Small Blessings (7 page)

“No, thank you. I have quite enough stuff inside me already. I just came down for some company.”

“You don't mind if I get one, do you?”

She turned to him with that look on her face again, the one that made him despair of ever keeping anything secret Agnes Tattle wanted to know. She still looked haggard and old, but there was strength and humor in her eyes again. “Have two,” she said, “and make them both doubles. This might be the night Scotch was invented for.”

Tom started toward the kitchen where the Scotch was kept, only to have Agnes snag his arm and stop him. “Listen, Tom. I know that letter you got had something in it we have to deal with, but is it something that will keep for twenty-four hours? Say, till Saturday morning?”

“Sure.” He smiled down at her.
Life's uncertain voyage.

How would he think if Shakespeare had never been? Tom wondered.

On the move toward the kitchen again, he felt almost giddy with relief. In talking about the something that had to be dealt with, Agnes had said “we” instead of “you.”

 

chapter 3

When she was sixteen, Miss Mavis Callahan of San Marcos, Texas, had spent a long, hot summer living in a boxcar with Janis Joplin. That experience, and others like it, had largely formed the character of Rose Callahan's mother. For her, life was to be lived at full-tilt boogie within the bounds of practicality. Mavis Callahan had no desire to flirt with drug addiction or to romanticize doomed love. Whatever was real was good enough for her, and so—like mother, like daughter—it had always been good enough for Rose.

Mavis had poured drinks for a living. Rose had grown up in a series of cramped apartments over noisy bars. Mavis had stuck to working in college towns after she'd had a child, figuring her customers there could contribute the most to her daughter's education. Rose had done her homework perched on phone directories placed on bar stools, books and papers spread out before her on glass-ringed slabs of mahogany. Mavis had kept a close eye on her daughter's progress while she dispensed drinks and traded wisecracks with friendly men and women who did indeed recite T. S. Eliot to Rose, explain the mathematical complexities of the moon's orbit on bar napkins, and otherwise fill in as Rose's supervision when Mavis had her hands full.

The two of them had moved around a lot. Mavis, like Merle Haggard (to whom she had four times, in four different towns, served an evening's worth of whiskey), had had ramblin' fever. Only once did Rose go to the same school for two years in a row. Only twice did she celebrate Christmas in the same apartment. Had she felt deprived by her disorderly childhood? Not a bit. Rose considered that she'd learned much that was valuable from growing up with Mavis. She'd learned to make friends quickly, to be cheerful when life wasn't perfect, to accept the fact that change was all you could count on in this life—except, of course, when it came to Mavis, who was rock-solid and would always be exactly the same. And sitting, bellied up to all those bars, listening to and watching all those strangers, Rose had early on formed the opinion that an awful lot of people had their hearts broken in ways they could have easily avoided. Miss Mavis Callahan (always with a decided emphasis on the
Miss,
thank you very much) had not raised a dreamer.

Perhaps the hardest lesson Rose had learned was that change was not only dependable, it was omnivorous. When she was a restless nineteen and poised to drop out of Rice, Rose had been forced to realize she could not even count on Mavis to remain the same. It was then that her mother, who had just turned thirty-eight, abruptly came to rest in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where, three years later, at the age of forty-one, she married a widowed college professor thirteen years her senior and became happily domesticated. She continued, however, to introduce herself emphatically as
Miss
Mavis Callahan. Her husband—Stu, a kindly professor of ancient history, whom Rose liked very much but had never felt the slightest pressure to love—did not seem to mind this at all.

*   *   *

There were a half-dozen cars parked in front of the Putnams', and another three in the driveway.
My goodness,
Rose thought,
it's a party, and here I am in a wrinkled dress, holding an old canning jar of backyard roses.

Her move out of the College Inn and into her cottage that day had happened without warning. Rose had gotten a call late yesterday afternoon at the Book Store saying her cottage was ready. Mr. Pitts had said why not take the next day off, since it was a Friday, and have a long weekend to get settled in? He'd even volunteered his two hulking teenaged sons to help get her things out of storage in the big barn next to the cottage. The boys had worked like stevedores, but even so, the last box of books had not been put down on the living room floor until late afternoon. Miss Mavis Callahan, however, had not raised a daughter who was late to dinner, so here Rose was, at seven on the dot, standing on the Putnams' front stoop.

Rose heard footsteps behind her. She turned and looked back down the walk. A man she dimly recognized from the Book Store was walking down the central path between the facing lines of houses on Faculty Row. “Good evening,” he called, just loudly enough to be heard. He paused and shook his head. “So sad.”

“Isn't it,” Rose said, wondering what news she had missed during the day. Surely there hadn't been another terrorist attack?

“I'll be over in a little while,” the man said. “As soon as I change.”

“Good,” Rose answered. What else was she to say?

The man, still shaking his head, went on his way. Rose inadvertently gave her unruly hair a shove. It immediately sprang back to its starting point, as independent as the rest of her. The man had mentioned changing. Whatever was going on at the Putnams', it was obvious that she was not adequately turned out. Her blue cotton dress was too casual and too discouraged looking. She had put it on only because lovely Marjory Putnam had worn such a fussy, flowery number when they'd met in the Book Store, and it was difficult to imagine her entertaining casually at home dressed in blue jeans and a tank top. The dress hung unimpeded to well below her knees, and her sandal-clad feet were clearly visible below. Rose sighed again. Growing up, she'd seen the attention her mother's breasts had attracted. She herself had not particularly liked attention, so one night she'd gone outside and wished upon a star that she would never grow boobs.

Obviously the star had listened.

Standing there on the Putnams' front stoop, Rose had one of her odd moments, blips of time when she felt as though she were waiting for something. What that might be—adventure, true love, Godot—who knew? Rose didn't like these moments at all. They smacked of the kind of pointless, existential quest for meaning that Mavis's customers had carried out through the bottom of a glass.

How funny life was, Rose thought. Two months ago she'd been living in Charlottesville with everything rolling merrily along. Now here she was awash in unknowns again. The only remaining constants were her furniture, her books, and her boyfriend, Ray. And Ray was a constant only because he lived in Washington, and their relationship was a commuter one. Rose was certain the two of them wouldn't have lasted six weeks in the same town. If they were separated by only a couple of Metro stops, Ray would have almost certainly wanted things from her she'd always assumed she didn't have to give and didn't want to have.

Rose looked down at her jar of blossoms. She'd picked them from the overgrown bush that sprawled along the cottage's back fence, not wanting to arrive at Marjory Putnam's house for dinner empty-handed. They were old-fashioned roses, blooming single and double on the same stem, the color of a baby's ear. Their lush scent was tinged with clove.

The protectiveness Rose had felt for Marjory in the Book Store came back to her. She immediately lifted her free hand to ring the bell, but then stopped and listened with her finger poised and pointing at the door. How quiet it was. There was no music, no sound of laughter. If this was a party, it must be a very dull one.

Ring the bell,
she told herself sternly.
This is your life now, these are your people, and this is what passes for a party. Get on with it …

The door was quickly opened by Russell Jacobs—tall, bushy browed, with a silver leonine mane of carefully styled hair.

He struck a pose. “Rose, my dear. How nice of you to come!” In spite of the pose, Russell seemed unnaturally constrained. In the Book Store, he always took stage like an old actor. “I didn't expect to see you here tonight,” he went on in this new, queer, quiet way. “I stopped by the Book Store today just to say hello, and Mr. Pitts said you were moving.”

“I did move,” Rose said, conscious of her jar of roses and her wrinkled dress—Russell was nattily turned out; Tom Wolfe, gone provincial. “That's why I'm such a mess. But Marjory was kind enough to invite me, and so here I am.”

Russell's jaw dropped. “
Marjory
invited you?”

“Yes. The day before yesterday. She and Professor Putnam came into the Book Store together.”

“Invited you to
what
?” Russell spoke sotto voce like a TV golf announcer.

“Why, to this!” Rose gestured at the parked cars. “I'd thought it was to be a casual dinner for the three of us, but from the cars and from your answering the door, I can see it's a party.”

Russell stepped outside and firmly took her arm, drawing her to the edge of the tiny stoop as though there they were to have some kind of chummy tête-à-tête. Rose looked at him closely. Was he drunk? She couldn't smell any booze, and he didn't seem drunk, just peculiar, even for Russ. “You don't know, do you?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Know what?” Rose looked up at him blankly.

“Marjory is dead,” Russell said softly. “I'm sorry. I guess nobody knew about your invitation to dinner tonight, and so nobody thought to find you and let you know.”

Rose stared at him.
People overuse the word “sudden,”
she thought.
It should be saved for times like this, when something comes at you so quickly it smacks the sense out of you.
Russell was looking down at her solicitously, his eyes politely sad and concerned, but not really distressed. “My goodness! I had no idea,” she said. “I'm so sorry.”

“I know you are.” Russell patted her arm. “We all are.”

There was a slight pause. Rose looked down at her jar of flowers. “How did it happen? What did poor Marjory do?”

Russell shook his head. “‘Poor Marjory' had a car wreck yesterday. She ran off the side of Route 29 in that section south of Charlottesville where the drop-off is so very steep. She was dead by the time they got to her.”

An image of a squashed car with that lovely woman trapped inside, people milling around it, yelling, flashed before Rose.
I'll never know what Marjory saw in me,
she thought. “How brutal,” she said.

“Yes. It is. Particularly since Marjory was such a flimsy creature.”

Flimsy? What an unkind word to use about someone who's just been killed. But accurate, Rose suspected, when it came to Marjory Putnam.

“Do you want to come in?” Russell asked. “Or would you rather sneak away into the night and escape? It's not very festive in there. Of course, there's a lot of truly awful food—casseroles and Jell-O and such—and you must be hungry if you've been moving all day and were expecting dinner.”

Someone walked heavily across the floor of the foyer and Iris Benson appeared in the doorway, swathed in a lime green, vaguely African-looking ensemble and carrying an almost empty highball glass. Was it possible her hair was even redder than yesterday? “Rosie!” she bellowed, striding out onto the front stoop, pushing Russell out of the way and attempting to fling her arms around Rose before she was stopped by the thorny bouquet in the canning jar. “My, my,” Iris said, swaying slightly. “It's our newest college star come with flowers to honor the passing of the little woman. How sweet.”

Iris was clearly very drunk, so drunk that standing was problematic. She grasped Russell's arm. “Have you ever noticed that we are both named for flowers?”

“Yes,” Russell said. “I have.”

Iris turned to face Russell's chest. “Isn't that sweet? Isn't
she
sweet?”

Russell let go of Rose and put his arm around Iris to steady her. “Yes, it is, and yes, she is. Now perhaps we'd better get you back inside, Iris, and see if someone will give you a ride home.”

But Iris was not to be corralled. She lunged for Rose and caught her by her free arm. “Not without Rosie!” she said, her voice soaring. “I won't go back in unless Rosie comes, too!”

Russell shrugged and looked across Iris's fiery head toward Rose. “Do you mind? It would save a scene. Iris is quite capable of a scene when she
hasn't
been drinking. When she has, the sky's the limit.”

Iris listed back toward Rose. “You got that right!” she said cheerfully. “The sky's the limit!”

“Of course not,” Rose said.

Together, each grasping one of Iris's arms, they hauled her into the house and shut the front door. The foyer was dim and cluttered. Piles of newspapers, books, and unread junk mail littered a wooden bench. More books lined the walls. Faint sounds of conversation and Bach drifted out from the back of the house, sounding like a gathering of polite, musical ghosts.

Rose and Russell lowered Iris onto the bench, wedging her in between a stack of paperbacks and a pile of back issues of the
Sunday Book Review
. Iris waved her highball glass at Russell. “I need another drink.”

Russell crossed his arms. “No, you don't, Iris. You're already as drunk as a frat boy on Saturday night. And this is not an occasion where even
you
want to lose control.”