When she announced that she had made reservations for seven o’clock that evening, however, David’s face registered slight irritation, and Martin said that they were both tired, but Dinah was adamant.
“I need to see Christie tonight, Mom,” David said. “It’s my last night at home.”
“I’d love to have Christie come, sweetie. Vic and Ellen are going to meet us there, too. And, you know, we’d like to see a little of you your last night at home,” she said lightly. “And we never did really celebrate Sarah’s birthday, anyway. This is an occasion. It needs to be observed. But we won’t be that long over dinner. You and Christie will have the rest of the evening. I know you’ll want to see some of your other friends, too.” She looked directly at him with an expression of huge good humor that brooked no disagreement.
The Candlelight Inn was the first civilized restaurant to which they had ever taken David and Toby. At the time, Dinah had been heavily pregnant with Sarah. Vic and Ellen had invited the four of them to meet there to celebrate Ellen’s birthday, and Dinah had insisted the boys wear blazers and slacks, which she had still been hemming fifteen minutes before they left the house. On the drive over to Lenox, Martin and Dinah had instructed the two little boys in a tone of deadly seriousness about not behaving as though they were at McDonald’s.
“Absolutely no diving under the table if you drop your napkin,” Martin said. “Or for any other reason,” he added, remembering how David and Toby could become giddy and silly at the Formica tables of McDonald’s while they waited for their parents to finish a quick cup of coffee. The boys’ voices would become loud and excited, they would kneel at their places or slide under the table to change seats, and Dinah and Martin would pretend to be surprised to find a different child sitting beside them on the vinyl banquettes.
Dinah had remembered to explain on the drive over to the inn that if either one of them dropped a knife or a fork, they were to let it lie. At home Toby so often forgot to keep his hands still, accidentally sweeping things off the table, and being lectured for it, that, once seated inside the restaurant, he had nervously clasped his hands together in his lap.
They had been in the East Room at a table in front of the fireplace. Toby and David were stiff and overdressed in their blazers, and were amazingly subdued as they drank Cokes and listened to the four adults discuss the menu over their drinks. David had opened his own menu and studied it solemnly, and when their waiter had come and taken Ellen’s and Dinah’s orders and then had turned to David, he had looked up at the man and inquired, “How is the lamb tonight?” And without a blink of his eye, the waiter had replied, “It’s very good, sir.”
Dinah’s and Martin’s eyes had met in amazement in one of those moments of revelation when one must acknowledge the individuality—the utter separateness—of one’s children from oneself. And because of the absolute lack of hesitation on the part of that waiter, The Candlelight Inn had been Dinah’s favorite restaurant in the world ever since. But she loved it anyway, as did the whole family. The food was excellent and unpretentious, the service was discreet, the rooms were charming, and the Howellses had fallen into the habit of celebrating the significant events of their lives there.
This evening, though, when Dinah looked down the table, she realized that eating dinner in public affected people as if they were performing onstage, and she thought that in this case it was all to the good. Vic and Ellen hadn’t yet arrived, and conversation flagged. Sarah launched into a long tale illustrating the unfairness of her field hockey coach, and Christie helped her out, chiming in with remembered incidents from her past. If there had not been waiters coming and going, however, and diners at other tables who glanced their way occasionally, the five of them would have sat silent in an atmosphere permeated with the tension of David’s imminent departure.
Dinah opened her menu, and said down the table to Martin that they might as well go on and order a first course. David and Christie studied a menu between the two of them. Christie thought she might only want to split a first course of the house smoked salmon. “They have the best desserts here,” she explained, “but I always eat too much of everything else to have any.”
But before the waiter approached the table, Ellen swept in on a wave of dramatic euphoria, with Vic just behind her. Dinah could see Ellen’s mood wash over everyone who glanced her way as she unwrapped a scarf from her luxurious hair, swept off her cape and gave it to the young woman who greeted them, and shook out her hair, ruffling it with her fingers to bring back its volume. Sometimes Dinah was put off by Ellen’s theatricality, but this evening she rejoiced as her friend blithely wove her way among the tables, already initiating conversation, her voice swooping over the tables around them.
“We saw you, David. We weren’t that far behind you. I don’t know how you got here so much ahead of us. We saw you turn off on Route Forty-three and then you simply disappeared!” She was seating herself with much fussing about, slinging the strap of her purse over the back of her chair but removing it when it swung to and fro, nudging her hip. The hostess materialized at her side, and Ellen beamed at her with approval. “Oh, yes, yes. Please put this with my cape! That will be wonderful. Just wonderful.” And then she looked back to David. “You ought to lighten your foot on the accelerator, my dear.”
Dinah and Martin and Sarah had arrived together in Martin’s car, since there was only room for two in the fully packed Volvo. David had picked up Christie and driven over on his own. Now David relaxed in his chair for the first time that evening, grinning at Ellen, crossing his arms, and rocking gently against the chair back. He and Ellen had been good friends all his life. “Oh, yeah. I really have to watch it. A car like that Volvo wagon. I wouldn’t want it to get away from me. Four cylinders of Swedish lightning!” They all laughed, and Dinah was glad to see that the meal would be a comfortable affair after all. David went on to explain. “There’s a shortcut through Richmond. It saves about twenty minutes. That’s how we always go to Tanglewood.”
“It’s a terrible road, though, David,” Vic said, and the conversation became easy while they all began to look at their menus and a waiter brought drinks to Vic and Ellen.
Sarah leaned around Christie to speak to David. “Do you remember when we tried to convince Mom that the next time we buy a car it should be something besides another Volvo?” She glanced around the rest of the table, signaling amusement, but David shook his head that he didn’t remember.
“Oh, David. You do. Don’t you remember? Mom was saying how safe they were, that we didn’t need to be able to go any faster. That the ‘point of having a car at all is just to be able to get from one place to another.’” Sarah made her tone didactic.
David smiled. “Oh, yeah. We were at the mall?”
Sarah laughed and nodded, and Dinah smiled, too, knowing now where they were headed. “Yeah. At Cross-gates.” She paused, to ensure the attention of these closest of her family’s friends. “And my mom pulled up at a stoplight and looked over at this car next to us and she said, ‘Now, I can see that a car like that might be handy just for doing errands around town.’ And David and I looked over at it, and it was this incredible white Porsche!”
Dinah shrugged and joined the general laughter, raising her hands in a gesture of resignation, of culpability, shaking her head in a show of wry wonder at her own naïveté. She was glad to have Sarah and David reminiscing; she was pleased to be in good company. She could hear the fondness in her children’s voices, the affection in which they held her. But it was also as if the lovely, sharp, first chill of fall had crept into her own spirit, because she came up hard against the fact that she no longer had any power to protect the children from anything at all. She couldn’t, in fact, be sure they traveled only in safe cars—a phobia with her since Toby’s death. She could no longer be sure that they wore their seat belts, put on life jackets if they went sailing. She was virtually powerless; she could not keep them from harm. And all her efforts at having done so—“Be hom
e before dark! Don’t talk on the phone during a thunderstorm! Those plastic bags from the cleaners are not toys!”—would be relegated to the nostalgia of their youth. She and Martin had become anecdotes in the lives of their own children.
Martin slept soundly, as usual, but Dinah heard David come in about two o’clock in the morning and move around the house, opening the refrigerator door, running water. She stayed where she was, turning from one side to another in an attempt to get comfortable. She was too hot under the down comforter and too cold without it, and she would have liked to go downstairs and read, but she knew she should give David the solitary run of the nighttime rooms. When she did wake up early in the morning, she had thrown the comforter off and was cold. She was surprised to see that Martin wasn’t asleep beside her. His side of the bed was empty.
In the kitchen she discovered she was the last one to come downstairs, even though it was only six-thirty. Martin had made coffee, and Sarah was having a glass of orange juice at the table. Dinah had planned on preparing a grand meal to see David off. She had bought beautiful cured bacon from a little store in Vermont that smoked its own meat, and blueberries at The Whole Grain Elevator for pancakes, but everyone had eaten. Martin and David were huddled over an enormous schefflera in a terra-cotta pot that Christie had given David for his dorm room.
“There’s no way in the world we can fit that thing into the car, David. We’ll bring it on Parents’ Weekend.”
“I know I can fit it in. Scheffleras are probably the best plants to clean toxic substances out of the air. They work almost like a scrubber.”
“Well, you’ll have to hold your breath until October, then. There’s not one inch of space left in that car.”
“Dad, don’t worry about it. I’ll get it in,” David said stonily, and went out the back door and around to the driveway, where the car was parked, to survey the possibilities.
Dinah moved around the kitchen helplessly, collecting cereal bowls, putting things back in cabinets. “Doesn’t anyone want some bacon and pancakes? I have beautiful huge blueberries that I bought yesterday.”
Martin finished his coffee and poured another cup. He was already dressed in khakis and an old plaid shirt, while Dinah had only taken the time to search for and slip on her pink flannel winter robe. “I’d like to get going as soon as we can,” Martin said. “If it takes us about three and a half hours, we’ll probably be earlier than most, and it won’t be so hard to unload all this stuff. I don’t imagine I’ll get home before about four o’clock.”
“Don’t you think we all ought to sit down and go over this list one more time to be sure he’s got everything?” Dinah asked. This was flying past her, this moment before David would be gone.
“God, no, Dinah. If he’s forgotten anything he’ll have to buy it in Cambridge. Or we can mail it to him, if it’s that important.”
Dinah was scanning the list when David came back into the room. “I can fit it in, Dad. There’s no problem.”
Martin was uneasy this morning, too, with a kind of regret and tension that he hadn’t expected to feel. He wanted to get this over with. “Okay, then? Are you ready to hit the road?”
“What did you do about the standing lamp, David?” Dinah asked. “Did you get it packed?” And David nodded in her direction, but he avoided holding her glance.
“Yeah,” he said to his father, “I’m all set.”
Martin rinsed his coffee cup and headed out the door, and David and Sarah followed him, while Dinah still stood in the center of the kitchen, running her eye down the carefully printed and now smudged list, each item having been crossed out, she presumed, as it had been put in the car. She looked around at the empty room in bewilderment, and her eyes filled with tears that she could not stop. She wiped them away quickly with her sleeve before she trailed after the rest of her family.
Martin was sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open, unsuccessfully trying to slide the seat back against the immovable mass of David’s possessions. “I’ll have to sit closer in than I like until we unload,” he said to David, who was leaning against the open door while Sarah stood by, holding the schefflera.
David straightened away from the driver’s side and made his way around the car. Then he stopped and turned to his mother, who was standing in backless summer slippers on the cold, damp grass along the drive, fiddling with the sash of her robe. He stopped just there in front of her, and when she met his eyes she saw that he, too, was near tears. She simply moved toward him, and he embraced her fiercely, raising her up on tiptoe, wrapping his arms up around her shoulders, and putting his face down against the top of her head.
“Oh, sweetie,” she said, overcoming the break in her voice, “oh, sweetie! I hope everything is just perfect. I hope you have a wonderful time and… I hope… well, I’m so excited for you! Harvard’s lucky to get you.”
David held on to her tightly. “I love you, Mom,” he said, almost brusquely, and then turned and climbed into the passenger seat of the car. She followed him into the drive and stood beside the car while Sarah gave him the schefflera to balance in his lap. Dinah bent down into the car and kissed him on the cheek. “I love you, too, sweetie. We’ll miss you.” She backed away a bit so David could close the door. Then she bent forward again to say to Martin to be careful, and the car began to back slowly into the U of the driveway to turn around. Martin put the gear in neutral while he twisted to shift several items to one side so that he could see clearly from the rearview mirror, and then the car began to move slowly toward the end of the drive.
“Wait, Martin,” Dinah called. “Wait a minute!” She waved the list at him frantically, and the car stopped and then slid back toward her in reverse. She was standing on the passenger’s side, and David rolled down the window, looking more businesslike now, more harried.
“David, look at this,” Dinah said, holding up the list to him and indicating an item that hadn’t been crossed out. “You didn’t get this in! You forgot to pack a trash can for your room.”
“I don’t need a trash can. I can get one there.”
Dinah felt almost frantic at this omission, and David saw it on her face.
“All right, Mom. I’ll get the one from my room.” He was not a bit rude, not even impatient, but all the sentiment of a moment ago was gone. He handed the schefflera to Sarah and dashed for the house, appearing again in moments with the blue metal wastebasket in his hand. He opened the rear station wagon door and squeezed it in and then, with Sarah’s help, he quickly resettled himself and the schefflera in the front seat.
“Have a safe trip,” Dinah said as the car moved slowly down the drive again, and David waved his hand up over the roof at her and Sarah as the car passed by them.
Dinah watched as the car paused before turning onto Slade Road. The last thing she noticed before it disappeared from view was David’s trash can, wedged against the tip of his skis and the rear window, mouth outward, still full to the brim with trash.
473 Slade Road
West Bradford, MA
September 7, 1991
Franklin M. Mount
Dean of Freshmen
Harvard College
12 Truscott Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Dear Mr. Mount,
We appreciate the effort Harvard College makes to know its students, and we welcome the opportunity to offer you our own insights and reflections concerning our son David, who will enter the freshman class this September. It seems to us that David will have very little trouble becoming acclimated to his new academic environment, and we don’t expect he will have a great deal of difficulty establishing a comfortable social life for himself in fairly short order. He has always been a good student, a person of integrity, and he has dealt successfully with the tragedy of the loss of his younger brother when the two of them were twelve and thirteen years old. We think, quite frankly, that he would be happy in any challenging situation and that Harvard is lucky to have him.
; David has no medical problems that require special attention and has never suffered an allergic reaction to any medication. We think he has a wonderful year ahead of him, as we hope all the Harvard community will enjoy.
Thank you for your attention and your interest. We look forward to visiting Cambridge and seeing David during Parents’ Weekend in October.
Sincerely,
Mr. and Mrs. Martin Howells
Dinah decided to accompany Martin when he took Duchess for her afternoon walks. For the first few weeks after David’s departure, she had been reluctant to leave the house in case her son might phone. In fact, he had called only once, and nothing he had said had appeased the longing that his brisk, busy voice evoked. He had needed to ask her advice about setting up a bank account, and then he had said he was fine. His classes were fine. He liked his roommate, and his room was fine. She hung up the phone, assuring herself that she was delighted he was content, but she had been momentarily shattered with yearning.
As she and Martin cut across the front yard to reach the sidewalk, Duchess kept circling back on her leash, tangling herself around their legs, wagging her tail, and bobbing in a little prance of her front feet in her excitement and delight at having Dinah with them. “This will be a good thing,” Dinah said. “I mean, to take a walk in the afternoons. I never get any exercise.”
“Walking with Duchess isn’t very invigorating,” Martin said.
“Maybe we can train her to heel,” Dinah mused, but they both looked doubtfully at the shambling dog, and Dinah realized Duchess’s muzzle was almost completely gray.
Once they reached the museum grounds, Duchess calmed down, taking Dinah’s presence for granted and on the alert for squirrels. The tourist season was over. Although the students were back, they never minded if there were dogs loose on campus, and Martin stopped at the foot of Bell’s Hill and let Duchess off her lead. Dinah had paused by the small markers at the edge of the parking lot and was bending over to make out the words, rubbing her fingers over the engravings to feel the letters. Martin went a little distance up the trail to be sure that Duchess hadn’t strayed too far, and then he stopped and waited for Dinah to reach him. They made their way along the path fairly briskly, Martin leading the way and Duchess crashing through the brush behind them.
Fortunate Lives Page 25
