Small Blessings (28 page)

“Oh?” Agnes leaned forward slightly. Again the eyebrows lifted. “Why?”

“Well, we were playing basketball, and—”

“Tom Putnam was playing
basketball
? You're kidding!”

“No, I'm not. I play a lot, and last night I asked if he'd like to play some one-on-one this morning—”

Again Agnes interrupted. “Was he any good?”

“Well, yes and no. He was terribly rusty and a bit out of shape, but he'd obviously been much better at some point. He made a really pretty mid-range jumper the one time I gave him a second to get himself squared up to the basket.”

“Well, great jumping Jehoshaphat!” Agnes said, reverting to an allowed expletive from her childhood. “Who'da thunk it?”

“He said he used to play basketball in college.”

“At Amherst? No kidding. I never knew that. Or maybe I did, and it just hasn't come up in the last decade or so. Okay, so you played some one-on-one this morning. Then what?”

“We played about thirty minutes, and then I had to go because you were coming.”

“Did you tell him why you had to go?”

“No, I didn't. I thought if I did then I would have to ask him to come, too, and I didn't want to do that without checking with you, and besides there's Henry, and…”

Agnes finished for her, “And Tom makes you uncomfortable.”

“Yes, Tom makes me uncomfortable. Well, it's more than that. He actually makes me rather nervous.”

“Okay.” Agnes nodded. “So then what?”

“He asked if we could play again sometime, and I said sure. And then…” Rose stopped. She could feel color rising in her face. “And then, I … I stood on my toes and kissed him. On the mouth.”

Agnes gaped. “You did
what?”

“I kissed him. And now I don't know how I'll ever face him again.”

Agnes did not even try to suppress her glee. “What did Tom do?”

Rose covered her face with her hands. “Nothing!” she whispered through the cracks in her fingers. “He didn't kiss me back and then he just walked away.”

Agnes sat back. “My, my. Silly old Tom.”

Rose lowered her hands. “Why do you say that?”

Much to her surprise, Agnes Tattle leaned back in her rickety chair and laughed. “Why, Rose Callahan, you
are
female, after all. Or human, I guess I should say. You know perfectly well why I said, ‘Silly old Tom.' Perhaps I should have said, ‘Silly old Rose,' as well! Aren't you and Tom Putnam a
mess
?”

“Well, I don't know about that!” Rose said indignantly, wanting to protest that in the whole of her thirty-seven years she had never been a mess, that it was against her religion, her upbringing, her philosophy of life.

But Agnes continued to laugh, hugely delighted by whatever images danced in her head.

*   *   *

When Russell Jacobs got back to his house around three, he found broken stems in one of his precious pots of geraniums, what looked like a blot of blood on the front stoop, and an empty guest room. The bedspread was mussed, but otherwise there was no sign that Iris Benson had ever been there.

Russell immediately searched the house just to be sure Iris wasn't hiding in it somewhere, invading his privacy, discovering some revealing piece of his deplorable childhood he'd banished to the back of a closet. He finished his search in the kitchen, thoroughly going through the walk-in pantry and finding nothing objectionable but two commercial fruitcakes he'd been given last Christmas and had forgotten to throw away, a package of tissue paper party hats, and three unopened bottles of Wild Turkey some hired college bartender must have stowed there for a party and forgotten about. Russell made a mental note to throw the bottles out with the fruitcakes. He was not the sort of alcoholic, he knew, who would be safe for long with liquor stashed in the house. Even looking at the bottles conjured up images of his crazy mother, mascara slithering down her cheeks, clotted red lips smiling at him, drunk, as usual, by the time he was home from school.

His crazy mother …

Russell stood there, his hand on the pantry doorknob, feeling somehow that he had missed a golden opportunity to come clean with another human about his past. Could it really have been a good idea to talk with Iris Benson, of all people, about his childhood? Might it have been helpful to him as well as to her? Lewis, his sponsor in AA, was always droning on about how dangerous secrets were for an alcoholic, and, until this moment, Russell had more or less tuned Lewis out on that particular subject. He'd been in AA for years and had yet to own up to his real past, even to Lewis, even when doing his 12 Steps, even Step 4, which stated he was to make “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of himself. What
was
that anyway? Only AA could come up with such tacky and confusing language. Surely the fact that his mother had rivaled Blanche DuBois as Queen of the Crazies and his father had been a blue-collar nebbish was nobody's business but his own.

Standing there in his kitchen with his hand still on the pantry door, Russell began wagging his head up and down, agreeing with himself on this point, yet again.
Right?
The really annoying thing was that, no matter how many times Russell went through this perfectly sound line of reasoning, the nagging feeling that he should have talked with Lewis about his days as a desperately unhappy and pimpled nonentity still bubbled up. It was bubbling up right now—all because that shrew Iris Benson had been in his house.

Then, just like that, two pieces of chaos collided inside his head and together made a new kind of sense. He was, Russell realized, having another goddamn AA epiphany.
What if he'd completely misunderstood the fundamental AA nature of character defects?
He'd always thought of them as like the Ten Commandments, rigid taboos that make up a sort of one-size-fits-all AA moral code:
Thou shalt not put personalities before principles! Etc.…
But perhaps…?

His mind struggled with whatever it was like a pushmi-pullyu; wanting, yet not wanting, to grasp that perhaps some character defects might be more in the nature of beauty, fluid concepts defined in the mind of the beholder, or, in this case, the transgressor. Perhaps whatever made you feel guilty or ashamed was what AA meant to be considered as a character defect. Perhaps AA expected you to be fully and completely before the world as you were to yourself.

Unexpectedly, like a beacon of hope, Rose Callahan was there beside him, smiling at him in that way she had of smiling that shot straight into the heart of the pimpled nonentity. Could he possibly talk to her about his secrets? Even about Henry? Might she be the One, come at last to save him from himself, after all these years?

The doorbell rang. Russell, certain it was Rose, rushed to answer it.

*   *   *

Tom Putnam stood on the front stoop, frowning down at the broken geraniums.

Russell's first thought was
He knows everything!
“What are you doing here?” he snapped.

Tom's frown deepened. “I … I wanted you to know I took Iris Benson to Student Health this morning.” His eyes wandered past Russell into the orderly insides of the Dean Dome. “I dropped by and she was here and she fainted and…”

Russell's relief was immediate and almost overwhelming. He reached for his friend's arm and pulled him inside. “Come in here right now and tell me exactly what's happened.”

Tom took a couple of steps into Russell's marble-floored foyer. “It's been quite a day. I can't seem to take everything in, so I thought I'd come talk to you. Agnes was out to lunch and she just got back or I'd have been here before now. I have to take Henry to the four-thirty soccer game, so I can't stay long. I hope it's all right that I stopped in? You're not busy, are you?”

“No. No.” It occurred to Russell that he was rarely busy, that everything he did, he could do in his sleep. This seemed sad, somehow, now that he thought about it.

Why was he suddenly doing all this
thinking
?

Tom was still talking. “I came by this morning, but you weren't here and Iris was. I … I need to talk to you.”

What Tom Putnam really needed, Russell thought, was a stiff drink. He did have those serendipitously discovered bottles of Wild Turkey in his pantry. But for some reason, Russell didn't want Tom to know about them. Nor did he want to figure out
why
he didn't want Tom to know about them. Anyway, coffee or a soda or water would do perfectly well, only now Russell realized he didn't want to go back into his kitchen for fear the whole childhood thing would start up in his head again. Then he remembered the paper cup dispenser in the powder room, something the college had insisted he have for official entertaining. “Do you want some water?” he asked.

“A glass of water would be nice,” Tom said. “I am thirsty.”

“I'll get you one, then. Go in there and sit down.” Russell pointed through the set of French doors into the library, his favorite and most comfortable room. The one he would never, ever let Iris Benson enter. “I'll get your water and be right there.”

Tom turned obediently and headed toward the French doors. Russell raced for the powder room and returned with a three-ounce cup of water to find that Tom had managed to make it into the library but was still standing up. Whatever resolve had driven him to make this visit appeared to be dissipating fast.

Tom looked up when he heard Russell's footsteps. “Iris hit her head on your geraniums,” he said. “I think she may have broken some of the stems. There was some blood, too.”

“That doesn't matter.” Russell felt slightly relieved. At least one mystery was solved. He handed Tom the water. Tom looked at the tiny paper cup with wonder.

Russell took his friend's arm again and guided him to the room's most comfortable chair. “Sit down,” he said gently, “and drink your water.”

Tom sat and took a sip from the paper cup. “This tastes good,” he said, looking up at Russell with kind, vacant eyes. Russell felt a sudden surge of fear. If Tom Putnam began acting weird, then the whole world would soon slide into insanity.

Russell sat down on the couch. “Why not start at the beginning and tell me what's happened?”

Something mulish came into Tom's eyes. “I don't want to.”

“You don't want to what?”

“Start at the beginning. I'm not sure where the beginning is.”

“Start wherever you want, then,” Russell said in a somewhat louder voice. “Just tell me what the hell is going on!”

Tom seemed to focus. He took another sip of water. “This morning, I was over at the gym shooting baskets with—” he began.

“You were
what?
” Russell was astonished.

The mulishness returned to Tom's eyes. “Do you want me to tell you what happened or not?”

“Yes. Please. Go on.”

Tom took a deep breath. “As I was saying, I was over at the gym shooting baskets, and something happened that I had to talk to someone about, and so—”

“
What
happened?”

“What happened when?”

“What happened that you needed to talk to someone about?”

Tom shut his mouth in a tight line. “I'm not sure I want to talk about it anymore. It's embarrassing.”

“Okay.” Russell spoke in what he hoped was a patient-sounding tone. “So this thing happened that you
did
want to talk about, but might not want to talk about anymore. Then what?”

“Then I came over here to talk to you about it. And I was raising my hand to knock when the door opened all by itself and Iris Benson fell out of it and hit her head on the geraniums and—” Tom's eyes clouded with misery again. “I'm so sorry about the geraniums. If I hadn't been so startled, I could have caught her and—”

“I don't give a damn about the geraniums!” Russell snapped. “Just get on with what happened.”

Tom's eyes were those of a lost puppy. “Iris hit her head is what happened, and she bled and knocked herself unconscious. She was only out for a couple of minutes, but I was afraid she might have a concussion. So I got her into my car and took her to Student Health, and the nurse there called an ambulance. The nurse was very bossy about it. She said she'd heard that Iris had already been sick this morning—evidently there was some big to-do over in the Book Store that students in getting their flu shots had talked about. So off Iris went in an ambulance, and I … I didn't quite know what to do with myself.” Tom looked up, and Russell was shocked to see tears in his eyes. “It's … it's been quite a week, and I … I guess I'm kind of overwhelmed by things, Marjory dying and Henry coming and all that money and now this. And so I came to find you.” Something uncomfortably close to desperation appeared in Tom's eyes. “You … you are my friend, aren't you, Russ? I mean, it's all right to come talk to you like this, isn't it?”

“Of course it is. But you haven't really
said
anything yet.”

Tom took a deep breath that seemed to settle him. When he looked up there was a firmness about him that Russell wasn't sure he'd ever seen before. “I wanted to let you know about Iris, because she was in your house. But what I really came here to talk to you about is Rose Callahan.”

*   *   *

There had been an eight-car pileup out on Route 29, and the Lynchburg emergency room was swamped. Iris Benson lay on some kind of high, hard surface in a tiny cubicle. Outside her cubicle, people were running up and down the hall, yelling commands at one another. Somewhere close by—perhaps even in the next cubicle—a huge commotion erupted, and a woman screamed. Iris would have liked to get up and get the hell out of there, even if it meant walking back to the college in her holey socks, but every time she lifted her head, waves of dizziness washed over her and she was forced to lie back down. An offensively cheerful woman had been in a couple of times, once to stab her in the arm and draw blood, the other to hook up an IV. This, she'd explained, held a saline solution. Iris needed it because she was dehydrated.