Small Blessings (20 page)

“Have you had a lot of adventures, then?”

“Almost none. I've done nothing but work in bookshops since I dropped out of college.”

Professor Putnam nodded but didn't say anything. He seemed to be encouraging her to go on. Did he expect her to go on about bookshops? If so, there wasn't much to go on about. A bookshop was a bookshop was a bookshop. The building around them had grown very still. A door opened and closed somewhere down the hall. A telephone rang once. All of Rose's fellow students had escaped into the bright afternoon. Would it be all right if she escaped now, too? Surely escaping wasn't the same as bolting. Or was it? “Speaking of bookshops,” she said, backing up a step, “I'd better be going.”

“Of course.” Professor Putnam immediately became professorial again. The strange, fragile, bothersome, intrusive intimacy between them dissipated, vaporized, retreated back into its inaccessible lair. “I'd better be getting along as well,” he said, picking up his briefcase. “Although I do want to thank you again for looking after Henry on Tuesday during Marjory's funeral. Agnes and I didn't think he should go, but we also didn't feel right about parking him with a stranger so soon after he'd gotten here. And then you called, and we knew we didn't have to worry about Henry at all because he'd be with you.”

“I was happy to do it,” Rose said. “Henry's great. Really great.”

Tom Putnam immediately put his briefcase down again and leaned toward her, radiating a kind of rusty
personal
intensity. “Did Henry say anything to you? You know, about his past?”

Well, this was odd. Surely Professor Putnam knew all about his son's past. “A little.”

“What did he say?”

“Just stuff, like he didn't get to watch much TV and how he's never liked beets.” Mavis shouted at Rose again from her childhood, something about speaking the truth and shaming politicians. “Henry reminds me of me,” she added quietly. “Not that that's what makes him great.”

“
How
does he remind you of you?”
Whap
. Back at her.

“I think Henry's had to work to keep a place inside him that feels safe,” Rose said, and then immediately wondered what the hell she'd meant by
that.
Rose had never, as far as she could remember, felt unsafe. Or had she? Was unsafe what she was feeling right now, face-to-face with Professor Putnam?

“I think you're right,” he said. “In fact, I
know
you're right.”

“I am?”

“Oh, yes. Henry's got a lot of issues. An awful lot of issues for a six-year-old.”

The question popped out before Rose knew she'd decided to ask it. “How much time have you spent with Henry?”

“You mean before this week?” he asked.

“Yes.”

A group of students thundered by in the hall, laughing loudly at some communal joke, forcing Professor Putnam to speak louder. “Oh,” he all but shouted, “I met Henry for the first time when he got off the train on Monday. So you see, Miss Callahan—Rose—anything you could tell me about him would be very helpful.”

*   *   *

Iris Benson paused outside the double side doors of All Souls Episcopal Church. It was not too late to turn around and walk back to her car. Her Toyota was parked just one block up the street, wedged in between an old pickup and a jacked-up Firebird. Walking toward the church, Iris had seen no other cars she considered normal. They were all what she thought of as statement cars: big pickups stating
we have testosterone problems;
enormous SUVs stating
we have aggression problems;
or dilapidated, older American cars stating
we have money problems.
Even the ones Iris considered to be regular cars—relatively new Toyotas, Hondas, the smaller SUVs, the well-maintained, midsize American cars—had bumper stickers on them saying
I cruise without booze
or
I'm a friend of Bill's,
announcing to anyone who could read that their drivers had alcohol problems.

Her psychiatrist had been so adamant, though. Dr. Oakton had actually leaned forward while speaking to her, something he had never done before. The man hardly moved most of the time, and Iris kept waiting for his eyes to close, which would mean he'd finally nodded off. But this last time, he'd lunged at her just the way her colleagues did at meetings when they were trying to shout her down and make a point. And after he'd lunged, what Dr. Oakton had said was “The truth is we can't do any real work together, Iris, unless you stop drinking. And your best chance of doing that is to go into treatment and follow that up with regular attendance at AA meetings.”

Well, treatment was completely out of the question. Treatment would mean going to the dean and telling him she was a helpless drunk at the same time she was up for tenure. She might just as well start sending out CVs now and applying for other jobs. The dean might be young, but he was an old boy if there ever was one. To him, a man who drank too much was a real man, but a woman who drank too much was—well, whatever she was, she wasn't tenure material.

That left AA. The sad thing was, Iris had almost stopped drinking for a couple of weeks on her own—keeping her daily alcohol consumption to a couple of glasses of wine, and that only after five o'clock—and life had begun to seem a little less stressful. She'd gone whole days without raising her voice. But then Marjory Putnam had been killed, and she'd accidentally gotten drunk out of her mind, and life had jumped right back into the toilet.

The last thing Iris remembered clearly about this past Friday was a colleague rushing into her office late in the afternoon to tell her the news about Marjory. What she had done after that was only there in bits and pieces that she didn't want to consider, ever, even in therapy. The ironic thing was that she'd been all set to tell Tom Putnam, who'd always been so kind, that she thought she might possibly have a tiny problem with alcohol. Iris had thought if she told someone, it might help her put the brakes on when she got the urge to really tie one on. Then Marjory had been killed, and she vaguely remembered shouting at Rose Callahan, of all people, in the entrance hall at the Putnams'. Her next memory was waking up in a strange room, which turned out to be the Putnams' guest room, with a head full of lead marbles banging about and a feeling that was uncomfortably close to despair. She'd lain there, staring at some god-awful ramshackle piece of furniture, and thought,
I have nowhere to go but down if I don't stop drinking, and I can't stop drinking
. But when she'd complained of this to her shrink, expecting him to help alleviate the bleakness of that moment, he had instead reinforced it, making her feel that if she didn't at least get herself to AA, she might as well hang herself and get it over with.

So here she was, poised to enter a church, something she hadn't done since she was twelve and old enough to rebel against
that
parental imperative. She would spend the next hour listening to a bunch of drunks, and somehow this was supposed to keep her from stopping at the ABC store on the way home? My God, it was hopeless. Just hopeless. She would have nothing in common with these people. Nothing. She could tell that from their cars. Her only real hope lay with her therapy, but now her shrink had lunged at her and given her the uncomfortable feeling that he didn't really want to see her again if she hadn't at least tried AA.

A middle-aged man in a faded flannel shirt appeared beside her. His stringy hair was cut very short on the sides and hung down to his shoulders in the back. When he smiled, Iris saw that he had very few teeth and none of those met. “I ain't seen you here before,” he said cheerfully. “This your first meeting?”

“Yes.” Iris was too startled to find herself speaking to this sort of person to evade the question.

The man stepped forward and pushed open one side of the heavy double doors. “Well, come on in,” he said, still cheerful, as though this were no big deal. “All you have to do is not drink while you're here. There's no law that says you can't drink all you want just as soon as you leave.” He stood there holding the door, smiling at her. Inside the room Iris could see a bunch of people sitting around a big seminar table. More people sat in folding chairs around the edges of the room. Heads had turned and were looking at her. “Thank you,” Iris said, raising her chin, squaring her shoulders, tossing her hair, and brushing past him, making one of her grander entrances.

The first person to come into focus was Russell Jacobs, sitting against the wall on the far side of the room.

Iris stopped.

She stared.

She would never,
ever,
in a million trillion years, have guessed that Russell Jacobs, Professor Pompous, was an alcoholic.

*   *   *

It was awful. It had never occurred to Iris there might be someone she knew at an AA meeting. And having that someone be Russell made her feel as though Yahweh Herself were laughing at her.

At least she had the pleasure of seeing Russell look momentarily discomforted to see
her
. If she was blown, so was he, which meant that neither of them could out the other without outing themselves. But still, Russell would forever and ever know that she knew he was a drunk. Which, hopefully, would make him a tiny bit crazy. Or should she say, crazier?

But then, being the world's, biggest, fattest
fake,
Russell smiled and waved as though he'd completely forgotten they hated each other. Iris took the first seat she came to among the wall chairs, wedging herself in between an enormous man and an enormous woman who had obviously hoped they would be allowed a little extra space between them. Iris put her purse on the floor under her chair and then stared at her purple Birkenstocks while a piece of paper was passed around and different people read some mumbo-jumbo about Higher Power this and Higher Power that.
It's a cult,
she thought,
just like Aunt Suzy said.
Aunt Suzy was a Southern Baptist. She was married to Iris's mother's brother, who drank like a fish. Uncle Harry had gone to AA for a while and stopped drinking, but then he'd begun referring to his Higher Power, and Aunt Suzy had made him stop going to meetings, saying she'd rather be married to a drinker than to a man who put his faith in something other than Our Lord Jesus Christ. Sure enough, in a couple of weeks, Uncle Harry was off on a full-blown toot, and Aunt Suzy had gotten what she'd asked for.

After they'd finished reading from the paper, the people who hadn't read introduced themselves. The introductions were obviously scripted. They started off as complete sentences—“Hi, I'm So-and-so (first name only), and I'm an alcoholic.” A few people even stuck in “grateful, recovering” before the word “alcoholic.” But by the time the first dozen people had finished, the introduction had shrunk to “So-and-so, alcoholic,” the way academics introduce themselves to each other at conferences, stating their names and their colleges or universities, running the two together as though their place of employment were their true last names. Of course, academics could do whatever they pleased because they had nothing to be ashamed of, while these people had plenty to be ashamed of. Their cars, for starters.

The introductions whipped around the room like a runaway horse, reaching the enormous woman on Iris's right. “Myrtle, alcoholic,” she said.

Silence fell. Everyone in the room looked at Iris. Even Russell Jacobs. Even the people at the near end of the table who had to turn around in their chairs. The almost-toothless man with the funny hair was nodding his head at her encouragingly from the other side of the room. Iris felt the pressure of her neighbor's shoulders on her own. What if she was stuck? Really stuck? Not just metaphorically stuck because of Dr. Oakton's ultimatum. Her shoulders certainly were mashed together, which made it impossible for her to sit up straight, which made it impossible for her to carry this moment off with any sort of aplomb.

Then dramatically—as though some inner-cranial intervention were taking place—the great black hole of last Friday night enveloped her, and a small voice spoke up very clearly inside her head:
Iris Benson, for once in your life, can't you just cut the crap?
She shrank back further against the wall. Oh, what the hell. As Martha and her Vandellas had sung so long ago, there was nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide. “Iris, alcoholic,” she mumbled, wanting very badly to add that she wasn't sure at all if that were true, and even if it were, she certainly didn't belong in this place with a bunch of losers and one pompous ass named Russell Jacobs.

The introductions galloped on around the rest of the room. Iris dimly heard, “Russell, alcoholic,” intoned in Russ's rich, professorial baritone. She stayed pressed against her wall, almost hidden behind her neighbors. When they asked for newcomers to stand, she didn't move. Iris stayed mute and motionless as various people got up and addressed some hare-brained “topic” suggested by a pinched little man who spoke in a disproportionately booming voice. At the end of the meeting, when they asked if anyone would like to pick up a twenty-four-hour chip, signifying that they were going to give the AA way of life a try, she didn't move. When the meeting was finally over, she had to wait until her neighbors got up before she could. But then one of them grabbed her hand, and Iris found herself part of a giant circle embarked on the Lord's Prayer, of all things. Surely this was unconstitutional. Surely you weren't allowed to pray at a public gathering. Although maybe you were at this one, since they were meeting in a church.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen. Keep coming back. It works if you work it!