Zeb was a pediatrician; so Barry and Rebecca gave way to him. He squatted and asked, “Are you okay?” and Peter nodded, swiping at his nose with a sleeve of his father’s windbreaker. “He’s okay,” Zeb announced.
Well, a layman could have done that much. “Check his lungs,” Rebecca ordered.
“His lungs are fine,” Zeb said, but he went on watching Peter. “How did it happen, son?” he asked.
Rebecca tensed, dreading the answer, but Peter kept silent. You couldn’t tell a thing from his expression: eyes lowered, mouth pursed in a stubborn little bunch. Even before his dunking, he had had the skinned appearance of a wet cat, and now she could make out the pink of his scalp beneath his colorless hair. Periodically he swiped at his nose again in a fractious way, as if a gnat were pestering him.
“Well,” Zeb said finally, and he sighed and rose to his feet. He was a gangling, bespectacled, kind-faced man, so accustomed to dealing with the children of the inner-city poor that he wore a permanent look of resignation. “Let’s rustle up some dry clothes for these two,” he said. “Come on, everybody. Fun’s over.”
As they were heading back toward the picnic — Rebecca hugging her rib cage and doing her best to stop her shivers — Barry came up beside her. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you, Mrs., er, Beck,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, “goodness! I’m sure he would have grabbed on to a branch or something, eventually.”
“Well, stilclass="underline" I appreciate your coming to the rescue.”
For now he did, she thought. But wait till he found out that Peter never would have fallen in if not for her.
* * *
They didn’t continue the ball game. There was talk of going home early, even; and for once, Rebecca let them argue without intervening. She sat quietly at the picnic table, cocooned in a leaf-littered blanket, while they hashed it out among themselves. Look at how blue Peter’s lips were, several of the women said. He would catch his death of cold! But of course, the grandchildren wanted to stay, and the uncle — an energy miser — pointed out the waste of gas if they had driven all this way only to turn around and drive back. “Let’s just eat, for mercy’s sake,” he said. Biddy, who had gone to a lot of trouble over the food, jumped up as if that settled things and started unpacking coolers.
By this time, Rebecca’s hair had dried into its usual pup-tent shape and her blouse had changed from an icy film to a warm, damp second skin beneath her blanket. She repositioned the blanket around her waist and accepted the loan of Zeb’s cardigan. Peter fared better: from the back seats and floors of various vehicles, an entire outfit was assembled. Emmy donated a sweatshirt, Danny a pair of striped baseball knickers, and Jeep two semi-white gym socks. Ignoring the curious stares of the other children, Peter stripped then and there, exposing tweaky pale dots of nipples and dingy, stretched-out underpants fraying at the edges. (This was what happened, Rebecca reflected, when a father had sole custody.) Everything was too big for him. Even Danny’s knickers — and Danny was barely thirteen — hung off him in folds, clinging to him only where the wet underpants had soaked through.
It struck Rebecca as unusual that a boy that old didn’t mind changing clothes in public. And there was something needful and nudging about the way he stayed so close to his father. Once they were settled on NoNo’s blanket, he kept interrupting the conversation by plucking Barry’s sleeve and whispering at length in his ear, as if he were not just small for his age but young for his age, too.
“Is that child all right?” she asked Zeb.
“Oh, sure. Just bashful, I suspect,” he told her.
But a big part of Zeb’s profession was soothing parents’ anxieties; so she turned to Biddy. “I haven’t heard him say a word to NoNo,” she said. “I hope there isn’t going to be some kind of stepmother problem.”
Biddy said, “Well, at least he was playing with the other kids by the river. That’s always a good sign.”
“He wouldn’t talk to us, though,” one of the children spoke up.
This was Emmy, a long-legged sprite pouring lemonade from a thermos. Rebecca hadn’t realized she was listening. Hastily, she said, “Well, of course he wouldn’t talk! Imagine meeting all of you at once! I bet he talks your ears off as soon as he feels more at home.”
“He wasn’t really playing, either. He was only, like, hanging around our edges.”
Rebecca said, “Maybe I should give him a welcoming party. You know? The way I do for our new babies? I could, oh, set up a scavenger hunt! And all the clues could be Davitch-related, I mean things he would have to ask the other kids to—”
“He would hate it,” Emmy said flatly.
Rebecca slumped in her seat.
Biddy was uncovering a tray of runny cheeses garnished with edible flowers, and a mosaic of tiny canapés studded with salmon roe, and a sunburst of snow peas filled with smoked trout and dill. Two days a week, Biddy worked as a nutritionist for a retirement community (her monthly newsletter, What Kind of Wine Goes with Oatmeal? had been mentioned in the Baltimore Sun), but she dreamed of becoming a gourmet chef, and it showed. “Ew, what’s this?” the children were forever asking, pointing to something stuffed or sculptured or wonton-encased or otherwise disguised; and today they were all the more distressed because meaty, smoky smells had started drifting down the river from somebody else’s grill. “Can’t we ever have hamburgers?” Joey asked.
Rebecca said, “You can get hamburgers any old place! It’s only at a Davitch party you can try these, um… these, um…”
She was looking at a platter of pastry thimbles filled with what seemed to be mud. Biddy said, “Snails in phyllo cups.”
Joey said, “Ew!”
“I beg your pardon—” Biddy began, but then Rebecca grabbed Joey around the waist and pulled him close and nuzzled his neck. “Such a persnickety,” she teased him, “such a hoity-toity,” while he squirmed and giggled. He smelled of fresh sweat and sunshine. “Gram!” he protested, and she released him, and he went careening off toward his cousins.
“That child needs to be taught some manners,” Biddy said. “Poppy? Care for a snail?” she asked her great-uncle.
Poppy was seated on the other side of the picnic table, folding both hands on his cane and hunching forward all hungry and hopeful, but he drew back sharply and, “Oh,” he said, “why, ah, not just now, I don’t believe, thank you just the same.”
Biddy sighed. “I don’t know why I bother,” she told Rebecca. “Why not just grill a batch of hot dogs, or set out a loaf of store-bought bread and a jar of peanut butter?”
Why not, in fact? Rebecca wanted to ask. It wasn’t as if Biddy were catering to her own tastes, because Biddy didn’t eat. She was painfully, unattractively thin, every vertebra visible down the back of her neck, even her short black ponytail skimped and stringy, her wide-legged slacks and long red sweater all but empty. Offer her a bite and she’d say, “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly,” and yet she talked about food nonstop, read cookbooks the way other women read romance novels, pored over magazine photos featuring glossy, lacy salads and succulent pork roasts. “Call people to the table,” she told Rebecca now. “Everything’s drying out! Make them come!”—as if she herself could not be heard; as if the food were her only means of communication.