Such Good People

by Martha Whitmore Hickman

  *

  The next day, she brought to Rachel’s bedside a string of carved amber beads. She held them in the morning sunlight. “I remember these. What did you wear them with?”

  Rachel shifted her head against the pillows. “I don’t know. I think I had those when we were first married. I haven’t worn them in years. Where did you find them?”

  “In a jewel box in your drawer. I used to open it sometimes when I was putting away your handkerchiefs. These beads were such a symbol of glamour to me. You dressed up in them to go out with Father.”

  Rachel smiled. Laura continued. “I remember when you turned forty. I would have been eight. I thought forty was so old.” She waited, bemused, watching Rachel’s face.

  Rachel was gazing out the window. She appeared not to have heard, and Laura wondered whether she was tiring her mother, whether being together in this way, recalling old stories, enriching though it was for her, was too much for Rachel.

  “Mother?”

  “I’m listening, dear—you thought forty was old.”

  “Do you mind my talking on this way?”

  “Mind?” Rachel turned, her expression tender, luminous. “I don’t mind anything you do, dear. Don’t you know that?”

  Laura drew in her breath. “Mother, there have been times. Is it all right with us now?”

  “Well, what about forty?” Rachel said.

  “Forty?” She had forgotten in the flow of peace that seemed suddenly to bathe the room. Then she remembered. “Just that I thought forty seemed so old, and then soon after your birthday you and Father went somewhere and you had on a long yellow silk gown, and these beads, and you came in to kiss us good night and you looked so beautiful….”

  Rachel was smiling again. “It’s…in…the…eye…of…the…beholder,” she said, recalling a word at a time. “My father used to say that—‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’” She picked up the amber beads. “When I was forty, Howard was still an infant. I’ve often wondered…”

  “Wondered what?”

  “I thought of being a writer. In college, I wrote for the magazine. But when I finished raising children, it seemed too late. Women weren’t doing so much—the way they are today.”

  Laura nodded, knowing all too well. “It’s still hard to get going on a new career. But it was a different time, Mother.”

  “I wrote a few things as you were growing up, some poems from time to time. I’m sure you’d think they were old-fashioned and sentimental. I threw most of them away. I did one when my mother died.”

  “Did you save it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where it is? May I look?”

  “It’s under some notebooks, in the drawer of my desk that’s nearest her picture. Go and see.”

  Laura went to the desk, in the living room. There, under the notebooks, was a single sheet, rippled with time, cream-colored at the edges—“My Mother’s Dress.” She took it to Rachel. “Shall I read it aloud?”

  “I guess so. If you want.”

  She began:

  “For mornings Mother always wore

  A print of lavender;

  She had gray hair and smiling eyes,

  The color suited her.

  But when the dinner work was done,

  The house all clean and bright,

  She changed the morning lavender

  For soft and dainty white.”

  Halfway through, Laura stopped and looked up. Rachel’s face was flushed. “Go on,” she said.

  Laura continued:

  “Now Mother’s earthly work is done,

  God called her home to rest.

  And so she changed her gown to white.

  I know, of course, it’s best.

  But oh, I miss the lavender,

  My earthly eyes could see,

  The dear familiar morning dress

  She wore at work with me.”

  “That’s lovely.” Laura looked up at her mother again.

  “I told you it was old-fashioned.” But Rachel was pleased, her eyes shining. “My angel mother,” she said.

  They were quiet together. “When you were so sick,” Rachel said, “I prayed to God for your healing. But it was my mother’s face I saw.”

  Laura closed her eyes, half-looking for the woman in the pale dress and dark hair of the photograph by her mother’s desk—her grandmother Laura.

  “I wish I remembered her,” she said.

  “You remind me of her sometimes. Do you know, I still miss her,” Rachel said, surprise in her voice, “after all this time.” Her hand brushed against the cream-colored paper—brittle, fragile with age. “I wonder,” she said, “if you’ll ever write about me.”

  “The thing is”—Laura set the glass down on the wicker table—“we don’t seem able to talk much anymore, Trace and I. If I start to talk about Annie, he gets impatient—or he turns away.”

  They were sitting in Ginny’s sunroom, a pitcher of sangria and a plate of crackers and cheese on the table in front of them—the wicker planters, the shelves of green plants and violets around them. Since Ginny had met her at the airport several days ago and taken her to Rachel’s, they had talked almost daily on the phone. Now Laura had come for a visit while Rachel napped. “Take your time, dear,” Carlena had said. “Your mother and I will be fine.”

  Ginny picked up a cracker, topped it with a thin slab of Havarti. “Maybe it’s too close to him—all that pain.”

  “It’s hard to believe he even cares.” The vehemence in her voice surprised her. “That was the thing with him and Annie, too. She felt he never listened to her. She and I talked a lot.”

  “So in some ways, he wasn’t there for her?”

  “In some ways, he wasn’t. He knew that, and he knows it now, and it’s terrible for him.”

  “Does he talk about it?”

  “Not much. I wish he did. He talked about it once when the boys were home.” She remembered it. “Actually, when he does, I don’t know that I’m much help. I want to be sympathetic, but sometimes I think, You brought it on yourself; now live with it. It’s almost”—she drew her shoulders forward in a shudder—“as though I want him to suffer, as though I’m blaming him all over again for what’s finished.” She reached in her purse for a handkerchief and blew her nose. “I suppose we set each other off, too. He told me once, ‘You always outclass me with your mother’s grief.’”

  Ginny nodded—yes, yes.

  “In a way, he’s right,” she went on. “I sometimes feel like I’m the one who’s most deeply hurt. I put more into raising her, so the lion’s share of grief is mine. Sometimes we’re with people and it comes up about Annie’s death and someone asks Trace a question about how it happened, and he tells them, one detail after another, hardly any feeling in his voice. I want to scream. I want them to ask me.”

  Ginny sighed. “We shield ourselves, Laura—sometimes to protect ourselves from feeling. Sometimes to preserve our illusions. You. Trace. Tom. I. We have to, at first. Then, little by little, we braid it into our lives. Do you mind if I tell you something about Tom and me?”

  “Please do.” But she thought, Not I. I have not shielded myself—I who have walked into the middle of this death, kept myself open to its nuances and its pain.

  “You know our Tommy was killed by a car?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you may not know the circumstances.”

  Laura shook her head—no.

  “He ran out of the play yard, into the street.” She paused. “The play yard had a gate, and Tom had left the gate open.”

  “Oh, Ginny!”

  “It was awful for him, of course. But I blamed him, too. We talked about it. I tried to forgive him—he felt so terrible. In between times, I’d find myself thinking, You did it. You’re responsible for it. It’s your fault.” She put her hand to the throat of her red blouse and swallowed. “Three weeks before Tommy was killed, I had left the gate open. I found him toddling along the curb, beside
the road. It terrified me. I thought, What kind of mother am I? How could I have been so careless? I was too ashamed to tell Tom—and it could have warned him.

  “After Tommy was killed, I kept pushing all that out of my mind. I couldn’t acknowledge it. It was as though the memory would come toward me and then veer off. The incident wasn’t real. No one must know about it—I, least of all. What had happened was Tom’s fault, not mine. I had to blame someone. I couldn’t blame myself. And he had left the gate open, the critical time.”

  She sat back in the chair, her hand playing over the intertwining cords of white wicker. “I struggled with it for months. Then one day, I told Tom. We talked, cried all over again, forgave each other for whatever there was to forgive by then. But for a while, I had this myth I needed to keep believing—that I was a better mother than that. Even that I was the good parent—almost like being the good child.”

  During the last of this recital, Laura had been turning her watchband around and around, twisting the links of the chain, turning them back. Now she stopped. Images flooded through her mind—Annie smiling, Annie coming to put her arms around her after Will’s death, Annie’s face when she asked, “Is it all right if I take your drawing to school?”

  But there were other images, too—Annie’s cool “No thanks” when Laura offered to share again a cooking project they used to do together; Annie’s defiant “Why not?” when they wouldn’t let Gordon stay overnight; the figure of a girl hunched over a desk, writing angry words in her journal.

  She looked at Virginia. “I have had my own myths,” she said.

  They were finishing dinner when the phone rang. Carlena jumped up. “I’ll get it.” She returned in a moment. “Some man for you, Laura—don’t sound like your husband.”

  She hurried to the phone. Bart, maybe?—a moment of panic. He’d seemed pretty low the last time she’d seen him.

  But it was Fred Thayer. “Laura, Ginny told me you’re here. Why didn’t you let me know?”

  “Fred! How nice to hear from you.” Her relief was audible, magnified her pleasure at hearing from Fred. “I did think about it,” she said, apologetic. “Maybe because I haven’t done anything about Iceland.” It was true. She’d made a few attempts at pencil sketches, but nothing seemed promising. It was even hard to get to the last two panels for Walter Stone, and she did know what that required—the darker gouaches, some ink outlining, blocking in the test.

  “Forget Iceland,” he said. “What about Cape Cod?”

  “Cape Cod? Where are you?”

  “I’m in Northampton,” he said. “I’ve been working here several days, and I have more still to do. But what I called about…I’d really like to see you again and I had this wild idea.”

  “Wild idea?” she said, bemused. “Tell me.”

  “I have to drive down to Dennis tomorrow for a homeowners’ meeting—we do this once every winter, and hope we don’t get snowed in—and I wondered if you’d like to go with me? I remember that you love the Cape. It would be a long day, but we could make it. The meeting will be a couple of hours in the early afternoon. You could hang out at my house, maybe bring your sketching stuff, or a book to read. The town isn’t much for browsing in midwinter. I invited Ginny, too, but she can’t come. What do you think?”

  She was quite speechless at the suggestion and at first didn’t say anything.

  Then he said, “I thought it might be a nice change for you, too—if your mother could spare you for a day.”

  For a moment, she closed her eyes, imagining…. It would be wonderful to fill her lungs with sea air and, yes, to leave for a full day the necessary cares and anxieties of the sickroom. And to be with Fred. Yes, to be with Fred. So much to talk about, so much unspoken history to share. “Hold on a minute.” She hurried into the dining room, where Carlena was settling Rachel back onto her bed.

  “There you go. Let me put this pillow under your head.” Rachel lifted her head obediently, sank down again. “Who was it, dear?”

  “He’s still on the phone,” she said. “It’s Ginny’s brother, Fred. He’s invited me to drive down to Cape Cod with him tomorrow—he has a meeting. We’d go early and get back pretty late at night. Would that be okay?” Even as she asked, she realized how much she wanted to go, was prepared to deal with Rachel’s protest if it was forthcoming.

  “But it’s winter,” Rachel said, puzzled.

  “I know,” Laura said. “He’s going down for a meeting. Just for the day.”

  “I guess it’s all right,” Rachel said, her voice trailing off.

  Carlena patted the pillow and spoke into Rachel’s ear. “We’ll be fine, dear.” Her mouth closed in a tight line and Laura wondered whether a daylong trip with a man not your husband stretched Carlena’s moral code.

  “I’ll bring you some saltwater taffy—if I can find any offseason,” she said, and turned, uncertain whether Rachel acquiesced or not—or even understood.

  She picked up the phone, feeling an ominous tug at her heart—she had only a few more days, and here she was, leaving Rachel. Or was it just the passing of time, the prospect of inevitable loss? “I’d love to go, Fred. When shall I be ready?”

  *

  They left as the sky was beginning to lighten. “I’m dressed for the North Pole,” Laura said. She was wearing plaid wool slacks, her heavy Irish sweater over a coral turtleneck, fleece-lined boots. She carried a coat over her arm. “I have a wool cap in my pocket,” she said, patting the bulge in the coat.

  Fred laughed. “The weather prediction is good. Unless there’s a lot of wind, it can be very pleasant on the beach, even in January.” He had wool slacks, too, and a down jacket, and a cap stuffed into the well pocket of the car door.

  On the way, they talked—of the weather first—that it was a nice day, nothing untoward predicted. He asked about Rachel. “I think she’s doing all right,” Laura said. “Sometimes, like last evening, she dozes a lot.” It was true—her mother had seemed unusually torpid last night, coming in and out of awareness, mumbling a few words, then going back to sleep. “Other times, she’s as alert as you or I.” And she found herself telling him about the coverlet, the beads, the poem about her grandmother.

  “That’s lovely,” he said.

  She nodded her head, remembering the quality of that afternoon.

  They recalled high school days. Fred, too, had not kept up with his classmates. “I traveled so much, and we lived abroad for a while—until the divorce. After that, I bought the Cape Cod house. I keep an apartment in New York, but I consider the house my home. I’ve always loved the ocean.”

  “Me, too,” she said. Then she asked, “Your divorce—how long ago?”

  “About ten years. I was still in the import business then.” He sighed. “I really worked at it—flying all over. I made a lot of money, too. But I suppose you’d say it cost me my marriage, though I’m not sure that was all of it.”

  “Nothing is ever all of it, I suppose,” she said wryly, and he nodded.

  They stopped at a Friendly’s near Worcester for breakfast. When they turned onto the Cape, it was still midmorning, the sun bright, only the slightest residue of old snow clinging at the bases of sea grass and the stubby pines that tilted against the dunes.

  As they approached Dennis, he said, “My meeting is at two. I keep some food in the house—wine, frozen stuff. Most of the restaurants are closed now, but there’s a place where they sell fried clams to go. How about it?”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  He pulled up at the Clam Shack and a few minutes later came out carrying a large brown bag. He set it on the floor by her feet. She saw the top of a quart box mounded with fried clams and a second box—covered, cylindrical. “Clam chowder,” he said, laughing. “Might as well OD while we’re here. And down in there somewhere is a box of coleslaw—an attempt at a well-balanced meal.”

  “Great. I’m willing to let the food pyramid go for the day. I mean”—she looked out the car window at the wide sky, bright
blue, a few scudding clouds, and, against the horizon, dunes and grass and the blurred gray line of the sea—“it’s another world.” She turned to him, put her hand over his as it rested on the steering wheel. “Thank you,” she said. “I didn’t know how much I needed to get away—just to see…this.”

  His smile was warm. “You’re welcome. Thank you for corning.”

  They drove in silence the additional half mile along the beach road. “Here we are.” He pulled in beside a gray-shingled house, one of several on a grassy overlook about one hundred yards from the beach. They got out and she went to stand on the promontory and took deep breaths of air and held her face to the sun and felt some of the strain and sadness of the past months ease away and felt her eyes sting—not from pain but from joy, and she thought, This is one of life’s perfect moments. And then the reminder: But your daughter… And she thought, Yes, my daughter, and went back to rejoin Fred, who was going in the side door, the brown paper bag in his arms.

  He put the bag down on the table. “This is it.” They were standing in the kitchen in a stream of sunlight from the wide glass windows, the skylight overhead. “I put that in,” Fred pointed up to it. “A little solar heat and a lot more light.”

  “It’s lovely,” she said, looking past a dining area and into a living room—the walls stark white, curtains of a blue-and-white swirling abstract print framing the windows, a few soft chairs, a sofa, a fireplace. “It works, too,” Fred said, watching her eyes light on one thing, then another. On either side of the fireplace were walls of books—a few knickknacks and photos scattered among them. Over the fireplace, a Winslow Homer–like picture of fishermen at sea. Beneath a glass covering, a coffee table held a profusion of shells. At the far end of the room, a door stood open. “Bedroom and bath,” he said. “Two more bedrooms and a bath upstairs—and a spray shower by the back door to wash sand off your feet.”

  He got out plates and bowls and silverware. “Coffee?” he asked. “Wine?” Then he took a bottle from a wooden wine rack in a corner of the kitchen.

  “Yes. Please. Both.” She was feeling a little uneasy, wished Ginny could have come. Or was it an uneasiness at leaving Rachel? She looked at her watch. Not quite twelve. “Is your meeting far from here?”