Ladder of Years (45 page)

She left unanswered the question of who would drive her.

They went back up the stairs, Delia preceding Sam and moving with self-conscious gracefulness. The kitchen was empty now. The dining-room table had a naked look; Sam had not thought to replace the candelabra after removing the tablecloth. The hall was empty too, but they paused there a minute, gazing toward the silence overhead.

“I don’t think he’s going to change her mind,” Delia said.

“It’s only wedding-day nerves.”

“I think she’s serious. I think she really means this.”

“You remember how she was when she was little,” Sam said. “She used to get these fixations, remember? Like when she wanted to wear her cowboy pajamas to kindergarten. You said no and she came to breakfast in her underwear, but you pretended not to notice and by schooltime she’d put on a skirt.”

“A skirt and her pajama tops, which I’d covered partway with a bandanna to hide the snaps,” Delia said. “We compromised. There’s a difference.”

She was touched, though. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because she herself figured so prominently in his story, as if he had taken notes on what she’d done and then attempted, years later, to do the same.

She stayed in the hall a moment longer, in case he wanted to tell her anything more, but evidently he didn’t. He turned away and made for the living room. Delia first smoothed her dress and adjusted her belt (not wanting to appear to chase him), and then she followed.

In the study, the lamps were unlit, and everyone sat in pewter-gray light watching TV—Velma and the boys on the couch, Rosalie on the floor between her mother’s feet. They turned as Sam and Delia entered. “What’s for lunch?” Carroll asked.

Delia said, “Lunch!”

“We’re starving.”

She checked the time. It was after one. She glanced toward Sam for some cue (the kitchen wasn’t hers anymore; the household wasn’t hers to feed), but he didn’t help her. Then footsteps sounded overhead.

“Driscoll,” Sam said.

Rosalie continued gaping at a soap opera, but the rest of them went
out to the hall—Velma and the boys rising in an elaborately bored, stretching way, everyone moving slowly so as not to seem overeager. They gathered at the bottom of the stairs and watched Driscoll descend.

He looked distraught. His hair was raked and ropy, and his tie was wrenched askew. When he reached the bottom step he shook his head.

“No wedding?” Delia asked him.

“Well, I wouldn’t
say no
wedding.”

“What, then?”

“She says she hates me and I’m not a good person and now she sees she never loved me anyway.”

“So, no wedding,” Delia mused aloud.

“But if I want to change her mind, she says, I know what I should do.”

“What should you do?”

“I don’t know,” Driscoll said.

Sam snorted and moved off toward the living room.

“Send flowers?” Velma suggested. “Send a singing telegram?”

“I don’t know, I tell you. I said, ’Couldn’t you give me a hint?’ She said, ’It’ll come to you. And if it doesn’t,’ she said, ’it’s a sign we shouldn’t get married.’”

“Send a Mylar balloon with a message printed on?” Velma pursued.

“Saying what, though?” Driscoll asked.

“Driscoll,” Delia said, “I believe your mother wants to talk with you.”

“Oh. Okay,” he said dully.

He stood thinking a moment. Then he gave his shoulders a shake and let himself out the front door—no raincoat, no umbrella, nothing. The rain was falling so hard it was bouncing off the porch railing.

“Hire a skywriter!” Velma said after he’d gone.

“Mom,” Carroll said, “could we just eat?”

“I’ll fix something right away,” she told him.

Might as well. Nobody else was going to do it.

Delia prepared a tray for Susie and brought it up to her room. She found her asleep on top of the covers—not all that surprising. Susie was the kind of person who retreated into sleep like a drug, losing whole days at times of emotional crisis. Oh, the
otherness
of Delia’s children never failed to entrance her! She considered it a sort of bonus gift—a means of experiencing, up close, an entirely opposite way of being.

“Susie, honey,” she said. Susie opened her eyes. “I thought you’d want something to eat,” Delia told her.

“Thanks,” Susie said, and she struggled blearily to a sitting position.

Delia placed the tray in Susie’s lap. “It’s all your favorites. Ginger cheesecake, Jewish-grandmother cookies …”

“Great, Mom,” Susie said, shaking out her napkin.

“Lemon chiffon tartlets, chocolate mousse cups …”

Susie looked down at the tray.

“I had to use the wedding food,” Delia explained. “There weren’t a lot of groceries in the kitchen.”

“Oh,” Susie said. She said, “So is that… what everyone’s eating?”

“Well, yes.”

“They’re eating up my wedding food?”

“Well … would you rather they didn’t?”

“No, no!” Susie said too breezily. She picked up a tartlet.

Delia felt confused. She said, “Did you want us to save them? If you were planning on, um, rescheduling in the near future, why, then I suppose—”

“No, I said! It’s fine.”

“Well, what
are
your plans? I’m not trying to pressure you or anything, but Driscoll did mention … I’m just asking so I can make travel arrangements.”

In the midst of taking a bite, Susie looked over at her.

“On account of my job and all,” Delia explained.

“Oh, just
go
, if you’re so set on it!” Susie burst out.

“That’s not what I—”

“I’m amazed you came at all! You and your stupid job and your man friend and your new family!”

“Why, Susie—”

“Gallivanting off down the beach and leaving Dad just wandering the house like the ghost of someone, and your children … orphaned, and me setting up a whole wedding on my own without my mother!”

Delia stared at her.

“What did he
do
, Mom?” Susie demanded. “Was it him? Was it us? What was so terrible? What made you run out on us?”

“Sweetheart, no one did anything,” Delia said. “It wasn’t that clear-cut. I never meant to hurt you; I didn’t even mean to leave you! I just got … unintentionally separated from you, and then it seemed I never found a way to get back again.”

She knew how lame that sounded. Susie listened in silence, gazing over her tartlet, and now that letter she’d sent—the forced gaiety of all those exclamation points, the careful carelessness of
See ya!
and
Luv
—made Delia want to weep. “Honeybun,” she said, “if I’d known you wanted help with the wedding, I would have done anything! Anything.”

But all Susie said was, “Could you please phone the realtor again?”

“Yes, of course,” Delia said, sighing, and she bent and kissed Susie’s forehead before she left.

By a process of inaction, of procrastination (much like the one that had stranded her so far from home in the first place), Delia stayed on through the afternoon, waiting for Susie to come downstairs. But time passed, and when she went back up to check, she found Susie asleep again, the tray nearly untouched on the floor beside the cot.

Sam was in his office, presumably—doing what, she had no idea, since she hadn’t seen any patients arrive. The others sat in the study watching TV, and she settled on the couch next to Velma and pretended to watch too. The good thing about TV was that everyone talked around it in an unthinking, natural way; they forgot that she was listening. She learned that Carroll had gone out three times with a girl from Holland; that Ramsay’s history professor had a grudge against him; that Velma had promised Rosalie a beauty-parlor manicure if she would quit biting her cuticles. It reminded Delia of her car-pool days, when she’d been privy to all the latest gossip because children don’t seem to realize that drivers have ears.

Nobody mentioned Susie.

Sam came to stand in the doorway, and when she looked over at him he asked if she would like him to go get some groceries for supper. She felt absurdly pleased. She said, “Yes, why not,” and then everyone started requesting specific dishes—her tarragon chicken, her ziti salad. She went out to the kitchen and made up a grocery list. She waited for Sam to invite her along when he left, but he didn’t.

Eliza phoned—her second call in two hours. “Now, where is Driscoll in all this?” she asked. “Don’t tell me he’s just letting her be.”

“It does seem that way,” Delia said. She was talking on the kitchen extension, so she didn’t have to lower her voice. “I don’t know
what
to think,” she said. “Susie’s fast asleep and Driscoll’s disappeared and the rest of us are just sitting here, wondering what next.”

“Mark my words,” Eliza said, “they’ll be married before sundown tomorrow. That’s what I told Linda. I said, ‘You won’t even have to switch your airline reservations.’ How about you? You’re not leaving yet, are you?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“You can’t,” Eliza said. “You’d only have to turn around and come back.”

“You may be right,” Delia said.

The real reason she couldn’t leave was Susie—her sad little face above the tartlet. But she didn’t tell Eliza that.

As soon as they said goodbye she called Joel, but the telephone rang and rang. They had probably gone out for supper, ignoring what she’d left for them. They were probably at Rick-Rack’s. She knew what they would order, even, and the tune of their conversation—Noah’s exuberant spurts of words and Joel’s neutral answers. His palms cradling her head. His mouth firm but not insistent. His body tensed as if, with every move, he had been gauging her response.

After the baby
, Ellie said,
we just kissed, the most wonderful kisses …

Delia hung up.

When Sam came back from the grocery store, she asked him (with her head in the fridge, tossing the question over her shoulder) whether he would mind if she stayed till tomorrow.

“Why would I mind?” he said.

It wasn’t a very satisfying answer. But before she could go into it further, Ramsay and Carroll trooped through—off to the video shop, they said, to rent that time-warp movie again—and Sam left the room. Delia fixed supper by herself. Everything came back to her: those weird little nipples on the cabinet knobs, the squeak of the exhaust fan above the stove. But here she was, in Miss Grinstead’s forest-green dress and old-maid shoes with the strap across the instep.

Susie did appear in time for supper. She sat at the table swaddled in a blanket, looking like a little girl awakened from her nap. But she didn’t refer to the wedding, and nobody else brought it up. Then afterward they all watched the movie—even Sam, his glasses glinting in the dark. Although really it was Susie they were watching. Any time Susie made a moderately humorous comment, her brothers fell all over themselves laughing, and Velma gave a hissing titter, and Rosalie sent her a deadpan, penetrating stare.

At the end of the movie Ramsay and Velma collected Rosalie and
said good night, but Carroll announced that he might as well sleep over. Delia went upstairs with him to put sheets on his bed. While she was plumping his pillow she heard Susie come upstairs too, and she knew that left only Sam in the study. She didn’t go back down, therefore. Instead, she returned to the linen closet for another set of sheets, and she made up the bed in Eliza’s room.

Much later, flat on her back in the dark, she heard Sam’s shoes on the stairs. He crossed the hall to his room without so much as a pause, and she heard his door click shut behind him.

It was ridiculous of her to feel so wounded.

20

“This sugar caster,” Linda told the twins, “was a gift from your great-great-aunt, Mercy Ramsay, when her sister married Isaiah Felson in 1899.”

Delia couldn’t imagine how Linda knew that. The twins, however, seemed unimpressed. They were busy admiring Carroll, who was shaking the caster upside down over his bowl of cornflakes. It was eleven-thirty in the morning, and he was only now eating breakfast. Linda and the twins had had breakfast earlier, after Eliza dropped them off on her way to work. Sam, presumably, had fixed himself something before he went into his office, and Susie wasn’t awake yet. It was going to be one of those days when the tail end of one person’s meal ran into the start of another’s from morning to night. Delia herself was just sort of munching along with every new shift.

“Mercy Ramsay was a huge concern to her parents because she never married,” Linda was saying. “She had a job as a ‘typewriter,’ was what they called them then, at a law office down near the harbor.”

Delia glanced over at her.

Carroll was shoveling in cornflakes now, and Marie-Claire appeared to be warming her hands on the sugar caster—which was not, to tell the truth, very imposing: a chesspiece-shaped urn of dulled and dented plate.
Thérèse was setting an index finger here and there on the table to mash stray crystals of sugar and transfer them to her tongue.

Linda said, “In every generation of our family, there’s been one girl who never married.”

“This generation it’ll be Thérèse,” Marie-Claire said.

“Will not,” Thérèse said.

“Will so.”

The phone rang.

“If that’s the school, I’m sick,” Carroll told Delia.

“Carroll Grinstead! I refuse to fib for you,” Delia said. She dumped the cat off her lap and rose to answer. “Hello?”

“Delia?” Noah said.

Delia turned away from the others. “What’s wrong?” she asked, as quietly as possible.

“I’ve got a cold.”

“Are you in bed?”

“I’m on the couch. Where’d you
get
to? Why aren’t you back yet?”

“Well, I did try to telephone last night, but you were out,” Delia said. “How’d you know where to call, anyway?”

“And that’s another thing! You didn’t leave a number! I had to phone Belle Flint and she said you’d gone to your family’s so I told Information, ‘Look for Grinstead,’ and the first Grinstead turned out to be this lady and she said, ‘Oh, that’s my daughter-in-law you want,’ and she had me write down the … But you said you’d be back yesterday!”