Small Blessings (4 page)

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

A child!
His
child.

Something deep inside Tom began elbowing its way to the front of his crowded consciousness, and that something seemed, unexpectedly, to be
excited.

He focused on the letter again. What didn't seem at
all
like Retesia was the brown ink and lavender paper. She'd had, as he remembered it, a real
thing
for Emily Post, who, as an etiquettarian, made Ms. Manners look casual. But whether or not the notepaper and ink were customary for Retesia, the letter had to be from her, because he, she, Marjory, and Russell (to whom he'd impulsively confided just after Marjory had found the ridiculous letter) were the only people in the world who knew that he and she had done what it takes to produce a child.

Someone else was coming up the stairs. Tom immediately stuffed the letter into his chair cushions and waited. It wasn't Agnes; the steps were far too hesitant. From their sound, Tom would have thought it was Marjory, but he couldn't remember the last time she'd been up here. Marjory always referred to his “office” in verbal quotation marks, as though its real purposes in his life were well known and unmentionable. Why, oh why, thought Tom, enduring a wave of defeat, did Marjory have to be so relentlessly unstable? Who knew what she'd do once Henry showed up?

Without thinking, Tom picked up the legal pad with its doodled roses and turned it over on his desk. His daydreams of the afternoon had taken place in another lifetime.

“Tom?”

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
It
was
Marjory. Tom was up in an instant. “Come in!” he sang out, too heartily. “This
is
a pleasant surprise.”

Marjory had a damaged person's ability to read another's reaction, and she shrank back before the mild blast of his greeting. One of her hands began pinching the flesh on the back of the other.

“I know I'm interrupting,” she said.

“No, you're not,” Tom said, reining in the last shred of heartiness. He forced himself to walk slowly and carefully over to his wife, approaching her as he might a wounded bird fluttering on the grass. When he got within range, he gently lifted his arm and touched the hand that was doing the picking. “Come over and sit down. Please.”

He drew her over to the chair. Marjory's eyes stayed on the floor, following the progress of her own feet. She perched on the seat's edge. Even in the dim light, Tom could see she'd carefully applied fresh makeup for this visit. When he released her hand, it immediately began dancing within the folds of her skirt.

Tom sat down in his desk chair and slowly rolled around to face her. There was absolutely no point in feigning chitchat. His wife would not have come up here without some serious purpose. It took too much effort. “Yes,” he said, in his kindest voice. “Did you need something, my dear?”

Marjory's eyes drifted upward until she looked him straight in the eye. She spoke in a rush. “I just wanted to say that I like Rose Callahan very much, and I think she will make a nice friend for both of us. I think she needs friends as well.” Her words sounded rehearsed, as though she'd written them down and memorized them once the macaroons were in the oven.

“I beg your pardon?” Tom was stunned. For Marjory, other women were threats, not nice friends.

Marjory dutifully repeated herself. “I wanted to say I like Rose Callahan very much. I think she will make a nice friend for both of us. And I think she needs friends as well.” Then, wonder of wonders, she smiled—truly smiled—at him and added, “I'm glad she's coming to dinner. I thought I would make spaghetti.”

This outpouring was perhaps the biggest, pleasantest bombshell Marjory had lobbed during their last, long decade together. His wife was trying to tell him something tremendously important, he was sure of it; much more important than that she was making spaghetti. But whatever did she mean by saying she thought Rose Callahan needed friends? That, Tom thought, was preposterous. Rose Callahan was obviously as quietly self-sufficient as they came. Besides, everyone on campus seemed to have taken to her immediately.

Marjory was still looking at him, her eyes uncharacteristically focused.

What now?
Tom thought. “Yes, my dear?”

“I'm glad you like her,” she said. “And I want you to know I understand completely about…” Here Marjory faltered. Her eyes drifted down until she seemed to be talking to Tom's third shirt button. “About that other thing.” The words came out in an almost unintelligible mumble.

Tom had no idea what she meant. Had she finally forgiven him for his affair with Retesia? “What was that? I'm not quite sure I understand your meaning?”

Marjory's hands were back among the folds of her skirt, her eyes on her hands. “It was nothing. The important things I wanted to say were about this afternoon and about the spaghetti.”

It occurred to Tom that something truly significant must have passed between his wife and Rose Callahan earlier today. It had to have been when Marjory stopped and mulishly insisted on turning back. He'd been quite cross with her at the time; all he'd wanted was to get out of there before Marjory became Marjory again. He'd wanted Rose Callahan to think—just for a little while—that they were a normal couple living a normal life. “Spaghetti would be lovely,” he said, deciding to concentrate on less disturbing issues.

Marjory stood up. She'd either said all she needed to say or she'd run out of courage to say more. “I'll leave you, then,” she said, whispering again. “I know you have a lot of work to do.” And with that she scuttled out the door and was gone. Tom listened to her creep back down the stairs and shut the door at the bottom of the attic steps. The house was once again as quiet as though it were uninhabited. Over the silence, he heard a faint aria wafting in through the small open window. Lost love, set to music. It came from the neighbors, a nice, childless couple, both in the Music Department, who were in the throes of fertility counseling.

Tom sat for quite a while staring at the blank doorway. He tried and failed to grasp that he was the father of a ten-year-old son. He tried and failed to wonder if his wife had somehow figured this out. His mind resolutely remained as blank as the doorway—a state with which Tom was familiar and quite comfortable. It came on when he needed a rest from bewilderment and had nothing orderly to think about. It was a signal he should give up trying to sort things out, at least for a while. What was there to sort out, anyway? He couldn't, no matter what it did to Marjory or to himself, tell a ten-year-old boy that his father didn't want anything to do with him. Even though Retesia's letter had not sounded at all like the wispy poet he remembered, Henry was relentlessly on his way. Tomorrow, he, Tom, would get up, go to class as though life were, quote-unquote “normal,” then come home and dump the whole mess in Agnes's capable lap.

There was also no point in trying to fathom Marjory's visit. It would remain forever a source of indecipherable wonderment. But Tom couldn't help wondering about Marjory's extraordinary statement about Rose Callahan needing friends. He remembered a similarly oddball statement she'd once made about Russ. Out of the blue, Marjory had looked up from her scrapbook one evening and said, “Russell has secrets, you know. It's why he is the way he is.” Then she'd calmly gone back to cutting out an article from
Glamour.
Marjory had also from time to time made such extreme statements about other people, all of which except—so far—the one about Russ had turned out to be astoundingly accurate. It was as though other people's inner workings gave off a scent that only Marjory could smell.

The faint aria changed to a faint duet that was much more joyous in tone. Perhaps the lost love had been found again? Tom stopped staring at the blank doorway and swiveled around to stare out the square, blank window. A bead of sweat ran off his chin and plummeted down onto the back of the legal pad. The small sound startled him out of his suspended state. He turned the pad back over and looked at his doodled roses. They were old-fashioned single roses, the kind you could find in the garden at Monticello, graceful, curving stems ending in clusters of simple blooms. They would smell of apples and fresh air and romance.

Rose. Rose Callahan. Russ was right, she wasn't pretty. She was a Modigliani painting; her face, too long; her nose, too crooked; her hair—to use his favorite word gleaned from the novels of Patrick O'Brian—all ahoo. But there was nothing pinched or mean or petty in her unpretty face. She had an aliveness, a
present
ness, that had reached out and shaken a hopeful part of him awake that had been snoozing for decades. With one chance encounter, quirky Rose Callahan had beamed herself into the center of his heart.

Her smiling face danced across Tom's notebook page, looking out from under her cloud of hair, not at him, but at Marjory. No one had bothered to be truly kind to Marjory in years. It was hardly worth the trouble. Marjory would take whatever anyone said to her and turn it into an embarrassment. But Marjory had responded to Rose's kindness with a properly phrased invitation. Would Marjory's propriety last through the dinner? Probably not. But perhaps they all owed Marjory the right to try one more time. Part of him remained fiercely protective of his wife against everything but his own despair. And somehow whatever errant shots Marjory let fly, Tom was sure that Rose Callahan would be no less kind to her than she'd been in the Book Store.

Tom took his pen and carefully sketched another flower.
Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell …

 

chapter 2

Rose rolled over on her back and stared at the plastered ceiling. Today appeared to be starting in the same way yesterday had ended, in the company of Marjory Putnam. As soon as the alarm had gone off, there she was again, in her elaborately flowered dress with its poufy sleeves and fussy collar, turning back from ten paces away with
that look
in her eye; the look that had made it perfectly clear to Rose that this woman knew something about her that she herself did not.

Mavis always said that people who hung out in bars wasted a lot of energy avoiding the truth about themselves. As it did not take the wisdom of Solomon to see that Mavis herself was wise, Rose had vowed early on never to waste one second in self-delusion. So what the hell had she missed about her own makeup that Marjory Putnam had not?

The bedside clock ticked relentlessly. If she was going to have her morning run, there was nothing for it but to get up. Rose threw back the covers, rolled out of bed, and padded soundlessly across the thick carpet to the bathroom. Once there, she turned on the ornate lamp over the sink and stared at herself in the mirror.

What if humans were simply hardwired to avoid knowing themselves completely?

“Oh, for pity's sake!” Rose said aloud. She'd never before had much desire to root around on the dark side of her psyche. After all, you didn't need to turn over every rock on a riverbank in order to have a good time on a picnic.

A particularly lusty white-throated sparrow shouted at her through the bathroom's open window. Marjory Putnam. There she was again, looking back like some latter-day Lot's wife with psychic abilities. And there beside her was her sad, brave, Shakespearean husband; so steady, so kind-looking, so—so something else Rose could not quite put into words. A flash went off in her brain, exploding like a tiny, trod-on land mine. Was it possible she was feeling out of sorts because she had developed an instantaneous
thing
for Professor Putnam and had to face him again this afternoon in class? Surely not. Oh, surely, surely, surely not. And yet there had been that something—that
jolt
—when their hands had touched briefly in the Book Store.

Mavis spoke up again inside her head:
The worst thing you can do in this life is turn away from it, my dear.

*   *   *

Tom Putnam felt surprisingly energetic as he straightened the stack of papers on the lectern, peered out at his class, and continued not to think about his newly discovered paternity. He'd made an appointment to talk privately with Agnes this evening. They would sneak out into the backyard and be assured of their privacy, as Marjory had wild theories about killer mosquitoes that kept her predictably indoors after dark.

His eyes dutifully scanned the students until they reached Rose Callahan. She sat off to his right, the spine of her paperback copy of
Dream
thoroughly creased from reading, a pad and pen laid out beside it for note taking. Today, Tom noted with intense interest, she wore a black T-shirt and brown pants, and there was a heavy silver band on the middle finger of each hand. Tom's heart gave a little jolt as he caught himself relishing this detail. He brought his eyes smartly back to the lectern, reminding himself sternly that, while she sat in this room, Rose Callahan was just another student. As such, she was someone in whom he should have no personal interest. Rose Callahan was here to learn about Shakespeare,
not
to be ogled by her professor.

The thirteen other students were all familiar to Tom. They were English majors, mostly seniors, with a few juniors and one particularly bright, albeit shy and gawky, sophomore who had petitioned to be let into the class.

The bell struck half past. Fourteen pairs of eyes looked up at him more or less expectantly. “So,” he said. “What did you think of Mr. Shakespeare's play?”

Twelve pairs of eyes looked thoughtful but noncommittal. Getting conversation going on the first day was always difficult. The sophomore, a freckle-faced sprig named Susan Mason, timidly raised her hand. He nodded; she spoke. “I liked it a lot,” she said. “I thought it was good.”

Not a lot to work with there, but probably enough to get started. Tom looked down at his remarks, recopied without the roses. He took in a breath and began his lecture. It was difficult for him not to deliver it solely to Rose Callahan, who paid close attention most of the time and took careful notes, although it did seem to take some effort for her to stay focused. He noticed her hands disappeared below the seminar table and her shoulders hunched as though she were gripping the edges of her chair.