Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  When he and Moira had first moved to West Bradford, they had been delighted with and in awe of L.J.’s and Amelia’s sophistication. Amelia, who was British, was amused at everything American. She was delighted at what she perceived as a quality of uncritical innocence, and all her new friends played up to her expectations. The Marchands had been almost fifteen years older than the Kaplans, and yet Nat and Moira had been adopted by them more or less. L.J. doted on his wife, not only commending her humor but recounting incidents that illustrated her discriminating and meticulous sense of the ludicrous, her remarkable intelligence. These were things that Nat admired in his own wife, and it often seemed to him that he learned from L.J. the reasons and all the ways in which he loved Moira.

  The Marchands had been his example of how it was possible to live a married life, although a few years after they had arrived in West Bradford it turned out, to everyone’s surprise, that they weren’t much good at it themselves. They had divorced amid surprising rumors of violent brawls between the two of them, one spilling out onto the lawn of their house and being broken up by their dinner guests. Suddenly stories had abounded of L.J.’s indiscriminate and particularly inelegant affairs, and there had been a good deal of speculation about Amelia’s involvement with various other men. All this gossip had been very satisfying to those friends of theirs who had been confronted with their own failures in the face of the Marchands’ smug unity. But it had saddened and disappointed Nat, although their breakup hadn’t disillusioned him. The model he had perceived when observing the Marchands at the best of times was valid, even if its practitioners had failed. He had learned much about the strengths of his own marriage, which had left him and Moira estranged for years from his Jewish family and her Catholic one.

  After the divorce, Amelia had gone back to England, and Moira and she had kept up a brief correspondence before eventually losing touch. L.J. had moved away almost three decades ago to Connecticut, where he had remarried, and Nat had come across his obituary in the Times about seven years ago.

  Nat Kaplan was unaware that every time he passed that way he glanced up at the profile of the house, now laced with exterior wooden staircases after being turned into four units of college housing. Saturday morning, when Nat looked in that direction, Netta Breckenridge and David Howells were standing on the little porch at the top of her staircase. Netta leaned forward and ran her hands from David’s shoulders to his waist, resting the tips of her fingers just above his hips. She was apparently instructing him in some way, because he nodded and turned and hurried down the steps.

  Nat looked away, embarrassed not to have been minding his own business. But two nights later, when he and Moira were crossing the street on their way to the seven o’clock show at the movie theater, Nat noticed Netta once again under her porch light, this time with Owen Croft, who was lounging against the railing. When Nat stepped up on the curb and turned to give Moira his arm, he saw Owen reach forward and pull Netta toward him so that she disappeared entirely from Nat’s sight, since Owen’s back was to him. Nat was bothered and distracted by the scene all during the movie. He considered the unhappy connection between David Howells and Owen Croft, and he didn’t like what appeared to be their mutual association with Netta Breckenridge. That night, before he went to sleep, he mentioned both incidents to Moira.

  “Oh, I don’t see how that could mean anything. I think David Howells is only a junior or senior in high school,” Moira said. “I think he’s going with Meg Cramer or that Douglas girl. Netta Breckenridge must be ten years older than he is. He was probably helping her with something or doing an errand for her. She has a little girl, you know. He might have been baby-sitting.” But both Moira and Nat thought about David Howells and Netta Breckenridge and Owen Croft now and then over the next several days. They remembered the terrible years the Howellses had endured after the death of their second child, and they were both uneasy.

  When Moira and Ellen Hofstatter were sorting through boxes of donated books Tuesday evening for the library’s annual used-book sale, Moira grasped the opportunity to mention the possible situation lightly to Ellen, as though it were Moira’s own foolishness even to imagine there was any significance to the little tale. But Ellen’s face puckered in thought as she listened, and she didn’t respond except to sigh and tuck one wing of her extravagant hair behind her ear.

  When Ellen got home she was brutal in her fury at David and Netta when she told Vic what was going on. “Netta’s just spooky, but I’m crazy about David. He’s acting like an absolute fool, though, and he’s making Dinah miserable! I don’t know whether to say anything to Dinah or not. I mean about David and Netta. But I think you’d better warn Martin. The whole thing could turn into a real mess since Owen’s involved.”

  Vic did tell Martin the next day, when they were alone in The Review office, and Martin gazed blankly at him for a moment. “Ah, shit. Christ!” And he passed his hands over his temples and into his hair, swinging his chair away slightly at an angle to Vic. Neither of them said any more about it.

  Shortly after David had received his letter of acceptance from Harvard this past spring, he had also received a booklet called Living in Freshmen Dorms. He had put it aside, but Dinah had read it thoroughly and had made detailed lists of things he would need: 3 wool blankets; extra-long twin bed sheets; 1 trash can; 1 chair; 2 lamps, desk & standing; 8 towels and washcloths. It was suggested that he bring an umbrella. A raincoat. Dinah reeled through all the images she could summon and couldn’t recall ever having seen a Bradford and Welbern student wearing a raincoat. Sometimes they used umbrellas, especially the girls, but she was certain she had never seen a single person on campus under the age of twenty-one in anything she would have called a raincoat.

  “A raincoat, David. You’ll need a raincoat at Harvard.” She had followed David to his room and was standing in the doorway while he was leafing through a stack of garden catalogues. “What kind of raincoat are you going to get? I mean, I wouldn’t think you’d want the London Fog kind.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mom,” he said over his shoulder. “I don’t need a raincoat.”

  Dinah had left him alone, but she had continued to brood about it. It seemed unlikely to her that Harvard would bother to print up this booklet and list things that David would not need.

  The next morning at breakfast, she had urged Martin and David to bring Martin’s old trunk down from the attic and put it in David’s room so that he could begin gathering together the things he would be taking to school in September. This was only a small chore she asked them to do, a task that would take them perhaps ten minutes, yet it was a request that washed through their house like a wave, receding and leaving behind the emotional detritus of a thousand other domestic disagreements, accommodations.

  Although they did as she asked, both of them made it clear that they were irritated, each in his own way. David merely tightened his expression, his eyebrows drawing down, his lips tightening against making any spoken objection. Martin had put his coffee cup down and set aside his toast in pained resignation. “Dinah, the attic is filthy, and I’ve got an appointment with the dean at ten,” he said. That morning neither David nor Martin had been gracious about being inconvenienced; they thought it was unnecessary, before David had even graduated from high school, to wrestle the foot locker down the narrow, doglegged staircase from the attic.

  And neither one of them said aloud that he knew too well what Dinah’s air of urgency might portend. Unexecuted plans, lists of tasks not done—any loose ends—were a torment to Dinah. Her husband and her son dreaded three whole months of her impatient preparations. What she did not say was that David and Martin always made plans in a slapdash fashion, and then made only desultory, un-thought-out forays into the practical world to do what was necessary to carry them out.

  She understood that David loathed the notion of non-spontaneity; he romanticized the idea of a kind of schoolyard, pickup existence. He seemed to be alarmed at taking the future int
o account, and so, this past spring, Dinah never said to him that there was nothing less spontaneous than his careful garden. When she passed by his room and saw him plotting his garden on graph paper, surrounded at his desk by a welter of books and seed catalogues, she had hoped that this might be a project that would literally and figuratively ground him. As for Martin, he simply went through life without great anxiety, sure that those things that needed to be done would get done.

  And so it was she who, years ago, had found someone to substitute for her at the Artists’ Guild shop, and dashed out to drop off David’s forgotten running shoes or soccer shorts, or to get the leather shoelaces for the hiking boots he had bought without laces. It was she who frantically rinsed and arranged the dusty china coffee cups and saucers, and made both coffee and tea to accompany a birthday cake that Martin had bought at the bakery to be a surprise for Nat Kaplan at an impromptu committee meeting Martin had called for the same evening. It had not occurred to him that he couldn’t serve the cake with beer. The loose ends she picked up were the unimportant ones; they earned her next to no gratitude, and the very fact that she continued to do them maddened Ellen.

  “Why do you do these things? It’s not fair to either David or Martin. They take it for granted. Leave them in the lurch a few times, for God’s sake. They’ll learn to do these things for themselves. Why do you feel your time is less important than theirs?”

  Dinah had never been able to explain it to Ellen. Not for a moment did she believe her time was less valuable than anyone else’s on earth. Dinah felt that she was, in fact, rather selfish, and that she rarely did anything she didn’t choose to do. In Martin’s case Dinah knew he did his share; the two of them had settled into an equitable division of labor, and she relied enormously on his wholehearted optimism and his good nature in taking care of the things that fell into his domain within their marriage. She didn’t begrudge him any of her time. She found it comforting, in fact, to be attached to the world by any activity that had a bearing on the real life she lived. She might ponder black holes, anguish over the extinction of yet another species, the depletion of the ozone layer, the implacable movement of the universe, the inevitable chaos and tragedy bearing down hard upon the tiny earth, but she also remembered to take all of their skis to Rudy’s Sporting Goods to be tuned before Thanksgiving.

  And David. “You can’t possibly understand how vulnerable any teenager is unless you have one of your own,” she had finally replied to Ellen, not unkindly, since it had been Ellen’s own decision not to have children. “We’ve all repressed memories of our own misery at that age. Or we’ve edited the whole experience so that we can bear to remember any of it at all.” But Dinah gave up the effort of explaining when she saw Ellen’s expression of suppressed disagreement.

  David was so vulnerable because he had made an apparent success of his childhood. He was one of those children whom most adults come to believe they once were themselves, the sort of person they unwisely urge their own children to be, as though anyone could choose his or her nature. It was perfectly natural that the anxious parents of West Bradford, when they considered what appeared to be David Howells’s easy progress through the years, didn’t understand that his talent for growing up would not necessarily have any bearing on his success at being a grown-up. They had, of course, reinterpreted their own history in the context of their current lives; otherwise the contradictions were unsettling, were too illogical.

  David appeared golden in his small pond because he had such easily recognizable talents, scholastically and socially, but he had a naïveté that only his parents understood. It seemed to his parents that David’s faith in the logical progression of his own life was unaccompanied by any understanding that he would have to shape its direction. Eventually he would have to make invidious comparisons, unpleasant judgments, difficult choices. He accepted his existence at face value, with very little cynicism. Dinah didn’t know how to protect him from his own innocent expectations; for the time being, she did her best to guard him from disillusionment by covering his tracks and anticipating his failure to plan ahead.

  But it was true that morning in May, while she cleared the way for Martin and David to maneuver the trunk into the bedroom, that she became increasingly angry at both of them. She didn’t think they had the right to pass judgment on her request, to patronize her by their mutual air of condescension. She had sensed she was being ganged up on. Didn’t they remember all the requests they had made of her over the years that were whimsical, foolish, or a consequence of their own forgetfulness or lack of foresight?

  She hadn’t said any of this; she merely nurtured her resentment icily in the old farmhouse, which had been filled with the light of spring when the leaves were still only sparsely sketched on the trees and the interiors of the four-windowed rooms were bleached with a shadeless profusion of unshifting sunshine. She had remained silent. She could not have said to them that if David was leaving in three months, she needed to begin to believe it at once.

  And now, in August, the trunk still sat empty, so while David helped Netta sort through the things she had salvaged from her marriage, filling the cupboards and bureaus and bookshelves of her apartment on Marchand’s Drive, Dinah rummaged through all the closets of her own house, collecting whatever items she had on hand that David would need. Sarah would have made up her own lists competently, needing very few reminders, and Toby would have had his trunk packed by mid-July. He had planned ahead with a sort of desperation and had never seemed to be able to relax entirely into whatever pleasure was to be had in the immediate moment. Whereas Toby had always been wary of the immutable onslaught of his own future, David’s talent was to navigate the present with brilliance.

  Dinah had glanced out the window one afternoon years ago, when Toby was in third grade, and had seen David emerge from the schoolbus and turn to continue a conversation with a friend through one of the bus windows. Finally Toby had climbed down the steps and trudged past David and even Duchess, who abased herself before him, wriggling and shambling around him in a humble plea for affection. He didn’t pay any attention to the dog or to his mother when he passed her in the kitchen, except to acknowledge her with a monosyllabic greeting and go on his way up the stairs to his room. After a while Dinah had gone to find him there, where he was stretched out on his bed.

  “Are you okay, sweetie?” Dinah asked. “You feel all right?”

  He was quiet for a moment, thinking it over. “Matthew thinks that if me and Anne and Jason are all lawyers we could have a good business, because he’s black and Jason’s Jewish and Anne’s a girl, and she’s a Catholic.” He looked away from her after explaining this and didn’t say anything for a moment. Dinah was so taken aback at such sad precocity that she was struck dumb. “And I guess I’m a Christian. That’s what Matthew says.” He looked at her for confirmation, but she was searching for some way to discourage this whole line of thought. He went on. “Jason’s going to go to Columbia, and Matthew’s going to Yale, and Anne’s going to Vassar, and I’ll go to Harvard.” None of this was cute or amusing to Dinah, and it was clear it had filled him with anxiety. “But if I can’t get into Harvard I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t even know how I’ll get a job.”

  “Toby, you’re only eight…. It’s tokenism…. Why are you… ? Well…” She had paused to marshal her thoughts, to think of a way to discourage him wisely. “Look at Ellen! Or your Aunt Isobel! Neither of them even finished college! God, Isobel didn’t even start…” She was sputtering with frustration. Where had he even heard of these schools? What could have put this into his mind? She made an effort to collect herself, and sat down on the foot of Toby’s bed. “Listen, most of the people in the world don’t go to Harvard or Yale or Columbia or Vassar, and they have jobs. Most of the people in the world don’t go to college at all! And there are lots of fools out there who did go to those schools and don’t and shouldn’t have jobs!” She had been surprisingly angry—not at Toby, but at this suffocating set o
f expectations he had set up for himself when he was only eight years old. For a few minutes she thought she had assuaged his fears about his life as an adult, because he settled farther into his pillow and gazed out the window.

  “You mean, even if I go to Harvard I might not get a job?”

  And over the years whenever Martin and Dinah took the children into New York, Toby had trod after them moodily through any museum and lagged behind them along the frantic sidewalks. Once when Martin had persuaded David to go again with him and Sarah to the Museum of Natural History, Dinah had begged off, and Toby had simply refused, so he and she were having a sandwich at a deli they frequented whenever they were in the city.

  For as long as Dinah could remember, there had been a bearded, disheveled man who stood or sometimes sat in front of the deli and never spoke, but became upset and insistent when customers approached, leaning forward aggressively and thrusting toward them a jar that already contained a few coins. Dinah always had some change ready to give him, and she took his presence in stride after so many years. But that lunchtime, when they had not gone to the Museum of Natural History, Toby had pulled his mother back as they approached the deli.

  “What, Toby?” she had said, but he hadn’t answered her. He had only been in the fourth grade, but his pull on her arm and his braced feet and locked knees had brought her to a standstill. He wouldn’t answer her, though. “Come on! I’m hungry, and it’ll be too crowded for us to sit down if we don’t go in now.” She had disengaged her arm from his grasp and moved ahead, and he had, indeed, followed her to a booth, although he refused to have anything to eat. She didn’t attempt to chat with him; she concentrated on her own lunch.