Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  His old ones were ragged, with holes at the big toes. Lily had bought him a new pair at Woolworth’s, but his mother did not like them. She bought him another pair, more expensive, which didn’t make sense, if what she said about the money was true. She didn’t like it that Lily had washed some of his clothes. They were a bit damp, because of having to catch the bus (which had meant Dad and Lily couldn’t go to Brewster). His mother shoved everything into the washing-machine, clean or dirty.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’ she finally asked. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Everything Beaches, ferry to the Vineyard, fried clams, riding, theatre.’

  ‘I’m glad, Ter. But I’m glad you’re home.’ She was so nice to him, and so easy and jokey that he was glad too. She let him ask Spike Clay to supper, whom she didn’t usually like, and they all went to the movies.

  Lunch at his North Shore grandparents was as boring as expected. They sat inside the screened porch, instead of out on the lawn, and ate in the dining-room. After lunch, everyone went to look at the horses, or swam in the pool, which Terry didn’t want to do, because his grazes and gravel burns hurt.

  He wanted them to hurt. They brought him a picture of the dunes and the flying children and the huge wave knocking him into the blackness, and the strong man in the soaked shirt and shorts carrying the boy through the surf on to the sand. It was a good picture to summon up. Terry hoped he wouldn’t lose it.

  ‘Got nothing to do?’

  His Uncle Robert, who had come back to live at home after his wife walked out, took him upstairs to play with the elaborate train set he had kept in the attic since he was a boy.

  With Uncle Robert, it wasn’t play, it was work. He timed the trains with a stopwatch. You had to get the signals right to the fraction of a second. He wrote out a schedule, and each train had to arrive and leave dead on time. If Terry bungled it, he had to start the train again on its complicated journey around the snaking tracks on the attic floor, through the tunnels and road crossings, past the lever that dropped a mail bag, and a child who waved, and a dog that came out of a kennel and lifted its leg on a fire plug. Terry’s knees on the bare floor were sore from the shingle under the powerful wave.

  Although Uncle Robert was in the family firm, he was a bit childish: long-faced, with a jaw that dropped and a heavy under-lip, and slow of speech. If he was hustled along, he stuttered. He played practical jokes on people, and giggled.

  Downstairs, someone had talked about his wife possibly coming back.

  ‘I don’t know that I want her to,’ he told Terry, over the whirr and clacking of the two forty-six to Deerfield Corner.

  ‘Don’t worry. She won’t. Once you split, that’s it.’

  Terry knew that now.

  In the years after their elder daughter took herself off to the United States, James and Nora Spooner found themselves getting a bit restless.

  Granada Avenue was no longer the flowering haven it had once seemed when they moved into it with Lily and Blanche. There was more room now at Number 127 without Lily, who had always seemed to take up more space than she actually did; but the house was shabby and the neighbourhood was going downhill. Some of the brick and stucco houses had two or three bells beside the front door. Gardens had grown rough, or were ironed out with concrete to park a second car beside the garage, or an egg-shaped caravan. Traffic at the top of the hill was so thick, you had to wait to cross to the bus stop. Down at the bottom of the road, where the church school used to be, some of the houses and shops and the red-brick school buildings were being demolished to put up a block of flats.

  ‘Noise and dust for years.’ James flapped his hands round his face and head to illustrate. ‘And then a lifetime of council tenants.’

  ‘Like my mother.’

  ‘Oops.’ James ducked from a non-existent blow. ‘She’s different.’

  ‘Vive la différence,’ Nora said comfortably. She had a fund of apt remarks. Her mother was different, with her righteous ways and her lavatory window thrown open to the Hounslow gales. She was worse.

  They often talked about moving out to the country, ‘before we hit fifty’. The Chilterns, perhaps. Somewhere with hills and village life. James could transfer to a sub post office or take over a sweetshop with a miniature post office in one corner, counting out stamps over the sausage rolls, being kind to pensioners and kiddies stopping in for suckers on their way home from school, and so on. Nora could nurse anywhere. Blanche loved dogs and country walks. James would grow scarlet runner-beans and giant marrows.

  They talked a lot about it, because talking meant you could enjoy the thought of it all without having to do anything. When Lily and Paul came over to visit with fierce little Isobel and the new baby Cathy, they told them what was in the wind.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ Nora said. ‘I could probably get a job anywhere, a nursing-home, if all else fails. I like the old ones.’

  ‘But to work in a place where people only leave for one reason,’ Lily said. ‘How awful.’

  ‘Someone’s got to take care of those poor old dears.’

  James saw his son-in-law – funny to call someone that when you hardly knew them – look up from the floor where he was changing the baby’s nappy – these modern fathers were beyond all belief – to smile because Nora was so kind and motherly.

  ‘Insurance for my old age.’ She smiled back at Paul. ‘Want Granny to help? No? Aren’t you marvellous.’ She was dotty about the fellow already. ‘Do unto others, I say, as you would be done by. Will you “do by” me, Jamie, when my time comes?’

  ‘I’ll die long before you. Look at me. I’m falling to pieces.’

  ‘What’s wrong, sir?’ Paul fastened the baby’s playsuit and picked her up.

  ‘You’ve just said it. My son-in-law, who’s only fourteen years younger than me, calls me sir. I’m all in, podner. I’m beat. Want to feel my heart? Cardiac fibrillation.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Nora said. ‘It’s hypochondria.’

  ‘Don’t ever live with a nurse, Paul,’ James grumbled. ‘You never get any attention.’

  ‘You do from me, Jam.’ With Isobel on her knee, Lily reached up to pull his head down and kiss him. Isobel’s short arms went up too, and she kissed him passionately and wetly on the mouth.

  ‘What happened to “Daddy”?’ Lily had started to call him James or Jam in her letters almost as soon as she got married.

  ‘I’m finally grown up. I’m an equal.’

  With a black bow behind her head where her hair was pulled back, and a bit of extra plumpness from the last baby, she did not look very different to James from the girl whose hockey stick had always fallen across the bottom of the cellar stairs when he went down to change a fuse.

  Paul had been at the Equestrian Trade Fair all day, flogging his brainchild, a new kind of adjustable rack to hang up saddles and bridles. After supper, he wanted to take Lily to the West End, since Nora would listen for the children.

  ‘Well now, wait a minute.’ Was the man trying to treat James’s house as a hotel? Bed and breakfast, suppers, baby-sitting, and claiming expenses from his firm, no doubt. Polish off a steak-and-kidney pie and rhubarb crumble and then off into the night with Lily, who was supposed to be visiting her dear old Dad and Mum. ‘I thought you and I were going up to the George.’

  Lily started to protest, but Paul looked at her, and then turned to James with one of his great disarming smiles that looked as if he were in love with all the world, and said, ‘Sure, James, I’d love to.’

  Paul was a hit at the pub. A Yank. Dennis, who liked to take a dig where he could, had a go at President Johnson and Viet Nam, and complained that America wanted to run the world, but Paul turned it aside. If James and Nora ever visited America, as Lily said they must, when they had settled into their new house, and someone attacked England, Jam would floor them. But Paul turned Dennis off with an amiable, ‘I guess we shouldn’t be there.’

  Everyone liked him. James had talked about him enough,
and now here he was, Jam’s Yank. Paul liked the look of the old upright, and was going to ask if he could play, but when Jonesey left the girl he had in his corner and came towards the piano, Paul stepped back, as if he had been a George regular for years, and knew about Jonesey’s touchy temper.

  James did the verses of ‘The Parson’s Lady’, and Paul joined in the chorus with the rest of them, once he got the hang of it. Later, Paul got James and that chap with the beard whose name no one ever knew to do ‘Lida Rose’ with him in barbershop harmony. James, who was taller than Paul, had to bend over, so they could put their heads together and feel the sound vibrating. The smell of the man’s skin and the feel of his thick hair against his temple gave James funny thoughts about Lily, his grown-up equal, who now belonged to this hair and this smell.

  Keep it clean, Jamspoon. But Lily had once been a gullible wriggly cuddler like Isobel, only the other day, so soon they grew away from you …

  ‘So soon,’ James got Jonesey to play after the barbershop. ‘So soon, the bird of love has flown,’ in melancholy mood, with an elbow among the glasses on top of the upright, and the other hand over his heart.

  ‘That was great,’ Paul told him, as they dropped, loose-jointed and mellow, down the hill. ‘You were great, Jam.’

  ‘Bit of fun, that’s all.’

  ‘When the Brits throw a compliment back in your face, do they mean to insult you, or does it just happen?’

  Paul had been putting questions about the pub, to Nigel, behind the bar. Being American, he always wanted to know how things worked.

  ‘You could do something like that, you and Nora,’ he told James as they went down Granada Road, falling into a snatch of close harmony opposite the haunted house with the pinnacles. ‘If you really want to get out of town, you could buy a pub somewhere, or manage one.’

  James’s imagination took flight immediately. Why mess about with a post office sweetshop? ‘I could be a jovial landlord. Mein Host. Nora could do bar snacks. Free beer for you any time.’

  At home, Lily and Nora were in the sitting-room, in dressing-gowns. Lily was bottle-feeding Cathy. James saw Paul’s eyes light up as he went quickly across to her, and she put up her face contentedly to be kissed. It was still odd to see clumsy, impulsive Lily with her large gestures and know-all opinions, scaled down to this gentle woman, beloved, bending in a curve over the sleepy baby.

  Blanche’s black and white dog was asleep on Nora’s foot. Paul picked him up and took him into his lap, massaging the knuckle of his ear with a practised hand.

  ‘He was the hit of the George.’ James put his huge hand on his son-in-law’s shoulder. Son-in-law came more easily to the tongue of the mind after the camaraderie of the smoky, malty saloon bar.

  ‘Your dad and I and a rather hairy character did some close harmony.’

  ‘Oh, Paul, not that awful barbershop quartet stuff.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘In the pub? That’s so – so American.’

  ‘I am American.’ Paul remained mild.

  James knew that face on Lily. ‘Are you angry because you couldn’t go dancing up West?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes.’ Lily always said what she thought. ‘I felt left out.’

  Oi, what’s this? She used to be sent upstairs for that pout when she was little. In years but not in size, because she had grown early. Better knock that off, ducky. Can’t interfere with a man going off to the pub. James was going to chide her, but then there passed between his daughter and her husband a look of such naked devotion as he had never seen, much less felt.

  Number one first. Never offer up your sanity to the god Eros. Keep ‘em guessing, etc., etc. The safe principles he had proudly followed shook like blancmange. There was something here – Lily of all people – that was selfless and abiding.

  ‘And you know what, Lil?’ James broke into the union of the look. ‘Your husband has settled our future. I’m going to run a country pub.’

  ‘Pigs might fly,’ Nora said. ‘Too much work for you.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll help, of course. You can learn to pull beer and do the ordering. Big cheeses in damp cloths in the larder. Hard-boiled eggs from your own chickens. I’ll carve the ham. Oak beams. Darts. Jangly old piano with dripping candles. Log fires. Beer garden in the summer. Everyone in the neighbourhood drops in.’ James leaned on his hands on the back of the sofa as if he were behind a bar, and passed an imaginary damp cloth along it. ‘Drink up, Sir Percy, Reverend Sid, old Tom, me lad. This one’s on the house. Grand, eh?’

  ‘New audience to show off to, Jam,’ Lily said. ‘Give them a break at the George.’

  ‘They’ll miss me,’ James warned.

  ‘Like a hole in the head.’ Nora had learned some new phrases from Paul, popping them primly from her practical mouth.

  Upstairs, James was still full of the plan.

  ‘We’d be together all the time, me old dear. No more me off to the post office salt mines and you off to that pest house at all brutal hours of the day and night.’

  ‘But you know what they say,’ Nora was comfortably in bed. ‘I married you for better or worse, but not for lunch.’

  ‘I get so lonely for you, dear.’ Before he turned out the light, he saw himself in the dressing-table mirror, lugubrious in his broad-striped pyjamas, big crooked nose, mouth and eyes pulled down like a basset-hound.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Nora said. ‘I’m here. There now.’

  When he climbed into her twin bed (she had used the excuse of his imaginary bad back to sell their soft old double, genesis of Lily and Blanche), she took him to her in a motherly fashion. ‘There now, lovey.’

  ‘It’s awful that I never see you,’ Lily said to Ida on the phone. ‘I’ve had you on my mind.’

  ‘Too bad there’s nothing better on it.’

  Lily sounded guilty, poor old Lil, with her incurable passion for taking people on and doing right by them.

  ‘I need to see you, Eye,’ she said, but did she really, with her successful husband and her two children and her house in Newton and probably a lot of new friends? She doesn’t need me, Ida thought, without bitterness, just as a statement of fact.

  Although Ida could drive now and had a bashed-in grey Chevrolet with rust-chewed flanks and a low seat from which she could hardly see over the wheel, she would not go to Newton. She did not want Lily to come up to Watkins, with Buddy the way he could be, so they met at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant on the highway.

  Lily’s two little girls were beautiful. The four-year-old was dark and intense, staring with shiny round eyes and not saying much, while the younger child was fair and fairylike and never stopped chattering nonsense.

  Lily said Ida’s children were beautiful too. She could not get over what a saint Bernie still was at ten years old.

  ‘Paul’s son was so mixed up and difficult at that age. I thought he came round to our side that first summer on the Cape, but his mother’s still so possessive and difficult. She tells him, “Your father abandoned us.” I try to straighten things out, but I can’t say, “Your mother was the one who was sleeping around.” And he’s so unpredictable. One minute he’s calling to say he wants to come to us, but then Barbara won’t let him. The next, she’s agreed to him staying with us, and he’ll be all over the girls, playing with them and being very responsible, and then start shouting because we can’t go to the movies since there’s no baby-sitter, and calling his mother to come and fetch him home.’

  ‘Well, he’s fifteen.’ Ida did not want any more of Lily agonizing over her stepson. ‘When Bernie’s a teenager, he’ll probably be just as bad.’

  ‘I don’t see why, Ma,’ Bernie said, eating salad. What kid his age chose salad in a restaurant?

  ‘You can’t go on being perfect for ever.’

  He worried Ida sometimes, he really did. He ought to be a mess, seeing the way Buddy was with him, either yelling at him or indulging him, or coming home pig drunk and smashing things. Last time, he had hauled Berni
e out of bed to come downstairs and listen to him raving, and when he threw up on the new couch-cover, Bernie, pale and skimpy in his shrunk pyjamas, had cleaned it up.

  Lily was careful also to praise Maggie, and not to notice that she made gaping faces and did not finish words. At seven, she had grown pretty homely, with thick-lensed glasses in the passionate pink frames she loved, and a short pug nose like Verna Legge’s side of the family. This bad luck made Ida love her more.

  ‘She’s just a bit slow, is all.’

  Maggie never minded what she heard said about her.

  Ida saw Lily take a breath before she risked asking, ‘How does she get on at school?’

  ‘Bit slow.’ Ida put some pieces of hamburger bun back on Maggie’s plate and mopped at the spilled juice. ‘But it’s a rotten school, on the base. Everyone knows that. If she can’t read too good, that’s the teacher’s fault, not hers.’

  ‘You don’t think she should be tested?’

  Four-year-old Isobel stared with those eyes like wet damsons. Maggie paid no attention.

  ‘There’s a place in Boston,’ Lily began, smiling with her head on one side to cover her nosiness.

  ‘Shut up,’ Ida said. ‘You leave us alone, eh?’

  ‘All right, all right. My God, Eye, what’s the matter with you?’

  Lily raised her voice, which was still so English that people at neighbouring tables looked around. Cathy began to wail in her high-chair, and Bernie gave her one of his french fries.

  ‘Gi’ a fren’ fry.’ Maggie scowled, and Bernie gave her the biggest one he had been saving to eat last.

  ‘There’s so much help children can get,’ Lily ploughed on. ‘You haven’t got the right to –’

  ‘Just lay off of me,’ Ida said. ‘Just lay off.’

  The doctor at the base, and the school, and other mothers, some of whom were just as nosy as Lily, had finally forced Ida to accept the truth about Maggie, but she was not going to let Lily feel sorry for her.

  Buddy said Maggie was an idiot, which did not help, but there was nothing much Ida could do about Buddy. They lived pretty well, with enough food, and the Air Force paying for the furnace to roar all day and all night in the wicked New England winters, which somebody should have told Ida about before she left home to be a GI bride in her pink suit and crippling shoes.