Ladder of Years Read online

  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 ot
hers, 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.”

  5

  It rained during their first evening at the beach, and their cottage roof turned out to have a leak. This was not a very fancy cottage, not an oceanfront, resort-style cottage, but a dumpy little house on the inland side of Highway 1. Delia could imagine an ordinary Delaware feed-store clerk living there until about a week ago. The kitchen sink was skirted in chintz, the living-room floor was blue linoleum squiggled to suggest a hooked rug, and all the beds sagged toward the middle and creaked at the slightest movement. Still, Sam said, they shouldn’t have to endure a puddle in the upstairs hall. He phoned the rental agent at once, using the after-hours emergency number, and insisted that the problem be seen to the first thing the following morning.

  “What,” Linda asked him, “do you have to have your crew of workmen even on vacation?”

  And Eliza said, “Let’s just mop it up and forget it. It surely won’t rain again while we’re here, because if it does I’m going to sue God.”

  Delia herself said nothing. She really couldn’t gather the strength.

  In their own house back in Baltimore, workmen would be using the week to sand down the floors and refinish them. This meant that Delia had had to bring the cat along. (He wouldn’t tolerate boarding—had nearly pined away the one time they had tried it.) Sam claimed they were sure to be evicted, since pets were expressly forbidden, but Delia told him that was impossible. How would anyone ever guess Vernon was there? For he’d been so incensed by the car trip that the instant he was set down in the cottage, he streaked to the back of a kitchen cabinet. Delia knew enough to leave him tactfully alone, but the twins wouldn’t rest, and after supper they hovered at the cabinet door with a plate of leftovers, trying to coax him out. “Here, Vernon! Nice Vernon.” His only response was that disheartening, numb silence cats seem to radiate when they’re determined to keep to themselves. “Oh,” Marie-Claire wailed, “what’ll we do? He’s going to starve to death!”

  “Good riddance,” Sam told her. “It’s only live pets that we’re not allowed.”

  Sam had been out of sorts all day, it seemed to Delia.

  So that first evening, when they should have been taking a stroll on the beach or walking into town for ice cream, the grown-ups sat in the kerosene-smelling, poorly lighted living room, reading tattered magazines left behind by earlier tenants and listening to the pecking of the rain against the windows. The twins were still in the kitchen, badgering Vernon. Susie and the boys had borrowed the Plymouth and driven to Ocean City, which made Delia anxious because she always pictured Ocean City as a gigantic arena of bumper cars manned by drunken college students. But she tried to keep her mind on American Deck and Patio.

  “If tomorrow isn’t sunny,” Linda said, “maybe we could take a little day trip out past Salisbury. I want the twins to get some sense of their heritage.”

  “Oh, Linda, not that damn cemetery again,” Eliza said.

  “Well, fine, then. Just lend me a car and I’ll take them myself. That’s what happened last year, as I recall.”

  “Yes, and last year both twins came back bored to tears and cranky. What do they care for a bunch of dead Carrolls and Webers?”

  “They had a wonderful time! And I’d like to find Great-Uncle Roscoe’s place too, if I can.”

&nbs
p; “Well, good hunting, is all I can say. I’m sure it’s a parking lot by now, and anyhow, Mother never got along with Uncle Roscoe.”

  “Eliza, why do you have to run me down at every turn?” Linda demanded. “Why is it that every little thing I propose you have to mock and denigrate?”

  “Now, ladies,” Sam said absently, leafing through Offshore Angler.

  Linda turned on him. She said, “Don’t you ’Now, ladies’ me, Sam Grinstead.”

  “Sorry,” Sam murmured.

  “Mr. Voice of Reason, here!”

  “My mistake.”

  She rose in a huff and went off to check the twins. Eliza closed her Yachting World and stared bleakly at the cover.

  Linda and Eliza were in their Day Two Mode, was how Delia always thought of it—that edgy, prickly stage after the first flush of Linda’s arrival had faded. Once, Delia had asked Eliza why she and Linda weren’t closer, and Eliza had said, “Oh, people who’ve shared an unhappy childhood rarely are close, I’ve found.” Delia was surprised. Their childhood had been unhappy? Hers had been idyllic. But she refrained from saying so.

  Linda returned with the twins, who were still fretting over Vernon, and Sam set aside his magazine and suggested a game of rummy. “Did you bring the cards?” he asked Delia.

  She had not. She realized it the instant he asked, but made a show of rooting through the shopping bag on the coffee table. Jigsaw puzzles, Monopoly, and a Parcheesi board emerged, but no cards. “Um …,” she said.

  “Oh, well,” Sam said, “we’ll play Parcheesi, then.” His tone was weightily patient, which seemed worse than shouting.

  At the bottom of the bag, Delia came across her current library book. Captive of Clarion Castle, it was called. She had started it last week and found it slow, but anything was preferable to deck plans. When Sam asked, “Are you playing too, Delia?” she said, “I think I’ll go read in bed.”

  “Now? It’s not even nine o’clock.”

  “Well, I’m tired,” she told him. She said good night to the others and walked out with the front of her book concealed, although no one made any attempt to see the title.