Small Blessings (11 page)

She turned away and headed for her door.

“Rose?”

“Yes?”

Russell stood there with shoulders hunched and his hands stuffed in his pockets. What on earth did he want to say to her? She had turned around and was looking back at him, a dark, slim silhouette against the porch light. Surely she knew all about him, even if she hadn't filled in all the details. He felt as exposed as a streaker, but there was nowhere to go with this other than forward, wherever that took him. “I know I can be an awful blowhard sometimes,” Russell heard himself say.

“Yes, you can.” Rose's tone was completely neutral, and there was no way to know whether or not she was smiling.

Enough was enough. Russell swung back into character. He straightened his back and gave her the smart bow of a movie butler. Whatever he was, he was, and it would have to do. “Sure, and it's part of me charm,” he said in what he'd often been told was a stellar imitation of an Irish brogue.

“If you say so!” Rose turned again and walked up the two steps of her newly painted front stoop. Russell waited until she had opened her front door, then took off again toward the main road. His own house was on the other side of campus, on a tree-lined, manicured street where deans, high-level administrators, and the president dwelt imposingly in brick. He walked very fast, because something kept pulling him backward, as though he were trying to drive a car with the brakes on.

 

chapter 5

Saturday morning, Tom Putnam sat up and looked around. The room he and Marjory had shared for most of their long, blank years together was strewn with her stuff; half-used pots of this and that, stacks and stacks of self-help books, the contraption she'd strapped under her chin every night that was supposed to keep her neck from turning into a turkey's. Every object offered its own mute and separate reproach that he'd not been able to make its owner whole again—or at least somewhat functional.

Tom heard Agnes open the door of her room and stomp down the hall toward the back stairs. For years the two of them had eaten a painfully polite breakfast with Marjory, then sent her off to do some failure-proof task while they sat on together at the kitchen table and chatted about what they planned to do with their days and how they felt about various unimportant subjects, like whether or not Agnes should start texting. Nothing they said would have held a thimbleful of interest for anyone else on the planet, but Tom had always found these morning conversations deeply satisfying. Talking to your mother-in-law might seem like small potatoes to people who luxuriated in more richly felt lives, but it had been enough for him to build a bearable day on.
Small blessings,
as his mother had so often said, shaking her head as though the wisdom of Solomon had been compressed into those two words.
Small blessings.

Tom rolled out of bed and peered through the open window. Today appeared to be shaping up much like yesterday, golden-lit and clear. He shaded his eyes and peered out at the ancient oak that spread its lofty arms over the backyard. Every October, its dull red leaves blew down across the lane and carpeted his yard. He'd spent one glorious Saturday morning every year raking them up, glad to have a worthwhile task to do. It was one of the few mornings during the year he'd been able to count on not having to battle dull anger at Marjory's absolute inability ever to let anything go. He knew this inability came from what Dr. Simms called “her pathological lack of self-esteem.” He
knew
that. But her whole life, Marjory had been allowed to demand what she could never give—nonstop understanding and forgiveness.

Tom stretched his arms high over his head and listened for signs of life downstairs. On most mornings Agnes banged her way around the kitchen, but today, she'd clumped down the stairs, and then … nothing.

Abruptly Tom was a man on a mission. He dressed and raced down to the kitchen, certain he would find the room empty except for a note on the table saying,
I'm outta here!
But there she was! Agnes Tattle, his crusty, cigarette-smoking mother-in-law. Tom could have kissed her—thrown his long arms around Agnes's small body and smacked her loudly on whatever part of her he reached first.

At a quick glance, everything looked relatively normal. Agnes sat in her usual place at the big kitchen table, working on the day's to-do lists with a ballpoint pen. But then Tom saw that his mother-in-law was not only smoking a Camel, she was still wearing those enormous men's pajamas. This was aberrant behavior in the extreme, for Agnes always dressed before coming downstairs in the morning.
Always.

“Good morning!” he sang out, a shade too heartily.

Agnes eyed him over her cigarette. She looked worn out, like a bag lady who'd spent the night on a subway vent. “Don't be so loud right off the bat,” she snapped, putting down her ballpoint. “Give me a moment to get used to being awake.”

“Okay,” Tom said cheerfully, glad to find Agnes had at least recovered some of her habitual bark. The kitchen windows were open. A slight breeze pushed cigarette smoke in his direction, and he sneezed. It was a real blast, out before he could even attempt to muffle it.

“Gesundheit,”
Agnes said.

“Thank you.”

The Braun hissed and spluttered on the kitchen counter, announcing it was through dripping. It was Tom's job to put the coffee together at night, Agnes's to turn it on in the morning. Each of them had come through as usual, at least in the coffee department. It might be a small scrap of structure to cling to, but it was something. A ripple of dread slapped at Tom. What would happen to their comfortingly familiar routine now that Marjory was gone and Henry was on his way?

Agnes was watching him, wearing her I-know-what-
you're
-thinking look. “Are you going to stand there looking rabbity or are you going to get us some coffee?”

“I'm going to get us some coffee, of course.” Tom crossed over to the counter, got their usual mugs down from the cupboard (both awkward gifts from Marjory—his said “World's Greatest Husband”; hers, “World's Greatest Mom”), poured coffee into them, placed Agnes's mug in front of her, and sat down across from her at the table.

Agnes stubbed out her half-finished Camel in the jar lid she was using as an ashtray. “I'm sorry about the smoke. I know it makes you clog up. This breakfast will be the last time I smoke in the house. I may smoke out on the back porch where no one can see me for quite a while, though. Who knows?” She gestured down at her pajamas. “These were my husband's.”

“You're kidding.” Tom looked at the pajamas more closely. They were exactly like a pair his father had had, years and years ago. Agnes rarely mentioned her husband to him. Why was she wearing his pajamas?

“Nope, I'm not kidding. I wear these things on the rare nights I need comfort. I think I've had them on ten times in the past four and a half decades, but I've needed them for the last two nights. I seem to have lost most of my self-discipline along with my daughter. Ever since the police were here, I've been drinking like a fish, smoking like a chimney, and fighting a desire to curl up and suck my thumb.”

“You'll get hold of yourself again,” Tom said, meaning it. Agnes
was
self-discipline. Self-destruction was not her thing.

“Sure.” Agnes lit another Camel, sucked in smoke, blew it out her nose, and eyed Tom over Rose Callahan's jar of roses, which someone (Agnes herself?) had placed in the center of the kitchen table. The flowers bloomed away as though nothing in the world were awry. “Look,” Agnes said, “I know that letter you got night before last contained some bomb you've got to detonate this morning, but before all that, I'd just like to say that I think Rose Callahan is a nice person.”

“You would?” Tom experienced a blast of confusion.

“I think she's a safe person, too,” Agnes went on. “And I don't say that about many people. I certainly can't say it about myself.”

“What do you mean by ‘safe'?”

“I mean she doesn't need a lot from other people. She was raised in a series of apartments over bars.”

“She was?” Tom's own hopelessly conventional upbringing loomed before him like an eighteen-year-long episode of
Leave It to Beaver.

“Yep. She was. She evidently moved around a lot.”

“Really?” The image of a skinny, ten-year-old Rose Callahan eating lunch by herself in yet another new school cafeteria tugged at Tom's heart. He'd had the same group of friends all through high school. “You know,” he said, “night before last, Marjory came up to my office to tell me that she liked Rose Callahan very much, and that she thought Rose needed friends.”

“Really?” Agnes eyed him.

“Yes. Really. It's hard to imagine, but that's what Marjory said.” Tom stared at a fallen rose petal that lay just beyond his coffee cup. “Do you think it could possibly be true? It seems so unlikely.”

Agnes shrugged. “Got me. Rose
is
remarkably self-contained. That's part of the reason Marjory responded to her the way she did. Rose Callahan instantly sized up poor, crazy Marjory and let her be who she was. The rest of us were always trying to force Marjory to act some way she wasn't capable of, just so
we
could feel a little better.”

“The rest of us had to live with her,” Tom said.

“That's true. We did have to do that. And Rose is new on the scene. She'd never had to deal with Marjory bursting into tears because her scissors were dull, or having an anxiety attack over which doughnut to choose. Oh, dear.” Agnes drew in a long, shuddering breath. “What a tortured human being my daughter was. Marjory is, I really do think, better off dead. I don't know what dead is, of course, but it's got to be more fun than my daughter's life was.”

Another rose petal fluttered to the tabletop. Tom picked it up. It felt like thin velvet between his fingers. The truth was that his mother-in-law often said things he was too timid even to think, things such as
Marjory is better off dead.
When he actually considered it, though, that statement seemed pretty likely to be true. Twenty years of marriage, and the woman he'd been married to was better off dead. Tom tried to picture Rose Callahan's oddly peaceful face, but it eluded him. He knew Agnes was waiting for him to say something. “I wish,” he said, “that Marjory could have figured out a way to be more relaxed about things. I really do. But she didn't seem to have much capacity for relaxation.”

Agnes snorted. “The master of understatement speaks again!”

Tom put the petal carefully back where it had fallen on the table. “I guess you've got that right.” It was a great relief to find that he and Agnes could still talk; that the two of them were joined in a way that had, initially anyway, survived Marjory's death. He would at least have a comfortable beginning to this long tumultuous day.
Small blessings.
There was his mother again. Louise Putnam was in a New Jersey nursing home, smoothing her apron and planning to bake brownies for him and her dead husband, blissfully convinced it was 1967. Growing up, Tom had thought she was mostly hopeless, only able to grasp the occasional big picture, such as civil rights. But now he knew she'd been wise, taking sustenance from the simple pleasures of everyday things. When you got down to actual survival, that
was
the big picture.

Agnes ground out her Camel. “So let's have it,” she said around a final blast of smoke. “I think I've put off knowing long enough.”

It didn't occur to Tom to be disingenuous, to ask, “Have what?” or to stall for time by talking about what he was about to talk about. He took a deep breath and addressed the jar of roses. “I have a ten-year-old son named Henry who's arriving in Charlottesville on the Monday morning train. I had no idea he existed until that letter arrived.”

“Hmmm.” Agnes lit another Camel. Tom heard her sucking and blowing, but other than that, nothing. The silence was unbearable, so he rattled on. “I had a short affair with a visiting poet the year before you came to live with us. It only lasted three weeks, but I guess that was long enough to produce Henry. I'm so, so sorry.”

“Why?” Agnes asked.

“Because I was a self-centered fool?” Tom heard the question in his voice, as though he were being quizzed and wasn't sure of the correct answer.

Agnes made a disgusted sound around her Camel. “I didn't mean why did you have the affair. I've known about that for a long, long time. I meant why are you
sorry
you had the affair?”

“Oh.” Tom's eyes were still on the roses. “I see. I guess I'm sorry because Marjory somehow sussed it out and it made her worse.”

“Hmmm,” Agnes said again. “And am I right in supposing that was the only affair you had during your two decades of marriage to my daughter?”

“Yes.”

Another suck. Another blow. “It was with that really pale Nordic poet, wasn't it? The one you said had just lost her husband and gone all needy?”

“Yes.”

“Pity. I remember I drove down to the college from Charlottesville for her reading. I thought she was quite a good poet, but she wasn't very jolly, and twenty years is a long time.”

Tom finally looked at his mother-in-law. Had she just implied she wished he'd had
more
affairs? “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

Tom would have never guessed that one person could bestow forgiveness and understanding on another person so efficiently. “I did hear you. Thank you.”

“The reality of all this is, Tom Putnam, that Marjory deserves peace. And you, Tom Putnam, deserve a life.”

His heart jolted unpleasantly.
What's that?

Agnes grinned. “Scared you, didn't I?”