Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  And as though she knew all this, on the tenth day she rested. He lined the bottles up in the refrigerator, put her down, and fell asleep himself, expecting to wake to crying in an hour or two. And instead she slept until three, woke and ate, went back to sleep, complained just before dawn, drank down a bottle scarcely waking, and went back to sleep again, her small mouth pursed, her fingers splayed, until around nine o’clock. So he had time to go up the basement steps, make the coffee for Mrs. Blessing, clear fallen branches from the drive, and water the vegetables and the zinnias before she woke demanding more. In the afternoon he rode the tractor far from the house and took her from the sling to lay her on a towel beneath leggy elm trees waving in the wind. A breeze blew and her eyes widened and he swore that she smiled vacantly at the sky. The book said that she wouldn’t smile for weeks, but he knew what he’d seen. “Whoa,” he said, kneeling beside her. Solemnly she blinked, closed her eyes, and tightened her fist around his finger. As far as Skip was concerned, that was that. She was his.

  Often in the middle of the night Lydia Blessing had wakened to the sound of a baby’s cries. Over the years she had learned to identify the sources: sometimes something as pedestrian as the wail of a cat in heat; occasionally the high thin call of the coyote, which had snuck back into this part of the Northeast from the West a decade before.

  The first few months after she had discovered she was pregnant, when the new wedding band, while slender, felt like some unexpected weal on her finger, the cries had seemed to be the spectral calls of the child within. That was after she had moved her things from her parents’ house in the city to Blessings for what she had vaguely thought of as a wartime interlude, Benny’s letters on transparent airmail paper arriving in the old rural-route mailbox.

  And then Meredith had been born, and the cries had been real, yet somehow as foreign as their imaginary counterparts. Slowly she would struggle through the veil of her dreams to the momentarily sinister forms of the lamp, the dresser, the highboy, and the desk ranged around her bedroom, and for a moment she would wonder whose baby that was, crying. Her legs would struggle with the sheets, the blankets, and then there would come the even tap tap tap of the footsteps of the baby nurse that her mother had hired and sent out from the city, a thin woman with cropped hair and a faint middle-European accent who played solitaire in the kitchen in her off-hours. Lydia Blessing could remember, in those early weeks, thinking she would not be able to go back to sleep, hearing the tick of the mantel clock, feeling the soreness where she’d been stitched straight up the middle after the Caesarian birth. And then she would waken again to the bright clear light of full day through the branches of the maple outside the bedroom window. She never slept that deep sleep now, and her bedroom in the dark was as familiar as the dimpled face of the moon over the pond.

  In the last two weeks the cries had come again, more plaintive and more demanding even than those she had heard when there was truly a baby in the house. Sometimes she thought she was dreaming of those days, sixty years ago now, when Meredith had cried and been comforted, in some fashion, by that foreign woman, who carried the small flannel-wrapped bundle under her arm like a loaf of fractious bread. Sometimes she would start awake, then realize she was hearing the sound of a radio faintly from the garage apartment. She had told Nadine to put a stop to that.

  Tonight she could hear nothing but the steady timpani of thunder rolling in from the northeast. She went to the window and peered out into the darkness, but the storm clouds had muted a half-moon. Most of the time she could see one corner of the barn roof from the sleeping porch off her bedroom, one green-shingled curve and one of the lightning rods, a horse in full canter in copper faded to a dull brown. She had put the horse atop the rod herself, held around her waist by her father at the top of a long, long ladder held steady by two of the men who had built the barn. “Must everything be a show?” her mother had said in the dining room that morning when her father had suggested it. Ethel Blessing had not even come down to watch. She had stayed on the long front porch, in a rocking chair, while everyone, the servants, the workmen, the gardeners, had come to see Lydia lift the glowing copper horse into place. She remembered that it had been warm in her hands. Sunny had been at Benny Carton’s house in Rhode Island that day, she remembered. It was her only disappointment.

  Her father had built the barn in the summer of 1930, when there were no jobs in Mount Mason. The father and an uncle of one of the girls in Lydia’s class at Bertram’s had killed themselves after the stock market crash, and two of the girls in her class had gone elsewhere even though Miss Bertram had offered them scholarships. But Lydia’s mother had never believed in the stock market, or even banks for that matter, and somehow all of the money from the business she had inherited from her father, which had once been called Simpson’s Dry Goods but was now called Simpson’s Fine Textiles, was safe. They moved not long after the crash from a narrow house on Seventy-seventh Street near Lexington Avenue to the larger house on Seventy-fourth Street near the park, a house that was sold at a considerable loss by a man who had had to be hospitalized at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital just before the Christmas holidays after he realized that all his capital was gone.

  The people in Mount Mason had been glad of the work, and the barn had gone up fast, the wall supports and roof struts laid out flat in the middle of the big grass gully next to the swamp that Edwin Blessing had decided upon for its site. He had also decided that Sunny should work on the barn with the hired laborers from town. “Make a man of him,” Mr. Blessing kept saying, as though even character could be contracted out. “Teach him the value of hard work.” Sunny had been thirteen years old that summer. His hair grew pale as sunlight, and his skin golden. Lydia thought her brother was beautiful.

  “I was so in love with him when we were children,” Jess had told her one day when they were waiting to have lunch until Sunny’s train came in, the children passing time playing Parcheesi in the library. “He was so dear.” Lydia remembered that Sunny had not arrived for lunch that day, had come on the last evening train smelling of gin, a fresh cut at the corner of one eye. She had put him to bed in his usual room. “I’m a bad boy, Lydie,” he’d muttered, belching loudly and then falling asleep as though he’d been given an anesthetic. Fifty years ago, that had been, and she could still see his tanned arm dangling from the single bed.

  Her sheets were cool as she slid back between them, shining white as a night-light in the dark room. In the years that Blessings had been hers and hers alone, she had never had a colored sheet in the house. She intended to keep it that way. White towels, too.

  She had not been down to the barn in many years. It was deserted now, empty of all but pigeons and mice and the odd foraging fox. There was a long steep slope down to it; the builder had said that was the disadvantage to the site, but Father had wanted it there, with a long back drive to the road and a deep pasture to one side. The wife of the farmer from whom he’d bought the cows wept in the doorway as they were driven into a truck with open slatted sides, and Lydia, who was in the old Lincoln with her father, had thought that the farmer’s wife must know each cow individually, and was sad to have them leave. Bessie. Brownie. Calico the calf. Perhaps she was saying good-bye in her mind. Years later Lydia had told the story at a dinner party, described the woman in the pink flowered apron holding open the screen door with her hip, wiping her eyes with the hem of the apron, watching the black and white cattle lumbering up the ramp, her husband prodding them with a sharpened broomstick. And Jess had left before coffee and dessert, and next morning had called Lydia and told her in that choked and breathy voice she used when she was angry that the reason the woman was crying was that the sale of the cows was the only thing that had forestalled foreclosure on a farm that had been in her family since before the Civil War. Jess had known because her father was the president of the bank that held the mortgage.

  “I had no way of knowing that, for pity’s sake,” Lydia had said.

  “Tha
t’s forever your problem,” Jess had said. “You ought to have known. There are always these things that you ought to know and yet somehow you don’t. Open your eyes, Lydia. You are not the center of the universe.”

  Those were the two people who had been the center of her universe: Jess and Sunny. Both of them gone now. And the people she had thought she’d loved were gone, too, her father, who had built Blessings and then lost it to his wife and daughter, and Frank Askew, still handsome and sleepy-eyed in his obituary photograph in the Times fifteen years ago, still married to Ella, still on the hospital board and the Bedford town council. Both men had sung to her. “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you,” her father would sing in his clear tenor as he danced her around the drawing room of the house in the city. “Night and day, you are the one,” Frank had sung one night at a deb ball for one of his daughters at the club. There had been a breakfast afterward at the Askew apartment on Park Avenue, and he’d locked the door to one of the maid’s rooms and made love to her on the single bed, and all the time she had been able to hear Ella Askew down the hall, with her distinctive voice, loud and bright as dinner chimes, tell a long story about difficulties with the tent for her sister’s lawn wedding. “Beautiful,” Frank kept whispering. “Beautiful.” She was shamed by it all, flushed bright as a peach, but perhaps that had been the pleasure, too. At age twenty her body had seemed to have a mind of its own, to open of its own accord, as automatic as a heartbeat. It was hard to imagine now.

  Once she had said to Jess, when they had finished a bottle of wine out on the terrace during the long lunches they had had, the children grown and the men gone, when they were back to what they’d been as girls, “I’m sixty years old and I’ve never seen a man completely naked.”

  “Oh, Lyds,” Jess had said. “Oh, dear.” And then, “Well, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” They’d laughed till they cried. Just cried.

  Jess had come back to her then, for a few years. She had not meant to leave Lydia alone: she had simply done that most perfidious of things, made a happy marriage, with a good man who loved her and did everything he could possibly think of, from emerald earrings to keeping the children quiet on Saturday mornings, to show her that he did. They had both been married at the beginning of the war, she and Jess, and they had both been widowed during it. But Jess had made another life: two sons, three daughters, and Roger. And Lydia never had. Her life was a life in sepia and black-and-white with deckled edges, framed in silver, mounted in scrapbooks. It had been a former life even years ago.

  There was a clammy stillness to the warm summer air, as though the atmosphere were exhaling slowly. An enormous moth danced on the window screen by the head of her bed, determined to get to the faint light filtering up from the hallway lamp downstairs or to die trying. His wings made a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled, and his feet clicked against the wire mesh. For a moment she thought she had dropped off to sleep, heard in her dreams the sound of those old trucks climbing the rise from the drive and then heading down to where the barn was being built, their gears straining with a deep rumble. Then she remembered that it was the Fourth of July, and that there would be fireworks in Mount Mason. That was how she had first met Jess, when her father had taken her to the big field behind the train tracks to watch the holiday fireworks. “The bombs bursting in air,” he’d roared, his car lurching along the dirt roads. Jess’s father had invited her to share his daughter’s blanket, and he and Ed Blessing had shared a bottle. “You should have come, Sunny,” she’d said next morning. “I met a nice girl.”

  “Whose daughter was that?” her mother had demanded, but her father had mouthed the words bank president and then it had been all right. But after that they had always had their own fireworks, and Lydia had done the same once the house was hers. One Fourth there had been thirty people staying at the house, sleeping on the patio divans, doubling up in the bedrooms, and they’d had starbursts and Roman candles at midnight, and then strawberry shortcake and champagne, sitting on quilts spread around the front lawn. She remembered that Jess had not liked the people who came from the city. She thought they drank too much, and one of the women, she thought it was Penny Lind, had tried to sit on Roger’s lap.

  There was another boom, and then another, and a series of them, in waves, and she couldn’t parse out which were fireworks and which the storm building overhead. There was the silken sound of wind pushing the tree branches aside, and her room was lit silver with a strike of lightning nearby. The rain came with another gust of wind and a faint groaning sound from the old house, and the thunder again, sure of itself this time, filling the air. She hoped the Fosters were checking to make sure the barn doors were closed. Then she remembered that the Fosters were gone. There had been Fosters in Mount Mason for years and years. There had been Blessings for Lydia’s lifetime, and soon there would be none.

  “Don’t say anything to Mother and Father,” Sunny had said when he came up from the barn that first day he was supposed to be working, holding his right arm with his left one, a scratch across his cheek. She had been sitting on the grass by the frog pond, holding some new barn kittens in her lap, and in the slanting sun she could see the pale down on his face where his beard was coming in. He got through dinner, eating left-handed without anyone noticing, and somehow he made it through the night, although in the morning he looked as if he hadn’t slept at all. Lydia wondered how he’d gotten on his dungarees and the frayed white shirt from his old school uniform that he wore to work on the barn.

  “Mr. Blessing, sir, this arm’s broken,” the foreman had said, jerking his head toward Sunny when her father had gone down to stand around and talk about the progress of his barn. Mr. Foster drove them to the little hospital in Mount Mason, and she held Sunny’s hand while the doctor set his arm. He’d cried out twice, turned white, then red, tiny beads of perspiration like pearls along his forehead. Then he’d fallen against her. “I need some salts in here,” the doctor had yelled to a nurse while Lydia held Sunny’s slack dead weight.

  “That boy is a disappointment,” her father had said after they put him on the train to Newport to stay with Benny Carton. When he came home Sunny said he’d learned to sail with just one arm.

  The rain was strong now, like the sound of gravel falling on the old slate roof. A gust blew a handful of drops through the screen and onto her pillow. Mrs. Blessing struggled slowly to her feet and brought down the sash. Her left arm was aching where she supposed she’d slept on it. She began to drift off again when a clap of thunder like an explosion settled over the house. They’d used dynamite to blow open the earth, to pour the cement foundation for the barn. She remembered being deaf and dazzled afterward, as though all her senses had been rattled by the sound. The thunder was like that, and on its heels another jab of lightning, so bright this time that for a moment it outdid the outdoor lights. Then the light outside her window, and the ones by the front door and front walk, went out. She realized, looking from her pillow into a black night deep as a well, that the lights in the hallway and kitchen had gone out, too. She was irritated, and then, when she smelled burning, afraid.

  The alarm for the house went off with a shrill scream, and she pressed her hands to her temples. When she could bear the sound no longer she stepped into her house slippers and felt her way down the stairs as though she were a blind woman, her white gown rippling like a sail in a high wind, driven by the gusts coming in through the bedroom windows, the hallway windows, and finally, when she had touched each step tentatively on the way down, the windows downstairs. The alarm would not turn off. Her foot slid on a patch of rainwater in the hallway and she started to fall, then caught the knob of a closet door. Feeling along the walls, she sank into the wing chair in the living room and lifted the phone. There was no sound. The burning smell was stronger.

  “Damn,” she said aloud in the empty house, with no one to hear, with the ringing and the thunder and the percussion of the heavy rain drowning out the word.

/>   From inside the closet she took out her raincoat and then tied a scarf around her hair. On the dining room table there was a bell that she used to call Nadine sometimes, and she took it to the back door and swung it frantically, the rain blowing into her face. The small silvery sound was nothing to the din. There were no lights on in the garage apartment, and no sign of life. In the kitchen drawer there was a large flashlight. She swung the beam around the room, then stamped one foot in rage and frustration. The sound of the alarm was intolerable, like having a tooth drilled.

  By the time she got to the stairs leading up to the garage apartment her slippers were soaked through. The rain was sluicing down the drive in great sheets, and during one long lightning strike she could see the pond roiled by the wind and a big limb from the willow tree lying on the lawn. “Charles!” she cried up the narrow stairway. “Charles!” There was a faint echo. She was appalled by the notion of finding him sleeping. It was not that she felt she was intruding on his privacy, more that he was intruding on hers by forcing her to come up to his living quarters and ask for help when he should already be providing it as a matter of course. Even here the screeching of the alarm was loud.

  She shone the flashlight around the apartment kitchen and frowned as she saw how untidy it was, with cans and saucepans ranged around the counter. She edged her way down the hall. “Charles?” she called again. The door to the biggest bedroom was closed, and she knocked, then knocked again. When she opened it she could see that the bed was made. There were two fans in the window, and both of them had blown water onto the wood floor before the power outage shut them down. Beneath one of the windows was a bureau drawer, and as she shone the flashlight into it she moved closer to peer inside. There was a baby sleeping on its side, a rolled towel behind its back to keep it propped in position. There was a faint luminescent freckling on one cheek, the mark of raindrops that had blown in but not waked it.