A Father for Philip

by Gill, Judy Griffith

  “Change into your play clothes, sport, will you? If you fall down you might get your good things all dirty or torn and I know you wouldn’t want to do that, especially when your mom’s sick. Let’s you and I try to keep the laundry to a minimum. Okay?” David smiled into the child’s face as he spoke, then ruffled his straight hair.

  “Okay, Jeff,” Philip replied cheerfully. “Are you going to cook dinner tonight, or is Mom?”

  Before Eleanor could assure her son that she was quite capable of preparing dinner, a lie, and she knew it, David’s hand pushed her back into the pillows. “I am,” he said. “Your mom still feeling kind of bad, Phil, but I’ve managed to keep her in bed most of the day.” He let what Eleanor chose to call a dirty smirk flit across his face for a moment, then went on. “She needs all the rest she can get. Want my help mounting Si, or do you want to do it alone by climbing up from the fence?”

  “I’ll do it my ownself!” the boy said as he sauntered from the room, flinging clothes helter-skelter as he went.

  “Hang up your pants,” David called.

  “Aw, Jeff! You sound just like my mom.”

  David stood there looking down at Eleanor’s back which she had turned to him during this last exchange between father and son. He remained silent until he heard the screen door squeak open then with another squeak slam shut “Darling, look at me,” he said quietly. “Please?”

  Eleanor might have been made of stone.

  David sat beside her on the bed and tremor ran through her as his weight depressed the mattress. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, could feel her mouth trembling, tried to stop it and failed. She gave up the struggle then, and opened her eyes, knowing he would know about the tears she was trying to hide even if she did keep them covered with squeezed eyelids.

  “Go home, David.”

  “I am home, Eleanor.” And the old, caressing note was in his tone as he said her name. “This is my home. You are my wife. We proved that today. No matter what, we belong together. Philip is our son and the three of us are a family. I built this house for us, remember?”

  “I remember,” she whispered. “But I also remember more than seven years of silence, seven years of raising my son alone. Remember the years of watching my father slowly die, having to bury him alone, without my husband beside me to give me support when I needed it. I was so alone when Dad died, Dave, and for the next three years I just barely made it. All that held me together was Philip and living with the hope that you would, by some miracle, return. Well, here you are, David. You have returned. The miracle did happen and when I ask you how it happened, why, all you can say is you remember building this house.

  “What else do you remember, David? You told me that for months you didn’t know who you were, where you were, or why you were there. What happened during that time, David? What else do you remember? A woman? A child, perhaps, whom you couldn’t bear to leave? Seven years is a long time, David, and you won’t convince me you didn’t make a life for yourself. Either before or after you decided that Philip and I could have no place in the new one you had. Another thing I would like to know is why you have left there now? Why did you come back? Did whomever it was kept you away for so long finally make you leave?”

  His face was gray, drawn. “Is that what you believe?”

  “You give me no choice but to draw my own conclusions. That seems the most logical.” And she choked on the last word, put her hands into her hair, rolled onto her side and shook with paroxysms of grief. That grief, David knew could only be assuaged by words he dared not utter. To do so would cause a wound that even he, given time, might never be able to heal, as he hoped to heal this wound she bled from now. All he could do was hold her to him and hope that the same miracle that had sent him back here would give him the time with her he needed to make her believe his reasons, unspoken though they must remain, were the best.

  “Go away… Go away…” she moaned. “I can’t bear you to touch me.”

  “Stop this! Oh, God, Eleanor. Stop!”

  “Go!”

  And he went, but only to find more aspirins. “Take these. You’re burning up again. Take them and sleep some more. I’ll look after everything.”

  “I know! I know!” she wept distractedly. “And it frightens me. Grant looked after everything, one day, too, because I was sick, and in spite of the way he was—is—with Philip, I agreed to start proceedings to have you declared dead… So I could marry him, David! But you aren’t dead, and I’m married to you, and I love you so much! I know I’ll never marry Grant. I probably shouldn’t even have considered it, not for a minute, but I don’t know if I can stay married to you, because for all those years you might have been dead and suddenly here you are, looking after me, looking after my son, giving us both orders and making us like it, teaching Philip to ride, ridding him of his fear of horses and what if I feel for you is the same as what I felt for Grant? Gratitude that someone, anyone, had taken over for a time and let me rest when I needed to?”

  He held her tenderly as she wept and ranted, and when she was finished, he gave her a little shake and pulled her face up to look down at her puffy eyes. “Sweetheart,” he said seriously, “did you go to bed with Grant when you were feeling grateful to him?”

  “Of course not. I don’t lo—”

  “No. You don’t love him. You love me, and after the loving we shared today, can you say you might feel nothing more than gratitude toward me?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! You aren’t the same. You don’t even look the same. Your face is all hidden, you’re bigger around, so much more muscled and I’m not sure I recognize you anymore even if you sound the same and your eyes never changed and the way you smell like trees and moss and fresh air.” What she said did not seem to be making much sense, but David answered as if it did to him.

  “You married a boy, Eleanor, who smelled like trees and moss and fresh air. He has simply become a man through the intervening years. A man who still hangs out with trees and moss in the fresh air. You loved me before, when I was skinny and underfed, so why shouldn’t you love me still when I look more mature?”

  “But I can’t stop making… unfair comparisons. Grant can’t help the way he’s built. That’s genetics and...” She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. “I feel… I don’t know what I feel.”

  “Guilty? Do you feel guilty about choosing me over Grant? Is it because I’m more of a man in your eyes? You chose me long before you ever knew of his existence.”

  “Guilt? Is that what you think I’m feeling?”

  “I do, darling.”

  She denied it. “What I’m feeling is lost. Out of my depth. I’m drowning in a sea of questions you don’t want to answer, like where did you grow from the boy into the man?” And with whom, she wanted to ask. In whose company? But something held her back. When she had suggested it before he had not denied it.

  “We have a long life ahead of us, sweetheart, to catch up on all that… If you will just give me that time. Time to teach you to trust me again. I promise I’ll tell you all the places I’ve been, all the jobs I’ve done, but you’ll just have to accept, for now, the fact that my reason for not returning was the best in the world, the only one that would ever have kept me from you. And accept that I have returned and will never leave you and Philip again unless you send me away. Can you accept me on those terms, Eleanor?”

  David gazed at her. Acceptance—the desire to accept—seemed to be lighting her eyes from within, lightning the darkness of misery which had been the only thing he had seen in them for the past few minutes. His heart leapt in his breast as she leaned toward him, her lips half parted, closed her eyes for a second, then something jerked her back and she opened her eyes, looked straight into his and said “No.”

  David bowed his head and picked up her left hand. With gentle, movements he held it to his lips, kissed each fingertip once, then kissed of the golden band he had p
laced there eight years before. Still bowed over her nerveless hand, he placed a finger and thumb over the band and gently removed it from her. He put it in his shirt pocket. Still without meeting her eyes, he said in a dull, lifeless voice, “As soon as you want to, we’ll go into town and see a lawyer.”

  Eleanor stared into the empty space where David had been sitting, and at the white band of skin around her tanned finger for a long time after David gently close the door behind him. Then she turned and wept silently into her pillow until she slipped into sleep.

  The following morning when she awoke, it was to hear the screen door slam and Philip calling, “See you later, Jeff! Look after my measly little mom for me!”

  “Sure will, sport. So long,” came the cheerful, not-at-all heartbroken reply from Eleanor’s husband.

  How did I suddenly become nothing more than the ‘measly little mom’? she wondered, feeling hurt. Has David been preaching ideas about the ‘weaker sex’ or ‘the little woman’? She felt horrible. Ordinarily something like that coming from her son wouldn’t bother her, she knew, but after the terrible night she had just put in, with fever, chills and nightmares, everything would bother her today. She slipped out of the bed and padded to the window. She swooped the drapes back and the bright sun stabbed in her eyes, making them ache nothing else on earth.

  Eleanor put a hand to her burning face and as she turned to cross the hall into the bathroom the act of putting one foot in front of the other made her head throb unbearably. Her cough tore from her lungs. Moaning slightly from the pain in her eyes, in her head and chest and all her joints, Eleanor washed her face, hoping to cool it. As she reached her towel on the rack she saw a shaving kit standing large as life, and looking like it belonged, on the counter. With a wild sweep of her hand, she sent it flying across the room. The lid off the spray can of lather rattled into the tub and the door burst open to reveal David standing there, a look of fear on his face.

  “What happened?” he barked. Then, “Oh. I thought you’d fallen.” He gave a glance of the debris from his shaving kit littering the floor, then reached out a gentle hand to his wife. “Come on, sweetheart, back to bed. Finished in here?”

  Dumbly, she nodded, then holding onto the side of the sink, said, “But you have to leave. You shouldn’t have brought your shaving gear here. Why did you cut off the beard? Now you’re David, my David again.” She dropped onto the lid of the toilet, holding her face in her hands, and sobbed. “Oh, please, just go away.”

  “I can’t leave you like this, Eleanor. Look in the mirror…” David shoved his shaving mirror in front of her until she was forced to see her reflection.

  “No…” She groaned. “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes indeed. Now back to bed with you and when I close the drapes you leave them that way.” He steered her into the bedroom, put her in bed and tucked the blanket securely around her. “Shame on you, Eleanor, not getting the measles vaccine for yourself when you had Philip immunized. I’ve already talked Dr. Grimes and he’ll be by in a little while.”

  “How… How did you speak to him?” she asked weekly, feeling the tears still straggling down her cheeks, but powerless to stop them. “Send him an email?”

  “I used Bill’s phone. Philip told me that’s what you did,” David explained patiently. “Why in the world don’t you have a phone here? We didn’t when we were first married, but a lot has changed since then.”

  “It was just one more ex—” She lifted her chin. “I didn’t want one. I doesn’t kill me to go up to the farmhouse for the few calls I have to make.”

  “Just one more expense?”

  As if he hadn’t asked, she said, “You’ve met Bill? What…?”

  “Did I tell them about myself? Only that I’ve bought the Anderson place, made friends with Philip and that when you got sick and he wasn’t home, Phil came to me. He’s gone now to the city to be with his wife and babies. He says he won’t tell Kathy about your measles, because she’d only worry. Okay?”

  Eleanor had no answer.

  ~ * ~

  The doctor came, went, and Eleanor slept. For the next few days she spent more time that way than she did awake, but she was aware now and then of David coming in and out of the room, giving her cold drinks, bits of food, feeding her aspirins and once, only once, bathing her again in the night when the fever spiked.

  She would call him, and he was there. She vaguely wondered where he was sleeping; it must be in the living room, for he did not share her bed. It did not occur to her he was only snatching the odd catnap in the big chair beside her bed, until she awoke one night and found him there and told him to go home, or at least, lie down. He merely shook his head and returned to his post in the chair by her bed.

  He changed her bedding and nightclothes when she perspired so much they became soaked, but the one time she became chilled again and pleaded with him for warmth, he only wrapped her in a scratchy wool blanket and put hot water bottles beside her. She cried to him to come to her, to make her warm, but he said sadly, “No, darling. You’re ill, and if I had known how ill, that first day, what happened wouldn’t have. Sleep now, and we’ll talk about it again when you’re better.”

  A week after her spots it first appeared, Eleanor was able to sit up in bed without breaking a sweat from weakness. The red rash was beginning to fade now, and her eyes felt so much better that David left the drapes open a few inches, letting a golden stream of sunlight fall across her green carpet. She heard steps in the yard, and rapping at the kitchen door.

  David’s heavy footsteps went slowly, haltingly across the hall and into the kitchen. He sounds so weary, she thought with contrition as she heard the screen door squeak open. David said to the caller, “Good morning. I’ll have to oil that door. Squeaks something awful, doesn’t it?”

  And Grant… Grant! answered, “Who the hell are you? Where’s Mrs. Jefferson?”

  “Oh, she’s still in bed,” replied David easily, a chuckle in his voice, an indulgent, tender little chuckle. “I’ve been keeping her there is much as possible.”

  “You’ve what? Who are you?” Grant demanded.

  “Oh, yes… Of course, you don’t know, do you?” asked David in an apologetic manner Eleanor held her breath and let out a long sigh of… Relief…? Disappointment…? When he went on. “I’m Jeff Davidson, a friend of young Philip. He came to me for help when his mother got sick. She has the measles,” he added with casual cruelty. But how could it be cruelty? Eleanor wondered. He doesn’t know about how Grant fears illness. Unless… Philip, or she herself in her delirium, had told him.

  If he hadn’t known, if the casual cruelty had been lucky accident, he would have known in the next instant, Eleanor decided, for Grant’s voice rose a full octave as he said, “Measles?” with such horror that she wondered how he would have reacted to smallpox, should such a disease still exist.

  David replied with pleasure, it sounded. “Yes, measles. Red measles. The bad kind. What did you say your name was?” He knows very well, Eleanor thought indignantly. He saw us together.

  “I didn’t. I’m Mrs. Jefferson’s fiancé, Grant Appleton.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know she was engaged. No ring that I noticed, except a cheap gold wedding band I guess Philip’s dad must have given her. It’s a good thing you’re here. She’s been very ill, you know, been calling out in her delirium for some man, begging her ‘darling’ to come to bed and help her get warm.” He laughed. “I wouldn’t have minded, but it seemed wrong, somehow, under the circumstances.

  “But you’re here at last. She will be pleased. Come right in. Let me show you to her bedroom,” David offered effusively.

  “I know where it is,” Grant snapped. “But I don’t think I should—”

  “Nonsense,” David said heartily. Too heartily, his wife snarled mentally. “She’ll be longing to see you and she’s so much better she must be getting bored with my constant company, day and night. Go right on in. Don’t mind me, all I am is temporary baby
-sitter, housemaid, nurse, chief cook and bottle-washer. I’ll make coffee for the two of you.”

  He ushered Grant through the open doorway of the bedroom and stood behind him, blocking off all exit.

  “Look who’s here, Mrs. Jefferson,” David said with only the slightest emphasis on her name. And her title. “Your very own fiancé. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to keep you warm. Go on, man, slide in there beside her and wrap her up tight in your arms.”

  “Hi, uh, Ellie.” Grant’s uneasy greeting sounded false. “I understand from the kid’s friend you have measles. How did that happen?”

  Before Eleanor could answer, David’s big, flat palm clapped Grant right between the shoulder blades, sending him staggering into the room where he caught the footboard of the bed and nearly fell over it, headlong onto the bed. He just escaped that ignominy by scrambling back with difficulty. He tried to retreat to the doorway, but David stood there, blocking him in. “I… uh, look, Ellie,” Grant stammered. “I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I don’t, uh, get too close. I might catch them… The hotel you know… The guests…”

  He looked so miserable standing there afraid to approach too near her, and unable to edge farther away, because David might push him back again, that Eleanor had to take pity on him. She smiled. “I understand, Grant.”

  “Well I don’t,” David said, an evil gleam in his eye. “What’s more important, the woman you want to marry, or a bunch of hotel guests who probably had the disease as children or at least had the sense to get themselves immunized?”

  “Well,” Grant blustered, puffing his cheeks out. “Just who do you think you are, anyway?”

  “No one,” replied Dave, “except the person who has nursed this woman through a very serious illness. I feel every consideration should be given her. If she wants you to hold her and make her warm, then I think it’s your duty as her fiancé to do so.”

  Grant and drew himself up to his not very great full height and glared at David. “If Mrs. Jefferson understands the importance of the safety of my hotel guests, I’d think you, a relative stranger, could keep out of it.”