Blessings (6 page)

But a couple of days in, he’d realized that, no matter how often and how haphazardly he put his index finger in her creased little palm, she would surround it with her fingers like a greeting. “Your baby will hold tight to your hand!” the book burbled, and without realizing it he’d fixed on that one word, the word
your.
Or maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe it was when he was raking out the old branches underneath the stand of birch trees along the fence that bordered Rolling Hills Road and was surprised by a small sound, like the one the deer made when they were startled, and realized that she had sneezed.

“Bless you,” he murmured, and when he knocked off at the end of the day he looked up “colds” in the book’s index.

Maybe he didn’t really have a choice, like so many people who wound up with children haphazardly, accidentally. When he thought of what else he could do, he could imagine only various cold and cruelly lit rooms that smelled of disinfectant. The hospital in Mount Mason, where he’d had his leg set when he was fourteen and his burns treated when the deep-fat fryer at Burger King spit back at his scrawny bicep just before closing one night, leaving a magenta blot. The police station, that looked like an elementary school and smelled like one, too, Lysol and fried food and cigarettes, where he’d sat on a bench with his hands cuffed behind him after the robbery. The courthouse, that had been refurbished in the sixties, so that it was still a grand limestone hulk without but inside a maze of particle-board paneling and checkerboard linoleum and gray metal desks.

He wasn’t taking anybody to any of those places, those places of impermanence and phony concern. He might as well drop this baby down a well and listen for the splash. He knew those people. They’d piss away a couple of years, passing around paper, looking for a mother who just wanted to be left in peace. The little girl would be three years old and still living in some lousy foster home with people who spent the money the state sent on Camel Lights and a satellite dish.

He bought some disposable cameras, and he took her picture, sleeping, waking, even screaming. Her angry maroon color had faded, by the beginning of the second week, to an almost ghostly white with a faint mottling of pink, like the flowers on the magnolia trees along the drive. Her umbilical cord fell off, scaring the hell out of him until he saw the small neat navel in its place, and he took the barrette that had been clipped to the cord, and the cardboard box, and the flannel shirt, and put them all together on the top shelf of the closet in the back room. He put the cameras next to them. He was constructing a history for her the way he wished someone had constructed one for him.

And as though she knew all this, on the tenth day she rested. He
lined the bottles up in the refrigerator, put her down, and fell asleep himself, expecting to wake to crying in an hour or two. And instead she slept until three, woke and ate, went back to sleep, complained just before dawn, drank down a bottle scarcely waking, and went back to sleep again, her small mouth pursed, her fingers splayed, until around nine o’clock. So he had time to go up the basement steps, make the coffee for Mrs. Blessing, clear fallen branches from the drive, and water the vegetables and the zinnias before she woke demanding more. In the afternoon he rode the tractor far from the house and took her from the sling to lay her on a towel beneath leggy elm trees waving in the wind. A breeze blew and her eyes widened and he swore that she smiled vacantly at the sky. The book said that she wouldn’t smile for weeks, but he knew what he’d seen. “Whoa,” he said, kneeling beside her. Solemnly she blinked, closed her eyes, and tightened her fist around his finger. As far as Skip was concerned, that was that. She was his.

O
ften in the middle of the night Lydia Blessing had wakened to the sound of a baby’s cries. Over the years she had learned to identify the sources: sometimes something as pedestrian as the wail of a cat in heat; occasionally the high thin call of the coyote, which had snuck back into this part of the Northeast from the West a decade before.

The first few months after she had discovered she was pregnant, when the new wedding band, while slender, felt like some unexpected weal on her finger, the cries had seemed to be the spectral calls of the child within. That was after she had moved her things from her parents’ house in the city to Blessings for what she had vaguely thought of as a wartime interlude, Benny’s letters on transparent airmail paper arriving in the old rural-route mailbox.

And then Meredith had been born, and the cries had been real, yet somehow as foreign as their imaginary counterparts. Slowly she would struggle through the veil of her dreams to the momentarily sinister forms of the lamp, the dresser, the highboy, and the desk ranged around her bedroom, and for a moment she would wonder whose baby that was, crying. Her legs would struggle with the sheets, the blankets, and then there would come the even
tap tap tap
of the footsteps of the baby nurse that her mother had hired and sent out from the city, a thin woman with cropped hair and a faint middle-European accent who played solitaire in the kitchen in her off-hours. Lydia Blessing could remember, in those early weeks, thinking she would not be able to go back to sleep, hearing
the tick of the mantel clock, feeling the soreness where she’d been stitched straight up the middle after the Caesarian birth. And then she would waken again to the bright clear light of full day through the branches of the maple outside the bedroom window. She never slept that deep sleep now, and her bedroom in the dark was as familiar as the dimpled face of the moon over the pond.

In the last two weeks the cries had come again, more plaintive and more demanding even than those she had heard when there was truly a baby in the house. Sometimes she thought she was dreaming of those days, sixty years ago now, when Meredith had cried and been comforted, in some fashion, by that foreign woman, who carried the small flannel-wrapped bundle under her arm like a loaf of fractious bread. Sometimes she would start awake, then realize she was hearing the sound of a radio faintly from the garage apartment. She had told Nadine to put a stop to that.

Tonight she could hear nothing but the steady timpani of thunder rolling in from the northeast. She went to the window and peered out into the darkness, but the storm clouds had muted a half-moon. Most of the time she could see one corner of the barn roof from the sleeping porch off her bedroom, one green-shingled curve and one of the lightning rods, a horse in full canter in copper faded to a dull brown. She had put the horse atop the rod herself, held around her waist by her father at the top of a long, long ladder held steady by two of the men who had built the barn. “Must everything be a show?” her mother had said in the dining room that morning when her father had suggested it. Ethel Blessing had not even come down to watch. She had stayed on the long front porch, in a rocking chair, while everyone, the servants, the workmen, the gardeners, had come to see Lydia lift the glowing copper horse into place. She remembered that it had been warm in her hands. Sunny had been at Benny Carton’s house in Rhode Island that day, she remembered. It was her only disappointment.

Her father had built the barn in the summer of 1930, when there were no jobs in Mount Mason. The father and an uncle of one of the girls in Lydia’s class at Bertram’s had killed themselves after the stock market crash, and two of the girls in her class
had gone elsewhere even though Miss Bertram had offered them scholarships. But Lydia’s mother had never believed in the stock market, or even banks for that matter, and somehow all of the money from the business she had inherited from her father, which had once been called Simpson’s Dry Goods but was now called Simpson’s Fine Textiles, was safe. They moved not long after the crash from a narrow house on Seventy-seventh Street near Lexington Avenue to the larger house on Seventy-fourth Street near the park, a house that was sold at a considerable loss by a man who had had to be hospitalized at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital just before the Christmas holidays after he realized that all his capital was gone.

The people in Mount Mason had been glad of the work, and the barn had gone up fast, the wall supports and roof struts laid out flat in the middle of the big grass gully next to the swamp that Edwin Blessing had decided upon for its site. He had also decided that Sunny should work on the barn with the hired laborers from town. “Make a man of him,” Mr. Blessing kept saying, as though even character could be contracted out. “Teach him the value of hard work.” Sunny had been thirteen years old that summer. His hair grew pale as sunlight, and his skin golden. Lydia thought her brother was beautiful.

“I was so in love with him when we were children,” Jess had told her one day when they were waiting to have lunch until Sunny’s train came in, the children passing time playing Parcheesi in the library. “He was so dear.” Lydia remembered that Sunny had not arrived for lunch that day, had come on the last evening train smelling of gin, a fresh cut at the corner of one eye. She had put him to bed in his usual room. “I’m a bad boy, Lydie,” he’d muttered, belching loudly and then falling asleep as though he’d been given an anesthetic. Fifty years ago, that had been, and she could still see his tanned arm dangling from the single bed.

Her sheets were cool as she slid back between them, shining white as a night-light in the dark room. In the years that Blessings had been hers and hers alone, she had never had a colored sheet in the house. She intended to keep it that way. White towels, too.

She had not been down to the barn in many years. It was deserted now, empty of all but pigeons and mice and the odd foraging fox. There was a long steep slope down to it; the builder had said that was the disadvantage to the site, but Father had wanted it there, with a long back drive to the road and a deep pasture to one side. The wife of the farmer from whom he’d bought the cows wept in the doorway as they were driven into a truck with open slatted sides, and Lydia, who was in the old Lincoln with her father, had thought that the farmer’s wife must know each cow individually, and was sad to have them leave. Bessie. Brownie. Calico the calf. Perhaps she was saying good-bye in her mind. Years later Lydia had told the story at a dinner party, described the woman in the pink flowered apron holding open the screen door with her hip, wiping her eyes with the hem of the apron, watching the black and white cattle lumbering up the ramp, her husband prodding them with a sharpened broomstick. And Jess had left before coffee and dessert, and next morning had called Lydia and told her in that choked and breathy voice she used when she was angry that the reason the woman was crying was that the sale of the cows was the only thing that had forestalled foreclosure on a farm that had been in her family since before the Civil War. Jess had known because her father was the president of the bank that held the mortgage.

“I had no way of knowing that, for pity’s sake,” Lydia had said.

“That’s forever your problem,” Jess had said. “You ought to have known. There are always these things that you ought to know and yet somehow you don’t. Open your eyes, Lydia. You are not the center of the universe.”

Those were the two people who had been the center of her universe: Jess and Sunny. Both of them gone now. And the people she had thought she’d loved were gone, too, her father, who had built Blessings and then lost it to his wife and daughter, and Frank Askew, still handsome and sleepy-eyed in his obituary photograph in the
Times
fifteen years ago, still married to Ella, still on the hospital board and the Bedford town council. Both men had sung to
her. “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you,” her father would sing in his clear tenor as he danced her around the drawing room of the house in the city. “Night and day, you are the one,” Frank had sung one night at a deb ball for one of his daughters at the club. There had been a breakfast afterward at the Askew apartment on Park Avenue, and he’d locked the door to one of the maid’s rooms and made love to her on the single bed, and all the time she had been able to hear Ella Askew down the hall, with her distinctive voice, loud and bright as dinner chimes, tell a long story about difficulties with the tent for her sister’s lawn wedding. “Beautiful,” Frank kept whispering. “Beautiful.” She was shamed by it all, flushed bright as a peach, but perhaps that had been the pleasure, too. At age twenty her body had seemed to have a mind of its own, to open of its own accord, as automatic as a heartbeat. It was hard to imagine now.

Once she had said to Jess, when they had finished a bottle of wine out on the terrace during the long lunches they had had, the children grown and the men gone, when they were back to what they’d been as girls, “I’m sixty years old and I’ve never seen a man completely naked.”

“Oh, Lyds,” Jess had said. “Oh, dear.” And then, “Well, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” They’d laughed till they cried. Just cried.

Jess had come back to her then, for a few years. She had not meant to leave Lydia alone: she had simply done that most perfidious of things, made a happy marriage, with a good man who loved her and did everything he could possibly think of, from emerald earrings to keeping the children quiet on Saturday mornings, to show her that he did. They had both been married at the beginning of the war, she and Jess, and they had both been widowed during it. But Jess had made another life: two sons, three daughters, and Roger. And Lydia never had. Her life was a life in sepia and black-and-white with deckled edges, framed in silver, mounted in scrapbooks. It had been a former life even years ago.

There was a clammy stillness to the warm summer air, as though the atmosphere were exhaling slowly. An enormous moth danced
on the window screen by the head of her bed, determined to get to the faint light filtering up from the hallway lamp downstairs or to die trying. His wings made a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled, and his feet clicked against the wire mesh. For a moment she thought she had dropped off to sleep, heard in her dreams the sound of those old trucks climbing the rise from the drive and then heading down to where the barn was being built, their gears straining with a deep rumble. Then she remembered that it was the Fourth of July, and that there would be fireworks in Mount Mason. That was how she had first met Jess, when her father had taken her to the big field behind the train tracks to watch the holiday fireworks. “The bombs bursting in air,” he’d roared, his car lurching along the dirt roads. Jess’s father had invited her to share his daughter’s blanket, and he and Ed Blessing had shared a bottle. “You should have come, Sunny,” she’d said next morning. “I met a nice girl.”