Ladder of Years (24 page)

She broke off. “Oh!” she cried. “Delia! Honestly!”

“What’s the matter?” Delia asked.

“You’ve gone and laid too many places!”

It was true. Delia had doled out all she’d found on the kitchen table, and that must have included a setting for Henry McIlwain. Belle gazed toward the chair at the far end, her eyes brimming over with fresh tears.

“I’m sorry,” Delia told her. “We could just—”

“Run fetch Mr. Lamb,” Belle ordered.

“Mr. Lamb? From upstairs?”

“Hurry, though. We’re all waiting. Tell him we’ll eat without him if he doesn’t get down here pronto.”

What they would have eaten Delia couldn’t imagine, since there wasn’t a morsel of food anywhere in sight. But Vanessa, returning from the kitchen with several phone books, told Delia, “Go ahead. I’ll get the meal on.”

Delia went out to the hall, which seemed very quiet after the bustle in the dining room. With the cat twining underfoot, she climbed the stairs and knocked on Mr. Lamb’s door. “Desperately, the salmon fling themselves against the current,” a stern voice announced. The door opened on a sliver of Mr. Lamb’s rag-and-bone face. “Yes?” he said, and then, “Oh!” for George had somehow managed to wriggle through the crack.

Delia said, “Belle sent me up to invite you for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“But it seems your animal’s got into my room!”

“Sorry,” Delia said. “Here, George.”

She reached in for the cat, and Mr. Lamb grudgingly opened the door another few inches. Delia caught the hazelnut smell of clothes worn once and then stuffed into drawers unwashed. The television’s icy light flickered in the dimness. She scooped George up and backed away.

“I’ve been meaning to mention the toilet arrangements under the bathroom sink,” Mr. Lamb told her.

“The …?”

“Couldn’t your animal use the outdoors?”

“Not in the middle of the night,” Delia said. She clutched George more tightly and asked, “Are you coming to dinner, or aren’t you?”

“What time?”

“Um … now?”

“Well, I suppose I could make it,” Mr. Lamb said.

He looked down at what he was wearing—a limp T-shirt, baggy dark pants—and then sadly closed the door in her face.

Delia wondered how a man so fond of nature programs could object to a harmless cat.

Downstairs, Vanessa had finished setting everything on the table—turkey, brussels sprouts, cranberry relish, mashed sweet potatoes dotted with marshmallows, all in their original pans. Still wearing her leather blazer, she was spooning the stuffing out of the turkey. Greggie lolled on the stack of phone books, sucking his thumb and watching his mother with heavy-lidded eyes. It must be naptime.

Belle was discussing Henry with the Hawsers. “What I can’t figure,” she was saying, “is when all this came about. Last night as of ten o’clock, everything was jim-dandy. Henry and I had a real nice dinner over in Ocean City. Then this noon on the phone—poof! He’s a totally changed man.”

“So his wife showed up in the morning,” Donald Hawser said sagely. He had draped his coat over the back of his chair, and he was lighting the warped candles with a silver lighter. “She got out of bed this morning and, ‘Here I am,’ she must have said, ‘away from home on Thanksgiving. A family holiday,’ she said.”

Delia placed the cat on the floor and sat down next to Donald.
A family holiday
, she thought,
and I’m eating a store-cooked turkey with strangers.
She felt madcap and adventurous.

“‘Here I am with my mom when I ought to be with my husband,’ she said, and she packed her suitcase then and there and went back to him, but he couldn’t let you know till noon because what was he going to do—excuse himself and run phone you the minute she walked in?”

“Donald has an expert opinion to offer on every subject,” his wife announced with a brittle laugh.

She was sitting very tensely, her spine not touching the chair. Her hair was scrolled upward at the ends like the sound holes in a violin.

“Yes; you might call it a gift,” Donald agreed, unruffled. “I’m able to envision. See, first there’s the business of settling her into the house. Don’t forget she has that baby with her, and a diaper bag no doubt and one of those infant car seats—”

“But he could have just turned her away!” Belle exploded. “He doesn’t even love her! He told me he didn’t!”

“Well, of course that’s what he would claim,” Donald said, leaning back expansively.

By now Vanessa was carving the turkey. Delia began passing around the other foods. The brussels sprouts were barely warm, she discovered. The sweet potatoes were refrigerator cold, but everybody took some anyhow.

“You’re right,” Belle said. “Oh, when will I learn? Seems this happens to me about every other week. Norton Grove was the only one who actually divorced his wife for me, and look how that ended up!”

“How
did
it end up?” Delia asked.

“He fell in love with a lady plumber who came to unstop our sink.”

Donald nodded, implying he could have predicted as much.

“It’s just the way Ann Landers keeps saying in her column,” Belle told them. “She says a man who would leave his wife will most likely leave you, too, by and by.”

“Maybe you ought to look for someone who doesn’t
have
a wife,” Vanessa suggested, handing her son a turkey wing.

“Yes, but it’s kind of like I lack imagination. I mean, I can’t seem to picture marrying a man till I see him married to someone else. Then I say, ‘Why! He’d make a good husband for
me
!’”

The hallway door opened and Mr. Lamb stood on the threshold, wearing a shiny black suit that turned his skin to ashes. “Oh, God, you have guests,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. Lamb, and you’re one of them,” Belle said. “Donald
Hawser, Melinda Hawser … Vanessa and Greggie you’ve seen around, I bet. This is Horace Lamb,’ she told the others. She waved carelessly toward the one empty chair. “Have a seat.”

“Well, I can’t stay long.”

“Have a
seat
, Mr. Lamb.”

He entered the room with a skimming sound that made Delia glance downward. On his feet he wore the kind of backless paper slippers given out free in hospitals. “This afternoon will be sports, sports, sports,” he said as he fell into his chair. “All regular programs are preempted. I’m reduced to the educational channels.”

“Say!” Donald cried. “Who you going to root for?”

“Pardon? Weekday afternoons, I like to watch the soaps. Oh, I confess. I admit it. I make a point of stopping for
All My Children
every blessed day I’m on the road.”

“What’s your line of business, Horace? Okay if I call you Horace?”

“I sell storm windows,” Mr. Lamb told him. He accepted the container of sweet potatoes and peered down into it. “This looks exceedingly rich,” he said. His long front teeth were so prominent that his lips had to labor to stretch across them. His whole face seemed stretched, and too intricately hinged at the jawbone. He raised his deep-set eyes to Belle and said, “Regrettably, I’m afflicted with a touchy stomach.”

“Oh, eat up, it’ll do you good,” Belle snapped. “We were discussing married men.”

“Pardon?”

“Another problem I have is, I look at a married man and I can’t believe he won’t find me irresistible.”

“Irresistible?”

“I’m speaking to the table at large, Mr. Lamb. Eat your dinner. I see a man with his wife, mousy boring wife who isn’t even attempting to keep herself up, and I think,
Why wouldn’t he prefer me instead? I’m a hell of a lot more fun, and better-looking to boot.
But it’s like there’s some—I don’t know—some hold wives have, and I can’t seem to break it. Is it a secret? Is it some secret you-all pass around among yourselves?”

She was asking Melinda Hawser, but Melinda just gave another shattered laugh and started crumbling bits of biscuit onto her plate. “Is it?” Belle asked Delia.

“Oh, no,” Delia told her. “It’s more like just … what’s the word? The word from science class. Momentum?”

“Inertia,” Mr. Lamb supplied.

“Right.” She glanced over at him. “It’s just a matter of people staying where they are.”

“Well, if that’s all it is,” Belle said, “how come Katie O’Connell got to waltz off to Hawaii with Larry Watts?
She
must have found out the secret. Why, when Larry Watts was boarding here, he never even gave me a look! He almost seemed to be avoiding me. He acted like I was some floozy the one time I asked him downstairs for a friendly little drink!”

Her mouth collapsed, and she covered her eyes with one hand. Donald said, “Oh, now! Hey!” and Vanessa said, “Aw, Belle, don’t cry,” while Mr. Lamb started tugging ferociously at his nose.

“To be honest,” Melinda said in a crystal voice, “I can’t think what you want with a husband anyhow.”

There was a pause, a kind of reconsidering among the other diners.

“Who first thought marriage up, do you suppose?” Melinda asked Greggie. He goggled at her from behind a greasy fistful of turkey wing. “Everyone pushes it so, especially the women. Your mother and your aunts and your girlfriends. Then after you’re married you see how he’s always so full of himself and always going on about something, always got these theories and pronouncements, always crowing over these triumphs at his business. ‘I told them this,’ and ‘I told them that,’ and you ask, ‘What did they say back?’ and he says, ‘
Oh
, you know, but then I told them such and such, and I let them have it outright, I put it to them straight, I said …’ And if you mention this to your mother and your aunts and so forth, ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘marriage is a pain, all right.’ ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel,’ you want to ask them, ‘why didn’t you speak up before? Where were you when I was announcing my engagement?’”

“Ha. Yes,” her husband said. He glanced around the table. “They’re going to think you mean
our
marriage. Dear.”

Everybody waited, but Melinda just speared a brussels sprout.

“Oh,” Belle assured him, “we would never think that.” She was sitting erect now, her tears already drying on her cheeks. “A gorgeous man like you? Of course we wouldn’t.” She told the others, “Donald and Melinda are customers of mine. They bought the old Meers place—lovely place. Donald’s an important executive at the furniture plant.”

Melinda was chewing her brussels sprout very noisily, or maybe it only seemed that way because the room was so quiet.

“
Mrs.
Meers had gone into the nursing home,” Belle said, “but Mr.
Meers was still living there. Took us through the house himself; taught us how to work the trash compactor. Told us, ‘Here in the freezer are one hundred forty-four egg whites, no charge.’”

“Folks who made their own mayonnaise,” Mr. Lamb surmised.

Belle was about to go on speaking, but she stopped and looked at him.

“I don’t guess you’d be in the market for storm windows,” Mr. Lamb told Donald.

“Not really,” Donald said, with his eyes on his wife.

“Ah, well, I didn’t think so.”

“That house needs absolutely nothing,” Belle said. “The Meerses kept after it every minute. And Donald here, Don …” She smiled at him. “Don spotted that the first time he walked through.”

“Melinda and I have a
fine
marriage. Married seven years.” Donald said, still watching his wife. “We were one of those recognized campus couples at our college. Went steady, got pinned: the works.”

“I know the type you mean,” Belle said.

“Why, Melinda’s known me so long she still calls me Hawk! Hawk Hawser,” he added, turning at last to meet Belle’s gaze. “I was on the basketball team. Kind of a star, some people might say, though I never had the height to go professional.”

“Is that right!” Belle exclaimed.

“Hawk Hawser,” he repeated lingeringly.

“I believe I might’ve heard of you.”

“Well, maybe so if you were ever in Illinois. Jerry Bingle College?”

“Jerry Bingle. Hmm.”

“I played center.”

“Really!”

“And midway through my senior year—”

“Marshmallow,” Greggie demanded.

He didn’t have the usual small child’s trouble pronouncing
I
’s. He spoke very precisely and daintily. “Mama? Marshmallow!”

It was Delia, finally, who plucked a marshmallow from the sweet potatoes and reached across the table to set it on his plate. Everyone else was watching Belle. Open-mouthed and breathless, miraculously recovered, Belle stroked her topmost button with a hypnotic, circular motion and kept her damp-lashed eyes focused raptly on Donald’s lips.

11

Sometimes Mr. Pomfret ordered Delia to go out and feed the parking meter for a client. Sometimes he snapped his fingers when he needed her. Once, he tossed her his raincoat and told her to take it down the block to the one-hour cleaner’s. “Yes, Mr. Pomfret,” she murmured. When she returned, she placed the receipt on his palm as smartly as a surgical nurse dealing out a scalpel.

But now she began to feel a little itch of rebellion.

“Miss Grinstead, can’t you see I’m
merging
?” he demanded when she brought in some letters to sign, and she said, “Sorry, Mr. Pomfret,” but neutrally, too evenly, with her expression set in granite. And back at her desk, she seethed with imaginary retorts.
You and your crummy computer! You and your “merging” and your Search-and-Destroy or whatever!

One Friday in early December, a stooped, gray-haired man in a baseball jacket arrived without an appointment. “I’m Mr. Leon Wesley,” he told Delia. “This is about my son Juval. Do you think Mr. Pomfret might have a minute for me?”

Mr. Pomfret’s office door was closed—it was early morning, his time to peruse new catalogs—but when Delia inquired, he said, “Leon? Why,
Leon resurfaced my driveway for me. Send him in. And make us a pot of coffee while you’re at it.”

It was impossible to avoid overhearing Mr. Wesley’s reason for coming. He poured it out even before he was seated, speaking through the grinding of the coffee beans so Mr. Pomfret had to ask him to repeat himself. Juval, Mr. Wesley said, was scheduled to join the navy first thing after Christmas. He had a highly promising future; special interest had been taken on account of his qualifications, which seemed to involve some technical know-how that Delia couldn’t quite follow. And last night, clear out of the blue, he had been arrested for breaking and entering. Caught climbing through the Hanffs’ dining-room window at ten o’clock in the evening.