Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  Dinah didn’t notice David’s expression tighten, and she decided that the extra sleep this week had improved David’s mood. She was amazed to be getting so much information from her son, whose life she could no longer envision, who no doubt had all sorts of thoughts and did all sorts of things that she could not possibly imagine. This was not a prurient interest on her part. She would have been as intrigued to find out that he was reading Dostoevsky as she would have been to discover the nature of his love life. She only wanted to continue to know him. She dried her hands on a kitchen towel and moved a few steps toward him where he sat at the table.

  “How do you know it was her mother? Did she introduce you?”

  “Nope. I just leaped to that conclusion, Mom. It was just a shot in the dark.” He was careful to keep humor in his voice, but Dinah was so eager for particulars, for one little way to hold on to her oldest child, that she didn’t even notice.

  “Well, I mean, it could have been her aunt or someone. It could even have been her sister. Her mother could have had a daughter when she was twenty and had another when she was forty. Or it could have been just a friend.” She was very serious about finding out every detail of this encounter, about having it accurately filed away in her mind.

  “Oh, my God! That’s what the writing on the napkin meant!” David said. He looked alarmed.

  “A napkin?”

  “Yeah. I was just clearing the table, but I did notice that someone had written on a napkin in lipstick. It said, ‘Help! I’m being kidnapped.’ I should have known!”

  Dinah laughed, and David went off to take a shower. But she was left with an abiding curiosity about the girl in the coffee shop, the girl’s mother, David’s conversation with them, all his movements and all the ideas he had had in his own day.

  This particular evening at the dinner table, both the children were being especially forthcoming, chatting to her with a gently forced animation that she welcomed and accepted. Within their small group was the clear acknowledgment that it was she among them who was most wounded this morning when she had finally had to have the cat, Ray, put to sleep. She had taken the cat to the clinic earlier in the week because he had stopped eating and his eyes were running. A new vet had checked him over and had given Dinah antibiotics for the cat and diagnosed him as having pneumonia. But it worried Dinah that she could coax the tablets down his throat so easily.

  This morning she had awakened to a strange sound in the bedroom. She had thought Martin was snoring, but he was sleeping silently, turned on one side. Finally she looked over the side of the bed and discovered Ray, pulling himself along the rug toward her bed, too feeble to walk and gasping for air. The cat had come to get her.

  She had jumped out of bed and said loudly to Martin to call the vet. He turned over slowly, coming awake, unable to make out what was going on.

  “The cat is sick,” she said. “I’ll take him to the clinic. Call Dr. Randolph and tell her to meet me over there!” She put her raincoat on over her nightgown and took her pillow from the bed and put it down next to the gasping cat. She was very careful as she eased him onto it.

  “But Dinah, it’s only six-thirty. They don’t even open until eight.” Martin couldn’t see the cat on the other side of the bed, and he wasn’t fully awake. But Dinah stood up and turned to him in a barely controlled rage that startled him.

  “Just call the vet. Tell her,” Dinah said very slowly so as to be entirely understood, “that she killed my cat! Tell that woman that she God damned well did kill my cat!”

  But at the clinic Dinah’s anger ran out, leaving her limp and vulnerable in the quiet building. She was terribly sad as she sat holding Ray on her lap, stroking his ragged fur while the vet injected him with a fatal dose of the anesthetic Somlethal. His head sank forward, and his heart stopped in seconds. And Dinah had no doubt that it was better, as she sat looking down at him, than to have let him slowly suffocate. Nevertheless, she felt she had betrayed him, not by having him killed, but by witnessing him there on the floor of her room, so desperately in need, so utterly without dignity. No longer God’s own cat.

  Dinah had been unable to move except to shake her head at the vet to signify that she would not leave yet, and the doctor withdrew, nodding in agreement. For a long time Dinah had sat in her nightgown and raincoat in the little examination room with Ray across her lap, not thinking about the cat at all, but brought face to face once again with the terrible recognition of inevitable sadness. She had thought then that there are a few things no one ever tells women. She supposed it wasn’t a conspiracy; maybe it was a kindness. When she was pregnant the first time a few people had at least suggested some of the possibilities. Martin’s mother had told her that her life would never again be the same, not altogether in a congratulatory tone.

  “I’ll tell you,” a woman in the obstetrician’s office had said, “there’s nothing like it in the world,” also with a trace of dolefulness. But no one could have made Dinah believe in the passion of being the mother of a child. Fathers are passionate, too, but they guard their souls more carefully. They are able to experience a crisis of faith, fear of mortality—in the abstract—apart from the fate of their children. And while she did know women who wore their maternity indifferently, Dinah was suspicious of them even while she sometimes envied them. But she didn’t really think of them as being anyone’s mother. She thought that real mothers—all the mothers in the world—are simply the fools of the earth in the ways they live with hope, in the ways they must continue to believe that they can save their own children. Momentarily overwhelmed with hopelessness, she had sat leaning against the tiled wall of the Vet Clinic, abstractedly stroking the limp body of the cat.

  By this evening, though, sitting at dinner with Martin and David and Sarah, Dinah was surprised to find the remembered image of her children moving through the garden in the near dusk filling her mind and pulling her to the edge of an exhausted and tentative peacefulness. She got up from the table and began clearing the plates away while David and Sarah and Martin went out to pick the corn.

  “I like the really small ears,” she said. “I want two of them.”

  A large kettle of water was boiling on the stove, and the windowpanes had misted over, so she couldn’t see the three of them moving through the cornstalks, but she was suddenly pleased for the moment just to have the knowledge of their being there. She had been trying for a long time, now, to hold on to kindliness in the world, wherever she could find it, in lieu of the terrible urgency of passion.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AT HOME

  OVER A PERIOD OF thirty years, Arlie Davidson, the Howellses, next door neighbor, had walked a succession of dogs along a route that crossed the corner of the property on his other side to reach the meadow that sloped up into Bell’s Forest. But one Saturday afternoon the new owner of that property, Raymond Brickley, who had bought the house to use as a weekend retreat, was disgruntedly inspecting the job the house painters had done in his absence when he caught sight of Mr. Davidson and his corgi. Mr. Brickley climbed down from his ladder and moved a few steps in Mr. Davidson’s direction. All his mistrust of the local tradesmen and his suspicion of the natives’ intransigent dislike of him were suddenly brought to bear on this flagrant transgression of his privacy.

  “Oh, you!” he had shouted across all the lovely green grass. “You! Davidson! You bring that animal on my property again and I’ll call the police!” Mr. Brickley was suffused with anger, he was trembling with outrage, and Arlie Davidson was bemused. He studied his new neighbor with interest while his corgi moved busily along from one bush to another, marking his territory.

  The whole idea interested Mr. Davidson, who had no great faith that the local police would show up on time even in an emergency. He smiled and lifted his arm in a dismissive gesture as he turned away again along the path. “Go right ahead,” he said. “By all means…” Mr. Davidson’s indifference, of course, only heightened Mr. Brickley’s fury, and it radiated outward ove
r his clipped lawn and carefully pruned maple trees and was ultimately absorbed by the far stand of spruces behind which Mr. Davidson and his dog had disappeared.

  It was a minor incident, only the small infraction of trespassing, but Mr. Brickley’s passion had momentarily been murderous. In some other place, perhaps under other circumstances, all that terrifying energy might have come to fruition; Mr. Brickley might truly have acted upon such a pure concentration of rage and frustration. As it was, though, he sat down on his terrace to await Mr. Davidson’s return and dozed off while gazing out at the gentle mountains rising beyond the enormous evergreens. And in any case, Mr. Davidson came home the long way round.

  The town of West Bradford has a population of eight thousand people settled into a valley in the northern reaches of the Berkshire Hills. It is the home of Bradford and Welbern College, which is the primary employer in the area. Otherwise, most of the working people in West Bradford are employed by one of the three light, clean industries that, taken together, provide jobs for a few less than three hundred.

  The doctors, dentists, and veterinarians are splendidly schooled. Having trained at such places as Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Yale, Tufts, Cornell, and Penn, they have given up the competition and money of big city medicine so that they and their families can enjoy a better quality of life, although the liability insurance has gotten entirely out of hand and fewer young practitioners are moving to town.

  Seven lawyers have offices in West Bradford, and they, too, have high-powered credentials, but have been drawn back to the area by nostalgia for the college where almost all of them were undergraduates. Five more have residences in West Bradford, but are associated with firms in nearby Bradford.

  The town easily supports a large lumberyard and a building supplies distributor, and the masons, electricians, carpenters, and plumbers are, by and large, excellent and honest and are often poets or painters as well.

  Thirty real estate agencies serve the area.

  In the summer there is climbing, hiking, biking, swimming, golf, and any racquet sport. The nationally famous West Bradford Summer Theater Festival brings Broadway and movie stars right into town. There are fourteen hotels and motels, seven flourishing bed-and-breakfasts, and twenty-four restaurants, including—June through August—the nonprofit café at the Freund Museum of Art. In the early 1950s, Thomas Freund chose West Bradford as the site of his museum because of his belief that, in the event of nuclear war, his collection would be protected from the inevitable shock waves by the gentle buffer of the surrounding mountains. But he had also been much taken by the bucolic setting, with cows grazing right outside a room of Renoirs, ice skaters on the pond beyond the Monets. He and his wife are interred beneath the marble steps of the entrance.

  Tanglewood, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is a half hour’s drive away, and Saratoga, which has the oldest thoroughbred racetrack in the country and is summer host to the New York City Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra, is only forty-five minutes in the other direction. Any of those professionals who might have been dubious about turning their backs on life in a metropolitan area are now absolutely delighted to discover that their property values have more than quadrupled in the past ten years, although they bemoan the encroaching condominiums and developing resort complexes.

  There are nine churches in West Bradford and a synagogue in nearby Bradford. Discounting church or synagogue attendance, which is large, it is hard to gauge the depth of genuine and fervent belief in God, but certainly, within the community there is a widely held belief in the need and comfort of religiousness, and the ministers and priests are generally more intellectual than passionate, espousing compassion and tolerance as opposed to the fear of damnation.

  Well over 150,000 tourists visit West Bradford every year, and their influx is simultaneously welcomed and dreaded. Martin Howells’s friend, Vic Hofstatter, likes to tell his story of standing in line at the local farmers’ market behind a woman in a beaded sweater and with carefully arranged hair—clearly not a New Englander. He was waiting to pay for two heads of lettuce and some asparagus, and he had begun to feel sorry for the restless woman in front of him, who had a basket filled with local bread and produce in an amount that could never be prepared and consumed before they lost their freshness. Eventually she seemed to suspect she looked foolish to the girl at the counter making change from a fishing tackle box, and she turned to Vic with a hawklike glance, casting her eye over his few items.

  “Are you a tourist or a native?” she asked sharply, and Vic smiled back at her indulgently.

  “Oh, I live here,” he said kindly. “And I have a garden of my own.” He was saving her from the embarrassment of being unskilled at shopping in a strange town.

  “Well, for God’s sake!” she said, clearly exasperated. “I’d think you people could find somewhere else to shop during the season.”

  What Moira Kaplan had said at the crowded opening of the summer theater had immediately become a cliché: that the tourists should send their money and just stay home. It had even become a kind of code. Martin had been stopped in his progress along the Carriage Street sidewalk one summer morning on his way to the post office by a group of tourists who had paused to observe the buildings across the way. One of the women seemed particularly indignant, gesturing with a sweep of her arm to include the entire street and the casually dressed natives. “We have reservations for three nights,” she complained. “I did think it would be a little more gentrified!” An acquaintance of Martin’s, making his way around the group by stepping into the street, caught Martin’s eye and said under his breath, “Go home now and leave a check.” And he and Martin acknowledged each other with a brief nod before they passed by and went on their way.

  On the other hand, it is a lucrative business, tourism, and it is sometimes quite heady to be securely established in a place where so many people want to be. Even the teenagers in town are casual and carefully unimpressed when Christopher Reeve or Paul Newman comes into the deli to pick up a sandwich.

  “And what’s the name on that prescription, please?” said Jennie Abrams, who works part time at the Carriage Street Pharmacy, when she looked up and was confronted with Mary Tyler Moore across the counter.

  The Board of Trade had erected a modest-sized sign at the entrance to Carriage Street, the one-street shopping area, that said:

  WEST BRADFORD

  JEWEL OF THE BERKSHIRES

  As it turned out, though, almost no one was pleased with the sign once it was up; it was so clearly ostentatious. Whenever anything at all went wrong—when the outlying routes became impassable in the spring thaw, when grocery shoppers faced one another over the winter produce in the supermarket and inspected the trammeled-looking lettuce—the residents would look at each other and say, “Oh, well. After all, this is the jewel of the Berkshires,” with a wry shrug. Like any other place that engenders affection, it also inspires a kind of proprietary contempt.

  A certain amount of town-gown tension exists, although generally civility rules. West Bradford is blessed with a relative lack of cliques and no prevailing social order, partly because of the interdependency of the inhabitants. When Mike Detweiler, general groundskeeper to most of the wealthy homeowners in town, sent invitations to a slide show and narrative of his most recent trip to Malaysia, where he studied tropical plants, not one of his customers cared to offend him in order to attend the performance of the Empire Brass Quintet or to hear Richard Wilbur read his poetry—both events having been scheduled at the college that same evening.

  No one would deny that there is room for improvement in West Bradford. Because of the sudden upsurge in real estate prices and the popularity of West Bradford as a “second home” community, very few mid-to-lower income families or new faculty are able to buy houses at all. The town is primarily a community of white families, and the college and the Medical Alliance often have a hard time keeping single or minority faculty or doctors. The rate of teenaged suicide—too high at any n
umber—is above average in West Bradford, and drug use is a problem, although it is quickly being surpassed by alcohol abuse.

  Certainly West Bradford has its share of poverty, and the current national recession is hitting the area hard. There were one actual and two attempted rapes on campus in the past year, and most of the townspeople believe that a disappearance and two murders of young women over the past eight years are the work of a serial murderer who has also struck in small towns nearby.

  There is always a run of various and assorted small crimes—thefts and break-ins—and this past spring three men from Boston robbed the West Bradford Drive-Thru Savings Bank, but were thwarted in their escape by a combination of muddy back roads and the fact that they were spotted by the animal control officer, who was parked in his driveway eating his lunch. His suspicions of something nasty afoot were aroused when the battered van they were driving careered wildly past him up the hill, headed at fifty or sixty miles an hour toward a dead end. He called ahead on his C.B. to alert the police in Bradford as well as West Bradford, and then gave chase in his pickup. The incident was amusing in the retelling but, in fact, the three men had been panicky and well armed, and when they were finally trapped at the end of the road it was mostly just good luck that they did not kill someone.

  The public schools had once been extraordinary but, as has happened all over the country since the 1970s, they have begun to decline, and a considerable number of people who ardently support public education are now sending their children away if they can possibly afford to.

  Long-standing animosities and current feuds among various factions of the community endure, but when the people in West Bradford chat at the post office, or when they meet each other at the newsstand to pick up the Times or The Boston Globe, they debate the relocation of the dilapidated town garage or the desirability of putting up the town’s first stoplight at a particularly bad intersection. They discuss the Red Sox, the Celtics, and even the Bruins, depending on the season. They talk about the summer theater productions, movies and also “films,” the latest PBS series, or a book they’ve just read. But they aren’t smug. They are as subject to terror, to passion, to pleasure as any people anywhere. It is only that in their circumstances they are fortunate.