Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  “Son, we’d like to thank you,” the girl’s father said, standing and putting out his hand, but Skip could only put his palms up as though he were pushing him away.

  “Sir, I appreciate that, but there’s nothing you could say right now that I want to hear. I just think you should know that she’s—that she’s—” But he couldn’t push any more words past the harsh twist in his throat, and he just put his head down and shook it over and over. The door slammed in the kitchen.

  “Don’t let them do this!” Jennifer Foster cried from the doorway. “Don’t let them do this to her!”

  “Not your business,” Nadine said.

  “This is the way it is, Jennifer,” Skip said. “This is the way things go.”

  “Bull. This is wrong. You know this is wrong. You’ve done everything for her and now that the hard part’s done, they show up and want to take her back?”

  All faces were turned to him, even Nadine’s, peeking furtively around the corner from the kitchen. “There wasn’t a hard part,” he said wearily, taking the diaper bag off his shoulder and putting it down on the floor. “It was all good.” He turned and walked back through the kitchen without a word, drove down the drive in his car and turned toward McGuire’s. He lowered the windows on Rolling Hills Road so he could get the smell of talcum powder out of the car, but it was still there when he went into the bar, bought a six-pack, drove up on a back mountain road, and drank it all down. Sitting behind the wheel, he fell into the deep unsatisfying sleep of the thoroughly drunk. When he woke up there were drifts of leaves in yellow and orange on his windshield, and it was morning.

  A gain the sound came, and again, and she turned slowly in bed, stiff and bone weary but not at all sleepy, reaching for the book on her bedside table. There was a small brass light clipped to the headboard that Meredith had given her for Christmas two years before. “It’s the one I have so I can read in bed without keeping Eric up,” she’d said as Lydia had turned it over in her hands in the way she had of looking at gifts before she was certain that she really liked them.

  “I don’t know why you two don’t have your own rooms. A lot of marriages have been saved by a little privacy,” she’d said, frowning at the fixture.

  “She’s not going anywhere,” Eric had said, putting his hand over his wife’s, and Lydia had felt a throb of what she believed to be strong disapproval but was really envy.

  She had read this Agatha Christie perhaps a dozen times in her lifetime. She had it in hardcover, an edition published during the war. She was certain because on the back jacket it said in big red letters “Buy War Bonds. Be a true soldier of democracy.” Her books, her photographs, and her winter clothes: those were the first things her mother had had the maids pack up and send out to Blessings once she was there, the necessary provisions for the extended exile of a young lady of a certain class.

  She liked to reread the Christie books and the other mysteries that filled the pickled pine shelves in the old den because they had a certain fine inevitable immutable order. The lovers had a misunderstanding; the wrong person was suspected, and an innocent killed to cover up the crime. But in the end Poirot or Miss Marple, that silly old woman, would have the brainstorm that Mrs. Blessing herself had had twenty pages before, and all would end as it should, the lovers reunited, the guilty party brought to justice, Miss Marple’s knitting complete and Poirot’s mustaches waxed. They were foolish books signifying nothing, but they had the appeal of scales played on the piano or multiplication tables recited aloud, a perfect predictability that she had learned unconsciously to love.

  Her life had once been in tumult, and that was how she had shoehorned it back into a manageable shape, by the imposition of rigid order. And then Charles had come, and the baby, and then the baby was gone, and Sunny’s wallet found, and all the order had gone, so that in the mornings she now woke in the silver-gray hours on the leading edge of dawn to nothing more than the faintly sweet odor of autumn air and the occasional sharp reminder that a skunk had been frightened by something in the far fields. There was no odor of coffee in her house until hours after she awoke, when the shape of her day and her mind had already gone awry because of its absence. One day she had crept down in her gown and robe to try to do it herself and discovered that she did not even know how to use the grinder. Pulling herself along the balustrade to retire, defeated, to bed to wait for the sound of Nadine playing her discordant matins on pot and pan, she saw in the mist that hung over the valley a blue heron poised at the end of her pond, thin and pale and still as she was. His beak flashed and shattered the reflection of the trees upon the mirrored surface and he came up with a rainbow trout speared and struggling.

  “Go!” she had hissed from the landing window. “Go away. Scat!” The enormous bird turned his head slowly, almost mechanically toward the sound, and in measured movements gulped down the fish.

  Now it was too dark for her to see anything, but the faint strips of silver coming and going beneath the scudding clouds showed her where the center of the pond lay. Perhaps it was the heron that made the sound that repeated itself over and over again. It did not sound like a birdsong, but, then, she had never heard a heron make a sound; she thought of them as ghostly mute birds that dropped down and ate and disappeared like smoke. She imagined that one of them was there now, plundering the pond, and she wished she could throw the lights around its rim and catch him out, as though that would satisfy something in her that was itching inside. But someone had turned the pond lights out, and she was ashamed to say that over the years she had forgotten where the switch was.

  “What do we do if he doesn’t show up?” that fidgety man in the golf shirt had said as he sat in her living room.

  “He’ll show up,” the sheriff said.

  “He’s very late,” the woman said, looking yet again at her watch.

  “So are all of you,” Mrs. Blessing had said fiercely, and all heads in the room had turned toward her, and the girl had started to sniffle and wheeze and finally sob harshly. Her mother had patted her back but the girl had pushed her away with a sharp roll of her shoulder and buried her face in her hands. “She has asthma,” the mother had said, burrowing in her purse. It occurred to Mrs. Blessing that the noise she kept hearing from outside was like the noise that girl had made, a kind of ragged and breathless crying.

  She had not offered them refreshment, not tea or a cold drink, though the parents certainly acted as if they could use one. She had hated having them in her house. “People I have never met in my life,” she had said to Lester Patton. “You had some pretty dicey characters here when you were younger, Lydia,” he’d replied, sipping halfheartedly at Nadine’s dreadful coffee. “People we knew,” she said. “That’s completely different.”

  But they both knew that that was not what she had objected to. They had destroyed that sense of order that she found inside these old books and these four walls. They destroyed it because she should have thought their presence perfectly proper, because if someone had said to her in springtime, just seven months ago, when the shoots of the daffodils were shafts from the soil around the back door, Now, Lydia, suppose a young man, unmarried, inexperienced with children, was to discover an infant lying by his back door, and was to keep that infant and try to raise her as his own, and suppose the mother was to come forward and claim her, what ought to be done? She knew what she would have answered.

  And yet today she knew it should not be so. She had called Lester Patton off the golf course, where he was playing a creditable nine holes for the first time in a month, and astonished him by saying, as she seemed destined to say these days, “I have made a terrible mistake.” And she had asked him to find a way for Charles to keep the baby, asked him to offer the girl money, have her charged with abandonment, have an action for custody brought under her own name. “She still thinks the name Blessing opens any door,” he’d told the other men in his foursome as he cleaned his cleats and changed his clothes. But Lester Patton, wisely, had begun by tal
king to Skip, and when he arrived at Blessings from Foster’s garage he took a gin and tonic, the glass slick in his hands, and told her that Skip thought the child should be returned. “He thinks the baby belongs with her mother.”

  “The baby belongs to the person who loves her most,” Mrs. Blessing replied.

  “The law assumes that that person is the one who gave birth to the baby.”

  “Then the law is an ass.”

  She lay in bed and turned a page and found that she could not attend to what the vicar had found when he paid an unexpected call on the lady from London renting a cottage. There was another cry from the back edge of the pond, like a tormented wild thing calling, like her own voice crying so many years ago, “My brother has had an accident.” On the bedside table was one of the old albums, so old that the pictures were held in place with black brackets and the photos themselves were black-and-white, now faded to gray and yellow. And in so many of them it was as though a tissue scrim were lifted, the same sort of tissue that covered all the invitations to parties, debuts, weddings. She could see clearly now: the way Sunny’s shoulder touched Benny’s in the foyer of the Carton house. The way they looked at Lydia in her dance dress, fond brothers both. The way they looked at each other over Lydia’s bent head. The emotional code hidden beneath the social one.

  Maybe that was what her mother was trying to hide, and not just for her own sake but for Lydia’s, too: not the pregnancy by a married man, but the marriage to the boy who was really in love with Lydia’s brother instead. Up in the garage attic her first thought had been that her union with Benny had been a sham, and then she had been shamed by the hypocrisy of her outrage, since the sham had not seemed so egregious when she was the sole perpetrator. It was like a French farce, in one door and out the other. And where just a few years ago she would have been disgusted and bitter, now she was merely sad at the dumb show.

  She tried to imagine a world in which the two of them sat by the pond, she and Sunny, and she told her secrets and he told his. But it was not the world in which the two of them had grown up, and grown older. Perhaps he had known about her and Frank Askew. Perhaps everyone had known. But order was maintained by silence.

  Looking at that young woman sitting in the living room bookended by her uncomprehending parents, waiting for her fate to find her, the notion that that thought was simply a relic of her youth fell away. She wondered if it would always be so, and if the coda of that silence was always regret, so that she would give anything now to cry out to Sunny, in the same ragged voice as the cry that kept sounding in the dark night, “Tell me the secrets of your heart.” But if she had said that, she knew what his reply would be, could almost hear him all these years after she’d found him on the floor of the barn sprawled amid the blood and hay, hear him drawl, “Lydie, love, don’t be so dramatic.”

  So much had come back to her after she found the wallet. She remembered one night seventy years ago when she had lain in bed in the narrow room at the end of the hallway with the blue walls and the white counterpane that had been hers until her marriage. A truck had driven into the driveway with the tearing sound of tires and gears coming to a sudden halt, a door had slammed, and she had heard her father’s low voice and another man, higher, distraught, finally crying, “You keep your goddamned boy away from my son!” She remembered how many times Sunny had come home bruised or with broken bones, and how the family legend had grown about how accident-prone he was. “I don’t mind the taste of blood so much,” he said one morning after a split lip, and she had shuddered, knowing and not knowing both at the same time.

  The little light cast a circle of gold on the pages of the old book, its margins set wide and the edges deckled in the fashion of long ago. She had called Meredith to tell her what had happened, about the burglary and Charles and the baby. “That’s dreadful,” Meredith had said. “He seemed like such a nice man. So good with that baby, too, in the way so few men are. My goodness, Mother, you have had a time of it.” Something about the way in which Meredith had said that last sentence reminded Lydia of something. She realized that it was exactly the sort of remark she herself might have made to cut off a certain sort of conversation. Perhaps the next time Meredith came she would sit with her by the pond, sit in the old Adirondack chairs and say, my dear, tell me what you know and what you suspect and what you fear. And I will tell you what is true and what is not.

  But on the phone she had said only, “I am still not myself.” Her arm hurt, and she shifted the book from one hand to the other, and the sound outside was louder. She pushed back the covers. She had turned ten pages without reading one, she thought as she put the book down on her bedside table, beside the ugly cut-crystal water carafe. It had been so like her mother to think that it would be grand for every room to have one and to ship them from the city, but to save on the cost by buying something square and graceless. The right instincts, the wrong execution. Lydia sighed. How deep the training of a lifetime, that she could still note something so mean and unimportant.

  She opened the front door and the breeze blew back against her, warm for an October night. The clouds had blown away and there was a full moon throwing a great blocky house shadow across the grass and turning the surface of the water into a mirror reflecting the willow trees. She pulled on her father’s old shooting jacket, tied a scarf around her hair against the wind, and walked slowly across the grass in her house slippers until she was standing by the little boat and could hear the cry echoing off the mountains. It was human, she was certain of it now, and when she considered that that wretched girl, who hadn’t even had a tissue to mop her streaming nose, might have brought the baby back yet again, she was filled not with the disapproval she ought to have felt but with happiness that things might be as they had been, the occasional picnic, the well-groomed lawn, her coffee made, her days fuller.

  “Jennifer,” she would say, “find Charles and tell him I have a surprise for him.”

  She picked her way around the ragged edges of the pond, a few frogs unafraid of early frost leaping from beneath her feet in terror, but the more she followed the sound the farther away it seemed. The fat grass carp moved darkly just beneath the surface, their backs breaking the water, and she could hear the whispery night noises that came from nocturnal animals crouched low and moving through the high grasses in the fields.

  By the time she had gotten to the far end of the pond, there was a roaring sound in her ears, like the inside of the old pink conch her mother had used for a doorstop on the long screened porch, and she could no longer be certain from which direction the crying came. There were the two old Adirondack chairs in the spot where the spring came in, so that her father could sit when he was tired from fly casting. “Lyds,” he would say, patting the one beside him, “come keep an old boy company.” Those chairs had been in this same spot for nearly seventy-five years; one set would rot, their nails giving way, the slats bowing, and be replaced by another that was exactly the same, and it would no more occur to her to change this arrangement than it had occurred to her that she could leave Blessings whenever she wanted to and start fresh. She dropped into one of the chairs heavily.

  Overhead the moon was a bright silver disk. “Like a new dime,” Sunny had said one night when they were floating in the little boat. “The moon is so much better than the sun.” She had never again known anyone who would think to say such a thing. The moon is so much better than the sun. She wished she could climb into the boat now and feel the almost imperceptible landlocked tide of the Blessings pond. She had loved it so as a child, the little village steeped in deep green: the trout glowing like stained glass with their colored scales, the turtles floating spread-eagled in the shelter of the plants, the carp pulling weed free and munching like cows, the curious goggle-eyed bass. All of them were there now yet she could see nothing but black and silver reflections, hear nothing but that inchoate cry, feel nothing but an ache in her heart. She would rest and then she would find the child and all would be well aga
in. She would arrange things so they would be as they had been. She tilted her head back to the new dime above her, her eyes dazzled. It was better than the sun because you could stare it in the face. A fish broke the surface, a bat swooped low by the dock, and an hour later the loon that had been crying insistently all night from the fen behind her flew low over the chair where she sat, but she could no longer see him.

  Meredith Fox had been sitting in one of the old Adirondack chairs when Skip came down the driveway. She was so still, so settled, that he wondered for a moment if she’d been in that exact same spot ever since the funeral. Well, not a funeral exactly, the way he thought of a funeral. There had been no hearse, and no limousine, and no cemetery, just Meredith and her husband in the old Cadillac. A parade of dark sedans had pulled up to the old stone church, and from the cars had emerged a parade of small wizened women in black suits, women who had borne some ineffable resemblance to Mrs. Blessing herself. He had heard them murmuring to Meredith on the sidewalk afterward, parsing family trees: this one was the sister of a boy who had gone to school with Meredith’s father, that one had been at someplace called Bertram’s a year ahead of Mrs. Blessing. Afterward they had come to the house for sandwiches and iced tea. He had not gone to the lunch. It didn’t feel right. But Mrs. Fox had called him at work after the lunch and asked him to come over.

  “You,” said Nadine, coming out of the kitchen door to stand on the back steps as he parked the truck.

  “Yep,” he said.

  “She out there,” she said, pointing, wiping her hands on a faded dish towel. He supposed Mrs. Fox was the she around Blessings now.