Ladder of Years

  Like now, for instance. Determined to start afresh, she perked all her features upward and asked, “Any calls while I was gone?” and he said, “Why would I answer the grown-ups’ line,” not bothering to add a question mark.

  Because the grown-ups buy the celery for your favorite mint pea soup, she could have told him, but years of dealing with teenagers had turned her into a pacifist, and she merely padded out of the kitchen in her stocking feet and crossed the hall to the study, where Sam kept the answering machine.

  The study was what they called it, and books did line the floor-to-ceiling shelves, but mainly this was a TV room now. The velvet draperies were kept permanently drawn, coloring the air the dusty dark red of an old-time movie house. Soft-drink cans and empty pretzel bags and stacks of rented videotapes littered the coffee table, and Susie lounged on the couch, watching Saturday-morning cartoons with her boyfriend, Driscoll Avery. The two of them had been dating so long that they looked like brother and sister, with their smooth beige coloring and stocky, waistless figures and identical baggy sweat suits. Driscoll barely blinked when Delia entered. Susie didn’t even do that much; just flipped a channel on the remote control.

  “Morning, you two,” Delia said. “Any calls?”

  Susie shrugged and flipped another channel. Driscoll yawned out loud. Just for that, Delia didn’t excuse herself when she walked in front of them to the answering machine. She bent to press the Message button, but nothing happened. Electronic devices were always double-crossing her. “How do I—?” she said, and then an old man’s splintery voice filled the room. “Dr. Grinstead, can you get back to me right away? It’s Grayson Knowles, and I told the pharmacist about those pills, but he asked if—”

  Whatever the pharmacist had asked was submerged by a flood of Bugs Bunny music. Susie must have raised the volume on the TV. Beep, the machine said, and then Delia’s sister came on. “Dee, it’s Eliza. I need an address. Could you please call me at work?”

  “What’s she doing at work on a Saturday?” Delia asked, but nobody answered.

  Beep. “This is Myrtle Allingham,” an old woman stated forthrightly.

  “Oh, God,” Susie told Driscoll.

  “Marshall and I were wondering if you-all would like to take supper with us Sunday evening. Nothing fancy! Just us folks! And do tell young Miss Susie she should bring that darlin’ Driscoll. Say seven o’clock?”

  Beep beep beep beep beep. The end.

  “We went last time,” Susie said, slouching lower on the couch. “Count us out.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Driscoll said. “That crab dip she served was not half bad.”

  “We aren’t going, Driscoll, so forget it.”

  “She’s lonesome, is all,” Delia said. “Stuck at home with her hip, no way to get around—”

  Something banged overhead.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  More bangs. Or clanks, really. Clank! Clank! at measured intervals, as if on purpose.

  “Plumber?” Driscoll said tentatively.

  “What plumber?”

  “Plumber upstairs in the bathroom?”

  “I never called for a plumber.”

  “Dr. Grinstead did, maybe?”

  Delia gave Susie a look. Susie met it blandly.

  “I don’t know what’s come over that man,” Delia said. “He’s been re—what’s the word?—rejuvenating, resuscitating …” Fully aware that neither one of them was listening, she walked on out of the room, still talking. “… renovating, I mean: renovating this house to a fare-thee-well. If it’s about that place in the ceiling, then really you’d think …”

  She climbed the stairs, halfway up encountering the cat, who was hurrying down in a scattered, ungraceful fashion. Vernon detested loud noises. “Hello?” Delia called. She poked her head into the bathroom off the hall. A ponytailed man in coveralls crouched beside the claw-footed tub, studying its pipes. “Well, hello,” she said.

  He twisted around to look at her. “Oh. Hey,” he said.

  “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “Can’t say just yet,” he said. He turned back to the pipes.

  She waited a moment, in case he wanted to add something, but she could tell he was one of those repairmen who think only the husband worth talking to.

  In her bedroom, she sat down on Sam’s side of the bed, picked up the telephone, and dialed Eliza’s work number. “Pratt Library,” a woman said.

  “Eliza Felson, please.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Delia propped a pillow against the headboard, and then she swung her feet up onto the frilled pink spread. The plumber had progressed to the bathroom between her room and her father’s. She couldn’t see him, but she could hear him banging around. What information could you hope to gain from whacking pipes?

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said, “but we can’t seem to locate Miss Felson. Are you sure she’s working today?”

  “She must be; she told me to call her there, and she isn’t here at home.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, thanks anyway.”

  She hung up. The plumber was whistling “Clementine.” While Delia was dialing Mrs. Allingham, he ambled into the bedroom, still whistling, and she demurely smoothed her skirt around her knees. He squatted in front of the miniature door that opened onto the pipes in the wall. Thou art lost and gone forever, he whistled; Delia mentally supplied the words. One tug at the door’s wooden knob, and it came off in his hand. She could have told him it would. She watched with some satisfaction as he muttered a curse beneath his breath and fished a pair of pliers from his belt loop.

  Seven rings. Eight. She wasn’t discouraged. Mrs. Allingham walked with a limp, and it took her ages to get to the phone.

  Nine rings. “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Allingham, it’s Delia.”

  “Delia, dear! How are you?”

  “I’m fine, how are you?”

  “Oh, we’re fine, doing just fine. Enjoying this nice spring weather! Nearly forgot what sunshine looks like, till today.”

  “Yes, me too,” Delia said. She was overtaken suddenly by a swell of something like homesickness; Mrs. Allingham’s chipper, slightly rasping voice was so reminiscent of all the women on this street where she had grown up. “Mrs. Allingham,” she said, “Sam and I would love to come for supper tomorrow night, but we can’t bring the children, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh!” Mrs. Allingham said.

  “It’s just that they’re so busy these days. You know how it is.”

  “Yes, of course,” Mrs. Allingham said faintly.

  “But another time, maybe! They always enjoy your company.”

  “Yes, well, and we enjoy theirs too.”

  “So we’ll see you at seven tomorrow,” Delia said briskly, for she could hear Sam downstairs and she had a million things to do. “Goodbye till then.”

  By now the plumber had the little door prized open and was peering into the bowels of the wall, but she knew better than to ask him what he’d found.

  In the kitchen, Sam stood propped against a counter, taking off his mud-caked running shoes. He was telling Carroll, “… sort of a toboggan effect when you hit those cedar chips …”

  “Sam, how could you go off alone like that?” Delia asked. “You knew I’d worry!”

  “Hello, Dee,” he said.

  His T-shirt was translucent with sweat, his sharp-boned face glistened, and his glasses were fogged. His hair—that shade that could be either blond or gray, it had faded so imperceptibly—lay in damp spikes on his forehead. “Look at you,” Delia scolded. “You got overheated. You went running all alone and got overheated to boot when the doctor told you a dozen times—”

  “Whose car is that in the driveway?”

  “Car?”

  “Station wagon parked in the driveway.”

  “Well, doesn’t it belong to a patient? No, I guess not.”

  “Plumber,” Carroll said from behind a glass of oran
ge juice.

  “Oh, good,” Sam said. “The plumber’s here.”

  He set his shoes on the doormat and started out of the kitchen, no doubt happily anticipating one of those laconic, man-to-man discussions of valves and joints and gaskets. “Sam, wait,” Delia said, for she had a pang of guilt nagging at the back of her mind. “Before I forget—”

  He turned, already wary.

  “Mr. Knowles phoned—something to do with his pills,” she said.

  “I thought he got that straightened out.”

  “And also, um, Mrs. Allingham. She wanted to know if we could come for—”

  He groaned. “No,” he said, “we can’t.”

  “But you haven’t even heard yet! A light Sunday supper, she said, and I told her—”

  “I’m sure not going,” Carroll broke in.

  “No, I told her that; I told her you kids were tied up. But you and I, Sam, just for—”

  “We can’t make it,” Sam said flatly.

  “But I’ve already accepted.”

  He had been on the point of turning away again, but now he stopped and looked at her.

  “I know I should have checked with you first, but by accident somehow I just went ahead and accepted.”

  “Well, then,” he said, “you’ll have to call her back and unaccept.”

  “But, Sam!”

  He left.

  She looked over at Carroll. “How can he be so mean?” she asked, but Carroll just raised one eyebrow in that urbane new way she suspected him of practicing in the mirror.

  Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family’s edges.

  The linoleum was slick and chilly beneath her feet, and she would have gone back upstairs for her slippers except that Sam and the plumber were upstairs. Instead, she turned to her grocery bags and unpacked several more boxes of pasta. Maybe she could tell Mrs. Allingham that Sam had been taken ill. That was always risky, though, when you lived in the same block and could so easily be observed, hale and hearty, stepping out to collect your morning paper or whatever. She sighed and shut a cabinet door. “When did this start happening to me?” she asked Carroll.

  “Huh?”

  “When did sweet and cute turn into silly and inefficient?”

  He didn’t seem to have an opinion.

  Her sister appeared in the doorway, rolling up her shirt sleeves. “Morning, all!” she announced.

  “Eliza?”

  There were days when Eliza seemed almost gnomish, and this was one of them. She wore her gardening clothes—a pith helmet that all but obscured her straight black Dutch-boy bob, a khaki shirt and stubby brown trousers, and boys’ brown oxfords with thick, thick soles intended to make her seem taller. (She was the shortest of the three Felson sisters.) Her horn-rimmed glasses overwhelmed her small, blunt, sallow face. “I figured I’d transplant some of those herbs before the ground dried out,” she told Delia.

  “But I thought you were at work.”

  “Work? It’s Saturday.”

  “You called from work, I thought.”

  Eliza looked over at Carroll. He raised that eyebrow again.

  “You called and left a message on the machine,” Delia said, “asking me to find an address.”

  “That was ten days ago, at least. I needed Jenny Coop’s address, remember?”

  “Then why did I just get it off the answering machine?”

  “Mom,” Carroll said. “You must have been playing back old calls.”

  “Well, how is that possible?”

  “You didn’t have the machine turned on in the first place, see, and then when you pressed the Message button—”

  “Oh, Lord,” Delia said. “Mrs. Allingham.”

  “Is there coffee?” Eliza asked her.

  “Not that I know of. Oh, Lord …”

  She went over to the wall phone and dialed Mrs. Allingham’s number. “I’m snug in bed,” Eliza was telling Carroll, “thinking, Goody, Saturday morning, I can sleep till noon—when who should come crawling through that door in the back of my closet but another one of your father’s blasted repairmen.”

  “Mrs. Allingham?” Delia said into the phone. “This is Delia again. Mrs. Allingham, I feel like such a dummy but it seems I got my calls mixed up and it was last week you invited us for. And of course last week we went, and a lovely time we had too; did I write you a thank-you note? I meant to write you a thank-you note. But this week we’re not coming; I mean I realize now that you didn’t invite us for—”

  “But, Delia, darlin’, we’d be happy to have you this week! We’d be happy to have you any old time, and I’ve already sent Marshall off to the Gourmet To Go with a shopping list.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Delia said, but then the coffee grinder started up—a deafening racket—and she shouted, “Anyhow! We’ll have to invite you to our place, very soon! Goodbye!”

  She replaced the receiver and glared at Eliza.

  “If only coffee tasted as good as it smells,” Eliza said serenely when the grinder stopped.

  Sam and the plumber were descending the stairs. Delia could hear the plumber’s elasticized East Baltimore vowels; he was waxing lyrical about water. “It’s the most amazing substance,” he was saying. “It’ll burst out one place and run twenty-five feet along the underside of a pipe and commence to dripping another place, where you least expect to see it. It’ll lie in wait, it’ll bide its time, it’ll search out some little cranny you would never think to look.”

  Delia placed her hands on her hips and stood waiting. The instant the two men stepped through the door, she said, “I certainly hope you’re satisfied, Sam Grinstead.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I called back poor Mrs. Allingham and canceled supper.”

  “Oh, good,” Sam said absently.

  “I broke our promise. I ducked out of our commitment. I probably hurt her feelings for all time,” Delia told him.

  But Sam wasn’t listening. He was following the plumber’s forefinger as it pointed upward to a line of blistered plaster. And Eliza was measuring coffee, so the only one who paid any heed was Carroll. He sent Delia a look of utter contempt.

  Delia turned sheepishly to her grocery bags. From the depths of one she drew the celery, pale green and pearly and precisely ribbed. She gazed at it for a long, thoughtful moment. “Aren’t you clever to say so!” she heard Adrian exclaim once again, and she held the words close; she hugged them to her breast as she turned back to give her son a beatific smile.

  3

  “Aren’t you clever to say so,” he had said, and, “Why, you’re very pretty!” and, “You have such a little face, like a flower.” Had he meant that she had such a flowerlike face, which incidentally was little? Or had its littleness been his sole point? She preferred the first interpretation, although the second, she supposed, was more likely.

  Also, he had praised her marvelous blancmange. Of course the blancmange did not really exist, but still she felt a lilt of pride, remembering that he had found it marvelous.

  She studied her face in the mirror when nobody else was around. Yes, maybe it did resemble a flower. If he had been referring to those flowers that seem freckled. She had always wanted to look more dramatic, more mysterious—more adult, in fact. It had struck her as unfair that she should be wrinkling around the eyes without ever losing the prim-featured, artless, triangular face of her childhood. But evidently Adrian had considered that attractive.

  Unless he had been speaking out of kindness.

  She checked for his name in the phone book, but he must have had an unlisted number. She kept watch for him on the streets and in the local shops. Twice in the next three days she drove back to the supermarket, on both occasions wearing the dress with the smocked, gathered front that made her seem less flat-chested. But Adrian never appeared.

  And if he had, what would she have done? It wasn’t that she’d fallen in love with him or anything like that. Why, she didn’t even know what kind of person he was! And she
certainly didn’t want (as she put it to herself) “something to start up.” Ever since she was seventeen, she had centered her life on Sam Grinstead. She had not so much as glanced at any other man from the moment she first met him. Even in her day-dreams, she wasn’t the type to be unfaithful.

  Still, whenever she imagined running into Adrian, she was conscious all at once of the light, quick way she naturally moved, and the outline of her body within the folds of her dress. She couldn’t remember when she had last been so aware of herself from outside, from a distance.

  At home, four workmen were installing air-conditioning—another of Sam’s sudden renovations. They were slicing through floors and walls; they were running huge, roaring machines; they were lugging in metal ducts and bales of what looked like gray cotton candy. Delia could lie in bed at night and gaze straight upward through a new rectangle in the ceiling to the stark bones of the attic. She pictured bats and barn swallows swooping down on her while she slept. She fancied she could hear the house groaning in distress—such a modest, mild house, so unprepared for change.

  But Sam was jubilant. Oh, he could hardly fit in his patients between visits from repairmen. Electricians, plasterers, and painters streamed through his office with estimates for the many improvements he planned. A carpenter arrived for the shutters, and a man with a spray for the mildewed shingles. Twenty-two years Sam had lived here; had he felt so critical of his surroundings all along?

  He had first walked into her father’s waiting room on a Monday morning in July, some three weeks after her high-school graduation. Delia had been sitting in her usual place at the desk, even though it was not her usual time (she worked afternoons, mostly), because she was so eager to meet him. She and her sisters had talked of nothing else since Dr. Felson had announced his hiring. Was this person married? they had asked, and how old was he? and what did he look like? (No, he was not married, their father said, and he was, oh, thirty-two, thirty-three, and he looked fine. Fine? Well, normal; perfectly all right, their father said impatiently, for to him what counted most was whether the man could ease his workload some—take over house calls and the morning office hours.) So Delia rose early that summer day and put on her prettiest sundress, the one with the sweetheart neckline. Then she seated herself behind the spinet desk, where she ostentatiously set to work transcribing her father’s notes. At nine o’clock exactly, young Dr. Grinstead stepped through the outside door, carrying a starched white coat folded over his forearm. Sunlight flashed off his clear-rimmed, serious glasses and glazed his sifted-looking blond hair, and Delia could still recall the pang of pure desire that had caused her insides to lurch as if she had leaned out over a canyon.