Small Blessings (21 page)

Where did that last cheer come from? That wasn't part of the regular Lord's Prayer, was it? It was just too, too tacky for words. Iris grabbed her purse the moment her hand was released and raced for the door, but she wasn't quite quick enough. The flannel-shirt man nabbed her and thrust a pamphlet at her. “Nice to have you here,” he said. “Keep coming back. This here's a meeting schedule.”

Iris took the schedule and fled. Out of the corner of her eye, she'd seen Russell Jacobs chatting away with some mousy middle-aged woman who was looking up at him as though he were God's gift to AA. Iris didn't care if she spent the rest of her life drunk as a skunk. All she wanted was to get out of there.

 

chapter 12

Her daughter's struggles had been the organizing principle of Agnes Tattle's existence for more than forty years. Marjory's death had left her skilled at coping, not at living. Since Henry's arrival, she'd spent most of her time in her first-floor “office,” a small, square room that had once been the house's china cupboard, trying to find some clue to the mystery that was Henry. But then, at some point late yesterday afternoon, it had occurred to her she might be more useful if she put in some time
with
Henry, so that Tom could get back to work.

So now, here she sat on the back porch steps,
not
smoking, watching Henry play politely with the new Tonka dump truck Rose Callahan had brought him.
Would that I
, Agnes thought,
shared Rose Callahan's ability to reach the hearts of small, damaged boys.
She'd been on her own with Henry for just under four hours and did not consider their time together a success. To begin with, she'd hovered, which was something she considered the hallmark of bad parenting. Children needed space more than overprotection. Parents who hovered were meeting their own needs, not their children's.

Agnes's one solace was that she'd been no worse than Tom in the hovering department. He had trailed Henry around like a besotted puppy, doing his best to “play” with him. Agnes had found the sight of her tall, semihandsome, thoroughly awkward son-in-law squatting, kneeling, crawling around after their small, strange cohabitant alternately unbearably endearing and unbearably pathetic. Midway through yesterday, overloaded with feelings, she'd fled to her converted china closet and mostly stayed there whenever she didn't have to entertain uninvited guests.

What Agnes wanted most was to stop feeling
anything
for a while. She thought she could probably have dealt with Marjory's death pretty well by itself. But that, coupled with Henry's baffling arrival and its attendant whiffs of renewed hope, had wrung her dry. It was as Tom had said, the boy had a
future
. This meant that, suddenly and alarmingly, so did she and Tom. Her own future might be very short—she was just turned seventy-two, after all—but there it was before her, as immovable as a mountain.

Oddly, of all the things that unsettled her, it was Tom's sudden
aliveness
that unhinged her the most. An energized Tom was much harder to deal with than an absent Marjory or an almost-silent Henry. Who was this strange man, chattering away about Barney and Transformers to a child who just
looked
at him? Last evening, after Henry had gone to bed, Tom enthusiastically confided to her that he'd had a couple of what he termed “mini-breakthroughs” with Henry while they'd been reading Harry Potter. This appeared to mean that Henry had spoken to him twice voluntarily.

Big whoop-de-doo! That oughta keep the child psychologists at bay another day,
she'd thought at the time. But now Agnes asked herself, what right did she have to rain on Tom's breakthrough parade? She and Henry had yet to exchange a single word.
A single word!
At breakfast this morning, when she'd asked him whether he'd like cornflakes or Wheaties, he'd pointed to the cornflakes box rather than speak to her. Did Henry sense how bossy and controlling she'd become over the last forty years?

Agnes watched the boy cautiously push the Tonka dump truck up against the base of a derelict bird feeder. Weren't small boys supposed to
crash
their dump trucks into things while making loud motor noises?
Rummmmmm, rummmmmm?

She sighed and wished with all her heart that she were expelling Camel smoke instead of air. At least, Agnes thought glumly, Henry
looks
a little less cautious.

The college bells began striking the hour. Agnes checked her watch. Good. Five o'clock. Tom's office hours were officially over. At this moment, he'd probably be racing home to resume “playing” with Henry. People would stop him, as they always did, but he would be in a hurry, so he would be uncharacteristically efficient in exchanging greetings. It was safe to assume Tom would be here in half or three-quarters of an hour, at which point she would go inside, mix up a meatloaf and watch
The News Hour
while it cooked. Talking back to nutcase politicians always revived her spirits. She was
good
at talking back to nutcases. In her bleaker moments, Agnes worried she no longer knew how to communicate with non-nutcases on anything other than the most superficial level.
How are you today?… My, isn't it hot?… Have you read
Blink
yet?
seemed to be about all she could muster by way of conversation with a regular person.

And Henry was much more important than a regular person. Henry was Henry.

*   *   *

Tom heard the college bells ring the hour through the open window. Five o'clock. There had been an early trickle of students showing up for his office hours, but then no one had come by after four o'clock.

Tom quickly packed his briefcase, closed his office door behind him, and walked down the hall with a spring in his step. Well, why shouldn't he? He was headed home after a surprisingly satisfying day, not to a bleak, predictable evening with Marjory, but to a completely unpredictable, possibly fun evening with Henry.

As he passed Iris Benson's closed office door, Tom briefly considered knocking, just to check up on her—an impulse that made him smile. Evidently his habit of feeling responsible for troubled people had not died with Marjory.

Marjory! How strange it was to think of her with something close to simple affection and regret instead of dread and guilt. The early fall sunlight slanted through the trees, pricking out light and shadow in ways that gave even Tom an artist's appreciative eye. Carried along on a miraculous tide of goodwill toward everyone, including himself, Tom realized that the reason he related to dead Marjory in a less complicated, more companionable way than he'd related to living Marjory might have nothing to do with him. It might, instead, have to do with some trick of memory. Perhaps in death, whatever she'd wished to be was allowed to stamp out the memory of what she'd been stuck with being? Which seemed, somehow, to release him from their shared, unhappy, pointless past. Perhaps it really was okay just to let go of all that worry and let a different, happier life begin?

Thinking this over—as much as he
could
think over something so illogical and fantastical—it occurred to Tom that embracing the possibility of a happy future might be the bravest thing he'd ever done. Change of any kind had always been a challenge for him, and this represented change on steroids, a shift in his entire habit of being.

Step by step, more and more, Tom began to feel that he
owed
it to Marjory to try; that allowing himself to be happy might, in some cockamamie way, be the most fitting tribute he could pay her. The hard truth was that, unlike him and unlike her mother, Marjory, for all her craziness, had always,
always
had the guts to hope that life would get better. Perhaps hope, thrust upon him in this queer
magical
way, was to be her lasting legacy?

A dog sniffed at his leg, then nipped him on the seat of his pants. Tom jumped and turned around.

“Sorry!” It was the president—teetering on stiletto heels, constrained by a short, tight skirt—out walking her greyhounds. Or rather being walked by them. The president's greyhounds had become a campus cross to bear. For two dogs who were never let loose, they caused a spectacular amount of ruckus. At the moment the president was ineffectually yanking the leash of the bigger one, who obviously wanted nothing more than to play with Tom. “I can't seem to control Romeo,” she gasped. “Juliet is really much better behaved.”

“That's all right.” Tom resisted the impulse to finger his pants bottom and find out if the fabric was torn.

In the space of a couple of heartbeats, the offending Romeo lost interest in Tom and wrapped his leash completely around the president twice, binding her tightly about the legs, so that she looked like a bad fashion statement ready to be burned at the stake.

A squirrel ran by on the grass, tantalizingly just out of reach. Romeo lunged at it on his shortened leash. The president swayed dangerously. Tom dropped his briefcase and leapt to steady her, grasping her by the upper arms and bracing his legs. Romeo lunged and tugged. It was all Tom could do to keep the president upright.

“Why don't you just let Romeo run?” he suggested. The president smelled faintly of cigarettes. Was she a closet smoker? My, my.

“What if he runs away?” the president gasped. “I'd never forgive myself.” Still, she unsnapped the leash, and Romeo shot after the squirrel. Or rather, he dashed about twenty feet and stopped, then veered to the right, dashed another twenty, and stopped. Then he sat down, thoroughly confused by his freedom. The president had rescued both him and Juliet from the racetrack. Romeo had spent most of his life in a cage. Now, actually given the chance to go anywhere he liked, the dog had no idea what to make of such options.

Tom stared at him.
We're two of a kind, Romeo,
he thought. A line from an old Dobie Gray song flashed through his head:
Looking back and longing for the freedom of my chains.
Then Henry and Rose Callahan wandered through his mind walking hand in hand, beckoning him to come with them …

The president, having extricated herself from Romeo's leash, was patting and pulling at herself and her clothes. Amazingly, Juliet sat calmly beside her like a working dog trained to
hup.
She looked up anxiously at Tom as though pleading with him.
Please, mister, don't let her release me, too. I couldn't stand it.

Romeo came loping back to the president, sat down, and waited patiently for her to understand that he wanted to be put back on his leash. Once she got it and his wish was granted, Romeo immediately began charging off in all directions again. Everything interesting lay just beyond the length of his leash, which was just the way Romeo liked it. Juliet immediately joined him in the fun.

Tom leaned over to pick up his briefcase. When he unbent again, the president was still there, standing with her legs as far apart as her tight skirt would allow in order to brace herself in all directions at once. Her arms shot stiffly this way and that at the whim of her greyhounds. Why didn't the president just give up and go home? Hire some student with strong legs and sensible shoes to walk her ridiculous dogs. Then Tom realized the president was still looking at him, and, what's more, seemed to be
thinking
about him as well, for her eyes held genuine concern. “I just wanted to say again, Tom,” she said, “how sorry I am that your life has had this dreadful disruption. I've had a few disruptions of my own, so I know how confusing it can be. So if there's anything you need, anything I can do, either personally or professionally, for you and your son, I do hope you'll let me know.”

Tom was startled. The president hadn't made some greeting-card statement about Marjory's loss and Henry's sudden arrival. Instead, she had used the word “disruption.” She'd figured out—who knew how—the thing he was only now fully coming to terms with himself: that his problem was not one of overpowering grief or a huge sense of loss, but was instead of deep confusion and disorientation at the possibility of something approaching happiness. This woman, who had only laid eyes on Marjory a couple of times at receptions, must have recognized her for what she was, not a wife so much as an extremely high-maintenance housemate, whose sudden removal would leave her husband not devastated so much as bewildered. Then, enter Henry, toting possibility in his backpack. Was it conceivable that under that ridiculous frosted hair and inside those ridiculous clothes and on top of those ridiculous shoes was a truly empathetic, observant human?

“Thank you,” Tom said.

“You're welcome.”

Both of them were pleased, but also slightly embarrassed, to find themselves capable of such surprising simplicity and sincerity.

“Well, good night, then,” the president said. She turned to walk toward home. Tom was thankful to see both greyhounds run around her as she pivoted, but then each shot out straight in a different direction, so the president teetered away from him with her arms out as though she were in mid-swan-dive. She looked much less ridiculous to him than usual, however. She had, after all, rescued those dogs from life in a box and was doing her best to take care of them. If she looked foolish in the process, shouldn't this just add to her credit?

The college bells chimed the half hour. Doors all over the Quad opened and staff began to spill out. People immediately came up to Tom, patted his arm, welcomed him back, proffered dinner invitations, lunch invitations, even offers to clean his house. For the first time since Marjory had flown off Route 29, ending her life and redefining his, it occurred to him that all the inquiries, all the saccharine cards and stiff, formal flower arrangements, all the ritualized gestures of condolence might
mean
something. Of course, they were conventional offerings. His colleagues were conventional people, for the most part. They had to be. It was a question of survival, for if conventions weren't observed in this tiny, closed community, people would probably start killing one another pretty quickly. But might it not be possible that all those comings and goings during the last week, all that baking and flower arranging, all that bothersome curiosity and fuss about Henry, all meant that people, to some small degree, understood? Not everyone would have the chutzpah the president did; not everyone would come right out and say in so many words,
I know your wife was crazy as a bedbug and you couldn't really love her, and that this “son” of yours is a complete surprise, but still this is a terribly confusing time in your life, and I'd like to do what I can to help.
Maybe that was what all those casseroles and chocolate chip cookies and Jell-O had actually meant? He'd been so focused on maintaining Marjory for all those years, it had never occurred to him that he might have accidentally, and without intending to, made a lot of friends.