by Belva Plain
The message was not for her. It was Mr. Mackenzie calling to talk to Mr. Crawfield.
Everyone followed Arthur into the house. When he turned from the telephone, he reported with his hand over the speaker, “Ralph only wanted to know how everything was going. I wondered—he’s in the city today—whether I might ask him to join us here for a few minutes.”
“But of course,” said Laura.
I bow out, he had told her, and she had taken that to mean that their relationship—no, you could hardly call it that—their friendship, then, was to dwindle easily away, as water trickles off into sand. And that was surely what he had meant. This visit today was for the Crawfields’ benefit.
“How like Ralph.” Margaret sighed. “He’s made such an effort to bring us all together, and now he’s feeling our pain.”
“He’s a prince,” said Arthur. “We’re agreed on that. But enough of pain. Are you perhaps planning to get another dog, Timmy? Holly volunteers at an animal shelter, you know. That’s where we got the dog we have now. Our first one, who came to us when Holly was two years old, died of old age. We went right out and got another one.”
Timmy said, “I don’t know whether I’m ready. Earl was a special dog. I don’t think I could ever love another that much. I don’t know. Would you like to see pictures of him, Holly? I have a whole album in Dad’s den.”
“I’d love to,” Holly said enthusiastically as she went with Timmy, followed by Laura’s grateful glance.
“There is something especially touching about boys that age,” Margaret observed. “A girl that age is almost a woman. There’s very little of childhood left in her. But in a boy, even when he’s very bright and can surprise you with adult opinions, the little child still shows through.”
“Timmy is very much like a child in some ways. I have to watch him so carefully. For instance, he knows that if he spits blood when he coughs, he’ll have to go back to the hospital, so I’m sure he’ll try to hide it from me if it happens. This heat’s the worst thing for him, too. He hasn’t been feeling well, but he won’t admit it. So I have to watch. It’s difficult …”
Margaret nodded. “Yes, they hide things. Sometimes they wait till the lungs fill up and it’s almost too late, or it is too late.”
“Last year he wanted to try out for the track team. He pestered and pestered, so finally we said he could. Of course he didn’t make it, he almost suffocated from the effort.”
Arthur, who had been staring at nothing while they talked, came awake. “It must be hard for him to compare himself with someone as vigorous as Tom.”
“Yes,” Laura said simply. “Yes, it is. But Tom has always tried to make it easier. He’s taught Timmy to lift weights, which is good enough for the muscles, but better still for the spirits. It’s an adult male activity, and they can do it together.”
No one commented. Darn catbird, Laura thought. He, or one of his relatives, had followed them from the other side of the house to squawk into their sudden silences.
Then Margaret said, “I have a sense of unreality. Do you feel how unreal it is for us to be sitting here like this talking about Tom?”
And Laura answered, “I do. And I also feel how remarkable it is that we don’t hate each other.”
Arthur spoke. “There wouldn’t be much use in that, would there?”
At that moment, Ralph Mackenzie came in. When he had sat down, he looked around at the three solemn, quiet faces, and making no false attempt at useless cheer, said bluntly that he had not expected this meeting with Tom to work, but had thought it worth a try.
“I think,” he said, “you have met with an immovable object.”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “a stone wall. And one doesn’t batter one’s head against stone walls. If Tom doesn’t want to talk to us, we’ll have to accept it. It will be easier all around.”
Margaret was biting her lips again. When she saw Laura glancing at her, she stopped and asked with an assumed brightness, “How is the campaign going, Ralph?”
“Pretty well. Two more of the men at the KKK meeting have been identified as Johnson men. The link is getting tighter and tighter, which is all to the good for our side.”
Arthur, addressing Laura, asked, “Your manager Pitt didn’t do your company any good, did he?”
Margaret remonstrated, “Arthur! Please!”
“Laura’s not a weakling,” Arthur replied. “The facts are there, the whole affair is horrendous, she’s had to face it, and she seems to have faced it rather well.”
“Thank you,” Laura said. “I try.”
“So what is happening with your company? Ralph says you have problems, that they—”
“It’s all right,” Ralph said. “Laura can know that I told you. I thought maybe you might have some ideas for her. You’ve got business contacts that I haven’t got.”
“I may have both, some ideas and some contacts.”
“I would be very grateful,” Laura said. “We can’t last too long like this. The wages and the expenses continue, but business has dropped way off.”
“Will Tom want to take it over someday?” Arthur inquired now. “I understand he’s been working there.”
It was as if, in spite of his remark about Tom and the stone wall, he was unable to stay away from the subject.
“No,” replied Laura. “That was only a summer project to please Bud. Tom still wants to be an astronomer.”
Arthur persisted. “No politics?”
Laura felt the heat tingle up her neck and onto her cheeks. “I can’t tell. It is all up in the air. Everything is.”
“Didn’t Holly come with you?” Ralph asked quickly.
“She’s with Timmy, looking at pictures of Timmy’s dog,” Margaret said.
Laura went to call the two. Her body was rigid from the strain of the day. But they would soon be going home, and the house would be empty of all their questions; she would go to the piano, she would play Monopoly with Timmy, she would lie down …
“You people had a long talk about dogs,” said Margaret. “I didn’t know there was so much to say about dogs.”
Margaret struggled too hard. She was on the verge of tears, anyone could see that, yet she was so determinedly upbeat. It was irritating. And yet I suppose I do the same, Laura said to herself.
Holly answered, “We didn’t talk that much about dogs, we talked about Peter.”
“Oh,” said Laura.
“I asked whether he knew he was going to die,” Timmy said, “whether when he was eleven he knew he would be dead in a few years.”
They were all stunned. There was no “proper” answer to give because, of course, Timmy was really asking whether he, too, would be dead at eighteen. What could one answer?
It was Arthur who replied. First he removed his glasses and wiped his forehead. Then he sighed. Finally, having moved his chair nearer to Timmy’s, he smiled and began to speak to the boy as though there was no one else in the room, only they two, man to man.
“Listen,” he said. “Listen to me. I don’t truly know what Peter actually thought. He certainly must have worried about it, and probably he put it out of his mind as best he could. We’re all going to die, but we don’t know when. Your father didn’t know it the night he left here in his car, intending to come back in a couple of hours.”
Oh no, thought Laura. He’s too blunt, too rash. He’s tearing the bandage off the fresh wound. But she did not know how to stop him.
“All of us are prey to accident or sickness. The only difference in your case is that you already know what it is that you have to fight. Most of us don’t know, so we’re caught by surprise.”
Timmy looked doubtful, yet kept his eyes focused on Arthur.
“The good news for you is that people with your disease are living much, much longer than ever before. The better news is that—well, have you ever heard anything about gene therapy? Do you know anything at all about it?”
“No, but Tom does. Tom reads about science things all
the time.”
“Well,” said Arthur, pausing. “Well, you can ask Tom to look it up for you. There are things going on in the universities and the National Institutes of Health, experiments with packaging the cystic fibrosis gene in a cold virus. It’s complicated stuff, more than I understand myself, because I’m not a scientist. The only thing I do understand is how hopeful it all is.”
“Why didn’t they use it for Peter?”
“It’s brand, brand new. It wasn’t ready yet.”
And it isn’t ready yet now, thought Laura, with tears prepared to flow in another minute, prickling the backs of her eyes.
“But it will be, soon?” asked Timmy.
Arthur made a skillful evasion. “They expect so. Soon enough for you, at any rate.”
“In the meantime,” Laura prompted, “he has to take care of himself.”
“By all means,” agreed Arthur.
“He has to obey all the rules. He knows them, but sometimes he forgets. He has to watch his diet, not overexercise, and not get overheated.”
“Absolutely,” Arthur said.
“I wish I could get him out of this awful heat,” Laura complained. “But I can’t possibly go anywhere now. There are things to do. Lawyers and papers. Things.”
Timmy was uncomfortable, and she became aware that she had been discussing him as if he weren’t present, just as one speaks about a little child who cannot understand what is being said.
“I wonder,” Margaret began, and looked toward her husband.
He nodded and smiled again. The smile used up his whole face, forehead and cheeks. “Go ahead.”
Margaret began, “I don’t suppose Laura would, or even that Timmy would—”
“Would what?” asked Timmy.
“We have a cottage near the lake,” Margaret said. “We were planning to go up for a week, but we postponed our departure till tomorrow because we were coming here. If you would consider it and your mother would let you,” Margaret said, turning to Laura, “it would be fun. It’s cool, at least ten degrees cooler than here.”
Now Holly interjected. “We go sailing and fishing in the river nearby, and there are two boys in the next cottage who are about your age.”
Timmy looked interested. He needed a change, he needed to have something good happen, Laura told herself. And yet she hardly knew these people. Unconsciously she looked toward Ralph, who promptly answered her silent appeal.
“Lake Mohawk’s a great place. Beautiful white sand beaches, hills all around, beautiful. Timmy would love it.”
Oh, she remembered the hills and the white sand beach, the sun and the wind, the bee-buzz in the flowers along the stairs rising to the cottage …
“I guess I’d like to go,” said Timmy, surprising her. Apparently these strangers attracted him. “Mom, yes, I’d like to go.”
“All right,” she said, giving in. And to the Crawfields, “You are just so incredibly kind, that I don’t know what to say.”
“Say nothing. It will be our pleasure. What we’ll do is, go back to our house from here, pack a few things, and make an early start in the morning.”
“Then, Timmy,” Laura said, “you’d better get your things now. Take two swim trunks, and don’t forget a sweater.”
As soon as he was out of the room, Margaret assured Laura, “You mustn’t worry for a minute. We know how to take care of him.”
“I know you do.”
When they had driven away, Laura remarked how strange it was that they had come here to be with their son, only to leave with hers instead.
“What really happened to Tom?” asked Ralph. “Although perhaps you don’t want to talk about it.”
“The same as always. He said it was just too much for him. It was the worst moment when they arrived and I had to tell them he wasn’t here. I didn’t know what to expect, whether Margaret would cry or they’d be furious, but they took the disappointment very well.”
“They do their crying in private.”
“I feel so sorry for them. It’s amazing that they wanted to take Timmy.”
“He’s Peter all over again, and they can feel for him.”
Ralph was still standing at the door. And when he turned to her, she, expecting a polite leave-taking, was about to respond when he remarked instead, “I look around at these huge old trees and all this space, and suddenly I miss what I grew up with. I think of a garden, a hammock, and a book. My apartment begins to feel like a box.”
“Would you like to see our garden for a minute?” A second after giving the invitation she was embarrassed. She had presumed on the man’s good manners. Had he not made clear his decision to “bow out”?
“I’d like to,” he said.
They went through the house onto the rear veranda. The afternoon had waned, and here in the shade the air had cooled enough to be bearable. A fine spray from the lawn sprinklers glistened on a broad perennial border, a well-tended melange of larkspur and phlox, of lilies, asters, and cosmos.
“Who takes care of all this?” asked Ralph.
“Bud and the boys, mostly Tom when he’s home.”
But they would not be home, Bud never again and Tom only rarely, more rarely than ever now, things being what they were. This awareness swept over Laura with the sudden force of wind, chilling the long lawn in front of her and the lonely house at her back. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, Ralph was looking at her. “I said if you needed help you should ask me,” he said gently. “You still haven’t asked.”
“But you also said you were ‘bowing out,’ and I understand why.”
“I was talking about Tom. Did you think I meant you?”
“It seemed that way.”
“I didn’t mean you,” he said quietly.
If she had been frail and weepy, she would not have touched him so, he believed. He had felt the strength of her, the iron under the velvet, from that very first day when he had brought his shocking message to this house. It seemed like years ago, but it had only been weeks. And he remembered that he had gone away wondering what could have brought such a woman and such a man together. What a waste! he had thought, and thought now. That man had corrupted the boy, or at least, having seen the creeping corruption, had done nothing to stop it. Indeed, he had encouraged it, and must have rejoiced in it. And now she stands in mourning, for he recognized the black blouse and white skirt as a kind of discreet mourning—not because the death had crushed her, but because she knows what this particular community expects. And while she’s here, she will properly meet expectations. He understood her.
He wished he could foresee what was to happen between them, whether anything could. Tall as she was, he was still much taller, and she had to look up to meet his eyes. Two round, heavy tears gathered in hers. I didn’t mean you. He was moved to the heart.
“Tell me,” he said, “let me help you. You never complain.”
Laura shook her head. Totally unable to say that he was too much in her thoughts, that he had reawakened in her all the longing, the fierce sickness of desire that she had once had—only once—and then lost, she shook her head.
“You keep everything locked up inside.”
“No. Well, yes, I guess I do.”
And now as her tears rolled freely, she spoke.
“How can I sort it out? Everything is tangled into everything else. I think of Bud and how he died. They say he was killed instantly, and maybe he was, I don’t really know, and I hope he didn’t suffer. But I didn’t love him. He was good to me, and he loved the boys, but he wasn’t honest with me, and I know my life with him wasn’t honest either. I covered up with my joy in music and my sons. Now I wonder what will become of my sons—” She stopped and drew back. “Are you shocked that a widow in these circumstances should say such things?”
“As you say, ‘in these circumstances.’ So no, I am not shocked,” he said gravely. And putting his arm around her shoulder, drew her to him.
The contact was tentative
, the intent was only to strengthen and console; she knew that. Yet she knew, too, that with a slight, responding turn of her body or his, there would be consequences. Already her heart was beating rapidly …
She pulled away. It wasn’t possible, not here and now, with a pile of black-bordered stationery on the desk waiting to be addressed, no, nor with the boys still wounded and grieving for their father; nor with Tom and Ralph at loggerheads …
He read her mind. Releasing her, he murmured, “There is a time, Laura. A right time for everything.”
The evening had darkened into a hazy blue when she accompanied him to the door. Neither of them spoke. He kissed her cheek and went quickly down the path.
She went to the back of the house to lock up for the night. A chorus of those insects who grow louder as summer moves toward fall now burst the quiet, making her aware before long that she had been there for minutes gazing, thinking and gazing at the night. The hedgerow at the garden’s end was deep as a forest, where, wandering in circles, one might be lost forever.
CHAPTER
16
On Saturday night Tom had sprung up out of bed, switched on the light and seen that it was almost three o’clock. Actually it was already Sunday.
At one o’clock in the afternoon those people would be coming up to the front door, the whole kit and caboodle of them, as Aunt Lillian used to say; remembering the old aunts and their sayings that had used to seem so boring and outdated, he longed for them now, those neat, proper American ladies. They would take his part, he was sure. Damn. He had to get out of here.
Enough was enough. No doubt it was mean to run out on Mom at the last minute, but he had never been mean to her before and must be forgiven a first time. Anyway, he felt bitter toward her. Deny it as she might and as she had done, there was something between her and Mackenzie, the bastard who was pushing him over to the Crawfields. He sensed it. Hadn’t Mom herself always said he had “an uncanny nose for people’s secrets”?
He folded his best slacks and a good sport shirt. Tonight they’d go out to dinner, he and Robbie, to a great lobster dinner. He folded some bills and zippered the pocket. At the last minute before turning the light off, he remembered the polar bear, tucked it under his arm, and crept downstairs. The house was too still, Mom was alone in the big room without Bud, and Timmy was alone without his dog.