Small Blessings Read online

  Now, finally, Professor Putnam put a hand gently on his wife’s arm again, and this time Marjory allowed herself to be turned back. The Putnams were again on the march, and Rose saw with real regret that lovely Marjory was beginning to act more as advertised, leading her husband on an awkward zigzag course through the Book Store that was only vaguely canted toward the front door. She was like a two-year-old, drawn to every colorful knickknack she passed. And still Professor Putnam managed to smile bravely at everyone they passed, as well as smile and nod at whatever his wife was saying, his expression as set and pleasant as a bobbing-head doll’s.

  Rose stood there in the archway and watched them, watched all the pitying looks that passed among other faculty members and the suppressed student giggles, and found that she’d stopped concentrating on lovely Marjory and begun, instead, to study Professor Putnam. Rose didn’t usually admire people who lived obviously muddled lives, but something about this man, about the way he made no effort to distance himself from his wife’s noticeably odd behavior, pinged her well-defended heart. Rose, who never hesitated to change or move on if life got complicated, began to wonder if this man might have a kind of remarkable bravery. Might he be one of the rare few who had the courage to accept—without malice—other people exactly as they were, even when this meant he found himself joined for life with Marjory?

  Rose folded her arms and sighed. She had never inspired anything like such loyalty from another person—except her mother, Mavis, of course. Nor had she given it. Rose hated the infrequent occasions when the impermanence of her own life left her feeling vaguely distressed instead of gloriously freewheeling. And that was exactly how Professor Putnam’s dealings with his damaged wife were making her feel.

  Mavis Callahan, who was never without a theory, especially about her only child, said that Rose, who was brave in every other way, had always been a coward when it came to accepting anything she didn’t have a complete handle on. Mavis said that Rose always kept one foot out the door of wherever she was so as to be ready to move on if things got confusing. Mavis would go on to say that this was not really Rose’s fault, it was the way she’d been raised. But, Mavis would add, she herself had finally managed to stick somewhere, and so Rose, God willing and the crik don’t rise—one of Mavis’s all-purpose sayings—probably had enough guts to stick somewhere, someday, as well. Her daughter was no coward, Mavis would always end with a flourish, just challenged in the acceptance department. The way she, Mavis, had been for the first forty-some years of her life. Before she’d come nose-to-nose with her professor and realized she’d better develop some staying power if she didn’t want to screw up her last best chance to have a real permanent mailing address.

  Her professor …

  “So you’ve finally met the redoubtable Putnams, man and wife,” said a voice at Rose’s elbow.

  Rose turned to find Iris Benson, standing too close as usual. It was, Rose suspected, a way for her to launch any interaction as an offensive. According to Russ, Iris Benson loved all confrontation, great and small.

  Rose calmly stepped away from her archway and moved back to a comfortable speaking distance. “Hello, Iris. How are you?”

  Iris Benson was dressed in the color of her namesake flower, in purple from head to toe. This, too, was as usual. Iris would never be called pretty by anyone, but Rose found her quite theatrically handsome—which was certainly appropriate since she’d tried for a career as an actress during a decade of regional rep and summer stock before retreating to graduate school. Iris had wild red hair, green eyes, a strong nose, and high cheekbones that were always blushed a bright pink. All these were assembled around, and within, a delicate, heart-shaped face. She was, Rose thought, a valentine delivering a call to battle. Rose liked talking to Iris, but then, as Mavis Callahan’s daughter, she would be drawn to anyone with rough edges. I like talking to someone who’s a bit of an adventure, Rose had heard her mother say often enough from behind whatever bar Mavis was tending.

  “How am I?” Iris frowned and looked fiercely at something over Rose’s left shoulder. “I’m not sure. But then I don’t suppose you really care.” She looked accusingly at Rose.

  “I don’t really have time to care now,” Rose said, calmly looking back at her and smiling. “I’m hosting an event.”

  Was it her imagination or did Iris Benson flush slightly under all that blusher? “I’m sorry,” Iris said unexpectedly. “That was rude. And I have no call to be rude to you. Yet.” With that, she turned around and stalked away.

  It was like Iris to attack, unlike her to apologize. Was she all right? Rose wondered. And if she weren’t all right, why should she, who’d been here such a short time, be suckered into caring? Surely Iris had real friends who liked caring about her? Then again, and here Rose loosed another sigh, perhaps not. Being Iris’s friend would be a prickly business.

  A student sitting with a group at one of the tables behind her let out a shriek, which was followed by a flood of giggles from the whole group. They would be laughing at someone, of course; that was what students did. Compassion bloomed late in most people. Rose turned her back on them and allowed herself a quick break from socializing to straighten bookshelves. Books were the main reason Rose worked in bookstores, for no matter how chaotic and strange the worlds in them might be, it would always be a finite chaos, one in which you could safely immerse yourself without getting stuck. It was so different from the low-keyed, never-ending, creeping chaos of real life.

  She gave a matched set of Emerson a vigorous push, so it was no longer hanging over the edge of its shelf. The simple truth was now what the simple truth had always been: Reality, with all its attendant complexities—i.e., other people—was inescapable. As Mavis had put it to her sodden customers, “Real life, darling, is the only game in town.”

  * * *

  His mother-in-law, Agnes Tattle, paid Tom a rare visit that night in his office. He’d escaped upstairs right after dinner, announcing he had to make final notes for tomorrow’s inaugural meeting of his Shakespeare class. The one thing Tom remained clear about was that he was morally bound to teach as effectively as possible. Just because his home life might be difficult, that did not relieve him of the responsibility to keep things in the classroom fresh and interesting. If he wasn’t engaged by what he was saying, how could he expect anyone else to be?

  Tom had indeed made some notes about the BBC production of Midsummer Night’s Dream with Helen Mirren as Titania. (My Oberon! What visions have I seen! Methought I was enamoured of an ass.) When Agnes arrived, though, he discovered he’d begun doodling roses.

  “What the hell is wrong with Marjory?” Agnes demanded in her froggy voice. She’d smoked unfiltered Camels for decades, then quit cold turkey when she’d moved in with them, as her son-in-law was allergic to smoke.

  Tom’s office was on the third floor of the house in what was really a still-unfinished attic. The rough room he’d fashioned for himself under the eaves was hot as hell in the summer and cold as a deep freeze in the winter. The college would have insulated it fully for him if he’d asked, but he never had. He had no wish to turn it into a comfortable room in which his wife and mother-in-law might want to visit him more regularly. As the years crept by, he was turning more and more into Greta Garbo, vanting to be alone. Agnes glared at him from the doorway, dabbing at her damp face with a Kleenex she’d fished out of what she called her “reticule,” a kind of at-home fabric purse she carried with her from room to room. “It’s hot as hell up here,” she said crossly. “I don’t understand why you don’t work on the second floor where it’s air-conditioned.”

  “What was that you asked about Marjory?” Tom ignored her comment about the heat. She said the same thing every time she came up here. Tom liked his mother-in-law. She’d been molded by the lingering effects of the Depression and World War II with all their deprivations and opportunities for soldiering through. Oddly enough, she had graduated from this very college back in the mid-fifties, magna cum
laude in mathematics of all things.

  Agnes never complained about the big things—such as her daughter’s chronic mental illness or her own considerable holdings in Enron—just the little ones, such as the location of his office. She had moved in with them when Marjory had gotten bad enough to need a keeper. Tom hadn’t asked for her help. What would he have said—your daughter’s gone completely crazy at last? It’s my fault because I had a stupid, three-week affair, but I still can’t cope? Nine years ago, Agnes had simply shown up with a suitcase and announced she was there to stay for a while. Tom would be eternally grateful to her, even though she had a bossy side that gave him one more reason to flee to his attic.

  Agnes came a step or two into the low-ceilinged room, looking around as though she’d never been there before and didn’t see any reason ever to come again, another ritual of visitation. “I said, ‘What the hell is wrong with Marjory?’ She’s down in the kitchen baking macaroons.”

  Tom was not above enjoying a chance to shock. He leaned back in his chair, tented his hands, and carefully composed his face into its mildest expression. “Your daughter has invited company for dinner on Friday. The macaroons must be for dessert. If I remember right, they have to age for a day or two to reach their full potential.”

  Agnes was satisfactorily bamboozled. She stared at her son-in-law openmouthed for perhaps ten seconds. Then she turned and very slowly removed a pile of books from the only other chair in the room and sat down. “What the hell is going on?”

  Tom shrugged. “Got me,” he said, quite cheerfully. “Rose Callahan, the new assistant director of the Book Store, introduced herself this afternoon, and before you could say Jack Robinson, Marjory had asked her to dinner on Friday.”

  “Was she drunk?” Agnes asked, leaning forward, still whispering. “I don’t see how she could have been. I watched her all afternoon until you took her to the Book Store. As far as I could tell, she spent the whole time sitting at the table in the sunroom working on her goddamn scrapbooks.” Marjory’s scrapbooks were picture books of her rampaging pathology. She bought and read piles of women’s and self-help magazines, cutting out articles about such things as “How to Keep Your Long-Term Partner Interested in Your Mind” and “Ten Steps to Staying Young Forever” and pasted them into an endless succession of photo albums. Agnes had wanted to make her daughter give up such nonsense years ago, but Dr. Simms, her psychiatrist, had forbidden her to intervene. The updated scrapbooks went off with Marjory to Charlottesville for her twice-weekly appointments with the good doctor, her only allowed solo trips these days. Privately, Tom thought, his wife’s psychiatrist must be bored out of his tree spending two hours a week with Marjory rehashing her husband’s one, ten-year-old, three-week-long transgression. The scrapbooks at least gave him something new to look at.

  Tom shook his head. “She seemed perfectly sober to me,” he said. “Maybe Dr. Simms changed her medication and found something that actually helps?”

  “Nope,” Agnes said, sitting back. “No such luck.”

  Tom shrugged again. “Well then,” he said, “the impetus for the invitation and the resulting macaroons remains a mystery.”

  Agnes narrowed her eyes and looked at him. She was, Tom knew, his committed partner in this mess. They had these moments of closeness, when Tom felt, in some cockeyed way, that he and Agnes were man and wife, and Marjory was their hopelessly dependent child. Agnes Tattle was the only person he’d ever met who was strong enough to look life right in the eye and spit. It must be the mathematics in her background. Such courageous realism certainly didn’t come from the study of English literature.

  “Well, I’ll be!” Agnes sighed and got up to go. At the door, she turned around and looked at him again. There really was nothing else for them to discuss. Marjory was a custodial issue between them, not a source of pleasant conversation. “I’m going to go down, unlock the Scotch, and have a drink. May I bring you one?”

  “No thanks,” Tom said. Had Agnes noticed the roses he’d doodled? She was looking at him with her usual inscrutable glare. If anyone could read minds, it was Agnes Tattle.

  “Well then, Professor. I’ll leave you with your mail.”

  The envelope Agnes withdrew from her reticule was small, lavender, and self-consciously feminine. It was addressed in brown ink, postmarked New Orleans, and the return address was confined to the initials R.T. Agnes looked Tom squarely in the eye as she handed it to him. “This came registered mail today. I beat Marjory to the door, which is probably just as well.”

  And then, before Tom could so much as blink, she was gone.

  * * *

  There was no need to tear open the small envelope. He had all evening to revisit one of the most boneheaded mistakes he had ever made.

  Tom Putnam’s affair had been with a visiting poet, Retesia Turnball; another wispy, dreamy woman, much like Marjory when he’d first met her, barely connected enough to the here and now to grocery shop. Retesia, who had been quite a good poet, had written a lot about her Nordic ancestry. What Tom mainly remembered about her was how pale she was.

  Retesia had been in residence at the college for exactly one month, laboring doggedly with a few overly self-involved students at turning angst into words. At the time, she had been newly widowed and grieving desperately, and Tom had just been desperate—desperate for life, for a meaningful connection with another human being—and so he’d ignored his usual overriding caution and had sex with Retesia a half-dozen times on the couch in her office. Then she was gone, never to be heard from again until now, and it had been he who was grieving—not so much for Retesia as for everything he’d wanted her to be.

  Why, Tom wondered, had he been so attracted to unhappy women in those days? Unhappiness repelled him now. He’d had enough of it.

  He’d written Retesia one letter, just a chatty compilation of college happenings, which he’d never mailed, but hadn’t thrown away either. Marjory had found it a month later. Even though there was nothing in the letter that hinted he and Retesia had been lovers, his wife’s decompensation, which had been proceeding for years at a sedate pace, had quickly accelerated.

  Within two months she was officially Mad as a Hatter.

  Tom hadn’t had sex or a normal, intimate conversation with a woman since. His punishment for his transgression was to live life as a caged eunuch. Why hadn’t he at least strayed with a woman who made him laugh? Why had he picked another struggling soul who, like Marjory, cried out for rescuing?

  Marjory. His wife. What a sad woman she was and had probably always been. But when he’d married her, he was sure their marriage would make all the difference in her life. She was so lovely and so lost, this girl child of the emphatic Agnes and her flyboy husband, who had flown off into the skies of Del Rio on an air force training mission and never come back. Some kind of engine failure, the family was told. Just pfft, a fireball, and he was gone.

  Agnes had evidently loved her flyboy passionately, for she’d remained fiercely single ever since. The flyboy had left her—his then just-pregnant wife—with a nice slice of family money, a pretty Charlottesville house, and an extended family of overbearing in-laws with stultifying ideas about femininity. Agnes had declined to join her mother-in-law’s garden club and had instead taken herself off to the UVA law school, rising to be editor of the Law Review and graduating third in her class. According to Agnes, her mother-in-law had been appalled.

  After graduation, Lawyer Tattle had quickly become the champion of middle-aged women who’d been dumped by their husbands, delighting in making the bastards pay through the nose for their disloyalty. Marjory—a physically frail child—had spent her formative years listening to her mother’s tales of browbeating unfaithful men and prodding unassertive women to buck up and not take no for an answer. Tom had met his future wife during his first year in grad school at UVA. Marjory had been a lovely, pathologically shy graduate of this same women’s college, already within shouting distance of thirty, back home living with
Agnes, without an inkling of how to survive on her own. He’d been introduced to her at some Legal Aid shindig. What he was doing there, Tom could never remember, but he did remember meeting Marjory for the first time. She had stood before him shyly, lovely as spring’s first daffodil, a dribble of punch spilled down her buttoned-up white blouse, while over the PA Fontella Bass had belted out “Rescue Me.”

  What he’d learned most painfully over the next quarter of a century was that you cannot do that. One human being, with the best will and intentions in the world, cannot fix what is wrong with someone else. There was enough left of Marjory to cling, but not to connect. Tom picked up his pen and absently doodled another rose. The past was always there, wasn’t it? Waiting to be sorted out and connected to the present. He must have been terribly lonely when he’d met Marjory—grad school had been so different from the easy, boys’ club atmosphere of Amherst. He’d slept with a few women in college, but they were all from Mount Holyoke and could jolly well take care of themselves. His Achilles’ heel, back in that lonely year, had been a wish to feel special, not just another likable Joe in the crowd. His collegiate longing to help save the world had somehow perverted itself into a longing to save another person.

  Agnes had tried to tell him before the wedding that her daughter was not marriage material. She’d sat him down and—as direct in this as in everything—said there was something missing in Marjory that neither she nor the doctors seemed to be able to do anything about. With the accumulated wisdom of twenty years behind him, however, Tom had politely but firmly told Agnes and her advice to take a hike. The truth was—Tom could see this plainly now, sitting at his desk in this dim, hot attic—that he’d been a little lost himself in those days; another sheltered intellectual trying to figure out how to live. And so he’d constructed the convenient fantasy that two straws, if bound together, would make an adequate broom.