Nobody's Fool (28 page)

The current owner was a man Vera had known and disliked when they were in the same high school class. At the time he bought her father's house everyone had assumed he'd move in, but instead he rented it, along with the one his parents had lived in around the corner, and he himself moved to Schuyler Springs. He'd bought her father's house for a song when Robert Halsey, who was in slowly declining health, sensed that it would not be long before he would be in need of constant care.

He'd sold the house well below market, without consulting his daughter or anyone else, perhaps without suspecting what the house was worth, perhaps fearing that if he waited too long, the house could conceivably be lost to illness. He'd sold it in the summer, when Vera and Ralph and Peter were away for their week's vacation, and had moved into the veterans' home in Schuyler Springs before she returned. He knew that she would try to dissuade him, and perhaps succeed in doing so, knew that it was her intention to tend to his needs for as long as he allowed her. He was unsentimental where his daughter was concerned, knew all too well the preternatural strength other devotion to him, knew that she would put his needs, his well-being, before her own, and maybe even before her family's. When she'd been a younger woman, away at her first year at the state teachers' college at Oneonta and he'd taken ill, she'd simply dropped all her classes and come home to tend to him. When he got well again, at least for a time, she never went back, instead allowing herself to slip into a doomed marriage with Sully (so she could be close by, he suspected) and then, after the divorce, into a more satisfactory but--her father suspected--equally unhappy marriage to Ralph Mott. Robert Halsey had been concerned, though not terribly surprised, when his daughter talked her second husband into buying a house down the street. He understood that the proximity made Vera feel safe and good, and he was never able to find a way to tell her that it was time for her to give him up, just as he was never able to tell her when she exercised bad judgment in other respects, despite the numerous opportunities she provided. Her love for him was the most terrible thing he'd ever witnessed, and he could think of no way to combat it, no way to prevent her from injuring herself further. By selling the house and giving her and Ralph the NOBODY'S FOOL 149 money, by moving to Schuyler Springs and into the VA home, he had fled her devotion and helped his daughter and her second husband get out from under the burden of debt brought on by her earlier lapses in judgment. Though he had never found a way to tell her, Vera knew that she was a disappointment to her father. He had worked hard and sacrificed much on his small-town teacher's salary to provide her with an opportunity to attend college. Instead of going to the university as he'd urged her, she'd insisted on the state teachers' college because it was closer, and then had walked away from even that.

She'd known that returning home to tend him would not please her father, that doing it was some sort of deep-down lie. She had not liked the college or her life there, had not made friends, had not been able to focus on her studies. Her father's illness had been an excuse to return home and share his life. She loved him that much and found it impossible to question her unflagging devotion to him, even though she understood, at least in moments of brutal clarity, that it was this devotion, as much as Sully's myriad shortcomings, that was responsible for the failure other first marriage, just as it was responsible for the continued unhappiness other second. The simple fact was that no man measured up to Robert Halsey, her father, a man of noble bearing, directly descended from Jedediah Halsey, the man who first envisioned, then made a reality of, the Sans Souci. The only person who came close to measuring up was her son, Peter, in whom Vera had a- great deal invested. In Peter she saw a boy destined to redeem her father's faith and sacrifice. He was bright, a far better student than she had ever been, and he did very well in school despite the fact that his teachers seemed not to like him. His achievements always seemed to fall just short of brilliance, a fact for which his mother was never able to account. He was an exceedingly nervous child, but she did not suspect that he studied out of fear, propelled forward only as far as fear could push him, which was a goodly distance.

When she finally began to recognize her son's terrors for what they were, it did not take her long to isolate their source, which could only be Sully, the man who both was and was not his father, who was lurking in the back of her son's consciousness. Vera was able to identify this fear because she shared it. She had always carried with her the knowledge that Sully possessed the power to destroy them all, possibly through carelessness, perhaps even through misguided good intentions. Her most nagging fear when Peter was growing up was that Sully might one day wake up and take an interest in their son. This turned out to be an unwarranted concern, but Vera spent many a sleepless night developing strategies for coping with Sully in the unlikely event that he should become an issue, and each time he turned up at her door, usually at her foolish husband Ralph's instigation, with plans to take Peter somewhere, Vera was terrified that he would suddenly love the boy. What would she do then? What could she do? It was this irrational concern that had so often led Vera's judgment to falter.

Recalling how homesick she'd been in college at Oneonta, how out of place she had felt, how hard it had been to focus on her studies, she decided to spare Peter North Bath's suspect high school by sending him to an all-boy prep school in New Hampshire. The decision had been an agonizing one because she'd known that even as the strategy protected Peter from his father, it also separated the boy from herself. In the end she decided the risk was worth it, telling herself that the better educated and more refined he became, the less appealing he would be to his father, the less likely Sully would be to come to his senses and love his own son. Some would call it justice, she supposed, the way things had turned out--file under "Be careful what you wish for." As she had hoped. Sully showed even less interest in their son after he went away to prep school. It occurred to Vera too late that this would have happened in any case.

The responsibility and burden of affection had always weighed heavily on her ex-husband. Given half a chance, he gravitated naturally to the easy camaraderie of the lunchroom, the barroom, the company of men, of another man's wife. By sending her son away, Vera had prevented something that did not need preventing, and at a cost to herself. Her attempts to protect Peter, her devotion to him, had once again, just as it had with her father, set into motion the law of unintended consequences, along with the cruel laws of irony and paradox. For Peter, in becoming a son to be proud of--an educator like her father, a college professor at home in the very environment that had intimidated Vera--had learned to lose his interest in and affection for her, coolly dismissing the books she recommended to him, smiling his ironic smile at her political views as if to suggest that she was incapable of any opinion or observation that wasn't entirely typical or predictable.

There was so much she would have liked to tell him, now that they were both adults, and he wasn't interested in any of it. He seemed more pleased to spend time with Ralph, her husband, who had no views at all, than with herself. That her son remained capable of affection but could spare so little for herself was the crudest twist of all. Today, at their Thanksgiving dinner together, Vera had seen more clearly than ever before what a terrible thing love was, or at least the kind 151 of love that had rooted most deeply in her own anxious heart. Knowing how difficult it would be, she had planned the day carefully. Yesterday she'd baked the pies and then had risen early this morning to stuff the turkey and prepare her father's favorite squash. Then, midmorning, she'd driven to Schuyler Springs with Ralph to gather Robert Halsey from the dreadful veterans' home, not an easy task because they had to transport not only the fragile man but also his breathing apparatus--the portable oxygen tank and mask--which they could not just put in the trunk, since her father might need it on the drive back to Bath. For a while it had seemed the day would work.

Back on Silver Street they'd been able to get her father, who was having one of his better days breathing and required the oxygen only sporadically, installed in the living room. Peter, who had always been fond of his grandfather, had drawn up a chair, and the two had swapped teaching stories, Peter suppressing for once his cynicism, along with, at Vera's insistence, the fact that he'd been denied tenure at the university. Ralph had turned the football game low, and horsey Charlotte had managed to keep the horrid little Wacker, a truly monstrous child, from tormenting his brother and everyone else. Vera had stayed in the warm kitchen, humming over the final dinner preparations and allowing herself to become intoxicated by the smells and sounds of food and family and terrible, terrible love and longing.

If she felt a fear, it was the distant one that Sully might show up and spoil everything, since Peter had informed her that he'd issued the invitation, surely to vex her. But she told herself that God would not be so cruel to her as to allow this, at least not today. Half an hour before dinner, she got Ralph to help her slip the leaf into the dining room table, and together they covered it with the white linen tablecloth she saved for holidays. She set the table with the family silver she had inherited from her mother, who had died when Vera was a child. At each end of the table she set two candles, which she lit, then dimmed the lights before calling the family to the table. She instructed each person where to sit, an annoyance, she could tell, Peter and Charlotte exchanging glances, Wacker refusing to vacate a chair at the head of the table until horsey Charlotte physically removed him.

She could tell that Peter disapproved not only of the concept of a seating plan in general but of her seating plan in particular, which called for her father to take the head and Peter the foot, and leaving Ralph, whose table it was, somewhere in the middle, though Ralph could have cared less, provided he was close to the platter of turkey.

And so, when the table was full of food and Vera's family had come together, and Vera herself had the satisfaction of knowing that she'd skillfully accomplished a difficult task, when the image she'd borne in her imagination had been replicated as faithfully as possible in her dining room, her father, looking healthier than she'd seen him in months and having left his oxygen set up in the next room, anchoring one end of the table and Peter, looking handsome and only a. little imperious at the other, when the family had begun to pass in the candlelight the food she'd prepared, only then when the doorbell did not ring and Sully did not show up at this perfect moment and spoil everything, only then did Vera have the leisure to note that the perfect moment, so long awaited and planned for, was a lie. As the platters of food got passed, Vera felt the truth rise in her throat, and she knew she would not be able to swallow so much as a mouthful.

Only Ralph, who never noticed anything, seemed oblivious to this truth as he ladled gravy over everything on his plate, including the cranberries. Her father, she suddenly realized, had left his oxygen behind not because he didn't need it but because he thought it would spoil everyone's dinner. She could hear him wheezing, gasping really, as he awaited the turkey, and when it came, his hand shook so that he was unable to spear a slice and had to be meted a portion by horsey Charlotte, who gave him dark meat, not knowing his preference for white, and he was too dred to say anything.

"Everything is delicious.

Mom," Peter said, looking down at his plate. Twice that day he and Charlotte had gone into the bedroom they used during these visits, and Vera had heard their angry, lowered voices and understood fully what she'd suspected for some time, that theirs was a worse-than-loveless marriage and that it would not hold together another year, maybe not even another month. " Yes ..

Vera," her father managed. " Very ..

fine. " But he hadn't the strength to say more, and she felt powerfully that he would not last the year, either. Neither of the men in her life had looked at her when he spoke, and she understood that neither was able to face her, or wanted to face her. What they needed from her was for this to be over, and neither looked up even when she did not respond to their compliments, her throat constricting with bitter truth, rising dangerously.

Only Will, her grandson, seemed aware of her distress, and he watched her so fearfully that she wished there was a way to reassure him that this feeling would pass, that truth was something she'd always been able to swallow and keep down.

She was not surprised when her father pushed back his chair and rose unsteadily.

"I'm ... so ... sorry .. . Vera," he said, turning away from the table and heading for the living room.

1S3

She rose quickly to help him, but with the leaf in the table the room was crowded and horsey Charlotte and the horrid little Wacker were between them, and anyway, he didn't need her. What he needed was oxygen. Air. Outside Vera's kitchen window the pickup truck at the curb continued to belch thick fumes, though it had grown dark enough now that the pollution was not clearly defined. Dark had overtaken dark, it occurred to her. As she watched, the street lamp kicked on, to little effect. She became aware of Peter then, and when she turned he was studying her from the doorway. He was carrying the cutting board that contained the turkey carcass. She'd bought a larger bird than necessary, and Peter had carved only half of it. Now, the way he held the cutting board, the uncarved portion facing her, the golden brown bird appeared intact, as if no one had eaten, as if her offering were being returned to her untouched, spurned. Peter, seeing there was no room on the counter around the sink, set the board and carcass down on the dinette table.