Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  They had all three fallen asleep on the old quilt, Lydia dozing off with the sounds of mosquitoes and Benny’s hoarse breathing in her ear. And then she woke to find herself stiff and sweaty and alone, one of her Wellies tumbled over the edge into the water. She climbed down to get it, and just around the corner in the pool she could see the two boys from behind. Both of them were naked. They looked like the golden trout that had lasted in the pond only one summer because their tremulous glow had been such an easy target for predators. Lydia had stared at the shining pale flesh, her feet unsteady on the pebbles at the bottom of the stream, and then she scrambled back up the bank toward the quilt, dragging her thigh across a piece of slate so sharp that she felt nothing for a moment, saw only the puffy lips of her own ripped skin, the reds and pinks of muscle in that stop-time moment before blood rushed into the gap.

  “How in heaven’s name did you do this, Miss Lydia?” Mrs. Foster asked when the boys brought her home held aloft in a cat’s cradle made of their thin arms. But she could scarcely remember the feeling of the stone slicing through her, could only remember that just before she scrambled up the bank Sunny had turned his head in the late-day sun coming lacy through the trees and had smiled at her with his eyes half-shut, smiled at her in a way that came to her in her dreams for years later, gloriously happy.

  “It wasn’t the size of that gash that scared the hell out of me,” Paul Benjamin said. “It was the way you sat on the edge of that kitchen table and didn’t make a sound. Without being numbed up, too. Doctor poured a shot glass of gin in that wound, and that was all.”

  “I still have the scar,” Lydia said.

  “I’d imagine so.”

  Lydia Blessing had never come close to remarrying. It was not so much that she covertly saw the physical side of things as the purview of the young, although she did, and found the imagined fumblings of her older friends ridiculous and demeaning. It was just that she could not imagine what it would be like to share her life. She could not imagine not being able to switch on the reading lamp next to her bed if she could not sleep at midnight, or having to ask someone else’s opinion on dinner plans or weekend guests. She had had her ways from the time she was young, and she had never had to change them.

  The closest she had ever come to a love affair was with Bill Stapleton, who had lived just outside of Mount Mason on an old horse farm for as long as she had been at Blessings. He had been a childhood friend of Jessie’s, and she had been seated next to him at an Easter dinner just after the war was over. He was quiet and thoughtful, letting her do all the talking until she would reach one of her acerbic pitches and he would murmur, “You don’t really mean that.” But he had never seemed put off. He had brought Meredith a Chutes and Ladders game once, and a little hat with a feather when he took a trip to London. “That’s a ridiculous gift for a little girl,” she had said, but she had been secretly pleased, although she would have been more pleased if he had brought the hat for her.

  “Such sad news,” Jess’s daughter Jeanne said when she called just as the rain was tapering off, and then she told her that Bill was dead.

  That was the sort of deaths they had now: such sad news. Once there had been the unthinkable deaths, like Benny’s and Sunny’s, deaths mercifully obliterated by sleep so that each morning, as her mind surfaced from dreaming, she would have to accept them all over again. Then there were the deaths that changed the world, that broke it in two: her mother, her father. There had been Jess’s death, which had left her feeling as though she had stiffened her spine and her shoulders for the funeral and had never again let them go. The first had been the unthinkable deaths of youth, the second the wrenching losses of middle age. Now there were the inevitable deaths of old age, which one after another prefigured her own. Such sad news.

  “I’ll be there by dinner,” Meredith said on the phone. “Eric can’t get away. But I’ll get in the car right after lunch.”

  “There’s no need,” Lydia said.

  And yet it was a comfort now to have her daughter on one side of her in the pew and Jeanne on the other, as though Jessie were somehow with her, too. “You drive people away, Lulu,” Jess had told her after Bill married that nice woman from Philadelphia, who had been at Vassar with one of Frank Askew’s daughters. “What’s the saying—no man is an island. You’ve made an island out of yourself. Benny wouldn’t have wanted that.”

  Thank goodness she had that photograph of Benny on the drop-leaf table. Sometimes she could no longer see his face. Jess had always liked him. When they were younger there were times when she had thought it was Jess he would marry, when she would watch the two of them making clover wreaths by the pond. She thought Sunny had thought so, too, but Jessie had made a face when she had asked once. “Benny’s like a brother,” Jess had said. And of course he had been like a brother to Lydia, too, until he had become like a husband.

  Sunny had not wanted her to marry again. Perhaps that was what had decided her. “What’s the point, Lyds?” he said one evening on the porch when she was telling him about Bill, and Bill’s marriage. Or perhaps it was that trip to Paris, when she had run into Frank Askew in the lobby of the hotel. His wife had invited her to lunch, almost dared her to come, and Lydia had felt ashamed as she watched him eat, fast and loudly. Of course she had never eaten with him before; the most they had ever done was drink together, while a gaggle of complicit onlookers stood by. She’d been forty on that Paris trip, and Frank over sixty, and his dentures clicked like a piece of machinery. His wife called him “old fellow” and said he should slow down or he’d be up all night with heartburn. Later he had called her room, and she had agreed to meet him in the Tuileries and then had not gone. It made her think that she had bad judgment where men were concerned. It made her think his wife had been wiser than she’d ever credited.

  The young minister eulogizing Bill was a kind of rebuke, with his pale sideburns and ruddy face. He took as his text the poem “Death Be Not Proud,” and Lydia wondered if it was because he was more conversant with literature than with Scripture. Bill’s two sons, surrounded by their own children, were in the front pews, along with his widow, who had been a college friend of Bill’s first wife. Paul Benjamin nodded to her in the nave. “All well at home?” he murmured, and Lydia nodded. Frank Askew’s daughter was on the other side of the church, and outside on the pavement she came to Lydia and embraced her, which was just the sort of thing she hated. “I knew your father,” she said to Meredith, and Lydia realized with a kind of light-headedness that she no longer cared what Harriet Askew meant by that. I have outlived my sins, she thought gleefully.

  “You can find a priest of a more appropriate age to bury me, Meredith,” she said in the car on the way to the cemetery.

  “It would probably have been difficult to find a priest Bill’s age, Mother. He was ninety, after all.”

  “Ninety-two in September,” Lydia said, adjusting her black felt hat. “And I assume there is at least one priest at St. Anselm’s who is not young enough to be my great-grandchild and doesn’t look as though he spends all his off-hours golfing.”

  The cemetery rattled her more than she would have expected. There were all those names she knew on the monuments, all the men and women who had come to the house for cocktails and played mixed doubles at the club. On a knoll in one corner she could see the edge of the square stone that marked the spot where Jess was buried between her first husband and her second, and as the car came around a curve there was the obelisk in front of her that her mother had insisted upon, with the one word at its base, BLESSING.

  The plot beneath was like her house, big and empty. Her father had purchased it the same year he bought Blessings, as though to show his faith in a future in Mount Mason that even transcended mortality. There were eight spaces. Perhaps he had expected that he and his wife would have more children. Certainly he had believed that Lydia would have more than just the one. Surely he had not expected that his own two children would not want to join their parents i
n eternal rest. But one weekend when Sunny had come to stay, the two of them had walked around the pond, and he had flicked his cigarette into the water and said lazily, “Don’t you dare put me in the ground after I’m gone, Lyds. No box for this boy.” They’d had quite a lot of wine at dinner, and she’d made a face and said, “Don’t be morbid,” but he would not be put off. “I mean it,” he said. “I can’t face the dark. Toast me to a cinder and set me free as a bird. Promise.”

  “Sunny, are you ill? Tell me if you’re ill.”

  “I’m just the same as always, dear heart,” he’d said, and he’d kissed her on the forehead and waited almost six months to die on the dirt floor of the barn.

  “I’m thinking of your uncle, Meredith,” she said as the car wended its way through the shady cemetery drives.

  “Are you? So was I. He told me after Grannie’s funeral that he would have preferred a kneeling angel with an armful of roses as the monument. I thought he was serious.”

  “What a dreadful thing to say to a child. You were—what? Ten? Eleven?”

  “I was sixteen when Grannie died, almost twenty when he did. He always made me feel so grown up. And loved, too. There was no one like Uncle Sunny for making you feel loved.”

  That was his gift, Lydia thought. If he loved you he made you feel all wrapped up in it, like ribbons or a blanket. If not, not. The minister had given a grudging little sermon about their brother Lazarus at Sunny’s funeral, and she had never known why. Jess had said she thought Sunny had mocked him once about the cut of his cassock, and Lydia thought it might be the cremation that had done it. A whole carload of Sunny’s friends had come from New York, several of them in light-colored suits, and gotten quite drunk at the house. “He was godfather to our daughter,” one woman told her several times during the course of the afternoon. “We never considered anyone else. Even my brother. No one else.” She had found one of the men curled up in Sunny’s single bed, weeping with the pillow held close to his face. All she could think was that her mother would have had a fit.

  “What would you say was your greatest mistake in life?” she asked Meredith in the car.

  “That’s an odd question,” her daughter replied. “Are you thinking of Bill? Of not marrying him?”

  “Goodness, no. That would have been disastrous. For him probably. No, I was simply curious.”

  Meredith was silent. Finally she said, “I never should have made friends with Betsy Milstone at school. She told all my secrets to the other girls. Especially the really terrible ones, like stealing bits of jewelry and cheating in math.”

  “You stole jewelry?”

  “Mother, this happened almost fifty years ago. It’s a little late for you to become exercised about it.”

  She was right, of course. What a soft patina the passage of time gave to everything, at least once one learned to live in the present. “That’s not much of a mistake,” Lydia said.

  “I’m realizing that. I’m happy to say I haven’t made too many terrible mistakes in my life. Quite the contrary. I’ve been lucky.”

  “Jess always said we make our own luck,” Lydia said.

  “I suppose there’s some truth to that. Jess was always good at cutting to the heart of the matter. In any event, I guess I’ve lived a charmed life.”

  “I am happy to hear you say that,” Lydia said.

  A silence stretched between them. Lydia rubbed her left arm, which felt stiff and sore. Meredith came around to help her out of the car. “Are you all right?” she said, putting out her hands just as Paul Benjamin had done for the baby, and impatiently Lydia waved her away and used the door of the car to pull herself erect.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake, Meredith,” she said. “Don’t fuss at me.”

  “Remember man that you are dust,” the young minister said at Bill’s graveside. Thou, Lydia thought. Thou art dust. Why did the modern drain all the ceremony from things? And unto dust thou shalt return. She had taken the boat and the box with Sunny’s ashes to the center of the pond one morning just after sunrise. The surface was a mirror. The ashes were unexpectedly heavy and they sluiced out like water, not like dust, and sank heavily except for a light penumbra that rose and held in the air. As she rowed back she had seen Meredith on the dock, wearing a straw hat, her hands crossed over her heart.

  “In the air the ashes looked just like glitter,” Meredith had said, and her mother had loved her as completely then as she ever had.

  Lydia looked at her sidelong as they drove toward the club for the funeral lunch. Her skin was lined now by the sun but her mouth was relaxed in that way so few women of her daughter’s age could manage. Meredith had arrived earlier than she expected from Virginia the day before. She and Charles and Jennifer and Faith had been out on the long lawn by the pond, sitting in the shadow of the old flowering crabapple. Nadine had called in sick and it was like being free of the dark schoolmistress, really, with cookies from the box and a thermos of sweet iced tea. The field opposite was thick with the last of the milkweed, and the pods had burst and in the breeze the white feathers carrying the seeds floated thick over them, like a summer snowstorm. The child’s eyes seemed to follow them as she sat propped up against Jennifer’s outstretched legs.

  “I swear she’s going to sit up by herself in a couple of weeks,” Charles had said. “It’s real early for her to be doing that, but look how strong she is.”

  “I still can’t get over how much you’ve learned about babies,” Jennifer said, handing around the tea in paper cups, which Mrs. Blessing had always loathed.

  “I read. Books. Magazines. Whatever.”

  “My mother had an enormous set of books about child rearing that are in the house someplace,” Mrs. Blessing said. “Perhaps in the back room. I will see if I can find them. Our nanny thought they were nonsense. She believed there were only three things necessary to raise a healthy child: fresh air, simple food, and quinine. I can’t recall what the quinine was meant to do but we were dosed with it regularly.”

  “My father says his uncle said your nanny was a terror,” Jennifer said.

  “Dreadful. But so were the Foster boys. She would see them trying to hit down crabapples with a broom or eating tomatoes from the garden and she would come out and give them a piece of her mind. There was a time when she took the broom from one of them and hit him with it on the bottom. But she was just doing my mother’s bidding. She would sit up in her sleeping porch and if she heard a disturbance she would say, ‘Nanny, please take care of that.’ My mother was difficult.”

  “Aren’t they all?” said Jennifer.

  “Did she use binoculars?” Charles said, squinting up at her from the blanket.

  “I can’t recall,” Mrs. Blessing said.

  “Your mother called her Nanny instead of her real name?”

  “Times were different then,” Mrs. Blessing said.

  She could not be certain exactly when times had changed. She knew only that when Meredith had arrived down the drive and walked over to them, Charles had stood up and said to her, “This is my daughter. Her name is Faith.” And Meredith had looked at the baby in his arms, who looked back with her eyelids fluttering and made a loud declarative “Ah!” sound. Meredith had smiled and Faith had smiled back, then kicked wildly, using both her arms and her legs. A bootie fell off, and Meredith bent to pick it up. Mrs. Blessing looked at her old watch. “You must have been speeding on the interstate,” she said.

  “I was just under the limit.” Meredith put the bootie back on Faith’s foot herself, then patted it when she was done. “What a pretty baby!” she had said to Skip. “Aren’t you lucky? How old is she?”

  “Your new caretaker’s not married, is he?” Meredith said in the car on the way back to Blessings when the funeral lunch was done.

  “Certainly not.”

  “Well, I guess you can’t have everything. He seems like a very good father.”

  “It’s an unusual situation,” Lydia said stiffly, and Meredith grinned.

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bsp; “Mother, they’re all unusual,” she said, and was surprised when Lydia did not reply.

  He couldn’t believe he was out of baby Tylenol. Or Motrin. Or whatever. The doctor had said Faith might have a bad reaction to the inoculations, and though it was a week later he should have been ready for the fever and the restlessness. Maybe the problem wasn’t the shots at all, but an ear infection, or a virus, or meningitis or pertussis or one of the other seemingly hundreds of things in the baby book that ended with the laconic sentence “May cause death.” He should have been ready, but there was always so much to do, to remember, to think about, where Faith was concerned. He looked down at her flushed face and put his hand on her forehead. The feel of her hot skin reminded him of smooth stones baked by the summer sun. Hot on a warm night, the perspiration had gathered in the folds of her neck, and when he took her out to the car it ran onto his shirt like tears. He kissed the fold between her small round shoulder and the puffy bend of her elbow and could taste it, salt in his mouth. Rubbing his cheek against her damp hot one, he said, “I love you, little girl.” She bobbed on his chest and made a grunting noise.

  “We’re going to bring this fever down,” he said as he buckled her into her car seat, his words sounding loud against the cricket hum of the dark night. The lights in the house were out except for the one in the downstairs hall that stayed on always. He drove slowly down the drive.