Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  “I was surprised by her, too,” he said finally in a tired voice, pointing the beam of the flashlight down at the floor. The room was quiet and the rain slowing, so that the individual raindrops fell on the roof like the sound of a child hammering on one key of a piano, one low note again and again. From their pattern he could tell that the storm was moving, and that by daybreak the air would be clear. He went down the hall to the hook where he hung the big slicker one of the Fosters had left behind.

  “Charles,” she called querulously after him, and he stiffened. “What is this baby’s name?”

  “She doesn’t have a name yet,” he said.

  “That’s preposterous. Where’s her mother?”

  “She doesn’t have a mother either.”

  “It’s impossible to imagine how someone could do everything that is needed around here and take care of an infant as well,” she said.

  “I would never have hired a man with a small child,” she said.

  “Babies are very unpredictable,” she said.

  Mostly he said nothing. He looked down at the Aubusson rug in the small study and rubbed at a paint spot on his brown work pants. This was the room where Lydia Blessing did what she thought of as business, where she told the carpenter the estimate was too high, complained to Nadine’s husband that the heat in the car was still insufficient, paid bills and wondered aloud why everything cost so much. Her father had done business here as well, with the decanter at his elbow.

  “Are you absolutely certain?” she said. “Just placed on the steps like that, in a box? Wasn’t there any sort of identification, or some sort of note?”

  “It’s not the kind of thing you’d make a mistake about, ma’am,” he said.

  “It’s very difficult to believe that someone would just abandon an infant in the middle of nowhere like that,” she said, straightening a stray envelope in one cubby.

  “It is the ideal place for you to have the baby,” her mother had said sixty years before.

  She put her hand to her forehead. There it was again, the echo, the minuet of words spoken in the present with those from the past. It had gotten worse since she had seen the baby in the yellow glare of the flashlight, sleeping with a fist pressed to its pursed lips. Her mother had been right, of course. In the middle of nowhere had seemed a good place to raise a child during that first year of the war. There were always rumors that bombings would begin in New York just as they had in London, and the social life of the city was constrained, partly in deference to the war, partly because there were no men around.

  Of course the young Lydia had thought it was a temporary measure, and that Blessings would once again become a country retreat when the war was over and real life began. In her mind’s eye she could see the apartment she and Benny would have, the brocade sofa against the long wall of the living room, the barrel end tables, the painting of a sailing schooner over the mantel. Benny would go downtown to his father’s firm, which would someday be his firm, and Lydia would play cards with girls she had once gone to Bertram’s with, and their children would go to Bertram’s, too, or the Thomas Makepeace Vester School for Boys, which was where Benny and Sunny had gone before they had gone away to boarding school. Sunny would come to dinner and make them both laugh, and the children would love him, perhaps as well as, if not better than, they loved their mother and father. It was as though it all really existed; it was all there, all true, as though, as their upper-school science teacher had said, Professor Einstein had indeed shown that all time took place simultaneously, only in different locations.

  In the middle of the night, as Meredith had been mollified by the rubber nipple and the thick yeasty-smelling formula, as the soft sounds of the outside slipped into the silence of the house, Mrs. Blessing had imagined that in an apartment on Park Avenue an older, wiser Lydia was going over the menu for a dinner party and telling a roomful of overexcited children to go see Nanny, please, and go to the park to play. It was only the moments alone with Benny she could not imagine, what she would say, what he would say, how he would touch her, what it would feel like, whether it would always feel cool and hesitant and smooth when he kissed her.

  “This is all right, isn’t it, Lydie?” he’d whispered at the municipal building after they were married. “This will be good.”

  “A child should have two parents,” she said to Skip Cuddy, folding her hands firmly in her lap and looking out over the pond. Still he was silent.

  Lydia Blessing had known Benny Carton almost her entire life. She had been five when he and Sunny became friends at Vester. “You have a sister,” Benny had breathed the first time his nanny brought him to the house, and he had reached out a hand to touch a blue ribbon tied around her hair.

  “You have two brothers,” Sunny said.

  “It’s not the same,” Benny said. “Is she good?”

  “I like her,” Sunny had said. That was what she remembered, how happy she had been. “Sunny likes me, Mama,” she had said that night at dinner after he’d been sent from the table for making his napkin into a hand puppet and refusing to make the hand puppet be quiet.

  “Well, he ought to, oughtn’t he?” her mother had said.

  It was odd, how important those things were to children. She wondered what she had said casually to Meredith that she had never given a thought and that Meredith could remember like a motto on a sampler. Well, he ought to, oughtn’t he? As though Sunny’s liking was no more momentous than a napkin on the lap, or a fish knife with Dover sole. But it was Sunny’s matter-of-fact “I like her” that she would never forget. He and Benny had always been together after that day, although now Benny lay beneath a white stone cross in a small cemetery by the sea in Newport and Sunny’s ashes had been scattered over the pond, a breeze blowing them up and over, into the air and then into the green water eddying around the little boat.

  She closed her eyes at the memory. Skip was still standing silent, and she wanted to make him say something. “I am far too old to have even collateral responsibility for an infant,” she said loudly in the small dark-paneled room as he picked at the spot on his pants.

  “I don’t like that guy one little bit,” Benny had said when he cut in on her and an older boy from Vester at a club dance. She remembered that, too. And that his hand at the small of her back had perspired, so that when they went onto the terrace that looked out over the children’s zoo she felt a cold place there. “I don’t like the way he behaves,” Benny had said when they were outside, holding their cigarettes conspicuously, both of them experimental smokers. “I’d rather not be more specific than that.” He had leaned over the ornamented limestone balcony, his head tilted to one side. “Listen,” he said. “Can you hear the monkeys?” She thought she could, a faint hooting sound, like the disapproving crowd at a sporting event if you were outside the stadium. Benny smiled. “You can hear them from my gran’s apartment. When I was little I thought they were talking. I used to think I could hear whole conversations in monkey talk.”

  “What were they saying?”

  “Not much. They say a lot of the same things we do, really. Weather. Gossip.”

  “That’s dull,” Lydia had said. Even when she was younger, sweeter, more tractable, less deadened by life, she had been what the teachers called blunt.

  Benny had laughed. He was not much taller than she was, and the way his hair arched back at each corner of his forehead foretold his future baldness. He had black eyes and long lashes, a small thin dash of a mouth bracketed by dimples, like a punctuation mark. That’s what she had said on the balcony, and he had laughed again.

  “You’re the only girl in the world I like,” he’d said, and he’d said it again the day they were married. He was still a little drunk that morning from the night before, and he sucked on peppermints so the clerk wouldn’t notice, although they overlooked a lot in the city hall chapel in those days, especially if the groom was in uniform. Three days later he was sent south to a base in Georgia, and then quickly overseas to
Europe. His letters suggested cryptically that his facility with languages would keep him out of harm’s way. Her mother sent Lydia to the country to do the same for her, or so she said.

  “It’s been sixty years since there’s been a baby in this house,” Lydia Blessing said.

  She had gotten the telegram telling her Benny was dead on the day that Meredith took her first step, lurching from the ottoman to the end table in the den. Benny’s father sent a car to bring her to the memorial service at St. Stephen’s, and afterward he took her into the library of the big apartment on Fifth Avenue and asked if Meredith could come to them in Newport for a month of every summer. All three of the Carton boys were dead, one of scarlet fever, another in the war two weeks before his brother. Only Benny had had time to marry. “Please say yes,” Mrs. Carton had murmured in the foyer. “Or more often if you’d like.”

  “It’s a good opportunity for Meredith,” Ethel Blessing had said when her parents came out to the house for the weekend.

  “Cherchez l’argent,” Lydia had said bitterly, but Ethel Blessing, who had not gone to Bertram’s, like so many of Lydia’s friends’ mothers had, but instead had been taught at home by a nanny who spoke bad French with a German accent, said only, “They have a lovely home. They are nice people.” As though the two were one and the same, eighteen rooms equaling excellent character.

  Lydia had stayed on in the country house for a while, thinking it was easier to have this interlude, with Mrs. Foster cooking and the baby nurse taking care of Meredith. It was difficult for her to imagine how she would manage to greet Frank Askew when she got back to the city, how she could affect the even uninterested gaze and the cool polite platitudes a girl was expected to use when she spoke to the fathers of her friends. It was difficult to imagine meeting his wife and daughters in Central Park with Meredith and watching their eyes light on the small face with swiftly veiled recognition. It made it easier when she remembered that the nannies usually took the children to the park, that in their heavy prams, in their embroidered caps, the babies all looked the same, as if they could be anyone’s.

  She spent hazy summer mornings walking around the pond, weeping, thinking about finding a place to live in New York and when it would be decent for her to return. She wept for her husband, not because she had not married him for love, but because had he lived she would have had to pretend she had until enough time had passed for them to settle into the passive give-and-take of the not unfriendly society pair. Each afternoon she took her baby with her in the boat, rowing from one end of the pond to another, while the nurse stood on the high ground by the dock, frowning down at her muddy shoes.

  The boat still lay by the pond, shining white. She remembered that Charles had painted it the week before, and remembering, she had a picture in her mind of him, stoop-shouldered and furtive, and understood that he had been carrying the child with him everywhere for days.

  “I can’t imagine what sort of a person would abandon a child in this fashion,” she said.

  Two months before Benny died she had received the longest of his letters. It was clear from the scribbling on the envelope and a variety of official stamps that it had gone badly astray after it was mailed. His handwriting was difficult to read, the left-handed scrawl of a haphazard student. She had waited until she was seven months pregnant to write to him about the baby. They had spent three nights in a small hotel on Gramercy Park, and on none of them had he been able to make love to her in the usual way. His ways were Benny ways, she supposed at the time, gentle, tentative, generous, a little boyish, as though they were in the back closet at dancing class. The sight of his handwriting on the letter had made her fearful, but there was nothing to fear.

  “Dear Lydie,” he had scrawled, “I am really happy about the baby. I hope it will be a girl, and that she will look exactly like you. The happiest thought I have here is that someday I will come home and you will be there and the baby will be there and it will be like a regular ordinary family and all this will be like a bad dream. When I keep that in my mind I am all right. Love, Benny (your husband).”

  It was as though with the parenthetical expression he was trying to convince, or remind, himself. And her. He had always loved babies, Benny had. He was the sort of boy who would help a pair of toddlers build with blocks at a birthday party while the other older boys were ripping up the drawing room and throwing cake. He was the sort of man who would have spent endless hours pushing a child on the swings in Central Park. She had been able to see him in her mind, singing nonsense songs, pushing a pram through the park paths while the nanny clucked disapproval. “Mr. Carton, sir,” she would say. “Mr. Carton! That’s my job.”

  That stayed with her for years, that sketch drawn in a few simple sentences, that idea of a parallel life that might have been hers, with Benny in a chesterfield chair, losing his hair little by little, and Meredith growing every day more like her mother, or even like Benny, instead of more like Frank Askew.

  A week after she’d learned that Benny was dead an enormous box had arrived from the stationers on Madison Avenue, and when she opened it she found box after box of ecru-colored cards. “Mrs. J. Bennet Carton” was engraved at the top of each one in faint script the color of coffee with cream. “Blessings, Mount Mason.” There was stationery enough to last for years.

  It had been a winter day, snow thick upon the roof and trees, and in the silence broken only by the sound of logs spitting sap from the living room fireplace Lydia had looked at the cards and understood then, as surely as if they were legal documents. Her mother had decided that Lydia was to live in exile at Blessings, never again to sleep lulled by the sounds of cars struggling by in the morass of the streets of the East Side of Manhattan. She knew. Lydia did not know how, but her mother knew. The sin Lydia Blessing thought she’d hidden so neatly was known to some and had to be kept secret from all the rest. She threw one of the boxes of stationery into the fire, then another, until the flames reached out with blue-and-orange claws, burned Lydia’s right hand, blistered and blackened the paint of the mantelpiece.

  “I’m happy you’ve made up your mind to stay,” Mrs. Foster said when Lydia told her she would remain at Blessings for a while. “The city is no place to bring up a child.”

  Lydia’s younger self had punished her mother by exiling her, too, at least in effigy, by banishing all the customs and ceremonies that Ethel Blessing had held so dear at Blessings. Since she had never thought of herself as anyone but Lydia Blessing, she ordered her own stationery with her own name on it in a fit of defiance that surprised even her when the cards and envelopes finally arrived. Just as she had burned some of the cards her mother had sent and put the rest away in the garage attic, so she buried the formalities that had defined the lives of her mother and her mother’s friends.

  For a time life at Blessings was irregular: sandwiches slapped together by other young widows who came for the weekend and ate at odd hours, swimming in their underwear with men who played at being interested in women. White circles from drink glasses on bedside tables, a martini shaker always in the bar refrigerator, the faint creak of bedroom doors opening and closing in the middle of the night.

  But the customs of slight degeneracy had become customs nonetheless, and after a time the swims became tedious, and sometimes dangerous for the guests who were really drunk, and everyone began to want better meals. And before she knew it Lydia’s life, too, had become a series of small ceremonies. The house parties became one or two long-married couples staying the weekend, and the gossip was about their children and their children’s friends instead of one another. There was tennis in the morning, croquet in the late afternoon, and Sunday brunch of Bloody Marys and omelets filled with herbs from the garden (in summer) or cheese from the farmer who raised goats down the road (in winter). During the week she played golf every Wednesday, followed by a swim, and tennis with her best friend, Jess.

  “This is my birthday wish,” Jess had said when she was turning thirty, a month afte
r Lydia had done so. “I want you to meet someone nice and marry again and have three more children who will play with my children, and when we’re old we’ll sit by your pond and talk about old times and watch our grandchildren swim the way we swam.”

  But none of it had turned out as Jess had wanted. Her children had come by with their mother to swim in the pond with Meredith, but there had been no husband for Lydia, and so no more children, and it had become clear over time that there would be no grandchildren, either. Jess had not gotten old, she had gotten sick. Lydia had spent hours sitting next to her bed and holding her hand, and Jessie had cried, “Goddamnit, I feel gypped.” And Lydia had felt gypped, too.

  She did not care to play golf or tennis after that, and soon she could no longer swing a club, what with the arthritis in her hands and shoulders, and the weekends with houseguests had given way to the occasional visit from Meredith and her husband, the occasional lunch with her lawyer, the occasional dinner with Jess’s daughter Jeanne and her husband, Ed. One set of rituals had given way to another as summer gave way to fall, not through choice but through inevitable custom. Sometimes she thought of Benny in his leather chair, reading the papers, losing his hair, but more often she thought of him as a boy listening to the monkeys talk, his head to one side, trying to figure out what the monkeys were saying. She thought of him and Meredith, rowing across the pond, laughing.

  She sighed. Thinking of the monkeys had made her sad, and her voice soft. “Charles,” she said. “Now that I am aware of this peculiar chain of events, at the very least you could bring her outside. Keeping her perpetually indoors can’t be healthy.”

  And finally he spoke, perhaps because the frost had melted from her voice. “I can’t be out with her, ma’am,” he said. “If Nadine sees her, she’ll tell Mr. Foster, and he’ll tell some of the guys he works with, and they’ll tell their wives, and then people will say I stole her, or she belongs to some girl in town that I was, I guess you’d say, fooling around with, and then there’ll be all these rumors, and they’ll send somebody official to see me, and there’ll be this whole big mess, and who knows what might happen.”