Ladder of Years

by Anne Tyler

  “Sam Grinstead, you don’t believe that for a minute!” Linda squawked. “What a bizarre suggestion!”

  Delia said, “Paul, will you have some rice and pass it on, please? Everybody! Sit down!”

  Very suddenly, the rest of them sat. They seemed to have run out of steam, and there was a pause, during which Paul dropped the serving spoon to the table with a loud clunk. He bared all his teeth in embarrassment and picked it up.

  Nat said, “Do any of you know the photographs of C. R. Savage?”

  The grown-ups turned courteous, receptive faces in his direction.

  “A nineteenth-century fellow,” he said. “Used the old wet-plate method, I would suppose. There’s a picture I’m reminded of that he took toward the end of his life. Shows his dining room table set for Christmas dinner. Savage himself sitting amongst the empty chairs, waiting for his family. Chair after chair after chair, silverware laid just so, even a baby’s high chair, all in readiness. And I can’t help thinking, when I look at that photo, I bet that’s as good as it got, that day. From there on out, it was all downhill, I bet. Actual sons and daughters arrived, and they quarreled over the drumsticks and sniped at their children’s table manners and brought up hurtful incidents from fifteen years before; and the baby had this whimper that gave everybody a headache. Only just for that moment,” Nat said, and his voice took on a tremor, “just as the shutter was clicking, none of that had happened yet, you see, and the table looked so beautiful, like someone’s dream of a table, and old Savage felt so happy and so—what’s the word I want, so …”

  But now his voice failed him completely, and he covered his eyes with one shaking hand and bent his head. “So anticipatory!” he whispered into his plate, while Delia, at a loss, patted his arm. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he said. Everyone sat dumbstruck. Then he said, “Ha!” and straightened, bracing his shoulders. “Postpartum depression, I guess this is,” he said. He wiped his eyes with his napkin.

  “Nat has a three-week-old baby,” Delia explained to the others. “Nat, would you like—”

  “Baby?” Linda asked incredulously.

  Sam said, “I thought Nat was your friend, Linda.”

  “No, he’s mine,” Delia said. “He lives on the Eastern Shore and he’s just had a baby boy, a lovely boy, you ought to see how—”

  “Most irresponsible thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Nat said hoarsely. “What could I have been thinking of? Oh, not that it was anything I planned, but … why did I go along with it? I believe I thought it was my chance to be a good father, finally. I know it was, or why else did I assume it was a girl? All my others were girls, you see. I must have thought I could do the whole thing over again, properly this time. But I’m just as short-tempered with James as I ever was with my daughters. Just as rigid, just as exacting. Why can’t he get on a schedule, why does he have to cry at such unpredictable hours … Oh, the best thing I could do for that kid is toddle off to Floor Five.”

  “Floor Five? Oh,” Delia said. “Oh, Nat! Don’t even think it!” she said, patting his arm all the harder.

  She should have realized at his wedding, she told herself, that someone so elated would have to end in tears, like an overexcited child allowed to stay up past his bedtime.

  “Yes. Well,” Sam said, clearing his throat. “It’s really very common now, this more senior class of parent. Why, just last week I was reading, where was it I was reading …”

  “The important thing to remember is, this is your assignment,” Eliza said in ringing tones. She was all the way up near Sam, and she had to lean forward, bypassing a row of tactfully expressionless profiles, to search out Nat’s face. “It’s my belief that we’re each assigned certain experiences,” she said. “And then at the end of our lives—”

  “The New England Journal of Medicine!” Sam announced triumphantly.

  Nat asked Delia, “Do you have a place where I might lie down?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said, and she slid her chair back and handed him his cane. “Excuse us, please,” she told the others.

  Everyone nodded, abashed. As she and Nat crossed the hall, she could almost feel the furtive exchange of glances behind their backs.

  “There’s a flight of stairs,” she warned Nat. “Can you manage?”

  “Oh, yes, if you’ll hang on to my other arm. I’m sorry, Delia. I don’t know what got into me.”

  “You’re just tired,” she told him. “I hope you’re not thinking of driving back tonight.”

  “No, I suppose I shouldn’t,” he said. On each stair step, his cane gave a tinny rattle, like a handful of jacks being shaken. His elbow within his tweed sleeve was nothing but knob and rope.

  “I’m going to make up a bed for you,” Delia told him when they reached the second floor, “and then you should call Binky and tell her you’re staying over.”

  “All right,” he said meekly. He hobbled through the door she held open and sank into a slipcovered chair.

  “This used to be my father’s room,” Delia said. She went out to the hall closet and came back with an armload of sheets. “There’s still a telephone by the bed, see? From the days when he was in practice. Even after he stopped seeing patients, he could pick up his receiver whenever Sam got a call; chime in with a second opinion. He just hated to feel left out of things, you know?”

  She was babbling aimlessly as she bustled around the bed, smoothing sheets and tucking in blankets. Nat watched without comment. He might not even have been listening, for when she went to Sam’s room to borrow a pair of pajamas, she returned to find him staring at the blue-black windowpanes. “In fact,” she said, placing the pajamas on the bureau, “I can’t tell you how often I made up his bed just the way I did tonight, while Daddy sat where you’re sitting now. He liked for his sheets to be fresh off the line, oh, long after we switched to an automatic dryer. And he would sit in that chair and—”

  “It’s a time trip,” Nat said suddenly.

  “Why, yes, I suppose it is, in a way.”

  But he’d been talking to himself, evidently. “Just a crazy, half-baked scheme to travel backwards,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken, “and live everything all over again. Unfortunately, Binky’s the one who’s left with the consequences. Poor Binky!”

  “Binky will be fine,” Delia said firmly. “Now. That door right there is the bathroom. New toothbrushes on the shelf above the tub. Can I get you anything more?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “A tray of food, maybe? You didn’t touch your supper.”

  “No.”

  “Well, you be sure to call me if you need me,” she said.

  Then she bent to press her lips to his forehead, the way she used to do with her father all those nights in the past.

  Delia was the next to go to bed. She went at nine-thirty, having struggled to keep her eyes open ever since dinner. “I am beat,” she told the others. They were all sitting around, still—even Courtney, although Paul had been picked up by his mother at some point. “It seems this morning took place way back in prehistory,” Delia told them, and then she climbed the stairs to Eliza’s room, so weary that she had to haul her feet behind her like buckets of cement.

  Once she was in bed, though, she couldn’t get to sleep. She lay staring at the ceiling, idly stroking the curl of warm cat nestled close to her hip. Downstairs, Linda and Sam were squabbling as usual. A Mozart horn concerto was playing. Eliza said, “Why wouldn’t he, I ask you.” Wouldn’t who? Delia wondered. Wouldn’t do what?

  She must have slept then, but it was such a fitful, shallow sleep that she seemed to remain partly conscious throughout, and when she woke again she wasn’t surprised to find the house dark and all the voices stilled. She sat up and angled her wristwatch to catch the light from the window. As near as she could make out, it was either eleven o’clock or five till twelve. More likely five till twelve, she decided, judging from the quiet.

  She propped her pillow and leaned back against it, yawning.
Tears of boredom were already edging the corners of her eyes. It was going to be one of those nights that go on for weeks.

  Let’s see: if the wedding began at ten tomorrow, she supposed it would be finished by eleven. Well, say noon, to play it safe. She’d reach the bus station by half past, if she could catch a ride with Ramsay. Or with Sam. Sam had offered, after all.

  She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.

  Where was she? Bus station. Catch a bus by one o’clock or so, reach Salisbury by …

  The tears seemed not exactly tears of boredom after all. She blotted them on her nightgown sleeve, but more came.

  She folded back the covers, mindful of the cat, and slid out of bed and walked barefoot toward the door. The hall was lit only by the one round window, high up. She had to more or less feel her way toward Sam’s room.

  Luckily, his door was ajar. No sound gave her away as she entered. But she knew, somehow, that he was awake. After all these years, of course she knew, just from that bated quality to the air. She stepped delicately across cool floorboards, then scratchy rug, then cool floorboards once again—terrain she had traveled since the day she first learned to walk. She sat with no perceptible weight upon the side of the bed that used to be hers. He was lying on his back, she saw. She could begin to sift his white face from the flocked half-dark. She whispered, “Sam?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You know that letter you wrote me in Bay Borough.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what was the line you crossed out?”

  He stirred beneath the bedclothes. “Oh,” he said, “I crossed out so many lines. That letter was a mess.”

  “I mean the very last line. The one you put so many x’s through I couldn’t possibly read it.”

  He didn’t answer at first. Then he said, “I forget.”

  Her impulse was to stand up and leave, but she forced herself to stay. She sat motionless, waiting and waiting.

  “I think,” he said finally, “that maybe it was … well, something like what Driscoll was wondering earlier. Was there anything that would, you know. Would persuade you to come back.”

  She said, “Oh, Sam. All you had to do was ask.”

  Then he turned toward her, and Delia slipped under the blankets and he drew her close against him. Although, in fact, he still had not asked. Not in so many words.

  ———

  Long after they went to sleep, the telephone rang, and Delia resurfaced gradually. This late, it had to be a patient calling. But Sam didn’t even change the rhythm of his breathing; so she inched out from under his arm to reach for the phone.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Mrs. Grinstead?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Joe Bright.”

  A voice as bright as his name, wide awake and chipper at the ungodly hour of—she peered at the alarm clock. One twenty-three.

  “Um …,” she said.

  “The realtor?” he prompted.

  “Oh!”

  “You called me? You and your daughter? Left a whole bunch of messages?”

  “Oh! Yes!” she said, but she was still floundering. “Um …”

  “I would never phone so late except you did say it was life and death, Mrs. Grinstead, and I only now got in from out of town. Wife’s mother died, spur of the moment.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. She sat up straighter. “Um, Mr. Bright, why I called was …” She shifted the phone to her other ear. “My daughter has been wanting to know,” she said. “Yes … will she be allowed to pound nails in the walls?”

  There was a silence.

  “Just in case they need to hang some pictures, say, or a mirror …,” Delia said, trailing off.

  “Nails,” Mr. Bright said.

  “Right.”

  “She wanted to know if she could pound in nails.”

  “Right.”

  “Well,” Mr. Bright said. “Sure. I reckon. Long as they spackle the holes upon vacating.”

  “Oh, they will!” Delia said. “I can promise. Thank you, Mr. Bright. Good night.”

  There was another silence, and then, “Good night,” he said.

  Delia replaced the receiver and lay down again. She had assumed Sam was still asleep, but then she heard him give a little whisking sound of amusement. She started smiling. Outside, far downtown, a train blew past. In the house, a floorboard creaked, and a moment later a foggy cough broke from the room where Nat slept.

  “It’s a time trip,” Nat had said.

  She thought of her attempt, that afternoon, to picture Adrian. She had begun with his resemblance to her high-school boyfriend, and only now did she realize that the image she had come up with happened to be Sam’s, not the boyfriend’s. A younger Sam, earnest and hopeful, the day he’d first walked through the door.

  It had all been a time trip—all this past year and a half. Unlike Nat’s, though, hers had been a time trip that worked. What else would you call it when she’d ended up back where she’d started, home with Sam for good? When the people she had left behind had actually traveled further, in some ways?

  Now she saw that June beach scene differently. Her three children, she saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explorers at the ocean’s edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving.

  Where they were going without her.

  How to say goodbye.

  Ladder of Years

  Anne Tyler

  A Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with Anne Tyler

  Q: How would you describe this novel to a potential reader?

  Anne Tyler: I think Nat says it best: It’s a time trip. If you look at Delia’s journey from one angle, it is nothing but an attempt to travel back through the life she’s already lived, doing it right this time (as in the unnamed movie, Groundhog Day, referred to toward the end of the book). Symbolically speaking, in her new life she acquires new sisters, a new son, a new husband, and a new father, and she tries to make a better job of it the second time around.

  Q: Is Delia a reliable narrator?

  AT: Not always. The more difficult aspects of her father’s character, for instance, and Adrian’s continued attachment to his wife are just two of the unwelcome truths she manages to hide from herself.

  Q: Your protagonist, Cordelia, is the youngest and favorite of three daughters of a powerful father. How did King Lear influence the writing of this novel?

  AT: It really didn’t. I had chosen the name Delia before it occurred to me that it must be “Cordelia,” and while Adrian does refer to the King Lear connection, I wouldn’t make too much of it.

  Q: Delia’s deceased father is a central figure in this novel, but he is obscured by Delia’s worshipful memories. How would her sisters and husband describe him?

  AT: Her sisters would say he was sexist and domineering; Sam would no doubt bring up Dr. Felson’s post-retirement habit of listening in on patients’ phone calls. I particularly enjoyed writing the scenes where these facts emerged so clearly but remained unremarked upon by Delia.

  Q: Why did you choose the profession of medical doctor for Delia’s father and husband?

  AT: I was looking for a profession with some power, since Delia’s sheltered life—from father’s hands to husband’s, with no break—seemed to require that.

  Q: You capture perfectly teenagers’ cruelty to their parents in this novel. Do you think such behavior is a necessary rite of passage to adulthood?

  AT: I wouldn’t call it cruelty, e
xactly, but I do think that it’s necessary at some point for teenagers to draw back and view their parents with a cooler eye. (Notice what happens when they never go through this stage—as Delia obviously never did with her father.)

  Q: What is a reader to make of the parallels between Delia’s handling of and socializing of teenagers and cats?

  AT: I was very fond of Delia, and I wanted readers to be fond of her, too. One of the qualities I hoped they would find endearing was her graceful and intuitive touch with both cats and children.

  Q: Is her friendship with Nat the most important new relationship Delia has formed and the most important for her to sustain?

  AT: Not really. Nat is only one member of the “surrogate family” she constructs for herself on her journey.

  Q: Would Delia really have come home sooner if Sam had asked her to?

  AT: She was very hurt when he didn’t ask her, but I suspect that if he had, she’d have invented some quibble with his tone, his wording—some flaw that would allow her to say no and go on with her sojourn until the moment she was ready to return.

  Q: So much is left unsaid by your characters. Would you agree that, among many other things, you are a novelist of the inarticulate?

  AT: I would be happy to be called that. I’ve always been fascinated by what’s unspoken in a conversation, what’s revealed by mere gesture or by silence or by talking too much about something completely irrelevant.

  Q: Your descriptions of characters, even the most minor, are so specific and evocative. How much work goes into creating a minor character such as Rosemary Bly-Brice?

  AT: Minor characters tend to arrive in my head fully formed, often the result of some long-ago, superficial encounter. The physical model for Rosemary, for instance, was a young woman I saw in a grocery store many years before. She was very conscious of her hairdo, an asymmetrical, angular, high-fashion cut, and held her head constantly to one side as if to accentuate it. I don’t know why I remember things like that, but they certainly come in handy.

  Q: Which do you find easier to write: a character like Belle, who is verbose and forthright, or a character like Joel, who is taciturn and emotionally unavailable?