Back When We Were Grownups

Eleven

As luck would have it, Poppy’s party fell on a day when two paying events could have been scheduled instead. One was just a small luncheon, but the other was a Christmas party for a brokerage firm, and Rebecca was very sorry to have to turn it down. A promise was a promise, though. She had told Poppy they would celebrate on his actual birth date. Enough of these second-best, orphan compromises — major milestones observed midweek or shoved into the next month so as not to interfere with more important people’s arrangements.

So: December 11th, a Saturday. The plan was to begin at two in the afternoon, for the little ones’ sake, and extend into early evening. Presents were not discouraged. (Poppy had been firm about that.) Food would be served from the very beginning; none of this waiting around for the toasts. Lots of desserts, but no savories, no hors d’oeuvres or crudités, certainly no main dishes. And the centerpiece would be a towering cake, really more of a wedding cake, prepared by Toot Sweet in Fells Point. Poppy had done the research: Toot Sweet was the winner. Fortunately, Biddy didn’t take offense. “Fine with me,” she said. “I have enough on my hands with all those pastries he wants.”

The guest list — saved these past six months in the pocket of Rebecca’s calico skirt, where it had gone through the laundry twice and emerged as soft as blotting paper but still comparatively readable — consisted mostly of family, plus two of Poppy’s old friends, plus some incidental acquaintances like his physical therapist and Alice Farmer. (It was ironic, Rebecca often reflected, that by definition those family parties that were largest and most demanding were the ones to which Alice Farmer had to be invited as a guest.) There had been more people on the list, but many of them were dead. A few others were too frail to attend, and a few had simply dropped out of sight at some unnoticed point in the past.

Rebecca’s mother and Aunt Ida had accepted, much to Rebecca’s surprise, with the understanding that they would leave the party early on account of the long drive home. Also they would arrive early, they announced, in order to help out. Privately, Rebecca began thinking up tasks that would keep them harmlessly occupied. Sorting through the napkins, inspecting the stemware for water spots…

Because it was December, the decorating scheme would be Christmassy. Already a slender tree stood in the front-parlor window, diminutive white lights twinkling tastefully from each branch. Now Rebecca set up another tree in the dining room, chunkier and messier, smothered in decades’ worth of construction-paper chains and Polaroid photos of the children pasted on paper-doily snowflakes. Some of the photos were faded past recognition. Many were interchangeable, since Davitch babies tended to look fairly much alike below a certain age. (All those little clock faces, wisps of dark hair, squinty mistrustful eyes.) On top she put a gold foil star with seven different-sized, unevenly spaced points, brought home from kindergarten long ago by one or another of the girls; no one knew which anymore. She draped a huge banner across the rear-parlor mantel reading HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY POOPY—a mistake she hadn’t noticed until she got it home — and she lugged the TV and the VCR down from the family room and plugged them into an outlet in the front parlor, because Hakim (in love with Western technology, like every immigrant Rebecca had ever known) was bringing as his present a professionally produced videotape assembled from the family’s home movies. This was supposed to be a secret, although Poppy had to have suspected something. On the morning of the party, when he went in to watch cartoons, all he found was a rectangle of dust on the TV stand. He didn’t say a word about it, though; just grunted and laid out a game of solitaire instead.

The day was bright and unusually cold, which meant Rebecca could wear her Bedouin costume. Although of course she didn’t put it on first thing. No, first she put on baggy pants and one of Joe’s old flannel shirts, and she raced around the house picking up and vacuuming and cooking Poppy a special breakfast. Nothing but sweets — waffles and cocoa. (The man would contract diabetes before the end of the day.) A little blue birthday candle flickered on the topmost waffle. “Happy birthday to you…” she sang, all by herself, standing over the table with her hands clasped together in front of her.

Poppy said, “Why, thank you, Beck,” and calmly blew out the candle. It amused and touched and exasperated her, all at the same time, how he accepted this fuss and bother as only his due.

“Just think,” she told him. “One hundred years ago today, you were just the tiniest bundle nestled in a cradle. Or maybe in your mother’s bed. Were you born at home? Did your mother have a doctor?”

“She had a midwife,” he said, cutting into his waffles. “Mrs. Bentham: she came to the house. We lived on North Avenue then. She was just starting out in her practice, and we were her first set of twins.”

“Oh, yes, twins,” Rebecca said. “I’d forgotten that.” Briefly, she laid a hand on his arm. “It must make you sad, celebrating your birthday without your brother here to share it.”

“No, not really,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’ve had a lot of years to get used to it.”

He took a much too large mouthful of waffles, dotting his mustache with beads of syrup. He was wearing his red plaid bathrobe over striped pajamas. Bristly whiskers silvered his face, and his white hair stood on end, unbrushed, raying out like sunbeams.

“Eighteen ninety-nine,” Rebecca said. “I don’t even know who was President then!”

“Beats me.”

“Your family wouldn’t have had a car, I suppose, or a telephone…”

But he was pursuing another train of thought. He said, “I’ve wondered, from time to time, if I’ve had added onto my life all those years my brother didn’t get to use.”

He spoke as if his brother had had no choice — as if it hadn’t been his own decision not to use those years. Rebecca said, “Well, I imagine he would have been glad to see you enjoying them.”

“Not necessarily,” Poppy told her. “He always did believe I got the best of the deal.”

“How was that?”

“Oh, you know… he wasn’t a naturally happy person. Some people, they just have a harder time being happy.”

“Would you say Joe was naturally happy?”

Poppy took another bite of waffles, either considering her question or stalling.

“When I met him, he was laughing,” she prompted him. Then she recalled that in fact, she was the one who’d been laughing. But she continued. “He said, ‘I see you’re having a wonderful time.’ His very first words to me. Because Zeb was clowning around; you know how he does, and so I started… And when I decided to marry him, then he was laughing, for sure! I saw him laughing in the library window and I decided at that moment.”

Poppy said, “Hmm,” and blotted his mustache on his napkin.

“And don’t forget,” Rebecca said, “by profession, he was a party-giver.”

“But he never felt party-giving was really his true life,” Poppy reminded her.

“Well, no.”

“And that’s where he and I differed,” Poppy said. “Because I was always telling him, ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Face it,’ I said. ‘There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you’ve got,’ I said.”

“But he had a fine life!” Rebecca said.

“He certainly did.”

Poppy folded his napkin and laid it beside his plate. “So what I tell myself,” he said, “is I’m observing our birthday for both of us. That’s how I like to view it.”

Evidently, he had swerved back onto the subject of his twin brother. Rebecca took a second to realize it, though. That was what happened when you lived with someone confused: you became confused yourself, and one thing developed the oddest way of blurring into other things.

* * *

Her mother and her aunt arrived shortly before noon. Her mother wore her dressiest pants set and a fluffy mohair jacket that made her look smaller than ever. Her hair had been crimped into ridges as evenly spaced as the rows of tufts on a bedspread. Aunt Ida was all ruffles and froth — a pink rosebud print, despite the season — and she must have gone to the same hairdresser, although her curls were already beginning to wander out of formation. Between them they carried a large, flat package, beautifully wrapped and ribboned. “It’s a portrait of William McKinley,” Aunt Ida confided in a whisper.

“McKinley,” Rebecca said.

“He was who was President in 1899.”

“Oh, we were just discussing that at breakfast,” Rebecca said. “McKinley! Is that who it was!”

“We thought it would remind Mr. Davitch of his youth.”

“I’m sure he’ll love it,” Rebecca said. “Have you two had lunch yet?”

“Oh, we don’t want to be any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble. I’ve got some cold cuts set out.”

She placed their gift on the chest of drawers in the front parlor, and then she led them back to the kitchen. “Poppy’s upstairs napping,” she said. “He had a sandwich ahead of time and now he’s trying to rest before the party.”

“Law, he must be so excited,” Aunt Ida said, but Rebecca’s mother said, “I never did understand the notion of adults having birthday parties.”

“Well, it’s kind of our tradition,” Rebecca told her. “And besides, this is his hundredth! He could have had his name read out on TV, if we had asked.”

“My last birthday party was in 1927,” Rebecca’s mother said. “I was five years old.”

Aunt Ida said, “Oh, that can’t be right! What about when you turned eighteen and Mother gave you her pearls?”

“That wasn’t a party, though, Ida.”

“Well, you had a cake! With candles on it! If you don’t call that a party, I’d like to know what it was!”

“Have a seat,” Rebecca told them. “Who would like iced tea?”

“Oh, I would, darlin’, if it’s made,” Aunt Ida said.

It was. (Rebecca knew that they always drank iced tea with lunch, even in the dead of winter, although at suppertime they would turn it down for fear of not sleeping well.) She brought the pitcher from the refrigerator and set it on the table. Aunt Ida was forking a mountain of cold cuts onto her plate, selecting each slice daintily with her little finger quirked as if that would make her portion seem smaller. Rebecca’s mother was delivering a blow-by-blow account of their trip. “We took the old County Highway,” she said, “because you couldn’t pay me to drive on that I-95, all those truckers whizzing past blaring their horns at a person. I don’t think I told you about Abbie Field’s daughter having that awful accident on I-95 down near Richmond. She had gone to I think Heathsville, or Heathsburg, one of those places; was it Heathsville? Heathsburg? Went to visit her parents-in-law and was coming back on a Sunday after mass; her mother-in-law is Catholic, you know, one of those very devout Catholic widows, and she had invited Abbie to her ladies’ bridge club luncheon on Saturday and then—”

“Wait; that’s not possible,” Aunt Ida said.

“Beg pardon? Of course it’s possible. You can be a Catholic and still play bridge.”

“You said Abbie went to visit her parents-in-law. Plural. But that her mother-in-law was a widow.”

“All right; I misspoke. It’s not a capital crime.”

Rebecca said, “How’s the move coming, Mother?”

“What move?”

“Your move to the retirement home.”

“Oh, that. Well, I’m working on it, but first I have to sort my belongings.”

Aunt Ida sent Rebecca a look. “Have a deviled egg,” Rebecca told her.

“Why, thank you, hon. I really shouldn’t, on account of my cholesterol, but you know I can’t resist.”

“Folks tell me I should hire help,” Rebecca’s mother said. “I’m too old to do all that sorting on my own, they tell me. But you know how that works. When Ida here tried to clean out my desk, would you believe what she did? Threw away a perfectly good sheet of three-cent postage stamps.”

“Have a deviled egg, Mother,” Rebecca said.

Then the phone rang, and she cried, “Whoops!” and raced off to answer it, even though the kitchen extension was no more than a foot away from her.

* * *

Rebecca’s Bedouin costume was a long black woolen robe with broad vertical bands of purple, red, and turquoise running from shoulder to hem. It made her feel like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, she had told the clerk at Discount Dashikis when she was trying it on. In order to keep the bright colors from blanching her features, she applied a good deal more makeup than usual. Then she wound a splashy purple-and-black silk sash around her head. When she descended the stairs, the sash wafted out behind her like a bridal train. “Goodness,” her mother said, meeting up with her in the foyer. Rebecca gave her a sphinxlike smile. (Nothing she would wear could make her mother happy.) But Aunt Ida, already seated in the front parlor, cried out, “Oh, my, don’t you look cheery!”

“Thank you,” Rebecca told her. In a majestically level, swift, flowing motion, she crossed to the hearth and bent for the butane torch hidden in the basket of pinecones at one side. She started lighting the candles she had set around the room — the Christmas candles and the Hanukkah candles and the all-occasion candles and even the pale egg-shaped candles ordinarily reserved for Easter.

“It’s a regular conflagration!” Aunt Ida said gaily.

Rebecca’s mother sat down in the rocker, first smoothing the back of her slacks beneath her as if she were wearing a skirt. “I laid out your cocktail napkins in a fan shape,” she told Rebecca. “I don’t know if that’s the way you wanted them. I straightened up some in the kitchen, and I took the liberty of watering that poor dead plant out back beside the steps.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

“You’ll find the leftover cold cuts on the top shelf in the fridge. I put them in one of those newspaper bags I found in the waxed-paper drawer, although I’m not entirely easy in my mind about letting foodstuffs come into contact with colored plastic.”

“I’m sure they’ll be finished off before the poison has time to take effect,” Rebecca told her.

The doorbell rang. Her mother said, “Mercy,” and checked her watch. “It’s three minutes before two! Who do you suppose that is?”

“Not a Davitch, you can bet,” Rebecca said. She went out into the foyer. “Company, Poppy!” she called up the stairs, and then she opened the door. J. J. Barrow, her electrician, was standing on the stoop with his twelve-year-old son. Both of them were dressed up — J.J. in a suit and tie, his son in a navy blazer and tan corduroys — and J.J. was holding a bottle of bourbon with a ribbon around its neck. “Come in!” Rebecca told them. “You two are so punctual!”

“Well, we didn’t want to keep folks waiting,” J.J. said. He was a large, bearded bear of a man, a type Rebecca had a weakness for, and she had invited him on impulse when he and his son came to fix the thermostat earlier in the week. Now she ushered them into the parlor, keeping an arm around the son’s shoulders. “Mother,” she said, “Aunt Ida, this is our electrician, J. J. Barrow, and this is his son, J.J.J.” J.J.J. was what they called J.J. Junior, and she always had to stifle a giggle when she was saying it; it made her feel she was stuttering. “My mother, Mildred Holmes, and my aunt, Ida Gates.”

“How do you do,” Aunt Ida said, and Rebecca’s mother smiled and tilted her head. “Are you… here as guests?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” J.J. said. “My wife would have come too, except her pastor dropped by unannounced.”

“J.J. can handle anything electrical,” Rebecca said, “and also some plumbing repairs as long as they don’t require inspection. And his son knows nearly as much as he does; don’t you, J.J.J.?” Oops, another giggle.

J.J.J. looked worried and said, “Well, I would still need Pop’s help with some of the big things, though.”

“Rebecca and me have been through a lot,” J.J. said, falling into a chair. “She was my main support when my first wife up and left me. And I was around when her grandson Danny passed through that little shoplifting stage.”

“Well, now!” Rebecca said, clapping her hands. (She hadn’t mentioned Danny’s shoplifting stage to her mother.) “Where’s our guest of honor, I wonder!”

Her mother wore a blank expression. Aunt Ida just smiled and patted the sofa cushion beside her. “Why don’t you come sit down, J.J.J.?” she asked. “Aren’t you sweet, to attend an old man’s birthday party!”

“I never met anybody who was a hundred before,” he told her, and he crossed the room and settled next to her, admirably composed, hands folded loosely between his corduroy knees.

Now they heard Poppy on the stairs — cane, shoe, shoe; cane, shoe, shoe — and Rebecca went out to the foyer to meet him. He often woke from his nap extra stiff; she thought he might want help. But no, he was barely leaning on the banister, and his face looked rested and relaxed, not stretched by pain. He wore his gray suit and a narrow black bow tie knotted around a collar so high and starched that he seemed to have stepped directly from the year when he had been born. His hair was slicked down flat and his cheeks looked polished. “I thought I heard the doorbell,” he said.

“Yes, J.J. and his son are here. You remember J.J.,” she said hopefully.

He might or he might not. At any rate, he grunted and continued his descent.

“And Mother and Aunt Ida came while you were napping,” she said. “You should see what they brought you!”

“I intend to open my gifts as they arrive,” he told her. He reached the bottom of the stairs and started pegging into the parlor, passing her in a breeze of lavender cologne. “They won’t get the proper notice if I just pile them in a heap and open them all at once.”

“Fine, Poppy,” Rebecca said.

Not that her permission was needed. Already he was reaching out a hand for J.J.’s bottle, holding it at arm’s length to study the label. “Thanks,” he said finally. “It’ll make a nice nightcap.” He turned toward the two older women. “Ladies.”

“Happy birthday, Mr. Davitch,” they said practically in unison, and Aunt Ida added, “You don’t look a day over eighty!”

“Eighty?” Poppy asked. The corners of his mouth turned down.

“Yes, sir, it’s not often I’m asked to celebrate somebody’s hundredth birthday,” J.J. told him.

“How often?” Poppy asked him.

“Well, now, I guess I would have to say never, in fact.”

“Here, Poppy,” Rebecca said. She took the wrapped package from the chest of drawers. “This is Mother and Aunt Ida’s gift.”

“Wait, just let me get comfy.”

He chose a wing chair and lowered himself by degrees, first setting the bourbon on the table beside him. Then Rebecca handed him the package. “Nice paper,” he said. He slid a trembling thumb beneath one taped flap. “Don’t want to tear it; might as well save it for later use.”

“Absolutely,” Rebecca’s mother told him, and she bit her lip and sat forward, concentrating, until he had lifted the flap without causing any damage.

William McKinley turned out to be a forthright-looking man in a high white collar and black bow tie nearly identical to Poppy’s. Rebecca had worried Poppy wouldn’t know who he was, but luckily a brass nameplate was tacked to the bottom of the frame. “William McKinley. Well, now,” Poppy said, slanting the picture on his knees to study it.

“He was President the year you were born,” Rebecca told him.

“Well, how about that.”

“Got himself assassinated,” J.J. offered out of the blue.

“How about that.”

“It was McKinley who was responsible for us taking over Cuba,” J.J. went on. “Also Hawaii, if I’m not very much mistaken.”

Poppy lowered the portrait and turned to frown at J.J. “Who did you say you were?” he asked.

“J.J. is our electrician, Poppy,” Rebecca said. “He just this week fixed our thermostat.”

J.J. was nodding emphatically, as if urging Poppy to do the same, but Poppy kept his frown. Then suddenly his forehead cleared. “’All I Want for Christmas Is You,’” he said.

“What, Poppy?” Rebecca asked.

“That’s what they were playing on the radio his boy brought along. ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’”

“Whoa! Sorry if we disturbed you,” J.J. said.

“Oh, it’s better than some others I’ve heard.”

He held the portrait out to Rebecca, and she stepped forward to take it from him.

“So! Mr. Davitch!” Aunt Ida said. “Did you receive a birthday greeting from the President?”

Poppy sent another frown in the direction of the portrait, which Rebecca was propping now on the chest of drawers. Perhaps he thought McKinley was the President in question. Instead of answering, though, he said, “Mr., ah, J.J., I wonder if you could settle a little argument for me.”

“Be glad to if I can,” J.J. told him.

“Those instant-on kind of lights. What do you call them? You know the kind. The ones that light up without blinking first.”

“Incandescent,” J.J. said.

“Now, I maintain that folks should turn those off whenever they leave a room. Because switching them back on doesn’t require any particular burst of energy, does it? As opposed to a fluorescent. But Beck, here: oh, no, she has to leave a trail of lights lit anyplace she goes. A waste of money, I tell her.”

“Yes, sir, you’d be amazed,” J.J. said. “Why, a single hundred-watt bulb, left burning for an hour—”

“J.J.! Don’t encourage him!” Rebecca said. “Poppy’d have us sitting in the dark, if he could have his way. Even the tree lights upset him! If we were to leave this room right now, just to go to the dining room and get ourselves a bite, he would turn off the tree lights first!”

“Oh,” J.J. said. He looked unhappy. No doubt he felt he’d been put on the spot. “Well: tree lights. I mean, these dinky white things are not a major draw of power. And you have to figure the, like, decorative effect. They’re more of a decoration, for people to see from outside too and not just inside the house.”

“See there?” Rebecca asked Poppy. “Didn’t I tell you? Oh, lights have a tremendous effect!” she said, turning to the others. “Like when guests are walking up the front walk for a party: it makes such a difference in their mood if they see all the windows glowing. They get… anticipatory. Switch on every light you own, I always say. Let them blaze for all they’re worth! Let them set the house on fire!”

J.J. laughed, and his son grinned shyly. Aunt Ida said, “Yes, you would certainly want to give people a nice sense of welcome.” Poppy, though, only grunted, and Rebecca’s mother shrank back slightly in her seat.

“Well, anyhow,” Rebecca said after a moment. “Drinks, anyone?” And she was careful to keep her voice at a decorous pitch.

* * *

It was so predictable that non-Davitches would show up before Davitches. Precisely fifteen minutes past the designated hour — Baltimore’s idea of the proper arrival time — Alice Farmer rang the doorbell in a silver sharkskin suit and silver shoes and a black felt cartwheel hat, bearing a stunningly wrapped gift that turned out to be a prayer toaster. (A prayer on a bread-slice-shaped piece of cardboard popped out of the slot if you pressed the lever, one prayer for every day of the year.) The physical therapist, Miss Nancy, followed with a flock of Mylar balloons so numerous that they had to be nudged through the door in clusters. Next came Poppy’s two friends, Mr. Ames and Mr. Hardesty. Mr. Ames brought a cactus with a bulbous pink growth on top that Poppy said reminded him of a baboon’s behind. Mr. Hardesty brought nothing, which was understandable because he was in a walker for which he needed both hands, besides having to rely on a sullen niece for his shopping; so Poppy was gracious about it.

At a quarter till three the first Davitch arrived: Zeb, short of breath. “Sorry,” he told Rebecca. “There was an emergency call from the hospital, and I went off thinking I’d come straight here afterwards, but I forgot about the gift; so I had to go back home first and get it.”

He meant the gift that he and she were giving jointly: a framed reprint of Poppy and Aunt Joyce’s engagement photo. He had bundled it clumsily in wads of white tissue and masses of Scotch tape. “I wish you could have seen it before I wrapped it,” he told her. “They did a tremendous job with the restoration.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Rebecca said. She had been dubious when she first slipped it, stealthily, from the family album. Blooms of mold had destroyed most of the background, and a white fold line ran across one corner.

Poppy was getting rowdy, like an overstimulated child. “Well? What have we here?” he asked as Zeb entered the room. “Bring it on in! Let me at it!”

“Happy birthday,” Zeb told him, and he laid the package across Poppy’s knees. “This is from Rebecca and me.”

“Well, thank you. Not much sense in saving this wrap, I don’t believe.” He ripped the tissue off one end and tugged the picture free. “Oh, my,” he said.

Zeb was right: the restorers had worked a miracle. The background was unblemished now, and the couple seemed somehow more alive. Aunt Joyce, slimmer than Rebecca had ever seen her, wore one of those drapey 1930s dresses that appeared to have been snatched up at the midriff and given a violent twist. Poppy was startlingly black-haired and black-mustached, and he gazed out at the viewer while Joyce had eyes only for him.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Poppy asked Rebecca. She thought he meant the restoration, until he went on. “There I am, watching the camera when I could have been looking at Joyce. I thought I had the rest of my life to look at Joyce, was why. I was thirty-nine years old. She was twenty-two. I thought she would outlive me.”

“Oh, if that is not the truth!” Aunt Ida cried from the couch.

Rebecca’s mother said, “Now, correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Davitch, but wasn’t I once told that your wife had always had a weak heart?”

“Weak hearts ran in her family,” Poppy said. “But I never really believed that she would go first.”

“Well, anyways, she sure was pretty,” Alice Farmer said. She had crossed the room to peer over Poppy’s shoulder. “How’d a plain old guy like you come to catch such a pretty young thing?”

“She used to work behind the pastry counter at her mother’s breakfast place,” Poppy said. “Finally her mother switched her to dishing out bacon and eggs, just so I’d eat more nutritiously.”

“Very considerate of her,” Miss Nancy said heartily, and J.J. chuckled, but Poppy just stared at the photo as if he hadn’t heard.

Then the door slammed against the closet, and he straightened and said, “Ah, well.”

First came NoNo with a sweater she’d been laboring over for months — a bulky white fisherman’s knit, not really Poppy’s style. He was nice about it, though. “You made this?” he asked her. “You hate to knit! You swore you’d give it up after you finished those baby booties.”

“Well, this time I will give it up, I promise,” NoNo said, and she bent to kiss his cheek.

Peter shook Poppy’s hand and said, “I’m supposed to tell you happy birthday, and that me and the other kids are going in on one big present from the bunch of us.”

“Well, that’s all right, then,” Poppy decided.

Peter was wearing his school blazer, the sleeves a good inch shorter than the last time Rebecca had seen him in it. It matched J.J.J.’s, she realized. They must go to the same school, for they seemed to know each other. J.J.J. made room for him on the couch, and they put their heads together over some kind of gadget that Peter pulled from his pocket. “I think the way I can get it to work is by differential friction,” Rebecca heard him say.

Biddy arrived with still more pastry boxes — having brought most of the food earlier that morning — and headed for the kitchen, followed by Dixon, who first set a wooden keg just inside the front door. Troy, however, came straight into the parlor to hand Poppy a small, flat package. “Your old friend Haydn,” he explained. “Biddy’s gift is the food, but I wanted you to have something especially from me.”

Poppy hadn’t always seen eye to eye with Troy (he had suggested more than once that a timely stint in the Army would have set him straight), but he seemed pleased when he unwrapped the CD. “Oh, one of my favorites,” he said. “The Military Symphony!”

Rebecca shot Troy a suspicious look, but he just smiled at her. “Why don’t I put it on,” he said, and he took the CD from Poppy and went over to the stereo.

Then Patch and her family arrived, and then Min Foo and hers. For several minutes, the foyer was wall-to-wall people. Children were struggling out of jackets; Abdul was cooing in his infant seat; Patch was having a tantrum over something insulting Min Foo had just said. (How had Min Foo had time, even?) “Come wish Poppy a happy birthday,” Rebecca told them. “Emmy! Are you wearing heels? Hakim, let me take the baby while you… Patch, please, come on in and tell Poppy happy birthday. I’m sure Min Foo didn’t mean whatever it was.”

“Min Fool, is more like it,” Patch snapped, but she trailed the others into the parlor, where Biddy had started circulating a platter of petits fours and Dixon was passing macaroons.

The party had changed to the stand-up kind, now that there was a crowd. Only the older ones stayed seated — Poppy receiving greetings benignly from his wing chair. Mr. Ames was telling Aunt Ida that he was choosing Poppy’s birth date for his next lottery number. Mr. Hardesty was asking the room at large who on earth all these people were.

Patch handed Poppy a gift so heavy he almost dropped it. And no wonder: he unwrapped it to find ankle weights, shaped like big blue doughnuts. “For your daily walk,” Patch explained. “They’ve just completed a study that proves…”

Then Dixon hauled in the keg, which turned out to contain the children’s present — a giant collection of horehound drops, Jujubes, Allsorts, Good & Plentys, and other candies, some of which Rebecca had assumed to be obsolete. Dixon pried off the lid and held up various samples while Poppy made appreciative remarks. “You helped buy me this? And you?” he asked various youngsters, skillfully avoiding the use of any names. “Oh, my, sassafras balls. How did you know I love sassafras?” In fact, his enthusiasm was probably genuine; this may have been the most successful gift yet.

Hakim’s videotape, on the other hand, bewildered him. He unwrapped it and peered at it doubtfully. “Paul P. Davitch,” he read out, “1954–1967. What? I don’t understand.”

“Those are the years covered by the videotape,” Rebecca told him. “Hakim took all our home movies to a shop where they turn reels into tapes. Remember Uncle Buddy’s home movies?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed,” Poppy said.

Uncle Buddy was Mother Davitch’s brother, the one technically minded member of the family, and when he died, in 1968, the movie camera might as well have been buried with him. Nobody had been certain how to work the projector, either; so this tape caused considerable interest. Children were called together and arranged on the floor, and chairs were dragged in from the dining room, and Mr. Hardesty’s walker was placed to one side. Zeb, Dixon, and Troy — the three tallest — retreated to the back of the group. Then Rebecca started the VCR.

First there were the usual hurdles — a black-and-white snowstorm, a duel between the two remote controls until the snowstorm disappeared, a pause while a child was sent off to silence Haydn. Eventually a white calling card came into focus with Paul P. Davitch, 1954–1967 engraved in flowing script. The next card read Photography: William R. “Buddy” Brand, and the next, Produced by Big Bob’s Production Service—all of these accompanied by a piano playing “Stardust.” October or November, 1954, the last card read.

Whatever scientific advances had restored Poppy’s engagement photo were evidently not available to Big Bob, because the people who filled the screen were bleached nearly white and shot through with darting white lines like slants of rain. Poppy stood on a brownish lawn with a plumper, dowdier Aunt Joyce, her knees like two underbaked biscuits below the cuffs of her long Bermudas. In front of them, hunched over the handlebar of a tricycle, was a small black-haired boy who would have to be Zeb. All three of them had their faces screwed up against the sunlight. “Would you look?” Poppy murmured, but he was the only one who seemed affected by this oddly unmovie-like shot. The younger children stirred restlessly, and a woman — perhaps Miss Nancy — was heard to ask, “Was there ever a less attractive fashion era than the fifties?”

A new card flashed on the screen: Christmas 1956. By now Uncle Buddy must have grasped the capabilities of his medium, for the scene was almost too animated. An electric train whizzed soundlessly around the base of a Christmas tree before it was obliterated by somebody’s swirling plaid skirt. An out-of-focus child (Zeb again, suddenly taller) lunged gleefully toward the camera with a red metal dump truck in one hand. Then Joe (Joe! so young and graceless that Rebecca almost didn’t know him, with his hair too short and his neck too thin) plucked Zeb up and removed him, and Mother Davitch advanced displaying a velvet-boxed bottle of perfume as if she were in a commercial, smiling a determined smile that was almost scary. She was followed, as if in a conga line, by Aunt Joyce vampishly modeling a pink angora sweater with a tag dangling from the top button, and then by Poppy holding a cellophane-wrapped bow tie in front of the bow tie he was already wearing. Last, a hairy arm was tugged into view by someone else’s hand, and a shirtfront loomed up, and then a man’s widely laughing, protesting mouth. “Uncle Buddy himself, in his one and only film appearance,” Zeb had time to announce before the whole scene vanished.

The children were asking, “Where were you, Mom?” and their mothers were saying, “Just wait a minute. I wasn’t even born yet.” Poppy was telling Mr. Ames to take his word for it: this was not really the way things had been. More Christmases swam by—Christmas 1957 and Christmas 1958. “Uncle Buddy lived in Delaware,” Zeb explained. “He didn’t get to visit more than once or twice a year.” The train beneath the tree acquired more cars; Poppy acquired more bow ties; Zeb grew another six inches. “Stardust” went on playing languorously, although Mr. Hardesty pointed out that some sort of Christmas carol might have been more in keeping. As if to prove him wrong, the next card read Spring 1961, and when it was removed, Joe and a glamorous, cross-looking Tina were standing on the front stoop with a cylinder of pastel blankets. “That’s me!” Biddy told the children, although she would have known that only because of the date. The clearest part of the picture was an arching bough of pink blossoms extending from the side of the screen where the front-parlor window would have been, and for some reason, this evidence of a long-dead, long-forgotten tree that Rebecca herself had never laid eyes on made her sadder than anything else. Poppy, too, gave a sigh. “Ah, me,” he said, and he gently stroked his mustache.

Christmas 1962, Christmas 1964. Easter 1965 and Christmas 1965 and Easter 1966. Biddy pushed a doll buggy and Patch learned to roller-skate and NoNo shook the bars of her playpen. Joe turned into the man Rebecca had married. Poppy’s hair was gray but Aunt Joyce’s was a yellower blond than ever. Mother Davitch’s mouth started blurring around the edges.

Then September 1966, and who was this? A heavyset young woman standing in front of a picnic table, wearing a silly miniskirt that exposed her broad thighs. Her face was large and shiny. Rebecca felt embarrassed for her; she seemed like such an interloper, so presumptuous, beaming straight at the camera while other, more entitled people (Mother Davitch, Aunt Joyce) wrapped leftovers in waxed paper.

She slid a glance around the audience, but nobody made any comment.

Christmas 1967, and Min Foo scowled from her father’s arms, her two clenched fists like tiny spools of thread. “There I am!” Min Foo said, hugging Lateesha on her lap.

As if Min Foo’s arrival had been the whole point of the movie, a card proclaiming The End promptly filled the screen. A few people clapped. Then another card popped up listing family members in order of appearance. Paul P. Davitch, Joyce Mays Davitch, Zebulon Davitch, M.D…. Rebecca went on watching, transfixed, but the children were drifting away now and the adults had started talking among themselves. Biddy called, “Folks? Are you listening? Cake will be served in the dining room.” Emmy and Joey were elbowing each other for space on the piano bench; Lateesha was chasing balloons; Poppy was telling J.J. that Joyce had been much prettier than the camera made her out to be.

The credits ended, followed by more snow. Rebecca bent to press the Rewind button, and then she went out to the dining room where a sizable group already stood admiring the mammoth birthday cake.

“My name wasn’t on the card,” she told Zeb.

Without turning, he said, “Hmm?”

“They didn’t list me on the card when they rolled the credits.”

Miss Nancy plucked Rebecca’s sleeve. “Could I just say something?” she asked. “In view of Mr. Davitch’s limitations, I’m not at all in favor of ankle weights for his walks.”

From behind them, Min Foo said, “Didn’t I tell them so? Didn’t I tell Patch? ‘The poor man can barely stagger around as it is,’ I said, ‘and now you want to tie lead weights to his ankles?’”

“I heard that!” Patch called from the other side of the room. “Criticize, criticize! Why don’t you say it to my face, if that’s how you feel?”

“I did say it to your face.”

Meanwhile, Rebecca’s mother was telling Alice Farmer how well the folks in Church Valley got along with the Colored; Haydn was resuming on the stereo; Emmy and Joey were playing “Heart and Soul” on the piano. Biddy was using the butane torch to light the candles on the cake — an actual one hundred candles, as Rebecca had insisted, plus an extra to grow on. They ringed each of the lower tiers and completely covered the top except for the center, where a little ceramic man stood — one half of a bride-and-groom set — wearing a black tailcoat and a tiny, bushy mustache very much like Poppy’s. “Aww,” several people said when they saw him. Poppy himself watched gravely, standing very straight with both hands on the crook of his cane.

Now Barry started singing “Happy Birthday,” swooping his arms above his head like an orchestra conductor. It was good to have somebody else, for a change, play the part of cruise-ship director. Rebecca chimed in on the second note, and the others joined by twos and threes as the song continued. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”

At the end, as always, a couple of the children went on singing. “How o-old are you, how o-old are you…” Their voices were so frail that Rebecca could hear, besides, Haydn on the stereo and “Heart and Soul” on the piano and “Stardust” on the VCR, which somebody must have started running all over again. The Military Symphony — at least this second section of it, whatever it was called — didn’t sound military at all; it sounded delicate and sad. And “Heart and Soul” had always struck her as so haunting, such an oddly haunting melody in view of the fact that it was literally child’s play. And anyone would agree that “Stardust” was a melancholy song. So that was probably why, in the middle of “How Old Are You?” she felt an ache of homesickness, right there in her own house.

But she brushed it aside, and, “Make a wish! Make a wish!” she chanted, until the others took it up. Poppy braced himself, sucked in a huge breath, and blew out every last candle.

Well, he did have help. Danny and Peter, whom he must have enlisted earlier, leaned forward at either side of him and blew when he did, which made everybody laugh. “It still counts, though!” Poppy said. “I still get my wish. Don’t I?”

“Of course you do,” Rebecca told him.

She stepped forward to take his arm, planning to settle him in a chair, but he resisted. Instead he stood for a long, silent moment watching Biddy pluck the candles from the cake. “Boy, that is kind of pitiful,” he said finally. “A groom without his bride like that.”

He was right, Rebecca realized. They should have thought how it would look: the poor little man all dressed up, all alone on his expanse of deforested icing. Well, too late now, for Poppy had already been reminded of his poem. “You’re given a special welcome when you get to heaven late…”

Min Foo blamed Hakim. That blasted videotape, she said in a piercing whisper, with Aunt Joyce in every frame, just about, reminding Poppy all over again that she was dead.

Hakim said, “So? He would otherwise forget?”

Lateesha asked if she could lick the frosting off the candles. Mr. Hardesty’s walker made a sound like inch, inch as he hobbled toward a chair. “The journey may be lonely, but the end is worth the wait,” Poppy finished. “The sight of your beloved, smiling at the gate.”

And then, without missing a beat, “Why! That wouldn’t be fondant icing, would it?”

“It would indeed,” Biddy told him.

“Fondant icing! My favorite! Oh, my.”

What Peter had said was right, Rebecca thought. You could still enjoy a party even if you didn’t remember it later.

* * *

The champagne was a top brand; Rebecca had made sure of that. Ordinarily they’d have drunk something cheaper — just sparkling wine, to be honest — but not today. Barry gave a whistle when she handed him a bottle to open. “Pretty classy,” he told her, and she said, “Well, we don’t observe a hundredth birthday every day of the week.” Even the little ones got the real thing. She poured a drop for each of them herself, over Biddy’s protests that they would never know the difference.

“A toast!” she said when everyone had a glass. She raised her own glass. She was standing in the center of the front parlor, surrounded by so many people that some were all the way back in the dining room, and at the moment she wasn’t even sure where Poppy was located. But she said, “To Poppy!” She cleared her throat.

“He’s beginning to seem perennial;

We’re observing his centennial.

So shout it from the chandeliers:

We wish him another hundred years!”

“To Poppy,” they all murmured. And then, in the silence when the others were drinking, Patch said clearly, “Oh, Lord, Beck is back to those everlasting rhymes of hers.”

Rebecca’s eyes stung. She swallowed her sip of champagne and blinked to clear her vision.

From over near the fireplace, Poppy said, “Thank you, all.”

He was standing next to Mr. Hardesty and grasping one side of the walker, so that at first glance it seemed the two men were holding hands. When he had everybody’s attention, he said, “Well. This has been just what I dreamed of, I tell you. From the very start of the day, it’s been perfect. Sunshine on my bedspread when I opened my eyes; radiators coming on all dusty-smelling and cozy. Waffles for breakfast, that puffy kind that are light inside but crispy outside, and one-hundred-percent maple syrup heated first in the microwave and then poured over in a pool and left a moment to soak, so the waffles swell and turn spongy and every crumb of them is sopping with that toasty, nutty flavor…”

Well, this would take a while. Rebecca downed the rest of her champagne and looked for a place to set her glass. Then she felt someone’s hand on the small of her back. When she turned, she found Zeb just behind her. He said, “That was just Patch being Patch. She didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Oh,” she said, “what do I care?”

But to her distress, the tears welled up again.

“The fact is,” she told Zeb, “I’m a superficial woman.”

She had meant to say “superfluous” (she was thinking again of the movie credits — how she might as well not have been present), but she didn’t correct herself; so Zeb, misunderstanding, said, “They can’t expect a Shakespearean sonnet, for heaven’s sake.”

“And another thing,” she said, regardless of who overheard her. “How come everyone calls me Beck? Beck is not my name! I’m Rebecca! How did I get to be Beck, all at once?”

“I don’t call you Beck,” Zeb pointed out.

This was true, she realized. But she went on. “’Beck’s unrelenting jollity’—that’s what Biddy told Troy this morning. I heard her, out in the kitchen. ‘This party will be a breeze,’ I heard her say. ‘We’ve got Poppy’s truckload of desserts, and enough champagne to float a ship, and Beck’s unrelenting jollity…’”

“Why don’t we find you a seat,” Zeb said, and he increased the pressure on the small of her back and steered her through the crowd. “Excuse us, please. Excuse us.”

People gave way, not noticing, still listening to Poppy’s speech. He had traveled past the waffles now and arrived at his morning shave. “… anything nicer than soft, rich lather and a plenitude of hot water? The bathroom’s warm and soapy-smelling; the mirror’s a steamy blur. You draw the razor down your cheek and leave this smooth swath of skin…”

No chairs were free, but Zeb guided Rebecca toward the piano, where Emmy and Joey were sitting, and asked if they’d mind moving. “Your grandma’s tired,” he told them. They jumped up, and Rebecca dropped heavily onto the bench. She was tired, come to think of it. She buried her nose in her empty glass and remembered, unexpectedly, a long-ago childhood crying fit that had ended when her father brought her a tumbler of ginger ale. (The same spicy, tingly smell, the same saltiness in her nostrils.) Then Zeb’s fingers closed around the stem of her glass, and she let him take it away to where Barry was pouring refills.

“The best thing about solitaire is, it’s so solitary,” Poppy was saying. “You’re allowed to think these aimless thoughts and nobody asks what you’re up to. You lay out the cards, slip slip slip—a peaceful sound — and then you sit a while and think, and the mantel clock is tick-tocking and the smell of fresh hot coffee is coming up from downstairs…”

People seemed to have reached the conclusion that Poppy’s speech was background music. They were discreet; they kept their voices low, but they were going about their own affairs now. Lateesha was drawing a face on a balloon with a squeaky felt-tip marker. NoNo and Min Foo had the giggles. Mr. Ames had waylaid Zeb to tell him something medical — displaying a gnarled wrist and flexing it this way and that while Zeb bent his head politely.

J.J. sat down on the bench beside Rebecca and confided that he wasn’t entirely at ease about his wife. “What seems to be the trouble?” Rebecca whispered, and he said, “I believe her pastor paid that visit because she asked him to. I believe she’s starting to wonder why she married me.”

“Oh, J.J., don’t you think you’re just anxious because of what happened with Denise?” Rebecca asked. “You’ve been a wonderful husband! You took her on that anniversary trip to Ocean City—”

“Yes, but I believe the more niggling things — the, like, wearing my socks to bed, which she hates…”

Lunch, Poppy was saying, had been precisely what he’d requested: a peanut-butter-jelly sandwich on whole wheat. “Oh, I know it’s not foie gras,” he said, “but there’s something so satisfactory about a p.b.j. done right. And this was done exactly right: the grape jelly smeared so thick that it had started soaking through, making these oozy purple stains like bruises on the bread…”

Rebecca’s mother and Aunt Ida tiptoed across the room with their purses tucked under their arms. They picked their way around a game of jacks on the rug and trilled their fingers toward Rebecca. “Don’t get up!” Aunt Ida mouthed, but of course Rebecca did get up. She followed them out to the foyer, where they could speak in normal tones.

“I won’t urge you to stay,” she said as she helped them into their things. “I know you want to be home before dark.” Already the light outside was dimming, she noticed. Both women placed soft, dry kisses on her cheek, and Aunt Ida said, “Thanks for a lovely party, darlin’.”

“Thank you for coming.”

“But I didn’t quite understand about the guest list,” her mother said.

“Sorry?”

“Who were some of those people? They seemed… beside the point.”

Ordinarily Rebecca would have been annoyed, but something about her mother’s wording struck her as comical, and so she merely laughed and said, “Drive safely.”

“We don’t want that Martin Luther King Boulevard,” she heard her mother tell her aunt as they walked toward the street. “Don’t want to get onto that ramp where the highways loop off like spaghetti…”

Other guests were stirring now. They were looking at their watches, sending meaningful glances toward the people they had come with. Oh, it always made Rebecca feel so bereft when a party hit that winding-down stage! The front parlor had a ragged look, with its empty chairs here and there and its scattered gift wrap. Instead of returning to her bench, she took a seat on the couch next to Peter. “Where’s he got to?” she whispered — meaning Poppy.

“Nap time,” he whispered back.

Nap time, and cool white sheets that warmed as they grew used to you. “It’s like you’ve made yourself a nest the exact same shape as your body,” Poppy was saying. “It’s this body-shape of warmth, and if you find you’re a little too warm, you just move your feet the least little bit and there’s this fresh new coolness.”

The person who kept replaying the videotape was Merrie; or at least Merrie was the person in front of the VCR at the moment, sitting tailor-fashion on the floor as close as she could get and studying one of the Christmases. Well, she was at that age, of course: seven. Still young enough to be interested in what kind of child her mother had been. In fact, Patch had been a downright homely child, as Rebecca recollected now that she watched her roller-skate across the screen. A spiky, knobby, wiry child, quarrelsome and thorny, not nurturing like Biddy or winsome like NoNo. But Patch was the first stepdaughter Rebecca had loved — or the first she’d become aware of loving. The night Patch’s appendix burst she had been so ill, in such visible pain, lying there so white-faced and enormous-eyed with every freckle standing out; and Rebecca had been struck by fear as physical as a kick in the stomach. In some ways, she had never recovered.

Not that this lessened her irritation in the slightest when Patch said, far too loudly, “What’s Poppy trying to do: set a world record?”

“Ssh,” Rebecca told her.

He must be nearing the finish line now; he was dressing for the party. (“… that crackly feel of starched shirtsleeves when you slither your arms inside them…”) And anyhow, Rebecca was enjoying this. It was sort of like a report on what it was like to be alive, she decided. Let’s say you had to report back to heaven at the end of your time on earth, tell them what your personal allotment of experience had been: wouldn’t it sound like Poppy’s speech? The smell of radiator dust on a winter morning, the taste of hot maple syrup…

Why, her own report might take even longer.

Zeb was wending his way toward her with that glass of champagne, finally. The jacks players were on their eightsies.

Peter was telling J.J.J. about scientists who made discoveries in their dreams. “And if you consider how many hours we spend dreaming,” he said, “figuring, say, two hours a night, which is the national average; and say we live eighty years, and… let’s see, two from ten, borrow the one… That would give me almost seven years of dreaming.”

Maybe it was his mention of dreams, or maybe the way he was sitting — next to her but turned slightly away, so that all she saw was his profile — but Rebecca just then had the strangest thought. She thought Peter was the boy she’d been traveling with on the train. She smiled at him, even though he wasn’t looking.

Poppy was describing the candles on his cake—”a wall of flame,” he called it — and the wish he’d made before he blew them out. “I wished for an even bigger party next year,” he said, “to celebrate my hundred and first. My palindromic birthday.”

Several people sent Rebecca looks of sympathy.

The jacks players had reached their ninesies. Zeb placed the glass of champagne in her hands and planted a kiss on the top of her head.

There were still so many happenings yet to be hoped for in her life.

“… and the icing was my favorite: fondant,” Poppy was saying. “It melted in my mouth. I held a bite in my mouth and it sat for just a second and then trickled, trickled down my throat, all that melting sweetness.”

On the screen, Rebecca’s face appeared, merry and open and sunlit, and she saw that she really had been having a wonderful time.