Ladder of Years (29 page)

It must feel eerie to see your absent mother deliver the weather report every night. Although Noah never did, to the best of Delia’s knowledge. Six o’clock was
The MacNeil / Lehrer NewsHour
, which Mr. Miller watched instead.

The fields gave way to hamburger joints and used-car lots and liquor stores, implying the approach of a town, but soon Delia realized this
was
the town—this scattering of buildings flung across the farmland. Noah pointed out the television station beneath its Erector-set tower. He showed her where his mother did her grocery shopping and where she got her hair done, and then he directed her two blocks south to a low, beige-brick apartment building. “Should I come in with you?” Delia asked, parking at the curb.

“Naw. I’ve got a key if she’s not there.”

Delia was disappointed, but she didn’t argue.

“When you wake up tomorrow,” Noah told her as she unlocked the trunk, “look on my closet shelf and you’ll find your present.”

“And when
you
wake up, look in the inside end pocket of your duffel bag.”

He grinned and took the bag from her. “So, okay,” he said. “See you, I guess.”

“Have a good Christmas.”

Instead of hugging him, she tousled his hair. She’d been longing to do that anyhow.

By the time she got back to the house, Mr. Miller was waiting at the front window. They barely crossed paths in the doorway—Mr. Miller holding out a palm for the car keys, wishing her a Merry Christmas, saying he’d be back with Noah tomorrow evening—and then he was gone. The cat mewed anxiously and trailed Delia to her room.

On her bureau, she found a Christmas card with a check for a hundred dollars.
Season’s Greetings
, the card read, followed by Mr. Miller’s block print:
Just a token thank you for setting our lives back in order. Gratefully, Joel and Noah.

That was nice of him, she thought. Also, he had shown tact in clearing out of the house when he did. It would have been a strain without Noah to serve as buffer.

She spent the afternoon on the couch, reading an extra-thick library book:
Doctor Zhivago.
The wind dashed bits of leaves against the picture windows. George slept curled at her feet. Twilight fell, and her lamp formed a nest of honey-colored light.

A few minutes before six, she took the remote control from the end table and clicked the TV on. WKMD had a one-eyed pirate advertising choice waterfront lots. Then a housewife spraying a room with aerosol. Then a deskful of newscasters—a bearded black man, a pink-faced white man, and a glamorous blonde in a business suit. Delia thought at first the blonde was Ellie Miller, till the black man called her Doris. Doris told about a bank heist in Ocean City. The robber had been dressed as Santa Claus, she said. She spoke in such a way that her lipstick never came in contact with her teeth.

Delia was disconcerted by the speed at which everything moved. She had lost the knack of watching television, it seemed. She felt her eyes had experienced an overload, and during the next round of commercials she looked away for awhile.

“Now here’s Ellie with the weather,” the bearded man said. “So tell us, Ellie, any chance of a white Christmas?”

“Not a prayer, Dave,” Ellie told him in that sporty, bosom-buddy tone that TV people affect. Her face, though, didn’t match her voice. It was too soft, too open—a pretty face with a large red mouth, surprised blue eyes, and circlets of pink rouge. Her hair was silvery fluff. Her white sweater, a scoop-necked angora, seemed uncertain around the edges.

Delia rose and went to stand in front of the TV. Ellie slid weather maps along an aluminum groove. Somewhere behind that painted backdrop of marsh and improbable cattails, Noah would be sitting, but at the moment Delia wasn’t thinking of Noah. She was memorizing Ellie, trying to see what lay beneath her sky-blue, doll-like stare.

“Continued cold … gale-force winds …” Delia listened with her head cocked, her fingertips supporting her cheek.

The weather was followed by sports, and Delia turned and wandered out of the family room and through the kitchen, down the hall to the master bedroom. She opened the closet door and studied the clothes hanging inside. Mr. Miller’s suits straggled across the rod toward the empty space at the right. The shelf above was empty on the right as well. It appeared that Ellie, unlike Rosemary Bly-Brice, had taken everything with her when she went. Even so, Delia next pulled out each drawer in Ellie’s bureau. All she found was a button, trailing a wisp of blue thread.

Back in the family room, the TV was showing the national news. It was months since she had watched the news, but she could see she hadn’t missed anything: the planet was still hurtling toward disaster. She switched the TV off in midsentence and went to make her supper.

When she woke the next morning, the sun was out. Something about the hard, bright light told her it was very cold. Also, George lay nestled close under her arm, which he wouldn’t do in warmer weather.

Not until she was drinking her tea did she consider the fact that it was Christmas. Christmas, all by herself! She supposed that would strike most people as tragic, but to her the prospect was enjoyable. She liked carrying her cup through the silent house, still wearing her nightgown and beach robe, humming a snatch of “We Three Kings” with no one to hear her. In Noah’s room she rooted through the top drawer for a pair of woolen socks to wear as slippers. Then she remembered he’d left her a gift, and she pulled it down from his closet shelf—a squarish shape
wrapped in red foil. The tag read,
Because you don’t have house-type clothes
, which puzzled her till she tore off the foil and saw a canvas carpenter’s apron with pockets across the front. She smiled and slipped the neck strap over her head. Till now she’d been using the cocktail apron she’d found among the dish towels, which protected no more than the laps of her dresses.

Her gift to Noah had been a survival kit from Kemp’s Kamping Store. Boys seemed to go for such things. And this kit was so ingenious—hardly bigger than a credit card, with streamlined foldout gadgets, including a magnifying lens for starting fires.

She fed George, and then she dressed and settled on the couch again with
Doctor Zhivago.
Periodically, she looked up from the book and let her eyes travel around the room. Wintry sunlight, almost white, fell across the carpet. The cat was giving himself a bath in a square of sunlight on the blue armchair. Everything had a pleasantly shallow look, like a painting.

At home they must be opening their presents now. It was nothing like the old days, when they used to rise before dawn. Now they ambled downstairs in midmorning, and they passed out presents decorously, one person at a time. Then for dinner they always had goose, a contribution from one of Sam’s patients who hunted. For dessert, plum pudding with hard sauce, and they would complain it was too heavy but eat it anyhow and spend the rest of the afternoon moaning and clutching their stomachs.

Every so often it took her breath away to realize how easily her family had accepted her leaving.

Although it
did
seem acceptable, come to think of it. It seemed almost inevitable. Almost … foreordained. In retrospect she saw all the events of the past year—her father’s death, Sam’s illness, Adrian’s arrival—as waves that had rolled her forward, one wave after another, closer and closer together. Not sideways, after all, but forward, for now she thought that her move to the Millers’ must surely represent some kind of progress.

She had imagined that her holiday would not last nearly long enough, but when Joel and Noah turned into the driveway at dusk, she was already watching at the window. She dropped the curtain as soon as she saw the headlights, and she rushed to open the door and welcome them home.

13

Once a week, generally on Wednesday afternoons, Delia drove Noah a few miles west on Highway 50 to visit his grandfather. The old man lived in a place called Senior City—four stories of new red brick on the edge of a marshy golf course. Delia would pull up in the U-shaped drive, let Noah out, and leave, maneuvering past a fleet of gigantic Buicks and Cadillacs. She came back to collect him at the front door an hour later. It was an inconvenient length of time, just slightly too short to make returning to Bay Borough worth her while, and so she formed the habit of heading for a nearby shopping center. There she browsed in a bookstore, or picked up some treat for supper at the gourmet food store.

She was dropping Noah off one Wednesday in mid-January, when he announced that she should come in with him. “Me? What for?” she asked.

“Grandpa wants to see you.”

“Well, but …”

She glanced down. Beneath her coat she was wearing a housedress, a dark cotton print she had bought at an after-Christmas sale. “How about next week?” she suggested.

“He asked me to bring you today. I forgot.”

She pulled into one of the visitors’ parking slots. “If you’d warned me, I would have dressed up,” she said.

“It’s only Grandpa.”

“I look a mess! What’s his name?”

“Nat.”

“I meant his last name,” she said, getting out of the car. Years of experience had taught her not to rely on children’s formal introductions. “I have to call him Mister
something.
”

“Everybody just says Nat.”

She gave up and followed Noah past a row of Handicapped license plates. “Does he want to see me for any particular reason?” she asked.

“He says he doesn’t know who to picture when I talk about you.”

They approached the double doors, which slid open to admit them. The lobby was carpeted with some nubby, hard substance, probably to accommodate wheelchairs. It made a winching sound beneath their feet. On their right was a glassed-in gift shop, and through an entrance at their left Delia glimpsed a cafeteria, deserted at this hour but still giving off that unmistakable steamed-vegetable smell. Several old women waited in front of the elevators. One sat in a motorized cart, and two leaned on walkers. This was like visiting a war zone, Delia thought. But the women were elegantly coiffed and dressed, and at the sight of Noah their faces lit up in smiles.
Valiant
smiles, they seemed to Delia. She was familiar with old people’s tribulations, having observed Sam’s patients for so long.

The elevator opened to expose a slim, blue-haired old woman in a designer dress. “Sorry!” she caroled. “I’m going down.”

“You
are
down, Pooky,” the woman on the cart said. “This is the bottom floor.”

“Well, you’re welcome to come along for the ride, but I’ve pressed One, I regret to say.”

“This
is
One, Pooky.”

The others didn’t bother to argue. They entered laboriously, most of them clinging to various surfaces for support. Noah and Delia came last. The door closed behind them, and they began rising. Meanwhile everyone beamed at Noah—even Pooky, who seemed unfazed that they were not, in fact, going down. At the second floor, a woman with a shopping bag got off. At the third floor, Noah said, “This is us,” and he and Delia stepped into a long corridor. Several women followed, with metallic clanking sounds and a whirring of wheels. Pooky, however, remained on
board, gazing contentedly straight ahead as the elevator door slid shut.

“She rides up and down all day sometimes,” Noah told Delia.

Nothing here seemed any different from a standard apartment building, except for the handrails that ran along both walls. Blond flush doors appeared at intervals, each with a peephole at eye level. Noah stopped at the fourth door on the right.
Nathaniel A. Moffat, Photographer
, a business card read, with a Cambridge, Maryland, street address crossed out. When Noah pressed the doorbell, a single golden note sounded from within.

“Is that my favorite grandson?” a man shouted.

“Yes, it is,” Noah called back.

“It’s his
only
grandson,” he told Delia with a giggle.

The door opened, but instead of the old man Delia had expected, a short, chunky woman stood smiling at them. She could not have been out of her thirties. She had a round apricot of a face and pink-tinted curls, and she wore an orange sweater-dress with a keyhole neckline. Her shoes were orange too—tiny, open-toed pumps, as Delia found when she checked, reflexively, for nurse shoes to explain the woman’s presence. “Hi! I’m Binky,” she told Delia. “Hey there, Noah. Come on in.”

The living room they entered must have been as modern as the rest of the building, but Delia couldn’t see beyond the furniture, which was dark and tangled, ornate, ponderously antique. Also, there was far too much of it, set far too close together, as if it had once filled several larger rooms. For a moment Delia had trouble locating Noah’s grandfather. He was rising from the depths of a maroon velvet chair with viny arms. A four-pronged metal cane stood next to him, but he moved forward on his own to shake her hand. “You’re Delia,” he said. “I’m Nat.”

He was one of those men who look better old, probably, than they ever did young—clipped white beard, ruddy face, and a lean, energetic body. He wore a tweed sports coat and gray trousers. His handshake was muscular and brisk.

“Thank you for coming,” he told her. “I wanted to get a look at this person my grandson’s so taken with.”

“Well, thank you for inviting me.”

“Won’t you give Binky your coat?”

Delia was about to tell him she would keep her coat, she could only stay a second; but then she saw that the table in front of the couch was laid for tea. There were plates of cakes, four china cups and saucers, and
a teapot already steeping in a swaddling of ivory linen. Thank goodness Noah had remembered she was invited.

She handed her coat to Binky and then sat where Nat indicated, at one end of the couch. Nat reclaimed his chair, and Noah took a seat in the little rocker next to him. Binky, when she returned from the coat closet, settled on the other end of the couch and bent forward to unwrap the teapot.

“Noah always likes mint instead of plain,” she told Delia. “I hope you don’t mind.”