Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  “My firing him and our being rid of him are probably going to turn out to be two different things,” Martin said, but Ellen’s enthusiasm wasn’t dampened.

  “Oh, that doesn’t even matter, you know. Penny Krautz will be back in a few weeks. But we’ve been so worried about you.” She paused for a moment and glanced uneasily at Vic, whose face remained impassive. She went on, almost shyly. “For the past few years it’s seemed to us… Well… It’s been too long a time that you’ve tried to forgive Owen, Martin.” Her voice was soft with her sorrow for him, and he didn’t know what to say. He was taken aback and unprepared. The connection between Toby’s death and Owen Croft had been far from his mind.

  She got up, and no one said anything while she fussed with the sash of her robe and unwound the towel from around her head, shaking her hair free in the sun. She crossed the few feet of grass to Martin and bent to embrace him in a fierce hug. “It’s been awful for us to see you try so hard to be generous.” She released him and stood up, running her fingers through her hair in an attempt to untangle it. “Martin, you shouldn’t ever doubt yourself, you know. I mean, in the very best sense of the term, you aren’t capable of being anything other than an honorable man.”

  So Martin knew that some long discussion about him had taken place between these two closest of his friends, and he felt defensive and resentful. But he couldn’t speak to object; Ellen’s sorrowing on his behalf had brought him surprisingly near to tears.

  “I’m going to shower and then I’ll bring lunch down,” Ellen said, kindly freeing him from the obligation of a response. Vic got up, too, and urged him to come for a swim.

  In the late afternoon as Martin drove through Bradford, stopping and starting in the afternoon traffic and restraining Duchess in the back seat by holding his right arm straight out as a barrier, bits and pieces of the day floated through his mind. He felt less and less unnerved by the idea of the Hofstatters’ probable discussion of and conclusions about him. Naturally they would speculate about him and about Dinah, just as he and Dinah did about them. Ellen had fixed a wonderful lunch and eaten her share, deciding that she would start her diet the next day, and Martin remembered her round arms and dimpled elbows, her heavy hips and thighs as she merged languidly into the water of the pond. He didn’t think there was any reason for there to be less of Ellen—or of Vic—two people he liked as much as he could like any people he didn’t love. He had for them an acute fondness.

  He sat at the traffic light in West Bradford, and was ashamed not to have disabused Ellen and Vic of their notion that his behavior toward Owen Croft had anything to do with his idea of himself as an honorable man. Martin had never been able to blame Owen for Toby’s death. Martin had often awakened to alternate realities: that he had only dreamed the accident, that his car had been struck from behind, but Toby had been all the way across town when it happened, running to intercept the soccer ball downfield, that his own car had executed a neat turn, and Owen’s car, unnoticed, passed on through the afternoon traffic. And hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times, he had supposed other possibilities: if he had stopped at the convenience store to buy milk first, before he picked up his sons at soccer practice; if he had been going a little faster; if he had been going a little slower… But Martin was, in fact, a practical man, and he repeatedly assured himself that Toby’s death was only horribly random.

  CHAPTER NINE

  PACKING

  IT FASCINATED DAVID TO watch Netta approach the task of unpacking the boxes that were stacked on the kitchen counters and table and strewn along the walls through the rooms of her apartment. He had dropped by to lend her a hand three afternoons in a row after he got off work, and yet they had made almost no progress. She would start a conversation, open a beer for them both, stop and fix something for dinner. Anna Tyson and he and Netta would sit in a row on the one unencumbered futon in the living room and eat the dry sandwiches that Netta made—two pieces of the hard French bread she bought at The Whole Grain Elevator and a slab of hard cheese between them. David admired these hastily put-together sandwiches, even though they weren’t good to eat. They required nothing in return. The meal was a bit of business, served without comment or ceremony. And all the while Netta ate her dinner, she talked about her work, her ideas, sketching them with both hands, waving the partially eaten sandwich in the air. She asked him about himself.

  “What are you planning?” she asked David. “I mean, I hope you know why you’re going to Harvard. So many people who get in just go there because it’s the next step. You know what I mean? It sounds good to them. To go to Harvard. But I taught three sections, and the freshmen don’t have the slightest idea why they’re at college. It was such a waste of my time to try to interest them in anything. One of the T.A.’s thought all the freshmen should be required to take mandatory deferments and not come to Harvard until they were twenty-one.” She laughed, remembering this, and David smiled. “But I really do think taking a deferment is a good idea. I should have waited a year before I went to Swarthmore. Have you thought about it?”

  David hadn’t, and he shook his head in reply, because Netta was filled with ideas and was rushing ahead. “I still wish I hadn’t just flung myself straight into college. I shouldn’t have had to decide so much so soon.” She looked at him imploringly, to be sure he sympathized, or at least that he understood. “I was trying to be too many people, I think.” She fell silent, contemplating that idea, testing it in her own mind for validity.

  Eventually she set to work, drooping languidly over the contents of this or that carton, unhinging the four flaps of a boxtop so that they fell open like wilted petals, and she would pick up one thing or another and scrutinize it. She held up an eggbeater to show him.

  “Look at this!” she said to David, who was sitting with Anna Tyson and helping her break her cheese into small pieces. “I bought it at a flea market in Arlington. It’s probably about seventy years old. Isn’t it an elegant shape? See how it’s elongated? People have forgotten how to look at things.”

  He nodded in agreement, although he had never paid attention to the shape of an eggbeater. But he could imagine himself perusing the long tables at garage sales with Netta, finding other treasures as amazing as her eggbeater. Netta rotated the handle, absorbed momentarily in watching the ratchet turn the looped blades. She opened a deep drawer next to the sink and placed the eggbeater in it before looking again into the depths of the carton. “Oh, it’s all this silverware,” she said, sounding disappointed after her discovery of the eggbeater.

  David got up and took a look. “Listen, why don’t I go get some of those plastic trays they have at Farrell’s Store that have dividers for forks and spoons? You could fit two of them in this drawer and it would hold all this stuff. Farrell’s is open until eight.”

  Netta considered the drawer, which was a little gritty with crumbs and so far contained only the eggbeater. “Oh… I don’t know. Here…” and she took a random handful of silverware and dropped it in the drawer. “Let’s just leave it loose. I mean, anyone can figure out which ones are the forks or knives or spoons, right?” She upended the box and dumped the welter of stainless steel flatware into the deep drawer where it fell in a jumble like pickup sticks.

  For a moment David was taken aback, but then it was clear to him that her gesture and idea were wonderful. It dawned on him that all the time he had taken over the years to put the silver away in little pockets of the appropriate size had been wasted. It was absolutely true that even Anna Tyson could sort out whatever utensils she might need, and for the first time he realized that any sort of domestic order was only whimsical, not necessary, as the arrangement of his mother’s kitchen seemed to suggest. Netta dropped the box to the floor with satisfaction as she closed the drawer. She rested against him with her head in the niche of his shoulder, and he was so surprised that he almost stepped backward, away from her. She moved off and began to sort through the cartons on the table, removing things randomly, not box by b
ox, dropping folded towels at her feet, unearthing cutting boards and measuring cups.

  He began unpacking a box on the kitchen counter that contained Netta’s Cuisinart and all its blades, which were packed within the carton in boxes of carefully fitted Styrofoam. When he glanced at Netta, he was struck by her fragility, the movement of the muscle and fragile bones in her wrists and arms as she stood on tiptoe to reach into the bottom of a deep box and strained to pull out a bundled, heavy down quilt. He was intrigued by her narrow, delicate torso, with small breasts but slightly wide hips for her tiny frame. He didn’t understand—nor would he have cared—that the fascinating play of bone and muscle and sinew of Netta’s arms as she hefted the puffy green quilt was the beginning of the loss of the elasticity of youth; the slightly widened hips and small curve of her stomach were those of a woman of twenty-six who has had a child.

  Netta moved back and forth carrying armfuls of towels and sheets, stuffing them unceremoniously into the linen closet in the hall. “There’s no point in folding all these, is there?” she said rather breathlessly, standing still for a moment with her hands on her hips. “Do you know that my mother actually irons her sheets? It’s such a waste of time since it all just has to be done all over again.” He nodded, but he was astounded by the eroticism of watching Netta dispatch all her possessions to their most likely storage space with such blithe practicality. It was a way of having a household that he hadn’t seen before, and she stood amid the rubble of scrunched newspapers and Styrofoam packing bubbles that clung to her long skirt with static electricity, triumphant and more arousing than anyone else he had ever encountered.

  He was impressed by all her ideas, by her absolute certainty about her profession, her household, her person. She never bothered with makeup or gave any thought to her clothes or hair, as far as he could tell. And not until tonight had he realized how pretty she was, and how unusually sexual, with her soft, soft voice and deliberate, thoughtful questions, her attention to his answers. He felt toward her a kind of considered desire that was new to him. It didn’t cross his mind that if he had passed her as a stranger on the street he wouldn’t have noticed her one way or another. David was so young, he didn’t quite understand that, for now, there were bodies to be found everywhere; he didn’t understand that he was really interested in Netta only for her mind.

  Anna Tyson was lying on her stomach on the floor, working with her crayons on a large pad of drawing paper that Dinah had given her the last time Anna Tyson had been at the Howellses’ house. David sat down beside her cross-legged and asked about the picture. He was too embarrassed to pay any more attention to Netta.

  “That looks like a really nice house,” he said, and Anna Tyson flipped over and lay on her back to study him. “Are you going to put any trees in the yard?” He didn’t have his mother’s assurance with small children. He had unconsciously slowed the rhythm of his speech as if Anna Tyson were dimwitted, and she narrowed her eyes and pinched in her lips disapprovingly. “No,” she said.

  “You could put some flowers in the yard,” he said, trying to speak to her as he might speak to anyone, but she wouldn’t be engaged by him. She held out the brown crayon she had been drawing with.

  “You do it!” she said.

  “Okay. Why don’t you help me? We could make some red flowers or some yellow flowers, maybe.” She didn’t comment. She merely rolled back over on her stomach and propped herself on her elbows to see what he would do.

  “Okay?” he asked, looking at her for permission but unnerved by her steady observation. “I’ll just draw some flowers over in this corner,” and he replaced the brown crayon in the shoebox of crayons, arranged much like Netta’s drawer of silverware, and searched for a red one. Netta was standing behind them, unfolding a brightly woven blanket over the back of the futon, but she stopped what she was doing to watch the two of them on the floor. All at once she swooped at David and snatched the box of crayons away, stooping down between the two of them. She looked at him with amazed and gentle reproach, holding the crayon box tightly against her chest.

  “You weren’t going to draw on her picture, were you?” she asked him plaintively.

  “I was just going to help her put some flowers in…”

  “David!” She seemed scarcely to believe him. “You wouldn’t really have done that.” And he had no answer at all, because he wasn’t sure what mistake he had made. Netta sighed in disappointment and sat down on the floor, putting the shoebox aside and picking up the drawing. She studied it for a moment, and then leaned over to show it to David, resting her shoulder against his arm as she held the paper up in front of him. “You see, this is Anna Tyson’s whole idea of what she wanted to create. She’s thought of this very carefully. Look at the smoke coming out of the chimney. She’s imagined a room inside this house with a fireplace where someone has built a fire. Lit a match, ignited the wood. Who built this warm fire inside the house, Anna Tyson? It must be cold outside, since the people who live in the house had to build a fire.” Her daughter was now stretched out on her side, pillowing her head on her outflung arm. Anna Tyson only shrugged one-sidedly, her eyelids drooping slightly. Now that her mother was talking with David, her own attention began to wander.

  Netta looked back to David, gesticulating with the drawing. “If you inhibit a child’s vision by imposing your own ideas… it’s almost like stealing,” she said pleadingly, trying to make him understand. He looked at the picture of a square brown house with two windows and brown smoke rising from the brown chimney. He didn’t know what to say. He was remembering the drive to Boston, with Netta tense and fragile for an hour or so until she had collapsed against the door in such a complete sleep that she had fallen forward against the shoulder harness with her head bowed against the window and her chin almost reaching the door lock.

  “Children can be so easily crushed, David,” Netta said gently. “Anna Tyson’s only four years old, and she’s just beginning to develop faith in her own convictions. She’s just beginning to form her own convictions.” Netta was leaning against him from shoulder to hip, although she was gazing at Anna Tyson’s picture. She let it fall to her lap and sat quietly, deliberating. Anna Tyson clambered up from the floor and stood for a moment, and Netta absently hugged her around the waist until Anna Tyson broke away and went off down the hall to her room.

  “You see what you would have been doing if you’d added anything to her picture, don’t you? It would have been an invasion of her imagination, which is so fragile at this stage. She’s just beginning to understand what’s real and what’s imagined.” David looked down at Netta. “I mean, I know you would never have intended anything like that, it’s just that… oh, well. But you should have thought about the damage you could have done,” she said, glancing up at him to see if she had made her point.

  David bent down and kissed her before he even realized what he was doing, and eventually they moved to the futon. Netta left him for a moment to check and see that Anna Tyson was asleep, and then came back to the living room wearing only her white cotton bikini panties and bringing with her a foil-wrapped condom, which she handed him with a little shrug of embarrassment. They made love uncomfortably on the narrow futon, and it didn’t occur to David to compare Netta and Christie in any way, except that when the thought of Christie crossed his mind he felt guilty. He fell briefly asleep, balanced precariously on the edge of the hard couch, and he came abruptly awake with Netta’s arm draped limply around his neck, his chin balanced against the top of her head. He felt relaxed and unanxious.

  When he and Christie made love—even though she was taking birth-control pills and he always used a condom—she became uneasy and nervous almost immediately afterward. And because of her anxiety, they were edgy toward each other until her period started. Twice she had driven to Bradford to buy a pregnancy test kit at a drugstore where she wouldn’t see anyone she knew, but each time she had doubted the results. David was pleased to think that Netta wouldn’t worry about any of thi
s. He was pleased with everything at the moment. He relished his inclusion in Netta’s chaotic household; he could imagine himself leading a comfortable life in such a haven.

  When he got home that night at 10:30, his father was making popcorn in the kitchen. “I didn’t know you’d be home so early,” Martin said. “The Red Sox are tied in the bottom of the seventh.” He raised his eyebrows in an invitation to David to join him.

  “I’m really tired,” David said, and passed by his father on his way to his room. Martin watched the popcorn fill the plastic dome of the popcorn popper, and worried about what might be happening between his son and Christie, wondering if he ought to follow David upstairs and ask him about it. But when Martin heard the roar of the water in the pipes as David turned on the shower, he decided to leave things alone for the time being.

  Netta lived two doors away from The Whole Grain Elevator, where almost everyone in town shopped for nice vegetables and fresh fish. Her apartment was half of the upstairs of a large house right off Carriage Street, along an unmarked, graveled lane called Marchand’s Drive that had become a shortcut to River Road. Only a few people in town still remembered the Marchand family, who had occupied the large house in the lane and had owned the thirty-five, acres behind it. Their drive had been extended long after they were gone from West Bradford. They had sold the house and much of the acreage to the college and a few home builders. Netta’s apartment was fashioned out of the bedroom and study and dressing room of L. J. Marchand, who had come back to West Bradford after World War II.

  Saturday morning Nat Kaplan, an older colleague of Martin’s, had picked up the Times at the news room and was glancing over the headlines as he made his way to The Whole Grain Elevator to pick up two loaves of bread and to see if there was any fresh asparagus. His wife, Moira, was hoping to serve it to their guests for dinner that evening. When he reached the curb of Marchand’s Drive, he folded the paper and tucked it under his arm and looked up at the house. For a while L. J. and Amelia Marchand had been great friends of his and Moira’s.