Small Blessings (27 page)

Agnes smiled.
Monad, shmonad.
If what she'd had with her flyboy hadn't been true connection, then there was no such thing. Would it have lasted forever? Who knew? Besides, that was hardly the point. She looked across at Rose Callahan. Was the woman lonely? A bit, probably, but so what? There were much worse things for a person than being lonely. She really shouldn't meddle, Agnes told herself sharply. She should let Tom, Rose, and Henry muddle along as best they could. Of course, that didn't mean she couldn't
assist
them a little …

“Tom told me that the night before she died, Marjory came up to his office to say she liked you very much, and that she thought you needed friends.”

“Really!” Rose's hand again rushed to cover her heart.

*   *   *

Iris Benson lay stretched out on top of what looked like a very expensive, hand-woven bedspread in one of Russell Jacobs's bewildering number of guest rooms. She still felt extremely weak, but she wasn't sleepy in the least. Iris saw herself as an undead corpse, laid out and waiting for the next bad thing to happen.

The room she was in was expensively and tastefully furnished. Russell, Iris thought, had to have had financial help from the college with furnishing all these guest rooms. He would be the type to finagle something like that, trading a night or two of overblown southern hospitality for thousands of dollars' worth of antiques. The furniture in the room Iris was in was all very old and beautifully preserved and not very comfortable. The bed was an imposing antique with a mattress hard as packed dirt. The pillows were down-filled. The feathers in them would start her sneezing violently at any moment, which meant she was going to have to get up shortly whether she had the strength to or not, because she certainly did
not
have the strength to sustain a violent sneezing attack.

Iris turned over on her side and looked at the room's far wall. Against it was a walnut bureau over which hung an antique mirror with wavy, not very clear glass. It was a lovely room. Peaceful, orderly, clean—something she couldn't claim for a single corner of her cabin. If she were truthful with herself, Iris unwillingly reflected, she would have to admit that it was sometimes depressing to wake up to the chaos in which she lived—particularly on the days she wasn't feeling quite up to snuff, which was most days, except for those few weeks she'd recently been able to lay off the booze.

Booze.
Iris groaned aloud. Every detail of the morning came back to her, except, of course, for the few moments when she was passed out on the floor of the Book Store bathroom.
Passed out on the floor of the Book Store bathroom!
Oh God in heaven, what, oh what, was she going to do? She couldn't seem to drink anymore without making a fool out of herself, and she couldn't seem to stop drinking. And she had no one to turn to for help. No one. Even her shrink had deserted her.

A giant sneeze gathered at the back of Iris's head and burst forth, racking her entire body. She struggled to sit up. Another sneeze exploded, blowing her backward, but Iris managed to catch herself with her elbows and so keep semi-upright. She felt as limp as a just-dead goldfish, but she had to find the strength to get away from those pillows.

Iris pulled herself over to the edge of the bed. The mattress sat so high that her feet dangled like a child's. She carefully lowered herself to the floor, mussing the expensive bedspread in the process. This bothered Iris a lot; she didn't want Russell Jacobs to think she was a slob. Then the morning came rushing back to her again with all its bleak, unmistakable, and unavoidable truths: Russell Jacobs
knew
she was a slob. By now, the whole college knew she was a slob. Worst of all,
she
knew she was a slob, not the rebellious wild child she had always pictured herself as being.

Iris eased herself down to the floor and felt around for her shoes. Her shit-kickers were not there. She looked down at her feet to be sure she wasn't wearing them but saw only her socks, mismatched, with giant holes in them through which poked her grubby big toes. Iris never sorted socks when she did laundry, just bundled them into her sock drawer. She'd always thought of this as the successful flouting of another of womankind's meaningless tasks, but whether it successfully flouted anything or not, it left her wearing mismatched socks with holes in them. She shuffled down to the end of the bed, hung on to one of its stubby footboard posts, and carefully bent over so as to be able to see underneath the bed. That was a mistake. Bending over sent the first stabs of what was sure to be a monumental headache through her. And her shoes were nowhere to be seen.

Iris straightened up. Another stab, accompanied by a slight wave of dizziness and nausea. “Oh, stop it!” she said aloud, addressing her own miserable body. “Enough is enough!” Neither the headache nor the nausea responded. She felt another sneeze gathering. “I've got to get out of here,” Iris said, again out loud, and she began to hand herself from piece of furniture to piece of furniture.

The door into the room was closed. Iris pulled it open and peeked out into what looked like the corridor of a small hotel. The stair landing, however, was mercifully close. Iris braced herself against the wall and crept to the top of the stairs. Once there, she eased herself down into a sitting position and bumped down the stairs on her bottom the way she used to at her grandfather's house when she was a child, except that each bump caused a fresh stab of pain in her head and a slight escalation of her nausea. At least there was nothing left inside to throw up.

Once at the bottom of the stairs, all she had to do was cross a rather grand foyer and then she would reach the front door and be able to escape. The need to get out of Russell Jacobs's house had become immediate and compelling, something very close to panic. Iris grasped the polished newel post and heaved herself to her feet. Without pausing to establish her balance, she let go of the newel post and tacked directly toward the front door, walking like a toddler who has leaned forward to get going and must now move her feet quickly to keep them under her. She reached the front door dizzily but successfully and flung it open, only to find Tom Putnam standing on the front stoop, his hand raised as though he were just about to knock. He was dressed in a pair of the skimpiest shorts Iris had ever seen on an adult male, and his shoes looked like a circus clown's.

“My God,” he said. “Iris! What are you doing here?”

For just a second Iris let go of the door and stood on her own. “I'm visiting,” she said, managing to sound quite dignified. Then the world abruptly telescoped, like the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon, and, for the second time that day, Iris Benson fainted. She fell forward, and as Tom Putnam was unable to react quickly enough to catch her, she smacked her head smartly on one of the large potted geraniums of which Russell Jacobs was so proud.

*   *   *

Agnes had gone to the bathroom, leaving Rose to, against her better judgment, stand at the window and think about what they'd just talked about. Or, more accurately, what she'd just said. All that atypically revelatory stuff about Mavis and Professor Putnam.

Rose had always defined her life through its movement: I came from here; I'll stay in this place for a while; I'll go there next. The rooms in which she lived were nests of carefully preserved keepsakes and carelessly researched future plans. It had never once occurred to her to stay put anywhere; never, at least, until her mother had announced her startling decision to marry her professor. Then the thought of staying put had begun to niggle at the edge of her consciousness, as unsettlingly persistent as the urge to jump was to a person with vertigo.

Mavis's professor, Dr. Stewart Rogers, had presented the one great complication in Rose's determinedly simple life. At first, the marriage had felt like a betrayal of her own value as a daughter (how
could
Mavis want someone else around permanently?), but then, once she'd gotten used to the idea, Rose was more bothered by a feeling that Mavis had betrayed herself, her own fundamental nature, or at least what Rose had always
thought
was her mother's fundamental nature. Mavis had always been a mossless stone, so surely that meant she should always
be
a mossless stone. It had only been in the last couple of months that Rose had begun to think she might have missed something important in her mother's character; that somewhere beneath all that hardy cheerfulness, Mavis had, in some mysterious way, been as lonely as her barfly customers. This thought had made Rose truly uncomfortable, for it had made her mother seem more vulnerable, less invincible, less fully insulated from the slings and arrows of everyone else's outrageous fortune.

If Mavis hadn't been able to insulate herself, then what did this say about her daughter? Just now, while standing at the kitchen window of this fairy-tale cottage with her back to Agnes Tattle, the most interesting person she had met in an age, Rose had been forced to realize what would have been obvious to her long ago if she'd had the courage to explore her own heart. The truth was that she herself was a tad lonely. Not in any devastating way, of course. Just in a way that made everything a bit more work. She kept all her relationships so carefully compartmentalized. There was no one person with whom she could completely let go. No one she could just
be
with without worrying about the awkwardness of mutual failure; without concern that she might ask too much, or be unable to give enough.

So this—her self-imposed separateness—was what Marjory Putnam must have seen in her when she'd turned back. This was, indeed, her deepest secret. And since Marjory had evidently told her husband about it and he had told Agnes, now Rose had to face the fact that three people had known her deepest secret before she did.

The simplest, most stripped-down life—a life such as hers without even so much as a house cat to look after—could not be kept complication-free. Rose, for just an instant, had a vision of all her nomadic drifting as nothing more than the long and winding road that had brought her, at last, to stand before Marjory Putnam to have this secret found out. It was simultaneously as obvious to Rose as a squashed bug on a windshield that Marjory's husband, Professor Thomas Putnam, for silly reasons of his own, had some kind of idiotic
thing
for her. And since the poor man was so vulnerable, so newly single, so unpracticed at the human mating dance, it was now her responsibility, in some screwy way, to protect him from coming to any harm because of her. It was the only kind thing she could do. Right on cue came her mother's voice inside her head, detailing the world according to Mavis:
Deliberate unkindness is the one great sin.

None of this would ever have occurred to her if she hadn't had Agnes to lunch and Agnes hadn't started asking her about her sex life. One thing had led to another, and then
presto!
Everything she'd been muddled about in the loneliness department was clear. What was
not
clear to Rose was how she felt about her new understanding.

“Oh, stuff it!” Rose said aloud, addressing the cardinal who still sat outside the window in the lilac bush.

“I beg your pardon,” Agnes said.

Rose whipped around to find Agnes back at the kitchen table. How long had she been there?

“Sorry,” Rose said. “I was thinking out loud.”

“Oh?” Agnes raised her eyebrows, letting Rose know she wasn't buying it.

Rose came reluctantly back to the table and sat down.
Well,
she thought.
What now?
Surely they didn't have to
talk
about this? She'd invited Agnes Tattle to lunch because she was certain that the two of them could have a rollicking good conversation without wandering off into anything personal. People so rarely talked about themselves accurately. They either made too much or too little out of everything. It seemed to Rose that you got to know people much more thoroughly by hearing what they
thought
and what they
did,
and then extrapolating the rest as a kind of interesting, intellectual puzzle. All you had to do was listen to the vehemence and passion with which a person talked about things other than himself or herself, and there the person was. Such impersonal conversations had the further advantage of keeping you away from messy moments such as this one; a messy moment that was, of course, entirely her fault, since first she'd spilled the beans about her father's unknown identity, and then, as though that had loosened some screw in her brain, she'd blatted out the awkward way she felt around Professor Putnam to his own mother-in-law. What
had
she been smoking? as Mavis used to say. In a few moments, if she didn't watch it, she would be telling Agnes everything.

“I'm sorry,” Rose said.

“For what?” Every crease in Agnes's angular face lifted inquiringly.

“For bringing Professor Putnam up. For asking you why I feel funny around him. It's unspeakably rude of me to ask you such an awkward question about a member of your own family. Particularly at a time like this. Whatever problems I have around Professor Putnam, I'm sure they have nothing to do with him. He's always been perfectly polite and kind to me.”

Agnes nodded. “Tom is kind. And polite as well. But he's a dolt around women and always has been, ever since I've known him. Even around me sometimes. So I hardly think it's your fault if he makes you feel awkward.” She fixed Rose with what must have been her most penetrating, lawyerly gaze. The one she would have used to let clients know it was time to quit shillyshallying and talk straight. “Exactly what do
you
think is going on between you two? It may not be my business, but I'd still like to know.”

But Rose did not want to tell her. It wasn't that she had anything to hide; she was simply more at ease being a recipient of confidences than a giver of them. She hadn't had much practice confiding. Her heart had always puttered along so predictably on its comfortable, tight leash that there had never been much to confide about. Evidently this was no longer quite the case. Thoughts of her Shakespeare seminar room with its Tilt-A-Whirl floor intruded, and there were those bothersome, lingering moments of stillness between them that had brought her the same sharp relief a grape Popsicle brought to the heat of a Texas summer. “I'm not sure,” she said.