Such Good People

by Martha Whitmore Hickman

  He moved toward her. “What in the world?”

  She moved away. “I’m sorry. I’m upset. I’m going to talk to Bart and Paula. I’ll be back, never fear.”

  “I wish you’d tell me—”

  “I tried to tell you. I tried.”

  “When? What?”

  “I said, twice, ‘I read in Annie’s journal… You said, ‘I see,’ and went right on reading the mail. You didn’t even hear me!”

  His jaw tightened. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a rough day. I’ve got a big seminar coming up. I’d like to hear about the journals. Can you tell me now?”

  “It’s too late now! I needed you then! It’s no wonder Annie gave up on you—always in your own head!”

  His face whitened. He followed her into the hall.

  She went out and slammed the door. She had never walked out on him before.

  *

  Bart answered her knock, Paula close behind him. “Come in, Mom. What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “Oh!” She went in and sat down, dug her hands into the Indian spread covering the sofa.

  “You’re shaking,” Paula said. “Tell us.”

  She began. “I was reading in Annie’s journals today.” She looked up—their faces acknowledged a quicksand danger. “I came to this place and—” She broke off, stifling a sob. “Oh! Do you think Annie loved me? Did I drive her away? Do you think I was a good mother?”

  Bart sighed. “Of course, Mom. Of course she loved you.”

  “I can’t stand it if she didn’t!”

  Bart and Paula looked at each other. Paula said, “Can you tell us what you found?”

  “Well, I read a lot of stuff that was fine, things we’d talked about. Then—” Again she broke off, gulped in air. “I know children, adolescents, have mixed feelings about parents. But having her gone, and then finding it—” She put her face in her hands. “It talked about Dad being a zombie and me being emotionally all over the place and then it said, ‘I’m sick of parents who want to be friends. Fuck off, will you! Get off my back!”

  Bart snorted. “Mom, don’t be silly. She was just mad about something.”

  Paula said, “It was her age. I felt that way about my folks sometimes. Kids do. It doesn’t mean that was her general opinion. Didn’t you ever feel that way about your mother and father?”

  The question startled her. She thought back. “No. Not that I remember. Nothing like that.” Panic rose in her chest again. “If she didn’t love me…”

  “Of course she loved you, Mom,” Bart reiterated. “Stuff like that is no big deal.” There was a touch of irritation in his voice. He walked over to the fireplace, stretched his arm along the mantel. “She talked to Philip and me when we were home last spring. She was worried about how you were going to get along when she went to college next year.”

  “She was?” She sat back, flooded with gratitude and relief. “Thank you for telling me!” She reached for a handkerchief. “That about my being emotionally all over the place—I guess I am.”

  “Whatever that means,” Bart said. “You cared about us a lot. Is that a sin?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry to be such a mess. I miss her so! When I was home with my mother, I kept thinking what it would be like to be old, and no Annie.”

  Bart had turned his head away, and when he turned back, there were tears in his eyes. “We’d all counted on her being here,” he said.

  “I know.” She stood up. “Thank you,” she said. “I feel much better. I just had to talk to someone.” Impulsively, she said to Paula, “You—a young woman—it’s so great to have you close. But I’m sorry I bothered you both.”

  “It’s no bother at all,” Paula said. “You want to stay and eat with us?”

  “No, thanks. Dad’s home.”

  “He is?” Paula said. They looked surprised, alarmed.

  She couldn’t tell them. “He was busy,” she said. The alarm stayed on their faces. Quick, change the subject, she thought. “I meant to ask you, Paula. When your mother comes, we’d like to have you all over to dinner.”

  Paula’s eyes shifted to Bart, then back again. “Thanks, but I suggested she wait until spring. Bart raves so about the Tennessee spring. I’ll go up there for Christmas.”

  Laura glanced at Bart. He was gazing intently at his shoes. He looked up. “I’ll be here,” he said. “Just Paula is going.”

  She searched their faces, remembering the argument. “Is that okay with both of you? I know when we were here…”

  Again they exchanged glances. “It’s fine,” they said in unison—reserved, but none of the hostility she’d seen that night at dinner.

  “Well, thank you,” she said again. Christmas—she didn’t want to think about it—Christmas without Annie. “Thanks for everything.” She hugged them and started down the steps.

  “Maybe you and I could have lunch sometime,” Paula called after her.

  “Oh, I’d like that,” she said, tears springing to her eyes again.

  “Tell Dad hi,” Bart said. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’ll talk to you later.” Quick, she thought. Get in the car before you lose it and tell them what it’s like living with someone who doesn’t know you’re there half the time.

  She drove a few blocks, pulled over to the curb, shut off the motor. Calm down, she told herself, taking some deep breaths. Sure, it was rough finding that diary entry of Annie’s. But Bart and Paula were reassuring, not even thrown by her outburst. Annie was right. She was “emotionally all over the place.” She had probably overreacted with Trace. She could have waited until he’d looked through the mail, not sprung her story on him when he first got home. She saw his face—white, frightened—as she slammed out the door. He must have thought she was crazy. He would be waiting. She started the car.

  *

  He was on the phone in the kitchen when she went into the house. As she passed by, she planted a quick kiss on his shoulder, the nubby grain of his tan oxford-cloth shirt. He waved a hand, said something into the phone, and hung up.

  “So, do you feel better? How are Bart and Paula?”

  “Yes, I feel better, and Bart and Paula seem okay.” She opened the refrigerator door to get out things for dinner. “Who was that on the phone?”

  “Kate Morton.”

  “Kate Morton?”

  “My graduate student.”

  “It’s an odd hour to be calling you—dinnertime.”

  “She didn’t call me. I called her.”

  She held the door, looked at him. “Oh?”

  “She and another student are helping with my seminar on Descartes. She’d asked me some questions this afternoon. I thought I’d answer. Since I had the time.” The words were measured, slow.

  She was tearing romaine into a salad bowl.

  “Have I met her?”

  “At the department’s open house last spring? Tall, dark hair. She was wearing a bright purple dress. Some kind of a shawl with fringe.” He moved toward the cupboard. “Shall I set the table?” he asked.

  The hubbub of lunchtime diners filled the restaurant, along with the smells of gumbo and apple crisp. Laura, seated across from Paula in a sunny corner booth, offered her the roll basket. “Here, have another.”

  “Thanks. I love these biscuits.” Paula took one, broke it open, buttered it, took a bite, and put the rest on her plate, beside the nearly finished quiche and fruit salad. A waitress came and tipped the pitcher sideways to refill their glasses of iced tea, then moved on.

  “Bart tells me they serve iced tea all year round here. In the north, it’s a summertime drink.”

  “That was a surprise to me, too,” Laura said. “Along with the predilection to sweeten it. So if you want unsweetened tea, you often have to ask for it.” She lifted her glass in acknowledgment, set it down. “How about some dessert?” She gestured toward a tiered cart against the wall. “Have you tried chess pie yet?”

  “No more for me, thanks. I’ll fini
sh up my fruit, and get back to work.” Paula smiled, looking across at Laura. “It’s very nice being with you. I love having our own place, but I miss seeing you and Mr. Randall.”

  “We miss you, too,” Laura said. “I apologize again for bursting in on you the other night. I was a real basket case.” She shook her head, chagrined. “You were sweet to take me in. It was dear of you to call me and suggest this get-together.”

  “I’d been meaning to,” Paula said. “I miss my mom, and I know you…” She hesitated. “Not that I’m any substitute.”

  “Not a substitute, no,” Laura said, “but a wonderful presence in our lives, someone”—she hesitated, groping for words—“who partakes of some of the same life she did, though several years further down the road.”

  “I’m so glad I had a chance to meet her that time you came to college,” Paula said.

  “She liked you a lot. She was looking forward to your being here”—she smiled wryly—“hoping you and Bart would be an escape hatch from the terrors of living with us, I think.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Randall. I’m sure you had your tensions. But all in all…Annie was a lucky young woman to have parents like you.”

  Laura was wistful. “Sometimes I think she saw that.”

  Neither of them spoke. The murmur of voices, the sound of silverware scraping against dishes formed an easy backdrop to their silence. Then Laura said, “Your mother—not coming till spring—is that really all right? I know there was some tension between you and Bart about his staying in the apartment when she comes. He was so adamant—though I can see his point, too.” She ran her finger down the side of her glass, clearing a path in the moisture. “I guess whatever shock Trace and I might have experienced, we used up long ago.” She looked up at the young woman across from her. “You know Annie was sexually active—at sixteen?”

  Paula nodded, her eyes registering sympathy. “Bart told me. That is young, though a lot of young people are, at that age. He also said she was very responsible, using birth control. Still, I bet it was hard for you. I’m sure my mother guesses that I have been, too—though I was older. But to live with someone advertises it to the world—you can’t deny it anymore.”

  “Sometimes young people live together for company and safety. No particular sexual involvement at all.”

  Paula laughed. “I know. My mother finds that hard to fathom, too. And she’d never believe that of Bart and me.”

  “Would you want her to?”

  “No. Besides, we couldn’t maintain the demeanor. And we have one bed.”

  Laura chuckled. “That is a giveaway.”

  “As far as delaying her visit—yes, it’s okay. She works in a college bookstore, and it’s a busy time with the fall classes getting under way. It’s fine with her as long as I come at Christmas—which I’ve planned to do all along.”

  Laura was reassured. “Good. I was afraid pressure from Bart had made you do something you really didn’t want to do or not do something you did want to do—have your mother visit.”

  “That is part of it, but only part. We talked about it after you left that night—why he was so ‘adamant,’ as you put it. We talked for a long time—about what was going on with him.”

  “Like what?” Laura asked. “If you can tell me. I don’t want to intrude….”

  “Well, for one thing, it was your first time to visit us, and he wanted everything just right.”

  “It was a lovely dinner, Paula, and fun to inspect your place, look at the yard.”

  “Which looks like something of a junk shop before trash-pickup day,” Paula interjected.

  “And of course it was wonderful to be with you and Bart—though I noticed that except for the flap about your mother’s visit, Bart didn’t say a lot. Does he talk to you much about Annie?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  “I’m glad. He’s not talked much to us. And I’ve worried about it.”

  The waitress came. “Anything else I can get for you ladies?” she asked in a bright voice.

  Laura and Paula looked at each other, shook their heads. “No thank you.”

  They were getting ready to leave when Paula stopped her slide out of the booth and turned to Laura. “There’s one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  A shadow crossed Paula’s face. Her eyes looked troubled. “He blames himself, too, that he wasn’t able to save her.”

  “Oh, Paula! How could he?” Laura’s heart clamped in her chest. “The horse had run off. Bart wasn’t even there.”

  “I know. So does he. But he can’t seem to be free of it—the idea that somehow he could have saved her life. That maybe you blame him.” She added softly, “Or that he might have been the one.”

  Laura could feel the pain of such speculation twist in her gut. Dear Bart. “No, no, no,” she murmured. Could he have handled a runaway horse? Or, if he had ridden that horse, might it not have bolted? Or, if not, and they had lost Bart, what then? To choose, even in fantasy, between her children? In horror, she drew back, walled off such thoughts, cast them away. “He mustn’t think that,” she said. “No, no. You mustn’t let him think that.”

  Now Paula’s eyes were grave. “Please don’t tell him I told you this,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t have. But if he sometimes seems a little…distracted, or whatever, well, that may be part of the reason.”

  Distracted? Laura thought. It wouldn’t be surprising. His father wrote the book on distraction. She reached across the table to take Paula’s hand. “Please know that no way on earth would Trace or I think of blaming Bart at all, not at all. I’ve been so grateful to him that he was there, to be with her, his tenderness….” She remembered in the car on the way to Boulder Bart’s telling how he had covered her with his jacket, patted her back, told her she would be all right. Remembered his words, “I didn’t want her to be alone.”

  They were gathering up their things now, resuming their leaving.

  Outside, they embraced. “Say hi to Mr. Randall,” Paula said.

  “Give my love to Bart.” Hungrily, she watched Paula move off, then got in her car and went home.

  In his dream, Bart reached to her again, and again. They were children. He had taken his telescope out on the roof to watch the stars. He’d left the window up and didn’t see her come out, wearing her long yellow nightie. He heard her cry out and saw the yellow bundle rolling past him down the slope of the roof. “Help!” she called. He reached for her, but she was too far away. A rise of the roof at the bottom of the slope kept her from falling to the ground. By the time he reached her, she was crying with fright. “You’re supposed to be in bed!” he shouted. “What are you doing here?”

  “I saw out the window that you were here. I just came out,” she stammered. “Don’t tell Mom!”

  He hadn’t. And she’d been none the worse for her fright. But he had never been able to get his telescope out again without thinking of that night, and how he almost reached her, but couldn’t.

  “Bart, wake up. You’re sobbing! What is it?” It was Paula’s voice. She was sitting up in bed, shaking his shoulder. Coming to, he saw the dip of her breasts at the neck of her white gown and he buried his face against her. “I should have taken that horse!” he cried.

  “No, Bart. No!” She cradled him against her and rocked back and forth in the bed. “No,” she crooned. “No, my love, no.”

  Woodbridge readied itself for Christmas. Ropes of red and silver foil festooned the streetlights on the main street of town. “Little Drummer Boy” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” scratched away on store PA systems. The symphony (a mix of town and gown musicians) prepared its holiday concert. The ballet troupe attempted The Nutcracker once more. The first snow fell.

  Philip, arriving for Christmas vacation in the old beat-up car he’d bought for two hundred dollars from a fellow student, went first to Bart and Paula’s house. It was evening and there were lights on in the first floor, where the owner lived, but no lights on upstairs. He parked and w
ent up on the porch and rang their bell anyway. Maybe they were in back? He’d seen the place before they moved in but couldn’t remember the layout of the rooms.

  No one answered. In a first-floor window, a child’s face peered around the edge of a window shade. Philip smiled and waved. A small hand appeared beside the face, waved a starfish wave. The child disappeared. Philip turned and went back to his car and continued on home.

  He was uneasy as he approached the door. His mother’s grief was so raw—he could tell that on the phone—and how would it be for him, going into that familiar house with Annie gone? Of course they’d all been here at the end of the summer, but this would be confronting it all over again.

  He rang the bell and heard his mother’s voice—“It’s Philip!” and the rush of feet. The door opened and they were both there. He hugged them, one at a time, and it was really all right that his eyes were wet with tears.

  Then the three of them went out and examined the car in the light from the streetlamp. “It had two new tires and a tankful of gas!” Philip exulted. They all agreed what a bargain it was, and then of course his mother needed to be reassured that it was safe to drive and his father wondered what kind of mileage he got and what he’d done about insurance, and if he wanted they’d put a rider on their policy to include him. He knew that right now they would do anything for him that they could—as he would for them.

  “I went by Bart and Paula’s,” he said when they got back in the house. He didn’t say why—to be some kind of a buffer against coming home. “The baby in the first floor waved at me, but no sight of Bart and Paula. Anybody know where they are?”

  Laura fought the familiar panic. Ever since Annie died, any uncertainty on the whereabouts of anyone close to her could set it off—even though there was no reason on earth she should know, right now, where her son and Paula were. They could be at the store…visiting friends…delayed at work. “Paula’s going to her mother’s in Ohio in a couple of days, and she said something about finishing her shopping. You can call them later. They know you’re coming.”