Small Blessings (8 page)

Iris's face grew ugly. “Get me a drink, you goddamn pompous hack!” she bellowed.

Russell turned bright red, took the glass without a word, and disappeared into the hall, slamming the foyer door shut behind him.

Iris grinned up at Rose. “I'd have said ‘asshole' to anyone else. But ‘hack' is more effective with Russell. People do so hate to hear the truth.” She spoke as though her mouth were full of hot oatmeal.

“Still, it wasn't very kind,” Rose said.

Iris's eyes filled with tears. “He isn't kind to me, why should I be kind back? Only Tom is kind. He's the only one.”

“Tom?”

“Tom Putnam. Widower Tom. The grieving husband of the dead Marjory. Who the hell do you think I mean?” Iris swayed on her bench.

“I'm sorry. I have yet to think of him as a Tom. I'm taking his class, so he's Professor Putnam to me.”

Iris nodded solemnly, regarding her green knees. “He's as old-fashioned as they come. But he's not a hack, and he's not mean. Tom Putnam is a very good teacher and a very kind man! Very kind!” She lifted damp eyes to Rose. “Did I already tell you that?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Sorry 'bout that.” Iris grinned sheepishly. “Had a little too much to drink. Don't do it all that often anymore, but I've sure as hell done it tonight. Makes me mix up what I say with what I think.” She screwed her face up as though she were trying to entertain a baby. “Does that make any sense?”

“Perfect sense,” Rose said.

The music finished and didn't begin again. There was a burst of laughter, quickly suppressed. Rose wished she could get rid of the roses. Their scent was overpowering in the enclosed space.

Abruptly, with a single sweeping motion, Iris pushed the stack of books onto the floor and patted the cleared space beside her. “Sit here, Rosie. I wanna tell you a secret.”

Rose hesitated. She didn't like secrets. She didn't have many herself, and she didn't like knowing other people's. But perhaps at this moment she didn't have a choice. “All right,” she said, sitting down and placing the jar of flowers on her knees.

Iris swayed into her. “Rosie, Rosie, Rosie,” she chanted. “Rosie, Rosie, Rosie with her posies!”

Rose nodded. “That's me!”

Iris wagged a finger. Her red hair might go on forever, but her nails were bitten to the quick. “‘That's I,'” she chided. “If you're in the house of a distinguished member of the English Department of this undistinguished college, you must be grammatical and say ‘That's I.'” Iris leaned against Rose, not for comradeship but for balance.

“Certainly.
I
stand corrected.”

Iris didn't get the joke. She wagged her head along with her finger. “You shouldn't be so cheerful about it when I correct you like that. You should tell me to go to hell. That's what I would do, if someone said that to me.”

Rose shifted the jar of flowers to one side so she could put an arm around the sagging Iris. It wouldn't do to have her land in a heap on the floor. “Well, I'm not you.”

Iris moved closer and settled in against her. “That's for sure. Tom's nice and you're nice. How come you're so nice to everyone, Rosie?”

“I don't know. It keeps life simple, I guess.”

“Oh. Hmmm. Never thought of that.” Iris's head dropped on Rose's shoulder. Her lime-green-clad body slumped.

She's passed out,
Rose thought.
What do I do now?

The only other piece of furniture in the foyer was a grandfather clock that looked very, very old. Its sedate face stared down at them. Rose stared back and listened to the clock's insistent ticking. There was almost no sound coming from the rear of the house now. Was everyone talking in whispers? Russell had obviously decided not to come back. And who could blame him?

She and Iris were forgotten and abandoned, snuggled up together in this dark box. Still, everything was fine, really, if only she weren't so hungry.

Iris abruptly pulled herself upright, shaking off Rose's arm. “I think I'm in trouble,” she said, mush no longer clinging to her words. “Did I already tell you that?”

“No,” Rose said cautiously. “You didn't.”

“Well, I certainly haven't told anyone else,” Iris said crossly.

“Well then,” Rose said. “It really is a secret, I guess.”

“What do you mean by that?” Iris turned on her, ready to fight.

“You were going to tell me a secret, remember?”

Iris looked blank. “I was?”

“Yes.”

Iris subsided into muddled thought. Rose stared at the clock again, wishing it had a visible pendulum, just so she could watch it move. Her stomach growled. Outside, children shouted and were quickly silenced. This was a house of grief. Time must be allowed to pass quietly, with as few intrusions as possible.

“I'm all mixed up,” Iris said.

No surprises there. “I'm sorry.” Rose's stomach had begun a low, constant droning.

“I was going to tell Tom this morning and then
this
happened.” She gestured vaguely at a stack of junk mail on the floor.

Rose had begun thinking about tuna casserole. There had to be one somewhere in this house. People weren't allowed to die in America without tuna casserole, were they? “What was that?”

Iris lifted her head like a she-wolf preparing to howl.
“God dammit! Everything's gone to hell, again!”
This time she shouted loud enough for anyone on the planet to hear.

“Nothing's ever as bad as it looks through the bottom of a bottle,” Rose said automatically. It had been Mavis's standard response to drunks who whined.

“Don't say that!” Iris wailed. “It's so demeaning!” She burst into noisy tears.

At that moment the overhead light in the foyer flicked on, the hallway door opened again, and the president of the college appeared, followed by Professor Putnam.

Rose stood up, clasping her jar of flowers. She liked the president, who often came over to the Book Store for what she called her “afternoon decompression.” She was a slightly overweight, aggressively chic frosted blonde from Dallas, who affected stiletto heels around this country campus, but was still, in Rose's book, a good and interesting person because she was smart and unafraid to be herself.

The president came clicking across the wooden floor in her signature stilettos. “Hello, Rose,” she said. “It's nice to see you. Although I'm sorry it's not under our usual more cheerful circumstances.”

“Yes,” Rose said.

The president then turned to Iris, who'd begun sobbing extravagantly, making loud honking noises, and so was oblivious to everything except her own painful inner drummer. “How sad.” The president patted Iris's bright green shoulders with the tips of her manicured fingers. “She and Marjory must have been very close.”

Professor Putnam still stood in the doorway. His look of amusement was there and gone in an instant, but Rose had seen it. There was a refreshing lack of pretense in allowing yourself to be amused in public by anything the day after your wife was killed. It made him seem more like a person and less like a caricature. How old was Professor Putnam? she wondered. Mid-forties? It was hard to tell the age of someone so self-effacing. He was as tall as Russell, but more stooped and without any of Russell's swagger. He looked tired, but not really devastated, not at all like a man who had just lost someone he loved. Perhaps “off-balance” would be the word to describe Professor Putnam, like someone who has pushed and pushed for a long time against a great weight that has suddenly and inexplicably disappeared.

*   *   *

Once the president had made her usual gracious exit, there was still Iris to deal with. She'd gone to sleep slumped over the pile of
Sunday Book Review
s. Rose and Professor Putnam stood over her side by side, clamped together in this strangely comic interlude.

“I'm sorry about this,” Rose said.

Professor Putnam smiled. “Why? It's not your fault.” He'd taken the jar of roses from her. He stood with both his hands wrapped around it, the flowers' thorny stalks pressed against his chest, his warm dark brown eyes looking down at her. “This is Russ's doing. Everyone knows Iris drinks too much if you let her. Well, actually she hasn't for a while, but it looks as though she's back at it again. Iris hates Russell for some reason, says really nasty things about his ideas in faculty meetings. Russ himself hasn't had a drink in years, but he feels perfectly justified in getting Iris drunk. He baits her until she says something that makes him mad, then he storms off and leaves her for someone else to deal with.”

“My, my,” Rose said quietly. “What a dysfunctional little couple they are.”

Professor Putnam smiled again from behind the roses. “I'd never thought of it in that way, but that's precisely what they are.”

“Where does Iris live?” Rose asked.

“Miles from here. Somewhere on the side of a mountain up around Lovingston. I don't know exactly. I doubt if anyone here has ever been to her house.”

“Oh dear.”

They looked down at the fallen woman. Rose was unsure whether her first order of business should be dealing with Iris or offering condolences about Marjory's death. She decided on condolences. “I'm very sorry about your wife. I didn't know about her death until I got here. I'm afraid I've intruded. I … I thought I was just coming for dinner. That's why I brought the roses. They were for Marjory.”

“Really!” Professor Putnam's grip on the jar of flowers tightened. For the first time, he seemed to be in real pain. “That was terribly thoughtful of you. Marjory would have been tremendously pleased. No one else around here has ever thought of treating her like that.”

Like what?
Rose wondered. “It's nothing.”

He turned to her, frowning. “Didn't you get my message?”

“What message?”

“About Marjory's accident. I called the Book Store to tell you, but no one seemed to know where you were. So I called the inn and left a message. Didn't you get it?”

Rose shook her head. “I was moving today. I haven't been back to the inn since about seven o'clock this morning.”

Professor Putnam stood looking down at her, still frowning. “No one at the Book Store said anything about your moving.”

This was the closest Rose had ever been to him. Drunken Iris was right, the man emanated kindness, even now. What in the name of the eyes of Texas had made her so anxious yesterday in his class? “It doesn't matter in the least,” she said. “I'm only sorry that I've intruded into an evening obviously meant for much older friends.”

He moved a step closer and took her arm. It was a completely unselfconscious gesture of concern. “But you must be starving. Have you had anything to eat?”

“No, but that's nothing for you to worry about,” Rose said. “Really. I'd better be going. You should get back to your guests.”

“But you're Marjory's guest,” Professor Putnam said with quiet, deliberate emphasis. Rose was moved. If this man wasn't shattered by his wife's death, at least he honored her place in this house. Not only did Professor Putnam have the courage to live with Marjory, he had enough courage to be honest in the wake of her death. Rose had long ago decided that she would be no good dealing with the complexities of a long-term relationship. She'd always called this self-assessment wisdom, but could it, perhaps, be fear?

Rose looked down at Professor Putnam's hand resting lightly on her arm. Abruptly all the confusion, all the bustle of the day, stopped, and she was perfectly contented to stand there.

Rose had always wondered what had first attracted Mavis to her professor, what had caused her to abandon the restless habits of a lifetime. Could it have been a moment such as this? Could it have been that in the midst of all the roar and hubbub, he'd taken her arm and, for just an instant, made her rackety life stand still?

Rose removed her arm. She immediately pushed back her hair, not wanting Professor Putnam to think she was deliberately breaking contact with him. He'd meant nothing personal by touching her. He was simply a host concerned about a guest's comfort.

Of this, she was almost certain.

 

chapter 4

Agnes Tattle was the only woman that evening not wearing a dress. She had thought about putting one on earlier, just to blend in, but then she'd decided to hell with blending in, and she'd put on slacks and a cotton sweater instead.

People had begun showing up about five thirty. Agnes had known they would appear as soon as they could according to their own rigid social code, which would naturally include precise times for coming over uninvited to comfort and feed the bereaved. Besides, with this particular death, there would be an eruption of collective guilt among her fellow campus residents. Marjory had been the Old Faithful subject around here for years. This evening would be the last, best chance for the campus to exorcise its communal guilt.

And sure enough, once the front door bell began to ring at five thirty, it didn't stop. Through the door marched a steady stream of food-bearing women, their plumage appropriately subdued (except for Iris, in her glorious lime green costume, who'd gotten drunk as a fart) and trailed by their soberly dressed men. The house had filled up quickly, but you would have never guessed how packed it was from the noise. Everyone talked very quietly, and no one laughed. After her second Scotch, Agnes began to wonder if these people might not be secretly afraid that if they let out a loud enough guffaw, Marjory would rise up from her casket, hitch a ride over from Peterson's funeral home, and haunt them. Would that her daughter had the guts to do that. Marjory, Agnes thought, was due a little payback.

Finally, about eight thirty, she'd had enough sanctimonious twaddle and slipped into the kitchen to pour herself a fresh drink. Her plan was to sneak out onto the back porch, smoke a cigarette, have another Scotch, and spend a few quiet moments away from all these whispering, well-meaning,
platitudinous—
was that a word?—college people. Most of all, her plan was to be
alone
out on the back porch, but when she quietly opened the door, Agnes found that Rose Callahan had gotten there before her. She sat sideways on the third step down with her back against a railing post, busily stuffing herself with tuna casserole and peanut butter pie. Agnes was surprised to see that Rose, too, had on a dress; certainly unfashionable and unironed, but still a dress. Her hair, however, was a spectacular mess—all over the place in some kind of anti-hairdo.