French Braid(31)

And she saw him off with a smile, and waved as she closed the door.

The litter box did fit in the bathroom, but just barely, and it came with a plastic spatula gadget that she laid alongside it. Desmond’s water bowl and his food bowl—both unnecessarily large, in her opinion—had to be placed on the kitchen floor beside the counter, where they were clearly visible from anywhere in the studio. This violated her no-clutter policy. It made her unhappy. She told herself that in time she would stop seeing them, but this thought made her even unhappier.

Overall, though, Desmond turned out to be less intrusive than she’d feared. He wasn’t a nagger or a whiner; nor was he a lap cat. When she sat on the daybed he sat next to her, rather than on her. He lay curled up like a nautilus, purring. At night he slept between her ankles but on top of the covers, so that the only time she was aware of him was when she stirred her feet or turned over. Then she felt the warm weight of him holding down her blankets.

She developed the habit of talking to him while she was painting. Just brief remarks; no baby voice or anything like that. “Oh, shoot,” she would say. “Look what I’ve gone and done.” Or “What’s your opinion, Desmond? I’m worried this looks fussed over.” And Desmond would give her a measured stare before he went back to bathing his left shin.

Often as she was painting she found herself drifting back through her past like someone wandering through an old house. She thought of her father, who used to take her for neighborhood walks on Sundays when she was a child so that her mother, already an invalid, could get her rest. “Notice the rust stains below those eaves,” he would say. “Below Mrs. Webb’s eaves. I don’t know how often I’ve told her she needs to have her gutters cleaned.” And once, when it began to rain, “Have you ever wondered where rain comes from?” “No, not really,” she had said bluntly, but he had told her anyhow—all about evaporation, condensation…Now she saw that he had adored her, and she felt a deep wave of regret for her failure to realize that before.

She thought of Robin as he was when he was courting her, when he came by the store too often and made little trumped-up purchases just so he could catch a glimpse of her behind the counter. So bashful, he’d been; so tongue-tied and respectful. It was a fad back then for boys to address girls as “kiddo” and treat them with the cool amusement that Humphrey Bogart, say, displayed toward his leading ladies. But Robin had called Mercy “Miss Wellington” until she laughingly told him not to. Some of his pronunciations were backwoodsy—“strenth” instead of “strength,” for instance, and “ditten” instead of “didn’t”—but he took great care with his grammar, and he made a point of using longer words than he needed to. “I’m wondering if you might ever want to go on a social engagement,” he’d said. He meant a movie, it turned out; she couldn’t remember now which one. It was such a hot evening that once they were settled in their seats, she had drawn a small jar from her purse and plucked out a cotton disc soaked in toner and blotted her upper lip. Then, on second thought, she had tapped him on the arm and offered him the jar as well, and he had glanced at it in surprise and then taken a disc himself and popped it into his mouth. Mercy had looked quickly away, pretending not to see. She had worried he would try to swallow it so as to save face, but a moment later she sensed a surreptitious movement in the dark as he removed the disc from his mouth and, who knows, perhaps slipped it into his pocket or dropped it beneath his seat.

He had extremely blue eyes that seemed clearer than other people’s eyes. They made him look trustful and hopeful. His lips were distinctly etched, double-peaked at the center in a way that she found intriguing. He knew everything there was to know—instinctively, it seemed—about everything mechanical. In that respect, he was very like her father.

He took her down to Canton to meet his one close relative, a great-aunt whom he boarded with in a row house twelve feet wide. She was a sharp-faced, unsmiling woman who might have been daunting if she had not treated Mercy so deferentially. She insisted that Mercy should sit in the only comfortable chair, and she apologized several times over for the supper she served them—a pot of beet soup and then some kind of rolled-up cabbage leaves with ground meat inside. “I know it’s not what you’d call upper-class,” she said, and Mercy said, “Oh, goodness, my dad’s a storekeeper,” and Aunt Alice said, “I know.” Mercy had a sense of futility then, and in fact for as long as Aunt Alice lived—eight more years—she never seemed fully relaxed around Mercy. She attended their wedding, an understated, street-clothes affair, in a hat with a bird on it and a church dress more formal than the bride’s dress.

After Mercy and Robin were married they rented the upper floor of a little house in Hampden, and Mercy slipped into domestic life as if she had been born to it. Which she had, really. No one she knew back then imagined any occupation for wives besides keeping house and rearing children. When the war began and other women started going off to jobs, Mercy was already pregnant with Alice. Then, two years later, along came Lily, and Mercy no longer wondered what to do with herself. She was busy night and day; she felt panicky, sometimes, and Robin would not have thought of offering to help even if he had been around, which he seldom was. Sometimes it seemed they barely exchanged two words before they fell into bed at night, exhausted.