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

10

The Sunday before Thanksgiving, Belle waylaid Delia at the bottom of the stairs. “Say, Dee,” she said. “What’re you doing for the holiday?”

“Oh, um…”

“Want to have dinner at my place?”

“Well, I’d love to,” Delia said.

“I’m serving this real hokey meal: turkey and dressing, cranberry relish…”

“I didn’t know you cooked!”

“I don’t,” Belle said grimly. “It’s a plot. I’m trying to look domestic for this fella I’ve been seeing.”

At the moment, she looked anything but domestic. Sunday was always a busy day at the real estate office, and she was dressed to go out in her huge purple coat, the one with the shoulders not just padded but flaring to sharp points like an alien’s space suit. Lilac trousers swam beneath it, and the smell of her fruity, overripe perfume freighted the air all around her.

“Vanessa is coming with Greggie,” she said. “Nice touch to invite a child, don’t you think? And these out-of-towners I just sold a house to, married couple; that’s always good…”

“And I would help in the food department,” Delia guessed.

“Oh, I’m bringing in the food from outside, just between you and me. But I was thinking you could add a little, call it, class. I need for this guy to see me as all proper and respectable. And also you could advise me on the wifely touches: the centerpiece and et cetera. You must’ve used to do that stuff back home, didn’t you? Do you have one of those baskety things that look like a cornucopia?”

“Well, not right handy,” Delia said. “But I’ll be glad to do what I can.”

“Great,” Belle said. She toed the cat aside-he had followed Delia downstairs-and opened the front door. They stepped out into a chilly, tin-colored day. “This fella’s name is Henry McIlwain, did I mention that?” she asked. “We’ve been dating several weeks now and I’d like to start getting more purposeful. I don’t want him thinking I’m just a goodtime gal! Maybe you could drop a few remarks in front of him. Something like, ‘Gosh, Belle, I hope you made your famous brussels-sprout dish.’”

“You’re serving him brussels sprouts?”

“I don’t have any choice. It’s the only green vegetable Copp Catering offers that will fit in my toaster oven.”

Delia said, “How did you manage the meals when you were living with Norton?”

“We ate out. But this time I want to do things differently. Maybe while Henry’s listening you could ask me for one of my recipes.”

“I can hardly wait to hear how you’ll answer,” Delia said.

“Dinner’s at one, but could you come down a bit early to help set up? And wear your gray pinstripe. Your gray pinstripe is so… gray; know what I mean?”

On Thanksgiving Day Delia slept late, and she idled the morning away drinking tea and reading in bed, with the cat curled up beside her. Across the hall, in Mr. Lamb’s room, an announcer’s voice droned steadily. This was a TV announcer, Delia had figured out; not radio. Now that she kept her door cracked open, she could hear how the music swelled and diminished without apparent reason, responding to some visual cue; and today she caught distinct phrases each time she emerged for more tea water. “The mother bear leads her cubs…,” she heard, and, “The female spider injects her victims…” Evidently Mr. Lamb was watching nature shows.

Shortly after noon, she rose and started dressing. It was a pity she didn’t have a string of pearls to add a festive note, she thought. Or at least a scarf. Didn’t she own a paisley scarf with gray commas around the edges? Yes, she did-back in Baltimore. She could see it lying folded in her grandmother’s lacquer glove box.

She applied an extra-bright coat of lipstick, and then she leaned toward the mirror to smooth her hair. It was longer now, which made her curls look flatter and somehow calmer-very suitable for Miss Grinstead. Although when she stepped back to gauge the total effect, the person who came to mind was not Miss Grinstead at all. It was Rosemary Bly-Brice.

She turned sharply from the mirror and picked up the vase of autumn flowers she had bought the day before.

The cat came along when she left. He scampered after her down the stairs, and he tumbled around her ankles while she knocked at the living-room door. When nobody answered she tried the other door, the one to the right, and finally she turned the knob and poked her head into the dining room. “Anybody home?” she asked.

Goodness, Belle did need her services. The table-one of those long, narrow, wood-grain affairs you see at PTA bazaars-was not even spread with a cloth yet. Delia put her flowers down and walked on into the kitchen. “Belle?” she said.

Belle was leaning against the sink. Her arms were clamped across the bosom of a violently frilled white apron, and tears were streaming down her face.

“Belle? What’s happened?” Delia asked.

“He’s not coming,” Belle said thickly.

“Your date?”

“He’s back with his wife.”

“I didn’t know he had a wife.”

“Well, he does.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

In fact, she was shocked, but she tried not to show it. No wonder Belle had been so eager to look respectable! Delia gave her a tentative pat, just in case she wanted consoling. She did, it turned out. She fell into Delia’s arms, sobbing hotly against her neck.

“He was perfect for me!” she wailed. “He was exactly what I wanted! And then this morning he calls up and-oh, I should have known from how low he was speaking, mumbly low secretive voice like he was scared somebody might hear him-”

She drew back from Delia’s embrace to snap a paper towel off the roll above the sink. Blotting first one eye and then the other, she said, “‘Belle,’ he tells me, ‘about today. Something’s come up,’ he tells me. ‘Oh?’ I ask. ‘What’s that?’ Thinking maybe he couldn’t start the car, or wanted to bring a friend. ‘Well, it’s like this,’ he tells me. ‘Seems like Pansy and I have gotten back together.’”

“Pansy would be his wife,” Delia guessed.

“Yes, and the baby’s name is Daffodil, can you believe it?”

“There’s a baby?”

“And it wasn’t even a springtime baby! It was born in October!”

“You’re talking about… this past October?”

Belle nodded, loudly blowing her nose.

“So the baby is, what, a month old?”

“Six weeks.”

“Ah.”

Belle’s apron was so new that the pinholes still showed from the packaging. Her hairdo was even larger than usual, and she wore the first actual dress Delia had ever seen her in-or presumably it was a dress, for her legs were visible beneath the apron, encased in nylon stockings with a frosty white sheen like the bloom on plums. But her face was a disaster-blurred lipstick and blackened eyes and gray dribbles of tears. “You’ll have to get in touch with the others,” she was saying as she dabbed the tears. “I can’t possibly go through with dinner.”

“But everything’s all ready,” Delia said. She was taking stock of the foil-wrapped, disposable pans covering one counter, and the plates and silver heaped on the kitchen table, and the empty serving dishes waiting to be filled. Through the oven’s lighted window she could make out a brown turkey, although she wasn’t able to smell it, for some reason. “That turkey looks about done,” she told Belle.

“It arrived done. I’m just reheating it. I had to keep it in the fridge overnight.”

“So, why not go ahead with your party? Maybe it’ll cheer you up.”

“Nothing could cheer me up,” Belle said.

“Oh, now, you sit here and I’ll see to things.”

“I wish I was dead and buried,” Belle said, pulling out one of the kitchen chairs. She sank into it and picked up the cat. “I’m getting too old to be jilted! I’m thirty-eight years old. It’s tiring to keep going on first dates.”

Delia didn’t answer, because she was hunting a tablecloth. No telling where Belle kept her linens. This was one of those fifties kitchens with shiny bare walls and enormous white appliances and rust-specked white metal cabinets and drawers. She slid open every drawer with a clanking sound. Most were empty. Eventually she located a jumble of fabrics in the space below the sink. “Aha!” she said, shaking out a wrinkled damask cloth. She carried it into the dining room and spread it over the table, resettling her flowers in the center. “I know you must have candlesticks,” she called.

“We met last spring,” Belle said. “I was the one who sold off their house. They were moving to a bigger place on account of the baby coming. And wouldn’t you know it took me six months, with the market the way it’s been.”

Delia opened all the drawers of the apple-green bureau that served as a dining room buffet. She found two brass candlesticks lying in a nest of extension cords, and she placed them on either side of the flowers. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Belle had sold the house just as Daffodil arrived. “Settlement date was two days before due date,” she said. “Kid was born three days later. So naturally I stopped by the hospital with a giftie; these things are tax-deductible. And there was Henry all proud and fatherly, took me down the hall to that baby window they have and showed me how smart and cute and blah-blah-blah. Well, he just got to me, you know? I stood there not hearing a word he said, watching how his mouth moved, and all at once I thought, Suppose I was to step forward and kiss him, what do you guess he’d do?”

“Candles?” Delia asked.

“Try the broom cupboard.” Belle blew her nose with a honking sound that caused the cat to spring off her lap. “And this was not even my usual style of man,” she said. “He was skinny! And pale! And computerish! But there I stood, thinking, Suppose I unbuttoned my blouse right here in front of the baby window, staring at his mouth the whole time and running the tip of my tongue across my lower lip.”

The candles were not in the broom cupboard but on top of the refrigerator, in a yellowing white box. Even the candles were yellowed, and also a bit warped, but Delia fitted them into the holders anyway. Then she collected the dishes and silver from the kitchen table and dealt them out. Belle proceeded through the baby’s colic, the new parents’ cranky quarrels, her own warm-eyed, cooing sympathy. “I schemed and plotted, I lay in wait,” she said. “I told him my door was always open. Two, three, four o’clock in the morning he would leave that spit-up milk and dirty-diaper smell and find me here in my spaghetti-strap nightie from Victoria’s Secret.”

And to think all this had been going on while Delia was sound asleep! She checked the turkey. It appeared to have caved in around the breastbone. She found the brussels sprouts in their foil pan and set them in the toaster oven at 350 degrees. There were biscuits too, but she would wait to warm those till the very last minute.

“Two weeks ago, Pansy goes back to her mom’s,” Belle said. “Takes Daffodil and leaves. I was in heaven. Didn’t you notice I’ve had this radiant glow about me lately? Oh, Delia, how can you stand it, going without a love life?”

Holding a pack of paper napkins printed all over with pilgrims, Delia paused to reflect upon the question. “Well,” she said, “I do miss hugs, I guess. But nowadays when I think about, um, the rest of it, I just feel sort of perplexed. I think, Why did that seem like such a big deal, once upon a time? But I suppose it’s only-”

The doorbell rang.

“Oh, Lord, we didn’t call off dinner,” Belle said, as if she had not been sitting in the midst of Delia’s preparations. “Shoot! I can’t cope with this! See who’s there, will you, while I try to fix my face.”

As Delia walked through the dining room to the hall, she felt drab and thin and virginal, like somebody’s spinster aunt fulfilling her duties.

It was Vanessa at the door. She wore a leather blazer and blue jeans, and she toted Greggie on one hip. Behind her, just stepping out of their car, were a man and a woman who must have been Belle’s married couple. Delia barely had time to whisper the news to Vanessa-“Henry McIlwain’s gone back to his wife”-before the couple arrived on the porch. “Why! What have we here!” the husband told Greggie. He was young, no more than thirty, but as staid as a middle-aged man, Delia thought, with his receding tuft of black hair and his long black formal overcoat. His wife was a trim, attractive brunette in a tidy red woolen suit that reminded Delia of a Barbie-doll outfit. “I’m Delia Grinstead,” Delia told her. “This is Vanessa Linley-do you know each other?-and Greggie.”

“We’re the Hawsers,” the husband said for both of them. “Donald and Melinda.”

“Won’t you come in?”

She planned to lead them into the living room, but when she turned she found Belle at the door of the dining room. She was showing all her teeth and adjusting the plunging neckline of a flowered, button-front dress. “Happy Thanksgiving!” she sang out. Whatever repairs she had made to her face had not done much good. Gray tracks still ran down her cheeks, and her eyes were pink and puffy. But she caroled, “So glad you could come! Step in and have a seat!”

There was nowhere to sit but around the table. “Donald, you’re on my right,” Belle said, “and Vanessa’s on my left. I’ve put Greggie next to you, Vanessa. Get some phone books from the kitchen if he needs a booster. And Melinda’s on the other side of Greggie.”

Well, maybe this was the local custom: proceeding directly to the food. But even Vanessa seemed taken aback. And the husband (still wearing his overcoat) stood frozen in place for a moment before approaching his chair. “Are we… late?” he asked Belle.

“Late! Not at all!” she said, and she let out a cascade of musical laughter. “Delia, you’ll sit next to-”

She broke off. “Oh!” she cried. “Delia! Honestly!”

“What’s the matter?” Delia asked.

“You’ve gone and laid too many places!”

It was true. Delia had doled out all she’d found on the kitchen table, and that must have included a setting for Henry McIlwain. Belle gazed toward the chair at the far end, her eyes brimming over with fresh tears.

“I’m sorry,” Delia told her. “We could just-”

“Run fetch Mr. Lamb,” Belle ordered.

“Mr. Lamb? From upstairs?”

“Hurry, though. We’re all waiting. Tell him we’ll eat without him if he doesn’t get down here pronto.”

What they would have eaten Delia couldn’t imagine, since there wasn’t a morsel of food anywhere in sight. But Vanessa, returning from the kitchen with several phone books, told Delia, “Go ahead. I’ll get the meal on.”

Delia went out to the hall, which seemed very quiet after the bustle in the dining room. With the cat twining underfoot, she climbed the stairs and knocked on Mr. Lamb’s door. “Desperately, the salmon fling themselves against the current,” a stern voice announced. The door opened on a sliver of Mr. Lamb’s rag-and-bone face. “Yes?” he said, and then, “Oh!” for George had somehow managed to wriggle through the crack.

Delia said, “Belle sent me up to invite you for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“But it seems your animal’s got into my room!”

“Sorry,” Delia said. “Here, George.”

She reached in for the cat, and Mr. Lamb grudgingly opened the door another few inches. Delia caught the hazelnut smell of clothes worn once and then stuffed into drawers unwashed. The television’s icy light flickered in the dimness. She scooped George up and backed away.

“I’ve been meaning to mention the toilet arrangements under the bathroom sink,” Mr. Lamb told her.

“The…?”

“Couldn’t your animal use the outdoors?”

“Not in the middle of the night,” Delia said. She clutched George more tightly and asked, “Are you coming to dinner, or aren’t you?”

“What time?”

“Um… now?”

“Well, I suppose I could make it,” Mr. Lamb said.

He looked down at what he was wearing-a limp T-shirt, baggy dark pants-and then sadly closed the door in her face.

Delia wondered how a man so fond of nature programs could object to a harmless cat.

Downstairs, Vanessa had finished setting everything on the table-turkey, brussels sprouts, cranberry relish, mashed sweet potatoes dotted with marshmallows, all in their original pans. Still wearing her leather blazer, she was spooning the stuffing out of the turkey. Greggie lolled on the stack of phone books, sucking his thumb and watching his mother with heavy-lidded eyes. It must be naptime.

Belle was discussing Henry with the Hawsers. “What I can’t figure,” she was saying, “is when all this came about. Last night as of ten o’clock, everything was jim-dandy. Henry and I had a real nice dinner over in Ocean City. Then this noon on the phone-poof! He’s a totally changed man.”

“So his wife showed up in the morning,” Donald Hawser said sagely. He had draped his coat over the back of his chair, and he was lighting the warped candles with a silver lighter. “She got out of bed this morning and, ‘Here I am,’ she must have said, ‘away from home on Thanksgiving. A family holiday,’ she said.”

Delia placed the cat on the floor and sat down next to Donald. A family holiday, she thought, and I’m eating a store-cooked turkey with strangers. She felt madcap and adventurous.

“‘Here I am with my mom when I ought to be with my husband,’ she said, and she packed her suitcase then and there and went back to him, but he couldn’t let you know till noon because what was he going to do-excuse himself and run phone you the minute she walked in?”

“Donald has an expert opinion to offer on every subject,” his wife announced with a brittle laugh.

She was sitting very tensely, her spine not touching the chair. Her hair was scrolled upward at the ends like the sound holes in a violin.

“Yes; you might call it a gift,” Donald agreed, unruffled. “I’m able to envision. See, first there’s the business of settling her into the house. Don’t forget she has that baby with her, and a diaper bag no doubt and one of those infant car seats-”

“But he could have just turned her away!” Belle exploded. “He doesn’t even love her! He told me he didn’t!”

“Well, of course that’s what he would claim,” Donald said, leaning back expansively.

By now Vanessa was carving the turkey. Delia began passing around the other foods. The brussels sprouts were barely warm, she discovered. The sweet potatoes were refrigerator cold, but everybody took some anyhow.

“You’re right,” Belle said. “Oh, when will I learn? Seems this happens to me about every other week. Norton Grove was the only one who actually divorced his wife for me, and look how that ended up!”

“How did it end up?” Delia asked.

“He fell in love with a lady plumber who came to unstop our sink.”

Donald nodded, implying he could have predicted as much.

“It’s just the way Ann Landers keeps saying in her column,” Belle told them. “She says a man who would leave his wife will most likely leave you, too, by and by.”

“Maybe you ought to look for someone who doesn’t have a wife,” Vanessa suggested, handing her son a turkey wing.

“Yes, but it’s kind of like I lack imagination. I mean, I can’t seem to picture marrying a man till I see him married to someone else. Then I say, ‘Why! He’d make a good husband for me!’”

The hallway door opened and Mr. Lamb stood on the threshold, wearing a shiny black suit that turned his skin to ashes. “Oh, God, you have guests,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. Lamb, and you’re one of them,” Belle said. “Donald Hawser, Melinda Hawser… Vanessa and Greggie you’ve seen around, I bet. This is Horace Lamb,’ she told the others. She waved carelessly toward the one empty chair. “Have a seat.”

“Well, I can’t stay long.”

“Have a seat, Mr. Lamb.”

He entered the room with a skimming sound that made Delia glance downward. On his feet he wore the kind of backless paper slippers given out free in hospitals. “This afternoon will be sports, sports, sports,” he said as he fell into his chair. “All regular programs are preempted. I’m reduced to the educational channels.”

“Say!” Donald cried. “Who you going to root for?”

“Pardon? Weekday afternoons, I like to watch the soaps. Oh, I confess. I admit it. I make a point of stopping for All My Children every blessed day I’m on the road.”

“What’s your line of business, Horace? Okay if I call you Horace?”

“I sell storm windows,” Mr. Lamb told him. He accepted the container of sweet potatoes and peered down into it. “This looks exceedingly rich,” he said. His long front teeth were so prominent that his lips had to labor to stretch across them. His whole face seemed stretched, and too intricately hinged at the jawbone. He raised his deep-set eyes to Belle and said, “Regrettably, I’m afflicted with a touchy stomach.”

“Oh, eat up, it’ll do you good,” Belle snapped. “We were discussing married men.”

“Pardon?”

“Another problem I have is, I look at a married man and I can’t believe he won’t find me irresistible.”

“Irresistible?”

“I’m speaking to the table at large, Mr. Lamb. Eat your dinner. I see a man with his wife, mousy boring wife who isn’t even attempting to keep herself up, and I think, Why wouldn’t he prefer me instead? I’m a hell of a lot more fun, and better-looking to boot. But it’s like there’s some-I don’t know-some hold wives have, and I can’t seem to break it. Is it a secret? Is it some secret you-all pass around among yourselves?”

She was asking Melinda Hawser, but Melinda just gave another shattered laugh and started crumbling bits of biscuit onto her plate. “Is it?” Belle asked Delia.

“Oh, no,” Delia told her. “It’s more like just… what’s the word? The word from science class. Momentum?”

“Inertia,” Mr. Lamb supplied.

“Right.” She glanced over at him. “It’s just a matter of people staying where they are.”

“Well, if that’s all it is,” Belle said, “how come Katie O’Connell got to waltz off to Hawaii with Larry Watts? She must have found out the secret. Why, when Larry Watts was boarding here, he never even gave me a look! He almost seemed to be avoiding me. He acted like I was some floozy the one time I asked him downstairs for a friendly little drink!”

Her mouth collapsed, and she covered her eyes with one hand. Donald said, “Oh, now! Hey!” and Vanessa said, “Aw, Belle, don’t cry,” while Mr. Lamb started tugging ferociously at his nose.

“To be honest,” Melinda said in a crystal voice, “I can’t think what you want with a husband anyhow.”

There was a pause, a kind of reconsidering among the other diners.

“Who first thought marriage up, do you suppose?” Melinda asked Greggie. He goggled at her from behind a greasy fistful of turkey wing. “Everyone pushes it so, especially the women. Your mother and your aunts and your girlfriends. Then after you’re married you see how he’s always so full of himself and always going on about something, always got these theories and pronouncements, always crowing over these triumphs at his business. ‘I told them this,’ and ‘I told them that,’ and you ask, ‘What did they say back?’ and he says, ‘Oh, you know, but then I told them such and such, and I let them have it outright, I put it to them straight, I said…’ And if you mention this to your mother and your aunts and so forth, ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘marriage is a pain, all right.’ ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel,’ you want to ask them, ‘why didn’t you speak up before? Where were you when I was announcing my engagement?’”

“Ha. Yes,” her husband said. He glanced around the table. “They’re going to think you mean our marriage. Dear.”

Everybody waited, but Melinda just speared a brussels sprout.

“Oh,” Belle assured him, “we would never think that.” She was sitting erect now, her tears already drying on her cheeks. “A gorgeous man like you? Of course we wouldn’t.” She told the others, “Donald and Melinda are customers of mine. They bought the old Meers place-lovely place. Donald’s an important executive at the furniture plant.”

Melinda was chewing her brussels sprout very noisily, or maybe it only seemed that way because the room was so quiet.

“Mrs. Meers had gone into the nursing home,” Belle said, “but Mr. Meers was still living there. Took us through the house himself; taught us how to work the trash compactor. Told us, ‘Here in the freezer are one hundred forty-four egg whites, no charge.’”

“Folks who made their own mayonnaise,” Mr. Lamb surmised.

Belle was about to go on speaking, but she stopped and looked at him.

“I don’t guess you’d be in the market for storm windows,” Mr. Lamb told Donald.

“Not really,” Donald said, with his eyes on his wife.

“Ah, well, I didn’t think so.”

“That house needs absolutely nothing,” Belle said. “The Meerses kept after it every minute. And Donald here, Don…” She smiled at him. “Don spotted that the first time he walked through.”

“Melinda and I have a fine marriage. Married seven years.” Donald said, still watching his wife. “We were one of those recognized campus couples at our college. Went steady, got pinned: the works.”

“I know the type you mean,” Belle said.

“Why, Melinda’s known me so long she still calls me Hawk! Hawk Hawser,” he added, turning at last to meet Belle’s gaze. “I was on the basketball team. Kind of a star, some people might say, though I never had the height to go professional.”

“Is that right!” Belle exclaimed.

“Hawk Hawser,” he repeated lingeringly.

“I believe I might’ve heard of you.”

“Well, maybe so if you were ever in Illinois. Jerry Bingle College?”

“Jerry Bingle. Hmm.”

“I played center.”

“Really!”

“And midway through my senior year-”

“Marshmallow,” Greggie demanded.

He didn’t have the usual small child’s trouble pronouncing I’s. He spoke very precisely and daintily. “Mama? Marshmallow!”

It was Delia, finally, who plucked a marshmallow from the sweet potatoes and reached across the table to set it on his plate. Everyone else was watching Belle. Open-mouthed and breathless, miraculously recovered, Belle stroked her topmost button with a hypnotic, circular motion and kept her damp-lashed eyes focused raptly on Donald’s lips.