Ladder of Years (7 page)

In the half-dark he had no color, but still she recognized his narrow, distinctly cheekboned face. She saw that his mouth was wider and fuller, more sculptured, than she had been imagining, and she wondered how she could have forgotten something so important. “Adrian, it’s me. Delia,” she said. The dog was still barking. She said, “Delia Grinstead? From the supermarket?”

“Why, Delia,” Adrian’said. “My rescuer!” He laughed, and the dog grew quiet. “What are you doing here?”

She said, “Oh, just…,” and then she laughed too, glancing down at her housecoat and smoothing it with her palms. “Just couldn’t sleep,” she said.

She was relieved to find that he was not so well dressed himself. He wore a dark-hued robe of some kind and pale pajamas. On his feet were jogging shoes, laces trailing, no socks. “Do you live nearby?” she asked him.

“Right here,” he said, and he waved toward a matted screen of barberry bushes. Behind it Delia glimpsed a porch light and a section of white clapboard. “I got up to let Butch here take a pee,” he said. “It’s his new hobby: waking me in the dead of night and claiming he needs to go out.”

At the sound of his name, Butch sat down on his haunches and grinned up at her. Delia leaned over to give his muzzle a timid pat. His
breath warmed and dampened her fingers. “I ran off with your groceries that day,” she said, ostensibly to the dog. “I felt terrible about it.”

“Groceries?” Adrian asked.

“Your orzo and your rotini …” She straightened and met his eyes. “I considered hunting up your address and bringing them over.”

“Oh. Well … orzo? Well, never mind,” he told her. “I’m just grateful you helped me out like that. You must have thought I was kind of weird, right?”

“No, not at all! I enjoyed it,” she said.

“You know how sometimes you just want to, say, keep up appearances in front of someone.”

“Certainly,” she said. “I ought to start a business: Appearances, Incorporated.”

“Rent-a-Date,” Adrian suggested. “Impostors To Go.”

“With blondes to pose as second wives, and football stars to take jilted girls to proms—”

“And beautiful women in black to weep at funerals,” Adrian said.

“Oh, why
don’t
they have such things?” Delia asked. “There’s just nothing like that … what? Like that fury, that prideful sort of fury you feel when you’ve been hurt or insulted or taken for granted—”

Well. She stopped herself. Adrian was watching her with such peculiar intentness, she worried all at once that she had curlers in her hair. She nearly raised a hand to check, till she remembered she hadn’t worn curlers since high school. “Goodness. I should get home,” she said.

“Wait!” Adrian said. “Would you like … could I offer you some coffee?”

“Coffee?”

“Or tea? Or cocoa? Or a drink?”

“Well,” she said, “I guess cocoa, maybe. Cocoa might be nice. I mean caffeine at this hour would probably … But are you sure it’s not too much trouble?”

“No trouble at all,” he told her. “Come on inside.”

He led her to a gap in the barberry bushes. A flagstone path curved toward the house, which was one of those lace-trimmed Victorian cottages young couples nowadays found so charming. The front door was paned with lozenges of glass in sugared-almond colors impossible to see through. Delia felt a sudden pinch of uneasiness. Why, she didn’t know a thing about this man! And no one else on earth had any inkling where she was.

“Usually if I’m up at this hour I’m up for good,” Adrian was saying, “so I fix myself a pot of—”

“What a lovely porch!” Delia exclaimed. “Maybe we could have our cocoa out here.”

“Here?”

He paused on the topmost step and looked around him. It was a depressing porch, really. The floorboards were battleship gray, and the furniture was painted a harsh bright shade of green. “Don’t you think you’d be cold?” he asked.

“Not a bit,” she told him, although now that she had stopped walking, it did seem cold. She stuffed both fists in the pockets of her housecoat.

He gazed down at her a moment. Then he said, “Ah. I see,” and the corners of his mouth quirked upward with amusement.

“But if
you’re
cold …,” she said, flushing.

“I understand,” he said. “You can’t be too careful.”

“Oh, it’s not that! Heavens!”

“I don’t blame you in the least. We’ll have our cocoa out here.”

“Really,” she said, “why don’t I come in?”

“No, you wait here. I’ll bring it out.”

“Please,” she said. “Please let me come in.”

And because she saw that the argument would otherwise go on forever, she took one hand from her pocket and laid it on his wrist. “I want to,” she said.

She wanted to come in, she meant. That was what she honestly meant, but the moment the words were out of her mouth she saw that they implied something more, and she dropped her hand and stepped back. “Or maybe …,” she said. “Yes, the … porch, why don’t we have our cocoa on the …” And she felt behind her for a chair and sat down. The icy, uncushioned seat took her breath away for an instant, as if she had heard a piece of startling news, or glimpsed some possibility that had never crossed her mind before.

4

“I told Eliza when she picked us up at the airport,” Linda said. “I told her, ‘Well, one good thing: now that Dad’s gone I won’t have to share a room with you, Eliza.’ Considering how she snores.”

Delia said, “Yes, but—”

“’And the twins won’t have to bunk with Susie,’ I said. I figured I could fit both of them in Dad’s big bed with me. Then I get to the house, and guess what.”

“I did plan at first for you to stay there,” Delia said, “but it seemed so … when I walked in to put the sheets on, it seemed so …”

“Fine, I’ll put the sheets on myself,” Linda said. “I’ll tell you this much: I am surely not sleeping with Eliza when there’s a whole extra room going empty.”

They were standing in the doorway of their father’s room at that moment, gazing in on its heartbreaking neatness, the dim air laden with dust motes, the candlewick bedspread unnaturally straight on the mattress. Linda, still in her traveling clothes, had not yet lost that aura of focus and efficiency that travel gives some people. She surveyed the room without a trace of sentiment, as far as Delia could see. “You’ve certainly wasted no time making changes elsewhere,” she said. “Air-conditioning
vents every place you look, nursery men tearing out the shrubs, I don’t know
what
all.”

“Oh, well, that’s—”

“I suppose it’s what Sam Grinstead has been waiting for,” Linda said. “He’s finally got the house in his clutches.”

Delia didn’t argue. Linda sent her a quizzical glance before crossing to their father’s bureau. Leaning into the mirror above it, she raked her fingers through her short brown pageboy. Then she removed her pocketbook, which she wore bandolier style, with the strap slanted over her chest—just one more of her European ways. You would never take her for American. (You would never guess she lived in Michigan, divorced from the French-literature professor who had not, after all, swooped her off to his native Paris as she’d hoped.) Her full, soft face was powdered white, her only other makeup a bloom of sticky scarlet on her lips, and although her clothes were unexceptional, she wore them with authority—those dowdy brown medium-heeled pumps, for instance, defiantly teamed with a navy suit. “But why are we standing around? No telling what Marie-Claire and Thérèse have got into,” she said, and the r’s in her children’s names were very nearly gargled. When she whisked past Delia toward the stairs, she smelled of airplane.

In the kitchen, they found Eliza making lemonade for the twins. This fall the twins would be nine years old—a long-limbed, sproutlike stage—and although they had their mother’s blocky brown haircut, they resembled the professor in every other way. Their eyes were almost black, mournfully downturned; their mouths were the color of plums. They were assisting each other up a bank of glass-fronted cabinets, the first pulling the second after her once she’d reached the counter, and for mobility’s sake they had tucked their old-fashioned, European-schoolgirl dresses into their underpants, which made them look all the leggier.

“As soon as your cousin Susie shows up, she’ll take you to the pool,” Eliza was saying. She stood at the drainboard, reaming lemons. “She promised she’d do it first thing, but I guess she must be off someplace with her boyfriend.”

The mention of a boyfriend diverted them for a second. “Driscoll?” Marie-Claire asked, pausing in her climb. “Does Susie still date Driscoll?”

“She does indeed.”

“Do they go to dances together? Do they kiss good night?”

“Now, that I wouldn’t know,” Eliza said tartly, and she bent to take a pitcher from a cupboard.

The twins had reached their goal: a jar of peppermints on the top shelf. Inch by inch, Thérèse maneuvered it through the partially opened door. (Thérèse was the uneven-featured twin, her face less balanced, less symmetrical, which made her appear slightly anxious. There was one in every set, Delia had noticed.) For a moment the jar seemed suspended, but then it arrived safely in Marie-Claire’s outstretched hands. “Do Ramsay and Carroll have sweethearts too?” she asked.

“Well, Ramsay does, I’m sorry to say.”

“How come you’re sorry?” Thérèse asked, and Marie-Claire said, “What’s wrong with her?”—the two of them so alert for scandal that Delia laughed aloud. Thérèse wheeled and said, “Are you sorry too, Aunt Delia? Do you forbid her to darken your door? Is she coming to the beach with us?”

“No, she’s not,” Delia said, answering only the easiest question. “The beach is just a family trip.”

They were leaving for a week at the beach early the following morning, a Sunday. It had come to be an annual event. In mid-June, as soon as the schools closed, Linda arrived from Michigan and they all took off for a cottage they rented on the Delaware shore. Already the front porch was heaped with rubber rafts and badminton rackets; the freezer was stuffed with casseroles; and Sam’s patients were thronging in for lastminute consultations in hopes of avoiding any contact with his backup.

“Delia, could you get the sugar?” Eliza asked. She was running water into the pitcher. “And girls, I’d like five tumblers from that cabinet to your right.”

While Delia was measuring sugar, she secretly checked the clock on the wall above her. Ten minutes till four. She glanced at the twins and cleared her throat. “If Susie isn’t back by the time you finish your lemonade, maybe
I
could take you to the pool,” she said.

Linda said, “You?” and the twins said, in a single voice, “You
hate
to swim!”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t actually go in. I’d just drive you over, and then Susie could pick you up later.”

Eliza clinked ice into the tumblers. Linda took a seat at the head of the table, and the twins claimed the chairs on either side of her. When Delia placed the pitcher of lemonade in front of them, Marie-Claire cried, “Ick! It’s full of shreddy things!”

“Those are good for you,” Linda said as she started pouring.

“And big seeds besides!”

“They won’t hurt you.”

“That’s what
she
says,” Thérèse told Marie-Claire in an ominous tone. “Really they’ll take root in your stomach and grow lemon trees out your ears.”

“Oh, honestly, Thérèse,” Linda said.

Ignoring her, the twins gazed significantly across the table at each other. Finally Marie-Claire said, “I guess we’re not thirsty after all.”

“We’ll just go change into our swimsuits,” Thérèse added.

They scooted their chairs back and raced out of the kitchen.

“Ah, me,” Linda sighed. “Sorry, Lize.”

“That’s all right,” Eliza said stiffly.

There were times when Delia realized, for an instant, that Eliza was what they used to call an old maid. She looked so forlorn in her eccentric weekend outfit of safari suit and clunky shoes; she pulled out a chair with her head down, her chopped black hair falling forward to hide her expression, and she seated herself and folded her small hands resolutely on the table.

“Well,
I’m
thirsty!” Delia said loudly, and she sat down too and reached for one of the tumblers. From the hall she heard a series of thumps—the twins’ suitcase, no doubt, being hauled up the stairs. Apparently they still planned to room with Susie, if the creaks that began overhead were any indication.

Outside the open window, a workman’s bearded face popped into view. He looked at the women, blinked, and disappeared. Delia and Linda saw him, but Eliza, who had her back to him, did not. “What is he up to, anyhow?” Linda asked.

Eliza said, “He? Who?”

“The workman,” Delia explained.

“No, not the workman,” Linda said. “I meant Sam. Why is he having all the shrubs torn out?”

“Well, they’re old and straggly, he says.”

“Can’t he just cut them back or something? And central air-conditioning! This house is not the type for air-conditioning.”

“I’m sure we’ll appreciate it once the weather heats up,” Eliza said. “Have some lemonade, Linda.”

Linda took a tumbler, but she didn’t drink from it. “I’d just like to know where he found the money,” she said darkly. “Plus: this house is in
our
three names, not his. We’re the ones Dad left it to.”

Delia glanced toward the window. (She suspected the workman of
lurking beneath it, absorbed as all workmen seemed to be in other people’s private lives.) “Goodness!” she said. “We’d better get to the pool. Anybody want anything from Eddie’s?”

“Eddie’s?” Eliza asked.

“I might stop for some fruit on my way home.”

“Delia, have you forgotten Sam’s mother is coming to dinner? And you still have the Medicare bills to see to! Why don’t I take the twins, instead, and then go to Eddie’s after.”

“No! Please!” Delia said. “I mean, I have plenty of time. And besides, I need to choose the fruit myself because I’m not sure what I—”

She was offering too many explanations—always a mistake. Linda didn’t notice, but Eliza could read her mind, Delia sometimes thought, and she was watching Delia consideringly. “Anyhow,” Delia said. “I’ll see you both in a while. Okay?” And she stood up. Already she heard the twins racketing down the stairs. “Hand me my purse, will you?” she asked. Eliza was still watching her, but she reached for Delia’s purse on the counter and passed it over.