Blessings (17 page)

“But I sent you a card and said I would,” she’d said.

“Well, my mother said you never would,” Lucy had said, pushing aside her veil. Perhaps she’d imagined it, but Lydia thought that many of her old friends looked surprised when they saw her at the reception afterward, and one girl she’d scarcely known took her hands and told her how terribly terribly sorry she’d been about
Benny, and what a wonderful wonderful man he’d been, and how was the baby, was she well?

“She’s scarcely a baby anymore,” Lydia had said. “She’s almost five.”

She’d stopped afterward at her parents’ house, but both of them were out, and she could not stay over because of Mr. Foster waiting in the car, his head swiveling as though New York were surrounding him on all sides and surreptitiously creeping forward to seize and eat him. Driving across the park, she’d realized that the city was like the pond at Blessings, that her life here had been a small splash, a series of concentric circles, and now the water was smooth again. She’d taken her gold compact out of her purse, the compact with her monogram that Mrs. Carton had given her for a wedding gift, and she’d looked at her own face in the mirror within the lid, touched her brow, her upper lip, to see that she was really there.

She’d been so tired when she got back to Blessings that day. Her garters had bitten into the flesh of her upper thighs and left red marks, and Meredith had come in while she was changing and tried to touch them, and she’d had to tell her that people needed their privacy when they were dressing and undressing. Now people changed clothes on the beach in front of strangers and thought nothing of it. People hired men to take care of their property, and somehow, out of the blue, infants turned up in their living quarters, needing to be held and fed and somehow cared for by these men who were supposed to be pruning the trees and keeping the creeping chrysanthemum from creeping.

But Faith was surprisingly easy to feed. Mrs. Blessing had done it twice now, once when Charles was out, once when he’d handed her the baby and the bottle. She had to hold her in her right arm now because her left ached so much of the time, and she worried that if the feeding went on too long the weight would be too much for her. But so far it had not. The baby sucked on the nipple with an avidity and a need that was somehow touching. Mrs. Blessing could not remember what it had been like to feed Meredith.
The baby nurse had said she was inexperienced. The woman had rolled her
r
’s, so that
inexperience
sounded much more serious than it might have otherwise. She was German. Ethel Blessing always got the servants no one else wanted, the black cooks, the Irish girls with spaces between their front teeth, the German baby nurses during the war. It had occurred to Mrs. Blessing as she held the bottle while the child sucked noisily that perhaps she had never actually given Meredith a bottle.

She had been so young when Meredith was born. She’d been only nineteen years old when she’d gone to that drinks party she had dreamed of as an old woman in the hospital. Frank Askew had raised his glass from the other side of the room. He had given her that hard look that made her groin swim and her face turn red. She thought no one noticed. How stupid she’d been. How surprised everyone had been to see her, only five years later, at Lucy Warren’s wedding, as though it had been arranged for the earth to swallow her up. Of course her mother had wanted her to stay hidden away at Blessings.

Six months after that first time, Frank had reached into the neck of her yellow voile dress and pulled her breast loose to kiss its upper curve, and she had felt her knees bend, and open. His mustache scratched her skin slightly, and then he drew back and stared down at the dark nipple, the swell of the skin, and his pelvis stopped pushing against hers as though he’d been struck by lightning.

“You need to go get looked at,” he’d said, pulling the top of her dress up far higher than it was meant to be.

“Get looked at?”

“By a doctor.”

She was so stupid then that she had needed a man to look at the swell of her breasts and feel the slight curve of her belly and tell her she was pregnant. “Eleven weeks,” said the doctor in West-chester whom Frank sent her to see the next day. That night she went to Chez Nous, one of those clubs that had sprung up where girls who’d gone to college and come home again and men who
were waiting to be shipped overseas went to have a good time before they got married, or had children, or surrendered to being grown-up. She’d had too much to drink, then insisted that everyone at her table go on the subway to a place she’d heard about downtown for breakfast. She was fast-talking and frantic that night, not like herself, and the New York she encountered was not her New York. It was an underground city in which strangers sat opposite one another on the train, eyes blank, shoulders touching anonymously. The New York she knew was the opposite of anonymous, in which all of them went to the same few schools and knew one another’s parents and the servants knew everyone else’s servants and everyone used the same apothecary and everyone’s children wore the same broadcloth coat with a velvet collar and matching leggings from The Childe’s Shoppe. It was, she was discovering, a small town in which things were secret, not because they were not known but because they were not spoken aloud.

The place she’d heard about turned out to be nothing more than an all-night luncheonette, but almost everyone there was someone they knew, except for one disgusted cab driver at the counter, eating sausages and making comments to the waitress about trust-fund babies and rich kids and uptown brats. Lydia threw up in the ladies’ room, which smelled like disinfectant and had a sign that said,
DON’T WASTE PAPER
—
THERE’S A WAR ON.
When she came out Benny was at a table by himself near the window, wearing his new uniform. The sleeves were too long, the pants too short.

“Keep me company,” he’d said. “Your brother stood me up.”

He was drunk, too, and when he ordered fried eggs she thought she’d be sick again. She had toast with butter, and tea that she drank in little sips. Neither of them said much until Benny reached over and took her hand. “What’s the matter, Lydie?” he said, and she started to cry. The only words that would come were “I need.” “I need I need I need” between wet sobs and heaves and then another trip to the ladies’.

“What do you need, Lydie?” he said when she’d come back.

“I need help,” she said softly.

“What kind of help?”

“I need someone to marry me.”

There was a silence. Benny buttered his toast. The cab driver said, “You can’t respect a person who doesn’t work for a living.” The waitress said, “Don’t be so hard on people.”

Benny said, “I’d marry you. I’d be happy to marry you.”

Now Meredith said, “The landscaping is looking lovely, Mother.”

Lydia’s head came up slowly, like one of the water birds fishing around the pond that tried to pretend that they weren’t there, that they were really a rock or a stick or a part of the dock. She hadn’t been following the conversation. Her head hurt. “I need aspirin,” she said.

“I’ll get some,” Meredith said. “Nadine? Can you bring two aspirin and some fresh water? Are you all right, Mother?”

“Don’t fuss, Meredith. It’s only a headache.”

“You have the healthiest pink dogwoods I’ve ever seen, Lydia,” said Eric, whom she’d never grown to like, although to his credit he was always respectful and never slobbered much, unlike Jess’s oldest son-in-law, the one who’d called Jess “Mama.” Not Ed, who was married to Jeanne, but Brian, who’d been married to Marian, the one who died of cancer of the pancreas. That was how she remembered people now: heart, stroke, cancer of the pancreas. She swallowed the aspirin slowly.

Meredith looked so much like her father that anyone who saw the two of them together would have been amazed by the resemblance. No one ever had seen the two of them together. When Meredith traveled to town as a child it was to go to the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show or the Plaza for tea with her grandparents and then to come back to Mount Mason again. After Lucy Warren’s wedding Mrs. Blessing had gone back herself only three other times. During her pregnancy, and then when the baby was small, she had sustained herself with the knowledge that before long the war would be over, and she would leave Mount Mason
and go back to the city. Not leave for good, of course: Blessings would always be her second home, for weekends and holidays. But the city was where she belonged. When Benny’s mother had first mentioned that long-ago aunt with the red hair and Mr. Carton had written the will that left Meredith everything, it had given her hope that everyone would be as publicly credulous as Benny’s parents were, even the people who had been in the hallways when she and Frank Askew had emerged, never together, always one at a time, from certain unused rooms at certain apartments and clubs.

She had not counted on her mother. The week after Lucy Warren’s wedding her parents had come for the weekend. While her father danced Meredith around the living room, singing, “Let me call you sweetheart,” her mother had taken her out onto the porch and handed her the deed to the property. “Ethel Simpson Blessing to Lydia Blessing Carton.” That was how the transference read. Her father had built the barn, added the porch, planted the trees around the pond, put up the fences, landscaped the terrace gardens, laid out the orchard. All of it had been owned by his wife.

“Ah, Lyds, my love,” he’d sighed over dinner, his hands shaking as he lifted his coffee cup, the whites of his eyes gone yellow, “I miss this place terribly.”

The past danced again with the present in her mind. Meredith was talking, using the flat of her hand to smooth back her hair. Lydia had named her after Benny’s grandmother. The Cartons had liked that. They’d sent a monogrammed locket from Tiffany. Her mother had handed her the deed and said, “Now you’ll always have a place to live.”

Two months later her parents moved into a small apartment at a residential hotel on Fifth Avenue. Then there was no place for Lydia in New York, and no money for her to buy a place of her own. Her mother gave her an allowance to run Blessings, and her parents stayed at the house one weekend a month, and during the month in the summer when Meredith was in Newport. “I’d rather be here with the little girl,” her father complained, but that was how Ethel Blessing arranged things.

Her father had seemed to get smaller and grayer, and afterward Lydia thought that maybe he’d been sick for years before he died. Or maybe he was just exhausted from the unacknowledged drama of his life. Sunny had betrayed him. He had gone into advertising and made a huge success of a slogan for a pen that read, “He’s got the prettiest penmanship at Princeton—and he uses a Papermate!” When Sunny spoke of their father, when he came out to Blessings alone for the weekend, circling the pond with his head lowered and his cigarette trailing a plume of gray smoke, it was with amused contempt. On the patio one evening he had said, “Have you ever noticed that Father has never said anything of moment in his entire life?”

“You’re so hard on him, Sunny,” she had said.

“Ah, Lyds my love,” Sunny had replied, imitating their father. “If only I were.”

Their mother had given Sunny an allowance, too. Perhaps, Lydia had thought, she even put their father on an allowance. Maybe that accounted for the boxes. From time to time her father had sent Lydia a box at Blessings by mail, so that the postman had to send a boy to drive it out. “Simpson’s Fine Textiles,” it said on each of the boxes, and when she had opened the first one there was a bolt of heavy green brocade, the color of new leaves, and a note from her father on his personal stationery. “Put this away for a rainy day,” it said. “Love and kisses, Papa.” The boxes came two or three times a year, always with the same message, always with a bolt of fabric.

Beneath the fabric was money, lots of money, in big packages encircled with paper bands, like the money in kidnap scenes in movies. She estimated that the first box contained four thousand dollars, and then there was a second, and a third, and by the time her father died there were stacks of boxes in the garage attic, most of them unopened. It seemed dirty, that money, the green faded to gray, the paper soft from the hands that had touched it. To have money in her world had been to go to the right schools, live in a proper apartment, furnish it in the old style. It was not to have
boxes of bills, like some old miser with a mattress full. They never spoke of it, she and her father, or her mother, either, or even Sunny. Sometimes she almost forgot it was there; sometimes she wondered whether the mice had gotten to it. By the time Meredith was starting school there was enough money over the garage to buy herself a place in the city. But for some reason she had had the guest rooms painted instead, and had stayed put.

“Do you want tea with your rice pudding?” Meredith asked.

“We’ll have tea on the porch,” Lydia said.

“Whatever you say, Mother.”

“Those are beautiful delphiniums,” Eric said heartily, pulling out her chair as she rose slowly.

“Staking,” she said. “If you want delphiniums you must keep them staked.” There were still some things of which she was absolutely certain.

S
kip heard Jennifer Foster arrive before the roofers or Nadine did, while Mrs. Blessing’s daughter and son-in-law were at the club playing golf. The idle on her car had been fixed; Skip could hear it as she pulled up and into one of the bays of the garage. When he put Faith in her arms the baby pushed back and stared her in the face. The books said Faith wouldn’t have stranger anxiety until she was ten months old. Maybe by then she wouldn’t consider Jennifer or Mrs. Blessing strangers.

“Good morning, pretty girl,” Jennifer said in that high voice people always used for babies. “How are you? Did you sleep good last night?”

“She did,” Skip said. “If I put her down at midnight now she goes straight through until six. I weighed her on the feed scale in the back of the garage and she’s up to fourteen pounds, which I think is pretty big.”