Small Blessings (6 page)

Tom stopped dead in his tracks. He was actually looking forward to tomorrow night. And so, it appeared, was his wife. My God, he felt
happy
! Who cared that the feeling couldn't last beyond the next ten minutes? They would be the best ten minutes he'd had in years, and he was going to enjoy them!

The path brought Tom up behind his house. The sun shone directly into his eyes. He squinted into the strong light, and immediately all joy fell out of him. Agnes sat on the back porch steps
smoking
! What had Marjory done now?

The last time his wife had gone bonkers in public—what he thought of as the Incident—was the last time she'd been allowed out alone except for trips to the doctor. One glorious afternoon last April, Marjory had driven the car into Lynchburg, gone into a sleazy little beer joint called the Dahlia, sat down all by herself at the bar, and gotten completely smashed. Then she'd taken a longneck beer bottle outside, smashed it on the sidewalk, sat herself down on the curb, and proceeded to trace ribbons of blood on her arms with the broken bottle. According to the police she'd screamed,
“I want to feel something!”
over and over all the way to the hospital, but that had been the last thing she'd said for three weeks. Marjory had sat silent and stoic on the edge of her hospital bed, not responding to her husband, her mother, her doctors, the Pink Ladies, anyone, until one day she'd asked a startled orderly to please turn down the air-conditioning and that had been that—Marjory had been back to whatever passed in her head for normal. He and Agnes had brought her home and taken away her car keys. End of the Incident. End of Marjory's freedom.

Agnes sat with one elbow on a knee, her head in her hand. The only time she lifted her face was to draw in smoke from her cigarette and let it out in the long stream of a habitual smoker. Tom couldn't see her expression from the bottom of the yard, but he could read her body language. Agnes Tattle had momentarily despaired.

He squared his shoulders and hurried up the weedy back walk. The college maintained the front yard, since parents of prospective students might wander down Faculty Row, but the backyard was as unkempt as the lives hidden inside the house. “Agnes!” he called out. “Agnes! What is it? What's wrong?”

She looked up, a Camel dangling between her fingers. Her eyes were expressionless.

He stared at her. Suddenly he didn't want to
know.
“You're—you're smoking!” was all he could bring himself to say.

Agnes Tattle would try to joke if she were inside the open mouth of Jaws. “So,” she said tiredly, “you think it's only small boys who sneak out back for a smoke?”

Tom put down his briefcase and sat beside her on the steps. Neither one of them said anything. He watched the smoke of her cigarette rise into the bright, slanted light and disappear. After a moment, he put his arm around her. He didn't pull her close but just rested it on her shoulders, reminding them both that the other was there.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's have it.”

“Marjory is dead,” Agnes said, in the exact same tired tone of voice. “She either had a wreck or deliberately ran her car off the road, on that curvy part of 29 about fifteen miles south of Charlottesville. The police left about ten minutes ago, but they said they'd be back to talk to you.”

Tom was used to emergencies involving Marjory. At first, this registered as just another one of those. His response was purely practical. “Have you talked to Dr. Simms?”

“Nope. And I hope I never will.” Agnes stared out across the weeds toward the woods where ten minutes ago her son-in-law had stood thumping his chest. “It's not his fault, of course, but he didn't help all that much either.”

“He tried. At least he kept seeing her.”

“Sure. We kept paying him, remember?”

Tom experienced his first blip of realization that this escapade of Marjory's stood apart from all her other escapades. And with this blip, there came a rush of feeling. Guilt, of course—it would be. Not about Marjory herself, but about the fact that it had been his mother-in-law's money that had kept the good doctor's attention after the college's inadequate mental health coverage had dried up. The irony was that he'd been the one who'd actually thought Dr. Simms had made a difference in the quality of Marjory's life, raised it from hopeless to pathetic. Agnes had always said the man was a nincompoop.

Marjory is dead,
Tom said to himself, trying to take it in.
I don't have to get up and go in there and sit with her and hear about Charlottesville. She won't be staring at me at supper. I will never have to explain Henry to her. Marjory is no longer here.

Shakespeare spoke up inside his head as Shakespeare always did in times of perplexity or stress. The Bard's words were easier for Tom to process, somehow, than his own.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

The weakest kind of fruit drops earliest to the ground.

Tom had experienced death before. His father had died of a stroke; his mother was all but dead from dementia. Both losses had caused him quiet, painful grief that had come upon him in waves and surprised him still, years after acceptance of the fact that his parents were gone. He had loved them both and missed them in his life. His wife's death felt—initially at least—more like a release and a relief. So what did this say about Marjory? What did it say about him?

But Marjory's death also meant the death of hope—and wasn't that what he'd just been feeling in the woods? The magical, expansive hope that somehow everyone's efforts would finally pay off, and Marjory would actually begin to live; the smaller, encapsulated hope that tomorrow night the four of them would, thanks to the healing elixir of Rose Callahan's presence, actually have a good time. And now it was not going to happen. Not tomorrow night. Not ever. The final verdict on his and Marjory's coupledom was in. Their twenty years of married life had done neither of them any good, and now it was over. There was no chance of redemption.

The trouble was that Marjory had never really
been,
and now she would never
be.
The harshness of this truth struck him like a kick. Marjory had come and gone, and he had made no real difference to her. Their marriage had accomplished absolutely nothing good.

Agnes moved slightly inside his arm. A guttural sound escaped her, the noise someone trying to breathe after being punched in the stomach might make. The hand holding the Camel began to shake violently. It occurred to Tom with a kind of hazy wonder that he loved his mother-in-law. Agnes had written the book on
being.
You had to love the woman in order to be able to live with her.

Tom took the cigarette gently out of her hand and crushed it out under his shoe. Then he sat there quietly staring off into the woods with his arm around his mother-in-law while Agnes's sobs struggled to get out from the depths of her broken heart.

*   *   *

Tom fixed scrambled eggs and toast for supper, then gave Agnes a double Scotch and one of Marjory's sleeping pills and sent her off to bed. It had taken him a while to find the capsules—his wife had a frightening array of prescriptions in the medicine cabinet. Agnes, who never went to the doctor and rarely took an aspirin, accepted the pill without complaint. She'd hardly spoken at dinner, and did not say anything but good night as she headed upstairs to her bedroom. Tom watched her climb the stairs and thought how frail she looked, clinging to the banister like an old woman. Poor Marjory had been so difficult to love, it had never occurred to him that Agnes might have loved her simply because she was her daughter, the child of her flyboy, the man who had flown away with her heart so long ago.

Instead of going up to his office, Tom sat down at the kitchen table. Agnes's bedroom was directly above him. For a few moments, she continued to move around, her steps as light as a child's. Then he heard the creak of bedsprings and the house was still.

Tom moved himself to one of the battered wing chairs by the parlor fireplace that faced the double windows looking out over the front lawn. It was not quite dark outside. Fireflies dotted the college's manicured grass, rising up toward the tree branches like minute floating bonfires lit by enterprising hobgoblins. Tom had always loved fireflies. As a child he'd sometimes caught and kept them in a jar overnight, shaking them to make them light up in his room. But they'd lit up only halfway, and there was always a dead one in the morning, and gradually Tom had realized he didn't really enjoy keeping fireflies in a jar but preferred them loose in the backyard where they belonged. He smiled to himself, thinking of how he and his friends must have looked like dancers in a pagan ritual, whirling and spinning in the half-light of summer evenings. How near those summer evenings seemed, as though his years with Marjory were not only over but had dissolved, had never been, and he was once again a young man with his childhood just over and a whole life of possibilities stretching out before him.

He should get up, go call Russ and tell him about Marjory. Russ always expected to be telephoned immediately when things happened, so that he could bustle in and help sort things out. But the truth was that right now Tom had no desire to sort things out. Right now, he wanted rather fiercely to be left alone to imagine what it would be like simply to live, to let life and his ten-year-old son come to him and see what happened, now that its constant, central crisis had been removed—or at least rejiggered into the shape of a small boy. Tomorrow he would feel guilty about allowing himself such a guilt-free evening on the day his wife had died. Tomorrow he would dutifully call Russ, which would effectively loose the news on campus. But tonight he seemed to be on some kind of weird post-traumatic high. Tonight all he wanted was to sit still and try to take in that he was a free man. He and Henry could move to Nova Scotia, where he would write rugged, manly poetry. They could move to Idaho and—

“I
still
can't sleep,” Agnes announced loudly from the hall door. “Those pills of Marjory's are worthless.”

Tom jumped as though his mother-in-law had set off a firecracker. “My goodness, you scared me! I didn't hear you coming down the stairs.”

“Sorry,” Agnes said shortly, coming into the room. It was hard to see in the dim light, but she seemed to be wearing an ancient pair of men's striped pajamas. She crossed in front of him and sat down in the other wing chair. Tom thought she seemed slightly more like herself and less like her own ghost. “What were you thinking about?” Agnes asked, snapping on the floor light beside her chair.

“When?”

“Just now. Just before I scared the living daylights out of you.”

He sat back. “Fireflies, I think.”

Agnes studied him with what he thought of as her I'm-reading-your-mind look. “You won't miss her, will you?”

There was no point in lying to her. Or to himself, for that matter. “No. I don't think I will. I'm sad, I feel a horrible sense of loss, but I guess that's not the same thing as actually missing her presence.”

To his surprise Agnes nodded agreement. “Good for you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, ‘Good for you.' I hate pretense between people who are supposed to respect each other.”

Tom felt himself flush with pleasure. Had Agnes really meant to imply he was someone she respected?

His mother-in-law turned and looked out the window. It was dark now. With the light on inside, there was nothing at all to look at but blank, dark squares of glass. “The truth is I won't miss her much either,” Agnes said softly. “I loved her, but I won't miss having to deal with her. Marjory was hard work from the day after she turned three. That was the day I started law school, and she was too attached to me for her own good. She had her first real attack of the howls when I left for my first class. She kept screaming, ‘Don't leave me, Mama,' as though I were leaving forever.” Agnes stared down at the backs of her hands. She still wore her wedding ring on her right ring finger. She'd mentioned once in passing that she'd moved it over there the day after her husband had been killed as an exercise in reality testing. “And this was even though I'd told her over and over that I'd be back for lunch, and Millie was right there to take care of her.” Millie was the unliberated, old-school nanny who'd practically raised Marjory's father and who, at that point in Marjory's three-year-long life, had probably been with her every day.

Tom said nothing. It had been exhausting just to
live
with Marjory over the past two decades. What would it have been like to love her? She'd been so relentlessly dysfunctional for so long, so persistent in turning everyone's efforts to help into nonsense.

“It makes me sad,” Agnes said, talking again to the blank, dark squares of the windows.

“I'm sorry,” Tom said, because he had to say something.

But Agnes hadn't finished yet. “I'm not sad for myself, you understand, I'm sad for my daughter. The best thing she ever did in life was to give up on it. And that's as bleak as a life can get.”

Tom had no idea what to say to that. Agnes was right, but where was the kindness in agreeing? They sat in silence, Agnes staring at the window while he stared at her.
What will she do now?
Tom wondered.
Will she go back to Charlottesville?
Something almost like panic flickered inside him. It hadn't occurred to him that Marjory's death might mean his mother-in-law would leave. And it had certainly never occurred to him how much he would miss her if she did. How little he knew his own heart. But then what had been the point? How he'd felt about anything had been irrelevant for a long time.

“Would you like a drink, Agnes?” Tom said, standing up.