My Name Is Lucy Barton(10)

“Never came back,” I finished.

“I should say he never came back. I should say he indeed never came back. He dropped dead on the street, and Harriet had such a time trying to keep the state from taking those kids. He left her nothing, poor woman, I’m sure he didn’t expect to just die. They were living in Rockford by then—you know, it’s over an hour away—and she stayed there, I never knew why. But she would send the kids to us a few weeks each summer, once we were in the house. Oh, such sad-looking children. I’d always try and make Dottie a new dress to send her home with.”

Abel Blaine. His pants were too short, above his ankles, I remember, and kids laughed at him when we went into town, and he always smiled as though none of it mattered. His teeth were crooked and bad, but otherwise he was nice-looking; perhaps he knew that he was nice-looking. I think, really, his heart was just good. He was the one who taught me to search for food from the dumpster behind Chatwin’s Cake Shoppe. What was striking was the lack of furtiveness he displayed as he stood in the dumpster and tossed aside boxes until he found what he was looking for—the old cakes and rolls and pastries from days before. Neither Dottie nor my own sister and brother were ever with us, I don’t know where they were. After a few visits to Amgash, Abel did not come back; he had a job as an usher in a theater where he lived. He sent me one letter, and enclosed a brochure that showed the theater’s lobby; it was just beautiful, I remember, with many different colored tiles, ornate and gorgeous.

“Abel landed on his feet,” my mother told me.

“Tell me again,” I said.

“He managed to marry the daughter of someone he worked for; the boss’s-daughter story, I guess, is his story. He lives in Chicago, has for years,” my mother said. “His wife’s quite a hoity-toity and won’t have anything to do with poor Dottie, whose husband ran off with someone else a few years ago now. He was from the East, Dottie’s husband. You know.”

“No.”

“Well.” My mother sighed. “He was. Somewhere here along the Eastern Seaboard he came from—” My mother gave a small toss of her head toward the window as though to indicate this was where Dottie’s husband came from. “Thought he was just a tiny bit better than she was, probably. Wizzle, how can you live with no sky?”

“There’s sky.” But I added, “Except I know what you mean.”

“But how can you live without sky?”

“There’s people instead,” I said. “So tell me why.”

“Why what?”

“Why did Dottie’s husband run off?”

“How do I know? Oh, I guess I do know. He met some woman at the local hospital when he had his gallbladder out. Say, that’s almost like you!”

“Like me? You think I’m going to run off with Cookie or Serious Child?”

“You never know what attracts people to each other,” my mother answered. “But I don’t think he ran off with any Toothache.” My mother tilted her head in the direction of the door. “Though he may have run off with a child, I’m sure she’s not a serious child, you know, I mean—” My mother leaned forward to whisper, “Dark or whatever ours is, you know, Indian.” My mother sat back. “But I’m rather sure she’s younger than Dottie and more attractive. He left Dottie the house they lived in, and she’s turned it into a bed-and-breakfast. Doing all right, as far as I know. And Abel’s in Chicago doing more than all right, so good for poor Harriet after all. Well, I suppose she’d worried about Dottie. My word, Harriet worried about everyone. Not worrying now, though, I guess. She’s been dead for years. Like that, in her sleep one night. Not a bad way to go.”

I dozed on and off listening to my mother’s voice.

I thought: All I want is this.

—

But it turned out I wanted something else. I wanted my mother to ask about my life. I wanted to tell her about the life I was living now. Stupidly—it was just stupidity—I blurted out, “Mom, I got two stories published.” She looked at me quickly and quizzically, as if I had said I had grown extra toes, then she looked out the window and said nothing. “Just dumb ones,” I said, “in tiny magazines.” Still she said nothing. Then I said, “Becka doesn’t sleep through the night. Maybe she gets it from you. Maybe she’ll take catnaps too.” My mother kept looking out the window.

“But I don’t want her to not feel safe,” I added. “Mom, why didn’t you feel safe?”

My mother closed her eyes as though the very question might drop her into a nap, but I did not think for one minute she had gone to sleep.

After many moments she opened her eyes and I said to her, “I have a friend, Jeremy. He used to live in France, and his family was part of the aristocracy.”

My mother looked at me, then looked out the window, and it was a long time before she said, “So he says,” and I said, “Yes, so he says,” in a tone of apology, and in a way that let her know we need not discuss him—or my life—any further.

Right then, through my doorway, came the doctor. “Girls,” he said, and nodded. He went and shook my mother’s hand, as he had the day before. “How’s everyone today?” Immediately he swooshed the curtain around me and this separated me from my mother. I loved him for many reasons, and one reason was for that: how he made his visits private for the two of us. I could hear my mother’s chair move, and I knew she’d left the room. The doctor held my wrist to take my pulse, and when he gently lifted my hospital gown, in order to check the scar, as he did each day, I watched his hands, thick-fingered and lovely, his plain gold wedding band glinting, pressing gently on the area near the scar, and he looked into my face to see if it hurt. He asked by raising his eyebrows, and I’d shake my head. The scar was healing nicely. “Healing nicely,” he said, and I said, “Yes, I know.” And we’d smile because it seemed to mean something—that it was not the scar trying to keep me sick. The smile was our acknowledgment of something, is what I mean. I have always remembered this man, and for years I gave money to that hospital in his name. And I thought then, and I think now, still, of the phrase “the laying on of hands.”