Fortunate Lives Page 9

  The parents watched in high spirits, too, enjoying having their children be so entertained. As the children began to make their way back to the porch, wearing a crown and beads or bracelets, David sat down on the bench next to Netta, who was leaning her head against the wall, looking out from under her brows at the whole event, which was winding down. The children’s voices were less high-pitched, their movements less frantic.

  Anna Tyson had been drawn into the singing circle of children in spite of herself and was still out in the yard with some of the others. Netta was frowning slightly.

  She turned her head against the clapboards to look at David. “I really didn’t want Anna Tyson to get involved in this,” she said, as matter-of-factly as if they had been in the middle of a conversation, but loudly enough so that Dinah heard her at the other end of the porch, where she was moving back and forth collecting glasses and paper plates.

  “I meant to take Anna Tyson home before this all started, but I didn’t want to get up in the middle of the singing and disturb everybody. But I mean, we don’t do Santa Claus or any of that.” She paused for a moment, considering. “Really, don’t you think it’s cruel in a way? I think it’s wrong to lie to children, don’t you? But Anna Tyson was really enchanted. I could tell. Now I don’t know what to do when she talks about it. I’d be lying to her, wouldn’t I, if I let her believe in all this when it’s really just one more of those insidious ways that adults lie to children. Don’t you think so?”

  Netta didn’t sound angry, only genuinely anxious for David’s opinion. “It’s bad enough just living in a town like this,” she said with some scorn, “where kids are bound to believe that people are safe, that there aren’t people dying on the streets, that there’s no hunger in the world, no real poverty! Anna Tyson’s whole life here is really a lie anyway, isn’t it? And this sort of… fantasy… it’s worse, because it’s a calculated lie.” She stopped again and peered at David intensely. “I don’t mean that I think Dinah and Martin intend harm,” she assured him and then drifted off into her own thoughts for a moment. “But you know, morally I think that may even make it a greater deceit, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah. I guess it’s a lie. I don’t know,” David said, his voice bemused; he had never thought of this as any kind of deceit. “Actually, this is one of the best memories I have of my childhood.” He spoke with a slight note of apology. “It was just for us, you see. Not like Santa Claus. And my mother always seemed amazed every time Moonflower appeared. Her act was skepticism, so we had to convince her.”

  As David grew quiet, he was filled with affection for everyone in sight. Netta was so exotic to him that he hadn’t paid much attention to what she was saying; he had merely been interested in the fact of her passionate ideas and her uncommon frankness. But at the other end of the porch, his mother was finally, in this day, enormously pleased to have been championed by her son.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE SUMMER HOUSE

  EVERY YEAR WHEN THE college and the public schools released their faculty and students in early June, Dinah’s house began to fill with people who came and went at all hours: her children’s friends, various contributors to The Review, Martin’s ex-students who wandered back into town with spouses or new children. The Hofstatters often dropped by, together or singly, as did other friends, neighbors, and assorted acquaintances. Any day of the summer Dinah might find herself drinking midmorning coffee with David’s former best friend from eighth grade, who was only an amiable acquaintance of David’s now, but had attached himself to the household in general.

  Each summer teenagers who had first witnessed Moonflower on a long-past Fourth of July would drop by. They felt a special association with Dinah in the magical conspiracy she had engineered against their younger selves. And even outside her own house, anywhere within the town, they often confided in her. She ran into them at the grocery store or at the college pool. They told her about the repression of their own households, their foolish parents, their secret lives.

  And yet, every summer Dinah was surprised when she wandered through her rooms and found them occupied, or when she was hurrying to get errands done and was helping the check-out girl bag the groceries and was suddenly involved in an intimate conversation about the girl’s college choices, love life.

  When she was pondering the cheese selection at The Whole Grain Elevator—a store displaced from the seventies—she found herself commiserating with a long-ago Moonflower devotee who didn’t know how to tell her parents that both she and the boy they thought was her lover only had in common the fact that they were each involved with the same woman at their college. “Kate cares about us both, but sexually she’s still ambivalent…. God,” the girl said, “I really, really wish I were just one bit ambivalent!” She paused after drawing the wire cheese cutter through the cheddar Dinah had chosen. “It would be easier to be in love with Tim. And you know what? He’s a much nicer person than Kate.” She wrapped the cheese in brown paper and began tying it with twine. “But one of us is going to end up so unhappy.” She handed Dinah the cheese and took payment for it, and Dinah left the store feeling sympathy for her, although Dinah had scarcely been able to place her and, at first, hadn’t remembered her last name.

  Dinah wasn’t aware of encouraging or discouraging anyone who chose to confide in her. In fact, she didn’t know such random intimacy was uncommon, but it was Dinah’s instinct to ease any other person’s anxiety in a conversation. Perhaps it was only cowardice masquerading as courtesy, because after cocktail parties or college functions she was often filled with self-loathing as she re-imagined her smiling, acquiescent self listening with apparent fascination to some fool pontificating about one thing or another. And she always despaired of herself when she realized that she had once again probably overwhelmed Christie with aggressive amiability in a desperate effort not to appear judgmental.

  But her courtesy was a habit she could not break. Invariably, she inclined her head forward and raised her eyebrows in an expression of anticipation at whatever information or opinion was being divulged to her in any conversation. People were shockingly forthcoming now and then. It never occurred to her that they didn’t speak this way to everyone.

  She was surprised and discomfited every summer by her lack of privacy, but her restiveness in the warm weather merely became part of her own climate, part of her daily life, just as the animals were who moved with her from place to place, in and out of doors. When friends of hers or acquaintances of her children dropped by to chat with her, she treated them as visitors; she didn’t understand that her house had become a haven to other people’s children.

  And the morning after Moonflower’s visit, it became a haven for Netta, too, and her daughter Anna Tyson. Netta phoned at eight in the morning and spoke to Martin, who answered the phone out of a sound sleep, but the call also woke Dinah, who listened to his side of the conversation with mounting exasperation.

  “What would you have said?” Martin asked in his own defense. “She started crying, for God’s sake, and I was hardly awake. She said she’s been up all night. You wouldn’t have told her no.” Martin was as irritated as Dinah, who had gathered that Netta had invited herself over for dinner.

  “I’m exhausted, Martin! I’ve been up all night myself. I couldn’t get to sleep until almost five-thirty, and I’m just exhausted. I really don’t want any company.” He turned his back to her and sank his head deeply into his pillow to shut out the light filtering into the room. He pulled the sheet up to the tip of his nose.

  “I would have thought of some excuse,” Dinah continued. She had turned to lie on her back, wide awake now. “I would have told her we were going out or something.”

  “She said she couldn’t stand to be so lonely after being with people last night. For God’s sake, Dinah! She’s had an awful time, and she’s going to bring a special dish for dinner, she said. She just wants to join us for leftovers. I’m no good on the phone. You know that. I’m not goo
d at lying.” Martin’s words were muffled by his pillow and by the sleep that he was allowing to overtake him.

  “Oh, God! Just because you don’t tell the truth doesn’t mean you’d be lying, Martin!” She believed this absolutely. “To protect yourself without hurting someone’s feelings! That’s called avoiding unpleasantness.” She didn’t expect a reaction, because she knew that Martin had sunk deeply into sleep again. For years she had suffered in restless aggravation while Martin turned his head to one side and slept, even in planes and trains and waiting rooms, and often in the midst of appalling circumstances. She had been in love with Martin, and now she loved him in a way that was simply a condition of her life, but there had been times when she had looked over at his sleeping face, loose in repose, his mouth slightly open, the muscles around his eyes and along his chin gone slack, and wondered if she liked him at all. Her own ideas or worries—thrilling or sorrowful, grave or frivolous—rarely relinquished their grip on her consciousness and never in any public place. Dinah thought of the sleep she got as coming to her in dribs and drabs, and not necessarily when she needed it.

  Just as Martin and Dinah were clearing up after a late breakfast Netta arrived as she had the previous day, before lunch, and with Anna Tyson at her side. But she had brought a contribution, and she was agitated and pleased with the idea she had. “I thought that a really wonderful summer soup would be just right to go with sandwiches! You had so much ham and turkey left over last night. Oh, this is a wonderful soup. Bill and I used to spend Sunday mornings reading the Times and clipping recipes….”

  Her animation dimmed as she put down her two grocery bags. Her expression became somber as she unpacked ingredients: a plastic produce bag of three oranges and another one with several rubber-banded bunches of green onions, whipping cream, a quart of chocolate milk, and a medium-sized, rumpled paper bag, from which emerged masses of long, broad, muddy, red-veined leaves that shed droplets of brownish water all over the white counter and the cutting board next to the sink.

  She turned to Dinah and held out her empty hands, as though to illustrate something. “Oh, God! It was all planning,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears. Anna Tyson was hanging on to her skirt, and Netta urged her along to the table and settled herself in the same spot she had occupied yesterday. She lifted Anna Tyson into the chair beside her own and appealed again to Dinah. “The only time I made this soup no one ever ate it. Anna Tyson ate some,” she amended, with a little more control, her voice less tremulous. She leaned back in her chair and gazed at the table a moment, collecting her thoughts. “We had planned to eat it, and Celia was going to make dark bread. I don’t know what happened. You know, that’s what I can’t ever understand. I just don’t know what happened. I’ve always thought that people are fated to meet each other.”

  She held her hand up to stop any possible misinterpretation. “I don’t mean anything mysterious when I say that. Well, I do believe in a kind of particular ESP, you know. A sort of instinctive selection. I met Bill because I had checked a book that he needed out of the library, and I’d forgotten all about it, so it had been out a long time. He came and found me! We talked for two hours, standing in the hall. I mean, other people were passing by. My roommates. After he left I went to the library and wrote him a twenty-page letter! You see”—and she bent forward to close the space a little between herself and Martin and Dinah so that they wouldn’t miss the point—“I had met someone I had to talk to. You know that experience! I don’t know how to say it, but it’s as though there’s an intention in the world that you reveal yourself to this other person.”

  To Dinah’s astonishment, Martin nodded in solemn agreement. It heightened her edgy irritation with the direction the whole day was taking. She remembered the fleeting look of condescension that had crossed his face just last week when she had told him that she and the upholsterer, who was making slipcovers for the living room chairs, had some sort of shared sensibility. A shared sense of time. Something. Within the space of a week one of them had phoned the other at least five times to check on this or that, only to find the other had picked up the phone just before it rang. They had begun sentences simultaneously and with the same words. And yet, Dinah couldn’t discover anything else they had in common. She, too, had always believed in some sort of ESP operating in the world, but she had assumed it would be dramatic or profound—just what Netta was describing. Dinah had never suspected it would be as indiscriminate as her experience with the upholsterer—a sort of mundane chemical function.

  But Netta took heart from Martin’s nod and went on. “It was the same with Celia. Since I was ten years old there was Celia. I was so glad when she and Bill had that same sort of… connection. I didn’t even mind when Celia and Bill had a sexual relationship. I don’t think that’s what I minded….” Her voice dwindled off into a silent musing, and Dinah took in the fact that David and Christie had come quietly into the kitchen from the garden, and that Sarah was in her robe at the counter across the room, making toast. Sarah didn’t seem to be paying any attention, but David had put his hand on Christie’s arm to stop her from coming farther into the room and interrupting Netta by making their presence known. Netta was oblivious, in any case.

  “I did mind that he wasn’t having sex with me,” she murmured, seemingly to herself but quite audibly. She put her elbows on the table and lowered her head to her palms in obvious despair. “Oh, God! That was so painful!” She exhaled the words as though she could not stop them, and then she straightened slightly and took in the room again, becoming more brisk. “Of course, I was pregnant when it all started,” Netta continued in a stronger voice, with just a hint of weariness, as though she were gathering her forces against enormous odds.

  Dinah got up from the table and went to the counter. She was sure she detected the unmistakably heraldic note of the beginning of a much longer story. “I’ll put this chocolate milk in the refrigerator unless you want some now, Anna Tyson,” she said, and she looked questioningly at Netta and Anna Tyson. “What do you have here, Netta?” Her own tone was light, and she lifted the paper bag a bit, which precipitated another rain of muddy water from the clustered greens. “Ah… beets. Well, I have a wide colander somewhere. You’ll need that, won’t you?” And she bent to search the lower cupboards. “And the kettle with the strainer insert. This soup? Is it borscht?”

  One of the reasons some people stopped Dinah in the drugstore, or leaned nearer to her at a dinner party to tell her something they might not have told someone they knew much better, was that they instinctively trusted her to stop them from revealing too much. Dinah was always alert to the honesty of strangers. She had a horror of being held responsible for any part of their well-being later on, in case they remembered that they had told her more than they should have. To any person in distress she possessed the seductiveness of polite and kindly interest combined with an obvious reluctance to participate in any sort of overly intimate confession.

  This morning, though, Dinah appeared to her family, whose attention suddenly shifted her way, not to be much interested in anything Netta said, not to be taking Netta’s anguish into account. Martin glanced curiously at Dinah as she put the chocolate milk away and stood in the center of the kitchen pinning her hair up haphazardly to get it out of her face. David, too, shot her a speculative glance filled with censure. But Dinah didn’t even notice; she was offended by Netta’s emotional sloppiness, her almost obscene social naïveté. She was embarrassed for and disturbed by her, and she was also daunted by the prospect of the mound of produce Netta had piled on the cutting board.

  “Oh, no, I don’t think it’s borscht,” Netta answered, once again falling into that soft sibilance that marked her speech. She began to search through a canvas carry-all that was propped against her chair. Anna Tyson slid off her own chair to lean against her mother and peer inside it. “I don’t think I’ve ever had borscht. This was in an article on summer soups. I’ve got the recipe with me here,” she said, “and I w
ould have done all the cooking at my apartment, but Bill has all the pans and knives—he even has the Cuisinart—at the apartment in Cambridge. Of course, he says I can come get anything I need, but I’ve been afraid to go alone. All I have to cook in is what was left by the former tenants of my apartment, and they didn’t leave much. But this soup is so beautiful! I found everything I need to make it. Oh, but I couldn’t find raspberry vinegar. Do you have any?” When Dinah merely shook her head, Netta smiled warmly, full of forgiveness. “Oh, well. Don’t worry about it! This soup will be delicious anyway.”

  She finally fished out a piece of newspaper and unfolded it to reveal an entire page. She disengaged herself from Anna Tyson and showed Dinah the photo of the finished product, beautifully displayed in a soup tureen shaped like a dragon, under the heading “Soup for When It’s Sizzling!” Dinah quickly scanned to the beginning of the recipe:

  18 beets, boiled, peeled, and cut into ½-inch dice

  And she stood in her own kitchen, on a nice day in July, and was overwhelmed momentarily by the idea that her life was going to be an endless round of chores and obligations for the rest of her days. She shut out the conversation going on around her as she carefully read through the long recipe. When she looked up, she saw that Martin had moved over to Netta and was frowning down at her, and David had come farther into the room to hear what Netta was saying.

  “No, no,” she was answering Martin, “I don’t think he would actually hurt me… but he’s so needy, you see. That’s what I’m afraid of. I mean, I’m afraid of not being able to leave again. I got all the way to Cambridge one day and called the apartment to be sure he and Celia weren’t there, but I couldn’t make myself go in. I just stood across the street and couldn’t stop shaking.” This revelation seemed to surprise her. “I’m afraid of Celia, too. I mean, there are ways in which I’ve let them down. Well, I’ve got Anna Tyson. I couldn’t have left if she hadn’t been with me, but they need her, too.”