Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  “She’s so strict about everything,” she had whispered to Sunny. “When I wanted to wear my amber beads to Lucy Warren’s birthday luncheon, she told me the Warrens would think we were vulgar. The Warrens! Half the chairs in their house have the stuffing coming out.”

  “You know why,” Sunny had said.

  “Why?”

  Sunny had drifted with his hand in the water. He was sitting on the bottom of the boat, his head resting on one of the seats, and Lydia could remember that he was smiling to himself, as though he was pleased about what he was about to tell her.

  “It’s because she’s Jewish.”

  “Who?”

  “Mother. Her parents were Jews.”

  “Don’t be silly. She goes to St. Stephen’s every Sunday with us. Nearly every Sunday she says ‘Jerusalem’ is her favorite hymn. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem.”

  “It’s all for show, Lydie,” Sunny had said. “Before her name was Simpson it was something else. That’s why everything has to be just so. So it won’t matter that she’s Jewish. But it does.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I listen to things,” he said. “At the Cartons’ one day Benny and I were eating in the kitchen and these people were having drinks out in the sunroom and one of the women said that Mother had married Father for position and Father had married Mother for money.”

  “I thought Papa was the one who had the money.”

  “That’s what everyone is supposed to think.”

  How wise Sunny had been; how much he could see that she could not. She thought that that was why he was so melancholy and so amused in equal measure. He had fallen asleep in the boat long before she had, one hand resting on her leg as though to make sure she would not go over the side. The air was pale blue-gray when they both heard the sounds of screaming from inside the house.

  “What’s wrong? Why are they doing that?” she’d cried, her hair in her face, pulled loose from its ribbon.

  “Because of us, I think,” Sunny said.

  She must have been almost eleven, because it was six months after the Lindbergh baby had been taken in 1932. Their nanny had found her bed empty, then Sunny’s, had gotten hysterics and then fallen to the kitchen floor. The Fosters had run across the drive, Mrs. Foster still in her nightgown with Mr. Foster’s work jacket over it, held closed with one hand. Papa had rung the dinner bell. He had looked ridiculous.

  But Mama had not even come downstairs. “They’ll turn up,” she’d said. “What a fuss.”

  After that day Lydia Blessing could never see her mother in the same way again, and she was never sure whether it was because Ethel Blessing had stayed in bed, waiting for coffee, when everyone else was panicked at the thought that they were gone, or because she was Jewish. When her mother had hired the Cartons’ decorator to make their new house look more or less exactly like the Cartons’, when she had forbidden Lydia to wear red to parties or to lighten her hair with lemon, when she had sent her to Blessings and made it impossible for her to come back to New York again, Lydia had always wondered whether an Episcopalian mother would have behaved differently. Perhaps she would have acted just the same. After all, what was Ethel Blessing doing but a careful imitation of an Episcopalian mother? How her two children had foiled her in what was to be the crowning gesture of her difficult passage into social Protestantism. Two good marriages: that was all it would have taken to launder Ethel Blessing’s origins forever.

  Instead there was Sunny, living in a top-floor apartment in a house in Greenwich Village, writing jingles, smoking small black cigars. Instead there was Lydia, living in purdah amid the possums and the lumbering black bear, living in purdah with a redheaded child with a widow’s peak like a brand on her broad white brow. How she had clung, Ethel Blessing, to that Carton in Meredith’s name, to the polite fiction, politely accepted, of the love match, the soldier, the bereavement, the early labor, the country air. “You are a careless girl,” she had said to Lydia on many occasions. “You take for granted your advantages. You don’t know the value of a dollar. The world doesn’t owe you a living.” The old truisms had the rote sound of repetition, almost like mimicry, and it occurred to Lydia, long after her mother was dead, that perhaps they had first been said to the young Ethel Simpson—or Sietz, or Simpkis, or whatever her name had been—by her own father, whose fortune made from bolts of brocade had allowed his only child to deny her past.

  She leaned closer to look at the baby lying on a blanket on the grass. They knew nothing about her, whether her mother was young or old, rich or poor. But Mrs. Blessing could see that this baby was beloved, and in the soft grass, with the breeze blowing the crippled limbs of the old apple trees, that seemed to be all that mattered. Skip knelt before Faith and cleaned and changed her, then cradled her in his arms. He still had a bit of that tentative godfather-at-the-font quality that men kept, although Mrs. Blessing had heard that so many more of them took care of their children now. She had to admit that she was surprised by the name he had chosen. She had been a bit put out when she was not consulted, but what he had decided on was in impeccable taste. She would not have objected to a grandchild by that name. The baby was holding her head up now, her eyes enormous, ranging around the trees and sky and over both their faces like a searchlight. She made small bird noises of pleasure, then spread her arms wide, bounced slightly in Skip’s arms as though she were ready to fly, then seemed to think better of it and clung to his shoulder with her starfish hands. She was an eager, playful little thing, with a constant light in her eyes. Mrs. Blessing was certain that not all babies were that way. Even Jess had had one, Henry, who had been dull and disconsolate.

  “Do you ever give any thought to the woman who must have left her here?” she said.

  “All the time. I try not to, but I wonder about her all the time.”

  “She is her mother, after all.”

  “No, see, that’s where I think you’re wrong. Because I keep thinking that that’s not how you get to be the mother. You get to be the mother like this. You get to be the mother by changing her and giving her a bath and walking her around in the middle of the night and loving her and making her feel like everything’s all right. That’s how you get to be the mother. That’s what being the mother is. That means I’m the mother, more or less.”

  “Well, then, have you considered that she may be better off with a man and a woman who want to adopt a child, who have a proper home and so forth?”

  “She’s mine,” he said. “You can feel it, can’t you? She’s mine.” Faith reared back and looked into Skip’s eyes and crowed and reached for his face. “Do you want to hold her again?”

  “In a minute,” Mrs. Blessing said. “She looks quite pleased with herself at the moment.”

  “Oh, she is,” Skip said, talking to the baby, rubbing her nose with his own. “She is pleased with herself. I am pleased with herself. We are pleased with each other. And that’s the deal. That’s the deal. That’s the deal.”

  “People talk such nonsense to babies,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I wonder why.”

  “Maybe we all ought to talk more nonsense more of the time.” He lifted Faith over his head and swooped her back and forth, up and down, and she sucked in her breath.

  Mrs. Blessing looked over the rows of twisted gray tree trunks. She and Sunny had eaten apples from these selfsame trees, Rome apples so full of juice that it ran down their chins and onto the Irish sweaters Nanny made them wear in autumn. “If you have these trees properly cared for, will they bear fruit again?” she asked.

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “How much will it cost?”

  “A couple thousand. It won’t be cheap.”

  “And you’ve found someone capable?”

  He slung Faith over his shoulder. She lifted her domed head sharply, once, twice, three times, then let it fall to one side and sucked her fist.

  “Barton’s Nursery. He says his grandfather put these trees in in the first place. He says his gra
ndfather used to tell a story about how your father memorized the leaves and the bark and the flowers, so that he could walk from tree to tree and know whether it was Winesap or Yellow Delicious or Rome.”

  “He made us do the same,” Mrs. Blessing said. “He said the trees would be here bearing fruit when he was only a memory in the minds of those who loved him. That’s why he had ‘Tempus fugit’ carved into these benches. Time flies. My father had a very extravagant turn of phrase and mind.”

  “He was right, though.”

  Mrs. Blessing shook her head. “Since you have come to work for me I have managed to do a great many things I never expected to do.” The baby made a grunting noise, then a funny whistle, then a grunt again. “Will you harvest the fruit?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Will you get her a doctor?”

  “I will. But I think you must focus on the future, Charles, and how you will manage in the years to come. There must be something that can be done. Perhaps I will consult my attorney.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe. Let me think about it. It’s early still, isn’t it? I mean, she can’t even sit up yet.”

  One afternoon when the air was hot and thick as soup Skip heard music coming from the front of the house. He was driving back from the orchard, driving through dirty clouds of gnats with the long-handled pruning clippers and the Portacrib bouncing in the back of the pickup truck. Just after sunrise he had driven almost twenty miles to a twenty-four-hour Price Club in Bessemer to get diapers and formula. Women smiled at him in the bright white light of the aisles because he was wearing the baby in a front pack on his chest. It reminded him of the picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that Chris’s mom had on the wall of her bedroom, his chest a glowing symbol of his absolute goodness. He imagined that all the women had dirtbag husbands who went out to the bar when the kid had a fever, or boyfriends who dropped a ten on the kitchen table for diapers. Last week in the paper there had been a story he almost skipped right over about single fathers, and then he realized that he was a single father. Holding a job, the story said, arranging play dates. He was nodding his head. The play dates part was pushing it, but he tried to imagine Faith going over to someone’s house to build with blocks and sit in the inflatable pool. He didn’t want her playing with Shelly’s grubby son, or the kids that his other old friends might have, coming home covered in cherry Kool-Aid and saying, “What’s fuck mean, Daddy?”

  The guys from the trout hatchery had their truck parked at the base of the driveway and they were flinging fish into the pond from plastic sheetrock buckets. The sun struck pink fire off the sides of the rainbow trout as they twisted in the air and hit the surface of the water. The ones that were already in were jumping now as though they were trying to get back to where they came from, corkscrewing above the surface. Skip parked up the driveway by the steps to the front porch. The baby was asleep in the back of the truck underneath the little canopy of mosquito netting he’d bought. The Taylor brothers, who ran the hatchery, were no danger. They were so brain-dead that they wouldn’t look twice at a baby. A hoe, a shovel, a chain saw, a baby in a basket. It was all the same to them. If Skip had had a corpse in the flatbed of the truck they would scarcely have noticed it, although if he’d had a new truck they would have been all over it. They spent most of their time sitting by the spillways shooting muskrats and snapping turtles before they could get to the fish. Smoking dope, too.

  “Yo,” Skip said to them.

  “Get your rod out, man,” said the older one, the one with the beard. “These suckers’d hit on baloney if it was on the surface there, they’re so nuts.”

  The other one was closing up the back of the fish truck. He reached into his pocket for the invoice. “Give this to the boss, why don’t you?” he said. “Tell her the herons won’t go hungry no more.”

  “That’s for sure,” said his brother. “You find any fish floating with that spear mark in them, like a V shape?”

  Skip nodded. He found four or five a week. Sitting in the chair by the living room window, giving Faith her first bottle of the day, listening to her suck with a gasping sound like she’d never been fed before, he could watch the big gray birds, tall and motionless at the edge of the water, until suddenly the curved bill plunged into the shallows and, with a movement of the throat not unlike an infant’s, it swallowed the fish. Occasionally one missed and later that day Skip would pull a dull-eyed trout from the rotting leaves in the spillway.

  There had been trout in Blessings pond since Ed Blessing had had the hatchery first stock it in the hope that his son would take up fly casting. The boy hadn’t, but every summer one hundred trout went into the pond, just like every fall the landscape gardener drove out from town and dug up the begonia tubers, wrapped them in cheesecloth, and put them in the basement.

  “You stepped in shit with this job,” said the younger Taylor brother, lighting a Newport and looking out over the pond, where the starlings were wheeling down to meet the fish leaping high, all of them chasing bugs.

  “Yeah, I keep hearing that.”

  “I don’t know that I’d want to work for her, though,” said the other, looking back at the house and keeping his cigarette cupped in his hand.

  “She’s all right,” Skip said. “Fair and all.”

  “Get your rod out,” said one of the Taylors again as they hopped up into the truck.

  The music started again. It sounded a little like what they had played on the loudspeakers on the football fields when they were graduating from the high school. Nadine was backing her car out of the driveway. She rolled down the window and leaned out toward him.

  “You count fish?” she said. He never got what she was saying the first time. “You count fish!” she shouted.

  “Yes, I did,” he said. “Every one. One hundred even.”

  “You lie,” she said, and peeled out. Nadine drove like she did everything else. Skip was glad his truck was nowhere near her. Whenever he cleared roadkill from the end of the drive, flattened frogs, turtles whose shells were broken mosaics, possums with their mouths half-opened to show their needle teeth, he wondered whether Nadine had run them over. On Fridays Nadine took two hours off to clean the Presbyterian church. She had vanity plates that Craig had gotten her for her car that said 4GSUS. Skip drove around to the front of the house to tell Mrs. Blessing about the apple trees, about how shoots were already beginning to grow from the freshly pruned limbs and even a leaf or two to emerge, soft and uncreased as one of her linen handkerchiefs. Faith stirred in the Portacrib, threw one arm over her head, and smacked her lips lazily. Skip was putting her on her back now. He wished the doctors would make up their minds about what position was least likely to cause crib death. He wondered if it was normal for parents to be as obsessed with their kid as he was. He’d be riding down the street, and he’d see one of those little pink bikes with silver streamers on the handlebars, and he’d file it away for later: pink bike, Christmas four years from now. Or he’d see some little girl in a lace top with her belly hanging out and pierced ears, and he’d think, no way. Maybe people with birth certificates in the dresser drawer could be more casual about those things.

  Through the window he could see Jennifer Foster sitting at the piano playing, her face bent over the keys. Her hands rose and fell like pale birds balancing on a limb in the half-darkness that was always inside the house because of the trees and the deep striped awnings. He could see what would come next in the music, how the tempo or the mood would change, by the slight signals of her arms and head just a moment before. He stood for several minutes listening and watching, and then when she stopped playing he knocked softly on the screen door.

  “Yes?” Mrs. Blessing called.

  “It’s me.”

  “Come in, Charles,” she replied.

  “I can’t get used to the Charles thing,” Jennifer said, smiling.

  “Nicknames are pernicious,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I was always grateful that your parents did not call you Jenny or Jen o
r one of those diminutive versions of Jennifer, which is a lovely name.”

  “I never really heard you play the piano,” Skip said.

  “I’m out of practice. The only place I play is here. It drives my mother crazy after all those years of piano lessons. Piano lessons, dance lessons, tap, jazz. You name it, I took it.”

  “My daughter, Meredith, took piano,” Mrs. Blessing said. “She hated her lessons. Luckily one summer when she was with her grandparents in Newport she fell from a horse and broke two fingers and that was that. She was always injuring herself, riding so much. She was like my brother in that regard. Both of them were accident-prone.” She looked at Jennifer. “Perhaps that’s hereditary. Although I’ve never injured myself at all.”

  Skip wasn’t sure why, but she looked different this morning, older, grayer, and yet less tense at the same time. Her hands lay open in her lap instead of tightly folded, and her mouth was looser, too. He wondered if it was the music. When he told her about the trees, he thought for just a moment that she was going to smile. He had thought from the beginning that there was something almost virginal about her, as though nothing had ever happened to her, as though her entire life had been listening to piano music in the living room and making sure the nasturtiums around the walk didn’t have blight. All the women he’d known growing up, the ones with the suggestion of soft swaying skin beneath their dresses, or the ones like his aunt who were hard and wiry and lined, all of them had faces and bodies that spoke of hard work, childbirth, aging, heartaches. Maybe it was the way Mrs. Blessing’s clothes were pressed, or her hair always pulled back in the same bun, that made her seem so different from those others. Today her manner seemed oddly youthful.

  “I’m glad you’re both in one place, and that Nadine has business elsewhere,” she finally said. “Charles, I think you should tell Jennifer about what’s been going on here.”

  “What?”

  “I hate that word. The phrase is ‘pardon me?’ You know exactly what I mean. I think we should be prepared for any eventuality, including illness, for example, or discovery. By being in my employ you’ve made this my business, too, and I think you need some assistance in making certain that there won’t be trouble in the years to come.”