Fortunate Lives Read online

The night before the party her restlessness had propelled her through the rooms of the house, as it often did, and finally outside, since it was warm, with the cats following her at a distance. The long yard was enclosed by tall cedar hedges, and Dinah often strolled across the grass in her nightgown, trailing silently along the narrow white ribbons of cat-worn paths crisscrossing the lawn or following the slate steps down to the garden.

  She had passed at least two hours roving about the yard, pausing and musing, infused with and overstimulated by anticipation of the next day. She no longer battled the images that kept her awake—the detailing of party plans, mental lists of things to be done and the sequence in which she would do them. On any sleepless night she had learned that she had to wear out her own sensibilities; she had never managed to medicate or meditate them into submission. But last night at least she had managed, as she sometimes did, to trick herself by settling in an odd corner, where sleep had overtaken her absolutely. She had awakened abruptly at dawn, huddled into the wicker swing on the screened porch, cramped and chilled but pleased to have weaseled a bit of sleep out of the dark.

  By ten-thirty in the morning Dinah had nearly finished preparing the garnishes for the cold supper she would serve buffet style that evening. While Sarah joined her in the kitchen to assemble the children’s prizes, Dinah had frosted several branches of lemon leaves with egg white and kosher salt and left them to dry beside the frosted cherry tomatoes. She stuffed the hard-boiled eggs and refrigerated them under dampened paper towels and plastic wrap, and she did the same with the freshly sliced breads, alternating dark and light slices in shallow wicker baskets. The day before, she had spent almost eight hours cooking, which had made her sweaty and cross even in the mild heat, but now she was enjoying herself.

  She stood at the sink looking out the window as she washed her hands and rinsed and dried the knives. David was in his garden, and she thought she would take a break and go chat with him for a few minutes. She could find out if he wanted to entertain the smaller children while the festivity was being arranged. She could simply join him in the beautiful day and gather the lettuces and basil and dill flowers and parsley she needed for the last-minute embellishment of the various platters filled with food.

  She was delighted this morning at the sight of him glazed with pale sunlight that lit his blue shirt and his fair hair under the fragile-looking sky. She often joined David in the garden on summer afternoons when he got home from work; it seemed to her a sociable time without any need to make small talk. Usually she busied herself with weeding and didn’t interfere with the design of the garden, although she was uneasy with the order her son had imposed on the little plot of land. He had planted not only the vegetables but the flowers, too, in militant rows according to species.

  She put her basket down and smiled over at him. “Isn’t it lucky that we’ve gotten such beautiful weather for tonight?” she said idly, but he didn’t look up from his careful job of transplanting seedlings. “I don’t know if you want to distract the children—you could play the guitar. You could do the songs. That always mesmerizes them. Especially if you let them try playing the guitar themselves. Or maybe you want to set up the prizes?”

  David hated to have company when he was working in his garden, although he had never said so. He still didn’t understand why anyone else’s presence seemed to him such a profound intrusion. He knew his irritation was both unreasonable and ungenerous, but it didn’t abate.

  Dinah stooped and began to collect the various lettuces she would use for the salad. She looked over at him once more. “Is Christie coming tonight? She isn’t working over the Fourth, is she?” Dinah considered Christie for a moment: she was a small, shy girl with whom Dinah found it difficult to have a conversation.

  “Christie!” Dinah would say. “It’s so nice of you to drop by. How are you?”

  Christie would smile and duck her head of curly brown hair. “Fine,” she would say, not meeting Dinah’s eyes.

  “Well, it’s so cold out. Come on in!” And Christie would come in without a word.

  “I’ll see if David’s upstairs. Did you want to see him?” And Christie would just smile and look at Dinah, with her soft brown eyes glancing up from beneath her bangs. She reminded Dinah of a cocker spaniel her family had inherited from neighbors who moved to England when she was a little girl. The dog had been sweet but disappointingly retiring, and Dinah’s mother always suspected the poor animal had been traumatized by the two little boys of its former household. Perhaps Christie, too, had been somehow disturbed and wounded. It was impossible to dislike her, but privately Dinah found her tiresome.

  “You’d think that simple curiosity would prompt her to ask just one question,” she had said once to Martin as she sat drinking coffee after a dinner at which Christie had been a guest. “It seems to me that—at least after a while—any sort of intelligent person would be interested in other people. You know what I mean? I mean, it could be pretty basic stuff. ‘How are you, Mrs. Howells? What do you think about the Brazilian rain forest? Eastern Europe? The depletion of the ozone layer? The stoplight they might put up on State Street?’ You begin to wonder if she ever has a single thought! A pinpoint of curiosity! When I try to talk to her I feel as if I’m conducting an interrogation!” She was staring down at her coffee as she stirred it absently, but she had looked up to see David standing behind Martin in the kitchen doorway.

  He had been so angry at his parents at that moment that it was reflected even in his stance, his shoulders tensed, his whole upper body seeming knotted, exactly as he had stood at age two before losing control and falling into an incoherent tantrum at being misunderstood or thwarted. But that night he had been alarmingly icy with unforgiveness. He had very calmly accused his parents of being nothing more than academic snobs, of knowing nothing of any real importance, of being incapable of understanding anything at all.

  Dinah had apologized profusely, but ever since she had been so uneasy around Christie in David’s presence, and so intent upon being fair and friendly, that her behavior had escalated into a kind of hysterical animation. Now she not only determinedly asked Christie all sorts of two- and three-part questions, but she answered them for her as well.

  “Are you enjoying your part in the musical, Christie? Or do you find that it just takes up so much more time than you ever imagined? Is Mrs. Hartwick able to direct with the same real authority as Mr. Walters, or is it actually better to have someone a little less arrogant? Sometimes, he was really insufferable.” Dinah’s questions were always multiple choice, and her answers were equally frantic and complex.

  “Of course,” she would continue, after increasingly minimal pauses during which Christie would smile at her blankly, “anyone would enjoy performing if they had a voice like yours even if it does eat into your life. Not your voice! I mean, so much rehearsing leaves you almost no time for yourself. David says you’ve had to give up Saturday mornings and even the evenings. There’s always some moment to be squeezed out of the day though, I suppose, to fit in what you absolutely have to get done. They say that it’s the busiest people who always have a moment to spare. You’re very organized, I imagine. I had forgotten that Mrs. Hartwick assisted in last year’s production. She’ll probably be fine!”

  Whenever Dinah came to a full stop, Christie would sometimes smile and mutter an agreement, sometimes not. “Well!” Dinah would exclaim, with the air of a person who can scarcely bear to pull herself away, “I’d better get busy! I have a million things to do.” And she would exit the room, exhausted.

  In fact, she was rather hoping that Christie wouldn’t be able to get off work for the evening. To Dinah’s astonishment, Christie had gotten a much-coveted part-time job at the tourist information desk of the Freund Museum, a job usually staffed by teenagers, but one that was always advertised as requiring “interpersonal skills.”

  “Frankly,” David said, while still transferring plants from small green containers to the darkly troweled earth, “
I’ve always thought this whole party is a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Christie said she would do the songs. I’m not crazy about having those kids fool with my guitar.”

  Dinah was surprised by David’s bad mood; he had been so cheerful yesterday. “Well, sweetie, you could use your old one. Of course, I didn’t mean you should let them handle the one you play.” She heard her own voice wheedling in revolting supplication over the space between them. When he didn’t respond, she was quiet. She had bought both guitars, the first one expensive, the price of the second one horrifying to think about even now. But they were gifts to him, she counseled herself; they were his own. “Anyway, I may need you to operate Moonflower’s pulley,” she said with an old note of authority. “Ellen called this morning with a terrible cold. I don’t know if she and Vic are coming.”

  “Okay… Well… you takes what you can, and you deals with what you gets,” he said, clearly mimicking someone clever, someone black, someone he admired, and someone she had never heard of.

  She cast her eye over the rigorously organized rows of vegetables and flowers that defied inherent grace. She viewed it as a slight to any natural aesthetic sense. She didn’t really like to give parties, she thought, and she only repeated this one summer after summer because she knew, even if they didn’t, that it was a custom her children would miss. But she put the thought aside and tried to calculate how many heads of lettuce she would need, how much parsley; would there be enough dill flowers for decoration or should she not bother with them?

  “You know,” she said mildly, while she bent to unearth another head of curly Winter Density lettuce, “you didn’t have to plant these flowers in rows like this, sweetie.” It seemed to her a waste that David took such care with a garden that was not in itself very pretty at all. “But these carnations are lovely, aren’t they?” He didn’t answer because she wasn’t asking a question as much as commenting to herself. “For years I wondered what the British meant—in all those books—always talking about ‘pinks,’ and I finally found out that they were just carnations. If I had only known sooner I would have called them pinks myself, and I would have liked them better. Like all those lime trees in Chekhov. Well, one of the Russians, anyway. Whenever I thought about limes I felt languorous… it probably isn’t Chekhov…. But it was years before I ever saw any carnations growing! When they come from the florist they look as if someone has made them out of crepe paper. Really, I still hate them in arrangements. But big masses of them together… You’ve had good luck,” she went on. “I’m awfully glad you’re so interested in gardening.”

  She spoke to her son with such hearty encouragement that he was suddenly alert. He heard the false cheer that often obscured a dangerous edge, and he paused to glance at her where she bent to her chore with efficiency and a determined smile which she turned toward him. “This is so good for you, I think. Most people start a garden when they’re already too old. It’s always seemed to me that gardening is a hobby that should be for the young. It’s such a good way to learn about life!” She was emphatic, her words tumbling into the day with blocklike certainty.

  Dinah had no idea how she looked squatting on her haunches in the flowerbeds, with her hands slightly chapped and her clothes and hair in early-morning disarray. She used a trowel to dislodge a clump of bishop’s-weed, and she tightened her lips in a little moue of concentration. She was pleased that she had managed not to betray her irritation at David, and she attacked the weeds with vigor, but David had stopped his work and turned to look at her when she spoke.

  All at once she seemed monstrous to him. He was almost light-headed with sudden loathing as he watched her bend her head with the effort of prying loose the root system. She stood up slowly to stretch, grasping herself at the waist, elbows cocked at an angle to lean backward. Her mouth went round in an exaggerated exhalation, and she smiled toward him as though she were innocent. He could scarcely bear to continue looking at her.

  In one moment she had destroyed the pleasure of his garden. He had planned it all so carefully during the last long months of high school, and over the past month it had begun to seem to him that the balance between the effort he made and the actual result was a perfect thing. Just as she was forming the words she had tossed out into the air, he had been wrestling with the notion—as he transplanted the stringy little seedlings—that he was at last getting a grip on something so much larger than his limited experience. Now he was abashed and infuriated. With one casual sentence his mother had made the need for meaning into a trivial thing that one merely cultivated on a sunny day.

  He had pinned his hopes on the belief that, if he was careful with his garden, the nature of things would be made perfectly clear to him. He had his own idea of how to go about discovering how things really were. He was looking for the plan of things to become apparent. It was unbearable to him to think that his desire for understanding was commonplace, and that his mother—in all about her that suddenly struck him as simplistic—was an insensitive fool.

  He was bereft as he looked at her with her sturdy smile and her graying-blond hair wisping free of the pins that held it back. How was it that he had never realized how oblivious she was to the consequences of what she said and did in the world? He turned his back on her and bent again to the tray of seedlings. He didn’t trust himself to say another word; in fact, he felt alarmingly suspended between sorrow and rage.

  For her part, as she made her way up the steps with her laden basket, Dinah was thinking how uncommunicative, how… cruel!… David was on this particular morning when she was going to so much trouble on his behalf and on Sarah’s, too. It shocked her when one of her children was unkind. And she was frightened that over the past year David’s newfound glibness and cynical humor—often amusing only by her sufferance, only if she agreed to be laughed at and not with—might be merely a veneer that covered some real dislike of her that she could not get at, that she could not fathom.

  Franklin M. Mount

  Dean of Freshmen

  Harvard College

  12 Truscott Street

  Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

  Dear Mr. Mount,

  Of course, I don’t know how old you are, or whether or not you have children yourself. If you do then you’ll understand that if you have a child of four who suddenly learns how to tie his or her shoelaces after weeks of frustrated attempts, then that child will be happy. (Although I do know that if you have a child of four, he or she probably has shoes with Velcro straps, but those were invented too late for my children. I’m simply trying to give you an example.) When your child is sick and running a fever you can give her Tylenol and spend time helping her connect a dot-to-dot picture, and she’ll be pleased and comforted.

  Well, I’m trying to explain that when I was the room mother for David’s first grade class, and the door decoration I made won the West Bradford Public School’s “Best Halloween Door Decoration Contest,” it seemed to me that I had done all I could do to be sure David was content with his life. And after each birthday party, and every Christmas morning, every time he made up with a friend or had some small triumph of one kind or another—after every one of those instances and many others, David was happy. And I also knew, just in general, that he loved all the people in his life—his brother, his sister, his father, and me. But I may well have failed him, because it never crossed my mind, you see, to teach myself or to warn him that it might not always be so.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MOONFLOWER

  SHE WAS TOO DISTRACTED by the problem of David’s strange mood to take much notice of the children’s prizes Sarah had left spread over newspapers on the table to dry. Dinah made an effort to turn her mind to lists, to chores ahead of her in the day, and she filled the sink with tepid water and added a handful of salt, swirling it until all the crystals dissolved. The loose-leaved lettuces—Winter Density, Boston, romaine, and escarole—fanned out gently when she immersed them, heads down, sloshing them plungerlike so the water reached up
into the curly, innermost leaves where the slugs recluded. She wished her thoughts would run through her mind in the same manner that a child runs a thumbnail along the keys of a piano so that each note sounds with equal resonance. She was weary of considering, weary of measuring all the tremors of her life in order to keep herself balanced in the aftershocks. Without thinking, Dinah brought one dripping hand from the water and brushed it across her cheekbone and through her hair, resting her temple in her palm for just a moment.

  She stood splashing the greens about absentmindedly, gazing once again out the window at David, who was standing among his plants, his thumbs looped in the waistband of his jeans, his feet apart, almost in a caricature, Dinah thought, of the stance of a man who is master of all he surveys. She had a flash of memory of some movie from her youth—starring Troy Donahue or Gardner McCay—set in Hawaii. The hero standing just so, while behind him his whole sugar plantation is going up in flames, improbably unbeknownst to him. But the memory gave Dinah a little frisson of satisfaction.

  She dried her hands and moved over to inspect all the trinkets and surprises that Sarah had so carefully embellished and spread out on the table to dry. But Dinah simply could not fend off a melancholy which was very much like the inevitable dolefulness that always accompanies a celebration of New Year’s Eve. She had fallen absurdly into a mild state of mourning for this whole occasion that was yet to happen. She browsed over the table, picking up this item or that to inspect and admire, turning it to see how it refracted the light; but this morning the prizes no longer seemed inherently magical as they had in previous years.

  This past Halloween Dinah had bought nine elaborate, shiny gold, sequined cardboard crowns at the drugstore. Sarah had used Elmer’s Glue All to write each child’s name on one of the crowns and then sprinkled red glitter over the tracery, carefully shaking off the excess into a paper bag. Now Dinah lifted each sequined, glittery crown to test it for dryness before she cautiously placed it in a carton along with the dozen artificial white doves that she had bought at the florist and that Sarah had also gilded with glitter so that they shimmered with gold. The tips of their fanned wings were burnished with metallic gold paint from a kit of children’s art supplies that Sarah had unearthed in her closet. She had used a nearly exhausted set of acrylic paints and a tiny eyeliner brush to decorate matchbox cars from the supermarket with elaborate little scrolls and flourishes after she had sprayed them gold and let them dry overnight, and there was a tangle of gaudy but impressive dime store jewelry that Dinah had bought over the past year whenever she noticed a particularly remarkable piece at Newberry or Kmart.