Why! He’d make a good husband for me!’”

  The hallway door opened and Mr. Lamb stood on the threshold, wearing a shiny black suit that turned his skin to ashes. “Oh, God, you have guests,” he said.

  “Yes, Mr. Lamb, and you’re one of them,” Belle said. “Donald Hawser, Melinda Hawser … Vanessa and Greggie you’ve seen around, I bet. This is Horace Lamb,’ she told the others. She waved carelessly toward the one empty chair. “Have a seat.”

  “Well, I can’t stay long.”

  “Have a seat, Mr. Lamb.”

  He entered the room with a skimming sound that made Delia glance downward. On his feet he wore the kind of backless paper slippers given out free in hospitals. “This afternoon will be sports, sports, sports,” he said as he fell into his chair. “All regular programs are preempted. I’m reduced to the educational channels.”

  “Say!” Donald cried. “Who you going to root for?”

  “Pardon? Weekday afternoons, I like to watch the soaps. Oh, I confess. I admit it. I make a point of stopping for All My Children every blessed day I’m on the road.”

  “What’s your line of business, Horace? Okay if I call you Horace?”

  “I sell storm windows,” Mr. Lamb told him. He accepted the container of sweet potatoes and peered down into it. “This looks exceedingly rich,” he said. His long front teeth were so prominent that his lips had to labor to stretch across them. His whole face seemed stretched, and too intricately hinged at the jawbone. He raised his deep-set eyes to Belle and said, “Regrettably, I’m afflicted with a touchy stomach.”

  “Oh, eat up, it’ll do you good,” Belle snapped. “We were discussing married men.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Another problem I have is, I look at a married man and I can’t believe he won’t find me irresistible.”

  “Irresistible?”

  “I’m speaking to the table at large, Mr. Lamb. Eat your dinner. I see a man with his wife, mousy boring wife who isn’t even attempting to keep herself up, and I think, Why wouldn’t he prefer me instead? I’m a hell of a lot more fun, and better-looking to boot. But it’s like there’s some—I don’t know—some hold wives have, and I can’t seem to break it. Is it a secret? Is it some secret you-all pass around among yourselves?”

  She was asking Melinda Hawser, but Melinda just gave another shattered laugh and started crumbling bits of biscuit onto her plate. “Is it?” Belle asked Delia.

  “Oh, no,” Delia told her. “It’s more like just … what’s the word? The word from science class. Momentum?”

  “Inertia,” Mr. Lamb supplied.

  “Right.” She glanced over at him. “It’s just a matter of people staying where they are.”

  “Well, if that’s all it is,” Belle said, “how come Katie O’Connell got to waltz off to Hawaii with Larry Watts? She must have found out the secret. Why, when Larry Watts was boarding here, he never even gave me a look! He almost seemed to be avoiding me. He acted like I was some floozy the one time I asked him downstairs for a friendly little drink!”

  Her mouth collapsed, and she covered her eyes with one hand. Donald said, “Oh, now! Hey!” and Vanessa said, “Aw, Belle, don’t cry,” while Mr. Lamb started tugging ferociously at his nose.

  “To be honest,” Melinda said in a crystal voice, “I can’t think what you want with a husband anyhow.”

  There was a pause, a kind of reconsidering among the other diners.

  “Who first thought marriage up, do you suppose?” Melinda asked Greggie. He goggled at her from behind a greasy fistful of turkey wing. “Everyone pushes it so, especially the women. Your mother and your aunts and your girlfriends. Then after you’re married you see how he’s always so full of himself and always going on about something, always got these theories and pronouncements, always crowing over these triumphs at his business. ‘I told them this,’ and ‘I told them that,’ and you ask, ‘What did they say back?’ and he says, ‘Oh, you know, but then I told them such and such, and I let them have it outright, I put it to them straight, I said …’ And if you mention this to your mother and your aunts and so forth, ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘marriage is a pain, all right.’ ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel,’ you want to ask them, ‘why didn’t you speak up before? Where were you when I was announcing my engagement?’”

  ?
??Ha. Yes,” her husband said. He glanced around the table. “They’re going to think you mean our marriage. Dear.”

  Everybody waited, but Melinda just speared a brussels sprout.

  “Oh,” Belle assured him, “we would never think that.” She was sitting erect now, her tears already drying on her cheeks. “A gorgeous man like you? Of course we wouldn’t.” She told the others, “Donald and Melinda are customers of mine. They bought the old Meers place—lovely place. Donald’s an important executive at the furniture plant.”

  Melinda was chewing her brussels sprout very noisily, or maybe it only seemed that way because the room was so quiet.

  “Mrs. Meers had gone into the nursing home,” Belle said, “but Mr. Meers was still living there. Took us through the house himself; taught us how to work the trash compactor. Told us, ‘Here in the freezer are one hundred forty-four egg whites, no charge.’”

  “Folks who made their own mayonnaise,” Mr. Lamb surmised.

  Belle was about to go on speaking, but she stopped and looked at him.

  “I don’t guess you’d be in the market for storm windows,” Mr. Lamb told Donald.

  “Not really,” Donald said, with his eyes on his wife.

  “Ah, well, I didn’t think so.”

  “That house needs absolutely nothing,” Belle said. “The Meerses kept after it every minute. And Donald here, Don …” She smiled at him. “Don spotted that the first time he walked through.”

  “Melinda and I have a fine marriage. Married seven years.” Donald said, still watching his wife. “We were one of those recognized campus couples at our college. Went steady, got pinned: the works.”

  “I know the type you mean,” Belle said.

  “Why, Melinda’s known me so long she still calls me Hawk! Hawk Hawser,” he added, turning at last to meet Belle’s gaze. “I was on the basketball team. Kind of a star, some people might say, though I never had the height to go professional.”

  “Is that right!” Belle exclaimed.

  “Hawk Hawser,” he repeated lingeringly.

  “I believe I might’ve heard of you.”

  “Well, maybe so if you were ever in Illinois. Jerry Bingle College?”

  “Jerry Bingle. Hmm.”

  “I played center.”

  “Really!”

  “And midway through my senior year—”

  “Marshmallow,” Greggie demanded.

  He didn’t have the usual small child’s trouble pronouncing I’s. He spoke very precisely and daintily. “Mama? Marshmallow!”

  It was Delia, finally, who plucked a marshmallow from the sweet potatoes and reached across the table to set it on his plate. Everyone else was watching Belle. Open-mouthed and breathless, miraculously recovered, Belle stroked her topmost button with a hypnotic, circular motion and kept her damp-lashed eyes focused raptly on Donald’s lips.

  11

  Sometimes Mr. Pomfret ordered Delia to go out and feed the parking meter for a client. Sometimes he snapped his fingers when he needed her. Once, he tossed her his raincoat and told her to take it down the block to the one-hour cleaner’s. “Yes, Mr. Pomfret,” she murmured. When she returned, she placed the receipt on his palm as smartly as a surgical nurse dealing out a scalpel.

  But now she began to feel a little itch of rebellion.

  “Miss Grinstead, can’t you see I’m merging?” he demanded when she brought in some letters to sign, and she said, “Sorry, Mr. Pomfret,” but neutrally, too evenly, with her expression set in granite. And back at her desk, she seethed with imaginary retorts. You and your crummy computer! You and your “merging” and your Search-and-Destroy or whatever!

  One Friday in early December, a stooped, gray-haired man in a baseball jacket arrived without an appointment. “I’m Mr. Leon Wesley,” he told Delia. “This is about my son Juval. Do you think Mr. Pomfret might have a minute for me?”

  Mr. Pomfret’s office door was closed—it was early morning, his time to peruse new catalogs—but when Delia inquired, he said, “Leon? Why, Leon resurfaced my driveway for me. Send him in. And make us a pot of coffee while you’re at it.”

  It was impossible to avoid overhearing Mr. Wesley’s reason for coming. He poured it out even before he was seated, speaking through the grinding of the coffee beans so Mr. Pomfret had to ask him to repeat himself. Juval, Mr. Wesley said, was scheduled to join the navy first thing after Christmas. He had a highly promising future; special interest had been taken on account of his qualifications, which seemed to involve some technical know-how that Delia couldn’t quite follow. And last night, clear out of the blue, he had been arrested for breaking and entering. Caught climbing through the Hanffs’ dining-room window at ten o’clock in the evening.

  “The Hanffs!” Mr. Pomfret said. The Hanffs owned the furniture factory, as even Delia knew—the town’s one industry. “Well, of all the doggone folks to up and burglarize,” he said.

  Delia went to the supply closet for more sugar, and when she came back Mr. Pomfret was still marveling at Juval’s choice of victims. “I mean, here you’ve got Reba Hanff, who disapproves of jewelry and doesn’t own a piece of silver,” he said, “gives every cent of their profits to some religious honcho in India … What did the boy hope to steal, for God’s sake?”

  “And why, is what I’d like to know,” Mr. Wesley said. “That’s the part I can’t figure. Was he in need of money? For what? He doesn’t even drink, let alone take drugs. Doesn’t even have a girlfriend.”

  “Not to mention the Hanffs own the only house alarm in all of Bay Borough,” Mr. Pomfret mused.

  “And with such a hotshot career ahead!” Mr. Wesley said. “You can bet that’s all down the drain now. How come he went and ruined things, so close to time he was leaving?”

  “Maybe that’s how come,” Delia spoke up, setting two mugs on a tray.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Maybe he ruined things so he wouldn’t have to leave after all.”

  Mr. Wesley gaped at her.

  Mr. Pomfret said, “You may go now, Miss Grinstead.”

  “Yes, Mr. Pomfret.”

  “Shut the door behind you, please.”

  She shut the door with such conspicuous care that every part of the latch declared itself.

  In regard to the establishment of a designated fund, she typed, and then Mr. Pomfret emerged from his office, stuffing his arms into his overcoat as he walked, forging a trail for Mr. Wesley. “Cancel my ten o’clock,” he told Delia.

  “Yes, Mr. Pomfret.”

  He opened the outer door, ushered Mr. Wesley through it, and then closed it and came back to stand at Delia’s desk. “Miss Grinstead,” he said, “from now on, please do not volunteer comments during my consultations.”

  She stared at him stubbornly, keeping her eyes wide and innocent.

  “You’re paid for your secretarial skills, not for your opinions,” he said.

  “Yes, Mr. Pomfret.”

  He left.

  She knew she had deserved that, but still she felt a flare of righteous anger once he was gone. She typed rapidly and badly, flinging the carriage so hard that the typewriter kept skidding across the desk. When she called to cancel the ten o’clock appointment, her voice shook. And when she left the office at lunchtime, she picked up a Bay Borough Bugle so she could look for another job.

  Well, not that she would actually go through with it, of course. It was just that she needed to fantasize awhile.

  The weather was raw and dismal, and she hadn’t brought any food with her, but she walked to the square even so because she couldn’t deal with the Cue Stick ’n’ Cola today. She found the park benches deserted. The statue looked huddled and dense, like a bird with all its feathers reared against the cold. She wrapped her coat around her and sat down on the very edge of one damp, chilly slat.

  How satisfying it would be to announce her resignation! “I regret to inform you, Mr. Pompous …,” she would say. He would be helpless. He didn’t even know where she kept the carbon
paper.

  She opened the Bugle and searched for the classified section. As a rule she didn’t read the Bugle, which was little more than an advertising handout—several pages of half-price specials and extremely local news, stacked weekly in various storefronts. She flipped past a choral call for the Christmas Eve Sing on the square, a two-for-one day at the shoe store, and a progress report on the Mitten Drive. On the next-to-last page she discovered four Help Wanted ads: baby-sitter, baby-sitter, lathe operator, and “live-in woman.” This town must have unemployment problems. After that came the For Sale ads. A person named Dwayne wished to sell two wedding rings, cheap. Her eyes slid back to Live-in Woman.

  Single father desires help w/ lively, bright, engaging, 12-yr-old son. Must be willing to wake boy in a.m., serve breakfast, see off to school, do light cleaning / errands / shopping, assist w/ homework, provide transportation to dentist / doctor / grandfather / playmates, attend athletic meets & cheer appropriate team, host groups of 11-13 yr olds, cook supper, show enthusiasm for TV sports programs / computer games / paperback war novels, be available nights for bad dreams / illness. Driver’s license a must. Non-smokers only. Room, board, generous salary. Weekends & most daytimes free except school holidays / sick days / snow days. Call Mr. Miller at Underwood High 8-5 Mon-Fri.

  Delia clucked. The nerve of the man! Some people wanted the moon. She rattled the paper impatiently and refolded it. You can’t expect a mere hireling to serve as a genuine mother, which was really what he was asking.

  She rose and placed the Bugle in the trash basket. So much for that.

  Crossing West Street, she glanced toward the shops—Debbi’s and the dime store and the florist. How about a job in sales? No, she was too quiet-natured. As for waitressing, she used to forget her own family’s dessert orders in the time it took to walk to the kitchen. And she knew from her talks with Mrs. Lincoln at the library that the town was having to struggle to support even one librarian.

  Actually, she reflected, passing the sterile white blinds of the Fingernail Clinic, a hireling would in some ways be better than a mother—less emotionally ensnarled, less likely to cause damage. Certainly less likely to suffer damage herself. When the employer’s child was unhappy, it would never occur to the live-in woman to feel personally responsible.