“Aldo’s not a stranger!”
“Ah. Well. Truthfully, I must say I’m not sure I find the man as laudable as you do. To me, his attitude toward his wife shows a lack of responsibility.”
“Responsibility for what?” Rebecca asked.
“He had a duty, in my opinion, to set some standards. Both for his children’s sake and his own. And he neglected that duty.”
“Oh, piffle,” Rebecca said.
She may have been more forceful than she intended, because Will drew back slightly. Rebecca drew back too, and pressed her fingers to her lips.
“Here we go!” Poppy said. “Joycie when we met.” He slid the album closer to Will.
“Ah, yes. Very attractive,” Will said, hunching over it.
“She was a cutie, all right.”
Will’s right hand rested on the top of the page, his thumb rubbing the corner with a repetitive, whiskery sound. Rebecca remembered him, all at once, seated at the library table: his papers laid out just so, his books in stacks, his colored pencils in rows.
With a little stretch of the imagination, she could have glanced toward the dark kitchen window and seen Joe Davitch’s laughing face.
Poppy tugged at the album till Will released it, and then he studied Joyce’s picture. “She had the brownest eyes,” he said. “You think the Davitches’ eyes are brown; you should have seen Joyce’s. Hers were more like black.”
He picked up his mug and drank off the last of his milk. “Well,” he said. “I’m beat. I’d better haul myself off to bed.”
Rebecca slid her chair back and stood up. She said, “I should say good night too, I guess.”
“Oh,” Will said. “All right.”
He stumbled to his feet. He stood waiting while she went around to Poppy’s chair and helped him up, handed him his cane, placed an arm round his waist; and then he followed them down the kitchen passageway.
“Feet ache, ankles ache, knees ache…” Poppy intoned. In the foyer, he turned to Will. “Good seeing you,” he said. “Don’t forget my birthday party.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Will told him.
Poppy started up the stairs. Rebecca crossed to the front door and opened it. “When is his party?” Will asked her.
“Well,” she said, “it’s December.”
“What date in December?”
She faced forward, gazing out. In the light from the streetlamps, everything had a soft, gray, blurry look, like a memory. She felt she had been through all this before; she knew she had been through it: that dampening of her spirit; that tamped-down, boxed-in feeling; that sense she had in Will’s presence that she was a little too loud and too brightly colored. And now she recollected that he was the one who had brought things to a halt that long-ago night on the sofa. She had been rushing ahead, ready to fling herself recklessly over the edge, and then he had pulled away and suggested they show more restraint.
She said, “I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other in December.”
Even the distant traffic sounds seemed to come to a stop.
“Or before then, either,” she said.
He took a ragged breath.
“Why?” he asked her.
And when she didn’t answer, he said, “Was it something I did?”
“No, Will, you didn’t do anything.”
“Was it your family? Did they not like me?”
She felt a stab of pity. She said, “Oh, I’m sure they liked you!”
“Or Zeb, then?”
“Zeb?”
“He’s obviously my competition.”
The pity faded. “The fact of the matter is,” she said, “this just won’t work, Will. I’m sorry.”
Then she stepped forward and pressed her cheek against his. He stood woodenly, not responding. “Goodbye,” she told him.
He said, “Well. Yes. All right. Goodbye, Rebecca.”
She watched his ungainly, angular figure set off down the front walk, and she waited until he’d climbed into his car before she shut the door.
The house had a muffled sound that seemed lonelier than silence. Coffee cups sat abandoned in the parlors, and the dining room looked half stripped and disheveled, and Aunt Joyce smiled wistfully from the album on the kitchen table.
It turned out that Rebecca was the one who was still in mourning.
Ten
A woman named Mrs. Mink called to organize a baby shower. “My friend Paulina Garrett recommended you,” she said. “I told her I wanted someplace elegant. Someplace like a mansion.”
Rebecca said, “Well, the Open Arms is just a row house.”
“It doesn’t have to be really a mansion, but it should have that atmosphere. That upper-class, elegant atmosphere. And then I’ll want it decorated in baby blue and white, with a cloudlike effect in the dining room.”
“Cloudlike?”
“Yes, ethereal; know what I mean?”
“We can decorate however you like,” Rebecca said, “but our dining room is papered in a maroon-and-gold stripe and the furniture is some dark kind of wood; walnut, I believe. So I’m not sure—”
“Oh, you can do it! I know you can! Paulina Garrett told me their party last spring was wonderful. Everything so joyous, she said; you made it such an occasion that nobody wanted to leave.”
Rebecca remembered the Garrett party all too well. A torrential thunderstorm had sprung up and somehow, by some process that she still didn’t quite understand, caused the front-parlor chandelier to start raining on the guests. Nice to hear that the Garretts didn’t hold it against her.
“The reason I want blue and white,” Mrs. Mink was saying, “is we know this will be a boy. They’ve had that special test. And we know he’s not going to live very long.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s got some kind of disease they can diagnose in the womb.”
“Oh, that’s terrible!” Rebecca said.
“So I want this party to be perfect, don’t you see? Every last detail. I want his life to be perfect. Because he gets to experience it for such a little while.”
“Well, of course,” Rebecca said.
But while she was discussing the fine points — the folding paper parasol, the white-clouded blue cotton tablecloth she’d seen advertised at Lust for Linens — she was reflecting that really, this baby’s story was just a shortened version of everybody’s story. Get born; die. Nothing more to it than that.
“And flowers?” Mrs. Mink was asking. “Paulina tells me you can recommend a florist.”
“Yes, NoNo,” Rebecca said.
“Pardon?”
“My stepdaughter, NoNo Sanborn. She could set out white asters and those pale-blue flowers, those what-do-you-call-them…”
In fact, Rebecca couldn’t think offhand of any flowers that were blue, except for those chicory blossoms that grew wild along the highways and closed up in tight little winces if you picked them. She said, “I can’t remember. I don’t know. I don’t have any idea.”
“Well, that’s all right, we’ll just ask your—”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’ll have to call you back,” Rebecca said, and she replaced the receiver, which all of a sudden weighed too much to hold on to any longer.
* * *
Lately, she’d been feeling so… What was the word? Blank. Low in spirit, flat as a desert; and now she grew more so every day. Getting up in the morning was like hauling a dead body. Food lost its flavor. Conversation required calling upon every muscle, summoning her last particle of strength. She kept noticing how very little there was in this world to talk about. It was turning into a beautiful fall — clear and mild, the leaves staying on the trees much later than usual — but the brilliant colors hurt her eyes, and the meditation center’s banner flapping in the breeze made a sinister, leathery sound, like bat wings.