Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  “We know each other already,” Jennifer said. “We knew each other at school. Except for the Charles part.”

  “It’s Skip,” Skip said, feeling the heat in his face.

  “Charles, before it slips my mind,” said Mrs. Blessing, “I am unhappy about what you’re doing to that willow tree. There’s no need for you to prune that. That tree has a particular shape. It’s not like a maple, or an elm. The weight of a willow tree goes down, not up. I would like to look at that tree before you do any more work on it. My father planted those trees. They are not replaceable.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But you’d better look at it soon. Half the branches on that tree are dead wood. There’s all this poison ivy vine that’s wrapped itself around the dead branches, that you can’t see from here with the binoculars. The woodpeckers are having a field day, and if we have a good-sized storm anytime soon, which we will have, since it’s July, it just might take off the good wood with the rotten stuff. That’s what happened during the July fourth storm. If it happens again, your father’s whole tree’ll wind up in the pond and I’ll be pulling it out with chains and the tractor.”

  Skip could feel Jennifer Foster watching him. He loved that tree, too.

  “That tree has done fine without you for sixty-odd years, Charles,” Mrs. Blessing said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And it will be fine for sixty more.”

  “No, ma’am, it won’t. I called the county extension service and they said that by rights I should prune a third of the small limbs on that tree every year. And there’s one more thing. There’s a repair that needs to be made to the roof of the barn, right near the door to the hayloft. It’s that place where the lightning hit during the storm. It has—”

  Mrs. Blessing got to her feet. When she moved, her clothes gave off a sharp powdery scent, like the lavender in the beds by the boathouse. “Take care of it,” she said, moving toward the piano and riffling through the sheet music on its stand.

  “I think it’s probably too big a job for me. Someone was shooting off a gun in there, maybe shooting pigeons or wood doves, and then the rain made—”

  She did not stop or turn back toward him, and there was a certain grave dignity to the precision of her slow and labored movements. Skip suddenly realized, looking at her curved back, that when she was younger she must have been a tall woman, nearly as tall as he was.

  “Have it taken care of,” she said.

  Jennifer Foster followed him outside and across the driveway turnaround. She stopped by her little blue car. A straw handbag was on the seat, and a pair of sunglasses. There was a stuffed panda on the dash wearing a little shirt that said “Number 1 Daughter!” Skip figured it had come from her father.

  “It sounds as if you can cut back the willow tree,” she said. “If she doesn’t object outright, then it means she agrees. If she really objects, you’d know about it.”

  “You translating?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Jennifer said, smiling. “I’ve known her a long time. I remember I wanted to cut my hair in sixth grade. She said, ‘I won’t hear of it.’ And when I said I was going to Mason County Community, you should have heard her.”

  “She wanted you to go to State?”

  “She wanted me to go to Wellesley. Or Smith.”

  “Never heard of them,” Skip said.

  “Waiting!” Nadine screeched from the kitchen window.

  “Sorry,” Jennifer said. “I have to go back in and play the piano. She says it saves on tuning.” She smiled again, and squinted up at him in the sun. “You should just fix the barn. You don’t even have to ask her about the barn when there’s a problem.”

  “How long have you known her?” Skip asked.

  “For as long as I’ve been in Mount Mason,” she replied. “She had my mother bring me over in the beginning to satisfy her curiosity, I think. And then she wanted to make sure that I wasn’t being allowed to speak Korean at home. Americans should be American. That’s what she always says. She obviously doesn’t know my mother. My mother wouldn’t let me speak Korean on the plane, much less in Mount Mason.”

  “So you think of her as like a grandmother?”

  “Not exactly. It sounds weird, but I think we’re friends. She started out wanting to arrange my life, the way she arranges everything around here, you know. She still tries to do some of that. But then I think she got to like me. She must like you.”

  “Why?”

  “She lets you in the house. I’m not even sure the Fosters were ever allowed in the house, except to serve meals or lay the fires in the fireplace. She’s funny that way. And since you’ve been here she’s seemed livelier, I guess I’d say. More tuned in than she has been.”

  “I’m not sure she likes me. I think she thinks I do a good job.”

  “With her it comes to the same thing. You should just fix the roof. It’ll be fine.”

  “The thing is, I can’t do it myself. It’ll take a professional roofer. You need special ladders and scaffolds. It’s not a one-person job.”

  “Then you should hire a roofer. She’ll complain, but she’ll pay for it. She never goes down to the barn, but she likes it kept up. Her father had it built for the cows, and her daughter used to stable her horses there.”

  “It seems like a waste. Nobody uses it.”

  “She doesn’t care. She just wants it kept up. Her brother died down there. There’s a stone, right where there’s that big clump of lilac bushes. When they’re in bloom I always cut her a big bouquet. The first time I ever came in the living room was to put the vase on the table.”

  “I didn’t know you were allowed to just bury people on your property.”

  “I’m not sure he’s buried there. Anyhow, Mrs. Blessing is allowed to do whatever she pleases. My father says she can make straw into gold and water into wine. Like Grimms’ fairy tales or the Bible.”

  “Do you really think that’s true? Not the straw, but that she can do what she wants and get away with it?”

  Jennifer Foster shrugged. “The point is, if she needs something done, she can find a way to get it done. And she wants you to find a way to get it done, too.”

  “I get that,” he said. “I meant to say before, your car is idling low. I could tune it the next time you’re here, if you want. If you want, I mean.”

  “Thanks,” she said, in the voice girls like her always used for guys like him at school. “My father owns a garage, so he usually does it.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I knew that. Stupid.”

  “No, no. Thanks, really.” There was a spear of silver from the porch window. “Don’t look now, but she’s watching us.”

  “Did you cut your hair in sixth grade?” he said.

  “Are you kidding? Of course not.”

  With a faint sense of irritation Mrs. Blessing realized that someone had invented many things that made having a baby infinitely easier than when she’d had a baby herself. Instead of the ungainly pram with its big stiff wheels there was this sling contraption that allowed a person to carry an infant around everywhere, hands free. Instead of the papers of enormous safety pins with Bakelite heads of pink or blue, there were these tapes to hold the paper diapers fast, printed with little dancing characters of some kind. Even the bottles were different, the nipple squared off, the inside lined with plastic bags. It reinforced her feeling that the young women of today had it easier than she had.

  On the other hand, she was rather proud of her pink KeepSafe baby monitor. Skip had handed it over with an air of resignation, the compromise between leaving the baby alone and letting her sleep in the big house when he was out and about. “You can hear every noise she makes,” he had said. “But don’t overreact. Sometimes she’ll just make a little sound and then go back to sleep.” Mrs. Blessing switched the monitor on. “I don’t hear a thing,” she said.

  “Listen real carefully,” he said.

  She pressed the receiver to her ear. In response she could hear faintly the sound of shallow bre
athing, in and out, in and out.

  “That’s her,” Skip had said proudly. Shyly he added, “Her name is Faith.”

  Mrs. Blessing pursed her lips. “I like it,” he added. “It’s not one of those made-up names that everybody has nowadays, like Summer or Whitney or whatever.”

  “There are children named Summer?”

  He nodded. “There’s a guy I know, his girlfriend had twins. Summer and Autumn.”

  “Dear Lord,” Mrs. Blessing had said. It was the closest she ever came to profanity.

  “What about Faith?”

  “I’m sure it will do nicely,” she said.

  “It just came to me,” he said.

  He had had to go out as soon as Nadine pulled away, to try to get to the motor vehicle office before it closed, to register Mrs. Blessing’s Cadillac. “She just got fed and changed,” he had said through the screen door to the living room. “She should sleep until I get back. Can you hear her?”

  Mrs. Blessing held the monitor to her ear. “Perfectly well,” she said.

  Ten minutes after he pulled out she heard a faint snort and convinced herself that it was her responsibility to check on the child. It was an effort for her to climb the steps to the apartment, and when she arrived at the top she was perspiring and her shoulder ached. She realized that the other sound she heard on the monitor was the sound of the fans going. Perhaps she should buy an air conditioner for the apartment. Then she snorted herself. Another indulgence for an indulged age. She remembered how the baby nurse had given Meredith cool sponge baths on July days like this one. The baby had splashed spastically, sneezing when the water got into her eyes. Lydia had been afraid always that her child would slip beneath the surface and drown.

  This baby looked sturdier somehow. The deep pleat in the fat at her elbow made her arms look muscled. Her mouth moved in a sucking motion. She was in the small vinyl Portacrib Skip had unloaded from the truck, along with a swing and a car seat. “I always wondered who shopped at garage sales,” he’d said. “Now I know. I got all this great stuff for ten bucks.”

  Mrs. Blessing liked economy, particularly in those who couldn’t afford to be profligate. But something sad stirred within her at the sight of the baby, who was becoming quite pretty in that puffy pink baby fashion, in the slightly shabby, slightly faded pastel print of the folding crib, a crib some other child had used when it was new. She laid her hand, which always trembled slightly now, atop the head and felt her fingers mold themselves automatically to the small skull. It was her favorite part of an infant because it seemed strongest, not as vulnerable as the wobbly trunk or flailing arms. There was a small mobile of mice hanging, grinning, from colored umbrellas; when she took her hand away she knocked it, and the first three notes of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” were sharp in the quiet half-darkness. The baby stirred, moved her head to the side, and brought a fist to her slack mouth.

  When Mrs. Blessing went back to the house she felt worn out, and as she breathed in concert with the breathing on the monitor she felt herself slip away and begin to doze. When the telephone rang she came awake, terrified, as though it were the security alarm again. But it was only Meredith, who made it a habit to call on Wednesdays just before dinner.

  “How are you feeling, Mother?” she always said now, instead of a simple hello.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “Of course not. Why in the world would I be sleeping? It isn’t six yet.”

  “How are the flowers?”

  “About as well as can be expected in this heat. This new man takes good care but the bugs have made a hash of the nasturtiums, and the lupines are terribly thin.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Meredith said. “How is Nadine?”

  “Don’t get me started on Nadine. If it were possible to find decent help, she’d be in Mount Mason looking for a job.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Meredith said again, by rote, her voice breathy with boredom and impatience.

  Two women long past their prime, talking about nothing, Mrs. Blessing thought, that’s what she and her daughter had become. Mrs. Blessing wondered what Meredith would say if she told her about the baby in the box, and realized that she had no earthly idea, which seemed terrible. She should know her daughter better, and she knew that this must be at least partly her fault. The baby nurse, the nanny, the summers in Newport, the boarding schools. Meredith had made an early marriage and moved to the horse farm in Virginia, which she’d bought with the proceeds from the sale of the Carton grandparents’ house. The result was that they did not know each other very well. Mother and daughter had always to become reacquainted, like people who met from time to time at the same parties.

  When she was younger Meredith had tried to talk to her sometimes when they were riding together, after school, before dinner, playing twenty questions to try to measure her young self and puzzle out what she was made of. What was your favorite food when you were my age, Mother? How many girls were in your class at Bertram’s? Tell me again about the time you and Uncle Sunny tobogganed onto the pond and broke through the ice. Tell me again about the party Nana and Papa had when you were coming out. Lydia Blessing had felt rather smug that at least she answered her daughter’s questions, not like her own mother, who often just had said, “Curiosity killed the cat.”

  “How is your leg feeling?” Meredith said now.

  When she had opened her eyes in the hospital two years ago she had been dreaming about that coming-out party. Or perhaps dreaming was not what it was called, when you had had a stroke. In the dream, she had been in the library of a club on Park Avenue; she was wearing a white faille dress that fell off her shoulders in big stiff pleats. The room was not very crowded; many of the guests her mother had invited had had other parties that evening, or at least that was what her mother had said. Across the room Lydia saw Frank Askew, whose daughter had been two years behind her at Bertram’s. He had a mustache and a widow’s peak. It had all been much as she remembered it, except that in the dream he had come across the room to talk to her, which hadn’t happened until a drinks party several months later. And he had bent and kissed her neck, the mustache tickling, which had happened some weeks after the drinks party, in a stuffy back bedroom at the Askews’ apartment that smelled of Shalimar and laundry soap and lemon wax. In the dream she had wanted to turn and walk away, and yet had been unable to do so, as she had been unable to do so in life all those years ago. She had been paralyzed, and aroused, too, as she had been in life. Except that when she had looked down at Frank’s brilliantined red head, bent to the curve of her shoulder, she had seen above the low neckline of the white dress the blue veins, the ropy muscles, the semaphore of brown cast across the skin, and realized that it was her old and not her younger self that he was kissing in the dream.

  Then everything had gone bright white, and she had opened her eyes and been still paralyzed, at least on one side, and still deeply stirred, although the feeling evaporated so quickly, in the glare of the hospital lights and the sudden attention of the nurses and Meredith’s guttural weeping, that she could convince herself that it had been something else, some medical condition.

  There had been no private room available, and she had had to share a room with a woman from north of Mount Mason who had had her gallbladder removed. “She goes on and on about her grandchildren until you want to scream,” Mrs. Blessing had said, slurring her words slightly, since the stroke had been a minor one. She had not noticed the look on Meredith’s face. After so many years of living alone, she had to remind herself that part of saying the right thing was reading the face of the person to whom you were speaking. It was no wonder that her own mother, who had tended to look down at her own rings whenever she talked, had so often gotten things wrong.

  “Come visit next weekend,” Mrs. Blessing said into the phone suddenly as the breathing on the baby monitor beside her rose and fell. She was certain as she said the words that she meant them as she never had before, and as c
ertain that she would regret the offer once it was made. There was only so much change in her routine that she could manage at any given time. She looked down at the monitor again.

  “What’s wrong?” Meredith said.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Need something be wrong for me to invite you to come to the house? Never mind. Never mind. Don’t put yourself out.”

  “Mother, we’d love to come. But there’s a customer coming to look at that foal that was born last month. And an assessor. What about the end of the month?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Blessing said, as though she were studying her calendar. It always lay open on her desk: white, white, like the dress in her dream, the dress that covered her face like a cloud when Frank had thrown up the skirt. White except for here and there an appointment with the doctor, a note about a dinner. There was Jess’s birthday marked on July 18, Jess’s birthday but Jess now sixteen years dead. “I suppose that will have to do,” she said to Meredith.

  “I could try to reschedule the assessor—”

  “No, no, the end of the month is fine. I suppose Nadine can get some decent corn by then.”

  Through the window she could see the lawns spread gray-green around the pond, the grass dry from lack of rain. Some small black birds picked at the foot of the dock and at the grass around the boat. For some reason that curve of bright white wood on the lawn gave her the sort of quiet feeling of contentment that she now found rather rare, and she realized that cupping the baby’s head for that brief moment had done the same. Those moments had always come rarely to her, and almost always about small creature comforts, never in times of great emotion. It was a feeling of peace accompanied by a kind of settling in her chest, her chest that was usually taut and thrown forward so that, when young, her breasts had been emphasized in a way men found suggestive and yielding and was really just the opposite. As a child, a pair of new shoes might bring the feeling on, and later a nice restaurant meal, or the simple sight of a quartet of iced martini glasses atop a tray out on the patio. The sight of Sunny had given her that feeling, too, when he came home from prep school or out to the house in the country, those years he had visited her here. And when she was much younger she had had that feeling when her father entered the room.