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

2

The trouble with plastic bags was, those convenient handles tempted you to carry too many at once. Delia had forgotten that. She remembered halfway across her front yard, when the crooks of her fingers began to ache. She hadn’t been able to bring the car around to the rear because someone’s station wagon was blocking the driveway. Nailed to the trunk of the largest oak was a rusty metal sign directing patients to park on the street, but people tended to ignore it.

She circled the front porch and picked her way through the scribble of spent forsythia bushes at the side. This was a large house but shabby, its brown shingles streaked with mildew and its shutters snaggletoothed where the louvers had fallen out over the years. Delia had never lived anywhere else. Neither had her father, for that matter. Her mother, an import from the Eastern Shore, had died of kidney failure before Delia could remember, leaving her in the care of her father and her two older sisters. Delia had played hopscotch on the parquet squares in the hall while her father doctored his patients in the glassed-in porch off the kitchen, and she had married his assistant beneath the sprawling brass chandelier that reminded her to this day of a daddy longlegs. Even after the wedding she had not moved away but simply installed her husband among her sweet-sixteen bedroom furniture, and once her children were born it was not uncommon for a patient to wander out of the waiting room calling, “Delia? Where are you, darlin’? Just wanted to see how those precious little babies were getting along.”

The cat was perched on the back stoop, meowing at her reproachfully. His short gray fur was flattened here and there by drops of water. “Didn’t I tell you?” Delia scolded as she let him in. “Didn’t I warn you the grass would still be wet?” Her shoes were soaked just from crossing the lawn, the thin soles cold and papery-feeling. She stepped out of them as soon as she entered the kitchen. “Well, hi there!” she said to her son. He sat slumped over the table in his pajamas, buttering a piece of toast. She placed her bags on the counter and said, “Fancy finding you awake so early!”

“It’s not like I had any choice,” he told her glumly.

He was her youngest child and the one who most resembled her, she had always thought (with his hair the light-brown color and frazzled texture of binder’s twine, his freckled white face shadowed violet beneath the eyes), but last month he had turned fifteen, and all at once she saw more of Sam in him. He had shot up to nearly six feet, and his pointy chin had suddenly squared, and his hands had grown muscular and disconcertingly competent-looking. Even the way he held his butter knife suggested some new authority.

His voice was Sam’s too: deep but fine-grained, not subject to the cracks and creaks his brother had gone through. “I hope you bought cornflakes,” he told her.

“Why, no, I-”

“Aw, Mom!”

“But wait till you hear why I didn’t,” she said. “The funniest thing, Carroll! This real adventure. I was standing in the produce section, minding my own business-”

“There’s not one decent thing in this house to eat.”

“Well, you don’t usually want breakfast on a Saturday.”

He scowled at her. “Try telling Ramsay that,” he said.

“Ramsay?”

“He’s the one who woke me. Came stumbling into the room in broad daylight, out all night with his lady friend. No way could I get back to sleep after that.”

Delia turned her attention to the grocery bags. (She knew where this conversation was headed.) She started rummaging through them as if the cornflakes might emerge after all. “But let me tell you my adventure,” she said over her shoulder. “Out of the blue, this man is standing next to me… Good-looking? He looked like my very first sweetheart, Will Britt. I don’t believe I ever mentioned Will to you.”

“Mom,” Carroll said. “When are you going to let me move across the hall?”

“Oh, Carroll.”

“Nobody else I know has to room with their brother.”

“Now, now. Plenty of people in this world have to room with whole families,” she told him.

“Not with their boozehead college-boy brother, though. Not when there’s another room, perfectly empty, right across the hall.”

Delia set down the box of orzo and faced him squarely. She noticed that he needed a haircut, but this was not the moment to point that out. “Carroll, I’m sorry,” she said, “but I am just not ready.”

“Aunt Eliza’s ready! Why aren’t you? Aunt Liza was Grandpa’s daughter too, and she says of course I should have his room. She doesn’t understand what’s stopping me.”

“Oh, listen to us!” Delia said gaily. “Spoiling such a pretty day with disagreements! Where’s your father? Is he seeing a patient?”

Carroll didn’t answer. He had dropped his toast to his plate, and now he sat tipping his chair back defiantly, no doubt adding more dents to the linoleum. Delia sighed.

“Sweetie,” she said, “I do know how you feel. And pretty soon you can have the room, I promise. But not just yet! Not right now! Right now it still smells of his pipe tobacco.”

“It won’t once I’m living there,” Carroll said.

“But that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Shoot, I’ll take up smoking, then.”

She waved his words away with a dutiful laugh. “Anyhow,” she said. “Is your father with a patient?”

“Naw.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s out running.”

“He’s what?”

Carroll picked up his toast again and chomped down on it noisily.

“He’s doing what?”

“He’s running, Mom.”

“Well, didn’t you at least offer to go with him?”

“He’s only running around the Gilman track, for gosh sakes.”

“I asked you children; I begged you not to let him go alone. What if something happens and no one’s around to help?”

“Fat chance, on the Gilman track,” Carroll said.

“He shouldn’t be running anyway. He ought to be walking.”

“Running’s good for him,” Carroll said. “Look. He’s not worried. His doctor’s not worried. So what’s your problem, Mom?”

Delia could have come up with so many responses to that; all she did was press a hand to her forehead.

These were the facts she had neglected to tell that young man in the supermarket: She was a sad, tired, anxious, forty-year-old woman who hadn’t had a champagne brunch in decades. And her husband was even older, by a good fifteen years, and just this past February he had suffered a bout of severe chest pain. Angina, they said in the emergency room. And now she was terrified any time he went anywhere alone, and she hated to let him drive, and she kept finding excuses not to make love for fear it would kill him, and at night while he slept she lay awake, tensing every muscle between each of his long, slow breaths.

And not only were her children past infancy; they were huge. They were great, galumphing, unmannerly, supercilious creatures-Susie a Goucher junior consumed by a baffling enthusiasm for various outdoor sports; Ramsay a Hopkins freshman on the brink of flunking out, thanks to the twenty-eight-year-old single-parent girlfriend he had somehow acquired. (And both of them, Susie and Ramsay both, were miffed beyond belief that the family finances forced them to live at home.) And Delia’s baby, her sweet, winsome Carroll, had been replaced by this rude adolescent, flinching from his mother’s hugs and criticizing her clothes and rolling his eyes disgustedly at every word she uttered.

Like now, for instance. Determined to start afresh, she perked all her features upward and asked, “Any calls while I was gone?” and he said, “Why would I answer the grown-ups’ line,” not bothering to add a question mark.

Because the grown-ups buy the celery for your favorite mint pea soup, she could have told him, but years of dealing with teenagers had turned her into a pacifist, and she merely padded out of the kitchen in her stocking feet and crossed the hall to the study, where Sam kept the answering machine.

The study was what they called it, and books did line the floor-to-ceiling shelves, but mainly this was a TV room now. The velvet draperies were kept permanently drawn, coloring the air the dusty dark red of an old-time movie house. Soft-drink cans and empty pretzel bags and stacks of rented videotapes littered the coffee table, and Susie lounged on the couch, watching Saturday-morning cartoons with her boyfriend, Driscoll Avery. The two of them had been dating so long that they looked like brother and sister, with their smooth beige coloring and stocky, waistless figures and identical baggy sweat suits. Driscoll barely blinked when Delia entered. Susie didn’t even do that much; just flipped a channel on the remote control.

“Morning, you two,” Delia said. “Any calls?”

Susie shrugged and flipped another channel. Driscoll yawned out loud. Just for that, Delia didn’t excuse herself when she walked in front of them to the answering machine. She bent to press the Message button, but nothing happened. Electronic devices were always double-crossing her. “How do I-?” she said, and then an old man’s splintery voice filled the room. “Dr. Grinstead, can you get back to me right away? It’s Grayson Knowles, and I told the pharmacist about those pills, but he asked if-”

Whatever the pharmacist had asked was submerged by a flood of Bugs Bunny music. Susie must have raised the volume on the TV. Beep, the machine said, and then Delia’s sister came on. “Dee, it’s Eliza. I need an address. Could you please call me at work?”

“What’s she doing at work on a Saturday?” Delia asked, but nobody answered.

Beep. “This is Myrtle Allingham,” an old woman stated forthrightly.

“Oh, God,” Susie told Driscoll.

“Marshall and I were wondering if you-all would like to take supper with us Sunday evening. Nothing fancy! Just us folks! And do tell young Miss Susie she should bring that darlin’ Driscoll. Say seven o’clock?”

Beep beep beep beep beep. The end.

“We went last time,” Susie said, slouching lower on the couch. “Count us out.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Driscoll said. “That crab dip she served was not half bad.”

“We aren’t going, Driscoll, so forget it.”

“She’s lonesome, is all,” Delia said. “Stuck at home with her hip, no way to get around-”

Something banged overhead.

“What’s that?” she asked.

More bangs. Or clanks, really. Clank! Clank! at measured intervals, as if on purpose.

“Plumber?” Driscoll said tentatively.

“What plumber?”

“Plumber upstairs in the bathroom?”

“I never called for a plumber.”

“Dr. Grinstead did, maybe?”

Delia gave Susie a look. Susie met it blandly.

“I don’t know what’s come over that man,” Delia said. “He’s been re-what’s the word?-rejuvenating, resuscitating…” Fully aware that neither one of them was listening, she walked on out of the room, still talking. “… renovating, I mean: renovating this house to a fare-thee-well. If it’s about that place in the ceiling, then really you’d think…”

She climbed the stairs, halfway up encountering the cat, who was hurrying down in a scattered, ungraceful fashion. Vernon detested loud noises. “Hello?” Delia called. She poked her head into the bathroom off the hall. A ponytailed man in coveralls crouched beside the claw-footed tub, studying its pipes. “Well, hello,” she said.

He twisted around to look at her. “Oh. Hey,” he said.

“What seems to be the trouble?”

“Can’t say just yet,” he said. He turned back to the pipes.

She waited a moment, in case he wanted to add something, but she could tell he was one of those repairmen who think only the husband worth talking to.

In her bedroom, she sat down on Sam’s side of the bed, picked up the telephone, and dialed Eliza’s work number. “Pratt Library,” a woman said.

“Eliza Felson, please.”

“Just a minute.”

Delia propped a pillow against the headboard, and then she swung her feet up onto the frilled pink spread. The plumber had progressed to the bathroom between her room and her father’s. She couldn’t see him, but she could hear him banging around. What information could you hope to gain from whacking pipes?

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “but we can’t seem to locate Miss Felson. Are you sure she’s working today?”

“She must be; she told me to call her there, and she isn’t here at home.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, thanks anyway.”

She hung up. The plumber was whistling “Clementine.” While Delia was dialing Mrs. Allingham, he ambled into the bedroom, still whistling, and she demurely smoothed her skirt around her knees. He squatted in front of the miniature door that opened onto the pipes in the wall. Thou art lost and gone forever, he whistled; Delia mentally supplied the words. One tug at the door’s wooden knob, and it came off in his hand. She could have told him it would. She watched with some satisfaction as he muttered a curse beneath his breath and fished a pair of pliers from his belt loop.

Seven rings. Eight. She wasn’t discouraged. Mrs. Allingham walked with a limp, and it took her ages to get to the phone.

Nine rings. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Allingham, it’s Delia.”

“Delia, dear! How are you?”

“I’m fine, how are you?”

“Oh, we’re fine, doing just fine. Enjoying this nice spring weather! Nearly forgot what sunshine looks like, till today.”

“Yes, me too,” Delia said. She was overtaken suddenly by a swell of something like homesickness; Mrs. Allingham’s chipper, slightly rasping voice was so reminiscent of all the women on this street where she had grown up. “Mrs. Allingham,” she said, “Sam and I would love to come for supper tomorrow night, but we can’t bring the children, I’m afraid.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Allingham said.

“It’s just that they’re so busy these days. You know how it is.”

“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Allingham said faintly.

“But another time, maybe! They always enjoy your company.”

“Yes, well, and we enjoy theirs too.”

“So we’ll see you at seven tomorrow,” Delia said briskly, for she could hear Sam downstairs and she had a million things to do. “Goodbye till then.”

By now the plumber had the little door prized open and was peering into the bowels of the wall, but she knew better than to ask him what he’d found.

In the kitchen, Sam stood propped against a counter, taking off his mud-caked running shoes. He was telling Carroll, “… sort of a toboggan effect when you hit those cedar chips…”

“Sam, how could you go off alone like that?” Delia asked. “You knew I’d worry!”

“Hello, Dee,” he said.

His T-shirt was translucent with sweat, his sharp-boned face glistened, and his glasses were fogged. His hair-that shade that could be either blond or gray, it had faded so imperceptibly-lay in damp spikes on his forehead. “Look at you,” Delia scolded. “You got overheated. You went running all alone and got overheated to boot when the doctor told you a dozen times-”

“Whose car is that in the driveway?”

“Car?”

“Station wagon parked in the driveway.”

“Well, doesn’t it belong to a patient? No, I guess not.”

“Plumber,” Carroll said from behind a glass of orange juice.

“Oh, good,” Sam said. “The plumber’s here.”

He set his shoes on the doormat and started out of the kitchen, no doubt happily anticipating one of those laconic, man-to-man discussions of valves and joints and gaskets. “Sam, wait,” Delia said, for she had a pang of guilt nagging at the back of her mind. “Before I forget-”

He turned, already wary.

“Mr. Knowles phoned-something to do with his pills,” she said.

“I thought he got that straightened out.”

“And also, um, Mrs. Allingham. She wanted to know if we could come for-”

He groaned. “No,” he said, “we can’t.”

“But you haven’t even heard yet! A light Sunday supper, she said, and I told her-”

“I’m sure not going,” Carroll broke in.

“No, I told her that; I told her you kids were tied up. But you and I, Sam, just for-”

“We can’t make it,” Sam said flatly.

“But I’ve already accepted.”

He had been on the point of turning away again, but now he stopped and looked at her.

“I know I should have checked with you first, but by accident somehow I just went ahead and accepted.”

“Well, then,” he said, “you’ll have to call her back and unaccept.”

“But, Sam!”

He left.

She looked over at Carroll. “How can he be so mean?” she asked, but Carroll just raised one eyebrow in that urbane new way she suspected him of practicing in the mirror.

Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family’s edges.

The linoleum was slick and chilly beneath her feet, and she would have gone back upstairs for her slippers except that Sam and the plumber were upstairs. Instead, she turned to her grocery bags and unpacked several more boxes of pasta. Maybe she could tell Mrs. Allingham that Sam had been taken ill. That was always risky, though, when you lived in the same block and could so easily be observed, hale and hearty, stepping out to collect your morning paper or whatever. She sighed and shut a cabinet door. “When did this start happening to me?” she asked Carroll.

“Huh?”

“When did sweet and cute turn into silly and inefficient?”

He didn’t seem to have an opinion.

Her sister appeared in the doorway, rolling up her shirt sleeves. “Morning, all!” she announced.

“Eliza?”

There were days when Eliza seemed almost gnomish, and this was one of them. She wore her gardening clothes-a pith helmet that all but obscured her straight black Dutch-boy bob, a khaki shirt and stubby brown trousers, and boys’ brown oxfords with thick, thick soles intended to make her seem taller. (She was the shortest of the three Felson sisters.) Her horn-rimmed glasses overwhelmed her small, blunt, sallow face. “I figured I’d transplant some of those herbs before the ground dried out,” she told Delia.

“But I thought you were at work.”

“Work? It’s Saturday.”

“You called from work, I thought.”

Eliza looked over at Carroll. He raised that eyebrow again.

“You called and left a message on the machine,” Delia said, “asking me to find an address.”

“That was ten days ago, at least. I needed Jenny Coop’s address, remember?”

“Then why did I just get it off the answering machine?”

“Mom,” Carroll said. “You must have been playing back old calls.”

“Well, how is that possible?”

“You didn’t have the machine turned on in the first place, see, and then when you pressed the Message button-”

“Oh, Lord,” Delia said. “Mrs. Allingham.”

“Is there coffee?” Eliza asked her.

“Not that I know of. Oh, Lord…”

She went over to the wall phone and dialed Mrs. Allingham’s number. “I’m snug in bed,” Eliza was telling Carroll, “thinking, Goody, Saturday morning, I can sleep till noon-when who should come crawling through that door in the back of my closet but another one of your father’s blasted repairmen.”

“Mrs. Allingham?” Delia said into the phone. “This is Delia again. Mrs. Allingham, I feel like such a dummy but it seems I got my calls mixed up and it was last week you invited us for. And of course last week we went, and a lovely time we had too; did I write you a thank-you note? I meant to write you a thank-you note. But this week we’re not coming; I mean I realize now that you didn’t invite us for-”

“But, Delia, darlin’, we’d be happy to have you this week! We’d be happy to have you any old time, and I’ve already sent Marshall off to the Gourmet To Go with a shopping list.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Delia said, but then the coffee grinder started up-a deafening racket-and she shouted, “Anyhow! We’ll have to invite you to our place, very soon! Goodbye!”

She replaced the receiver and glared at Eliza.

“If only coffee tasted as good as it smells,” Eliza said serenely when the grinder stopped.

Sam and the plumber were descending the stairs. Delia could hear the plumber’s elasticized East Baltimore vowels; he was waxing lyrical about water. “It’s the most amazing substance,” he was saying. “It’ll burst out one place and run twenty-five feet along the underside of a pipe and commence to dripping another place, where you least expect to see it. It’ll lie in wait, it’ll bide its time, it’ll search out some little cranny you would never think to look.”

Delia placed her hands on her hips and stood waiting. The instant the two men stepped through the door, she said, “I certainly hope you’re satisfied, Sam Grinstead.”

“Hmm?”

“I called back poor Mrs. Allingham and canceled supper.”

“Oh, good,” Sam said absently.

“I broke our promise. I ducked out of our commitment. I probably hurt her feelings for all time,” Delia told him.

But Sam wasn’t listening. He was following the plumber’s forefinger as it pointed upward to a line of blistered plaster. And Eliza was measuring coffee, so the only one who paid any heed was Carroll. He sent Delia a look of utter contempt.

Delia turned sheepishly to her grocery bags. From the depths of one she drew the celery, pale green and pearly and precisely ribbed. She gazed at it for a long, thoughtful moment. “Aren’t you clever to say so!” she heard Adrian exclaim once again, and she held the words close; she hugged them to her breast as she turned back to give her son a beatific smile.