The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  A month later, they learned she was pregnant. It was such a happy time. He hadn’t anticipated the scope of his own happiness.

  He knew he understood something about his wife that few people did. She might be moody, she might be demanding, but she was rarely this way out of a purely selfish motive. Her moods, her demands—they always served an end, and though you might not see it at the time—though you didn’t know it yet—just possibly she was giving you the very thing you wanted. She was one of the most selfless people he had ever known, and she was better than other selfless people because she never insisted on her selflessness as an identity. There was never any sanctimony with her, none of the humorlessness of pathological do-gooders. He had been lucky. She had married him, and that had made him the husband of someone genuinely good.

  He rolled across the bedspread with its lunar roses and reached into the drawer of the bedside table, where he found a pencil and a small pad of paper bearing the Sandpiper logo. Dawn was still several hours away. He had all that time to write. But now that he was finally getting started, he didn’t think he would need it. The change in his mind from having nothing to say to having something was complete. Before long, he could hardly comprehend within himself why it had once seemed so difficult to write a few words about the person he loved.

  9.

  GENE ARRIVED WITH Dary and Annie at the college’s quadrangle to find a scene already in progress. The women, many wearing large straw hats in dark colors, were monitoring the lawn for the new arrivals, inspecting them for information about their relationship to the deceased. The men, some in suits with handkerchiefs protruding from their pockets, tended to drift to the outskirts of the women. The most elderly guests had found refuge in the shade of a large beech tree that had some importance to the college that Gene could no longer remember. This failure of memory both saddened him (Maida had told him why it was important) and relieved him (his mind was freed from responsibility for a fact that had never meant much of anything to him). Nearby a large white tent sheltered a table of refreshments—plastic cups of sparkling lemonade, strawberries impaled on toothpicks, butter cookies with jam centers. Dary left his side to circulate among the guests, and Annie ran off and piled four cookies on a plate.

  He felt adrift in the milling, waiting crowd. He knew more people there than anyone else, yet he couldn’t think of anyone he wanted to talk to. The mere idea of struggling to find a neutral topic—or, failing that, talking about present difficulties—exhausted him. He had already had all of those conversations and they hadn’t led anywhere.

  Michael Donnelly was there with his wife and son. Michael had met his wife, who was a good deal older than him, in his building a few years after he’d gotten sober. Luke, their son, was probably five or six by now, but Gene was always confused because Luke was a big guy who looked like he might be older. Michael and his wife still lived in the same building—Michael had bought the apartment next to his and merged the adjoining properties—and though Gene had never seen it, he remembered there was a gym with a steam room in the basement, because at the time Michael had told him about it, Gene had never heard of anything like that.

  Colin was there but his wife was not. For a moment, feeling sorry for himself, Gene latched onto Justine’s absence, construing it as an insult. Then he remembered that Justine had been sent to Sudan to help coordinate a food program, and she was extremely sorry she would miss the memorial. She had sent a warm note saying exactly this. Colin had brought his children: the two little girls who, with their long, thin faces, already looked like their mother; and the older boy, Max, who presumably still had an impressive and slightly irritating vocabulary that belied his eleven years. (The last time Gene had asked Max how he was doing, Max replied he was “feeling insouciant.”)

  When Michael saw Gene he approached with a vigorousness that translated as excitement, though just before the two men met, his stride changed abruptly and he almost stumbled, as if in that moment he remembered why they were meeting. His chin was indeed more defined and it would have made him more handsome, except that for some reason the smoothness of the skin in that region didn’t seem to integrate completely with the rest of his face.

  “You’re looking well,” Gene said, taking Michael’s hand.

  Colin spotted them and descended with his alternating kisses. The three men had a conversation about what Gene had done that morning, as if it mattered greatly whether he had eaten his oatmeal with or without peach jam and whether he had glanced at the newspaper or merely carried it inside.

  “Where’s Brian?” Gene asked.

  Colin, who was quite a bit taller than Gene, lowered his head slightly, taking what appeared to be extra care to move centrally into Gene’s visual space. “He wanted to be here,” Colin said. “He really did. He tried to make it happen.”

  “But his wife’s a whore,” Michael added.

  Colin grimaced. His expression toward his brother, in which disappointment and disgust mingled, seemed to say, Why do you always do the thing I tell you not to? Then he appeared to dismiss his brother altogether, and turning to Gene, he rearranged his face into a mask of pleasantness. “Did I tell you Justine and I bought a townhouse? There’s an extra bedroom in the attic. Anytime you want a vacation, you let us know. The room’s all yours.”

  Before long Gayle sailed up to them in a nimbus of strong perfume and pulled Gene into a bosomy hug. “You found the monkeys,” she said. With a tender, doting murmur, she inspected Gene’s appearance. His chin was marred with an invisible smudge, which she erased with a good rubbing. She straightened his tie, then took his arm and shepherded him across the lawn to the rows of chairs. She deposited him in the seat next to hers at the front and assured him they would start momentarily; they were just going to wait a few more minutes to see if Esther would arrive. Her flight from New York had been delayed and she was coming from the airport.

  Ed approached with a bottle of water for Gene.

  “I’m too nervous,” Gene said.

  Ed stowed the bottle at Gene’s feet and said it would be there for him later. Then together they stared at the garland of white peonies strung across the podium.

  “Gayle?” Gene said.

  “I told her they looked a little bridal, but—” Ed shrugged to suggest this was the extent of his powers.

  Dary, looking slightly overwhelmed but happy, made her way over to them and took a seat next to Gene. She asked him how he was feeling.

  “This wasn’t my idea,” he said.

  “You’re a good sport anyway.”

  He didn’t think this was particularly true, but the remark temporarily quieted some of his internal opposition.

  Annie was playing with the youngest children, picking them up in turn and whirling them around. When Dary called her over to join them, she came with a little girl, a child who belonged to one of Dary’s friends from high school. Gene expected that she would return the child to the mother, but when Gayle said it was time to get started, Annie sat down with the child on her lap.

  Gene took his place behind the podium and avoided looking at the faces. Sweat shimmered in the seams of his fingers as he unfolded his pages. There was no temptation to speak extemporaneously. He began by saying that Maida was a natural mother, born to it. Natural with all children, whether they belonged to her or not. He spoke of her more than thirty years at the day care. How she had lived to see children whose diapers she’d changed graduate from the college with honors and go on to get important positions in the government and at companies. How it never would have occurred to her to take offense when these same men and women, returning to campus for reunions or an alumni award, didn’t remember her. She never wasted time wondering if the things she did were the right things, she just did them with fortitude and patience. He recalled a scene from the middle of their marriage when on a beautiful summer day they had walked together through a familiar wood that had been charred by a fire earlier that year. The wood was favored for nesting by a part
icular owl that built her nest year after year in the same white pine previously inhabited by woodpeckers. With some hunting they found the tree but it was no longer living; it was just a blackened pole sharpened to a crude point at the top. And yet the owl had returned to it and made its nest in the same chiseled-out cavity. He had found this tremendously moving, but Maida seemed to take it for granted. Now he could say she was a bit like that owl—as stubborn and as steady, and with as little inclination for regret.

  His voice died away and he heard from the assembled crowd what perhaps had been beneath his speech all along: a cautious, respectful silence. It was over, and he felt the relief of knowing that something wearying had been carried off with just enough elegance and propriety. A compression that he hadn’t known was there was released at the base of his spine. He was a little taller and looser in his body when he returned to his seat.

  Dary smiled at him in a way that made him uncertain of her pleasure.

  “Well?” he said.

  “It was different,” she said.

  He didn’t know whether she meant it was different from hers or from what she expected, and whether she viewed this favorably or not. But she bowed her head closer to his, and this seemed to signal, if not her endorsement, at least not her complete disapproval.

  Gayle spoke next. She talked of the enduring connection between the two families, how at the cry of a child from the bathroom not one of them thought to inquire whose child needed his bottom wiped. She read a passage from The Velveteen Rabbit. (“Once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”) Tears moistened her eyes and she went on. It was this continuing on, rather than the tears, that moved him. She felt such responsibility to him. When she returned to her seat, he squeezed her hand as if to say they had accomplished something together.

  There was a pause in the proceedings as a new effort was made to locate Esther. An inquiry went out into the crowd and came back with the information that she still hadn’t arrived. Gene was surprised to feel a pang of distress on her behalf. He imagined how awful it would be to miss your oldest friend’s memorial, and especially to be aware you were missing it as you sat helplessly in traffic. But another part of him was perfectly placid; it wouldn’t break his heart if she failed to turn up in time. Either way, there was nothing to be done about it. They had to proceed.

  Dary’s face glowed with muted rosiness above the podium. She smiled at various people in the crowd, her eyes not scanning past them but alighting on individual faces, now nodding at some acquaintance in the rear, now smiling at the child on Annie’s lap. If he didn’t know the reason they were gathered, he might have thought she was enjoying herself. The crowd certainly seemed to be enjoying her. You could feel the way she was winning people to her with her smile, with this long expressive pause that resisted lurching directly into speech. She was inciting some connection, real or imagined, and she didn’t seem to feel any shame about it.

  “We’ve heard a lot today about Maida as a wife and mother and friend,” she began. “But one question I’ve been thinking about since her death is what she was like when she wasn’t taking care of anyone.” There was a perceptible shift, a slight resettling in the crowd. “It isn’t an easy question to answer,” she went on, “because her life didn’t allow for much solitude. It may be the closest thing she had was the two weeks of summer we spent every year with the Donnellys at Fisher Lake. Now I know what you’re thinking: that’s not much solitude at all. But consider for a moment she’d been sprung from her house. She was in someone else’s home, on borrowed time. And I imagine this temporary—and, let it also be said, imaginary—freedom was the nearest thing to solitude for many women of her generation…”

  A part of his mind slumped at the phrase “women of her generation.” It was like a tic his daughter had, this constant need to reimagine the past in a language that would have been unintelligible in the context in which it transpired. He wondered what she would say about him and the marriage. She went on for some time with her political inventions of solitude and freedom and something else made-up that she called “the deep yearning to be cast as yourself in your life.” It hardly seemed like she was talking about her mother, about a real, specific person. It was all an abstraction. And as she continued and as he failed to hear himself mentioned, it dawned on him that she was going to skip over him. She was going to skip over her own father, who not incidentally had been married to her mother for forty-nine years.

  It was cruel, this exclusion of him. What had he done to deserve it?

  Dary must have seen Esther arrive as she was speaking because when she finished her remarks she called Esther’s name and coaxed her up to the podium. Esther affected a flustered air, but she looked as put-together as ever (still the platinum hair, still the tiny waist). She and Dary hugged on the platform, and as Dary made her way back to her seat, her smile said, How lucky we are to have such a person in our midst! She took her place beside Gene once again, and her smile toward him was softer and sweeter than the smile she had given him before. She seemed to be experiencing the same burst of lightness and freedom that he had felt once his eulogy was over. But one of them had spoken more truthfully than the other.

  Esther began her remarks with an apology. She said she had collected many wonderful stories from Maida’s college friends, and she had hoped to share them. But having arrived so late, she would have time for only one, which she had decided as she sat in traffic would be the story of how Maida met Reginald Hay, the handsome (“too handsome, really”) professor whose book on Renaissance painting Maida had helped to write. Hay was demanding and arrogant, which Esther supposed was exactly how newly minted thirty-two-year-old professors ought to be when they were fresh back from a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. His lecture on Botticelli’s Primavera was known to draw students out of other classes for the day, all of them piling into the crowded auditorium where they sat on the floor and in the aisles, as Esther and Maida did one day in the spring of 1951. Hay stood before an image of the Primavera projected above the stage, and when the lights went down he noted the half-lidded eyes of the women and their peasant necks and stiff arms and sallow skin. For the next seventy-five minutes he proceeded to lecture on his theory of why a painter as adroit as Botticelli would choose to give the women features that typically wouldn’t be considered sensual or appealing.

  “When the lights came up,” Esther said, “Maida raised her hand. She told him it was a pretty good lecture, only he’d forgotten to say which traits supposedly made women sexy. ‘Not sexy,’ Hay chided. ‘Sensual.’ ‘So you maintain they’re unrelated?’ Maida said. By then there was a palpable charge between them—the room had gone totally silent—and I remember thinking, Well, he’s either going to make her life hell after this or he’s going to fall in love with her. We all know how that story goes. But what’s important to this story is what Maida said as we were walking out of the auditorium. She was a little ruffled, a little irritated, I could tell, and when I asked if she was okay, she said, ‘I don’t know what the big deal is about a person’s looks anyway. Everyone knows the brain is the most sexual organ we’ve got, but everyone goes around trying to cover it up. Don’t you wonder what it would be like to take our clothes off our brains?’ That’s when I realized this person wasn’t at all ordinary, and I should probably pay attention to her if I wanted to learn something about life. Which I did.”

  Esther paused momentarily as if she might go on, but instead she collected her notes, shuffled them together, and left the podium.

  Two

  10.

  IN THE FALL he met three people Dary had interviewed by telephone, all of whom expressed interest in a part-time position to help a recently widowed man with miscellaneous errands and chores. The first of the three candidates was a boy right out of college, an energetic young man with an interest in land stewardship and something called eco-development. He told Gene he cooked only one dish, a bean macaroni, but that everyone who had e
ver eaten it had asked for it again. Gene liked him at once, but felt it would be unfair to hire him. Anyone could see it wasn’t this young man’s destiny to spend his days taking care of an older man.

  The second person was a woman in her thirties, a mother of three, who had managed a restaurant before having her kids. He liked her well enough but was reluctant to hire her, fearing a mother with young children would have trouble making the job a priority.

  The third person, who was the closest to him in age, seemed most promising. Having worked a number of different jobs as a cashier and before that in a salon, Adele said she was ready for a change. She was pretty in a plain sort of way, with overcast blue eyes and an appealing fullness in her face. The simplicity of her appearance—no long fingernails, no hair doodads, no mounds of necklaces—pleased him. She didn’t object to working the occasional evening or indicate other demands on her time. He had the impression she lived alone, except for the two old dogs she had mentioned, and it appealed to him to have someone who might be available during off-hours if he needed her. When he offered her the job, she said she could start right away.

  He wondered what Maida would have thought of her. Probably she would have pitied her a little, finding her too transparent in her need for someone like Gene, someone who had the means to make a job for another person in his home and would feel a degree of responsibility for her. Gene himself felt unresolved about having this help, but Dary believed it would make his life easier.

  On her first day Adele showed up in the same outfit she had interviewed in, a plain white V-neck tee of the kind that sold three-to-a-pack at the Food & Drug, and blue jeans that had some elastic in the waist. Once inside, she changed out of her canvas sneakers into a pair of slip-on rubber sandals, the type that people were encouraged to wear in public showers to prevent the spread of germs. He wondered if the outfit was a kind of uniform for her.