The apartment looked a bit different. All the plants were there, and Dad’s pictures of horses and the cartoon sketch of Buster that Terry had drawn from memory a year ago, but it wasn’t the same. There was more furniture and a rug in the living-room and some new ornaments and photographs of people Terry didn’t know, and women’s clothes hanging in the hall and on the back of the bathroom door. The bathroom smelled unfamiliar, and the whole place was much more untidy. His father’s neat kitchen was a wreck. Sweaters and books lay about at random and phonograph records slid off each other on the floor. His father picked some things up automatically as he passed them, and rinsed out the coffee mugs, but he did not seem to mind. His smile was there all the time. His eyes were narrow and crinkly, always a sign of good times.
‘This is Terry,’ he said quickly, when they came in. ‘Terry, this is Lily.’
Terry had imagined someone the size of his mother. A much taller woman unfolded herself from the low sofa, not fat, but quite large and solid. She was smiling widely, excited, a bit overpowering. Shaking her strong hand, Terry was aware that he was shorter than she expected. That had been one of the great things about Eddie. Although he was older, he was shorter than Terry.
People like his Dedham grandmother said comfortably, ‘You’ll shoot up in your own time.’ But now was now, and meanwhile he was small for his age, and Lily was as tall as his father.
She tried hard, and laughed a lot in a clear, English sort of way. Once Terry saw her reach to put her arms round his father, and then drop them self-consciously, and step back and stumble over a stool. She had brought Terry a set of carved wooden boxes from England. One fitted into another, and the smallest was about as big as a stamp.
She watched him take all the boxes out and range them on the coffee-table. He felt he had to do that. When he said nothing, she could not help asking, ‘Do you like them?’
‘Sure. Yeah.’ He began to put the boxes inside each other again, which filled in some more time. They were all on their best behaviour. His father waited, but in the end he reminded Terry to say thank you.
‘I’m glad you like it. I had a lovely time choosing it. Look.’ Lily squatted down to the low table. ‘I bought it because I like buying presents, not because I’m trying to bribe you to like me, all right?’
She knew what he was thinking. Some people’s stepmothers bought them so much stuff, it was pathetic.
Terry could not play checkers with his father, or put on records, or talk back and forth as they usually did, because Lily was there, slopping his orange soda as she carried it in, hunting for potato chips, making coffee, making conversation, filling the apartment spaces. They were both watching her: Terry to see what her game was, his father because he wanted her to feel comfortable.
None of them could think what to do, so they went across the avenue to the park behind the college, and walked fast, because it was cold. Lily galloped about in new furry boots like a giant kid, because she was not used to so much snow. Terry galloped off with somebody’s bounding dog, so he would not have to throw snowballs with her.
‘He liked you,’ she said when the owner called away the dog, and Terry came back. ‘Have you got a dog at home?’
‘Not any more.’ Terry and his father looked at each other.
‘Sorry, have I said the wrong thing?’. Lily banged the snow off her mittens.
‘Buster was more my dog,’ his father said, to avoid it being known that Barbara would not let Terry keep the dog.
‘Yeah. He’d never sleep on my bed or pay attention to. me when Dad was home.’
When Dad was home. Why did he have to say that? The words hung in the still cold air. The bright-coloured children on the sled slope stopped shrieking. Saturday traffic sounded miles away.
His father put an arm around him, but Terry jumped away. Playing with the dog had reminded him that he was still angry with his mother about Buster, so to hide that, he muttered to Lily, ‘We didn’t want to keep him,’ stamping about in his own snow footsteps.
‘Come on.’ His father brushed snow off Lily’s face. ‘Let’s go get something to eat.’
They had lunch at a more expensive place than his father usually took him. Lily – he was to call her that, but he did not use her name – ate in a peculiar clumsy way, with two hands, and Dad reminded her to put the fork in her right hand, as if she were a child.
‘Oh, yes, sorry.’ She changed over the fork and put the knife on the edge of the plate so that it fell on to the tablecloth. ‘I want to do everything the American way, Terry. You’ll have to teach me words to use. They don’t know what I mean in shops when I say things like cotton wool and tiss-yew.’ She gave one of her loud spontaneous laughs.
Terry kept silent. He did not know what she was talking about.
They tried to get him going by making plans. ‘At Easter, let’s do such and such… On your next weekend, why don’t we…’ Grown-ups did that to work you up into being pleased, and when it did not come off, they had some more plans to promise.
‘Lily and I are going down to the Cape pretty soon. Maybe look for a cottage to rent for a week this summer.’
‘Would you come and stay with us?’ Lily asked.
‘I guess so.’
‘So could I, Mom?’
‘Cape Cod?’ His mother raised her eyebrows, which were pencilled in again since she had stopped being depressed. ‘Your family and friends are on the North Shore.’
‘Dad likes the Cape better.’
‘I know.’
She was not going to say yes or no, so it would have to wait. She wanted Terry to talk about Lily, even though someone was there, a new guy called Silas.
‘What’s she like, Ter?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Didn’t you look at her?’
‘Not much.’
‘Tall? Short? Young and girlish? Funny accent?’
Terry shook his head. All that Saturday, he had been watching out for attacks on his mother. Now he felt he had to defend Lily.
‘She was okay.’
‘You liked her?’
‘Hunhnyah.’
‘Not easy is it, feller, all these new things to deal with.’ Silas got up. ‘Come on, I’ll take you round the block in my new Corvette. See how you like it.’
Uh-oh. Was this the new boyfriend, then, muscling his way into favour? He was quite old. His hair was going grey. His knowing face had a rogue’s smile, with a sticking-out lower lip, very sure of himself.
‘Leave me alone.’ Terry hunched his shoulders forward and scowled.
‘You see the way he is?’ his mother said, as he headed for upstairs. ‘Don’t take it personally, Silas. That’s just the way he is.’
‘See you again, some time, somewhere,’ they had promised each other at Boston airport, but Ida did not believe they ever would. After a couple of postcards each way, and a Christmas card from Lily with a scrawled message Ida could not read, that was it.
When Bernie was born, Ida wanted to write to Lily, ‘Now I’ve got everything I wanted,’ but Buddy, in a whirlwind mood, had been through the kitchen drawer where she kept papers, and Lily’s address had been lost.
When Buddy brought home Lily’s letter from the base post office, Ida was surprised. She turned it over a couple of times, fascinated by the huge colourful stamp, for she hardly ever got a letter from England. When she opened it, she was amazed.
‘Guess what?’ she called to Buddy, who was upstairs changing out of his uniform fatigues. ‘I’m amazed.’
‘Guess what?’ Bernie echoed. He could talk perfectly well, but he often parroted what she said. He copied what she did too, putting on her apron like a long skirt, and standing on a chair to wipe off the counter.
‘What the hell?’ Buddy muttered. The walls were so thin that you could talk from one end of the house to the other, as if you were in the same room. You could also hear more than you wanted from the duplex next door.
‘This girl I know. Lily, you know,
who I met on the aeroplane.’
‘Airplane.’ Bernie started up the stairs to his father. ‘Puppa, kin I have…’ the whine he put on for Buddy.
‘She’s getting married to an American.’
‘Like you did.’
‘Yeah, like I did.’
Sort of. Lily was marrying the nice friendly man she had gone crazy about in Iceland. ‘All my romantic dreams come true,’ she wrote to Ida. ‘Can you believe such luck? Secretly, Eye, I never forgot him in all those years.’
‘She’s going to be married and live in Boston,’ Ida told Buddy when he came silently downstairs in his sneakers, and tried to scare her by putting his hands suddenly on her hips from behind. She was scared, but she always pretended she was not, controlling the jump of nerves and keeping her voice calm.
‘Where are you going, Buddy?’
‘Down to the Fisherman.’
‘Working or drinking?’
‘Working, you cow.’
‘Cow,’ Bernie said thoughtfully, through the candy bar his father had given him. He wasn’t allowed candy before supper.
‘Get your ass in the kitchen, Ah-eye-da, and get me sump’n to eat.’
‘We got dogs and beans, that okay?’
‘What’s Bernie going to have?’ Buddy’s plump face screwed up into an anxious concern he never showed for Ida or Maggie. ‘You know he don’t like wieners.’
Taking his cue, Bernie went, ‘Yuck,’ watching both of them with his bright brown eyes.
‘Well, it’s what we’ve got, and he’ll eat it or go hungry,’ Ida said manfully. What a hope.
‘Come on, little boy, Puppa will fix you a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich.’ Buddy ambled towards the kitchen.
‘He can’t live on peanut-butter.’
‘Why not? I did.’
‘And look at you.’
‘Li’l boy gets what he wants when Poppa’s home.’
‘You spoil him, just like your mother spoiled you.’
‘Sure.’ Buddy picked up his five-year-old son and looked into the child’s alert, inquiring face, his dark eyes liquid with a soppy love he never showed to anyone else.
They ate at the small table, messily. Ida was up and down all the time – ‘You’d think I’d lose weight at meals, not gain’ – mopping up, fetching things her males wanted, picking up food the little girl scattered around her sticky high-chair.
‘I thought we were going to the club tonight,’ she said, when Buddy found his car keys where Bernie had hidden them, and went to the door.
‘You shouldn’t complain. I make money for you, babe. You shall have it all, clubs, champagne, furs, jewels, what is it they have – caviare.’
‘All I want is to see the money coming in, not going out to lay bets on the track.’
‘Shut your face,’ Buddy said amiably. He was usually in a good mood when he was going out, whether it was to work (if he did go to work), or God knows where.
‘Bed, Maggie.’ Ida extracted the three-year-old from the high-chair. Maggie’s hands clung to her like rubber crabs. She nodded her head and made silly gobbling sounds. ‘Talk properly,’ Ida said severely. She never let up on her. ‘Bed, Bernie.’
‘Not yet.’
Oh, well. She would carry him up when he fell asleep on the couch. Maybe he would be too tired to wake when Buddy came noisily home. If he woke, Buddy might get him up and bring him downstairs and play with him, exciting him past sleep.
Ida sat down in front of the television, which had been going all this time, and read Lily’s letter again.
‘…going to marry my one and only love.’
‘You could knock me down,’ Ida said to Bernie.
‘Down.’ Bernie rolled off the couch, to make her laugh.
In the six years since she had lived in the United States, Ida had become quite Americanized. She had always been quick, and she picked up the accent and the sayings like a monkey. She had copied ‘you could knock me down’ from Buddy’s father, during the time she had to stay with Henry Legge and take care of the children while the hospital tried to find Verna’s baby under all the layers of fat.
Ida and Henry had enjoyed quite a good time, playing cribbage and chatting about nothing very much on old wicker chairs, when the evening sun slanted on to the porch. Billy had fed the dogs and cats and chickens for Ida, but Phyllis had been jealous and lazy, although when her mother came home with Laverne, she complained to Verna that Ida had made her work her guts out. She was also jealous of Laverne, who was an amazingly pretty baby with fluffy silver hair, delicate as a moth in Verna’s vast embrace.
Ida had to stay on to help for a few days, until Buddy came roaring up the hill in his car to demand the return of his wife.
‘I was never so glad to see you.’ Ida ran out to the car, carrying the demoted baby Vernon, who had been having a hard time, raising his arms at his mother and crying, ‘Up! Up!’ when she was, holding Laverne.
‘That’s my girl.’ Buddy pulled her and Vernon into the car across his lap. He was so pleased, that she did not tell him she was glad because she was sick of Legge Manor.
‘Where’s my fella?’ Verna came shouting out on to the porch. ‘Come on in and say hullo to your new baby sister!’
Laverne was in the scarred old swinging crib in which they had all rocked as babies. Buddy was so tickled by her that he put his hand on Ida’s thin waist and started pinching, trying to find a fingerful of fat.
They had agreed not to have any children yet, but when Verna bent her great bosoms over the crib like a ceiling caving in, to pick up the baby, and asked with a wink, ‘You gonna put one of these in there, Buddy boy?’ he licked his soft lips and crowed, ‘You bet,’ as if it would be totally his achievement if Ida had a baby.
When she did, the following year, Verna did not come to help her, thank God. Sis came. She took Ellen out of school and stayed at Watkins for a week when Ida came home from the hospital with Bernie. Two and a half years later, she came back to take care of him while Ida was going through the terrible experience that she thought would kill her, when Maggie was born. Although it was lambing season, Jeff let Sis stay on the base until Ida was back on her feet, and later, Buddy took Ida and the children to the farm for two summer weeks of quiet hills and animal sounds and smells and hay and walks in the green woods.
They picked vegetables and salads from the garden, and Sis taught Ida how to make wholemeal bread.
‘Wish you hadn’t.’ Ida smeared a crust with honey from Jeff’s bees. ‘I’ll never get rid of the birth fat. If I have any more kids, I’m going to end up like Verna.’
They laughed, since Buddy was out fishing with Jeff, and could not hear. Sis would rather laugh about her mother than hate her. Ida wished she could do the same about her own mother, but if she tried to think about Clara Lott as comic, the dour figure, with ‘nothing under her apron’, as they said in Staple Street, would not shape into a clown, and the old bitterness and spite spilled over the picture and washed it out.
All Ida’s clothes were too tight, except the maternity things, and she had sold those, sick of them, at the Women’s Exchange. Sis, who was larger than her, gave her a loose top and one of her long cotton skirts. Ida wore it with bare legs and feet and took off her bra, like Sis. Would Buddy admire this new image? Although he wanted her to be well-dressed at the Enlisted Men’s Club, it didn’t make much difference with him how she looked. He either fell on her or not, according to the urges of his moods.
Although he had leave, he did not stay in New Hampshire the whole time, because he got bored in the country. There was country around Watkins Base, but they did not go out to it much, beyond driving to some place along the highway to eat.
Ida and Sis became quite close, more like sisters. They told each other things about their lives, and Ida felt good, because Sis admired her and said she had guts and was a survivor.
It was while she was at the farm, that Ida first began to notice that Maggie was slower to do things than Be
rnie had been.
‘Don’t worry,’ Sis said comfortably. ‘Bernie was quick, like you. She’ll come to it when she’s ready.’
‘You think I should take her back to the doctor?’
‘Not until her next check-up. What can a doctor do that you can’t do, Ida honey, with your love and patience? Why, Ellen here wasn’t turning over by herself or taking the strained food when the book said she should.’ Sis shook her thick hair, which had gold as well as red in it in the summer. ‘So I threw away the book.’
Ida had written to Lily that there was no way she could come to Boston, so when Lily had got used to driving in America, she dropped Paul off at the shop and then drove his red car up through unknown northern Massachusetts.
Watkins Base sprawled over a large tract of countryside. When Lily had got a pass from the sentry and some directions, she drove down a long straight road with no sign of any planes or hangars, and then turned past barrack buildings and a school and two wooden churches and rows of hospital huts and a high gaol fence marked, ‘Confinement Facility’. It was a city in itself: filled car parks round the Commissary buildings, and beyond, dozens of streets and hundreds of houses: white wooden boxes with flat roofs and two front paths to each. Some had fences enclosing a space at the back. Some had toys and bikes lying about on rough grass that sloped up to a low scrubby woodland, penetrated with children’s pathways, like rabbit tracks.
1009 Pershing Street had a few daffodils and a flowering bush braving the general landscape of coarse grass and scrub oaks, hanging on to their brown leaves as if they did not trust green buds to ripen. Ida’s laundry was neatly pegged on a carousel washing-line, big things, little things, nappies.
Lily parked under the carport between this house and the next, and went to the back door. She was suddenly self-conscious, and did not want to be seen walking round to the front, if Ida was watching behind the muslin curtains to see how much she had changed.
A little boy opened the door. He had Buddy’s baby face that Lily had seen in the photograph, but without the heavy brows. Bernie’s eyebrows were a delicate line, arched over bright, wide-open eyes. He looked Lily up and down with intelligent interest, and called out, ‘She’s here, Ma!’
Dear Doctor Lily Page 9
