Such Good People

by Martha Whitmore Hickman

  “What’s the use of sharing your life with someone if they can’t know what’s going on for you?”

  “They can. There are degrees and degrees. And extenuating circumstances—like how much a person is preoccupied by his own needs. Some people do better than others. I’m not saying a person can’t learn, or can’t improve. Women are probably more adept than men at really listening, taking in the subtleties of what someone is saying.”

  She nodded. “I know. But you—yesterday…”

  He shook his head. “I was blessed to be there for you, Laura. Believe me”—his voice took on an earnestness and his eyes darkened—“I would consider turning my life over into your hands if you were free—and would have me. Even at that, there would be places where we would be alien to each other.”

  “You would?” she said, startled, touched, by what she had just heard. “We’ve only known each other a little while.”

  “We’ve known each other all our lives,” he said. “We just found out about it lately.”

  “It seems that, doesn’t it? And, of course, we knew each other back in high school.”

  ‘” My salad days, when I was green in judgment, ’” he said. “I should never have let you get away.”

  She smiled, wistful. “Who knows?”

  The musicians, who had taken a break, were starting up again. “We’ll try something for the old folks,” the bass player said. “Something slow and sweet.”

  Laura looked around, laughed. “That must mean us. We’re the oldest people here.”

  Some of the young folks, too, were getting up to dance to the strains of a Cole Porter song, and when three couples had stepped into the circle of light and begun dancing, Fred put down his glass and said, “Shall we?” and she stood and followed him out onto the dance floor and moved into his arms and they danced.

  “It’s not exactly Charley’s,” he said. “That was the name of the place, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. And we’re not the people we were then, either.”

  “No, we’re not,” he said, holding her close, and they danced on, wordlessly, turning as the music carried them along.

  *

  They drove home in silence. At the door, she said, “I won’t invite you in. It’s very late. I think Mother’s coming home tomorrow. But it’s been wonderful being with you this evening. I’ll be going home myself in several days.”

  “I suppose so,” he said, a sadness in his voice, and he took her face between his hands and kissed her. “I’ll call you,” he said, and stepped down from the porch, and she went inside.

  *

  The house was quiet. There was a note on the message pad in the hall. “Your son Bart called. He asked that you call him back. No matter if it’s late.”

  She looked at her watch. Midnight.

  Hastily, she put in the call. Paula answered. “Hello?”

  “Paula, this is Laura. Bart called. Nothing wrong?”

  “No. Everything’s fine.”

  “I understand you had some excitement there last night.”

  “Yes, but he wants to tell you. Bart,” she called, “it’s your mother.”

  He came to the phone. “Mom! Where you been? Hospitals throw you out before midnight.”

  “I’ve had a late dinner with a friend. But I’m so glad you’re all right. Such a brave thing, Bart.”

  “Oh yeah, the fire. Dad told you?”

  “Yes, this morning. It must have been awful.”

  “It was pretty horrendous for a few minutes. But everyone is fine. We don’t even have much mess to clean up. But that’s not what I called you about.”

  “Well, what, then? Nothing wrong?”

  “Hardly. Paula and I are going to get married.”

  “You are! That’s wonderful! When?”

  “Not right away. We just decided. Sometime in the next year.”

  “I couldn’t be happier! Does Dad know? Have you told Paula’s mother? Or Philip?”

  “I’ll call Phil. I haven’t reached Dad yet. I guess he’s at a meeting or something. Paula called her mom tonight. She’s coming down to visit real soon. And guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have to move out.”

  Paula came on the phone. “Hi, Mom,” she said, laughing.

  “We’re real happy. Are you surprised?”

  “I’d hoped, of course. But I didn’t know. How about your mother?”

  “She’s excited. My brother was married two years ago. But she’s never been the mother of the bride before.”

  A sudden pang—the mother of the bride. “No, I guess not,” Laura said.

  “Maybe when she’s here, we can all talk colors.”

  “Wonderful,” Laura said. A few more exchanges and they hung up, and for a moment Laura stood quietly in the hall, letting the joy sink in. A new milestone for them all. How excited Annie would have been, and yes, it would be sad not having Annie there. But she wouldn’t think about that now. Because it was wonderful news about Bart and Paula. Sometimes the cup was filled to overflowing.

  Rachel came home. She seemed in good spirits, even stronger from her brush with death. She spent long stretches on the phone, describing her health crisis and recovery. “And the funny part about it, I don’t remember a thing from the time I threw up my breakfast until I saw Laura’s face in the hospital.”

  Laura called Trace again. Rachel was home and doing well. What was the news from Woodbridge?

  He’d talked with Bart and Paula. Yes, it was wonderful about their planning to marry. He was busy with work. He and Kate had had several good sessions with her thesis. “She’s invited me over for some of her mother’s raspberry cordial.”

  “Are you going?”

  “Yes, I’m going.” His laugh seemed self-conscious, or was she imagining it?

  “Any word from Philip?”

  “A letter came. He seemed kind of down. He’s finding the term difficult, having a hard time concentrating.”

  “Do you think he’s all right?”

  “I imagine so. Probably feeling depressed when he wrote.”

  “We can call him when I get home.”

  *

  “How’s Trace?” Rachel asked when she came from the phone. “Fine. Busy. He’s talked with Bart and Paula. He’s had a letter from Philip.” No particular point in telling her mother about Kate and the raspberry cordial.

  “How is Philip?”

  “A little blue—maybe a midwinter slump.”

  “No wonder.” Rachel looked out the window, then back at Laura. “Would you do something for me while you’re here?”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve enjoyed Ginny’s flowers.” She looked over at the crescents of yellow flowers, the stalks of pussy willows—still fresh and lovely—spilling from the glass vase. “But now I’d like to share them…with Will.” She looked up, her eyes questioning and vulnerable. “Would you take them to the cemetery? Is that foolish?”

  Laura leaned over, kissed her mother. “Of course it isn’t foolish, and I’ll be glad to take them, right now.”

  “Let me see them up close once more before you go?”

  Laura took the vase of flowers over to Rachel’s bed and watched as her mother touched the yellow blossoms, ran her fingers up a stalk of pussy willows. “There. Thank you. Now you can take them.”

  She emptied the water from the vase and put flowers and vase on a newspaper in the backseat of the car and drove the mile and a half to the cemetery. She drove through the open gate, then slowly along the serpentine road that wound between the plots marked with gravestones of granite and marble—rose, gray, white veined with blue. In the center of each plot was a large stone bearing the family name—Stedman, Forbes, Dowling—around it a village of small headstones—the names of their dead.

  There it was—Taylor, incised in the granite block. She parked beside the road, took the vase and cluster of forsythia and pussy willows to the nearest faucet, filled the vase, set the bouquet
down into the water, and, kneeling down, set the jar on the earth in front of Will’s headstone—William A.

  She sat back on her heels, her knees pressed against the hard ground. Beyond Will’s headstone were the graves of his parents, Cassie and Charles Taylor. A black iron cross for the Spanish-American War. A small stone marked Baby for the child of Cassie and Charles who had died at birth, before Will was born. Beyond that, the grave of a maiden aunt.

  Closer, on this side of the large central stone, only Will’s headstone broke the wide corridor of brown winter grass. There, beside it, would go Rachel’s. When? Not soon, she hoped, not soon. But not too long a time, either, for Rachel’s sake.

  The water in the jar caught the light, recalled a single tea rose rising through water in a clear glass vase. The memorial service for Annie. Will. Annie. Rachel’s life hanging by a thread, as easily interrupted as a beam of light.

  Then the thought came to her…Annie! She saw the box, wrapped in brown paper, on the shelf in the closet in Annie’s room. Annie’s ashes. Perhaps this is what they should do. When her mother died, bury Annie’s ashes close to those of her grandmother, consign them together to this already-hallowed ground? They could incise their name, Randall, beneath that of Taylor on the large stone. There would even be room to bury the ashes of the rest of the family, if they wanted it, if it would help to think of it that way—herself, Trace, the boys.

  Her mind flew back to that afternoon when she and Trace had brought Annie’s ashes home.

  “I wonder what we’ll do with them, eventually,” she’d said. And Trace’s answer: “When the time comes, I think we’ll know.”

  There, opposite Will’s, would go Rachel’s stone. And beside it, a third? Her chest knotted and she bent forward and pressed her forehead against the hard earth. “Anne,” she moaned. “Anne.”

  Driving away from the cemetery, she passed the Cramer Home, a rambling brown clapboard structure. On a sudden impulse, she stopped the car, parked along the curb, and got out. The home was an old Victorian house, with leaded-glass panels on either side of a large oak door, and a deep porch, now lined with rocking chairs, running across the front.

  She rang the bell. A woman in a white uniform came to the door.

  “I’m Laura Randall. Could I see Mabel Olmstead?”

  “Why, yes. Come in.”

  She entered a large carpeted vestibule hung with gold-framed paintings and flowered drapes; clusters of soft chairs and sofas were slipcovered to match the drapes. A poster labeled FEBRUARY BIRTHDAYS with names penciled in hung over a small writing desk.

  “This way.”

  She followed the woman down a corridor paneled in dark wood, a brass handrail extending along the wall.

  The nurse stopped at a doorway. “Mrs. Olmsted, here’s somebody to see you.” She nodded and left as Laura entered the room.

  In a large chair in a corner of the room, a pink blanket over her lap, a crocheted shawl covering her shoulders, a small woman looked out over the shimmering circles of her glasses. “Why Laura Taylor! I do declare!”

  “Mabel!” Laura stepped forward and hugged her, her face against the white curls that squished to nothing against the bows of the woman’s glasses. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “Pull up a chair and sit down. You’re in town to see your mother. Say, wasn’t that a scare she gave us? How is she today?”

  “She’s doing well. Better, I think, than before this happened.”

  “A little excitement is good medicine for us old folks.” Her shoulders lifted under the shawl. “We run out of things to toot our horns over. Your mother’ll be talking about that for weeks—almost as good as a new grandchild. How are your babies? I suppose they’re all grown up.”

  “Yes, Mabel, my babies are grown up.” Was it possible she didn’t know about Annie?

  “Of course I heard about your daughter. I’m so sad, dear. It doesn’t seem right, folks like us should stay and she should go.” Mabel’s voice quivered and Laura reached over and touched Mabel’s tiny knarled hand.

  “Thank you. Tell me how you are?”

  “I’m doing well. They’re awful good to us here. There’s lots to do. I have friends. I go to the dining room for my meals. Sometimes when Buddy and Ellen come, they take me for a drive.”

  “Do you see them often? Are they still in Boston?”

  “Yes. They come. Seems like you get to Hadley about as often. We talked about my going down there. But I’ve lived in Hadley for forty years.” She looked up, as though to share the astonishment of so much time. “Buddy calls me. I call him. Children have to live their own lives, you know.”

  They chatted on—about Mabel’s neighbors, about people they’d both known. Then Mabel said, “Say, let me show you—” She turned to the table beside her, crowded with books, a box of tissues, a water glass, a small radio, and pulled out an old photo album. Crumbs of disintegrating paper fell from it as she brought it to her lap. “I was looking at this just this morning. It’s got pictures of your mother and father in it.” She lifted the corners of the dull black pages, one by one.

  “Here!” She turned the book so Laura could see two snapshots, almost alike—six young adults crowded on a sofa, six others standing behind them. She’d seen pictures of these same twelve people in her parents’ photo album. “We were the Couples Club,” Rachel had said. “We were all young and poor, so we made our own fun—we had parties once a month.”

  In Mabel’s pictures, they were wearing costumes—a man in a pirate suit with a patch over one eye, a woman in an old-fashioned wool bathing suit, the white braid squaring off the neckline of a dark middy blouse over ballooning dark knickers. In the back row were her parents—her mother wearing the Indian dress from her days as a Camp Fire girl, her father in a white apron and high chef’s hat. They were all laughing, their arms round one another. Barney Olmstead stood by her mother, his cheek against hers, grinning for the camera.

  A thought crossed Laura’s mind. Years ago, a teenager, falling in and out of love, she had asked Rachel, “Do you think there’s one man for one woman?”

  “No,” Rachel said. “I’ve known other people I could be happy with. Mr. Olmstead, for one.” It had startled her then, he little more than a stranger to her, though a good friend of her parents. Looking at their faces now, she wondered, Had they ever spoken of it between them—her mother and Barney Olmstead? Did they have it in their shared possession, a jeweled cache of fantasy and high regard?

  “Mother used to tell me about those good times,” she said. She looked at the faces again.

  Mabel said it first: “So many of them are gone.”

  A nurse came to the door. “Would you like some tea for your guest?”

  Laura stood. “Thanks. I’ve got to go. I was just driving by and thought I’d stop.” She kissed Mabel good-bye and left, with a final glance at the photo album on the table.

  *

  At home, Carlena was boiling water for tea. “I thought you’d be here sooner,” Rachel said. “Did it take that long to do the flowers?”

  She shook her head, no. “I stopped at the Cramer Home to see Mabel.”

  “How is she? What did you think of it? I haven’t been there since she moved.”

  “It’s attractive. They evidently get good care. She goes to the dining room. Buddy and Ellen come to see her. Interesting things going on. It seems like a fine place. She seems very happy.”

  For a yearning, tender moment she hovered on the edge of a question: Mother, is it all right—your not coming to Woodbridge? Do you forgive me? But she didn’t ask—it would be for her own sake only, and it might revive an old hurt.

  Rachel wasn’t looking at her. Her eyes were scanning the room—the folding screen with white chrysanthemums her own mother had painted, the buffet stacked with books and pictures and trivia of her life with Will, the doorway onto the porch, where roses covered the trellis every June, the china closet, the window looking out toward the lilacs and the pulleyed clothes
line. Her gaze came back to rest on Laura. “It’s not like being in your own home,” she said.

  Laura’s heart lifted in gratitude. Her mother had answered the question without her asking.

  It emboldened her, her mother’s contentment. There was something else that came to her—formed out of the inchoate, blundering pain of the past months.

  “Mother?”

  “What is it, dear?”

  She drew closer, felt the tears start.

  Rachel stroked her hand. “Was the cemetery that hard?”

  “No.”

  “Then what, dear?”

  “It’s about Annie.”

  “What about her, that lovely child?”

  Her voice caught on the jagged edges of her breath. “I feel as though I failed.”

  “Why?” Rachel was uncomprehending.

  “Because—” Laura was crying now, but she could not stop. “Mothers are supposed to save their children. You saved me—and I couldn’t save her.” There. She put her head down, sobbing.

  She felt Rachel’s knarled hand on her neck, stroking gently, as of old. “Darling. That was a totally different thing. Yours was a sickness. Annie’s was a violent death—over right away. She had a beautiful life. Not as long as we’d hoped, but very full for her years.” Rachel’s hand lifted her hair, smoothed it back in place.

  After a while, Rachel said, “I want to tell you something, dear.”

  “Yes.” Laura looked up. Her mother’s eyes were luminous and clear.

  “I have a feeling I may not live long.”

  “Is it a new feeling?”

  “The last few days. Since my hospitalization.”

  “The doctor says you’re doing very well. You seem very alert, full of cheer.”

  “Do I? That’s good.”

  Laura reached for a handkerchief. “I’ll miss you, whenever you go…. And I feel like saying to you, ‘Give her my love’—and Father, too.”

  “Don’t think I won’t,” Rachel said.

  *

  The next day, Laura called Trace’s office. It was late afternoon. At first, no one answered, but then someone picked up the phone and a woman’s voice said, “Hello.”