Fortunate Lives Read online

  Also by Robb Forman Dew

  Fiction

  The Evidence Against Her

  The Time of Her Life

  Dale Loves Sophie to Death

  Nonfiction

  The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out

  A Southern Thanksgiving: Recipes and Musings

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1992 by Robb Forman Dew

  Reading Group Guide copyright © 2003 by Robb Forman Dew and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Originally published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, 1992

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use material in this book: “Puff the Magic Dragon” by Peter Yarrow and Leonard Lipton. Copyright © 1963 by Pepemar Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The lines from Half of Man Is Woman by Zhang Xianliang, translated by Martha Avery, are reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Translation copyright © 1986 by Martha Avery.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-09034-6

  Contents

  Also by Robb Forman Dew

  Copyright

  Chapter One: God’s Own Cat

  Chapter Two: At Home

  Chapter Three: A Perfect Thing

  Chapter Four: Moonflower

  Chapter Five: The Summer House

  Chapter Six: Bad Weather

  Chapter Seven: Life as a Girl

  Chapter Eight: Traffic

  Chapter Nine: Packing

  Chapter Ten: A Cry of Absence

  Chapter Eleven: Losing Weight

  Chapter Twelve: Slade Road

  A Reading Group Guide

  About the Author

  The Evidence Against Her

  For Helen, for Dear, for Elizabeth,

  and in memory of

  Robert Edgar Rachal

  CHAPTER ONE

  GOD’S OWN CAT

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOON Dinah retreated to her bedroom in that deadly time before the family had dinner. She had read that this was the time of day when most people experience a drop in their blood sugar, but that notion struck her as only a useful rationalization. She knew too well the hours from morning to night. They bobbled by like varicolored balloons, soft and round, like the word “hour” itself. Except the hours between four and six of any day, before dawn or before dusk. Those are sinister moments in which the spirit is endangered and deflated. She imagined those two hours drifting gray and close to the earth, flaccid and exhausted of buoyancy.

  And even though today she might reasonably allow herself to luxuriate in melancholy while that bit of time slid by, she knew how easily she might fall into serious despair. She occupied herself, taking with her to the bedroom the white wicker-and-wood lap desk that Martin had given her for Christmas. It was stocked with cream-colored monogrammed stationery and embossed envelopes interlined with blue. She had requested the gift, and she thought of herself as someone who used these things, although such correspondence as she carried on was likely to be scribbled out on a sheet of typing paper at her desk, paper-clipped to a rumpled editorial cut out from the newspaper weeks before, or enclosed with a book review, or a recipe and hastily folded into the flimsy, long envelopes she bought at the grocery store and kept on hand to pay bills.

  She settled on the bed, kicking off her shoes and crossing her ankles, and pulled out the packet of booklets and informational sheets that had come last week from the Freshmen Dean’s Office at Harvard College. She riffled through the pages of material until she found the letter from Franklin M. Mount, Dean of Freshmen. Dinah’s huge orange cat had draped himself irritatingly over her legs in the warm June weather, and she heaved him aside.

  “Move, Taffy! Move over! Move over!” And the cat toppled over unresistingly onto his back right next to her, with his silky white stomach exposed. He gazed backward at Dinah and tried to purr in his snuffling way until he fell asleep. Dinah relaxed farther back into the pillows propped against the headboard and held the letter up before her at arm’s length, since she didn’t have her glasses.

  FRESHMEN DEAN’S OFFICE

  HARVARD COLLEGE

  12 Truscott Street

  Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

  Telephone (617) 459-1325

  June 1, 1991

  To the Parents of Members of the Class of 1995:

  Each year, we ask parents of incoming freshmen to write us frankly and fully about their sons and daughters. Statements about our students from those who know them best help us to assign them appropriate advisers, assign resident students to compatible rooming groups, and anticipate the pleasures and the problems we will share. We would be grateful for detailed impressions about your son’s or daughter’s strengths, weaknesses, and interests, and also for information about any medical problems we ought to know of.

  Once again she pondered the problem of the last sentence and that dangling preposition. Most likely it was unconsidered, merely an example of the new flexibility of the written as well as the spoken word, the new language that encompassed peculiar uses of such words as “impact.” On the other hand, it smacked of trickery to Dinah. It might be that the staff in the Freshmen Dean’s Office had conferred about this. Suppose it was a calculated effort not to seem stuffy, or an attempt to elicit informal and overly revealing replies?

  She had read through all the other information sheets and pamphlets, trying to find out the intentions of the Freshmen Dean’s Office, and had been truly alarmed by the cozy, conspiratorial tone of the last paragraph of a booklet called Some Notes for Freshmen Parents:

  Don’t try to hold the course you set and have been sailing together for seventeen years. It is hard to sail a ship with two pilots. You should come along, but always keep in mind that it is a new voyage, someone else’s voyage. This way, college can be the shared and happy embarkation it ought to be.

  Martin refused to take it seriously. “This is great! I love this,” he had said when she insisted he read through the little booklet. “We buy the ticket and David takes the cruise.” Of course, she understood the foolishness of all these communications, but on the other hand, suppose there was something she did or did not write—an attitude and manner she did or did not adopt—that might prejudice the Freshmen Dean’s Office against her own son. Suppose she unwittingly wrote something that condemned David to a terrible roommate, or brought down upon his head the collective derision of the freshmen advisers. She had been struggling for a week to draft an adequate reply to what seemed to her a daunting request, and had finally resorted to working out the first draft on a yellow legal pad so as not to waste any more of the expensive Crane writing paper.

  473 Slade Road

  West Bradford, MA

  June 8, 1991

  Franklin M. Mount

  Dean of Freshmen

  Harvard College

  12 Truscott Street

  Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

  Dear Mr. Mount,

  I can only respond to your request for my and my husband’s impression of our son David Howells…

  She turned the page back to start fresh. She couldn’t use the possessive “my and my
husband’s,” since Harvard had declined to use the prepositional construction “of which we ought to know.”

  Dear Mr. Mount,

  Of course, we’re biased, but we think Harvard is really lucky to be getting our son David Howells as a student and a member of its community…

  She reconsidered this immediately. The tone was altogether too jaunty, even arrogant. At the very least, she decided, she would have to avoid using contractions and telling Harvard how lucky they were. Probably Mr. Mount was hoping for as succinct a reply as possible, given the gravity of the task he had set for the parents of all the freshmen entering Harvard. But his request was so provocative that Dinah closed her eyes briefly, trying to block out the images of her children that were rushing through her mind. She turned to a fresh page and decided to get right to the heart of the matter, to illuminate for Mr. Mount David’s character and personality, describe to Mr. Mount David’s whole life as he would live it up until the moment he entered Harvard, and she would make every effort to do this in the space of one page:

  Dear Mr. Mount,

  Our son David Howells has a discerning intelligence, great love for and loyalty to his friends and his family, and a generous spirit. He has always been a good student and is well liked by his peers, and we think that David will be a responsible and productive member of the Harvard College community.

  Perhaps what is most remarkable about David is his capacity for empathy. It is a quality he has possessed since early childhood, but which was probably heightened by the death of his younger brother when David was thirteen years old.

  She paused for a moment, gazing down at what she had written, and she realized that her fingers were clenched so tightly around her pen that her words were nearly illegible. This was not the right day to attempt such a letter. The white sunshine of early afternoon darkened into a thick yellow light that fell slantwise across the room, and she replaced the yellow pad, the sheets of stationery, and the envelopes with their shiny blue lining inside the wicker compartment of the lap desk. She set the desk to one side and rested her head against the pillows, letting her arms drop loosely to the quilt.

  At the foot of the bed the dog had been listening anxiously to the scratching and rustling of Dinah’s endeavor, but when she heard Dinah grow still, Duchess lay her head down comfortably between her paws and relaxed. Taffy didn’t stir, but the gray cat, Bob, neatly perched on the wide, sunlighted windowsill, settled farther down on his turned-under paws and shifted his gaze away from Dinah to the peak of the porch roof outside, where the sweet-eyed, round-breasted doves fluttering to a perch, trekking poultry-fashion along the roof’s peak, made his muscles quiver under his rough coat and brought forth tiny anticipatory chatterings of his teeth.

  He was a cat who lived mostly along the perimeters of the rooms, and Dinah was sure he was only a first-generation domestic cat. He had been one of the two tiny kittens David had rescued five years ago from underneath a car in the Price Chopper parking lot. One gray-striped and the other a muddy tortoiseshell.

  Neither of those two cats had ever acquired the glossy sheen, though, of Dinah’s big orange cat. Taffy was sanguine in his golden glory of thick fur, and he was sweet-natured, although not especially intelligent. And unlike Bob, Taffy crossed all the rooms of the house and even the yard outside with placid assurance, and stopped to sleep wherever he might be when the urge overtook him.

  Dinah and Martin had never sat down and discussed somberly whether or not to have children; they had merely stopped trying not to have them. It had been a decision too momentous to confront. And certainly with altogether lesser consequences, but in much the same way, they had over the years become the custodians of these various animals. Duchess was the last of a litter of long-haired German shepherd dogs—not fierce dogs under any circumstances and a strain, in fact, that breeders were trying to eliminate from the genetic pool. Dinah had adopted Duchess as a favor to the receptionist at the Vet Clinic. Melissa knew all the Howellses’ animals, and over the years she had become a friendly acquaintance of Dinah’s.

  Dinah had arrived at the Vet Clinic one afternoon with Taffy, who needed shots, and found Melissa huddled in a chair in the waiting room weeping while the dog looked on abashed. “I don’t know why her owners waited so long,” Melissa said when she had composed herself a little. “Duchess is almost a year old! We’ve treated her at the clinic since she was a puppy. Now she’s in heat, though, and they won’t keep her. I have two dogs at home already, and they’re both male. I’m not even supposed to have pets in the apartment.” Melissa had been distraught. “I really despise those people! They just come in here and say, ‘Duke needs his rabies booster and we’re leaving Duchess to be destroyed.’ Destroyed! I used to think it was awful to say you were going to put a dog to sleep when you just meant you were going to kill it. But these people… I think they’re like Nazis!”

  Dinah, of course, had taken Duchess home. But the dog seemed to have absorbed some idea of the precarious nature of her continued existence. She was a coward, racing around the rooms to find Dinah whenever the doorbell rang and forever agonizing over the possibility that the cats were more favored than she. They often appropriated her dog bed, ate chunks of her dog meal, and so subtly harassed her that she would even drink every drop of water poured out for her until she was bloated with the effort as the cats sat on the windowsills watching. Dinah had learned never to fill Duchess’s bowl more than half full.

  Taffy padded after Dinah wherever she went in the house, and Bob, in his furtive cat life, directed his cautious gray attention toward her, too, and yet he kept his distance. He shadowed her from room to room, materializing only after she had settled somewhere, and even then he regarded her obliquely, out of range; it had been the tortoise-shell who had studied her every move, kept tabs on her, made her his business.

  Dinah always had the animals in mind, one way or another—just as unconsciously she kept account of the seasons, the months, the days, and the hours—but they had come into her life spontaneously, and she had never thought of them as hers any more than it would have occurred to her to feel proprietary about all that time slipping by.

  She turned her head toward the last of the sun. Beyond the tall windows of her room she could see all the way across the wide space of lawn, down the far slope of the yard behind the kitchen. She watched her children moving through the garden. David had borrowed a Rototiller and turned the soil for a garden early in the spring, and he spent hours reading gardening books and catalogues. It was his current enthusiasm.

  Now he moved deliberately among the rows, turning a leaf here or there for inspection and snapping off dead blooms, and Sarah followed slowly along behind him. She dawdled among the flowers in the syrupy golden air as though she were mesmerized by the late afternoon heat, and her brother stooped to cut an armful of tall gladiolas for the hall vase and gave them over to her to hold while he moved along to the rows of vegetables. Sarah accepted the flowers and stood with her arms slightly raised and cupped around the long stems, and she suddenly seemed to Dinah to be a girl entirely unlike the everyday person Dinah thought of as her daughter. In the waning afternoon Sarah was a lovely and romantic figure, as mysterious and intriguing as a painting. As Dinah watched Sarah and David intently, she marveled that any parents were able to sum up all that they knew about one of their children in a short letter to Mr. Franklin M. Mount, Dean of Freshmen, Harvard College.

  David stood up, shaking the earth from two heads of lettuce, holding them aloft to get Sarah’s attention as she turned away to carry the flowers up to the house. Dinah had unconsciously leaned toward the window, and she breathed a long sigh and fell back against the pillows. If she were Sarah’s age, the days would accrue slowly, each one likely to be overwhelming in its drama. Dinah let her neck go limp against the headboard, relieved that at age forty she was past the point of anticipation of a whole life to be shaped and lived, measured and judged.

  She stayed exactly where she was in that mo
ment of the late summer afternoon that is suspended on the verge of twilight. Mourning doves bobbed and fluttered on the telephone lines along the street, sobbing into the deep light; the hearty spears of brilliant gladiolas and the soft purple phlox glowed vibrantly among the thin-petaled, palely drooping day lilies, until it seemed that the taller flowers, spiking into the dimming afternoon, were themselves a source of illumination. When the view of the garden grew hazy in the fading light, she roused herself and went downstairs to organize dinner. Martin came in to put away the tools he had used to mend this and that around the house, and Sarah wandered in to set the table. David dashed up the lawn to see how much time there was before they ate and to be sure she would have the water boiling before he picked the corn.

  “I can husk it in a second. It’s better just picked,” he said.

  “Okay, David. Let’s have it last. I’ll put the water on when I take the chicken out. We can have the corn for dessert.”

  When they were all four seated at the table and Martin was carving the chicken, Duchess joined them for dinner. “God! That dog is disgusting,” Sarah said. Duchess patiently picked up mouthfuls of dog meal from her bowl in the corner and dropped all the nuggets on the rug under their feet, where she lay down and munched along companionably. She knew Sarah was irritated, though, and her ears went flat in apology. Sarah bent over and gave her a pat.

  “Sarah, don’t pet the dog when you’re eating your dinner,” Dinah said. “It’s just not clean.” This was only what she said because she was Sarah’s mother; there was no conviction in the words.

  Sarah took little notice. “I’m going over to Elise’s after dinner, Mom,” she said. “Is that okay? Could you drive me?”

  Dinah turned to answer her daughter, who was sitting where Toby had once sat. It was Sarah, fair and fine-boned as Toby had been, approximately the same age and size as Toby was six years ago when he had last sat in that very chair—restless, fidgeting with his food, anxious to be done. It was Sarah, but for a split second Dinah clearly registered the image of her second son, as though he were a visual echo. “It’ll still be light, Sarah. Why don’t you walk over and maybe David can pick you up later if he has the car?” And there was no dissension between them as there would have been if Toby had made the same request; Sarah was accommodating and perfectly amenable.