Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  And Owen was pushing himself to his feet, too, where he stood for a moment before turning and moving slowly off toward the dressing room. One of the coaches left midcourt to follow him, but no one else moved. Once the onlookers had recognized Martin, they were horrified. Several people in the stands had risen to their feet, but most had stayed exactly where they were, stunned. The teenagers were awed by these consequences more profoundly than they had understood the fact of Toby’s death, and the adults were filled with dismay and pity and relief.

  One of the coaches caught Martin roughly by the elbow as he turned to leave, but Martin swung around so furiously, in a slight, aggressive crouch, that the coach drew back. The two men spoke briefly, and Martin moved away, stopping to collect Duchess at the far end of the room. The spectators relaxed a little and sat back down or rearranged themselves in the bleachers. No one had been seriously hurt. In fact, there was an unspoken feeling that something had been brought to a conclusion.

  Martin paused once more on the ridge of Bell’s Hill, before following Duchess down the steep incline that would lead him into the parking lot of the Freund Museum. Only now, six years later, did it occur to him exactly what had propelled him across that basketball court. It was simply that he had not been able to bear the innocent self-centeredness of Owen’s own suffering.

  He clipped Duchess back onto her leash. His thoughts turned to the soft day ahead. He had awakened this morning already making a mental list of chores to be done. When he had been on the roof some weeks earlier to unclog a gutter, he had noticed that several slates needed replacing. Water had seeped beneath them and then had frozen and dislodged them sometime over the winter, and he had made a quick inspection of his household to discover any other ravages of the past unusually brutal February.

  But surely at seventeen Martin had not really believed in weather, had not really known about gravity, had given no thought to the seasons as they happened around him. When he was the age Owen had been when Toby was killed, Martin had taken the natural world for granted. Living on the earth had not impressed him with the slightest degree of humility.

  No doubt he had understood that dramatic weather has dramatic consequences, but he had not known that just a little bit of weather can weigh down the soul—the prevailing wind that moves west to east, the cold that sweeps in from the north, the stifling heat that might settle over the village of West Bradford in long days of damp haze. Not until he had become a householder and begun his yearly battle with the storm windows, the peeling paint on the west wall, the sump pump in the spring, the winter-killed evergreen branches to be trimmed back, had he sometimes succumbed to the melancholy that accompanies the recognition of inevitability.

  In the saturated air that long-ago afternoon in the gymnasium, it had maddened Martin that Owen’s very sadness had been perceived by those around him as a virtue. But what could someone Owen’s age have known about anything, and what difference would it have made how Owen felt?

  As he made his way home, Martin battled a feeling of chagrin. In that gymnasium so long ago he had behaved like a person who had not understood the absurdity of indignation. That one moment of futile aggression had been induced by his realization that Owen’s agony was inevitably self-centered and peripheral to the real tragedy of the loss of Toby. But of course, so had been his own grief. As inevitable as it is, there is no use in grief, that’s what he had not understood. It only battens down one’s sensibilities a little more, further delineates that little core of “self,” and makes it even more necessary to repress one’s own knowledge in order to get on with the days.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A PERFECT THING

  EARLY ON THE MORNING of the Howellses’ annual Fourth of July party, David came down so early to work in the garden that ground fog still pooled and swirled at the foot of the yard. Even parts of his own small garden were obscured from him. He had not slept at all after taking Christie home from a late party. Near dawn he had pulled on jeans and an old blue shirt, and carried his shoes through the barely lightening rooms and crept out the back door before sitting down on the steps to put on his old L. L. Bean bluchers.

  He and Christie had gone to a party on Squire’s Hill where there was a fluctuating group of twenty to thirty. They had sat around with Ethan and Sam, who was with Meg Cramer most of the night. By the time David got Christie away, Meg had wandered off, and Sam was stretched out on the low stone wall next to the Park Service built-in barbecue pit. Ethan was mixing drinks of vodka and cranberry juice for everyone, but David had brought a six-pack and sipped a beer.

  Sitting there on the grass, watching the four of them get drunk, David had suddenly been as bored as he had ever remembered being in his life. The sensation had frightened him because it was a feeling he had fought this whole last year of high school. He had turned all at once, just at the moment Sam was taking a last drag on a cigarette, holding it between his thumb and index finger, in a manner that for the first time filled David with scorn because it seemed so affected. He had been overwhelmed by the idea that all he had thought about Sam, who had been his best friend since third grade—all he had thought about him or any way in which he had ever valued him—was false. Simultaneously, however, he had been filled with a longing for Sam’s easy friendship.

  Sometime after midnight he and Christie had broken away from the group; but when they approached her house, the patio lights were on, and they could see Mrs. Douglas sitting out in a lawn chair by the pool, her cigarette making a bright arc every few moments, up and back. Through the filmy curtains the shadow of Christie’s father could be seen moving through the house, past the lighted windows.

  “Oh, God, David. Don’t take me home.”

  “Are they waiting up for you?”

  “No. They went out before I left. They probably just got home. I just don’t want to have to talk to them right now.” So he had pulled the car over to the curb two houses down the street. He had been unaccountably impatient. He didn’t even want to touch Christie, but he had reached over and put his hand on her neck under her soft hair in a pretense of comfort. She sat still for a moment, her head bowed under his hand, and then with a sudden spasm of rage she had straightened, rigid against the door, and thrown his hand off.

  “I really wish you just wouldn’t touch me when you’re in a mood like this!”

  He hadn’t said anything, but he put his hand on the steering wheel and leaned his head against the headrest.

  “You’re getting ready, aren’t you, not to care at all about anybody? Won’t that make your life easy? Won’t you be free? You can just go away with your great, fucking brilliance, and your… superiority, and when you think about me you can just say, ‘Oh, well, Christie was so intense. Christie had so many problems! Christie’s so young!’” Her face was splotchy and glaring, and he looked away from her, out the window.

  She rose to her knees and swung her hand at him ineffectually, just grazing the side of his head. “Don’t you dare look away from me! Don’t you dare… don’t you dare! Even Ethan and Sam! You’re not even honest with Ethan and Sam anymore. You’re like, ‘Oh, it’s so awful for me to have to be around all the barbarians!’” She made her voice light and feminine, implying an unsavory kind of fastidiousness.

  David had been quiet and hurt, at first, because he had never thought he felt superior to, and certainly not any smarter than, Ethan or Sam or Christie herself. But even as he was offended he was bored, and the boredom was quickly translated into anger. He didn’t have any way of knowing that what Christie perceived as his sense of superiority was really a kind of emotional stinginess, a protective reserve peculiar in someone his age. Usually when David was angry he kept it to himself; he merely left the room. And last night he had not yelled back at Christie, but his voice had somehow expanded in volume so that it had a hollow, desperate sound even to his own ears, and he had slammed his fist against the dashboard. “I can’t do all this at once, Christie! I can’t be nice to everyone all the time
anymore!”

  She had sat back and simply studied him for a moment while she wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. Then she had smiled weakly. “God, David!” And at last she had laughed a little. “You’re not as nice as you think you are, anyway.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay,” she answered.

  “Are you coming over tomorrow night? For the party?”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, but then her words became exact, as though they occurred to her for the first time as she spoke. “Your house is probably my favorite place to be in the world,” she said with no hint of sarcasm, and he turned then to look at her face, which was composed. “It’s like a visit with the world’s last happy family,” she added, while she took her brush out of her purse and began pulling it through her curly hair, smoothing it as best she could away from her face. But that last remark had irritated him more than anything else she had said the whole night.

  In the early gray of the morning damp, as David carefully weeded between the rows, it made her seem stupid to have said such a thing. In his remembrance of that one sentence he thought he heard a false note, a way Christie thought she should sound. What could be happening to him that lately he scarcely liked any of the people he loved? Why was it that no one he knew possessed any quirk of personality, any point of view about which he was the least bit curious? It frightened him that the world to which he was so accustomed had taken on the flattened aspect of a badly animated cartoon.

  And, as he worked painstakingly down one row and into the next under the rising sun, he became more and more agitated, more irritated, although now his disgruntlement was amorphous, as though it shrouded him from without rather than springing from within. Nothing except this little plot of ground seemed to be right in the world just at the moment.

  Dinah was able to walk up and down the stairs of her house, and in and out of the rooms, and think of it as a spare, clean, crisp apple of a place—a perfect thing. The building was a simple one, an old gray farmhouse with good bones and a plain face, and the interior was not decorated, but she had thought about the color of the paint, the fabric of the curtains, the arrangement of the chairs and sofas and lamps and rugs very carefully. It seemed to her legitimately beautiful, like an original Shaker box, austere but not contrived. But, in fact, this view of her house was a product of her own selective vision; her household burgeoned with the collected detritus of the lives of the people who lived in it.

  The mantelpieces in the dining room and living room were crowded with a variety of things the children had brought home from school over the years—a lumpish blue candlestick Sarah had made in fifth grade, a varnished wooden plaque with “Howells” etched into it by Toby with the woodburning kit he had gotten for his eighth birthday, an overlarge white mug emblazoned in gilt script “Mother… A Mother Is Love,” which David had given to her one Christmas as a joke because of its inherent ugliness and its silly sentimentality. After unwrapping it, though, she had put it on the mantel to get it out of the way, and it had been there ever since, a receptacle for pencils, felt-tipped pens, paper clips, rubber bands, Chap Sticks, and safety pins.

  The handsome glass coffee table in the living room, the little desk in the hall, the sideboard in the dining room, even the wide sills of the old windows were crowded, if not actually cluttered, with oddments—old National Geographics; empty eyeglass cases; dried, shedding flower arrangements that Sarah had made in a summer crafts class; scraggly plants potted from cuttings. The windowsills were liberally scattered with deep baskets because whenever Dinah perceived that here was a place in which objects were inevitably bound to collect, she stopped at Farrell’s Store and bought a nice, roomy basket and merely swept everything into it. Tiny, smudged price tags were still suspended from the handles of several of those baskets by little interlooped white strings.

  Her house did not encompass the crisp asceticism she believed it did—it had the rich fullness of a ripe plum—but she was happy with her notion of the pleasant austerity of her surroundings. Although Dinah loathed the idea of materialism, she had an almost visceral connection to the place in which she lived. For her it represented a victory over chaos, over despair and disorder. She both enjoyed having guests and begrudged their sharing any part of her hard-earned grace.

  In any case, she always thought of their annual Fourth of July party with a shadowy sense of martyrdom, a vague feeling of self-sacrifice that had in the past always proven to be worth the end result. When twilight came, she would create a bit of fantasy for all the smaller children, bringing the magical fairy Moonflower to earth, provided Martin took care to check the pulley mechanism he and Vic Hofstatter had rigged over the porch roof almost fifteen years ago.

  Martin and Vic had founded a small literary magazine, The Review, soon after the Howellses moved to West Bradford. As a result, the Hofstatters and the Howellses spent so much time at each other’s houses, while Martin and Vic argued over solicited manuscripts and sorted through unsolicited ones, that Ellen and Dinah had fallen into a necessarily informal relationship. Dinah would see to the children, while Ellen might take it upon herself to peruse the refrigerator and start dinner for them all.

  The Hofstatters lived almost twenty miles out of town, and in the first few years of the venture, The Review’s offices had taken over the Howellses’ living room during the school year. Dinah was running the local Artists’ Guild then, and Ellen would often arrive early in the day with wine or groceries for the evening’s meal and work at her own writing in an unused bedroom while the children kept out of her way unless there was an emergency. It saved the cost of a baby-sitter, and in those days all four adults got involved with the makeup of the quarterly magazine, sitting at the kitchen table long into the night. By now, The Review had become respectable and mainstream, and some years ago the college had allotted office space and even the salary for part-time help in sorting through the three thousand or so submissions and dealing with the heavy correspondence.

  The advent of Moonflower had begun as a diversion for the children when they were small, conceived one evening when Dinah and Martin and Vic and Ellen had grown tired of debating the merits or lack of them of an essay that Martin wanted to publish in the magazine. They had fallen into reminiscences, and Martin had described his great-aunt’s wonderful invention and customary presentation of the magical fairy that he had marveled at each year when he was very young in Sheridan, Mississippi.

  The Hofstatters had become contagiously enthused about re-creating the whole experience for the Howellses’ own children, and they had stayed on later than usual, elaborating on the idea and planning how to carry it out. When David and Toby, and eventually Sarah, had become too old for such make-believe, Dinah and Martin had integrated it into what had become an annual party, and they had invited younger faculty and friends to join them and bring along their small children. The occasion had grown into a buffet supper for about forty-five adults and, sometimes, as many as fifteen children aged six and under. This year only nine young children were expected, and Dinah had prepared for them with care.

  On the night of the third, she had eventually realized that she wouldn’t sleep as she lay in bed anticipating the pleasure of the smaller children and her own corresponding satisfaction and Martin’s and Sarah’s and David’s. After all, this was David’s last Moonflower summer before he left for school. And Sarah had asked if she could have two friends join them, which was proof that the party remained special to her, a celebration that had been shaped over the years into a unique festivity of her own family.

  Dinah counted on rituals, the reassurance of them, and she believed it was especially important for David, in this last official summer of his youth, that the party go off well. She had a hazy idea of how she wanted David to think about his family—literally, how he would imagine them when he might be walking across campus or sitting in his dorm room reading, with his feet propped on the window-sill. If he was pushing his tray through the
cafeteria line and happened to let his mind drift and began to wonder what his family was doing, she wanted him to picture them on the wide screened porch among so many friends and excited small children.

  To Dinah, the appearance of Moonflower—having become a conspiracy among them—was part and parcel of their undeclared conspiracy to live together as a family, to continue to love each other in spite of anything at all, to be bound, as families are, by an absolute and unbreachable loyalty. Before Toby’s death, their association had merely been a condition of each one’s life; now it was an unacknowledged decision. Sometimes it seemed to Dinah that her family was becoming a unit too fragilely joined, and she was overwhelmed with anxiety these days that they were about to break apart like Humpty Dumpty—never to be put together again.

  These past few months had baffled and troubled her. Although she didn’t expect the anguish of the loss of Toby ever to leave her, she had recovered from the initial preoccupation with the pure, terrible grief of it. These days, though, she often found herself flooded with shockingly intense sorrow and an unwarranted feeling of desolation and loneliness. Every aspect of life had become perilous to Dinah, and all she knew how to do was to hang on to her life exactly as it was, to let routine and necessity direct her days. And now she was especially anxious to give David a gift of this final ritual, to give him a perfect picture of his family that would be his defense against any feeling of isolation that might overcome him once he had departed a safe harbor.