For My Daughters

by Barbara Delinsky

She took a minute to admire the tall scarlet-and-white lilies that spiked from crystal bowls in elegant trios. Moving closer, she wrapped herself in their scent. It wasn’t her favorite; she was more a lilac, even a honeysuckle person. But she preferred a lily bouquet to the memory of cigars that clung stalely to the corners of the room.

  She resisted the urge to open the windows. It would be a futile effort. The April night air was warm and humid, not at all the clean, dry, bracing air she craved.

  She removed stubs of candles from sterling candlesticks and picked at waxy drips, sweeping them into her palm along with the glitter that had decorated the table.

  Stunning presentation, Leah. Simple but festive. Shiny. Sophisticated.

  And the food had been great—the tenderloin butter-soft, the béarnaise perfectly piquant. Even the fiddlehead ferns, on whose preparation she had had to tutor the chef herself, had been divine.

  She frowned at a splotch of pink on the Indian oriental in the den. What had once been a fine red Bordeaux was on its way to becoming a permanent stain. Loath to let that happen, she fetched the proper solution, hiked up her long gown, and knelt. She sprayed and blotted, sprayed and blotted. Gradually the stain began to fade. She continued to spray and blot until it was little more than a shadow, then she sat back in triumph.

  “We’re leaving now, Ms. St. Clair,” called the caterer.

  She gave a satisfied smile and a wave, but didn’t rise. She had already thanked him and tipped his staff accordingly. Experience told her that a hefty bill would be in the mail the very next morning.

  The door closed. In the sudden silence, her contentment waned.

  She went at the stain on the rug once more for good measure, then stood and looked around. This was her home, yet, in the wake of the invasion of the night’s strangers, not so. The emptiness was stark, the remains of the party few but grating. She felt deserted, stranded in a place of frozen smiles.

  A good cleaning would remedy the situation. By the time her woman was done the next day, the party would be history, the cigar smoke gone, home would be home, and Leah would relax.

  She returned a displaced side chair to its proper position, straightened picture frames, disposed of several crushed cocktail napkins that the caterers had missed.

  It had been a great party. A great party. Conversation had flowed, intriguing at times, amusing at others. The bores of the group had been pleasantly quiet. She tried to pick out the high point of the evening, but details blurred with other parties on other nights.

  Feeling suddenly muddled and in need of escape, she flipped off the lights and climbed the two flights of stairs to her bedroom. There, in the dark, she slipped out of the long white gown that had given elegance to her waifishness, and, wearing only the silk teddy that had been beneath it, stood at the window’s edge. Far below, the courtyard was an amber glow through the spray of budding branches, a diffused portrait of a wrought-iron bench and chairs set to advantage in an urban garden.

  The thought of working in the garden that weekend brought her a measure of calm.

  She sank onto the window seat with her back to the hunter green wall. She loved this room, with its preponderance of white wicker on hunter, loved this spot with its garden view. When her neighbors complained about the smallness of their third-floor rooms, she never joined in. The smallness here gave her comfort. The coziness warmed her. The walls defined a segment of the world that was wholly familiar and blessedly safe.

  Gingerly she shifted her head against the wall, then brought it forward and pulled out the pins that had held her hair in a tidy knot for so many long hours. When they lay in a neat pile, she ran her fingers through her hair. Like a dry sponge watered, the blond mane took on volume and curl such that it pillowed her head when she sat back again.

  She thought of the party. She looked at the courtyard. She listened to the silence.

  She sighed once, then again, and when her vision blurred, she closed her eyes. She was tired. That was all. And expecting her period, which always made her weepy. Then, of course, there was the inevitable letdown after a party. All the work done. Nothing more to do but plan another.

  She opened her eyes to a lovely idea. She would redecorate. That was always good for a lift. The living room could use new wallcovering. No, the kitchen. A new stove. A larger one this time, a professional one. She loved cooking. If she had three small dinners for eight, rather than a big bash for twenty-four, she could do the cooking herself.

  Not that her friends would appreciate it. The women among them might actually be threatened, which would be a surefire way of drawing catty comments. Leah didn’t need that. She had insecurities enough.

  Still, she might invest in that stove. She could cook for herself. Or, hell, for the local soup kitchen.

  Pushing up from the window seat, she crossed to the corner armchair. A cashmere shawl was draped on its back. She transferred it to her own, sank into the deep cushions of the chair, and drew in her arms and feet. She adjusted the shawl until it covered all of her but her head.

  Perhaps a stove.

  Then again, the stove could wait. Summer was coming, and she was going away—assuming she could decide on a destination. She had given thought to her travel agent’s suggestions, but Hong Kong was too busy, Costa Rica too hot, Paris too coupled. Alaska was a possibility; the cruiseship the travel agent proposed was small and personal. She might not feel as lost as she would on something larger.

  What she really wanted was to go on a cattle drive. The romance of the Old West held a certain appeal.

  But she had never been one for horseback riding, or for roughing it, and doubted she could survive a cattle drive, even with a friend, though none of hers wanted to go. She suspected that things like cattle drives, even luxury ones of the type she was considering, were better dreamed of than lived through.

  Still there wasn’t any harm in looking into it. She had sent for information. She wondered when it would arrive.

  With that thought came the realization that she hadn’t yet seen the day’s mail. It had arrived late that afternoon, when she was caught up in preparation for the evening.

  Holding the shawl tightly closed, she went barefoot down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen, where the mail stood propped between bright copper canisters. Anticipation lifted her spirits. She loved getting mail. There was always the chance that someone new might call or write, that something totally unexpected might happen. For all she knew, her life was about to take an exciting twist.

  She flipped through. The information on the cattle drive hadn’t come. Nor had a letter from a secret admirer who had just now decided to declare himself. The only communication to arrive that day with any element of surprise was from her mother.

  Experience told Leah that there would be little sweet-talking from that source. But hope died hard, even after years of neglect. Excited in spite of herself, she tore open the thick envelope and read the letter inside. She paused midway to peek at the airline tickets. When she had finished the letter, she tucked it back into the envelope with the tickets and took it upstairs. After turning on the low lamp beside the bed, she snuggled under the comforter, took the letter out, and read it again.

  Not sweet-talking, exactly. But surely a compliment, and, in that, flattering. Virginia St. Clair didn’t hand out compliments easily, though not because of arrogance, pride, or impossibly high standards. Only recently had Leah come to understand that. The truth was that when flattery might have been appropriate, her mother’s mind was off somewhere else.

  Leah refused to consider all the reasons why she shouldn’t go to Maine. Rather, she fell asleep thinking about Virginia’s request and slept the night through lulled by hopes and dreams.

  Excitement woke her at eight the next morning. She laughed at her startled cleaning woman, who was accustomed to letting herself in and not seeing Leah until later, let alone bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. But Leah was buoyant. She knotted her hair back, put on a silk lounging suit, and
indulged in a bowl of raspberries and cream at the table on the edge of the courtyard. She sipped coffee while she read the paper, and bided her time with varying degrees of good-natured impatience until ten o’clock arrived. Only then did she dare phone her mother.

  Virginia was out.

  “This early?” Leah asked in dismay.

  “She’s at the hair shop,” Gwen said. Gwen was more than a housekeeper. She was Virginia’s right hand. “I expect she’ll be there until noon.”

  Leah refused to be deflated. “Then I’ll try her at twelve-fifteen.”

  “She’s going straight from the hair shop to the club.”

  “Lunch can’t last very long,” she insisted. “I’ll try back at two or so.”

  “After lunch she’s playing bridge.”

  Echoes of the past burst into sound. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. “And after that?” Leah asked, wary now.

  “I believe,” Gwen said apologetically, “that she’ll be at the dressmaker’s. The Robinsons are having a dinner party tonight, and the new dress your mother ordered was late in arriving.”

  “Ahhh,” Leah said. New dresses for dinner parties did take precedence over daughters. Any fool knew that.

  She supposed she might have caught Virginia at home for the few minutes when she was preparing for the party, but it suddenly didn’t seem worth the effort. After telling Gwen that there was no message, she pressed the disconnect button and punched out another number. She hadn’t called this one in a while either.

  Several hours later, tucked in an old familiar corner of Ellen McKenna’s leather loveseat, she unburdened her heart. “I spent all of last night being excited, thinking that maybe Mother really does find comfort in me, that maybe she really does need me, that maybe she really does want to be with me. Then I tried to call her today, and she’s out doing all of the other things that mean more to her than me. Okay. I can accept it. Nothing’s changed—which makes this all so absurd.”

  “What all?”

  “Her letter. The fact that she’s sold the house, which is a huge change. Mother is a social creature. I can’t believe she’s removing herself from civilization.”

  “Is she?” Ellen asked in her gentle, nonjudgmental way. She was nearly as petite as Leah, though twenty years older and silver-haired. The fact that in those basics she resembled Virginia, was something they had discussed at length. “What do you know about Downlee?”

  “Only what she wrote in her letter, that it’s a small town. But Mother isn’t the small-town type. She’s lived all her life in the city.”

  “Maybe she’s always dreamed of living elsewhere.”

  Leah considered that. As improbable as it sounded, she couldn’t rule it out. Virginia’s dream world, if one did exist, was a mystery to Leah. “But if that had been at the back of her mind,” she thought aloud, “wouldn’t something of it have slipped out last year? We spent hours sitting together in doctors’ offices. If that wasn’t a time for thinking about mortality and dreams that may or may not come true, I don’t know what is.”

  Ellen remained silent.

  After several minutes, Leah said, “I know. She was never a sharer. After keeping her thoughts to herself all those years, this shouldn’t surprise me. It’s just that I thought—I thought—” She tried to stand back, as Ellen had taught her to do in four years of therapy, and view her expectations and emotions from a distance and hence with greater objectivity. “I had hoped that last year might have made a difference. I was there for her then. And she did thank me. But once the worst was over, that was it. She went her own way. She was her usual, detached self.”

  “What might you have liked?” Ellen asked quietly.

  “A bouquet of flowers, a call now and then, an invitation to Palm Springs. Hell—” Leah threw up a hand. “I don’t know. I’d like to have gone to lunch with her and talked.” She frowned at the letter that lay open on her lap. “She says something here. At the very end. “She says she regrets that we’ve never done that—really talked—and that she’s hoping we can do it in Maine. She says that she’s looking forward to spending time with me.” She gave the letter a despairing nudge. “Can a leopard change its spots?”

  “This may be a belated bow to last year’s brush with mortality,” Ellen offered.

  “I could have bought that, if she’d been at home waiting for my phone call. Or if she’d told Gwen to ask if I was coming. Gwen does whatever Mother wants. But Mother was out. Like it really doesn’t matter, one way or the other, whether I take her up on her invitation or not.” She sighed. “Okay. So she wants to talk. But Mother is shallow. Substantive discussions scare the heeby-jeebies out of her. She avoids them like the plague.”

  That didn’t explain the words she had written, words Leah clung to against her better judgment. “Maybe she does want to talk. Maybe she’ll actually try. Then again,” more realistically, “maybe these tickets are her way of thanking me for last year. I mean, it’s me she’s invited to Maine, not Caroline or Annette.”

  “Have you spoken with either of them?”

  “Not since I got this letter.”

  That wasn’t what I was asking, Ellen’s arched brows said.

  Leah sighed. “It’s been a while.”

  “Still not comfortable doing it?”

  She shook her head. “When I think of calling Caroline, I picture her snowed under with work of some critical nature. She thinks I’m a ditz. She’ll resent my interrupting her. And when I think of calling Annette, I just know that she’ll be busy with the kids.”

  “That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t like to hear from you.”

  “She doesn’t call me.”

  “Maybe she thinks you don’t want to hear from her.”

  “That’s no excuse. She’s older than I am. She should take the lead. Besides, she’s the family-oriented one. If she considered me family, she would call.”

  “She may be thinking the same about you. She may be thinking that you have more time than she does.”

  “No doubt she thinks that. She thinks my life is a waste.”

  “Has she ever said that?”

  “Not in as many words, but I know she’s thinking it.”

  “How do you know?”

  There were facial expressions and tones of voice. There were comments of the type women made, that were indirectly direct. And, to Leah’s chagrin, there was her own hypersensitivity, which Ellen had helped her see, though not quite overcome.

  “I think,” she said with a sheepish smile, “that we’ve had this discussion before.”

  “But not for a while. It’s been months since I’ve seen you, Leah. I take it there have been no major upheavals in your life?”

  “No major upheavals.” Or she would have called Ellen sooner. Ellen knew more about her than any soul on earth, and if there was sadness in having to pay someone to listen to one’s woes, Leah didn’t care. Ellen was an insurance policy on sanity. She was worth far more than she charged.

  “All is serene?”

  “Serene is one word for it.”

  “Give me another.”

  “Uneventful.”

  “And another.”

  “Boring.” The word hung in the air.

  “Is boring bad?” Ellen finally prompted.

  Leah considered that. “I don’t know. Boring isn’t traumatic. It isn’t threatening. Well, maybe it is.”

  “In what way?”

  She tried to pin it down. “Frightening. To think that the life I have now may be the life I’ll have for the rest of my life.”

  “You don’t want that?”

  “Part of me does. I’ve been named chairperson for next year’s Cancer Society benefit. It’s an honor. I’ve worked a long time to get it.”

  “So what’s frightening?”

  “After that. Beyond that.” She sighed. “I know, I know. If I don’t like my life, I can change it. I have that power.” She and Ellen had discussed this at length during their last few sessions t
ogether. Nothing had changed since then—neither Leah’s reluctance to take that power into her own hands, nor Ellen’s inability to do it for her. As her therapist, Ellen could only take her so far. It was up to Leah to do the rest.

  “I’m looking,” Leah said now. “I’m waiting for the right time. When I see a change for the better, I’ll go for it.” She frowned. “Assuming I can recognize that it’s for the better. My record isn’t great. First Ron, then Charlie. Face it. I’ve made some lousy mistakes.”

  “Not lately. Not for a while. Don’t condemn yourself for things that happened years ago. You were younger then, and naive. I dare say that if you met either Ron or Charlie now, you wouldn’t be in the least bit interested.”

  “Lord, I hope not. But then there are those times when I’m feeling desperate and thinking that anyone would be better than no one. Thank God, those times always pass, but they leave me doubly cautious. Maybe too much so. Caution can be paralyzing.”

  After a bit, Ellen said, “Is that what you’re feeling today? Paralysis?”

  “Some. I’m confused. I need to talk with someone who knows me well.”

  “You have friends.”

  Leah studied her hands. “It’s hard to confide in the kind of people I know. Gossip is…well, it’s a way of life. When you see the same people night after night, you eventually run out of things to say, so you pass on something you heard. You don’t intend to say it—well, the kind friends don’t. It just slips out to fill a lull in the conversation.” She looked up. “I’m not justifying it. I hate it. But I can’t condemn everyone who does it. I can’t say that my friends are bad people just because they let something slip once in a while.” She knew she sounded defensive, but she had a point to make. “I like my friends. I just want to be careful about what I share with them, that’s all.” She grinned. “You, on the other hand, are bound by ethical considerations, so I can tell you anything and everything I want.”

  Ellen smiled. With that momentary softening and brightening of her face, she was the mother Leah had always wanted. Virginia had never, to Leah’s memory, looked soft and bright. Virginia had never listened to her woes.