Dear Doctor Lily (16 page)

But Lily imagined he was rather grand and intellectual. He wasn't. Steven Stephens had been a scrupulous attorney, and now he was a very fair and humane judge, popularly known as Even Steven. Paul's mother, Muriel, from small-town Indiana, was more like Lily's family. His father had come from the same town, but, in working his way eastward through his law career, he had shed whatever folksiness he might have had, while his wife had hung on to hers, like an heirloom. When the Spooners came over to visit, Muriel and Lily's mother would get along fine together.

Paul's cousin Joanne came for Easter dinner with her husband and two daughters, self-conscious in fancy new dresses and white straw hats.

‘Does everybody get new clothes at Easter?' Lily asked in her bright, interested way.

‘Sure, honey,' Muriel said. ‘To knock 'em dead in church.'

‘Did you go to church?' Lily asked one of the girls.

‘No.'

The Judge carved the huge glazed ham, and Paul's mother was happy with ‘a lovely crowd of folk around my table'.

‘You almost had a few more.' Paul told them about the man in
the flower store, and Lily, who was still distressed about it, added some elaborations about the father running up and down outside the burning shed and hearing his son screaming.

The children stopped eating, fascinated. Muriel put her fingers to her lips and shook her head.

‘Who started the fire?' Terry asked. Paul wished he hadn't. The family were beginning to forget about Eddie Waite and the mailbox.

‘I don't know. The poor man just told me, and then went out.'

When the children had gone into the garden – ‘Watch out for those new white dresses' – and they were having coffee, Muriel said to Lily, ‘You don't look so well, honey. Are you okay?'

‘I always look puffy for ages if I've been crying. I can't get that man out of my mind.'

She was genuinely upset, yet, because he already knew her so well, Paul could hear her listening to herself. He loved and admired her desperately, but he knew when her full-blooded participation in life was enhanced by being an audience for her own drama, like everyone who lives in the present.

This is me in my new red dress at a big oval table with the best white cloth, laying my feelings on the line for my new family. Lily's letters to him before they were married had been present-tense autobiographical narrative: ‘There I am, rushing for the train, my God, I'm late! My bag's open and my wallet falls on to the line. I'm paralyzed – help! Do I climb down, miss the train? I'm shouting and people are staring,' etc., etc.

‘I should have gone after him,' she said.

‘You can't take on everyone else's troubles,' the Judge told her. ‘I know I've lost sleep at night over some terrible story I've heard in court, but I've learned to do the job and not get involved. It's too destructive.'

‘But you've got to be involved!' Lily leaned forwards to him across the table. ‘That's the whole point of life. You can't just stand back and watch what happens to people. You've got to be a part of it.'

‘True up to a point,' Even Steven said. ‘I've pronounced a man guilty and then had the verdict overturned on Appeal, and felt
pretty guilty myself. I've wanted to write to people sometimes, who've stood in front of me in court, and say, “I'm sorry.” '

‘Did you?'

He shook his head. ‘One has to learn not to plunge in up to the neck. That could, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, sow the seeds of ruin.'

His face was too serious. Paul looked at Lily. The words were too chilling. But if they had affected her, she did not show it. She was leaning forwards, impatient to make her point again, when Muriel cut in.

‘Lily's all right,' she said comfortably. ‘She's not a cold-hearted old buzzard like you, are you, honey? Maybe you're so upset because you're – you know.' She nodded at the table edge in front of Lily's stomach. ‘We're so happy that you and Paul are going to give us a grandchild.'

Her indulgent OB–GYN face made Paul want to protest, ‘That's not why people have children.' But it was more important to say, ‘You've got Terry.'

‘That's not the same,' Muriel said in a half whisper, although Terry was at the end of the garden. She had not cared much for Barbara, with whom she had never felt at ease.

‘That's a perfectly rotten thing to say.' The Judge was angry with her.

‘Oh, you know me, Steven, I don't mean a thing. I'll just make another pot of coffee,' she said to get herself out of the room.

‘Don't bother for us,' Paul said. ‘We have to go.'

‘I thought you were going to stay and watch the football game.'

‘We have to get Terry back.'

They took him to a movie and then for pizza, and got him home quite late. Lily stayed in the car. Paul got out to go to the door and explain why they were late, but the chrome of a black Corvette was glittering in the driveway.

‘Shit,' Terry said. ‘Silas.' So Paul let him go in alone.

The house that Terry's father rented for two weeks that July was not much more than a shack on the edge of a bog.

‘My father has rented a Cape house for the summer,' Terry had said at school. The people who talked a lot about ‘my father' were those whose fathers did not live at home.

During the drive from the Sagamore bridge bus stop, Lily yacked away like a maniac, because Terry was silent, building up the house as something so beautiful and special, that when they rounded the last bend of the sandy road, he had to say, ‘This is
it
?'

‘Don't you love it?'

‘Isn't it great?'

Lily and Paul had obviously plotted to deal with any sulks by turning sour to sweet.

Terry was fed up with being dealt with by various grown-ups at home and at school, and the hints his mother had leaked out about the whole situation had made him almost not want to come to the Cape at all. But she had gone to Maine in the Corvette with Silas, so he had to come.

When he saw the narrow white house standing sentinel over the marsh and the slow stream that meandered away to the sea, his heart raced, but he was not going to show them that he was dazzled.

‘Take off your jacket,' his father said. ‘It's hot.'

‘Maybe.' Terry shifted his light jacket back on his shoulders. Taking it off was an admission he wasn't ready to make yet.

He took off his sneakers and jumped off the bank into squelching mud, and waded along the stream. The water pushed gently at the back of his ankles. Farther down, two boys were fishing, and another was digging something out of the mud bank. Terry said, ‘Hi,' but they didn't. He kept to the side as the stream broadened and deepened. His shorts were wet, but he wasn't going to plunge in wearing clothes among the whole mess of kids in bathing suits, large and small, who were shrieking and wrestling and letting themselves be carried out by the quickening water into the shallow sea.

Terry walked across the sand between groups of people, and felt their eyes on his back as he stood at the edge of the water. A
clamour of gulls with wicked curved beaks and silly feet tucked up under their bodies flew sideways along the beach and veered out to sea. Staring after them to the far shore of the bay, Terry emptied his mind of thought and feeling. He had got quite good at this. You could just
be,
which passed the time pretty well, with no effort.

His father and Lily came to the beach another way and turned up with a picnic lunch in a cooler. They had brought Terry's swimming trunks.

‘Put them on under a towel,' Lily said, but Terry would not take them.

Lily added that he shouldn't wander off without saying where he was going, and Terry snapped, ‘You found me, didn't you?'

‘That's no way to talk to Lily,' his father said.

Terry kicked up sand. If they were going to gang up on him … He saw Lily make an ‘Oh dear' face at Paul. Was this kid going to ruin the vacation for them?

Was he? He had not decided. He could give them hell and have a lousy time, or he could enjoy it and let them think they'd won. It wasn't up to him anyway. It depended on the system of weights and balances inside him. He could be light one minute, free and feeling great and expecting marvels. Then someone said or did something, or he remembered something, and the weight dropped, plummeting him down with it into a murk of rage and disgust where nothing good could happen.

Later when they had gone to their room, Terry knelt on the rollaway bed under the living-room window with his arms on the sill, and stuck his head out to breathe in the moon and stars and the dinosaur smell of the silvery marsh. This was the best place he had ever slept, the most fantastic house, like a dwarfs home, with a kitchen like a closet and patchy white walls and old cane furniture with floppy cushions.

He woke early and went outside to poke about. When he smelled bacon and came in, Lily was making coffee in her nightgown, which was different from seeing his mother in her nightgown, because there was more of Lily.

‘I like it here.' Terry made wet tracks toward her over the speckled green painted floor.

‘Oh, I
am
glad!' She turned with a mug in one hand and her arms out as if she was going to embrace him.

Terry kept a safe distance, but he said, ‘Yeah, it's okay. What are we going to do today?'

They did everything. They went to different beaches. They crossed Sandwich marsh by the boardwalk and climbed over the beach rocks to plunge into the icy sea on the north side of Cape Cod. They bought lobsters and cooked them in sea water with seaweed on the top. They ate fried clams. They rode bikes. Terry's father rented two horses to ride through the woods.

‘Lily's not coming?'

‘I don't know how to ride properly.'

‘Oh.' Terry had thought it was because his father wanted to ride alone with him.

‘And to tell you the truth, Terry,' Lily said, looking at him uncertainly, ‘I'm going to have a baby.'

‘Oh.'

‘Do you mind?'

‘Why should I?'

He did mind, so he insisted on a Western saddle, to annoy his father. But Paul was so determined to give Terry a good time that he let him ride like a half-baked cowboy, with his feet stuck forward and his hands in the air, although he cared desperately about that kind of horsy thing, and doing it right.

When Paul went to see a customer in Osterville, Lily took Terry to the secret beach she had found, a lagoon full of clams and mussels on one side and a small horseshoe of empty sand on the other.

‘Where is everybody?' The other beaches were crowded.

‘They don't know about it, so let's not tell them.'

‘Is it private?' A swimming raft was anchored some yards out.

‘Beaches belong to everyone. It's our special, secret place.'

Before she could start blabbering about fairies and mermaids, Terry ran into the sea and swam out to the raft.

That evening, Paul's friend Harry came down, and they went to a small summer theatre and saw a musical. In the interval, a glamorous woman with sparkling silver eyelids and a cloud of colourless hair like cotton candy swept through the crowd to
them with cries of rapture. She was in charge of the theatre, but she was also in the horse world, and knew Harry quite well. Her name was Paige, which was no kind of name for a woman, or a man either, come to that.

‘Poll Stephens!' Holy shit, she knew Terry's father too. He had sold her a saddle she adored to death. She kissed him theatrically.

‘My dear,' she told Lily, standing far back to allow room for her huge spangled boobs. ‘You've no idea what this adorable guy of yours has done for my seat!'

People were looking at them. Paige shone out in the crowd as if she were on stage in her own spotlight.

‘Don't you adore the show, dahling?' She swooped on Terry.

He nodded without bringing his head up again, and ducked away to pretend to look at the old theatre posters which papered the walls.

She invited them to stay in the bar after the show and meet the cast. Terry thought he would fall through the floor, but off the stage the actors were just ordinary people in jeans and sweat shirts. The one who had been the bald comic uncle, who was now young with hair, showed Terry tricks with coins and glasses. Paige and Harry and some of the actors sang, and Terry's father played the piano. Terry expected to die of shame, seeing him up there banging away, with his foot thumping the pedals and his hair disordered and a wild light in his blue eyes, laughing when he hit a wrong note or muffed a chord. But everybody thought he was great.

Harry pulled Lily on to the little stage and made her sing a cockney song with him, which she did quite well, in an odd deep voice, in the same octave as Harry. Terry stayed firmly at the table, with his arm hooked through the back of the chair for safety. He would not sing, but he told the comic uncle his story about the German policeman.

During a break in the singing, the uncle called out, ‘Listen, everyone, you've got to hear this! Tell it again, Terence.'

The blood rushed up into Terry's head and out at the top, but he told it. They all roared, including Lily, who had already heard it six times in different accents. His father was so proud that for a moment of incredible surging lightness, Terry wanted to die for him.

When would real life come relentlessly back? When would the weight drop down?

Because there was only one bedroom in the dwarf house, Harry had to sleep on the rollaway bed in the living-room and Terry slept on the floor in a sleeping-bag. Or tried to. Harry turned on the light to make himself a drink, and wanted to tell Terry at some length how wonderful his mother was and that he must always remember she was the most wonderful mother in the world, although he had been making up to Lily all evening, and telling Paul how wonderful
she
was.