Ladder of Years Read online

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 swimsui
ts 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.