Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Two weeks in July? For that money? What’s this craziness? Look, there’s going to be dozens of clients coming in and out of here all weekend, and I don’t have a thing to show them. What am I supposed to do? Wait now, you only want one bedroom and a rollaway, so let’s see.’

  She sent them off with a cheerful young woman, who showed them two possible houses and one perfect one.

  It was tiny, not much more than an elaborate whitewashed shed, off the road down a sandy track that ended in a hump of rough grass and a broken fence crushed down by clambering rose briars. Through a miniature kitchen, they stepped up into an odd-shaped living-room, barely furnished, and full of light. Lily made for the big window that was the end wall, and cried out when she saw the marsh which lay like a carpet below the sandy mound on to which the house had been fitted. Paul stood close behind, holding her.

  The marsh, half land, half water, stirred in the breeze, the grass and bog plants all shades through grey to green, an insignificant stream glinting yellow where its curves emerged. A flock of geese headed over the flat wet expanse to where, between two distant houses on the low dunes, shone the sea.

  ‘Can we live here for ever?’ Lily’s face was vulnerable with delight. She had grown up a lot since Iceland, but sometimes she still looked like that eager child who had cast herself, with such reckless joy, headlong towards disappointment.

  ‘For a coupla weeks anyway, Saturday to Saturday,’ the agent said.

  She took them back to her office, and then they drove to the long sweep of Old Silver beach, which had a big hotel at its edge. Although it was colder here than in Boston, quite a few people were lying in the sun or picnicking or walking or wading, as Paul and Lily did with their pants rolled up, far out in the low tide water towards the blurred line of the New Bedford shore across the bay.

  ‘In July, we’ll hardly find a space to sit on this beach,’ Paul said. Terry and I came last year, and everybody else had come too. When I was a kid with a pail and shovel, there was almost nobody. We were outraged if another family sat down within fifty yards. In the good old days.’

  ‘Don’t talk as if you’re middle-aged.’

  ‘I’m thirty-five.’

  ‘Rubbish, that’s nothing.’ Lily would never talk about the difference in their ages.

  They raced each other down the long beach to the line of breakwater rocks, scrambled over them and fell into the soft sand of a private beach below a sturdy shuttered house, where no one could see them.

  Before going into Falmouth for lunch, they went back to their shed house to glory in the view again and look in through the windows. Still barefoot, they explored down one of the other narrow tracks which branched off to other houses. It turned back through some trees and wound about, soft with old pine needles, until it came out on a small road of sand and sea-grass tufts that ran along the edge of an inlet. At the inner end, the tiled roof of a big house showed above thick trees. At the outer end, they found a steep mound of smooth sand at the inlet’s opening, and across the road where the trees ended in coarse grass and thorny bushes, a narrow beach backed by a groin of huge stones that ran out and fell into the sea. The edges of the sheltered water lapped quietly at glossy pebbles, more like a lake than an ocean. It was a bay within a bay within the broad horseshoe of Buzzard’s Bay, secret, untrodden. The distant Massachusetts shore and a nearer headland dotted with houses were worlds away. Five dark cormorants stood motionless on a lone rock, waiting for the tide to turn.

  ‘I never saw this,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t remember this beach being here.’

  ‘You invented it for me.’

  ‘You love it all, don’t you?’

  ‘You know I do. Especially because today … well, specially because.’

  It wasn’t worth asking, ‘What?’ When Lily stopped in the middle of a sentence and her eyes stilled and looked inward, she did not want to be probed or coaxed. She wanted to be left alone.

  After lunch, they went into a greenhouse store to buy an Easter lily for Paul’s mother. There were dozens of them, white madonna lilies, flaunting their loud sweet scent. Lily said it looked like a funeral.

  ‘Everybody has to have lilies on Easter,’ Paul explained. ‘Like the ham with all the fixin’s.’

  ‘Dead right.’ A square, crew-cut man was waiting at the counter with them to get their lilies wrapped. ‘Why do we do it? It’s a heck of a bore.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Lily, ardent immigrant, was shocked. ‘I’m fairly new here – oh, this is my husband.’ She always introduced Paul to everybody she talked to in stores, restaurants, the subway, waiting in line to get into the movie theatre. ‘I love all of it. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. It’s so – so, sort of, sumptuous.’

  ‘And unnecessary.’

  ‘Oh, don’t feel like that.’

  She looked so concerned that the man told her, ‘It’s senseless this year, because there’s one less of us.’

  ‘Far away?’

  ‘My young son was burned to death two months ago. In a play hut he had in the woods. The other boy got out.’

  Paul could say nothing. He could not even look at the man. Lily put her hand on his arm and said, ‘Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Oh well.’ The woman in the green overall was putting stiff paper round the man’s plant. He gave a small snort, between a laugh and a moan. ‘C’est la vie.’ He put some money on the counter, picked up his funeral lily and went out.

  In the car, Lily cried, not so much for the man, as for her own guilt at having said too much, not enough, the wrong things.

  ‘I should have run after him.’

  ‘What would you have said?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anything. Asked him to bring the rest of his family to have Easter with us.’

  ‘All the way to Dedham?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, but I should have done something.’

  ‘What could you do? You couldn’t bring his boy back. Don’t lash yourself, darling. It’s like with that girl, Anna. You couldn’t bring her boyfriend back or make her parents suddenly dote on her.’

  ‘I couldn’t even find her. And now that man … how can he bear it? C’est not la vie.’

  ‘He told you. That’s something.’

  ‘Not enough.’

  ‘Don’t cry, Lily. Don’t spoil our lovely day.’

  ‘I’m a mess.’ Paul’s mother’s favourite statement when she met you, fussing at her hair and clothes, straightening ornaments, bashing a cushion.

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you till I’d had a test, because it’s bad luck, but now I’ve got to. Because I really do feel …’

  Paul stopped the car on grass at the side of the road. Lily shed a few more tears, and dug back into the self-indulgent guilt.

  ‘Me with a child, and that man without one. Do you suppose he tried to get the boy out? Suppose he couldn’t get into the hut, and heard him screaming.’

  ‘Hush, Lily. Stop that.’

  ‘I’m homesick, Paul. I want my mum.’

  ‘That proves it,’ he said. ‘It can take women that way. Barbara never liked her mother, but when she was carrying Terry – ’ He shut up. Luckily, Lily had her head buried in his arms and could not hear.

  ‘I’m a mess, Lily dear.’ Paul’s mother opened the door of her house, a Dedham miniature baronial Tudor, in her apron, pushing at her soft, faded yellow hair. ‘Oh, a lily from Lily! Aren’t you a doll?’

  ‘Paul bought it,’ Lily said honestly.

  ‘He always buys me an Easter lily. Hello there, Terry, come on in. Your Grandpa can’t wait to see you.’

  Terry walked in wordlessly, with his shoulders hunched. He and the Judge greeted each other soberly. Lily never knew whether to kiss her father-in-law, or what to call him. Paul had told her, ‘Kiss him and call him Steven. He’ll like that.’

  But Lily imagined he was rather grand and intellectual. He wasn’t. Steven Stephens had been a scrupulous attorney, and now he was a very fair and humane judge, popula
rly known as Even Steven. Paul’s mother, Muriel, from small-town Indiana, was more like Lily’s family. His father had come from the same town, but, in working his way eastward through his law career, he had shed whatever folksiness he might have had, while his wife had hung on to hers, like an heirloom. When the Spooners came over to visit, Muriel and Lily’s mother would get along fine together.

  Paul’s cousin Joanne came for Easter dinner with her husband and two daughters, self-conscious in fancy new dresses and white straw hats.

  ‘Does everybody get new clothes at Easter?’ Lily asked in her bright, interested way.

  ‘Sure, honey,’ Muriel said. ‘To knock ’em dead in church.’

  ‘Did you go to church?’ Lily asked one of the girls.

  ‘No.’

  The Judge carved the huge glazed ham, and Paul’s mother was happy with ‘a lovely crowd of folk around my table’.

  ‘You almost had a few more.’ Paul told them about the man in the flower store, and Lily, who was still distressed about it, added some elaborations about the father running up and down outside the burning shed and hearing his son screaming.

  The children stopped eating, fascinated. Muriel put her fingers to her lips and shook her head.

  ‘Who started the fire?’ Terry asked. Paul wished he hadn’t. The family were beginning to forget about Eddie Waite and the mailbox.

  ‘I don’t know. The poor man just told me, and then went out.’

  When the children had gone into the garden – ‘Watch out for those new white dresses’ – and they were having coffee, Muriel said to Lily, ‘You don’t look so well, honey. Are you okay?’

  ‘I always look puffy for ages if I’ve been crying. I can’t get that man out of my mind.’

  She was genuinely upset, yet, because he already knew her so well, Paul could hear her listening to herself. He loved and admired her desperately, but he knew when her full-blooded participation in life was enhanced by being an audience for her own drama, like everyone who lives in the present.

  This is me in my new red dress at a big oval table with the best white cloth, laying my feelings on the line for my new family. Lily’s letters to him before they were married had been present-tense autobiographical narrative: ‘There I am, rushing for the train, my God, I’m late! My bag’s open and my wallet falls on to the line. I’m paralyzed – help! Do I climb down, miss the train? I’m shouting and people are staring,’ etc., etc.

  ‘I should have gone after him,’ she said.

  ‘You can’t take on everyone else’s troubles,’ the Judge told her. ‘I know I’ve lost sleep at night over some terrible story I’ve heard in court, but I’ve learned to do the job and not get involved. It’s too destructive.’

  ‘But you’ve got to be involved!’ Lily leaned forwards to him across the table. ‘That’s the whole point of life. You can’t just stand back and watch what happens to people. You’ve got to be a part of it.’

  ‘True up to a point,’ Even Steven said. ‘I’ve pronounced a man guilty and then had the verdict overturned on Appeal, and felt pretty guilty myself. I’ve wanted to write to people sometimes, who’ve stood in front of me in court, and say, “I’m sorry.” ’

  ‘Did you?’

  He shook his head. ‘One has to learn not to plunge in up to the neck. That could, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, sow the seeds of ruin.’

  His face was too serious. Paul looked at Lily. The words were too chilling. But if they had affected her, she did not show it. She was leaning forwards, impatient to make her point again, when Muriel cut in.

  ‘Lily’s all right,’ she said comfortably. ‘She’s not a cold-hearted old buzzard like you, are you, honey? Maybe you’re so upset because you’re – you know.’ She nodded at the table edge in front of Lily’s stomach. ‘We’re so happy that you and Paul are going to give us a grandchild.’

  Her indulgent OB–GYN face made Paul want to protest, ‘That’s not why people have children.’ But it was more important to say, ‘You’ve got Terry.’

  ‘That’s not the same,’ Muriel said in a half whisper, although Terry was at the end of the garden. She had not cared much for Barbara, with whom she had never felt at ease.

  ‘That’s a perfectly rotten thing to say.’ The Judge was angry with her.

  ‘Oh, you know me, Steven, I don’t mean a thing. I’ll just make another pot of coffee,’ she said to get herself out of the room.

  ‘Don’t bother for us,’ Paul said. ‘We have to go.’

  ‘I thought you were going to stay and watch the football game.’

  ‘We have to get Terry back.’

  They took him to a movie and then for pizza, and got him home quite late. Lily stayed in the car. Paul got out to go to the door and explain why they were late, but the chrome of a black Corvette was glittering in the driveway.

  ‘Shit,’ Terry said. ‘Silas.’ So Paul let him go in alone.

  The house that Terry’s father rented for two weeks that July was not much more than a shack on the edge of a bog.

  ‘My father has rented a Cape house for the summer,’ Terry had said at school. The people who talked a lot about ‘my father’ were those whose fathers did not live at home.

  During the drive from the Sagamore bridge bus stop, Lily yacked away like a maniac, because Terry was silent, building up the house as something so beautiful and special, that when they rounded the last bend of the sandy road, he had to say, ‘This is it?’

  ‘Don’t you love it?’

  ‘Isn’t it great?’

  Lily and Paul had obviously plotted to deal with any sulks by turning sour to sweet.

  Terry was fed up with being dealt with by various grown-ups at home and at school, and the hints his mother had leaked out about the whole situation had made him almost not want to come to the Cape at all. But she had gone to Maine in the Corvette with Silas, so he had to come.

  When he saw the narrow white house standing sentinel over the marsh and the slow stream that meandered away to the sea, his heart raced, but he was not going to show them that he was dazzled.

  ‘Take off your jacket,’ his father said. ‘It’s hot.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Terry shifted his light jacket back on his shoulders. Taking it off was an admission he wasn’t ready to make yet.

  He took off his sneakers and jumped off the bank into squelching mud, and waded along the stream. The water pushed gently at the back of his ankles. Farther down, two boys were fishing, and another was digging something out of the mud bank. Terry said, ‘Hi,’ but they didn’t. He kept to the side as the stream broadened and deepened. His shorts were wet, but he wasn’t going to plunge in wearing clothes among the whole mess of kids in bathing suits, large and small, who were shrieking and wrestling and letting themselves be carried out by the quickening water into the shallow sea.

  Terry walked across the sand between groups of people, and felt their eyes on his back as he stood at the edge of the water. A clamour of gulls with wicked curved beaks and silly feet tucked up under their bodies flew sideways along the beach and veered out to sea. Staring after them to the far shore of the bay, Terry emptied his mind of thought and feeling. He had got quite good at this. You could just be, which passed the time pretty well, with no effort.

  His father and Lily came to the beach another way and turned up with a picnic lunch in a cooler. They had brought Terry’s swimming trunks.

  ‘Put them on under a towel,’ Lily said, but Terry would not take them.

  Lily added that he shouldn’t wander off without saying where he was going, and Terry snapped, ‘You found me, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s no way to talk to Lily,’ his father said.

  Terry kicked up sand. If they were going to gang up on him … He saw Lily make an ‘Oh dear’ face at Paul. Was this kid going to ruin the vacation for them?

  Was he? He had not decided. He could give them hell and have a lousy time, or he could enjoy it and let them think they’d won. It wasn’t up to him
anyway. It depended on the system of weights and balances inside him. He could be light one minute, free and feeling great and expecting marvels. Then someone said or did something, or he remembered something, and the weight dropped, plummeting him down with it into a murk of rage and disgust where nothing good could happen.

  Later when they had gone to their room, Terry knelt on the rollaway bed under the living-room window with his arms on the sill, and stuck his head out to breathe in the moon and stars and the dinosaur smell of the silvery marsh. This was the best place he had ever slept, the most fantastic house, like a dwarfs home, with a kitchen like a closet and patchy white walls and old cane furniture with floppy cushions.

  He woke early and went outside to poke about. When he smelled bacon and came in, Lily was making coffee in her nightgown, which was different from seeing his mother in her nightgown, because there was more of Lily.

  ‘I like it here.’ Terry made wet tracks toward her over the speckled green painted floor.

  ‘Oh, I am glad!’ She turned with a mug in one hand and her arms out as if she was going to embrace him.

  Terry kept a safe distance, but he said, ‘Yeah, it’s okay. What are we going to do today?’

  They did everything. They went to different beaches. They crossed Sandwich marsh by the boardwalk and climbed over the beach rocks to plunge into the icy sea on the north side of Cape Cod. They bought lobsters and cooked them in sea water with seaweed on the top. They ate fried clams. They rode bikes. Terry’s father rented two horses to ride through the woods.

  ‘Lily’s not coming?’

  ‘I don’t know how to ride properly.’

  ‘Oh.’ Terry had thought it was because his father wanted to ride alone with him.

  ‘And to tell you the truth, Terry,’ Lily said, looking at him uncertainly, ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  He did mind, so he insisted on a Western saddle, to annoy his father. But Paul was so determined to give Terry a good time that he let him ride like a half-baked cowboy, with his feet stuck forward and his hands in the air, although he cared desperately about that kind of horsy thing, and doing it right.