Ladder of Years (49 page)

Formally, Driscoll faced Susie again. “
Now
will you marry me?” he asked.

Susie said, “Well, I guess.”

One of the twins said, “Hot dog!” and the other said, “Kiss him! Kiss him, Susie!”

Susie planted a kiss to one side of Driscoll’s mouth. She told Paul, “It’s nice of you to be so understanding.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a bit!” he said, and he sent Courtney a shining glance from under his long lashes. Courtney just surveyed him coolly and then turned back to Susie.

“And Courtney, it was nice of you to come along,” Susie told her.

“No problem. Me and your brother Carroll met last spring at a party.”

“Oh, really?”

“My girlfriend asked him to her birthday party; I put it all together when your fiancé told me your name.”

Paul was looking less happy now; so Delia broke in and said, “Can you two stay for dinner? We’re having this Chinese dish that’s infinitely expandable.”

“Well, I
might
could,” Courtney said.

Paul said, “I’ll just need to phone my mother.”

“Right over here,” Delia told him, and she cupped his elbow protectively as she led him toward the phone. How cruel and baffling—how tribal, almost—young girls must seem to boys! Somehow she hadn’t realized that when she was a young girl herself.

“I propose a toast,” Nat said. He raised his coffee mug. “To the bridal couple!”

Driscoll said, “Why, thanks”—not having the dimmest notion, of course, who this old man might be, but adapting with his usual good humor. “Hello, Ma?” Paul said into the phone, and then Carroll appeared from the dining room just as Eliza stepped through the back door; so both of them had to be filled in on the latest developments. Eliza hadn’t even heard yet what Driscoll’s magic task was. She kept saying, “Who? He brought who?” with her eyebrows quirked in bewilderment, her pocketbook hugged to her chest, and Courtney was sidling toward Carroll to ask, “Carroll Grinstead? I don’t know if you remember me,” and the twins were insisting that this time they should wear lipstick to the wedding.

Delia took her cutting board to a less populated area, and she started chopping ginger. Her Chinese dish required eleven different bowls of ingredients, most minced no bigger than matchstick heads, all lined up in a row for rapid frying. So far she had finished only bowl number four. She was thankful to be occupied, though. She chopped rhythmically, mindlessly, letting an ocean of chatter eddy around her.
Tick-tick
, the knife came down on the cutting board.
Tick-tick
, and she slid all her thoughts to one side as she slid the mounds of ginger into a bowl.

With every one of its leaves in place, the table filled the whole dining room. (“This tablecloth came from your grandma’s hope chest,” Linda told the twins. “The stain is where your aunt Delia set a bowl of curry.
She
doesn’t give a damn; she was your grandpa’s favorite; she treats these things like Woolworth things.”) Twelve place settings marched the length of it—five at each side, one each at head and foot. There had been talk of inviting Eleanor, but Susie didn’t want to jinx her entire marriage with thirteen at table; and no one answered the phone when they called Ramsay.

“Courtney, I’ll put you in the middle here,” Delia said. “Then Paul, you’re next to Courtney …”

Courtney, however, had obviously made up her mind to sit with Carroll, which left Paul stuck between the twins; not that the twins weren’t delighted. And the others remained standing while they continued a discussion they’d started in the living room—something about Mr. Knowles’s tingly arm. “Didn’t Daddy always say the same thing!” Eliza
was exclaiming. “He used to say he wished he had a dictionary of pains. Those symptoms people came up with—‘Pepsi-bubble stomach’ and ‘whiny argumentative back’!”

“Driscoll, you’re beside Linda,” Delia said, but Driscoll, feigning engrossment in the conversation, kept his face turned toward Eliza and sneakily drew out the chair beside Susie. Delia gave up. “Oh, just
sit
,” she told Nat, and Nat sat down where he was, which happened to be exactly where she’d intended, at her right hand. “Help yourself to some rice,” she said, passing him the bowl, and she told the others, “Everything’s getting cold!”

Eliza settled at Sam’s left, shaking her head at what Sam was saying. “Who knows, anyhow?” he was saying. “Maybe it’s all equal: hangnail for one, cancer for another. Everything on the same level, just barely within endurance.”

“Sam Grinstead, you don’t believe that for a minute!” Linda squawked. “What a bizarre suggestion!”

Delia said, “Paul, will you have some rice and pass it on, please? Everybody! Sit down!”

Very suddenly, the rest of them sat. They seemed to have run out of steam, and there was a pause, during which Paul dropped the serving spoon to the table with a loud clunk. He bared all his teeth in embarrassment and picked it up.

Nat said, “Do any of you know the photographs of C. R. Savage?”

The grown-ups turned courteous, receptive faces in his direction.

“A nineteenth-century fellow,” he said. “Used the old wet-plate method, I would suppose. There’s a picture I’m reminded of that he took toward the end of his life. Shows his dining room table set for Christmas dinner. Savage himself sitting amongst the empty chairs, waiting for his family. Chair after chair after chair, silverware laid just so, even a baby’s high chair, all in readiness. And I can’t help thinking, when I look at that photo,
I bet that’s as good as it got, that day. From there on out, it was all downhill, I bet.
Actual sons and daughters arrived, and they quarreled over the drumsticks and sniped at their children’s table manners and brought up hurtful incidents from fifteen years before; and the baby had this whimper that gave everybody a headache. Only just for that moment,” Nat said, and his voice took on a tremor, “just as the shutter was clicking, none of that had happened yet, you see, and the table looked so beautiful, like someone’s dream of a table, and old Savage felt so happy and so—what’s the word I want, so …”

But now his voice failed him completely, and he covered his eyes with one shaking hand and bent his head. “So anticipatory!” he whispered into his plate, while Delia, at a loss, patted his arm. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he said. Everyone sat dumbstruck. Then he said, “Ha!” and straightened, bracing his shoulders. “Postpartum depression, I guess this is,” he said. He wiped his eyes with his napkin.

“Nat has a three-week-old baby,” Delia explained to the others. “Nat, would you like—”

“Baby?” Linda asked incredulously.

Sam said, “I thought Nat was
your
friend, Linda.”

“No, he’s mine,” Delia said. “He lives on the Eastern Shore and he’s just had a baby boy, a lovely boy, you ought to see how—”

“Most irresponsible thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Nat said hoarsely. “What could I have been thinking of? Oh, not that it was anything I planned, but … why did I go along with it? I believe I thought it was my chance to be a good father, finally. I know it was, or why else did I assume it was a girl? All my others were girls, you see. I must have thought I could do the whole thing over again, properly this time. But I’m just as short-tempered with James as I ever was with my daughters. Just as rigid, just as exacting. Why can’t he get on a schedule, why does he have to cry at such unpredictable hours … Oh, the best thing I could do for that kid is toddle off to Floor Five.”

“Floor Five? Oh,” Delia said. “Oh, Nat! Don’t even think it!” she said, patting his arm all the harder.

She should have realized at his wedding, she told herself, that someone so elated would have to end in tears, like an overexcited child allowed to stay up past his bedtime.

“Yes. Well,” Sam said, clearing his throat. “It’s really very common now, this more senior class of parent. Why, just last week I was reading, where was it I was reading …”

“The important thing to remember is, this is your assignment,” Eliza said in ringing tones. She was all the way up near Sam, and she had to lean forward, bypassing a row of tactfully expressionless profiles, to search out Nat’s face. “It’s my belief that we’re each assigned certain experiences,” she said. “And then at the end of our lives—”

“The New England Journal of Medicine!”
Sam announced triumphantly.

Nat asked Delia, “Do you have a place where I might lie down?”

“Yes, of course,” she said, and she slid her chair back and handed him his cane. “Excuse us, please,” she told the others.

Everyone nodded, abashed. As she and Nat crossed the hall, she could almost feel the furtive exchange of glances behind their backs.

“There’s a flight of stairs,” she warned Nat. “Can you manage?”

“Oh, yes, if you’ll hang on to my other arm. I’m sorry, Delia. I don’t know what got into me.”

“You’re just tired,” she told him. “I hope you’re not thinking of driving back tonight.”

“No, I suppose I shouldn’t,” he said. On each stair step, his cane gave a tinny rattle, like a handful of jacks being shaken. His elbow within his tweed sleeve was nothing but knob and rope.

“I’m going to make up a bed for you,” Delia told him when they reached the second floor, “and then you should call Binky and tell her you’re staying over.”

“All right,” he said meekly. He hobbled through the door she held open and sank into a slipcovered chair.

“This used to be my father’s room,” Delia said. She went out to the hall closet and came back with an armload of sheets. “There’s still a telephone by the bed, see? From the days when he was in practice. Even after he stopped seeing patients, he could pick up his receiver whenever Sam got a call; chime in with a second opinion. He just hated to feel left out of things, you know?”

She was babbling aimlessly as she bustled around the bed, smoothing sheets and tucking in blankets. Nat watched without comment. He might not even have been listening, for when she went to Sam’s room to borrow a pair of pajamas, she returned to find him staring at the blue-black windowpanes. “In fact,” she said, placing the pajamas on the bureau, “I can’t tell you how often I made up his bed just the way I did tonight, while Daddy sat where you’re sitting now. He liked for his sheets to be fresh off the line, oh, long after we switched to an automatic dryer. And he would sit in that chair and—”

“It’s a time trip,” Nat said suddenly.

“Why, yes, I suppose it is, in a way.”

But he’d been talking to himself, evidently. “Just a crazy, half-baked scheme to travel backwards,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken, “and live everything all over again. Unfortunately, Binky’s the one who’s left with the consequences. Poor Binky!”

“Binky will be fine,” Delia said firmly. “Now. That door right there
is the bathroom. New toothbrushes on the shelf above the tub. Can I get you anything more?”

“No, thank you.”

“A tray of food, maybe? You didn’t touch your supper.”

“No.”

“Well, you be sure to call me if you need me,” she said.

Then she bent to press her lips to his forehead, the way she used to do with her father all those nights in the past.

Delia was the next to go to bed. She went at nine-thirty, having struggled to keep her eyes open ever since dinner. “I am
beat
,” she told the others. They were all sitting around, still—even Courtney, although Paul had been picked up by his mother at some point. “It seems this morning took place way back in prehistory,” Delia told them, and then she climbed the stairs to Eliza’s room, so weary that she had to haul her feet behind her like buckets of cement.

Once she was in bed, though, she couldn’t get to sleep. She lay staring at the ceiling, idly stroking the curl of warm cat nestled close to her hip. Downstairs, Linda and Sam were squabbling as usual. A Mozart horn concerto was playing. Eliza said, “Why
wouldn’t
he, I ask you.” Wouldn’t who? Delia wondered. Wouldn’t do what?

She must have slept then, but it was such a fitful, shallow sleep that she seemed to remain partly conscious throughout, and when she woke again she wasn’t surprised to find the house dark and all the voices stilled. She sat up and angled her wristwatch to catch the light from the window. As near as she could make out, it was either eleven o’clock or five till twelve. More likely five till twelve, she decided, judging from the quiet.

She propped her pillow and leaned back against it, yawning. Tears of boredom were already edging the corners of her eyes. It was going to be one of those nights that go on for weeks.

Let’s see: if the wedding began at ten tomorrow, she supposed it would be finished by eleven. Well, say noon, to play it safe. She’d reach the bus station by half past, if she could catch a ride with Ramsay. Or with Sam. Sam had offered, after all.

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long
ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.

Where was she? Bus station. Catch a bus by one o’clock or so, reach Salisbury by …

The tears seemed not exactly tears of boredom after all. She blotted them on her nightgown sleeve, but more came.

She folded back the covers, mindful of the cat, and slid out of bed and walked barefoot toward the door. The hall was lit only by the one round window, high up. She had to more or less feel her way toward Sam’s room.

Luckily, his door was ajar. No sound gave her away as she entered. But she knew, somehow, that he was awake. After all these years, of course she knew, just from that bated quality to the air. She stepped delicately across cool floorboards, then scratchy rug, then cool floorboards once again—terrain she had traveled since the day she first learned to walk. She sat with no perceptible weight upon the side of the bed that used to be hers. He was lying on his back, she saw. She could begin to sift his white face from the flocked half-dark. She whispered, “Sam?”