"Ladder of Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tyler Anne)

9

No wonder she’d been unable to picture winter in Bay Borough! Underneath, she realized now, she had expected Sam to come fetch her long before then. She resembled those runaway children who never, no matter how far they travel, truly mean to leave home.

So anyhow. Here she was. And the entire rest of her life was stretching out empty before her.

She took to sitting on her bed in the evenings and staring into space. It was too much to say that she was thinking. She certainly had no conscious thoughts, or at any rate, none that mattered. Most often she was, oh, just watching the air, as she used to do when she was small. She used to gaze for hours at those multicolored specks that swarm in a room’s atmosphere. Then Linda had informed her they were dust motes. That took the pleasure out of it, somehow. Who cares about mere dust? But now she thought Linda was wrong. It was air she watched, an infinity of air endlessly rearranging itself, and the longer she watched the more soothed she felt, the more mesmerized, the more peaceful.

She was learning the value of boredom. She was clearing out her mind. She had always known that her body was just a shell she lived in, but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell-in which case, who was “she”? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left. Maybe there would be nothing.

Often she didn’t begin the night’s reading till nine or nine-thirty, which meant she could no longer finish a novel in one sitting; so she switched to short stories instead. She would read a story, watch the air awhile, and read another. She would mark her page with a library slip and listen to the sounds from outdoors-the swish of cars, the chirring of insects, the voices of the children in the house across the street. On hot nights the older children slept on a second-floor porch, and they always talked among themselves until their parents intervened. “Am I going to have to come upstairs?” was their father’s direst threat. That would quiet them, but only for a minute.

Delia wondered if Sam knew that Carroll was scheduled for tennis lessons the middle two weeks in July. You couldn’t depend on Carroll to remember on his own. And did anyone recall that this was dentist month? Well, probably Eliza did. Without Eliza, Delia could never have left her family so easily.

She wasn’t sure if that was something to be thankful for.

The fact was, Delia was expendable. She was an extra. She had lived out her married life like a little girl playing house, and always there’d been a grown-up standing ready to take over-her sister or her husband or her father.

Logically, she should have found that a comfort. (She used to be so afraid of dying while her children were small.) But instead, she had suffered pangs of jealousy. Why was it Sam, for instance, that everybody turned to in times of crisis? He always got to be the reasonable one, the steady and reliable one; she was purely decorative. But how had that come about? Where had she been looking while that state of affairs developed?

She read another story, which contained several lengthy nature descriptions. She enjoyed nature as much as the next person, but you could carry it too far, she felt.

And was anybody keeping an eye on Sam’s health? He had that tendency, lately, to overdo the exercise. But, It’s none of my concern, Delia reminded herself. His letter had freed her. No more need to count cholesterol grams; pointless to note that the Gobble-Up carried fat-free mayonnaise.

She called back some of the letter’s phrases: You cannot have been unaware and Nor am I entirely clear. Bloodless phrases, emotionless phrases. She supposed the whole neighborhood knew he hadn’t married her for love.

Again she saw the three daughters arrayed on the couch-Sam’s memory, originally, but she seemed to have adopted it. She saw her father in his armchair and Sam in the Boston rocker. The two of them discussed a new arthritis drug while Delia sipped her sherry and slid glances toward Sam’s hands, reflecting on how skilled they looked, how doctorly and knowing. It might have been the unaccustomed sherry that made her feel so giddy.

Just a few scattered moments, she thought, have a way of summing up a person’s life. Just five or six tableaux that flip past again and again, like tarot cards constantly reshuffled and redealt. A patch of sunlight on a window seat where someone big was scrubbing Delia’s hands with a washcloth. A grade-school spelling bee where Eliza showed up unannounced and Delia saw her for an instant as a stranger. The gleam of Sam’s fair head against the molasses-dark wood of the rocker. Her father propped on two pillows, struggling to speak. And Delia walking south alongside the Atlantic Ocean.

In this last picture, she wore her gray secretary dress. (Not all such memories are absolutely accurate.) She wore the black leather shoes she had bought at Bassett Bros. The clothes were wrong, but the look was right-the firmness, the decisiveness. That was the image that bolstered her.

“Whenever I hear the word ‘summer,’” one of the three marriageable maidens announced (Eliza, of course), “I smell this sort of melting smell, this yellow, heated, melting smell.” And Linda chimed in, “Yes, that’s the way she is! Eliza can smell nutmeg day at the spice plant clear downtown! Also anger.” And Delia smiled at her sherry. “Ah,” Sam murmured thoughtfully. Did he guess their ulterior motives? That Eliza was trying to sound interesting, that Linda was pointing out Eliza’s queerness, that Delia was hoping to demonstrate the dimple in her right cheek?

The washcloth scrubbing her hands was as rough and warm as a mother cat’s tongue. The squat, unhappy-looking young woman approaching Miss Sutherland’s desk changed into Delia’s sister. “I wish…,” her father whispered, and his cracked lips seemed to tear apart rather than separate, and he turned his face away from her. The evening after he died, she went to bed with a sleeping pill. She was so susceptible to drugs that she seldom took even an aspirin, but she gratefully swallowed the pill Sam gave her and slept through the night. Only it was more like burrowing through the night, tunneling through with some blunt, inadequate instrument like a soup spoon, and she woke in the morning muddled and tired and convinced that she had missed something. Now she thought what she had missed was her own grief. Why that rush toward forgetfulness? she asked herself. Why the hurry to leap past grief to the next stage?

She wondered what her father had been wishing for. She hadn’t been able to figure it out at the time, and maybe he had assumed she just didn’t care. Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She made no effort to stop them.

Didn’t it often happen, she thought, that aged parents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming? But a parent is always thrilled, always dwells so lovingly on your face as you are speaking. One of life’s many ironies.

She reached for her store of toilet paper and blew her nose. She felt that something was loosening inside her, and she hoped she would go on crying all night.

In the house across the street, a child called, “Ma, Jerry’s kicking me.” But the voice was distant and dreamy, and the response was mild. “Now, Jerry…” Gradually, it seemed, the children were dropping off. Those who remained awake allowed longer pauses to stretch between their words, and spoke more and more languidly, until finally the house was silent and no one said anything more.

Independence Day had passed nearly unobserved in Bay Borough-no parades, no fireworks, nothing but a few red-white-and-blue store windows. Bay Day, however, was another matter. Bay Day marked the anniversary of George Pendle Bay ’s famous dream. It was celebrated on the first Saturday in August, with a baseball game and a picnic in the town square. Delia knew all about it because Mr. Pomfret was chairman of the Recreation Committee. He had had her type a letter proposing they replace the baseball game with a sport that demanded less space-for instance, horseshoes. The square, he argued, was so small and so thickly treed. But Mayor Frick, who was the son and grandson of earlier mayors and evidently reigned supreme, wrote back to say that the baseball game was a “time-honored tradition” and should continue.

“Tradition!” Mr. Pomfret fumed. “Bill Frick wouldn’t know a tradition if it bit him in the rear end. Why, at the start it was always horseshoes. Then Ab Bennett came back from the minors with his tail between his legs, and Bill Frick Senior got up a baseball game to make him look good. But Ab doesn’t even play anymore! He’s too old. He runs the lemonade stand.”

Delia had no interest in Bay Day. She planned to spend the morning on errands and give the square a wide berth. But first she found everything closed, and then the peculiar weather (a fog as dense as oatmeal and almost palpably soft) lured her to keep walking, and by the time she reached the crowd she felt so safe in her cloak of mist that she joined in.

The four streets surrounding the square were blocked off and spread with picnic blankets. Food booths lined the sidewalks, and strolling vendors hawked pennants and balloons. Even this much, though, Delia had trouble making out, because of the fog. People approaching seemed to be materializing, their features assembling themselves at the very last instant. The effect was especially unsettling in the case of young boys on skateboards. Elated by the closed streets, they careened through the crowd recklessly, looming up entire and then dissolving. All sounds were muffled, cotton-padded, and yet eerily distinct. Even smells were more distinct: the scent of bergamot hung tentlike over two old ladies pouring tea from a thermos.

“Delia!” someone said.

Delia turned to see Belle Flint unfolding a striped canvas sand chair. She was wearing a vivid pink romper and an armload of bangle bracelets that jingled when she sat down. Delia hadn’t been sure till now that Belle remembered her name; so she reacted out of surprise. “Why, hello, Belle,” she said, and Belle said, “Do you know Vanessa?”

The woman she waved a hand toward was the young mother from the square. She was seated just beyond Belle on a bedspread the same color as the fog, with her toddler between her knees. “Have some of my spread,” she told Delia.

“Oh, thanks, but-” Delia said. And then she said, “Yes, maybe I will,” and she went over to sit next to her.

“Get a load of the picnic lunches,” Belle told Delia. “It’s some kind of contest; they ought to give prizes. What did you bring?”

“Well, nothing,” Delia said.

“A woman after my own heart,” Belle said, and then she leaned closer to whisper, “Selma Frick’s brought assorted hors d’oeuvres in stacked bamboo baskets. Polly Pomfret’s brought whole fresh artichokes on a bed of curried crayfish.”

“Me, I’m with the teenagers,” Vanessa said, handing her son an animal cracker. “I grab something from a booth whenever I get hungry.”

She reminded Delia of those girl-next-door movie stars from the 1940s, slim and dark and pretty in a white blouse and flared red shorts, with shoulder-length black hair and bright-red lipstick. Her son was overdressed, Delia thought-typical for a first child. In his corduroys and long-sleeved shirt, he looked cross and squirmy, and for good reason; Delia could feel the heat of the pavement rising through the bedspread.

“How old is your little boy?” she asked Vanessa.

“Eighteen months last Wednesday.”

Eighteen months! Delia could have said. Why, she remembered that age. When Ramsay was eighteen months, he used to… and Susie, that was when Susie learned to…

Such a temptation, it was, to prove her claims to membership-the labor pains, the teething, the time when she too could have told her baby’s age to the day. But she resisted. She merely smiled at the child’s shimmer of blond hair and said, “I suppose he gets his coloring from his father.”

“Most likely,” Vanessa said carelessly.

“Vanessa’s a single parent,” Belle told Delia.

“Oh!”

“I have no idea who Greggie’s father might be,” Vanessa said, wiping her son’s mouth with a tissue. “Or rather, I have a few ideas, but I could never narrow it down to just one.”

“Oh, I see,” Delia said, and she turned quickly toward the ball game.

Not that there was much to look at, in the fog. Apparently home plate lay in the southeast corner. It was from there she heard the plock! of a hit. But all she could discern was second base, which was marked by a park bench. While she watched, a runner loped up to settle on the bench, and the player already seated there rose and caught a ball out of nowhere and threw it back into the mist. Then he sat down again. The runner leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and stared intently toward home plate, although how he hoped to see that far Delia couldn’t imagine.

“Derek Ames,” Belle informed her. “One of our best hitters.”

Delia said, “I would think the statue would get in the way.”

“Oh, George plays shortstop,” Belle said, giggling. “No, seriously: there’s a rule. Bean the statue and you walk to first. It used to count as an automatic run till Rick Rackley moved here. But you know professional athletes: they excel at any sport. It got so every time Rick came to bat, he laid old Georgie low.”

“Rick Rackley’s a professional athlete?”

“Or was, till his knee went. Where’ve you been living-Mars? Of course, his game was football, but believe me, the Blues are lucky to have him on their side. That’s who we’re watching, in case you didn’t know: the Blues versus the Grays. Blues are the new folks in town; Grays have been here all along. Whoops! That sounds to me like a homer.”

Another plock! had broken through from the southeast corner. Delia gazed upward but saw only opaque white flannel. In the outfield, such as it was (a triangle of grass behind second base), one player called to another, “Where’s it headed?”

“Damned if I know,” the second player said. Then, with a startled grunt, he caught the ball as it arrived in front of him. “Got it,” he called to the first man.

“You see it?”

“I caught it.”

“It came down already?”

“Right.”

“Bobby caught that!” the first man shouted toward home plate.

“What say?”

“He caught it,” someone relayed. “Batter’s out.”

“He’s what?”

“He’s out!”

“Where is the batter?”

“Who is the batter?”

Vanessa fed her son another animal cracker. “Fog on Bay Day is kind of a rule here,” she told Delia. “I don’t believe anyone’s ever once got a good look at that game. So! Delia. How do you like working for Zeke Pomfret?”

“Well… he’s okay,” Delia said. She supposed she should have expected that her job would be common knowledge.

“He’s a real fine lawyer, you know. If you decide to go ahead with your divorce, you could do worse than hire Zeke.”

Delia blinked.

“Yes, he did just great with my ex-boyfriend’s,” Belle told her. “And he got Vanessa here’s brother Jip out of jail, when Jip hit a spell of bad luck once.”

“I haven’t given much thought to, um, divorce,” Delia said.

“Well, sure! No hurry! And anyhow, my ex-boyfriend’s case was totally different from yours.”

What did they imagine Delia’s case was? She decided not to ask.

Belle was rummaging through her big purse. She pulled forth a pale-green bottle and a stack of paper cups. “Wine?” she asked the others. “It’s a screw top. Don’t tell Polly Pomfret. Yes, Norton’s case was so straightforward, for one thing. He’d only been married a year. In fact, we met on his first anniversary. Met at a Gamblers’ Weekend Special in Atlantic City, where he’d brought his wife to celebrate. He and I just sort of… gravitated, you know?” She passed Delia a cup of white wine. “It helped that his wife was one of those people who end up soldered to their slot machines. So one-two-three I move to Bay Borough, and we rent a little apartment together, and Zeke Pomfret goes to work on Norton’s divorce.”

The wine had a metallic aftertaste, like tinned grapefruit juice. Delia cradled the cup in both hands. She said, “I’m not really planning anything that definite just yet.”

“Well, of course you’re not.”

“I’m really feeling sort of… blank right now. You know?”

“Of course you are!” both women said simultaneously.

In the square, the inning must have ended. The players they had been watching vanished and new players took shape, a new second baseman floating up by degrees and solidifying on the bench.

She dreamed Sam was driving a truck across the front lawn in Baltimore and the children were playing hide-and-seek directly in his path. They were little, though; not their present-day selves. She tried to call out and warn them, but her voice didn’t work, and they were all run over. Then Ramsay stood up again, holding his wrist, and Sam climbed out of the truck and he fell down and tried to get up again, fell down and tried to get up, and the sight made Delia feel as if a huge, ragged wound had ripped open in her chest.

When she woke, her cheeks were wet. She had thought she was starting to lose her habit of crying at night, but now tears flooded her eyes and she gave in to wrenching sobs. She was haunted by the picture of Ramsay in those little brown sandals she’d forgotten he’d ever owned. She saw her children lined up on the lawn, still in their younger versions before they’d turned hard-shelled and spiky, before the boys had grown whiskers and Susie bought a diary with an unpickable brass lock. Those were the children she longed for.

One evening in September, she returned from work to find several envelopes bearing her name scattered across the hall floor. She knew they must be birthday cards-she was turning forty-one tomorrow-and she could tell they were from her family because of the wordy address. (House w/ low front porch…) The first card showed a wheelbarrow full of daisies. A BIRTHDAY WISH, it said, and inside, Friendship and health / Laughter and cheer / Now and through / The coming year. The signature was just Ramsay, with the tail of the y wandering off across the page in a halfhearted manner.

She carried the rest of her mail upstairs. No sense facing this in public.

Susie, the next card was signed. (Heartiest Congratulations and Many Happy Returns.) And nothing at all from Carroll, though she riffled through the envelopes twice. Well, it was easy to see what had happened. These cards were Eliza’s idea. She had coaxed and cajoled the whole family into sending them. “All I’m asking,” was a phrase she would have used. Or, “No one should have to pass a birthday without…” But Carroll, the stubborn one, had flatly refused. And Sam? Delia opened his envelope next. A color photo of roses in a blue-and-white porcelain vase. Barrels of joy / Bushels of glee… Signed, Sam.

Then a letter from Linda, in Michigan. I want you to know that I sincerely wish you a happy birthday, she wrote. I don’t hold it against you that you absconded like that even though it did mean we had to cut short our vacation which is the twin’s only chance each year to get some sense of their heritage but anyhow, have a good day. Below her signature were Marie-Claire’s and Thérèse’s-a prim strand of copperplate and a left-hander’s gnarly crumple.

Dear Delia, Eliza wrote, on yet another rhymed card.

We are all fine but we hope you’ll soon be home. I am taking care of the office paperwork for now, and all three kids have started back to school.

Bootsy Fisher has phoned several times and also some of the neighbors but I tell everyone you’re visiting relatives at the moment.

I hope you have a good birthday. I remember the night you were born as if it were just last week. Daddy let Linda and me wait in the waiting room with the fathers, and when the nurse came out she told us, “Congratulations, kids, you can form a singing trio now and go on Arthur Godfrey,” and that’s how we knew you were a girl. I do miss you.

Love, Eliza

Delia kept that one. The others she discarded. Then she decided she might as well discard Eliza’s too. Afterward she sat on her bed a long while, pressing her fingertips to her lips.

On her actual birthday, a package arrived from Sam’s mother. It was roughly the size of a book, too thick to fit through the mail slot, so it stood inside the screen door, where Delia found it when she came home. She groaned when she recognized the writing. Eleanor was known for her extremely practical gifts-a metric-conversion tape measure, say, or a battery recharger, always wrapped in wrinkled paper saved from Christmas. This time, as Delia discovered when she took the package upstairs, it was a miniature reading light on a neck cord. Well, in fact…, she reflected. It would probably work much better than her lamp. She tucked it under her pillow, next to her stash of toilet paper.

There was a letter too, on Eleanor’s plain buff stationery:

Dear Delia,

This is just a little something I thought you might find helpful. On the few occasions when I’ve traveled myself, the reading light has generally been miserable. Perhaps you’re having the same experience. If not, just pass this along to your favorite charity. (Lately I’ve been most dissatisfied with Goodwill but continue to feel that Retarded Citizens is a worthwhile organization.)

My best wishes for your birthday.

Love, Eleanor

Delia flipped it over, but all she found on the back was RECYCLED PAPER RECYCLED PAPER RECYCLED PAPER running across the bottom. She had expected indignation, or at least a few reproaches.

She remembered how, when she and Sam were first engaged, she had entertained such high hopes for Eleanor. She had thought she was finally getting a mother of her own. But that was before they met. Eleanor came to supper at the Felsons’, arriving directly from the Home for Wayward Girls, where she volunteered as a typing teacher twice a week. Once the introductions were over, she hardly gave Delia a glance. All she talked about was the terrible, terrible poverty endured by the wayward girls and the staggering contrast of this meal-which, by the way, was merely pot roast sprinkled with onion-soup mix and an iceberg lettuce salad. “I asked this one poor child,” Eleanor said, “I asked, ‘Dear, could your people buy you a typewriter so you could work from your house after the baby arrives?’ And she said, ‘Miss, my family’s so poor they can’t even afford shampoo.’” A basket of rolls appeared before her. Eleanor gazed into it, looking puzzled, and passed it on. “I don’t know what made her choose that example, of all things,” she said. “Shampoo.”

(Why was it that so many voices came wafting back to Delia these days? Sometimes as she fell asleep she heard them nattering on without her, as if everybody she’d ever known sat around her, conversing. Like people in a sickroom, she thought. Like people at a deathbed.)

Another present Eleanor had once given her was a tiny electric steamer gadget to freshen clothes during trips. This was some years back; Delia couldn’t remember what she’d done with it. But the thing was, here in Bay Borough she could have put it to use. She could have touched up her office dresses, both of which had grown somewhat puckery at the seams after repeated hand laundering. It would certainly have been preferable to buying an iron and ironing board. Oh, why hadn’t she kept the steamer? Why hadn’t she brought it with her? How could she have been so shortsighted, and so ungrateful?

She didn’t answer any of the birthday cards, but etiquette demanded a thank-you note to Eleanor. The little light is very convenient, she wrote. Much better than the goosenecked lamp I’ve been reading by up till now. So I’ve moved the lamp to the bureau which means I don’t have to use the ceiling bulb and therefore the room looks much softer. In this manner she contrived to cover the entire writing area of a U.S. postcard without really saying anything at all.

The next morning, while she was dropping the card in the mailbox near the office, she was suddenly struck by the fact that Eleanor had once worked in an office. She had put her son through college on a high-school secretary’s salary-no small feat, as Delia could now appreciate. She wished she had thought to mention her job in her thank-you note. But maybe Eliza had said something. “Delia’s employed by a lawyer,” Eliza might have said. “She handles every detail for him. You should see her all dressed up for work; if you met her on the street, you wouldn’t know her.”

“Is that so?” Sam would ask. (Somehow, the listener had changed from Eleanor to Sam.) “Handles everything, you say. Not mislaying important files? Not lounging around the waiting room, reading trashy novels?”

Well, she’d spent more than half her life trying to win Sam’s approval. She supposed she couldn’t expect to break a habit like that overnight.

October came, and the weather grew cooler. The square filled up with yellow leaves. Some nights, Delia had to shut her windows. She bought a flannel nightgown and two long-sleeved dresses-one gray pinstripe, one forest green-and she started keeping an eye out for a good secondhand coat. It was not yet cold enough for a coat, but she wanted to be prepared.

On rainy days, now, she ate lunch at the Cue Stick ‘n’ Cola on Bay Street. She ordered coffee and a sandwich and watched the action at the one pool table. Vanessa often wheeled her stroller in to join her. While Greggie lurched among the chair legs like a brightly colored top, Vanessa would offer Delia thumbnail sketches of the players. “See the guy breaking? Buck Baxter. Moved here eight or ten years ago. Baxter as in Baxter Janitorial Supplies, but they say his father’s disowned him. No, Greggie, the man doesn’t want your cookie. Now, her I don’t know,” she said. She meant the diminutive, dark-haired young woman who was leaning across the pool table to shoot on tiptoe, her purple canvas pocketbook still slung over her shoulder. “Must be from outside. Leave him alone, Greggie. And the fellow in the cowboy boots, that’s Belle’s ex-boyfriend, Norton Grove. Belle was out of her mind to fall for him. Fickle? That man put fickle in the dictionary.”

Delia was gathering an impression of Bay Borough as a town of misfits. Almost everybody here had run away from someplace else, or been run away from. And no longer did it seem so idyllic. Rick and Teensy Rackley were treated very coolly by some of the older citizens; the only two gay men she knew of seemed to walk about with no one but each other; there was talk of serious drug use in the consolidated high school; and Mr. Pomfret’s appointment book was crammed with people feuding over property lines and challenging drunk-driving arrests.

Still, she felt contented here. She had her comfortable routine, her niche in the general scheme of things. Making her way from office to library, from library to café, she thought that her exterior self was instructing her interior self, much like someone closing his eyes and mimicking sleep in order to persuade sleep to come. It was not that her sadness had left her, but she seemed to operate on a smooth surface several inches above the sadness. She deposited her check each Saturday; she dined each Sunday at the Bay Arms Restaurant. People nodded now when they saw her, which she took not just for greeting but for confirmation: Ah, yes, there’s Miss Grinstead, exactly where she belongs.

Although every so often something would stab her. A song from Ramsay’s Deadhead period about knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door, for instance. Or a mother and a little girl hugging each other in front of the house across the street. “She’s leaving me!” the mother called mock-plaintively to Delia. “Going off to her very first slumber party!”

Maybe Delia could pretend to herself that she was back in the days before her marriage. That she didn’t miss her children at all because they hadn’t been born yet.

But in retrospect it seemed she had missed them even then. Was it possible there had been a time when she hadn’t known her children?

Dear Delia, Eleanor wrote. (She addressed her letter to 14 George Street this time.)

I was so pleased to get your postcard. It’s good to know that my little gift came in handy, and I’m glad you’re doing some reading.

I myself find it impossible to sleep if I don’t read at least a few pages first, preferably from something instructive like biography or current events. For a while after Sam’s father died I used to read the dictionary. It was the only thing with small enough divisions to fit my attention span. Also the information was so definite.

Probably Sam has been marked by losing his father at such an early age. I meant to say that in my last note but I don’t believe I did. And his father never had a strong personality. He was the kind of man who let all the bathwater drain away before he got out of the tub. Maybe it would worry a boy to think he might grow up to do the same.

I hope I haven’t overstepped.

Love, Eleanor

Delia didn’t know what to make of that. She understood it better when the next note came, some two weeks later. Please forgive me if you felt I sounded “mother-in-lawish” and that’s why you didn’t answer my letter. I had no intention of offering excuses for my son. I’ve always said he was forty years old when he was born, and I realize that’s not easy to live with.

Delia bought another postcard-this one the kind with a picture on it, a rectangle of unblemished white captioned Bay Day in Bay Borough, so there was even less space to write on. Dear Eleanor, she wrote. I’m not here because of Sam, so much. I’m here because

Then she sat back, not knowing how to end the sentence. She considered starting over, but these postcards cost money, and so she settled, finally, for I’m here because I just like the thought of beginning again from scratch. She signed it, Love, Delia, and mailed it the following morning on her way to work.

And after all, wasn’t that the true reason? Truer than she had realized when she wrote it, in fact. Her leaving had very little to do with any specific person.

Unlocking the office door, she noticed the pleasure she took in the emptiness of the room. She raised the white window shades; she turned the calendar to a fresh page; she sat down and rolled a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter. It was possible to review her entire morning thus far and find not a single misstep.

Mr. Pomfret sometimes employed a detective named Pete Murphy. This was not the swaggery character Delia would have envisioned, but a baby-faced fat boy from Easton. It seemed he was hired less often to locate people than to fail to locate them. Whenever a will or a title search required his services, Pete would plod in, whistling tunelessly, and trill his pudgy fingers at Delia and proceed to the inner office. He never spoke to her, and he probably didn’t know her name.

One rainy afternoon, though, he arrived with something bulging and struggling inside the front of his windbreaker. “Got a present for you,” he told Delia.

“For me?”

“Found it out in the street.”

He lowered his zipper, and a small, damp gray-and-black cat bounded to the floor and made a dash for the radiator. “Oh!” Delia said.

Pete said, “Shoot. Come out of there, you little dickens.”

Beneath the radiator, silence.

“It’ll never come if you order it to,” Delia said. “You have to back away a bit. Turn your face away. Pretend you’re not looking.”

“Well, I’ll let you see to that,” Pete decided. He brushed cat hairs off his sleeves and started for the office.

“Me! But… wait! I can’t do this!” Delia said. She was speaking now to Mr. Pomfret; he had come to his door to see what all the fuss was about. “He’s brought a stray cat! I can’t take care of a cat!”

“Now, now, I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Mr. Pomfret said genially. “Miss Grinstead was a cat in her last incarnation, you know,” he told Pete.

“Is that a fact,” Pete said. They walked into the office, and Mr. Pomfret closed the door.

For the next half hour, Delia worked with one eye on the radiator. She watched a gray-and-black tiger tail unfurl from behind a pipe, gradually fluffing as it dried. She had a sense of being under surveillance.

When Pete reemerged, she said, “Maybe the cat belongs to someone. Have you thought of that?”

“I doubt it,” he told her. “I didn’t see no collar.” He trilled his fingers and left. When the door slammed behind him, the tail gave a twitch.

Delia rose and went to the office. “Excuse me,” she said.

Mr. Pomfret said, “Hmm?” He was back at his computer already. This morning he had discovered something called Search-and-Replace that was apparently very exciting. Tap-tap, his fingers went, while he craned his sloping neck earnestly toward the screen.

“Mr. Pomfret, that cat is still under the radiator and I can’t take it anywhere! I don’t even have a car!”

“Maybe get a box from the supply closet,” he said. “Damn!” He hit several keys in succession. “Just see to it, will you, Miss Grinstead? There’s a good girl.”

“I live in a boardinghouse!” Delia said.

Mr. Pomfret reached for his computer manual and started thumbing through it. “Who wrote this damn thing, anyhow?” he asked. “No human being, that’s for sure. Look, Miss Grinstead, why don’t you leave early and take the kitty wherever you think best. I’ll lock up for you, how’s that?”

Delia sighed and headed for the supply closet.

Pet Heaven: they might help. She emptied a carton of manila envelopes and carried it to the other room. Kneeling in front of the radiator, she placed a palm on the floor. “Tsk-tsk!” she said. She waited. After a minute, she felt a tiny wince of cold on the back of her middle finger. “Tsk-tsk-tsk!” The cat peered out at her, only its whiskers and heart-shaped nose visible. Gently, Delia curved her hand around the frail body and drew it forward.

This was hardly more than a kitten, she saw-a scrawny male with large feet and spindly legs. His fur was almost startlingly soft. It reminded her of milkweed. When she stroked him, he shrank beneath her hand, but he seemed to realize he had nowhere to run. She gathered him up and set him in the carton and folded the flaps shut. He gave a single woebegone mew before falling silent.

It was still raining, and she didn’t have a free hand to open her umbrella, so she hurried along the sidewalk unprotected. The carton rocked in her arms as if it contained a bowling ball. For such a little thing, he certainly was heavy.

She rounded the corner and burst through the door of Pet Heaven. A gray-haired woman stood behind the counter, checking off a list. “You wouldn’t happen to know if Bay Borough has an S.P.C.A.,” Delia said.

The woman looked at her a moment, slowly refocusing vague blue eyes. Then she said, “No; the nearest one’s in Ashford.”

“Or any other place that takes homeless animals?”

“Sorry.”

“Maybe you’d like a cat.”

“Gracious! If I brought home another stray my husband would kill me.”

So Delia gave up, for now, and bought a box of kibble and a sack of litter-box filler, the smallest size of each just to get her through one night. Then she lugged the cat home.

Belle was there ahead of her, talking on the phone in the kitchen. Delia heard her laugh. She tiptoed up the stairs, unlocked the door of her room, set the carton on the floor, and shut the door behind her. In the mirror she looked like a crazy woman. Tendrils of wet hair were plastered to her forehead. The shoulders of her sweater were dark with rain, and her handbag was spotted and streaked.

She bent over the carton and raised the flaps. Inside, the cat sat hunched in a snail shape, glaring up at her. Delia retreated, settled on the edge of her bed, looked pointedly in another direction. Eventually, the cat sprang out of the carton. He started sniffing around the baseboards. Delia stayed where she was. He ducked beneath the bureau and returned with linty whiskers. He approached the bed obliquely, gazing elsewhere. Delia turned her head away. A moment later she felt the delicate denting of the mattress as he landed on it. He passed behind her, lightly brushing the length of his body against her back as if by chance. Delia didn’t move a muscle. She felt they were performing a dance together, something courtly and elaborate and dignified.

But she couldn’t possibly keep him.

Then Belle’s clacky shoes started climbing the stairs. Belle almost never came upstairs. But she did today. Delia threw a glance at the cat, willing him to hide. All he did was freeze and direct a wide-eyed stare toward the door. Knock-knock. He was smack in the center of the pillow, with his bottle-brush tail standing vertical. You couldn’t overlook him if you tried.

Delia scooped him up beneath his hot little downy armpits. She could feel the rapid patter of his heart. “Just a minute,” she called. She reached for the carton.

But Belle must have misheard, for she breezed on in, caroling, “Delia, here’s a-” Then she said, “Why!”

Delia straightened. “I’m just trying to find a home for him,” she said.

“Aww. What a honey!”

“Don’t worry, I’m not keeping him.”

“Oh, why not? Er, that is… he is housebroken, isn’t he?”

“All cats are housebroken,” Delia said. “For goodness’ sake!”

“Well, then! Not keep this little socky-paws? This dinky little pookums?” Belle was bending over the cat now and offering him her polished fingernails to sniff. “Is it a prinky-nose,” she crooned. “Is it a frowzy-head. Is it a fluffer-bunch.”

“Mr. Pomfret’s detective found him out in the rain,” Delia said. “He just dumped him on me; nothing I could do. I mean, I knew I couldn’t keep him myself. Where would I put a litter box, for one thing?”

“In the bathroom?” Belle asked. She started scratching behind the cat’s ears.

“But how would he get out to use it?”

“You could leave your door cracked open, let him go in and out as he likes,” Belle said. “Ooh, feel how soft! I don’t know why you ever lock it, anyhow. Little town like this, who do you think’s going to rob you? Who’s going to creep in and ravish you?”

“Well…”

“Believe me, Mr. Lamb couldn’t gather up the enthusiasm.”

Belle stroked beneath the cat’s chin, and the cat tipped his head back blissfully. He had one of those putt-putt purrs, like a Model T Ford.

“I don’t know if I want my life to get that complicated,” Delia said.

“Is he a complication. Is he a bundle of trouble.”

Belle was holding an envelope in her free hand, Delia saw. That must be what had brought her upstairs. Eleanor’s stalky print marched across the front. Delia felt suddenly overburdened. Things were crowding in on her so!

But when Belle said, “Are you going to keep this itty-bitty, or am I?” Delia said, “I am, I guess.”

“Well, good. Let’s call him Puffball, what do you say?”

“Hmm,” Delia said, pretending to consider it.

But she had never approved of cutesy names for cats. And besides, it seemed that at some point she had already started thinking of him as George.

She was in bed that night before she got around to reading Eleanor’s letter. It was more of the same: a thank you for Delia’s last postcard, news of her Meals on Wheels work. I can certainly empathize with your desire to start over! she wrote. (That careful word, empathize, revealing her effort to say just the right thing.)

And I’m relieved it’s the reason you left. I had assumed it was Sam. I’ve wondered if maybe he expressly wanted a flighty wife, in which case you could hardly be held to blame.

But when you’ve finished starting over, do you picture working up to the present again and coming home? Just asking.

All my love, dear,

Eleanor

A furry paw reached out to bat the page, and Delia laid the letter aside. The cat had found a resting place next to her on the blankets. He had eaten an enormous meal and paid two visits to the makeshift litter box in the bathroom. She could tell he was beginning to feel at home.

She reached for her book-Carson McCullers-and turned to where she had stopped reading last night. She read two stories and started a third. Then she found she was growing sleepy; so she set the book on the windowsill and clicked off her little reader’s light and placed it on top of the book. Light continued to shine through the partly open door, sending a rod of yellow across the floorboards. She slid downward in bed very cautiously so as not to disturb the cat. He was giving himself a bath now. He pressed against her ribs with each movement in a way that seemed accidental, but she could tell he meant to do it.

How strange it was, when you thought about it, that animals would share quarters with humans! If Delia had been out in the wilderness, if this were some woodland creature nestling so close, she would have been astounded.

She yawned and shut her eyes and pulled the blanket up around her shoulders.

One of the stories she had read tonight was called “A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud.” A man in this story said people should begin by loving easier things before they worked up to another person. Begin with something less complex, he proposed. Like a tree. Or a rock. Or a cloud. The rhythm of these words kept tapping across Delia’s mind: tree, rock, cloud.

First a time alone, then a casual acquaintance or two, then a small, undemanding animal. Delia wondered what came after that, and where it would end up.