Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  “I’m going to take Anna Tyson to get a T-shirt at the gift shop,” Sarah said, and only when she was well away from her mother did she suddenly feel the pressure of tears behind her eyes and a long aching in her throat. She was sorrowful all at once at not having responded to her mother just now, and she was also overcome with some amorphous disappointment that was almost like being homesick. At the Glass House, where souvenirs were sold, she bought a T-shirt for Anna Tyson, and before she turned away from the salesgirl, Sarah asked for a Tanglewood poster and bought it for her mother.

  When she finished arranging the plates of sandwiches and fruit and cheese, Ellen leaned back on her elbows on the blanket with her eyes closed, her face tipped up toward the sun. Her thick hair fell in loose waves just above her shoulders. Ellen was the adult Dinah knew better than any other except Martin, and she studied her with admiration and then hazarded a soft comment.

  “You know, I don’t know what to do about David these days, Ellen. What to say to him. He can hardly stand to be in the same room with me.” She spoke matter-of-factly; she wasn’t even sure Ellen was listening to her. “And now Sarah… Well… Oh, God, Ellen, you can’t imagine how painful it is to realize that sometimes your own children really don’t like you!”

  “Umm. No, you’re wrong. I imagine that it’s very hard. But you know, I was talking to Vic this morning. It seems to both of us… well… you can’t expect so much from Sarah and especially from David. Frankly, I think you’re behaving very badly toward your children, Dinah.”

  Dinah was astonished. She swiveled around to stare at her friend, but Ellen was still basking in the mild sunshine, eyes closed. “I can’t even imagine what would make you say something like that to me when you have absolutely no idea…” Dinah didn’t raise her voice; in fact, her tone was softly plaintive, but she was quite angry.

  Ellen interrupted her, though, by a continual shaking of her head, her hair swinging behind her, her eyes still closed, and her face tilted away from Dinah. “You’ve got to understand, Dinah, that you simply aren’t allowed to need anything from your children! It’s the greatest unkindness you can do them. And we probably shouldn’t even discuss it, because you won’t get any pity from me.”

  Dinah sat completely still with shock and anger, and Ellen, who could not see her, mistook her silence for reluctant acquiescence, and she began to elaborate on the subject. “I know the situation too well from the other side,” Ellen said. Her voice was soft with pained amusement. “My parents were impossible. You know I was in therapy for years, of course. But you have no idea… I can’t tell you the enormous relief I feel whenever I remember that my parents finally died. Oh, my God! The freedom! I started writing…. Well, I suppose I also feel guilty, too, in spite of myself, at feeling that relief. But still…”

  Without opening her eyes, Ellen stretched full-out on the blanket and put her hands behind her head, turning her face to the side slightly so that Dinah only gazed at her profile. Dinah was too dumbfounded to reply. No longer than three minutes ago she had thought of herself as the mother of two children who sometimes, and in varying degrees, seemed to dislike her, but now she saw quite clearly that she was a woman whose children—perhaps unwittingly—eagerly anticipated her death. It was quite a lot to absorb in the soft air and under the gentle sky.

  She glanced in appalled enlightenment at the clusters of picknickers around them. There was a woman nursing an infant, and another mother in irritable pursuit of a gleefully fleeing toddler, but when she caught up to him and swung him into the air, he crowed exultantly, and the woman laughed, too. Nearby an elegantly dressed couple talked between themselves while their teenaged sons threw a Frisbee back and forth. Dinah studied the boys carefully, putting their ages between fourteen and sixteen. As the younger boy ran backward several steps and raised his arm to grasp the lip of the descending Frisbee, Dinah saw, in her mind’s eye, the slow, uncurling motion of his arm and a mighty and precise snap of his wrist, which sent the Frisbee in a lethal path in his parents’ direction, striking them simultaneously where their heads were bent together in pleasant discussion. Without a sound the two of them crumpled toward each other in a quick and painless death. Dinah experienced a reflexive recoiling from the blow in the same way that one awakens with a start from a dream of falling. As she came back into the moment, the younger boy released the Frisbee in a high, short arc in his brother’s direction, and they both moved farther away where there was more space and fewer people. A taller boy in a Boston College sweatshirt called out to them, and the older brother sent the Frisbee spiraling in his direction. A fourth boy joined them so that they formed a loose square. They were attractive young men, laughing and calling to each other, and Dinah felt sure, all at once, that not one of them was brooding about the fact that his parents were still alive. The idea gave her faint hope and renewed her anger at Ellen. The notion of Vic and Ellen discussing her over their morning coffee flashed through her thoughts.

  “Ellen! For God’s sake! What are you talking about? I don’t want anyone’s pity! That’s not the point at all. Of course I need things from my children. Every parent needs things… which, granted, is not to say that I’ll get them.” She wanted to put an end to this discussion. She was amazed at herself for having taken it up with Ellen, who had no children of her own, and who fancied that by occasionally borrowing the Howells children for an outing or a weekend that she could comprehend parenthood. She had once explained to Dinah that she wanted to take the children into New York, that it would be helpful to her poetry. Dinah had thought at the time that only someone with Ellen’s vanity could even imagine such a thing. But because Dinah liked Ellen’s poetry very much, Dinah had decided that other people’s children might well serve as triggers to Ellen’s own younger self. The act of writing was mysterious to Dinah, and she had great respect for Ellen’s talent; but her arrogance, her presumption this afternoon was galling. Dinah meant to speak patiently. “Every parent in the world needs at least the illusion of returned affection….”

  Ellen remained stretched out on the blanket with her arms crossed behind her head, but she opened her eyes very wide when she recognized Dinah’s indignation. She seemed mildly amused. “No. Absolutely not. You can’t need anything!” She watched Dinah alertly, and Dinah sputtered back at her, “Ellen, you don’t know anything about living with people you love unconditionally! I need just what they need from me….”

  “You don’t get to do that, you know,” Ellen said calmly, “especially if you’re anyone’s mother.”

  “Of course you do. It’s not a question of getting to do it! It’s simply the way it is. I need affection…”

  Ellen was shaking her head again, and Dinah’s voice rose imploringly.

  “… and kindness. That’s just reasonable! Courtesy…”

  “If you really need all those things—if you can’t survive without them—then you’ll become a monster,” Ellen said, closing her eyes again, ending the discussion.

  Dinah moved to one of the lawn chairs and sat gently massaging her neck, seeing no point in reminding Ellen of what she and Martin—and Sarah and David, too—had already survived. She did not say that the murkiness and intricacies of family life sometimes bewildered her with the things that could not be, were not under any conditions said to each other. Dinah would not admit to her friend that sometimes she felt she held on to her humanity only by the very tips of her fingers.

  Franklin M. Mount

  Dean of Freshmen

  Harvard College

  12 Truscott Street

  Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

  Dear Mr. Mount,

  Do you think it’s true that people don’t reach adulthood until the death of their parents? Erik Erikson said that, and I have no idea how he meant to define adulthood. I don’t even remember where I learned it. Some people never become adults no matter how old they are and even if both their parents are dead. I think other people are adults at age six or seven. But I’m trying to u
nderstand what he was getting at. I wonder how old Erik Erikson was when he decided that. I wonder if his own parents were still alive, and also if he was an only child. Is adulthood what we’re all striving for? Do you think it’s a particularly desirable condition, or did he only mean that it was inevitable? He may have meant that adulthood is regrettable.

  Our daughter Sarah just turned thirteen and still needs us, and I think that she probably knows it. I think that she needs her father right now more than she needs me, but in some ways she would never recover if she lost either one of us at her age. What I’ve been thinking, though, is that it seems possible to me that David could survive contentedly without either one of us. I do know, of course, that in all sorts of ways he would feel grief at our absence, and he would miss us terribly, but I’m no longer sure that our existence is necessary to his living a successful life. I guess it’s true that in the ordinary way of the world it may be that parents simply live too long.

  When Sarah and Anna Tyson reappeared, and all four of them were eating their lunch, Ellen told them about the problems she was having with her writing.

  “I worry and pace,” Ellen said. “I glance at the final poem and compare it with the shape of the copy I tape up across the room. It all seems wrong. The real poem—I mean, when it’s written out—seems to me to be only a sort of shadow of the literal shape I’ve intended. Oh, well… but now that Owen Croft is in The Review office, Vic wants me to help weed through some of those poems. I don’t know if I can cope with the distraction.”

  “What do you mean?” Dinah said. She was helping Anna Tyson slip the Tanglewood T-shirt over her dress. “What does Owen’s being there have to do with your helping?”

  But Ellen had lost the thread of what she was saying while Dinah was struggling with Anna Tyson’s puffed sleeves. Ellen had turned to watch Sarah, who had taken off, then put back on, her wide-brimmed straw hat, arranging her hair with a toss so that it fell across one shoulder. She had grown restless where they were sitting—at the far edge of the lawn. They had Shed tickets and hadn’t needed to eat their lunch among the multitudes in order to establish a place on the lawn close to the orchestra. Sarah would have much preferred to be in the middle of a crowd. She was covertly watching the boys who had been throwing the Frisbee and wondering if they had noticed her and also wondering how old they thought she was. She absently fiddled with the poster she had bought for her mother but had forgotten to give to her, unfurling it slightly and letting it snap to like a spring.

  “Aha, Sarah! We’ve succeeded in boring you to death!” Ellen said with seeming delight. “But that’s wonderful! Oh, Sarah, you should be so bored by the two of us that you will simply trample us under your feet to get to what you believe in, or to do what you have to do. Whenever it is. Whenever that happens!”

  Dinah saw that her daughter was embarrassed at being caught out in inattention and also by Ellen’s drama, and perhaps even by the fact that she was bored to death with this company on her thirteenth birthday. But Dinah couldn’t think of anything to say that would ameliorate Sarah’s discomfort, and just then the first warning bell rang. They all turned their attention to gathering up the remnants of their lunch.

  Finally the four of them made their way to the Shed as the third warning bell began to sound, but they were stopped by an usher, who reminded them that no child under six years old was allowed inside during a performance. Dinah felt a surge of relief. “I’ll stay outside with Anna Tyson, Sarah. You and Ellen go on in. I’ll give these other two tickets to someone out here.”

  Sarah and Ellen both began to protest, but Dinah forestalled any objection.

  “No, no. I’ve seen the BSO perform the Magnificat in Boston. I’d really rather be outside, anyway. It’s a beautiful day.”

  Dinah threaded through the crowd with Anna Tyson in tow and exchanged the box-seat tickets with the couple who had set up the lovely little luncheon for themselves just outside the Shed. She settled in one of their lawn chairs, and Anna Tyson climbed exhaustedly onto her lap instead of sitting in the other chair. Dinah settled her comfortably, with Anna Tyson’s head against her shoulder, and pushed the little girl’s damp hair away from her forehead. She didn’t happen to glance up and see an expression of pure yearning cross Sarah’s face as she looked back at her mother through the crowds of people, and witnessed that mindless caress as her mother’s hand brushed across Anna Tyson’s forehead.

  In fact, Dinah didn’t see Ellen or Sarah at all. She was idly stroking Anna Tyson’s forehead and thinking of Ellen in that beautifully austere room of her renovated farmhouse where she sat at a window and composed her poems, working anxiously, filled with uncertainty. The picture of Ellen that Dinah conjured up embodied a high-level sort of anguish. Clean despair. It was too bad, Dinah mused, that her writing cost Ellen so dearly. She had such talent, and she was almost belligerently honest, for which Dinah could do nothing but admire her. It was also a shame, really, that she had let herself get so fat.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TRAFFIC

  FOR THE THIRD MORNING in a row, Martin was awakened instantly and unnaturally early by the hammering of a woodpecker in the metal guttering at the corner of the house. The first gray daylight only smudged the screens, and in the dusky bedroom the windows themselves could scarcely be discerned except by the outlines of their white woodwork. He felt nearly tearful under the onslaught of morning—the maddened woodpecker and all the rest of the wretched din of morning birdsong. He pushed aside the rumpled sheet and lay still in the slight breeze produced by a careful and precarious arrangement of window and oscillating fans. Usually once during the night a sudden wind or a wandering cat brought the box fan, balanced on the windowsill, crashing to the floor, and by now its propeller was so askew that it tick-ticked with every rotation. The oscillating fan, which Martin had arranged with careful deliberation on a chair placed strategically at the foot of the bed, whooshed and whirred as it made its slow sweep back and forth. All night he and Dinah slept fitfully with the sound, but not the feel, of rushing air. The artificial breeze was teasing; it was very nearly a torment.

  Dinah reached over and touched his hand, although she didn’t grasp it, she simply made contact, and they looked across the expanse of white sheet between them and gazed dumbly at each other. Her hair was matted and spiked around her face; she had thrashed from side to side during the night, turning her head against the pillow, while her hair was damp from sweat. She ran her hand through it with a grimace.

  “My God! That damned bird. I can’t get up now,” she said. “Can you?”

  “He’s not going to stop.”

  “I know. It’s not even five o’clock, though. I believe I’ll just lie here and languish and suffer.” It was a phrase caught up from a long-ago telephone conversation with Martin’s mother when she was asked how all the relations in Sheridan were faring during yet another parched summer. “Oh, we’re all just fine,” she had said to Dinah, “except, of course, we’re just languishing and suffering in all this heat.” Even David and Sarah used the phrase, although they probably didn’t know its origin. It was part of the family’s shorthand, conveying a determination to endure cheerfully.

  Martin offered Dinah a weak smile, and then he closed his eyes briefly, contemplating the possibilities of the day as the woodpecker began another barrage above their heads. He thought about breakfast and the wonderful, piercingly bitter smell of the only two cups of real coffee he could drink during a day without becoming shaky and nauseated; when he was in his twenties he could drink coffee all day, even ten minutes before he fell sound asleep. On the other hand, given that he was heading downhill, what difference would it make if he had some bacon after a night like this? The idea of sitting in the relatively cool kitchen with the aroma of coffee brewing and bacon cooking was comforting. He glanced over at Dinah, but he couldn’t see her face; she had withdrawn her hand from his and was sheltering her eyes from the light with her forearm.

  “What if I fix bac
on and eggs? You want some? Or pancakes?”

  “Oh, sweetheart, I really can’t get up now. I’ll feel tired all day.”

  “I can’t get back to sleep,” he said. “I think I’ll go over to the office and get some things cleared up.”

  Dinah had turned on her side, away from the windows, and she only murmured, but he came around the bed and kissed her lightly on the temple before he pulled on a seersucker robe and padded barefoot downstairs and into the kitchen.

  In cycles during all the years of the Howellses’ marriage, there was never a subtraction from the deep core of genuine affection each held for the other, even when they were irritated at each other, even when they were desperately angry at each other. But after the first several years of the giddiness of unrestrained sensuality, and with the birth of children, their lust had generally become more companionable than romantic, friendly, and accommodating more often than it was frantic or demanding. And it had become a habit since the children were small that the mornings were the time Dinah and Martin most enjoyed making love. While the children were still asleep, but past any nighttime crisis of midnight fevers, dreaming terrors, croup, or alarmingly severe nocturnal stomachaches, Martin and Dinah could indulge in the drowsy luxury of sex.

  As the children grew up, Martin and Dinah were less physically but more emotionally exhausted by evening, and the habit of lovemaking in the early morning had persisted. But this was not their climate, and they both were awake in the early dawn with the exhausted, fuzzy sensation of never having slept at all. When Martin left the room, Dinah slowly fell back into a sticky sleep and unfolded her long arms and legs across the whole breadth of the bed in an attempt to be cooled by the sluggishly churned air.