And Be My Love

by Joyce C. Ware

  Marilyn Springer's glare at her husband had been venomous. Howard, belatedly registering his spectacular lack of social tact, had blinked bleary red-rimmed eyes and mumbled an apology that succeeded only in compounding his error, signaling a premature end to the evening. Beth couldn't remember Ralph mentioning club membership to Andy again.

  "I'm taking your iron to be repaired, dear," Beth said, brandishing the appliance's ruined cord.

  Housa blinked, as if at a strange object whose purpose escaped her. "Oh, yeah. Thanks, Beth." She turned her distracted gaze to her daughter. "Where's Daisy, sweetie? She should be home from school by now."

  "Daisy's at Kim's house, Mommy."

  "Ohmigosh, I forgot. Daisy and Kim are doing a Science Fair project together."

  Beth received this news without comment. Daisy was still four months short of seven—how much original science could be expected from a child whose reading skills were put to the test by Dr. Seuss?

  "I was supposed to pick them up on the way home," Housa continued, "maybe Andy—”

  "Maybe Andy what?"

  Beth's face lighted at the sound of her son's voice. "Darling!"

  "Hi, Mom! Hi to you, too, Clarabelle," he said, lifting the ecstatic little girl into his arms. Jamie pulled at his father's trouser leg. "Watch it. Buster,"he said fondly."Cavalry twill pants don't come cheap these days."

  "Andy! You're home!" Dismay roughened Housa's voice. Her face was a study in tragedy.

  "Hey! I'm sorry. Were you expecting someone else? Love in the afternoon with a romantic stranger, maybe?"

  "Andy!" the two women chorused.

  "I was just about to phone you," Housa explained. "I forgot to pick Daisy up from Kim's."

  The droop of Andy's shoulders would have been imperceptible to all but a mother's eyes. "No problem," he said. Nothing ever was where Housa was concerned. He leaned over to give his wife a kiss, a daughter-squashing maneuver Clara found more amusing than threatening.

  Kisses and giggles. There were worse ways to live, Beth mused as she bent to pick up the toys that made every step a hazard.

  "Now, Mom.…"

  Beth straightened. Although her son's tone was light, there was no mistaking the admonishment his words intended. Once, when Andy and Housa were due at a dinner honoring the staff at the River Haven hospice he established, Ralph was pressed into baby sitting service at the last minute. Beth was in the first sneezing stages of a cold; no one else was available. Ralph had arrived home shaken.

  "That house is beyond belief! I feel as if I should be steamed in an autoclave. For God's sake, Beth, can't you say something?"

  "I did, once," Beth admitted. "Housa burst into tears and Andy told me to mind my own business."

  "Andy did?" Ralph, who thought his son far too accepting of the demands of others, had looked at her askance.

  "Well, maybe not in so many words, but the message was very clear."

  Beth recalled Ralph throwing up his hands in that way he had. "Why is it I never seem to know these things about my own family?"

  Because, she thought, you really don't want to know. "You already have enough to worry about," she had said.

  Beth looked at her watch, a large-faced model she bought for everyday use in place of the elegant diamond and gold bracelet watch Ralph had given her when she turned forty. Barely able to make out its tiny numerals even with her reading glasses on, she wore it now only on rare social occasions. "I have enough time to pick up Daisy, Andy."

  The look of gratified relief on her son's face was all the thanks Beth needed.

  "Great! That'll give me time for a fast shower. Say, why don't you stay for supper? I don't get to see nearly as much of you as I'd like."

  Beth appreciated the "like"; Dana would have said "ought".

  "Yes, do!" Housa seconded. "I have this new recipe I'm dying to try. Chicken and bok choy and tofu... come to think of it, the tofu's a little past it..." Her voice trailed off as she pondered this unanticipated glitch.

  Beth, grateful for a legitimate excuse, smiled. She found her daughter-in-law's nature-foody menus too bland for her taste, and the cranberry juice served before dinner in lieu of what Beth considered a proper aperitif made her mouth pucker.

  "Thank you, darlings, but I promised Mother I'd stop in before five."

  "Mustn't keep the dowager queen waiting.”

  "Andy, please.”

  "Sorry, Mom. Give Murry our love."

  Murry. Beth recalled her mother instructing three-year-old Andy in the form of address she expected.

  "Grandmother Muriel, Andrew."

  Andy's sunny face—how like him Clara looked!—had clouded with his effort to comply with her wishes.

  "Grand-moth-er Mur-i-el," she had repeated very distinctly, pausing between each of the many syllables. Impossibly many, it turned out.

  "Murry!" he finally produced with a triumphant, gap-toothed smile, and Murry she became.

  "Try to get to bed early for once, Andy," Beth said, reaching up on tip-toe to kiss her tall son's cheek. Her finger tips traced the dark smudges beneath his eyes. "You look tired."

  "Can't, Mom, I have a staff meeting at the clinic this evening—that's why I'm home early. Besides, what doctor worth his salt doesn't look tired? Dad never entirely lost the circles under his eyes, even after a week's snorkeling in the Bahamas. Think of them as badges of honor."

  Andy was the only member of Beth's family consistently able to see things in their best light. Her mother and daughter prided themselves on always facing facts, provided the facts met certain criteria. Although Beth envied this confident approach, she tended to be an out-of-sight, out-of-minder, except when the loose ends trailing from her daughter-in-law's cheerful, eccentric world threatened to become hopelessly snarled. Like today, she thought resignedly.

  It was five before Beth finished bestowing the obligatory goodbye kisses. The drive back through Eastbury's historic district, where traffic moved at a pace as stately as the homes that graced it, took another fifteen minutes. By the time she hurried between fluted white columns to grasp the brass lion's head knocker on the door to her mother's Greek revival house--Jeremiah Hotchkiss, circa 1830—she knew she was too late. Muriel Tomlinson's bridge foursome met every Thursday, promptly at five, for one drink, a light supper and an evening of cutthroat play. "Always has, always will," Beth's father used to say. "Come hell, high water, or invasion from Mars."

  The "always will" part of the equation had been thrown into grim question as human frailty took its toll of her mother's lifelong friends. Death had already reduced four couples to four widows, all of whom were either in or fast approaching their eighties, but this was one of the facts Muriel Tomlinson preferred not to recognize. When Andy suggested they meet in the afternoon, given the failing night vision they all now complained of, his grandmother retorted, "If we can't manage that short drive, we might as well go into a nursing home."

  For Muriel Tomlinson, nursing homes constituted the ultimate indignity. Never mind that several of her friends were blissfully happy at Valley Fields, Eastbury's new, very grand, life-care community which, when she was not being challenged, she admitted was far from the warehouse sort of institution she deplored.

  Beth sighed and turned back to her car. Andy wasn't far wrong in referring to his grandmother as a dowager queen. Her fierce, unremitting uprightness was about as near as one could get to royalty in a democratic society. Still pretty at eighty, she had been a beauty at twenty-six when Henry Tomlinson courted and married her. Judging from the silver-framed, hand-tinted wedding portrait kept always on the mahogany baby grand in the living room, she had never been a full-blown rose like Housa. Her ash-blonde hair, pink and white complexion and refined features called to mind instead the delicate, fine grained bells of lilies of the valley.

  Her mother had been raised in Eastbury in the house where she still lived. Beth's grandfather, a high-living, high-flying stockbroker, had retired to his study one late December evening in 1929
and, taking the gun he kept for protection from his desk, ended his life with one carefully determined shot. His widow, whom he left with no financial protection of any kind, had remarked bitterly to her daughter that at least her father had the decency to wait until after Christmas.

  Muriel's debut, eagerly anticipated by both mother and daughter, was quietly cancelled. Her traditional white gown was retrieved from the seamstress before its final fitting could be added to the bill. It hung in her closet, a constant billowy reminder of her dashed hopes, until one morning two months later when she yanked it out and tore it from seed-pearled neckline to flouncy hem.

  "I've never been as angry before or since," she told Beth years later. "The very next day I closed out the small savings account Papa had started for me, rented a room by the week from a respectable New Haven family who had also fallen on hard times; and enrolled in a six-month secretarial course."

  The director of the school, impressed by her determination, allowed her access to the typewriter practice room in the evenings. If he pressed any personal attentions on his attractive young pupil, Beth suspected they were rebuffed with the elegant grace that later became her mother's hallmark.

  Her well-honed skills, refined looks and ladylike manner soon landed her a job with a New Haven law firm whose brisk business in bankruptcies demonstrated the truth of the old adage about the good that ill winds sometimes blow. It was there she met Henry Tomlinson, a self-made entrepreneur attracted by a failed company in which he saw interesting possibilities.

  She liked him. He made her feel safe. Above all, he provided a way for her to resume a familiar and comfortable way of life well worth a minor sacrifice or two. Beth knew that by her mother and grandmother's standards her father lacked breeding, was even a bit rough around the edges, but she suspected they decided that between them they could supply enough polish for him to pass muster. He didn't have to ask her twice, he later bragged.

  Muriel and Henry moved to Eastbury the year after they were married, and although he often grumbled about moving in with his mother-in-law, Beth suspected her father secretly relished playing squire of the elegant old house, which he restored to its former glory and equipped with the latest thing in bathrooms and kitchen appliances. Before long, the Tomlinsons were playing bridge every week with three other congenial young couples, as Muriel's parents had before them. Eventually, Henry was invited to join the country club, where he became an enthusiastic golfer.

  They had only one child, but if Beth's father would have preferred a boy, she was never aware of it. She adored him: his jokes, his stories, and his gleeful home-comings from the travel demanded by his expanding business interests. He was court jester to her queenly mother, who grew more erect and spare and unyielding as the years went by. Beth sometimes suspected her mother was made nervous by her husband's risky business ventures, haunted perhaps by the specter of failure that in her experience ended in bankruptcy or worse. Whatever the reason, her mother had little tolerance for the mistakes her father encouraged her to learn from.

  Beth's first semester report from high school, whose size and adolescent social demands bewildered her, included an F in geometry. She had never failed anything before, never been near failing anything. Her mother's tight lipped censure—this is not acceptable, Elizabeth—had reduced her to tears. Her father took her into his study and drew her into his arms.

  "Don't get me wrong, Bethy, success is great, and it's worth aiming for, but I gotta tell you, it never taught me much."

  Her father died alone in a hotel room in Cincinnati five and a half years later. A heart attack, her mother told her brokenly.

  "It was inevitable," Ralph assured her months later after reviewing the autopsy report she asked him to read. Her father's condition, he said, had advanced too far for him to be a candidate for a bypass, a technique just out of the experimental stages at that time. “In fact, it's a miracle he lasted as long as he did."

  Although Beth resented his speaking of her father like a worn-out washing machine, his words finally relieved her of the guilty anxiety responsible for the symptoms that had alarmed her sophomore dorm mother at Peabody and landed her in the hospital where Ralph Volmar was a new, well-regarded member of staff. The handsome blond cardiologist diagnosed a hiatal hernia—a non-threatening condition often mistaken at first for a heart attack--but despite her removal from his area of specialization, he began stopping by her room after rounds. His interest continued after her discharge, gradually becoming a courtship warmly encouraged by her mother.

  Dr. Ralph Volmar, at thirty-one an established professional assured of a prosperous future, good times and bad, seemed to Muriel Tomlinson as God-like as any mortal man was likely to be. She never actually said "For God's sake, Beth, marry the man” but her expressive eyes spoke as loudly as any words she might have chosen. Beth's friends were wildly envious: in those days, girls like Beth were just beginning to think in terms of combining marriage with a career, and when it came to a choice of career or marriage, wedding bells won ninety-five times out of a hundred. Few, however, expected to walk up the aisle with anyone as eligible as Ralph Volmar.

  Beth, who had already lost a month out of the fall semester, lacked the motivation to catch up. Ever since flunking geometry all those years ago, she had unconsciously chosen courses in which she knew she could succeed. No one reminded her of the stimulating effect of failure: her busy father hadn't been home enough in recent years to do so; her mother would have thought it preposterous.

  It was, in the end, an easy decision. Ralph was physically attractive, sophisticated and attentive. Beth, thrilled by his practiced kisses, fell in love, and in the fullness of time—don't be too damn eager, one of her more worldly friends advised her—accepted his proposal. At the reception, as Ralph whirled his radiant young bride into the obligatory first dance, everyone remarked on what an exceptionally handsome couple they were. For once, everyone was right.

  Beth slowed as her house came in sight, alerted by the glint of the late afternoon sun's slanting rays from a car in the driveway. Belatedly, she remembered the early morning call from a broker asking to show the house between five and six to an IBM executive relocated to the Southbury facility. She parked behind the sheared hemlocks defining the property lines. Through a break in the feathery barrier she could see a middle-aged couple standing with the broker and gazing up at the facade. As she watched, smiles and handshakes were exchanged between broker and prospects, the man stepping back into the bed of mixed daffodils she and Ralph had planted the fall they moved in. The buds, just showing promise of the yellow glory to come, were crushed beneath his heels. Beth closed her eyes. Next year, God willing, none of this will be yours. You've made your decision; it's time you learned to live with it. When she looked up, the car was gone.

  Beth ate her simple supper in front of the television set. The news offered little more than it had that morning at breakfast; the programs that followed were reruns, and by nine-thirty she had bathed, creamed her face and settled into bed with a paper on hospice management her son had asked her to read. Although the author's suggestions were often interesting, his jargon-laden style made for very heavy going. When the phone rang, Beth snatched at it as a drowning man would a straw.

  "Mother?" she blurted, "I'm so sorry! I was at Andy's, and what with one thing and another—"

  "Haven't I told you, Beth?" a familiar husky voice broke in. "Never apologize, never explain."

  Beth laughed. "Georgina! I always do, always will, you know that. How was your trip?"

  She groaned. "It sure ain't the eighties anymore, honeybunch. Time was, all a well-heeled Peabody alumnus wanted was a smile and the range in which I expected his donation to fall. Today, it's who, what, why, when, and a grudging pause before handing over the check to me. If anything, the women are worse than the men."

  "You mean they give you a check for the whole amount? No pledge cards or follow-ups?"

  "We're talking keystone donors here, Beth. Person
al visits. Carefully planned casual chit-chat: "My, what a lovely house!" "So this is the art collection I've heard so much about!"—leading into a short powerful pitch designed to trigger a five- or six-figure one-shot commitment. That pledge stuff we did for the Eastbury Library is for the little fish, Beth."

  "Like you and me."

  "Well, like me, anyway. That's why I'm calling."

  "About a pledge from me?" Beth's voice revealed her bewilderment. "But I thought Ralph's—”

  "And you thought right," her friend hastily assured her. "Ralph's bequest has spared you for another year or two at least. No, I'm talking about the presentation Peabody's president-in-waiting is organizing for the trustees. Fierce kind of guy." She chuckled. "He's known among the younger faculty members as the Terrible Turk."

  "Kurdish,” Beth said without thinking.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  Beth hesitated. "He's half Kurdish, not Turkish."

  "Whatever," Georgina returned carelessly. In the ensuing pause Beth fancied she could hear her friend's mind click into gear. "You know Karim Donovan?"

  "Yes...well, no, not really. I met him. He seemed...nice."

  "Nice?" Georgina sounded bemused. "Trust me, Beth, this is not a nice fellow."

  "Driving the money changers out of the temple isn't a nice job."

  "Beth, what on earth are you talking about?"

  "Cleaning up after Merrill Longyear. That situation couldn't have lasted as long as it did without a few blind eyes being turned. I expect he's trying to erase the image of Sodom and Gomorrah."

  "For God's sake, Beth, you sound like your mother!"

  "I've lived in a small town too long not to know how word gets around and what happens to it in the process. Didn't any of the alumni you visited mention it?"

  Georgina sighed heavily, the sound issuing through the phone's speaker like wind through dry leaves. "Okay, okay, point granted. Oops! I've got a call waiting, Beth. One I've been expecting, I hope. Drop by my office tomorrow if you've got a minute—and hey, save the evening of the twenty-second for me. That's when this college-related show-and-tell thing is coming off. So Karim Donovan is half Kurdish, huh?"