Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  Lydia Blessing ate breakfast each morning in the summer months at a small drop-leaf table in one corner of the long porch overlooking the pond. In the winter the table went into a corner of the library, since the long porch was too cold after the first frost came to Mount Mason. Both locations had the advantage of allowing her to look out over a substantial swathe of her substantial property. Her father had begun the tradition, and more often than not, sometime during the meal, he would say happily, “Lord of all he surveys.” Her mother ate upstairs on a tray in bed.

  Lydia had continued because she liked to think of herself as a person who honored tradition, and because from this vantage point she could usually keep a close eye on anyone working on the property. She could see her new caretaker on the rider mower in the back field. He was hunched forward over the seat and the steering wheel looking, as her father would have said, as though he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. She wondered why his posture was suddenly so poor. She was of the school that believed that the spine was a reflection of character, and that only the weak stooped. She had not noticed this young man’s poor posture when she had hired him, nor for the first month he had worked for her, but for the last few days he had gone about his tasks with the rounded shoulders of an old man. She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. A bad sign, for a young person to be so bowled over by the summer heat when it was only the first day of July.

  “Now today the coffee is too strong,” Mrs. Blessing said, looking at the front page of the newspaper. “Yesterday it wasn’t strong enough.”

  “Not my fault,” said Nadine, clearing the breakfast dishes from the small table onto a silver tray with the monogram of Mrs. Blessing’s mother at its center. Lydia had had half a grapefruit, a bowl of All-Bran with strawberries on top, and two cups of coffee, black. Bananas, she always said, had a tendency to bind her. Nadine hated it when she talked like that. “Keep herself to herself, the old wrinkled lady,” she said to her husband, Craig.

  “That’s a nice way to talk,” Craig had said.

  “You never mind,” said Nadine.

  Mrs. Blessing wiped her mouth with a napkin that had her monogram on it in white, thread so very much the color of the linen upon which it had been placed that it was easier to feel the letters, as though they were in Braille, than it was to read them. This, too, drove Nadine nuts. The fabric and the floss had faded in tandem, so that both now were a pale ecru, the color of age. Mrs. Blessing herself was the same shade. So was the face of the watch her parents had given her for her graduation from Bertram’s. The white dial had become ivory, then the palest café au lait, the black letters brownish, then coffee-colored. The gold band had acquired a matte finish. It had had to be mended only six months after she had gotten it, when she had caught it on the edge of a rented gilt chair at her deb party, then again in 1946, when it had exploded from her wrist on the tennis court as she served, and sometime in the early 1960s, when one of Jess’s sons had carelessly trod on it on the dock while she was swimming the length of the pond.

  Each time it had been returned to the jeweler on Madison Avenue from whom her father had bought it. She wound it every night before bed. For her seventieth birthday her daughter, Meredith, had given her a gold watch with a brown leather strap. “I don’t see how you can even read the dial of your old one,” Meredith had said. “This one never needs winding,” she added. The watch had been in its box in a drawer for a dozen years, next to several boxes of stockings from the old B. Altman’s store, closed now. “I don’t know why I even bother to buy her things,” Meredith had said to her husband the next time she visited.

  At the Bertram School they had learned that old was always better than new, that the past was always nicer than the present, that white was always more elegant than any other shade except for black, which was inappropriate for girls under age twenty-one. She’d graduated from Bertram’s when she was seventeen, in 1939, but there were long afternoons now, when she dozed off in the wing chair next to the fireplace in the living room, when Bertram’s seemed more real than the news in the paper she’d read that morning. The long linoleum hallways, the smell of starch in their uniform blouses, Miss Bertram’s lace-up shoes black against the red Turkish carpet in the head’s office when a girl was called in for insolence or bad temper or lack of charity or insufficient effort.

  The sins of the past seemed so venial in light of what she now read each morning in the Times that Nadine fetched from the newsstand in Mount Mason, stories about girls who had sex for money and got sick and died because of it, who killed their friends and their parents and themselves. There had not been truly bad girls at Bertram’s, or at least not bad in ways that mattered or were openly discussed. There was in each class one girl who was clever and slightly profane and who had what Miss Bertram referred to as “errant ways.” It was always understood among them that these girls would come to a bad end, but Lydia Blessing had noticed that it somehow always happened that those girls did very well for themselves. The girl with the errant ways in Lydia’s class, Priscilla North, had become an ambassador to one of the smaller European countries after her husband died, and was often asked back to the school to talk about the new American woman.

  Lydia Blessing had become outspoken only as she’d grown older, coming late to the realization that saying what she truly thought provided a certain satisfaction and had no material effect on how people treated her. As a girl she had been hugely obedient, especially when compared to her brother, Sunny. If she slammed the door of the house on East Seventy-seventh Street, she was sentenced to quiet reading in the library for half an hour. If she pushed one of the visiting children down on the lawn tennis court beside the boathouse, she was forbidden bathing in the pond for the rest of the day. She wore white all summer long at the country house, dresses, never pants or shorts. Sunny wore shorts, and when he was older, white twill pants that yellowed as they were laundered, just as the face of her watch had.

  Sunny was disobedient not so much in deed as in word. He once told one of their mother’s friends that he had never seen a dress that so closely matched the upholstery. He had already left the room before the two women realized what a clever insult it had been, so clever that neither said a word to the other, although Sunny was whipped by his father and the woman never again came to the Blessing home. It had been especially insulting given Mrs. Blessing’s taste in upholstery, which ran to dark brocades from the fabric business left to her by her father.

  Sumner was his real name, but Lydia called him Sunny when she was a baby, and then everyone else did, too. The gardeners had called him Master Blessing, and her Miss Lydia. There had been three gardeners when she was a child: one for the trees and shrubs, one for the perennial borders, and the last, the youngest, for the vegetables. Foster had overseen them all. The first Foster, not the second one.

  She sipped her coffee and looked from the window across the fields at the figure sitting hunched astride the riding mower. This new man must be made to sit up correctly. Mrs. Blessing thought of her own back as still straight. The faint hump was behind her, and so she did not notice it. She insisted her white blouses did not fit as they once had because tailoring, like everything else, had gone down in quality.

  “I think he’s settling in, this new man,” she said. “Except for the coffee.”

  “Been in jail,” said Nadine.

  “So was Thomas More,” Mrs. Blessing replied. She had set her lawyer to work, to find out if this was true and how serious the offense had been.

  “Kill everyone with knives.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Nadine. You can tell by looking at him that he’s not about to kill anyone. Except for that groundhog out by the asparagus patch. I need to speak to him about that.”

  Of course if Mrs. Blessing had known in the Wal-Mart lot that the young man was recently released from prison, as Nadine so vehemently insisted, she would have rolled up her window and gone on her way alone. But she was not about to back down now. Lydia Blessing
did what she wanted: that was something upon which she had prided herself. Once she moved to Blessings for good she told it to herself and to others over and over again, so that after a time it was said to be true: Lydia Blessing does what she wants. One of Foster’s nephews had set himself up in the apartment over the garage, as though it were his sinecure, the third generation of his family to do so, and two weeks later she had noticed from inside the sleeping porch that the garbage cans had been left at the roadside for a full day after the truck had come. She had even used the binoculars next to her bed to make certain that she was not being precipitous. Then she’d fired the man, and hired another, the man who plowed the driveway in winter. His coffee had been vile, and in his second month on the job he had left the door to the basement ajar, and a soiled work glove on the kitchen counter. She had looked at it for a long time, remembering when the grounds staff never went farther into the kitchen than the pantry, the kitchen staff never farther into the house than the dining room. There had been a succession of unsatisfactory men. It had never occurred to her that she was demanding.

  There was something furtive about this new one in the last few days, but he worked hard, never cut corners, never complained. From time to time she would see him disappear into the garage, but she also saw him hosing off the boat just after dawn as she watched the pond and the fields and the faraway road with her binoculars. He seemed to work odd hours now, but there were no weeds around her tree peonies, and the bachelor buttons had been properly pinched, so that they were spreading a constellation of blue beneath the window of the small office where she attended to her correspondence on stationery stacked in boxes ten deep inside the storage closet, stationery that would surely survive her.

  It was just luck that she had found him at the Wal-Mart. That morning she had told Nadine that the household expenses were exorbitant, that Nadine paid too much for paper towels and dishwashing detergent and light bulbs, that she was profligate with money that was not hers. Mrs. Blessing had put on her old driving jacket, the plaid one from the place Father liked so much in London, the one near Regent Street with all the guns and walking sticks, and walked slowly, her back straight, her head high, to the garage. The odor of mothballs and bath powder hung like a miasma in the still summer air of the car. The Cadillac had been dusty. It had been three weeks since she had taken it out, to go to the club for a drink with her lawyer. And she was between caretakers. The last one had brought a woman into the apartment one night and been fired by the end of the week. It paid to know what the staff was up to. Her mother had always said that.

  Mount Mason had seemed dusty, too, dusty and out-of-date, aging the way that the cheap houses around the industrial park did, peeling, cracked, disintegrating instead of mellowing. So many of her landmarks had gone, the old limestone bank building chopped up into a travel agency, a beauty parlor, and a used-book store; the boxy red brick hardware store refaced with some horrid imitation stone and made over into a place that sold records. She had had to drive around the circle in the center of town twice, unsure of which way to turn for the commercial strip, and a car full of teenagers had honked at her and driven far too close to her back bumper. And then there had been the horrid noisy glare of the store, and the insistence of the other shoppers on pushing past her and screaming at their dirty children. But she had found light bulbs cheaper than the ones Nadine had found at the ShopRite, and paper towels, too, in a bargain twelve-pack. “Could you put that in my cart,” she had said to one of the stock boys, with no hint of a question in the sentence. In a locked drawer in her dresser Mrs. Blessing had a handmade leather case crammed with her mother’s old, ugly, and rather showy jewelry: diamonds as big as almonds set in a piecrust of sapphires or emeralds, ropes of pearls that dropped to the waist with jeweled clasps. She owned nearly twelve hundred acres of the best land in the northeastern part of the state. But she was cheap the way the rich are often cheap, about small things that do not last. “Thrifty,” she called it. “For pity’s sake, Mother,” said Meredith, who felt a faint throb each time she looked at the old watch on the ropy spotted wrist.

  The Cadillac had died in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart. The engine rumbled disconsolately and then was silent, no matter how many times she turned the key. She had heard a peculiar sound from the car and suddenly realized that it was a man tapping on her window. He was thin and pale, his hair a kind of flat brown, tan really, all this way and that way over his forehead and his ears. He had small, closely set eyes and a big, wide, mobile mouth. There was a space between his front teeth. Alma, the cook at their house in the city, had once told the maids that this was a sign of licentiousness. “That’s a mark on a girl, and all the men can see it,” Alma had said, and she’d pushed her hips into the air, not knowing the little girl was lurking in the dim area just outside the pantry.

  Mrs. Blessing had held her handbag close as she looked at the man outside her car window.

  “You need a jump?” the young man had said loudly.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You need a jump? A jump? Do you—Sorry, do you want me to charge your battery from my battery? From my truck? It won’t take but a minute.”

  “What would be the charge for that?”

  He’d smiled then. It was a smile like Sunny’s, just this side of a grimace, as though it were a social gesture and his heart wasn’t in it. “Presentation!” Father had shouted at Sunny, hitting him between the shoulder blades. “Presence!”

  The car had started instantly after he had attached the cables from a dented pickup truck to the Cadillac. She’d had a moment’s panic when he’d pulled the jaws of the connectors from the two, afraid that the engine would sputter and stop again. Then she’d remembered herself and taken two dollars from her handbag and rolled down the window little more than an inch to slip them through.

  “Nobody’d charge you for that,” he’d said. “But you do need a tune-up. I don’t know who services your car, but they’re not taking good care of it.”

  She couldn’t say why, except that she thought he was too dim to be duplicitous, but she’d had him follow her home along the roads that left Mount Mason for the mountains.

  “What is your name?” she had said, seating him at the table in the kitchen as Nadine cleaned vegetables at the sink, making a good deal of noise, as though she were playing a concerto of disapproval written for colander, knives, pan lids, and faucet.

  “Skip,” he said. “Cuddy,” as though his last name were an afterthought.

  “Skip is not a name for a person. Skip is a dog’s name. Skippy. I knew a boy named Quad once.”

  “What?”

  “Quad.”

  “What?”

  “You deaf?” shouted Nadine.

  “Mind your own business,” Mrs. Blessing called over the noise from the sink.

  “I’m sorry, I thought you said Quad,” Skip had said, pushing his hair back and fidgeting in his chair.

  “I did. Quad Preston. Leland Preston the Fourth. Quad. Because of the Fourth. I refused to call him Quad. I don’t care for most nicknames. What is your real name?”

  He’d flushed, looked at his hands, which were cut and marked by the work in the prison laundry and the day job he had now, putting in fences. “Charles,” he said.

  “Charles, are you looking for work?” she’d asked.

  “Oh. Oh.” Nadine groaned and slashed at a head of broccoli with a carving knife.

  Mrs. Blessing liked to think of herself as a good judge of people, and of horses, although the horses were long gone, sold when Meredith went away to college. The cosmos grew so well in the far field because that was the land on which the horses and, before them, the cows had grazed, when Father had liked the idea of the place as a farm and himself as a gentleman farmer. “You’ve got a good eye, Lyds,” he said when they went to other farms to buy animals. He’d wanted to give the house a name when he first bought it, but before long everyone called it Blessings, and soon another name seemed beside the point.
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  She thought now she’d had a good eye for that young man. He was done with the grass in the fields and was clipping the yews around the pond spillway. Ed and Jeanne Chester had noticed an improvement in the property right away when they’d been out there the other night for drinks and dinner. “The place looks grand, Lydia,” Ed had said, sipping his Manhattan. “Wonderful,” Jeanne had added. “I’ve never seen the flowers looking finer.”

  “I have a new man,” Mrs. Blessing had replied, and the two of them had nodded solemnly. Jeanne was the daughter of Mrs. Blessing’s old friend Jess, with whom she had played tennis on the grass courts out back for so many Tuesday and Thursday mornings, filling the hours of their long aimless young lives. But Jess was dead now, like nearly all of Mrs. Blessing’s friends, and her daughter had grown from a young girl into a middle-aged woman. She and Mrs. Blessing, once a generation apart, had somehow become contemporaries and secondhand friends of a sort. Still, Jeanne and Ed were always deferential.

  “Where did you find him?” Ed asked, cocking his head to one side.

  Nadine made a snorting noise as she passed around the cubed cheese and olives. Mrs. Blessing made Nadine stay late when she had dinner guests, although Nadine stubbornly refused to wear a uniform.

  “Nadine doesn’t countenance change,” Ed said, with that twinkle that Mrs. Blessing had always found so irritating.

  “Pick up like dog,” Nadine said. “No references, no nothing.”

  “That’s enough, Nadine,” Mrs. Blessing had said.

  Nadine did not like change, but, then, neither did Lydia Blessing. It had been many years since she had cared to travel outside of Mount Mason, more than thirty since she’d driven up Park Avenue, which had once been the Main Street of her life. She liked her routines now, her breakfast, her Times, her letters posted, a light lunch, a walk around the pond with her stick at her side, perhaps a surreptitious doze in one of the Adirondack chairs with a book facedown on her lap, an hour of talk shows on television, an hour of news, a bowl of soup, two drinks, and an early bed. She didn’t sleep most of the night. She rested for the day ahead and thought about the days behind. It was a puzzle to her, how eagerly she’d rushed into life when she was eighteen or twenty, and in what a desultory fashion it had dragged out ever since. Even when she had been younger, thirty, forty years before, when there had been long house parties at Blessings and games of golf and swimming at midnight and dinners for twelve—even then, the days were so long, and the years somehow so short.