Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  Everyone had expected her to have it with Meredith. Such a beautiful baby, such a lovely child, such green eyes, tip-tilted like the accents in her French text at Bertram’s, accent aigu, accent grave. Of course her hair had been red, like a flame atop the long pale candle of her face. Red as Ethel Blessing had probably feared it would be when she sent Lydia away to the country, red as Frank Askew’s had been when he was a boy, although when Lydia had first met him his hair was faded to a rust color. Benny’s mother had dredged up an aunt who had had auburn hair whenever anyone thoughtlessly mentioned it. Now that it no longer mattered, Meredith’s hair was as silver as her own.

  Sometimes when she was young Meredith had taken the boat out to the middle of the pond and sat with a book, an old straw hat of her grandfather’s pulled low on her head. She had a lovely widow’s peak, Meredith, clear and deep. She never wore hats now except for the black riding helmet, always wore her silver hair pulled straight back so that the widow’s peak stood out on her forehead like an arrowhead.

  “Lyds, my love,” Edwin Blessing used to say, speaking in comfortably unoriginal aphorisms, “a gentleman wears a hat or he stays inside.”

  “You girls will wrinkle dreadfully in this sun,” her mother had said, on those rare occasions, after Meredith was born, when she’d come to Blessings and watched Lydia and her friends dive off the dock.

  Mrs. Blessing had told Nadine that her little girl could use the boat, too, the boat that sat there day after day upturned, abandoned, unused. But Nadine would not allow it. “No, no,” she had grumbled. “Not right.” Mrs. Blessing had been surprised to like Nadine’s child. Like so much else in the world in which she found herself marooned, she had disapproved of the girl in theory. Men like Craig Foster should marry women from Mount Mason who went to the same church and knew the same people, not Korean women they had met somehow when they were soldiers stationed overseas. Nadine could not even be considered a war bride; Craig had been in Korea long after there had been an American war there. But his foreign wife and his foreign daughter had come to seem to Mount Mason more foreign still because some immigration regulations meant they had not been able to join the husband and father until three years after Craig Foster had come home. Legends had grown up about them during that time, like the legends about the man who lived on the dead end by the high school and never left his house.

  Mrs. Blessing had met Jennifer for the first time twelve years ago, when the child was six, when Nadine had been working for her for six months and the little girl had had to stay home from school with an ear infection. She had perched on a stool in the corner of the kitchen all day long, so quiet that Mrs. Blessing knew she was there only because from time to time she heard, on the air, like a treble counterpoint to the atonal music of Nadine’s flat fractured English, a high lilt.

  “I am very pleased to meet you, ma’am, and I am sorry that I have had to come with my mother today,” the child had said when Mrs. Blessing came into the kitchen, under the pretense of asking for a change in the lunch menu.

  She had been tickled by the stiff little speech of a sentence, and the oddly outdated clothes the girl wore, what Mrs. Blessing still thought of as appropriate clothes, a plaid skirt, a wool sweater, knee socks, laced shoes. She had not recognized the clothes as Meredith’s castoffs, four decades old, preserved between tissue, silted with mothballs. Mrs. Blessing had asked Nadine to give the clothes to the Salvation Army when a new roof had had to be put on and the attic cleaned out as a result. “There’s obviously no point in keeping them for Meredith,” said Mrs. Blessing, who in some inchoate way disapproved of her daughter’s childlessness. Nadine had picked out the hand-stitched monograms with a pair of scissors, ironed and ironed until the peaks and valleys where the stitches had lain were pressed out, and kept the clothes herself.

  Meredith was talking about one of their horses. A pulled muscle, she said, visits from the vet. Mrs. Blessing was not listening. Now, at age eighty, the past so distant and yet so perfectly clear, like one of the dioramas in the natural history museum, her mind tended to drift. From the monitor she heard a series of thuds, and her heart beat fast until she realized it was the sound of footsteps going up the stairs of the apartment. It irritated her, that she had been so addled by sleep and the heat and the surprise of the phone and what her father had called woolgathering that she had not heard the truck return. Or perhaps he’d used the back drive, which came from the road around the barn. That was a sneaky sort of thing to do. On the monitor she heard the footsteps louder now, and a few notes of the mobile’s music box again.

  “What’s that?” Meredith said.

  “Nothing,” Lydia said. “I believe Nadine’s listening to the radio.”

  “She’s there late today.”

  What was Meredith saying? That she had hired a new housekeeper herself because the one she’d had had not suited. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Lydia could hear her father saying. She was growing tired of all these people speaking at once, the past, the present, perhaps even the future in the slow breathing of the baby. From the monitor she heard a voice whispering, “Hey, sweet pea. Hey, Faith. I’m home. I’m home.” Softly Skip began to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” He didn’t know all the words, and his voice was almost tuneless. For some reason she simply could not fathom, Lydia felt tears fill her eyes.

  “I hope I haven’t made a mistake,” she said, interrupting Meredith, who was talking about a stallion in Middleburg who was available for stud.

  “Pardon?” Meredith said.

  “About this new man,” said Lydia.

  “Oh, Mother, you’re never satisfied.”

  “I’m perfectly satisfied when things are done correctly.”

  “And does he do things correctly?”

  “I suppose he does,” Lydia said.

  The thing that amazed him, when he listened to her old-fashioned locutions, the shalls instead of wills, when he looked at her living room, that would have been faintly shabby and purely ridiculous if it had been in one of those big development houses down the hill, was that you couldn’t get loose from what you were born into. Everyone believed you could, in America, but it wasn’t true. One moment you were a Boatwright baby, with a crusty nose and a diaper that should have been changed two game shows ago, and then you were a Boatwright girl, giving hand jobs in pickup trucks and carting around a baby of your own. You weren’t ever a cheerleader, or a college girl, or one of the women who sat behind a desk at the First National Bank and said, “Can I help you?” and “Your mortgage approval should take approximately ten to fourteen working days.” Just like if you were Robert Bentemenn, and you ran your Corolla into a tree and got popped with hash in your pocket. Instead of going to jail, like Skip or Joe would, you wound up in rehab in Arizona, then at Arizona State, which would lead to law school, which is what your lawyer dad planned in the first place. Robert Bentemenn was a moron, and once burned a girl with a cigarette just for the hell of it, but thin blond girls with sweaters tied around their shoulders who would freeze Skip if he smiled at them sat at their desks in high school and wrote “Mrs. Robert Bentemenn” on the covers of their spiral notebooks.

  Maybe, he thought, in the truck on his way to the Mount Mason Medical Center, that was why he wanted to keep Faith, and why he thought he should give her up, too. Her parents were going to make the difference between that sweater tied around her shoulders and some flimsy maternity T-shirt with an arrow pointing down at her belly at age sixteen. Maybe if he gave her to some nice cookies-and-milk woman and suit-and-tie man she’d wind up sleeping in a canopy bed in one of those mock Tudor houses that clean people with new money seemed to like so much.

  Or maybe he could just make something of himself, and so make something of her. He wasn’t sure how to do that. “Not college material,” the counselor had said in high school, looking at his shop courses and his address. But Craig Foster had managed to edge into the middle of Mount Mason society with his auto body shop, man
aged to mingle at the Elks club with the plumbing contractors and the restaurant owners. Maybe Skip could do something like that, try working his way up in some business in which he could work with his hands. He’d become one of those people who could take his daughter on vacations, not to Europe the way the lawyers and doctors did, but at least to Florida somewhere. He could just imagine showing up at his father’s new place, in a polo shirt and pressed slacks, handing his old man a business card: “Cuddy Sheetrocking” or “Cuddy Painting Contractors.” He’d show off his little girl, talk about their new ranch house a couple of miles out of town: “Wall-to-wall carpeting all through the house, and a spa on the patio,” he’d say. He’d always had a little bit of contempt for those kinds of guys, all clean clothes and briefcases and high blood pressure, ruddy and smelling of lemon aftershave. But he’d join their ranks if it would buy a sleepover for Faith in one of their daughters’ pink gingham rooms.

  At least she had a cradle now, a carved cherry cradle on shallow rockers that Mrs. Blessing had told him to come and take from a musty back bedroom in the big house. He had tickled himself with the thought of tying a string to his toe and looping its other end around the ornamental curves at the head of the little bed so that in the nighttime he could rock her without getting up. But she was such a good baby now, so orderly and cooperative in her habits, that the idea was more of a cartoon construct than anything he needed to consider. He felt stupid sometimes, how he liked to watch her, how he still flinched when she popped herself in the nose with her spastic fist, how her face went real still and her mouth opened as she watched the sunlight shoot down onto the floor next to her blanket, how she would smile like a spasm and it would go straight to his heart. He’d watched some doctor on his little TV and seen him make babies, little babies, just as small as Faith was, imitate the things he did, and though they were stupid things Skip did them every day, pushing out his tongue slowly, watching her do the same, over and over. He figured when she was six months old he would start to read books to her, and when she started to stand he would get her shoes. Shoes were a problem, too, though, like sleeping positions; some books said that they provided support for the feet, others that they were unnecessary and maybe uncomfortable. He’d have to think about that one a little more.

  When she went down at nine, woke at two, slept until seven, sucked down a bottle, and went down again for two hours more, he could convince himself that the future might be that regular. First grade, junior high, a life with a place for everything and everything in its place. When she stayed up half the night and threw up all down the back of his only remaining clean T-shirt, he didn’t know if he was going to make it, and he figured it must somehow be his fault. He’d always been a pretty tidy guy, for a guy, but the apartment had clothes and towels and cans and bottles all over the tables and counters, and just when he thought he was getting it cleaned up a diaper would explode out the sides and into the legs of one of those little suits with the snaps that he’d bought, and there’d be dirty sheets and shirts tied up in a case by the kitchen window to isolate the odor.

  “Charles,” Mrs. Blessing had called one evening. “Where are you taking those things?”

  “I’ve got to go to the Laundromat,” he said. “The monitor is on and she’s asleep.”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Blessing said with a frown. “There’s a perfectly good washing machine in the basement. Just use the basement door.”

  He tried to look into Faith’s eyes at times when all the things she needed seemed too much for one man, to fasten on her face and not just the endless tasks she seemed to generate. “Teaching you to ride a two-wheeler is going to be so cool,” he said once. He thought about when he had learned. He had been nine years old and his friends found out he didn’t know how to ride a bike. Chris had taught him to ride. Chris had run beside him, his arms shaking with the weight of the bike and Skip on it. It hadn’t been easy to teach him, but Chris had kept at it all one weekend, and by Sunday afternoon he’d finally learned.

  “I learned to ride a bike,” he said that night to his father, who was watching football on TV.

  “That’s good.” It didn’t seem to occur to his dad that he was about four years late on the learning. But the next weekend his father brought home a pretty nice secondhand bike he’d gotten from a guy who sold things out of his garage. “You know, I never did learn to ride one of these things myself,” his father said, watching Skip make jerky circles in the driveway.

  “I’ll teach you to swim in the pond,” Skip said to Faith. “And to fish.” She hooted in reply, arched her back, shuddered, then hooted again.

  “Talk to your baby whenever the spirit moves you!” the book said. “He understands more than you can imagine.”

  “Faith,” he said each night when he put her to bed, “you’re safe.” Sometimes he really believed this was true. He did a lot of the outside jobs at Blessings in the evenings now, after Nadine was gone, and he could take the baby with him while he vacuumed the pool, filled the bird feeders, cleaned the boathouse. She would lie on a blanket twisting her head from side to side, watching the play of light on the surface of a window, the pond, the slowly darkening edge of the western sky. Sometimes Mrs. Blessing would sit in one of the white wooden rockers on the front porch and he would leave Faith on a blanket on the lawn just past the walk, lying among the small umbrellas of pachysandra. “This child is going to roll over sooner than you think,” Mrs. Blessing said once, and “Those nails are badly in need of a cutting,” and “She has especially long fingers.” But mostly she rocked and watched and looked sideways over the pond while he worked.

  He looked at the old woman and the big house and the spreading pachysandra and the roses growing along the terrace and he thought that maybe it would all work out, that the little girl could grow up here. When the breeze was soft and the fish flipped in the air over the pond and dove back down into the green water again and Mrs. Blessing’s tight disapproving mouth relaxed into something like a smile, he could convince himself that somehow no one would notice that, instead of a mother and a father and a birth certificate, this particular child had this young guy and this old woman and a cardboard box and a barrette that had once clamped her cord. As Mrs. Blessing said, who cared about one baby?

  “Faith, you have a good deal,” he’d whispered on one of those nights.

  But that night when he heard Joe outside his window, calling, “Yo, dude—dude!” he knew that any little girl of his in this town would have a hard road to hoe, even if he found a way to explain her to people.

  “Yo,” Joe yelled, “yo,” and Skip went downstairs because he couldn’t let Joe come up with Faith slumped in the baby swing, listening to its tinny workings picking out the Sesame Street theme song while she tried to get her thumb into her mouth. Joe smelled like turpentine and tobacco.

  “You painting again?” Skip said.

  “Yo, man, you need a phone for emergencies.”

  “What’s the emergency?”

  A light went on in the back of the big house in what Skip thought was Mrs. Blessing’s bathroom. She’d managed to come around about the baby, but he didn’t think Joe was the sort she’d want visiting the place. For that matter, Skip didn’t want him there either. “Come in the garage,” he whispered. “What’s up?”

  “You got a beer upstairs?”

  “You drove all the way out here to get a beer?”

  “What kind of way is that to talk, man? You think I’m a moron, I’d drive all the way over here for a beer?”

  Skip sighed. Talking to Joe was like driving a tractor through mud. He remembered when he was living in the trailer, how Joe had a big sign on one side of the steps that said BE WARE OF DOG. He remembered pointing at it, saying, “You want someone to be ware? What’s that, ware?” He’d laughed. “It’s not two words, man,” he’d said, but Joe’s eyes had stayed blank, not getting the joke. “I don’t get you,” Joe had said.

  “Joe, just tell me what’s up,” Skip said softly
in the big bay of the garage, his words echoing faintly. “What’s going on? You need help with something?”

  “No, man, it’s Chris, all right? Chris busted up his motorcycle bad. I tried to call you this morning but I forgot your old number didn’t work anymore and I woke up your aunt. She was pissed, man. She said to tell you to get your stuff out of her garage. She’s still really mean, you know? Like she hasn’t mellowed at all.”

  Skip grabbed Joe’s arm to get him back on track. “Is Chris okay?”

  “It looked really bad, man. He almost coded on the table.” Joe watched a lot of hospital emergency room shows. He’d wanted to be an EMT but he’d had a felony conviction for a B and E when he was eighteen, and that took care of running the cherry lights on an ambulance. Another reason why Skip hadn’t given him up on the Quik-Stop deal.

  “But he’s gonna make it?”

  Joe shrugged. “Maybe permanent damage in one leg, man. He broke a lot of shit. A lot of shit. But the thing is, he really wants to see you. I think he saw the white light last night.” Joe watched a lot of shows about miracles and mysteries, too. He was always peering at people in the mall to see if they looked like anyone on America’s Most Wanted. “He really needs to make things right with you.”

  “Things are right with me,” Skip said. Things are right with me, he thought. I never see Chris anymore. That’s exactly right.

  “Dude.” Joe gripped his arm. “Go see him. Go tomorrow.”