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

4

“I told Eliza when she picked us up at the airport,” Linda said. “I told her, ‘Well, one good thing: now that Dad’s gone I won’t have to share a room with you, Eliza.’ Considering how she snores.”

Delia said, “Yes, but-”

“’And the twins won’t have to bunk with Susie,’ I said. I figured I could fit both of them in Dad’s big bed with me. Then I get to the house, and guess what.”

“I did plan at first for you to stay there,” Delia said, “but it seemed so… when I walked in to put the sheets on, it seemed so…”

“Fine, I’ll put the sheets on myself,” Linda said. “I’ll tell you this much: I am surely not sleeping with Eliza when there’s a whole extra room going empty.”

They were standing in the doorway of their father’s room at that moment, gazing in on its heartbreaking neatness, the dim air laden with dust motes, the candlewick bedspread unnaturally straight on the mattress. Linda, still in her traveling clothes, had not yet lost that aura of focus and efficiency that travel gives some people. She surveyed the room without a trace of sentiment, as far as Delia could see. “You’ve certainly wasted no time making changes elsewhere,” she said. “Air-conditioning vents every place you look, nursery men tearing out the shrubs, I don’t know what all.”

“Oh, well, that’s-”

“I suppose it’s what Sam Grinstead has been waiting for,” Linda said. “He’s finally got the house in his clutches.”

Delia didn’t argue. Linda sent her a quizzical glance before crossing to their father’s bureau. Leaning into the mirror above it, she raked her fingers through her short brown pageboy. Then she removed her pocketbook, which she wore bandolier style, with the strap slanted over her chest-just one more of her European ways. You would never take her for American. (You would never guess she lived in Michigan, divorced from the French-literature professor who had not, after all, swooped her off to his native Paris as she’d hoped.) Her full, soft face was powdered white, her only other makeup a bloom of sticky scarlet on her lips, and although her clothes were unexceptional, she wore them with authority-those dowdy brown medium-heeled pumps, for instance, defiantly teamed with a navy suit. “But why are we standing around? No telling what Marie-Claire and Thérèse have got into,” she said, and the r’s in her children’s names were very nearly gargled. When she whisked past Delia toward the stairs, she smelled of airplane.

In the kitchen, they found Eliza making lemonade for the twins. This fall the twins would be nine years old-a long-limbed, sproutlike stage-and although they had their mother’s blocky brown haircut, they resembled the professor in every other way. Their eyes were almost black, mournfully downturned; their mouths were the color of plums. They were assisting each other up a bank of glass-fronted cabinets, the first pulling the second after her once she’d reached the counter, and for mobility’s sake they had tucked their old-fashioned, European-schoolgirl dresses into their underpants, which made them look all the leggier.

“As soon as your cousin Susie shows up, she’ll take you to the pool,” Eliza was saying. She stood at the drainboard, reaming lemons. “She promised she’d do it first thing, but I guess she must be off someplace with her boyfriend.”

The mention of a boyfriend diverted them for a second. “Driscoll?” Marie-Claire asked, pausing in her climb. “Does Susie still date Driscoll?”

“She does indeed.”

“Do they go to dances together? Do they kiss good night?”

“Now, that I wouldn’t know,” Eliza said tartly, and she bent to take a pitcher from a cupboard.

The twins had reached their goal: a jar of peppermints on the top shelf. Inch by inch, Thérèse maneuvered it through the partially opened door. (Thérèse was the uneven-featured twin, her face less balanced, less symmetrical, which made her appear slightly anxious. There was one in every set, Delia had noticed.) For a moment the jar seemed suspended, but then it arrived safely in Marie-Claire’s outstretched hands. “Do Ramsay and Carroll have sweethearts too?” she asked.

“Well, Ramsay does, I’m sorry to say.”

“How come you’re sorry?” Thérèse asked, and Marie-Claire said, “What’s wrong with her?”-the two of them so alert for scandal that Delia laughed aloud. Thérèse wheeled and said, “Are you sorry too, Aunt Delia? Do you forbid her to darken your door? Is she coming to the beach with us?”

“No, she’s not,” Delia said, answering only the easiest question. “The beach is just a family trip.”

They were leaving for a week at the beach early the following morning, a Sunday. It had come to be an annual event. In mid-June, as soon as the schools closed, Linda arrived from Michigan and they all took off for a cottage they rented on the Delaware shore. Already the front porch was heaped with rubber rafts and badminton rackets; the freezer was stuffed with casseroles; and Sam’s patients were thronging in for lastminute consultations in hopes of avoiding any contact with his backup.

“Delia, could you get the sugar?” Eliza asked. She was running water into the pitcher. “And girls, I’d like five tumblers from that cabinet to your right.”

While Delia was measuring sugar, she secretly checked the clock on the wall above her. Ten minutes till four. She glanced at the twins and cleared her throat. “If Susie isn’t back by the time you finish your lemonade, maybe I could take you to the pool,” she said.

Linda said, “You?” and the twins said, in a single voice, “You hate to swim!”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t actually go in. I’d just drive you over, and then Susie could pick you up later.”

Eliza clinked ice into the tumblers. Linda took a seat at the head of the table, and the twins claimed the chairs on either side of her. When Delia placed the pitcher of lemonade in front of them, Marie-Claire cried, “Ick! It’s full of shreddy things!”

“Those are good for you,” Linda said as she started pouring.

“And big seeds besides!”

“They won’t hurt you.”

“That’s what she says,” Thérèse told Marie-Claire in an ominous tone. “Really they’ll take root in your stomach and grow lemon trees out your ears.”

“Oh, honestly, Thérèse,” Linda said.

Ignoring her, the twins gazed significantly across the table at each other. Finally Marie-Claire said, “I guess we’re not thirsty after all.”

“We’ll just go change into our swimsuits,” Thérèse added.

They scooted their chairs back and raced out of the kitchen.

“Ah, me,” Linda sighed. “Sorry, Lize.”

“That’s all right,” Eliza said stiffly.

There were times when Delia realized, for an instant, that Eliza was what they used to call an old maid. She looked so forlorn in her eccentric weekend outfit of safari suit and clunky shoes; she pulled out a chair with her head down, her chopped black hair falling forward to hide her expression, and she seated herself and folded her small hands resolutely on the table.

“Well, I’m thirsty!” Delia said loudly, and she sat down too and reached for one of the tumblers. From the hall she heard a series of thumps-the twins’ suitcase, no doubt, being hauled up the stairs. Apparently they still planned to room with Susie, if the creaks that began overhead were any indication.

Outside the open window, a workman’s bearded face popped into view. He looked at the women, blinked, and disappeared. Delia and Linda saw him, but Eliza, who had her back to him, did not. “What is he up to, anyhow?” Linda asked.

Eliza said, “He? Who?”

“The workman,” Delia explained.

“No, not the workman,” Linda said. “I meant Sam. Why is he having all the shrubs torn out?”

“Well, they’re old and straggly, he says.”

“Can’t he just cut them back or something? And central air-conditioning! This house is not the type for air-conditioning.”

“I’m sure we’ll appreciate it once the weather heats up,” Eliza said. “Have some lemonade, Linda.”

Linda took a tumbler, but she didn’t drink from it. “I’d just like to know where he found the money,” she said darkly. “Plus: this house is in our three names, not his. We’re the ones Dad left it to.”

Delia glanced toward the window. (She suspected the workman of lurking beneath it, absorbed as all workmen seemed to be in other people’s private lives.) “Goodness!” she said. “We’d better get to the pool. Anybody want anything from Eddie’s?”

“Eddie’s?” Eliza asked.

“I might stop for some fruit on my way home.”

“Delia, have you forgotten Sam’s mother is coming to dinner? And you still have the Medicare bills to see to! Why don’t I take the twins, instead, and then go to Eddie’s after.”

“No! Please!” Delia said. “I mean, I have plenty of time. And besides, I need to choose the fruit myself because I’m not sure what I-”

She was offering too many explanations-always a mistake. Linda didn’t notice, but Eliza could read her mind, Delia sometimes thought, and she was watching Delia consideringly. “Anyhow,” Delia said. “I’ll see you both in a while. Okay?” And she stood up. Already she heard the twins racketing down the stairs. “Hand me my purse, will you?” she asked. Eliza was still watching her, but she reached for Delia’s purse on the counter and passed it over.

In the hall, the twins were quarreling over a pair of goggles they must have liberated from the beach equipment. They wore identical skinny knit swimsuits in different colors-one red, one blue-and a red-and-blue flip-flop apiece on their long, pale, knobby feet. Neither one had a towel, but the towels were upstairs and so Delia didn’t remind them. “Let’s go,” she told them. “I’m parked out front.” From the kitchen, Linda called, “You do what the lifeguard tells you, girls, hear?”

Delia followed them across the porch, avoiding the shaft of a beach umbrella. Beside the steps, a young man in a red bandanna was hacking at the roots of an azalea bush. He straightened, wiped his face on his forearm, and gave them a grin. “Wisht I was going swimming,” he said.

“Come with us, then,” Thérèse said, but Marie-Claire told her, “Dope, you can see he’s not wearing his bathing suit.” They skipped ahead of Delia down the walk, chanting a routine that she remembered from her childhood:

“Well, that’s life.”

“What’s life?”

“Fifteen cents a copy.”

“But I only have a dime.”

“Well, that’s life.”

“What’s life?”

“Fifteen cents a…”

The weather was perfect, sunny and not too warm, but Delia’s car had been sitting at the curb collecting heat all day. Both girls squealed as they slid across the back seat. “Could you turn on the air-conditioning?” they asked Delia.

“I don’t have air-conditioning.”

“Don’t have air-conditioning!”

“Just open your windows,” she told them, rolling down her own. She started the engine and pulled into the street. The steering wheel was almost too hot to touch.

You could tell it was a weekend, because so many joggers were out. And people were at work in their yards, running their mowers or their hedge trimmers, filling the air with a visible green dust that made Thérèse (the allergic one) sneeze. At Wyndhurst the traffic light changed to amber, but Delia didn’t stop. She had a sense of time slipping away from her. She took the long downhill slope at a good ten miles above the speed limit, and screeched left on Lawndale and parked in the first available space. The twins were in a hurry themselves; they tore ahead of her to the gate, and even before she paid for them they had disappeared among the other swimmers.

Driving back up the hill, she kept plucking at the front of her blouse and blowing toward the damp frizz sticking to her forehead. If only she could stop by home and freshen up a bit! But she would never manage to escape her sisters a second time. She turned south, not so much as glancing northward to Eddie’s. She traveled through a blessedly cool corridor of shade trees, and when she reached Bouton Road she parked beneath a maple. Before she got out, she blotted her face on a tissue from her purse. Then she walked through Adrian ’s front yard and climbed the porch steps and rang the doorbell.

By now the dog knew her well enough so he merely roused himself from the mat to nose her skirt. “Hi, Butch,” she said. She dabbed at his muzzle ineptly, at the same time backing off a bit. The front door opened, and Adrian said, “Finally!”

“I’m sorry,” she told him, stepping inside. “I couldn’t get away till Linda came, and wouldn’t you know her plane was late, and then of course I had to make sure that she and the children were…”

She was talking too much, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. These first few minutes were always so awkward. Adrian took her purse from her and set it on a chair, and she fell silent. Then he bent and kissed her. She supposed she must taste of salt. They had not been kissing for very long-at least not like this, so seriously. They had started with the breeziest peck on the cheek, pretending to be just friends; then day by day more parts of them became involved-their lips, their open mouths, their arms around each other, their bodies pressing closer until Delia (it was always Delia) drew back with a little laugh and a “Well!” and some adjustment of her clothes. “Well! Did you get much work done?” she asked now. He was looking down at her, smiling. He wore khakis and a faded blue chambray shirt that matched his eyes. Over these past few weeks of sunshine his hair had turned almost golden, so that it seemed to give off a light of its own as he stood in the dark hallway-one more detail to make her spin away abruptly and walk on into the house as if she had some business to attend to.

Adrian ’s house always struck her as only marginally inhabited, which was odd because until three months ago his wife had lived here too. Why, then, did the rooms have this feeling of long-term indifference and neglect? The living room, viewed from the hall, never enticed her inside. Its walls were bare except for a single bland still life above the mantel, and instead of a couch, three chairs stood at offended-looking angles to each other. The tabletops bore only what was useful-a lamp, a telephone; none of the decorative this-and-thats that would have taken the chill off.

“I finished printing out the Adwater piece,” Adrian was saying. “I thought you might look it over and tell me what you think.”

He was leading her up the narrow stairway and across the hall, into an area that must once have been called the conservatory or the sunroom. Now it was his office. Cloudy windows lined three walls, their sills piled high with papers. Along the fourth wall ran a built-in desk that held various pieces of computer equipment. This was where Adrian produced his newsletter. Subscribers from thirty-four states paid actual money for Hurry Up, Please, a quarterly devoted to the subject of time travel. Its cover was a glossy sky blue, its logo an arched wooden mantel clock on spoked wheels. Each issue contained an assortment of science fiction and nonfiction, as well as reviews of time-machine novels and time-machine movies, and even an occasional cartoon or joke. In fact, was this whole publication a joke, or was it for real? Reading the letters to the editor, Delia often wondered. Many of the subscribers seemed to believe in earnest. At least a few claimed to speak from personal experience. And she detected an almost anthropological tone to the article Adrian handed her now-an essay by one Charles L. Adwater, Ph.D., proposing that the quality known as “charisma” was merely the superior grace and dash found in visitors from the future who are sojourning in the present. Consider, Dr. Adwater wrote, how easily you and I would navigate the 1940s, which today seems a rather naive period, by and large, and one in which a denizen of our own decade could hope to make a considerable impact with relatively little effort.

“Would you say the 1940s seem?” Adrian asked. “Either one has arguments for and against it.”

Delia didn’t answer. She paced the room as she read, chewing her lower lip, squinting at draft-quality print as dotty and sparse as the scabs on an old brier scratch. “Well…,” she said, and pretending absent-mindedness, she wandered out to the hall while she flipped to the second page.

Adrian followed. “In my opinion, Adwater’s style is kind of stuffy,” he was saying, “but I can’t suggest too many changes because he’s one of the biggest names in the field.”

How would you make a name for yourself in the time-travel field? Delia was intrigued, but only briefly. Her visit to Adrian ’s office was a ruse, in fact, as even Adrian must know. It was being upstairs that mattered: roaming the second floor, the bedroom floor, and peeking through each doorway. Adrian slept in a drab little dressing room; he had moved there after Rosemary left him, so Delia felt free to stroll into the master bedroom while flipping to page three. She went over to stand near a bureau-just trying to get more reading light from the window above it, she could argue. Behind her, Adrian straightened her collar. His fingers made a whispery sound. “Why do you always wear a necklace?” he asked, very close to her ear.

“Hmm?” she said in a small voice. She turned another page, blindly.

“You always wear a string of pearls, or a cameo, or today this heart-shaped locket. Always something snug around your throat, and these little round innocent collars.”

“It’s only habit,” she said, but her thoughts were racing. Did he mean that she looked silly, unsuited to her age?

He had never asked how old she was, and although she wouldn’t have lied to him, she didn’t feel any need to volunteer the truth. When he’d told her that he himself was thirty-two, she had said, “Thirty-two! Young enough to be my son!”-a deliberate exaggeration, calculated to make him laugh. She had not mentioned the ages of her children, even. Nor had he inquired, for like most childless people, he seemed ignorant of the enormous space that children occupy in a life.

Also, he had a slightly skewed image of her husband. She could tell from some of his remarks that he was picturing Sam as beefy and athletic (because he jogged) and perhaps possessed of a jealous disposition. And Delia had not set him straight.

All it would take was bringing the two men together once-inviting Adrian for supper, say, as a neighbor left wifeless and forced to cook for himself-and the situation would lose all its potential for drama. Sam would start referring to “your pal Bly-Brice,” in that sardonic way of his; the children would roll their eyes if she talked to him too long on the phone. But Delia made no move to arrange such a meeting. She had not so much as spoken his name to anyone in her family. And when Adrian ’s hands left her collar to settle on both her shoulders and draw her closer, she didn’t resist but tipped her head back to rest it against his chest. “You’re such a little person,” he said. She heard the rumble of his voice within his rib cage. “You’re so little and dainty and delicate.”

Compared with his wife, she supposed he meant; and the notion pulled her upright. She walked away from him, briskly realigning pages. She circled the bed (Rosemary’s bed! covered with a rather seedy sateen quilt) and approached the closet. “What I want to know,” she said over her shoulder, “is can you really make a living this way? Because a magazine like yours is kind of specialized, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I’m not so much as breaking even,” Adrian told her offhandedly. “Pretty soon I’ll have to fold, I guess. Switch to something new. But I’m used to that. Before this, I published a bulletin for rotisserie-baseball owners.”

The closet was filled with Rosemary’s clothes-tops, then dresses, then pants, so there was an orderly progression from short to long; and they hung evenly spaced, not bunched together as in Delia’s closet. According to Adrian, Rosemary had abandoned every single one of her possessions when she left. All she took was the black silk jumpsuit she was wearing and a slim black purse tucked under her arm. Why did Delia find that so alluring? This was not the first time she had stood mesmerized in front of Rosemary’s closet.

“And before that,” Adrian said, “I had a quarterly for M^* A^* S^* H fans.” He was behind her again. He reached out one finger to stroke the point of her bent elbow.

Delia said, “How’ve you been supporting yourself all this time?”

“Well, Rosemary had a bit of an inheritance.”

She closed the closet door. She said, “Did you know that before you married her?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Lately I’ve been wondering if Sam married me for my father’s practice,” she said.

She shouldn’t have told him. Adrian would look at her and think, Yes, she is rather homely, and her elbows are chapped besides.

But he smiled and said, “If it were me, I’d have married you for your freckles.”

She went over to Rosemary’s side of the bed. She knew it was Rosemary’s because a blown-glass perfume bottle sat next to the lamp. First she laid Dr. Adwater’s article on the nightstand, and then, as if it were the logical next step, she opened the little drawer underneath. She gazed into a clutter of manicure scissors, emery boards, and nail polish bottles.

How fitting, the name Rosemary! Rosemary was such a sophisticated herb, so sharp-tasting, almost chemical. Put too much in a recipe, and you’d swear you were eating a petroleum product. There was nothing plain about it, nothing mild or dull. Nothing freckled.

Adrian came up behind her. He turned her to face him and wrapped his arms around her, and this time she didn’t move away but set her hands at his waist and strained upward to meet his kisses. He kissed her mouth, her eyelids, her mouth once more. He whispered, “Lie down with me, Delia.”

Then the phone rang.

He didn’t seem to hear it; he never heard it. And he never answered it. He said it was his mother-in-law, who liked him better than she liked her own daughter and was always trying to get them back together. “How do you know it’s not Rosemary?” Delia once asked, and Adrian, shrugging, said, “The telephone isn’t Rosemary’s instrument of choice.” Now he didn’t flinch, didn’t even tense. Delia would have felt it if he had. He kissed the curve where her neck met her shoulder, and she began to notice the bed pressing the backs of her knees. But the phone continued to ring. Ten rings, eleven. Subconsciously, she must be counting. The realization enabled her, somehow, to pull away, although she felt that she was dragging her limbs through water. “Oh, my,” she said, out of breath, and she made a great business of tucking her blouse more securely into her skirt. “I really should be… did I leave my purse downstairs?”

He was out of breath too. He didn’t speak. She said, “Yes, I remember! On the chair. I have to hurry; Sam’s mother is coming to dinner.”

Meanwhile she was clattering down the stairs. The extension phone in the living room was on its fourteenth ring. Its fifteenth. She reached the front hall and seized her purse and turned at the door to say, “You know we’re leaving tomorrow for-”

“You never stay,” he said. “You’re always rushing off as soon as you get here.”

“Oh, well, I-”

“What are you afraid of?”

I’m afraid of getting undressed in front of someone thirty-two years old, she did not say. She smiled up at him, falsely. She said, “I’ll see you after the beach, I guess.”

“Can’t you ever manage a solid block of time? A whole night? Can’t you tell them you’re visiting one of your girlfriends?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” she said.

She really didn’t, come to think of it. When she married Sam she had switched generations and left everyone behind, all her old high-school classmates. “Although it’s true there’s Bootsy Fisher,” she said. (Whom Sam called Bootsy Officious: the thought rose out of nowhere.) “Her kids and mine used to carpool.”

“Can’t you say you’re at Bootsy’s?”

“Oh, no, I don’t see how I-”

And then, because she guessed from the way his mouth seemed to soften that he was about to kiss her again, she gave him a fluttery wave and hurried out the door, nearly tripping over Butch on the mat.

Funny, she thought, as she settled herself in her car, how often lately her high-school days came to mind. It must be this dizzy, damp, rumpled feeling as she rushed home from secret meetings; her telltale flushed cheeks, the used and smushed look of her lips when she risked a glance in the rearview mirror. At a stop sign she made sure that all her buttons were buttoned, and she patted her locket into place between her collarbones. Once again she heard Adrian say, “Why do you always wear a necklace?” And then, “Lie down with me, Delia,” and just as in her high-school days, she felt stirred even more by the memory than by the event itself. If she hadn’t already been seated, her legs might have buckled.

Maybe she could say she was visiting Bootsy. Not for a whole night, of course, but for an evening. Certainly no one in her family would bother checking up on her.

She parked in the driveway, which was clear now of all cars except for Sam’s. Smoke billowed from the yard on the other side of the house. He must be firing up the grill for dinner.

She followed the trail of smoke to the little flagstone rectangle beneath the office windows. Yes, there he was, peering at the grill’s thermometer with his glasses raised. He still wore his shirt and tie and his suit trousers, minus his white coat. He looked so professional that Delia felt a flash of anxiety. Didn’t he know everything? But when he straightened, lowering his glasses, all he said was, “Hi, Dee. Where’ve you been?”

“Oh, I was… running a few errands,” she said.

She was amazed that he didn’t ask why, then, she had returned empty-handed. He just nodded and tapped the thermometer with his index finger.

Climbing the steps to the kitchen door, she felt like a woman emerging from a deep, thick daytime sleep. She walked past Eliza and drifted toward the hall. “Are you going to grill the vegetables too? Or put them in the oven?” Eliza called after her.

There wouldn’t be space for them on the grill. They would have to go in the oven, and she meant to say as much to Eliza but forgot, lost the words, and merely floated into the study. It was unoccupied, thank heaven. She didn’t believe she could have waited till she reached the phone upstairs. She lifted the receiver, dialed Adrian ’s number, let his phone ring twice, and then hung up-her way of letting him know that this was not his mother-in-law. She redialed, and he answered halfway through the first ring. “Is that you?” he asked. His voice sounded urgent, intense. She sank onto a footstool and gripped the receiver more tightly.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Come back here, Delia.”

“I wish I could.”

“Come back and stay with me.”

“I want to. I do want to,” she said.

Sam’s mother said, “Delia?”

Delia slammed the phone down and jumped to her feet. “Eleanor!” she cried. She thrust her hands in the folds of her skirt to hide their tremor. “I was just-I was just-”

“Sorry to barge in,” Eleanor said, “but nobody answered the door.” She advanced to kiss the air near Delia’s ear. She smelled of soap; she was an unperfumed, unfrilled woman, sensibly clad in a drip-dry shirt-dress and Nikes, with a handsome face and clipped white monkish hair. “Didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation.”

“No, I was just winding it up,” Delia told her.

“It appears that someone has left some articles on your front porch.”

“Articles?”

Delia had a fleeting vision of Dr. Adwater’s article on charisma.

“Badminton sets and rafts and such, scattered all about where anyone might stumble on them.”

Eleanor was the kind of guest who felt it her duty to point out alarming flaws in the household. How long had their toilet been making that noise? Did they know they had a tree limb about to come down? Delia always countered by pretending that she was a guest herself. “Imagine that!” she said. “Let me take you to Sam. He’s out by the grill.”

“Now, I thought you weren’t going to any fuss,” Eleanor told her, leading the way from the study. Instead of a purse, she had one of those belt packs, glow-in-the-dark chartreuse nylon, riding in front of her stomach like some sort of add-on pregnancy. It caused her to walk slightly swaybacked, although ordinarily her posture was perfect.

“I’m only serving grilled chicken,” Delia said as they crossed the hall. “Nothing complicated.”

“Tinned soup would have been plenty,” Eleanor said. She eyed a browning apple core centered on the newel post. “Particularly in view of all you need to do for your beach trip.”

Did she mean this as a reproach? Every year, Sam suggested inviting his mother along to the beach, and every year Delia talked him out of it, which was why they always held this placatory family dinner the night before they left. It wasn’t that Delia disliked his mother. She knew that Eleanor was admirable. She knew that she herself would never have coped so magnificently in Eleanor’s circumstances-widowed early, forced to take a secretarial job to support herself and her young son. (And to hear Sam tell it, his father had not been much use anyhow-a weak and ineffectual, watery sort of man.) The trouble was, in Eleanor’s presence Delia felt so inadequate. She felt so frivolous and spendthrift and disorganized. Their vacation was the one time she could hope to shake off that feeling.

Besides, she couldn’t imagine the Iron Mama lolling on a beach towel.

“Did Linda get here?” Eleanor was asking as they entered the kitchen. “Are the twins just huge? Where are they all?”

It was Eliza, standing at the sink, who answered. “The twins are at the pool,” she said. “Linda just left with Susie to fetch them home. How’re you doing, Eleanor?”

“Oh, couldn’t be better. Is that asparagus I see? Delia, my word, do you know what asparagus costs?”

“I found some on sale,” Delia lied. “I’m going to roast it in the oven in this new way, really simple. No fuss,” she added craftily.

“Well, if your idea of simple is asparagus and roast squab!”

“Chicken, actually.”

“Just an old withered carrot would have been good enough for me,” Eleanor said.

She headed for the back door, with Delia meekly shadowing her.

In the side yard, Sam was tinkering with the grill knobs. “Looks about the right temperature,” he told Delia. “Hello, Mother. Good to see you.”

“What’s going on with the shrubbery, son?” Eleanor asked, looking past him.

“We’re having it taken out,” he said. “Putting in a whole new bunch of plantings.”

“Why, that must cost a fortune! Couldn’t you just work with what you had, for gracious sake?”

“We wanted totally new,” Sam told her. (We? Delia thought.) “We’re tired of working with what we had. Dee, believe I’m ready to start cooking.”

As Delia walked toward the house, she heard Eleanor say, “Well, I don’t know, son. This life of yours seems mighty rich for my blood, what with asparagus for dinner and grilled pheasant.”

“Chicken!” Delia called back.

Eliza must have heard too, for she was grinning to herself when Delia opened the screen door. “You bring it to him,” Delia told her. “I can’t stand another minute.”

“Oh, now, you take her too much to heart,” Eliza said as she went over to the refrigerator. Eliza seemed to find Eleanor merely amusing. But then, Eliza wasn’t Eleanor’s daughter-in-law. She didn’t have Eleanor held up before her daily as a paragon of thrift, with her professional-quality tool chest and her twelve-column budget book and her thrice-used, washed-and-dried sandwich bags.

Did it ever occur to Sam that Delia and his father might well have been kindred spirits?

She gathered up the silverware, ten of everything, and went into the dining room. Here the sounds from the yard were muted, and she could let her mind return to Adrian. She traveled around the table, doling out knives and forks and remembering the rustle of Adrian ’s fingers on her collar, his warm breath when he kissed her. But she could no longer truly feel the kiss, she discovered. Eleanor’s interruption must have startled all feeling out of her, as in the old days when the telephone rang while she and Sam were making love and she had lost her place, so to speak, and not been able to fall back into it afterward.

She returned to the kitchen and found Eliza pondering in front of the glassware cupboard. “Which do we want?” Eliza asked her. “Iced tea or wine?”

“Wine,” Delia answered promptly.

From the side yard, Eleanor’s confident voice came sailing: “Have you checked the price of asparagus lately?”

“Pretty steep, is it,” Sam said equably.

“Sky-high,” Eleanor told him. “But that’s what we’re having for dinner tonight: asparagus and grilled peacock.”

Eliza was the only one who laughed.

Supper was late, for one reason or another. First Linda and Susie took forever bringing the twins from the pool, and then Ramsay didn’t appear till seven although he’d promised faithfully to be home by six, and when he did show up he had his girlfriend in tow and her wan and silent six-year-old daughter. This enthralled the twins, of course, but Delia was furious. It had been understood that tonight would be strictly family. However, she didn’t have quite what it took to face Ramsay down in public. Seething inwardly, she scrunched two extra, mismatched place settings in among the others before she called everyone to the table.

Velma, the girlfriend, was a tiny, elfin woman with a cap of glassy hair and a pert little figure set off by trim white shorts. Delia could see what her appeal was, sort of. For one thing, when she entered the dining room she went straight to one of the orphan place settings, as if she were accustomed to existing on the edges of events. And for another, she was so inexhaustibly vivacious that even Carroll-surly Carroll-brightened in her presence, and Sam made a point of giving her the largest piece of chicken. (“Got to put some meat on your bones,” he said-not his type of remark at all.) Then she endeared herself to Linda by marveling at the twins’ names. “I’m crazy about things that sound French-I guess you can tell from me naming my daughter Rosalie,” she said. “Shoot, I’d like to go to France. The furtherest I’ve been is Hagerstown a few times for hair shows.”

Velma was a beautician. She worked in one of those unisex places, which was how she and Ramsay had met. He had come in for a haircut and invited her on the spot to a tea at the house of his freshman adviser. Now he sat proudly next to her, one arm resting on the back of her chair, and beamed around the table at his family. Short though he was (he took after Delia’s father), he seemed manly and imposing alongside Velma.

“Although last fall I did attend a color conference in Pittsburgh,” Velma was recalling. “I stayed overnight and left Rosalie with my mother.”

Rosalie, perched behind the other odd plate, raised her enormous, liquid eyes and gave Velma a look that struck Delia as despairing.

“Everybody in our whole entire shop has been trained to do your colors,” Velma went on. Was she speaking to Eleanor, of all people? Eleanor nodded encouragingly, wearing her most gracious expression.

“Some people ought to wear cool colors and some people ought to wear warm,” Velma told her, “and they should never, ever cross over, though you’d be shocked at how many try.”

“Would that be determined by temperament, dear?” Eleanor asked.

“Ma’am?”

But Eleanor was sidetracked just then by the plate that Sam was filling for her. “Oh, mercy, Sam,” she said, “not such a great big helping!”

“I thought you asked for a breast.”

“Well, I did, but just a little one. That one’s way too big for me.”

He forked another and held it up. “This okay?”

“Oh, that’s huge!”

“Well, there’s nothing smaller, Mother.”

“Can’t you just cut it in half? I could never manage to eat all that.”

He put it back on the platter to cut it.

“This one lady,” Velma told the others, “she was wearing pink when she came in and I’m like, ’Lady, you are so, so wrong. You should be all in cools,’ I tell her, ’with the tone of skin you got.’ She says, ’Oh, but that’s why I head for warm.’ Says, ’I go for what’s my opposite.’ I could not believe her. I really could not believe her.”

“Sam, dear, that’s about six times as much asparagus as I can possibly handle,” Eleanor said.

“It’s three spears, Mother. How can I give you a sixth of that?”

“I just want a half a spear, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“You, now,” Velma told Eliza, “you would look stunning in magenta. With your coal-black hair? That tan color doesn’t do a thing for you.”

“However, I’m partial to tan,” Eliza said in her declarative way.

“And Susie, I bet you had your colors done already. Right? That aqua’s real becoming.”

“It was the only thing not in the laundry,” Susie said. But she was fighting down a pleased expression around the mouth.

“I dress Rosalie in nothing but aqua, just about. She turns washed out in any other color.”

“Sam, I hate to be a nuisance,” Eleanor said, “but I’m going to send my plate back to you so you can take a teensy little bit of that potato salad off and give it to someone else.”

“Well, why not just keep it, Mother.”

“But it’s much too large a helping, dear.”

“Then eat what you can and leave the rest, why don’t you.”

“Now, you know how I hate to waste food.”

“Oh, just force yourself to choke the damn stuff down, then, Mother!”

“Goodness,” Eleanor said.

The telephone rang.

Delia said, “Carroll, would you answer that? If it’s a patient, tell them we’re eating.”

Not that she imagined a patient could be so easily dissuaded.

Carroll slouched off to the kitchen, muttering something about the grown-ups’ phone, and Delia took a bite of her drumstick. It was dry and stringy as old bark from being kept warm in the oven too long.

“For you, Mom,” Carroll said, poking his head through the door.

“Well, see who it is and ask if I can call back.”

“He says it’s about a time machine.”

“Oh!”

Sam said, “Time machine?”

“I’ll just be a minute,” Delia said, setting aside her napkin.

“Someone wants to sell you a time machine?” Sam asked her.

“No! Not that I know of. Or, I don’t know…” She sank back in her seat. “Tell him we don’t need a thing,” she told Carroll.

Carroll withdrew his head.

It seemed to Delia that her one bite of chicken was stuck halfway down her throat. She picked up the basket of rolls and said, “Thérèse? Marie-Claire? Take one and pass them on, please.”

When Carroll returned to the table, she didn’t so much as glance at him. She sent the butter plate after the rolls, and only then looked up to face Eliza’s steady gaze.

It was Eliza she had to watch out for. Eliza was uncanny sometimes.

“This china belonged to your great-grandmother,” Linda was telling the twins. “Cynthia Ramsay, her name was. She was a famous Baltimore beauty, and the whole town wondered why she ever said yes to that short, stumpy nobody, Isaiah Felson. But he was a doctor, you see, and he promised that if she married him she would never get TB. See, just about her whole family had died of TB. So sure enough, she married him and moved out to Roland Park and stayed healthy as a horse all her days and bore two healthy children besides, one of them your grandpa. You remember your grandpa.”

“He wouldn’t let us roller-skate in the house.”

“Right. Anyhow, your great-grandmother ordered her wedding china all the way from Europe, these very plates you are eating from tonight.”

“Except for Rosalie,” Marie-Claire said.

“What, sweet?”

“Rosalie’s plate is not wedding china.”

“No, Rosalie’s comes from Kmart,” Linda said, and she passed the butter to Eleanor, not noticing how Rosalie’s eyes started growing even more liquid.

“Heavens, no butter for me, dear,” Eleanor said.

Why had he phoned her? Delia wondered. How unlike him. He must have had something crucial to tell her. She should have taken the call.

She would go to the kitchen for water or something and call him back.

Grabbing the water pitcher, she stood up, and just then the doorbell rang. She froze. Her first, heart-pounding thought was that this was Adrian. He had come to take her away; he would no longer listen to reason. A whole scenario played itself out rapidly in her mind-her family’s bewilderment as she allowed herself to be led from the house, her journey through the night with him (in a horse-drawn carriage, it seemed), and their blissful life together in a sunlit, whitewashed room on some Mediterranean shore. Meanwhile Sam was saying, “I’ve told them and told them…,” and he rose and strode out to the hall, apparently assuming that this was a patient. Well, maybe it was. Delia remained on her feet, straining to hear. One of the twins said, “Rosalie’s napkin is plain old paper,” and Delia had an urge to bat her voice away physically.

It was a woman. An elderly, querulous woman, saying something unintelligible. So. A patient after all. Delia felt more relieved than she would have expected. She said, “Well! Anybody want anything from the kitchen?” But before she could turn to go, Sam was ushering in his visitor.

Easily past seventy, doughy and wrinkled beneath her heap of dyed black curls and her plastering of red rouge and dark-red lipstick, the woman advanced on absurdly small, open-toed shoes that barely poked forth from the hem of her shapeless black dress. She was clutching a drawstring purse in both fat, ringed hands, and diamond teardrops swung from her long earlobes. All of this Delia somehow took in while at the same time registering Sam’s astonished face just beyond the woman’s shoulder. “ Dee?” he said. “This person’s saying-”

The woman asked, “Are you Mrs. Delia Grinstead?”

“Well, yes.”

“I want you to leave my daughter’s husband alone.”

Around the table there was a sort of snapping to attention. Delia sensed it, even though she forced her eyes to remain on the woman. She said, “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”

“You know who I mean! My son-in-law, Adrian Bly-Brice. Or don’t you even keep track? Have you collected so many paramours you can’t tell one from another?”

Somebody snickered. Ramsay. Delia felt slightly affronted by this, but she made herself focus on the issue at hand. She said, “Mrs., um, really I…”

She hated how little-girlish her voice came out.

“That is a happy marriage you’re destroying,” the old woman told her. She was stationed now at the far end of the table, just behind Sam’s empty chair. She glared at Delia from underneath lashes so thickly beaded with mascara that they shaded her face like awnings. “They may have their ups and downs, like any other young couple,” she said, “but they’re trying to work things out, I tell you! They’re dating again, has he mentioned that? Twice they’ve gone to dinner at the restaurant where they got engaged. They’re thinking it might help if they started a baby. But every time I look out of my house, what do I find? Your car, parked across the street. You at his front door kissing him, all over him, can’t get enough of him, going up the stairs with him to paw him at his bedroom window for all the neighbors to gawk at.”

Adrian ’s mother-in-law lived across the street from him?

Delia felt burning hot. She sensed the others’ thunderstruck expressions.

Sam said, quietly, “Delia, do you know anything about this?”

“No! Nothing!” she cried. “She’s making it up! She’s confused me with somebody else!”

“Then what’s this?” the old woman asked, and she started tweaking at her purse. The drawstring was held tight by some sort of sliding clasp, and it took her whole minutes, it seemed, to work it loose, while everybody watched in riveted silence. Delia realized she had not released a breath in some time. She was prepared for absolutely anything to emerge from that purse-something steamy and lurid and reeking of sex, although what would that be, precisely? But all the old woman brought forth in the end was a photograph. “See? See?” she demanded, and she held it up and swung slowly from left to right.

It was a Polaroid snapshot, so underexposed that it amounted to no more than a square of mangled darkness. But not till Ramsay snickered once again did Delia understand that she was safe.

“Now, there,” Sam was saying, “don’t you worry, I’m sure your daughter is very happily married…” In the most chivalrous fashion, he was turning the old woman toward the door. “May I see you to your car?” he asked.

“Oh. Well… yes, maybe… yes, maybe so,” she said. She was still fumbling with her purse, but she let him guide her out. She walked beneath the shelter of his arm in a dazed, uncertain manner that filled Delia with sudden pity.

“Who was that?” Marie-Claire asked distinctly.

Ramsay said, “Oh, just somebody for your aunt Delia; you know what a siren she is,” and everybody stirred and chuckled.

It was perverse of her, she knew, but for one split second Delia actually considered confessing, just to show them. She didn’t, of course. She smiled around the table and sat back down and placed the water pitcher on her left. “Who’s for more chicken?” she asked, and she looked brazenly into Eliza’s measuring eyes.

It was Susie’s night to do the dishes, and Eleanor said she would help. She wouldn’t think of letting Delia lift a finger, she said, after that extravagant meal. So Delia backed out of the kitchen, pretending reluctance, but instead of heading toward the porch with the others, she sped up the stairs and into her bedroom. She shut the door behind her, sat on the edge of the bed, and picked up the phone.

He answered almost instantly. She had braced herself to go through that whole two-ring rigmarole, but right away he said, “Hello?”

“ Adrian?”

“Oh, God, Delia, did she come?”

“She came.”

“I tried to warn you. I called your house, and even after your husband answered I went ahead and-”

“My husband answered? When?”

“Wasn’t that your husband?”

“Oh, Carroll. My son. At suppertime, you mean.”

“Yes, and I was hoping you would… That was your son?”

“Yes, my younger son. Carroll.”

“But he was so old.”

“Old? He’s not old!”

“He sounded like a grown man.”

“Well, he isn’t,” Delia said curtly. “ Adrian, why did you stand there kissing me in doors and windows when you knew your mother-in-law lived across the street?”

“So she did what she said she would, did she?”

“She came and told my family I had a ’paramour,’ if that’s what you mean.”

“Lord, Delia, what did they say?”

“I think they just thought she was crazy or something, but… Adrian. She claimed you were happily married.”

“Of course she did. You know she would want to believe that.”

“She claimed you and Rosemary have started dating; you’ve gone out together twice to the restaurant where you got engaged.”

“Well, that much is true.”

“It is?”

“Just to talk things over; sure. We do have a lot in common, after all. A lot of shared history.”

“I see.”

“But it wasn’t how you imagine. We met for dinner! Just to eat dinner!”

“And you’re thinking of starting a baby.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, naturally it came up.”

“Naturally?” Delia cried.

“I mean, Rosemary isn’t getting any younger.”

“No, that’s right, she must be all of thirty,” Delia said with some bitterness. She twined the telephone cord between her fingers. The connection was the kind with a rushing sound in the background, like long distance.

“Well, probably she’s not the maternal type, though, anyhow,” Adrian said cheerfully. “Weird, isn’t it? The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off. When Rosemary and I first met, she was so… cool, I guess you’d say, so cool-mannered I was bewitched, but now I see she might be too cool to be a good mother.”

“How about me?” Delia asked him.

“You?”

“What is it about me that attracts you but puts you off?”

“Oh, why, nothing, Delia. Why do you ask?”

“Nothing attracts you?”

“Oh! Well, maybe… well, when we met, you acted so fresh and sweet and childish, I mean childlike, you know? But then when we reached the point where most people would, for example, um, get more involved, you were still so damn sweet and childlike. Turning all flustered, saying you should leave: you’d think we were teenagers or something.”

“I see,” Delia said.

Adrian said, “Delia. Just how old is your son, anyway?”

“Ancient,” she told him. But it was herself she was referring to.

She hung up and walked out of the room.

Downstairs, she heard water running in the kitchen, and dishes clattering, and Eleanor saying, “Susie, dear, you’re not planning to discard that, surely.” Delia crossed the hall to stand at the screen door, gazing out toward the porch. She saw no sign of the boys, who had not stayed to talk after dinner in years; no sign of Velma or Rosalie. But Sam and Linda sat sniping at each other in the swing. “Some of those azaleas were planted by our grandfather,” Linda said, “not that that would be any concern of yours,” and Sam said, “Or yours either, unless you plan to start sharing a little of the burden here,” and Eliza, rocking in the cane rocker, said, “Oh, just quit it, both of you.” The twins were twirling on the front walk beneath the pole lamp, with grass blades stuck to their skin and white moths flickering above them. They had reached that high-pitched, overwrought state that seizes children outdoors on summer evenings, and they were chanting at breakneck speed:

“What’s life?”

“Fifteen cents a copy.”

“But I only have a dime.”

“Well, that’s life.”

“What’s life?”

“Fifteen cents a copy.”

“But I only have a dime.”