Such Good People

by Martha Whitmore Hickman

  He nodded, turned a pencil in his hand. “You’re not making any connections, are you—wondering whether if you’d brought your mother here, things might have been different?”

  The question startled her. “No, I don’t think so. Maybe I haven’t allowed myself to. But I haven’t.”

  Again he nodded. “Just wanted to be sure,” he said.

  “I do wonder how it will be between Mother and me—the first time together since Annie died. And I’m a little scared of going home, leaving Trace.”

  “Is he doing okay?”

  “I guess. He and Annie were having a bad time with each other. She told him he’d never paid any attention to her when she was growing up—that all he thought of was his work. It was an exaggeration, but there was truth in it, too.” She looked up, wondering whether to speak of her own anger. But Matt’s face had taken on some extra pain and she thought of his own adolescent daughters.

  “I know how that can be,” he said. “Fathers get busy.” He set the pencil on the desk. “How about you? What about you and Annie?”

  She leaned forward, her handkerchief twisting in her hand. “It wasn’t like that at all with us. We were very close. We always had been. Oh, of course we had some tension between us. She was mature for her age, independent. We had struggles over that—especially this year.” Her voice caught, and she stopped.

  “Was that hard?”

  “Yes. We knew she had to establish her independence, but yes, it was hard.” Her eyes were stinging again and she blew her nose.

  “Was Annie like you, when you were sixteen?”

  “Oh, no. I was much less mature. Much less sure of myself. Not nearly so adventurous.” Her pride in Annie swelled in her voice. She wondered if Matt heard it.

  “I used to see her down here with the other young people,” Matt said. “She seemed to have a lot of self-confidence. Her maturity was very noticeable. Something else, too.”

  “What was that?”

  “She’d be talking to the other kids, asking them stuff. Somewhere, Laura”—he spoke slowly—“she’d learned to care a lot about people.”

  “I know. She was good at that.”

  “Where do you think she learned it?”

  She smiled, grateful. “Some of it, I suppose, from me. I think I was a good mother—” Suddenly, her voice broke off and she put her head in her hands, sobbing. “But I have this awful feeling. What if she needs me? I don’t want her to be scared and lonely.” She gulped in air, appealing to him. “Matt, do you think she’s all right?”

  He reached over and put a hand on her shoulder, and she felt some comfort from his hand run through her body. She reached up and pressed the hand into her shoulder and then sat up.

  “Laura,” he said, “the memorial service—I’ve thought about it a lot—you remember the feeling there—so thick, you could hold it in your hand?”

  “Yes.” She drifted back into the memory of it. “It was almost as though nothing could ever go wrong again, as though whatever could happen, it would be all right.”

  “Yes,” he said. “A very few times in my life I’ve had that feeling. To me, those times are like promises, premonitions, if you will. I don’t go for the streets of gold, the heavenly choirs.” He shook his head and chuckled. “I’ve been a minister too long for that. But the feeling in the room that night”—his brows drew together, remembering, and his hands rested, quiet, in the hollow of his lap—“if it’s anything like that, then Annie…”

  She nodded, tears streaming down her face. “Then Annie’s okay, isn’t she?” Images of the child in the night came to her—“Scaryitis?” “Yes.” And an older memory, of herself standing in the dark by her mother’s bed, waiting for her to waken…

  “I got scared of the shadows. The walls were creaky….”

  “Climb in with me a few minutes.”

  When she would go back to bed, the shadows on the wall would be lovely pictures and the sounds of night friendly company.

  “There are some lines from Emily Dickinson,” she said to Matt, though by now it seemed only an afterthought. “‘Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.’”

  “Sure,” he said. “There’s that. But sometimes I can believe more than that. That night was one of those times.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “You don’t think”—it was her reservation; she had to tell him—“we’re deluding ourselves, because we want so much for it to be so?”

  He leaned forward, hands cupped together. “No, I don’t. That’s like saying, ‘Because I’m hungry, there mustn’t be any food.’”

  She sighed. “That’s nice. I like that.” She sat back for a minute and closed her eyes. Then she moved forward in the chair. “Thank you, Matt.” She got up.

  He stood, put his arms out, and they embraced. “When you go, you don’t go alone,” he said.

  “I know. Sometimes I even feel she’s with me.” Her chin moved against his shoulder. “That feeling’s a gift, too. Believe in it.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured again.

  “Thank you for coming.”

  *

  At home, she told Trace, “I went to see Matt. We had a long talk. He was very helpful.”

  Trace was reading the paper. “Mmmhmm,” he said. “Good.” He didn’t look up.

  She went to him, tore the paper from his hands. “Did you hear me? He was very helpful.”

  His face whitened in astonishment. “Of course I heard you. I’m glad Matt was helpful.” He looked down at the paper, peaked on the floor. “What do you want from me, Laura? Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Some human feeling, that’s what. You’re so damn distant! I tell you something that obviously has a lot of emotional weight to me and you go on as though I were a radio announcer telling the weather!”

  “Distant!” he shouted. “Every time I make a move—make a suggestion—I feel like you slam doors in my face.”

  “That’s crazy,” she said. “Like when?”

  “Well, in the car on the way home, for one,” he said. “I was trying to get people to talk about what we wanted for Annie’s memorial service and all I got was icy put-downs—as though I had no business asking, had butted in on someone’s private preserve.”

  “It was all so academic, Trace. We didn’t want to talk hymn choices. We wanted some expression of feeling.”

  He jumped out of the chair now and began to pace. “Feeling! I try to express a feeling and you overwhelm me with yours. I can’t compete with your grief. I have my own grieving to do. I can’t always be sucked into the quicksand of yours. Sometimes I feel we’ll all drown in the quicksand of your grieving.” He paused, his face grim. “Now, do you want to tell me about the visit with Matt?”

  “Are you kidding? After that? No, I don’t. I wouldn’t want to subject you to any unnecessary emotion.”

  “You can skip the sarcasm,” he said through clenched teeth. “Believe me, it’s counterproductive.”

  She left the room, shaken, hollow at the pit of her stomach. Not only for her mother’s sake but for her own—and Trace’s too—she needed to get away from here for a while. Next week, when they all drove Philip to college, she’d fly on to see Rachel.

  It was Philip’s last night at home. Laura and Trace, Bart and Paula and Philip went out to dinner. They talked about the weeks ahead. Bart and Paula were excited about moving into their own place. They’d be all settled by the time Laura came back from visiting Rachel. They’d found an apartment—the second floor of a large frame house close to the school where Bart would be teaching junior high social studies—a position he’d acquired almost at the last minute, when the previous teacher needed an earlier-than-anticipated maternity leave. Paula would use their car for her job doing home interviews in the town’s social-service network. Philip talked about returning to college. He was going to be taking courses in urban planning and joked about being at a college surrounded by dairy farms—“Crowd behavior in a cattle barn,” he
said. Laura spoke about her wish to return to art projects. She did have that assignment to complete for the Walter Stone Company and, later, might take a course at the college.

  After dinner, they returned home and sat around the living room. The knowledge that this was their last night together seemed to settle over them all.

  “I hope you guys write me,” Philip said. “I’m going to miss you.”

  “We’ll come up,” Bart said. He sat on the sofa, his arm around Paula. “We’ll all come for the weekend.”

  “Good,” Philip said. “But wait till I invite you.”

  They laughed.

  All during the evening, Trace had said little. Now Philip turned to him. “How about you, Dad? How are you going to be?”

  He was sitting back in the blue corner chair, his face half in shadow. At first, he appeared not to have been listening. Then he said, “Oh, I’ll be fine. As soon as my classes get under way. Except—” He brought the tips of his fingers together unsteadily. They waited.

  “Except what, Dad?” Philip said gently.

  “Except”—his voice shook and he seemed to inhale sharply—“I wish things had been better between Annie and me.”

  There was a murmur of assent and then they were silent in the face of his vulnerability. Laura, listening in the silence, closed her eyes, felt her compassion move toward him, hover, pull back, felt the memory of her daughter’s anger—and her own: Wait, it was a long time coming.

  *

  At college, they helped Philip carry in his things. In the cindery driveway, they stood in a circle—on the edge of leaving. “Remember, come and see me. I’ll write you.” He hugged them, each in turn, his eyes bright. He left first, going off toward the campus center. At the bend of the path, he turned to wave.

  *

  At the hotel by the airport, Laura and Trace got out. They would stay overnight before Trace went on to a meeting in Chicago and Laura went on to visit her mother. “We’ll see you back in Woodbridge.” Bart and Paula drove off.

  In their room, Laura threw herself facedown on the bed, exhausted. Trace stretched out beside her. “How are you?” he asked.

  “Tired.”

  “We’ve been through a lot these last days, Philip leaving.” They rested, and after a while he began to move his hand over her shoulders. At first, it felt only soothing; then she began to awaken, the surface of her body first; then deep inside her the desire for him opened slowly, like a flower, and she turned over and drew him down. His eyes questioned, wanting to be sure, and she nodded, yes. This time, it was she who unfastened his shirt, loosened the buckle of his belt. They moved to each other. On the nightstand, the sweep of the minute hand went around and around, and over the bed a pair of fauns danced on a muted tapestry in a gold frame that glittered in the slanting light of late afternoon.

  They lay against each other for a long time. She sighed deeply, content. “I wondered if it would always be sad for me, thinking of her,” she said, her voice light. “It wasn’t, not at all,” and she lifted herself on one elbow and kissed him again.

  They got dressed and went down to dinner, past the coffee shop, to the dining room with its dark paneled walls and candles flickering in columned glass shades.

  A small combo played for dancing, and after dinner they got up and danced, drifting in each other’s arms. Laura raised her head. “Do you remember our wedding night, dancing in the hotel after dinner?”

  “Yes.”

  She recalled leaning into him, tense, wondering, the corsage of her white gardenia quivering on the shoulder of her velveteen going-away suit.

  “So much has happened,” she said.

  “Yes,” he acknowledged.

  They danced a while longer, then returned to their table and drank the rest of their wine. “Ready?” he said.

  They went upstairs and made love again, then went to sleep. In the morning, Trace flew to Chicago and Laura flew to Massachusetts to see her mother.

  Virginia Thayer would meet her at the airport.

  The plane began its descent over the Connecticut Valley, the golds and reds of trees mingling in a blurring haze of flame, the river a dark band, its current hidden beneath a surface that seemed ageless and still. On either side of the river lay a fringe of trees, then barns, the broad brown fields of rural Connecticut, the fields and towns of western Massachusetts.

  Laura sat forward in her seat. Home. Every fall, she got homesick for New England, tried to make a trip. One October, she’d driven here with Annie, driven through tapestries of red-gold trees, through the smell of Concord grapes and apples heaped in baskets along roadside stands.

  Every summer, she and Trace came with the children, who, as they got close to their grandparents’ home, would call out the familiar places—“The ice cream store.” “The lookout tower!” “The school Mom went to.” Finally at the house, they’d spill onto the grass. Rachel and Will would hurry out. “Well, here you are!” Hugs all around, then the children would run through the house and yard, finding favorite places—an attic stairway that pulled down from the ceiling, the sleeping porch high among the elm branches, a window seat in the upper hall beneath whose hinged lid a cache of treasures awaited: an old stereopticon and attendant pictures, boxes of dominoes used for building a snaking parade, which when touched with a finger would fall in a rippling chain reaction.

  The wheels touched down. The plane roared along the ground and stopped. People got up and began moving into the aisle.

  *

  Inside the terminal, she walked down the ramp. Near the electronic arches, a crowd waited. “I’ll be wearing a tan trench coat and a red scarf— Red Badge of Courage,” Virginia had said. “As you pass me, I’ll hum ‘Londonderry Air.’” Over the phone, they’d laughed. As adolescents, they’d read a book in which spies in trench coats hummed songs outside the gates of foreign embassies; it was always raining. “I’ll know you,” Laura had said.

  But it had been a long time. She scanned the crowd. An arm shot up, waving a red scarf. She started to run.

  “Ginny!”

  “Laura!” Their arms were around each other, Laura’s chin over Ginny’s slim shoulder in the tan trench coat. They stood back, holding each other at arm’s length.

  “I don’t believe it!” Laura said.

  “You look wonderful!” They both said it, and fell against each other again.

  “Let’s get your bag,” Virginia said. “Have you had lunch?”

  “No. Coffee. Three times.” Laura laughed again.

  “Can we stop on the way to Hadley? Or do you want to get right on to your mother’s?”

  “Let’s stop. I talked with her last night. She’s not expecting me till midafternoon.”

  They got the bags and the car and worked their way out of the airport cloverleaf onto the road toward Hadley.

  “Do you remember Van’s—the hangout after dances?” Ginny waved toward a large building advertising china and glassware at wholesale prices. “That’s where it was.”

  “I came only once, with Alex Barlow, after a senior dance. Only he was a junior.” She went on, remembering it all. “I liked him all right. He invited me, and I wanted to go, but I was embarrassed to be seen with a younger man. Then we won the Spotlight Dance.” She broke into a laugh. “I was mortified.”

  “We had fun, though, in those days,” Virginia said.

  “Yes, we did. Though I always felt just on the edge of social success. It seems all right to me now, looking back.”

  Virginia slowed the car, turned off the road to a low Colonial building—a long white porch with a row of pillars and a huge plaster cow straddling the peak of the roof. “No class,” Virginia said, “but it’s the old Dutchland Farms. They still have good food.”

  “I remember. Hot fudge—in your own pitcher. I brought Annie here once.” In spite of her intention, her voice broke.

  “Would you rather somewhere else?”

  “No, this is fine.”

  In the restaura
nt, they ordered salads and coffee. Laura leaned back in the chair, studying Virginia. She had been an “Irish beauty”—black hair, clear skin, blue eyes. Now gray tendrils curled forward onto her cheekbones. The rest of her hair was dark, drawn back into a coil at her neck, the line of her cheek still taut, a strip of pale rouge under the cheekbone. Her eyes picked up the blue of a lapis lazuli necklace knotted against a white cashmere shirt. Rust-colored lipstick—Virginia had always been able to keep her lipstick on. Chic was what Virginia was. Slender. She always had been. Both of them had been thin as poles; they’d had names for each other—“Ginny McSkinny” was Virginia’s. “You do look wonderful,” Laura said.

  “So do you. God, it’s good to see you. I’ve thought about you ever since I read about it. Ever since we talked.”

  Laura nodded. She could feel her eyes begin to smart. Their salads came, and the coffee. “I want to talk about it,” she said. “But first, tell me about you and Tom. I feel so far behind on news of you.”

  Virginia told about moving back to Hadley a year ago. “That time I saw your Mother?”

  Laura nodded.

  “She gave me your address and I lost it.”

  “She told me about your visit. I’d not known about your Tommy—until then. I wrote you, asked Mother to send it on. Even though it was so late—years late. Did she?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Maybe it got lost. We were coming and going so much in those early weeks.”

  Laura stretched out her hand. “I’m sorry, about Tommy.” She hesitated. “I’m afraid this brings it all up again, for you.”

  Ginny nodded, her eyes bright. “Thanks. Still, it’s nothing like it was, like it is for you.” She paused, then went on. “I kept thinking I’d call your mother and find out when you were coming for a visit. We were away when your father died. I somehow missed learning about it.”

  They talked on. Virginia had lived in New York, then Boston. Then Tom thought he could conduct his business from a smaller town. “Less frazzle,” she said. “And with the interstate, he can get to Boston in an hour and a half. We love being back.” Several years ago, she’d gotten into advertising—writing copy, thinking up catchy slogans for companies. “I do it freelance. My latest project was helping push a new soap product.” Virginia wrinkled her nose. “Mrs. Clean, that’s me. Not the greatest social usefulness, perhaps. But I love what I do.” She picked up the water glass, drank, put it down on the mottled beige of the tabletop. “What about you? Any yen to get back into art, stuff like that children’s magazine? At least I knew what you were doing after college.”