Back When We Were Grownups

Six

Early on the last Wednesday morning in August, Joey and Lateesha rang Rebecca’s doorbell. Lateesha was carrying the pink crib pillow she never slept without, and both children wore knapsacks. Behind them stood Hakim — a considerable distance behind, all the way out on the curb, almost back in his car already. “I take Min Foo to the hospital!” he shouted. “The pains are five minutes apart!”

“All right! Good luck!” Rebecca said, and she blew a kiss to Min Foo. “Just remind yourself, sweetheart, you’re going to get a baby out of this!”

Min Foo said, “What? Well, yes. The kids haven’t had breakfast yet, Mom.”

“I’ll see to it,” Rebecca promised, laying an arm around each child.

As soon as the car had driven off, she led the children upstairs to the third-floor guest room. “Isn’t this exciting?” she asked as she helped Lateesha shuck her knapsack. “By lunchtime, I bet, you’ll have a brand-new brother or sister!”

They didn’t seem all that thrilled. They had the bleary, befuddled look of sleepers awakened too suddenly, and they followed her back down to the kitchen in a shuffling silence. When she set out toast and jam, Lateesha’s eyes filled with tears. “The jam’s got dots!” she said. “It’s got dots that will stick in my teeth!”

“Those are raspberry seeds, dummy,” Joey said.

“Joey called me a dummy!”

“Now, now,” Rebecca said. “Never mind; I’ll find you some nice grape jelly.”

Then Poppy came down wanting his breakfast, and he needed the situation explained to him several times. “Min Foo’s having a baby? I thought she was divorced,” he said.

“She was, Poppy, but then she married Hakim, remember?”

“Hakim! Good glory, not another black man!”

“No, Poppy, he’s Arab. What a way to talk,” Rebecca said, sending a glance toward Lateesha. But Lateesha was absorbed in spreading grape jelly precisely to the edges of her toast, and she seemed oblivious.

After breakfast, Rebecca made up the two beds in the guest room and propped Lateesha’s pink pillow against one headboard. This had probably once been a servant’s room. It was small and stuffy, with an oppressively low ceiling and a single narrow window. In one corner stood a dark wooden bookcase crammed with curling paperbacks, faded textbooks from the girls’ school days, and the histories and biographies that Rebecca used to read in college. She used to get crushes, almost, on people like Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln. She would study them in depth, try to learn every detail of their lives in much the same way that her roommate studied the lives of movie stars.

And she had once been so political! She had picketed the Macadam cafeteria on behalf of its underpaid workers; she had marched against the war in Vietnam; she had plastered the door of her dorm room with anti-nuclear stickers. Now she could barely bring herself to vote. All she read in the newspaper was Ann Landers and her horoscope. Her eyes slid over Kosovo and Rwanda and hurried on.

It occurred to her that so far, the only step she’d taken toward retrieving that old Rebecca was to try and reconnect with the old Rebecca’s boyfriend. Like some fluff-headed girl from the fifties, she had assumed she would reach her goal by riding a man’s coattails.

Just as well that she had failed, she told herself. (Although still, more than two weeks later, the memory of her dinner with Will continued to pinch her pride.)

The telephone rang and she flew downstairs, calling, “Get that, somebody! Answer the phone!” because she thought it might be Hakim. But it was only the man from Second Eden, arranging to come replace the dead azaleas in the backyard. “Now, I don’t want to do it quite yet,” he said, “because it’s still kind of warm. Could turn downright hot again, even, and I always advise waiting till—”

“My daughter’s having a baby; could you get off the line?” she said.

“Oh! Sorry.”

“Not that I mean to be rude,” she said, instantly feeling guilty. “It’s just, you know how it is when one of your children—”

“Ma’am. Believe me. My daughter had twins. Me and my wife sat in that waiting room twenty-one hours.”

“Twenty-one hours!”

“The nurses kept saying, ‘You-all might want to go home and come back,’ but we said, ‘No, sir. No, indeed. No way, José. Not on your life,’ we said, and it got to be suppertime, got to be dark, got to be the next morning—”

“I have to get off the line,” Rebecca told him. She hung up, and then felt guilty all over again.

It seemed she always developed a stomachache when one of the girls was in labor. Unconsciously, she would spend the duration holding in her abdominal muscles. It made her wonder how the nurses in delivery rooms survived.

As luck would have it, no party had been scheduled for that evening. The Open Arms was going through a slow spell. But to keep the children amused, she hauled out all the candleholders and set them on the dining-room table. Then she unloaded a mammoth shopping bag of fresh candles. “Put in any color you like,” she said. “After that you can light them for a minute, just so they’ll lose that new look. Only while I’m in the room, though; you understand?”

She watched Joey choose a taper striped red and white like a barber pole — a bit Christmassy, but never mind. She said, “Now that fall’s on the way, we can start using candles at parties again. I always hate to give them up over the summer, but it’s true they have a sort of warming effect psychologically, even if they don’t produce that much actual heat.”

The telephone in the kitchen bleeped once and fell silent. Rebecca paused for several seconds, but no rings followed.

“When I was a little girl,” she went on, “my Aunt Ida gave me this beautiful, tall white candle with a kind of frill of white lace running up it in a spiral. I thought it was the most elegant thing I’d ever seen in my life. I saved it in my bureau drawer for some momentous event, although I can’t imagine now what that would have been. I mean, I was only eight years old. Not a whole lot of momentous events happen when you’re eight. And Aunt Ida would ask me, now and then, ‘Have you ever burned that candle?’ I’d say, ‘No, not yet. I’m saving it,’ I’d say. Then one day, oh, maybe three or four years later, I came across it in my drawer. It had turned all yellow and warped; it was practically a C shape, and the lace was coming off in crumbles. I’d never seen it burning, and now I never would. So ever since that time, I light my candles any chance I get. I light them by the dozens, all over every room, at every party from September through May. Multitudes of candles.”

She handed each child a box of matches, and they started lighting the candles that marched the length of the table — tapers and pillars and votive lights, white and colored and striped and gilded, blazing in the dim room like a skyful of stars.

* * *

It was after one o’clock when Hakim finally called. “I have a son!” he said. “He is huge: eight pounds ten ounces. Is looking just like me. Min Foo is feeling fine and sending all her love.”

“What’s his name?” Rebecca asked.

“We have no name. NoNo said that it would only be a girl.”

“Oh. Right,” Rebecca said.

She let the children telephone their aunts and all their friends to spread the news, and after that she hauled out her decorating supplies and the three of them made a poster reading WELCOME HOME, MOM AND LITTLE BROTHER. Then Poppy came down from his nap and they all drank a ginger-ale toast in Mother Davitch’s sherbet glasses. Poppy seemed to have the impression that the baby was Rebecca’s, but he got that straightened out in due course.

When Hakim called again, in the late afternoon, Rebecca drove the children to the hospital for a visit. “You two are lucky,” she told them on the way. “It used to be they wouldn’t let children visit before they were twelve. Your aunts didn’t see your mother till I brought her home from the hospital.”

Hard to believe that had been thirty-two years ago. To Rebecca, it seemed as vivid as last week: the nearly imperceptible weight of that tiny body, the warmth of that downy head nestling in the crook of her neck as she climbed the front steps, and the three little girls in the doorway, goggle-eyed and awed, reaching out reverently to touch the baby’s foot.

When she was handed her new grandson in the hospital room — another modern development, no plate-glass window between them — she had a moment of confusion where it seemed he was Min Foo. He had Min Foo’s paintbrush hair and caraway-seed eyes, and he peered curiously up at Rebecca as if he thought he might know her from somewhere. “Look,” she told the children. “He’s saying, ‘Who are you? What kind of people have I ended up with, here? How am I going to like living on this planet?’”

She hoped they didn’t notice the ridiculous break in her voice.

* * *

When they got home again, bringing carry-out chicken and French fries for supper, they found Poppy playing solitaire on the coffee table in the front parlor. “I couldn’t stand it up in the family room,” he told them, “because that telephone kept ringing, ringing, ringing. Durn thing nearly rang my ear off.”

“Did you answer it?” Rebecca asked.

“No,” he said, “I let them leave a message. Yammer, yammer away on that benighted machine of yours.”

But when she went upstairs to check, she found only three messages. “Well, this here’s Alice Farmer,” was the first. “I know you don’t plan on no parties this weekend but I want to come in anyhow because I need the money. My brother’s girl Berenice is turning twenty. You remember Berenice, who’s afflicted with eating disorder…” Then she sort of wandered off, still talking but growing fainter.

The second message was a long pause and a click.

The third, recorded one minute after the second, was, “Rebecca, um, it’s Will.”

She drew back sharply.

“I was just afraid you might have gotten the wrong idea,” he said. “I don’t know why you felt you had to rush off like that. You didn’t even eat your salmon! The waiter asked if anything was wrong. I’m afraid you might have misunderstood me. Could you please call me back, please?”

She frowned at the machine for a moment. Then she pressed the Delete button.

* * *

Thursday morning she took the children to the zoo, where they spent some time commiserating with the dusty, panting lions. From there they went to the hospital. The baby was off getting circumcised, with Hakim (a cardiologist) watching from the sidelines and no doubt wringing his hands, and Min Foo was sitting up in bed doing a crossword puzzle; so Rebecca took a short walk in order to give the children a private visit with their mother. She stopped at the nursery window, where rows of infants lay in their cots like little wrapped burritos, and then she went back to the room. The baby had returned in a state of outrage and was being soothed and cooed over. Lateesha was sucking her thumb, which she hadn’t done in some time. Rebecca suggested to the children that they go home and have a picnic lunch in the backyard.

In the afternoon LaVon came by, Lateesha’s father, and carried the children off to watch his jazz band practice. (He was actually a fourth-grade teacher, but he had hopes of someday becoming a professional musician.) When he brought them back he stayed for Thursday-night supper; so Rebecca thought of his appearance as sort of a mixed blessing. Not that she wasn’t pleased to see him. He was a funny, charming, high-spirited young man, inclined toward African-print shirts and wild hairdos, so full of energy that he all but danced even when he was standing still. But Hakim was at supper too, and he tended to act somewhat bristly around his predecessor. Also, Min Foo would hear about this and throw a fit. “Why are you so nice to LaVon?” she’d be bound to ask. “Don’t you understand that he’s out of the picture now?” To which Rebecca would answer, “I can’t turn my feelings off like a faucet, honey, every time you choose to dump another husband.”

Although she did turn her feelings on, in a way, because she had always sworn that she would welcome newcomers to the family. She had promised herself that, Aunt Ida — like, she would declare her door to be permanently ajar, and she had kept her promise so faithfully that now she couldn’t say for certain whether she truly loved her sons-in-law or merely thought she did.

Anyhow, what difference did it make? They were good husbands, all of them — including Troy, the non-husband. Good husbands and good fathers. (Well, maybe except for Joey’s father, the antique Professor Drake, who had moved to some Greek island after his banishment and ceased all communication.) She smiled now to see how comfortably LaVon tipped back in his chair as he argued some musical issue with Troy, who taught theory at the Peabody Conservatory. Poppy was interrupting to say that nothing remotely worth listening to had been written after 1820. “My favorite composer is Haydn,” he said. “It’s true I used to think he was sort of music-boxy, but that was before I went to a concert and heard him play in person.”

“In… what?” LaVon asked, not having been exposed lately to Poppy and his lapses.

Rebecca hastened to tinkle a fork against her iced-tea glass. “Okay, everybody!” she said. “Time to propose a toast to Abdul!”

That was the name the parents had finally chosen for the new baby: Abdul Abdulazim. Rebecca liked pronouncing it. “To Abdul Abdulazim!” she said now. “His arrival makes us beam.” Abdul’s father, Hakim Abdulazim (whose name was even more fun to pronounce) sat up straighter and raised his chin proudly. “It’s such a pleasure to have a new boy,” Rebecca chanted, “Let’s hope he’s as nice as Lateesha and Joey!”

Hakim lifted his glass, and so did the two children, but the others just murmured, “Cheers,” and went on with their conversations. They heard so many toasts, after all. Rebecca could sympathize. It seemed she was constantly mustering enthusiasm for her family’s engagements and weddings and births, their children’s straight A’s and starring roles and graduations. Sometimes, for lack of any other reason, she proposed a toast to Thursday. “To Thursday once again, and so many of us together! To good food and good talk, and lovely summer weather!” (Or spring weather, or fall, or winter weather.) And that was not even counting all those professional events — her clients’ Christmases and New Years, their business promotions and mergers and retirements, their everlasting anniversaries and confirmations and bar mitzvahs and bridal showers.

Well. She squared her shoulders and turned to Hakim. “Now, about the baby-welcoming,” she said.

He looked worried. “This is what?” he asked.

“The party we give our new babies. It’s kind of a Davitch tradition,” she told him. “The idea came from one time when I was waiting for one of the girls at the airport and I saw this huge, happy, noisy crowd carrying balloons and placards and video cameras and regular cameras and flowers and wrapped gifts, and then the plane landed and a woman walked in with a tiny little button of a baby, Korean I think or Chinese, and the crowd started cheering and this couple stepped forward and the wife held out her arms and the woman gave her the baby and… I’ve always felt sort of cheated that we haven’t had any adoptions in our family. Adoption is more sudden than pregnancy, don’t you think? It’s more dramatic. So I said, ‘Why don’t we welcome our babies like that?’ And that’s what we’ve done ever since.”

Hakim blinked. Rebecca wondered, sometimes, exactly how good his English was. “Well, anyhow,” she said, “all I need from you two is a date. We can do it this weekend, if you like. The Open Arms isn’t booked. Or would you prefer just a Thursday? A normal family Thursday?”

“I will ask Min Foo,” he said. But he still looked worried.

It wasn’t a huge gathering tonight — just nine around the table. As usual, Troy and Biddy and Zeb were present — Biddy because she used Thursdays to experiment with new recipes, and Zeb because (Rebecca suspected) this was his only chance for a home-cooked meal. He would go home laden down with leftovers, she always made certain. It used to be that NoNo had been a regular too, but since the wedding they’d hardly seen her. Well, that was as it should be, of course. She was establishing her own traditions now.

Last week, NoNo had phoned Rebecca and asked how people formed car pools. Peter’s school was due to reopen and she would be in charge of his transportation. “Do I put an ad in the paper?” she’d asked. “Tack a note to a bulletin board? Or what?”

“You get hold of the school directory…” Rebecca began. She spoke slowly; she was trying to cast her mind back. “You look up all the students who live near you…”

“I asked Peter who lived near us and he said he didn’t think anyone. But I’m not sure he knows. It doesn’t seem to me that he has any friends.”

“None at all?” Rebecca said.

“Well, he never gets any phone calls, at least.”

“Maybe boys just don’t phone,” Rebecca told her.

“Oh, you’re right; maybe they don’t.”

“It’s not as if you or I have had much experience with boys.”

“You’re right,” NoNo said again, and her voice turned thin and quavery. “I’m really not equipped for this, you know?”

“Oh, sweetheart, you’ll do fine,” Rebecca had said. “Don’t worry for an instant. Just call Patch or Min Foo and ask them about car pools, why don’t you.”

Now she leaned across the table to Joey. “Joey,” she said, “do you ever talk on the phone?”

“I talk with you, Gram.”

“With your friends, I mean. Do you ever get on the phone and talk with them in the evening?”

“Well, sure, if I need to know about a homework assignment or something.”

“But not just to talk for no reason.”

“No reason! Then why would I call?”

“Aha,” Rebecca said. She told Zeb, “NoNo thinks Peter doesn’t have any friends because nobody ever phones him.”

“He’ll be okay. Just give him time,” Zeb said. Which was probably what he told every parent who walked into his office, Rebecca reflected. He was helping Lateesha cut her pork chop, and he didn’t even look up as he spoke.

“This spinach dish—” Biddy was announcing. “Could I have people’s attention, please? This spinach dish contains a tiny bit of nutmeg, but the point is that you’re not supposed to taste it. It’s only meant to enhance the flavor of the spinach. Does anyone taste any nutmeg?”

Hard to tell, for as usual, the others were too busy arguing and interrupting each other. “I think it’s delicious,” Rebecca told her.

But Biddy said, “I don’t know why I bother making the effort,” just as if no one had spoken. She snatched up the spinach dish and marched back to the kitchen.

Rebecca looked down at her plate for a second, and when she looked up again she found Zeb watching her. He said, “It’s just that you always say things are delicious. She didn’t mean any harm.”

“Well, I know that,” Rebecca said.

Then she said, “More pork chops, anyone? Who’d like another pork chop?” and the moment passed.

* * *

On Friday Min Foo and the baby went home, and Rebecca dropped the two children off along with a bag of groceries. From there she drove directly to a bookstore. “Do you have any books on Robert E. Lee?” she asked a salesclerk.

“Try Biography, over by the window.”

“Thank you.”

She crossed the store, pausing once or twice when something in another section caught her eye — a children’s book on ballet, which was Merrie’s current passion, and a collection of Holy Land photos that would make a very good birthday present for Alice Farmer. In Biography she found three books about Lee, one of them a paperback. She plucked that from the shelf and studied the portrait on the cover: Lee’s square-cut beard and disappointed gaze. He wasn’t someone she particularly admired. It was only that he represented the first and last extensive scholarly research she had ever undertaken. She had barely assembled her reference materials, was just starting to feel caught up in the project, when Joe Davitch walked into her life. Now the sight of Lee’s face brought back a swarm of memories: the musty smell of the Macadam College library; the sweetly rounded o’s of her history professor, who came from Minnesota; and the thrilling crispness of brand-new textbooks and spiral-bound notebooks purchased from the school store.

A couple of feet away, a severe-looking woman with a tight bun of white hair selected a hardback and showed it to a girl in a miniskirt — her granddaughter, most likely. “Now, this would be a good choice,” she said. “The life of Charles Lindbergh.”

“But it’s, like, humongous,” the granddaughter said. “I’d totally never finish it before the start of classes.”

The woman somehow managed to grow taller as she stood there. “May I inquire,” she said icily, “what kind of voice that is you’re using?”

Rebecca knew exactly what kind of voice it was. She’d heard Dixon call it a surfer-girl voice. (Though why it should be needed in Baltimore, Maryland, and how that shallow, breathy tone could be advantageous — did it carry more easily over the sound of the waves, or what? — she couldn’t say.) But the granddaughter didn’t seem to have heard. “And besides,” she went on, “he’s, like, a guy. Guys’ biographies suck.”

“I beg your pardon,” the woman said, growing even taller.

“Well. Sorry, Grandma,” the girl said meekly.

The woman sniffed and replaced the book on the shelf.

Rebecca was impressed. Imagine having such authority! She herself might have drifted into a string of likes and totallys right along with the granddaughter, hardly noticing what she was doing. She had no sense of definition, was the problem. No wonder she’d ended up a whole different person!

She bought not only the Lee paperback but the two hardbacks as well, although she couldn’t afford them. When she set them on the counter, the salesclerk asked, “Will that be all?” and Rebecca said, “Yes. It will,” in a firm, declarative manner that (she realized too late) exactly duplicated the white-haired woman’s.

* * *

Some days were telephone days and other days were not. Did it work that way for everyone? Some days Rebecca’s phone rang nonstop, one caller tumbling over the heels of another, and other days you wouldn’t know she owned a phone.

On this particular afternoon the painter called; then the dentist’s office; then the man who inspected the furnace. Poppy’s physical therapist wanted to reschedule. Patch wanted to complain about Jeep. Min Foo wanted to list possible dates for the baby-welcoming.

A Mrs. Allen called to arrange for her husband’s fiftieth-birthday party. “This would be, oh, maybe sixty guests,” she said. “Or sixty-five. Let’s play it safe and say seventy.”

Rebecca wondered why people couldn’t figure these things out before they got on the line. But she said, “Seventy. All right.”

“It’s going to be a surprise.”

“Really,” Rebecca said.

She should have let that go, but in all good conscience, she couldn’t. “If you want my honest opinion,” she said, “surprise parties are guaranteed disasters. Is what I would call them.”

This made the plumber, flat on his back beneath the kitchen sink, snort and mutter, “Amen to that!” But Mrs. Allen was undeterred. “I’m thinking just drinks and canapés,” she went on blithely. “Sit-down dinners are so stuffy, don’t you agree?”

The Open Arms could not have managed a sit-down dinner for seventy; so Rebecca certainly did agree. They settled on the date and the deposit fee, after which she prepared to say goodbye, but Mrs. Allen moved on next to the subject of her husband’s midlife crisis. (His decision to try a hair transplant, his drastic weight-loss diet, his purchase of a sixteen-hundred-dollar set of golf clubs although that was cheaper, she supposed, than taking up with some dolly half his age.) Rebecca tiptoed across the kitchen, stretching the telephone cord to its limit, and turned the timer dial on the stove till it started dinging. “Oops! Gotta go!” she cried, and she hung up. “Some people think the phone is some kind of… hobby,” she told the plumber.

He said, “You ought to check out my house. You know my daughter? Felicia?” Then the phone rang again.

Rebecca sighed and reached for the receiver. “Hello,” she said.

Will Allenby said, “Rebecca?”

She said, “Oh.”

“Don’t hang up!”

“I wasn’t going to hang up,” she told him.

Although a part of her would have liked to. It was only curiosity that stopped her.

He said, “I just wanted to apologize for the other evening.”

“That’s quite all right,” she said stiffly.

“I never meant for the conversation to go that way, believe me. I don’t know how it happened.”

The odd thing was, the apology made her feel humiliated all over again. But she said, “Really, don’t give it a thought. I’ve forgotten it completely. Thanks for calling, though.”

“Wait!”

She waited.

“Please,” he said. “Could we just talk a little bit? Could you just listen?”

“Well,” she said, “all right. I guess so.”

“I seem to be in… something of a sorry state, Rebecca. Lately it’s been all I can do just to get up in the morning. I get up; I look in the mirror; I think, Oh, God, it’s the same old, same old me, and I want to crawl back into bed and stay there forever.”

Rebecca held very still, as if he could observe how attentively she was listening.

He said, “The fact of the matter is, the divorce was my wife’s idea, not mine. I’m not even sure what went wrong there! One day she just announced that she wanted me to move out. And of course she kept our daughter with her. I can understand that; what do I know about teenaged girls? But we both agreed that I’d still have lots of contact. I would see my daughter regularly, any day I liked, back and forth between our two places. Now whenever I phone, though, Beatrice is busy. I ask her to come for supper and she says she’s got a friend over, or she’s made other plans. She never has any time to get together.”

“Well, she’s seventeen!” Rebecca said. “Of course she doesn’t have time.”

“I tell her to bring the friend along and she says her friend wouldn’t feel comfortable in my apartment.”

“You know how teenagers are. They’re constitutionally ashamed of their parents. It isn’t personal.”

“No,” Will said, “there’s more to it than that. I can’t explain it. It seems I’m just… destined not to have anyone in my life. Here I am, all alone in this old lady’s dead-quiet house, and it feels so natural; that’s the worst of it. It feels like my natural state. What did you expect? I ask myself. Did you imagine someone would actually want to stay with you forever? You should thank your lucky stars you ever got married at all. It’s as if I’m lacking some talent that everyone else takes for granted.”

“Now, Will, you’re just plain wrong about that,” Rebecca said.

“Okay,” he said. “Then tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me why you broke up with me.”

“We’ve been through that! When Joe Davitch came along—”

“No, I want the real reason. I want you to be honest.”

“I am being honest!” she said.

“Don’t insult my intelligence, Rebecca.”

She felt stung. She said, “I can see this is going nowhere; so I’m going to hang up now. Goodbye.”

And without waiting for his answer, she put the receiver back on the hook.

The plumber was packing his tools away more noisily than seemed necessary, with lots of clanks and rattles and many exaggerated grunts as he reached for various wrenches. She suspected he felt embarrassed for her. “What a nuisance!” she said gaily. “These people who stay on the phone forever; I just never know how to get off, do you?”

The plumber said, “Sort of persistent type, was he?”

Then he cocked his head at her and waited, looking expectant, but Rebecca just said, “Right,” and asked if he’d fixed the leak.

She wished she hadn’t ended the call so abruptly. She was beginning to get that awful torn feeling she always had after saying something hurtful to somebody.

For the rest of the afternoon the telephone was silent, but at suppertime, there was the usual flurry of telemarketers. Also another call from the Second Eden man. “Those azaleas I told you we had, they’re a teensy bit off from the color I said. They’re more like a, what would you say, not a pink, not a red, not orange—”

“I couldn’t care less what color they are. Any color. Fine,” she said, and she hung up and returned to the table. “If I could undo one modern invention,” she told Poppy, “I believe it would be the telephone.”

“Why, I would choose the zipper,” he said.

Rebecca stared at him a moment, but before she could pursue the subject, the telephone rang again. Mrs. Allen had forgotten to mention that her husband didn’t eat red meat. Then a moment later, she called back: he didn’t eat chicken, either.

“Why don’t you let that machine of yours pick up?” Poppy asked Rebecca.

A reasonable enough question. She didn’t tell him that she kept thinking each call might be Will Allenby.

The evening seemed to be the time for wrong numbers. Three different people phoned by mistake, one of them several times in succession — a Slavic-sounding woman who wanted to argue the issue. “Wrong number! No! This is not wrong number! I telephone my daughter! Bring her on!”

At nine o’clock, Rebecca went off to bed with one of her Robert E. Lee books. It began with Lee’s genealogy, which she found dull. She made herself continue, though. The thought came to her (on a whole separate track in her brain, while the first track continued cataloguing Lee’s great-grandparents) that over the years, she had gradually given up reading anything difficult. Even a newspaper article, the briefest little piece: if the first line didn’t grab her, she turned the page. It was something like her attitude toward exercise. Whenever she grew the least bit tired or out of breath, she quit. “I figure my body’s trying to tell me something,” she would say jokingly to Patch. (For invariably, it was Patch who urged her into these fitness efforts.) “If it’s sending me such a clear message, how can I ignore it?”

When Lee’s great-grandparents gave way to his grandparents, she put down her book and phoned Zeb. “What are you doing?” she asked when he answered.

“I’m reading about the harmful effects of night-lights.”

“Night-lights!”

“Evidently, children who’ve been raised with night-lights in their rooms end up having vision problems. Their eyes don’t get enough rest, is the hypothesis.”

“Or maybe,” Rebecca said, “the children didn’t see well to begin with, and there’s some biological connection between fear of the dark and bad eyesight; ever thought of that?”

“Hmm.”

“Maybe their bad eyesight caused their fear of the dark. The chair that looks like a monster, for instance.”

“This subject appears to have really gripped your imagination,” Zeb told her.

“Yes, well…”

She glanced at her clock radio. It was almost 10 p.m. Anybody phoning this late would think, Who can she be talking to?

She must be so popular! he would think.

“I’ve been making some resolutions,” she told Zeb. “From now on, I’m reading two books a week, serious books that I have to work at. Also, I’m joining a gym. I plan to get into shape, for once.”

“Now, what would you want to do that for? You’re fine the way you are.”

“No, I’m not! I’m a slug. You of all people, a doctor… Or maybe I should take up jogging. That would be less expensive. Except jogging’s affected by weather. Half the time the weather would be too hot, or it would be raining. I would feel so conspicuous, jogging with an umbrella.”

“Rebecca. Joggers don’t carry umbrellas.”

“How do they stay dry, then?” she asked him. But she was just being silly now, trying to get him to laugh.

After they said goodbye, she instantly sobered. The torn feeling seemed to have grown more pronounced, spreading its ragged edges deep inside her. She sat upright against her pillows and fixed her gaze on the phone. But no one else called.

* * *

The time that was finally settled on for the baby-welcoming was Labor Day. Another picnic lunch on the North Fork River, was the plan, except that Hurricane Dennis moved through the area over the weekend and they changed it to an indoor event.

The general theme turned out to be medical emergencies. First Joey was stung by a bee that had somehow found its way into the front parlor, and he had to be rushed off for a shot because he was allergic. Min Foo and Hakim, of course, were the ones who took him, along with the guest of honor since Min Foo was breast-feeding. This made the whole occasion sort of pointless. (Although still the Open Arms was a seething mass of Davitches, quarreling and laughing and shouting above the racket, children chasing each other around the dining-room table, Biddy pressing food on people, Troy and Jeep exchanging hair-raising childbirth stories.) Then Patch’s youngest two got into some kind of shoving match — not a very serious one, but Merrie bruised her crazy bone and had to be carried off, howling, to the kitchen for ice. “It wasn’t my fault,” Danny said. “She’s the one who was acting so damn piggish.”

Rebecca tried to grow taller. “I beg your pardon,” she said.

Danny, raising his voice, said, “It wasn’t my fault; she’s the one who was acting so damn piggish!”

Rebecca briefly closed her eyes. She opened them to find Poppy standing in front of her, swaying slightly. “Beck,” he said, “I don’t feel so good.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve got this pain.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Here,” he said, and he clutched a handful of his shirtfront.

His face, she saw now, was a grayish white. All his features seemed to have sharpened. “Sit down,” she told him. “Zeb? Where’s Zeb? Somebody get Zeb! Hurry!”

She was leading Poppy toward the sofa as she spoke, half supporting him, noticing how alarmingly lightweight he was. She thought that he was trembling; then she thought it might be she who was trembling. He, in fact, seemed curiously calm, and made a point of positioning his cane just so along the inside edge of the sofa before he lay down. He laced his fingers across his diaphragm and closed his eyes. Rebecca said, “Zeb?”

“Zeb went with Joey and them,” a child offered.

“He did?”

“In case Joey needed first aid on the way.”

“Call an ambulance,” Rebecca ordered. “Poppy? Is the pain, let’s see, radiating down your left arm?”

He thought it over. “It could be,” he said.

“Somebody call an ambulance!”

Then there was the question of who would go along. Half a dozen people offered, including Danny, who wanted to see what an ambulance ride was like, and Alice Farmer, who felt that Poppy needed her prayers. “Beck would be enough,” Poppy said with his eyes still closed. “I don’t believe I care for a lot of clucking and wailing.” His lids were like bits of waxed paper that had been crumpled and then smoothed out.

Rebecca rushed off for her purse and Poppy’s Medicare card. His room, with its smell of cough drops and stale clothing, the bedspread drawn clumsily over the pillow, seemed emptier than was natural. She snatched his billfold from the bureau and hurried downstairs.

Two ambulance men were already loading Poppy onto a stretcher. They had arrived without sirens, or maybe she just hadn’t heard them over the hubbub. (Everyone seemed to be issuing orders, and a couple of children were crying.) “What’s the matter with him?” she asked the men. “Is he going to be all right?” They brushed past her with the stretcher and she trotted close behind, clasping Poppy’s frail ankle beneath the blanket until they reached the front door and she had to let go. Luckily it wasn’t raining at the moment, although the sidewalks were wet and everyone had to step carefully.

Inside the ambulance, which was crammed with a reassuring array of dials and gauges and stainless steel machinery, Rebecca sat on a little seat beside the stretcher and took hold of Poppy’s ankle again — the only part of him not hooked up to wires in some way. This time they turned on the sirens. The driver spoke into a sort of intercom while he drove, relaying Poppy’s name, age, and Social Security number as Rebecca supplied them, and the other man monitored Poppy. “Is this a heart attack?” Rebecca asked, and the man said, “Too soon to tell.”

Poppy said, “But I haven’t had my hundredth-birthday party yet!”

“Oh, Poppy,” she said. “You’ll have your party! I promise.”

She felt close to tears, which surprised her, because hadn’t she always chafed at Poppy’s presence in her life, and resented how she’d had no choice in the matter, and even, on occasion, allowed herself to fantasize his death? But apparently you grow to love whom you’re handed. It seemed shocking — a scandal, an atrocity — that such a thin, gray, warm-ankled person might just stop being, as easily as that.

Poppy glared at the ceiling and chewed his mustache.

Once they’d reached the hospital, Rebecca was directed to a desk to answer questions while the ambulance men wheeled Poppy through a set of swinging doors. “I’ve already answered everything!” she told a nurse. (Was she a nurse? Hard to know, nowadays, with these teddy-bear-print smocks and baggy pants.) The woman patted her arm and said, “You can see your loved one in just a few minutes.”

Rebecca didn’t like the sound of that loved one.

She answered the questions all over again, signed several forms, and then chose a chair as far as possible from anybody else. The room had the scrappy, exhausted look of a place where people had sat too long and then left in too much of a hurry. Empty Styrofoam cups — one of them scalloped with bite marks around the rim — dotted the tables; the magazines had been read into ruffles; a blue-jeaned man lay sleeping on an orange vinyl couch patched here and there with duct tape. Near the window, a family argued about who should go back home and walk the dog. A woman spoke urgently into a pay phone. Another woman tore something from a magazine inch by inch, trying to make no sound, while her husband yawned aloud and stretched his legs out until he was nearly diagonal in his seat.

Just yesterday Rebecca had snapped Poppy’s head off. He’d been complaining about his exercises—“Why you make me go through these boring, baby arm bends every morning…” he’d said — and she had said, “Fine, then; quit doing them. See if I care when your elbows rust solid.” And last week she had refused to take him to visit his friend, Mr. Ames. Worse than refused: she had said she would but kept putting it off, hoping Poppy would forget, and eventually he had stopped asking her, perhaps because he forgot but perhaps because he had simply lost hope. It broke her heart, now, to think of that.

She watched a skeletal man on crutches shuffle through the room, guided by some kind of aide — a round-faced young girl who kept an arm around his waist. He was speaking to her in a peevish drone: “They shoot you with their needles, wrench you every which way, make you stay perfectly still for hours on end… Then they force you to drink all these gallons of water after. Say, ‘With our patients who get a dye, we like to encourage the fluids.’ Which gave me quite a start, seeing as how what I heard was, ‘With our patients who’re going to die …’”

The girl laughed softly and squeezed his waist with such apparent affection that Rebecca wondered for a moment whether she was a relative. But no: more likely just one of those low-level, underpaid hospital employees who showed more genuine care than many physicians. She was opening a door now and shepherding him through it, one hand placed gently at the small of his back.

This was where they’d brought Patch when her appendix burst. Although the place had been remodeled since then, perhaps more than once. And NoNo when she broke her wrist. Or maybe not; that might have been Union Memorial. Oh, all those accidents, childhood illnesses, frantic late-night rides… Rebecca ought to publish a rating chart for Baltimore emergency rooms.

Joe had been taken here, too, but they’d moved him to Intensive Care before she arrived. She had spent four days and three nights in the Intensive Care waiting room — a much smaller space, with its own uniquely dread-filled atmosphere. Once an hour she had been allowed to come in and grip Joe’s unresponsive hand for five minutes before they made her leave again. Upon her return to the waiting room, total strangers would ask, “Did he speak to you? Did he open his eyes?” and she would ask the same of them when they returned from their relatives. They had grown as close as family through fear and grief and endless hours of just sitting. Although now, she couldn’t recall what those people had looked like, even.

A woman dressed in aqua scrubs called, “Mrs. Davitch? Is there a Mrs. Davitch?”

“Here I am,” she said, standing up.

“You can come on back now.”

Rebecca collected her purse and followed the woman through the swinging doors, down a linoleum-floored corridor. “How is he?” she asked, but the woman said, “Doing just fine!” so promptly that Rebecca suspected she had no idea. They entered a large, uncannily quiet area where doctors were going about their business without any appearance of haste, thoughtfully studying clipboards or conferring at a central desk. Curtained cubicles lined three walls, and the woman slid one curtain back to expose Poppy’s yellow-soled feet poking forth from his stretcher. “Company!” she sang out, and then she left, her jogging shoes squeaking as she turned to close the curtain behind her.

Rebecca walked around to Poppy’s head and found him wide awake, scowling at the machine that chirped and blinked beside him. “How’re you feeling?” she asked him.

“How do you expect I’d feel? With all this commotion going on.”

“Is the chest pain any better?”

“Some.”

“What have they done so far?”

“Punctured about six veins for blood. Gave me an EKG. Went off and left me lying here in the very worst position for somebody subject to backache.”

He was wearing a pastel hospital gown that made him look frivolous and pathetic. An IV needle was attached to the back of one hand. She covered the other hand with her own, and he allowed it. He closed his eyes and said, “It’s okay with me if you stay.”

“I’ll be right here,” she told him.

She kept her hand on top of his, shifting her weight from time to time when her legs started to tire. There was a chair over near the curtain, but she didn’t want to risk disturbing him.

If this turned out to be Poppy’s deathbed, heaven forbid, how strange that she should be standing beside it! Ninety-nine years ago, when he had come into the world, nobody could have foreseen that an overweight college dropout from Church Valley, Virginia — not even a Davitch, strictly speaking — would be the one to hold his hand as he left it.

Well, that was the case with nearly everybody, she supposed. Lord only knew who would be attending her deathbed.

The curtain rattled back, and all at once, there was Zeb — a comfort to behold, with his long, kind, homely face and smudged glasses. “How’re you doing?” he asked her.

“Well, I’m fine, but Poppy, here…”

Poppy opened his eyes and said, “I believe they’re trying to finish me off.”

“Nope. They’re letting you go,” Zeb told him. He was peering now at the chirpy machine. “Turns out it’s indigestion.”

“It is?”

“I just spoke with the resident.”

“Oh! Indigestion!” Rebecca cried. It was such a wonderful word, she felt the need to say it herself.

“I hear you had three cupcakes at the baby-welcoming,” Zeb told Poppy.

“Well, what if I did? I’ve eaten far more, many a time.”

“They’re going to bring you an antacid. That should help,” Zeb said. “It may take a while to spring you, hospitals being what they are, but sooner or later, we’ll get you out.” He looked over at Rebecca and said, “We should let them know at home. They’re pretty worried.”

“Did Joey get his shot?”

“He did, and he’s back at the party making up for lost time.”

“I’ll go telephone,” she said. She bent to kiss Poppy’s cheek and told him, “I’m glad it wasn’t serious.”

“Well, I don’t know what the world is coming to,” Poppy said, “if a man can’t eat three measly cupcakes without folks calling an ambulance.”

She patted his shoulder and walked out, feeling lighter than air.

During the period she’d spent with Poppy, the waiting room had acquired a whole different population. The blue-jeaned man had vanished from the couch. A boy in a yellow raincoat sat slumped in front of the TV. An elderly woman stared into space and bit her lip. Rebecca felt a distant, detached pity. When she dropped her coins in the pay phone and called home, she tried to keep her voice low so that none of them would hear what a lucky person she was.

* * *

By the time they got back to the Open Arms, it was evening and all the guests had gone home except for Biddy. She was tidying up in the kitchen. “Have some green-tea soufflé,” she told them. “There’s a ton of it left over, because none of the others would eat it. I shouldn’t have let on what kind it was. ‘Green tea!’ they said. ‘What’s wrong with chocolate?’ Oh, you had a phone call, Beck. Somebody named Will Allenby.”

Rebecca froze.

“’Green tea is for drinking,’ they said, and I said, ‘Listen.’ I said, ‘If you-all were not so prejudiced—‘”

“What did he want?” Rebecca asked.

“Pardon?”

“What did Will Allenby want?”

“Just for you to call him back, I think. He said you would know his number. How are you feeling, Poppy? Are you still having chest pains?”

“Pains? Oh, pains,” Poppy said. He was dishing out the soufflé, piling it into a bowl he had taken from the cabinet. “I don’t know why everybody had to get so excited,” he said. “I told them all along, I said—”

“I guess I’ll be going to bed now,” Rebecca broke in.

Everyone looked at her.

“Good night,” she said, and she walked out, leaving a startled silence behind her.

She climbed the stairs, went straight to her room, and sat on the edge of her bed. Felt for the little stick of paper under her telephone. Held it up to the soft yellow light shining in from the hall.

It meant something, she supposed, that she hadn’t thrown away his number.

He answered after several rings, just when she was starting to think he might be asleep. But his voice was alert. “Dr. Allenby speaking.”

“Hello, Will. This is Rebecca.”

But of course he already knew that, if he had looked at his Caller ID. So when he said, “Oh! Rebecca!” in a voice spiked with stagy surprise, it made her smile. She said, “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, no! Goodness, no! No, I’m just… I was just…” There was some kind of scrambling sound, a rustle, a clink, something falling over. “I was just sitting here,” he said, out of breath. “Gosh, thanks for calling back.”

“Well. That’s okay.”

He cleared his throat.

“Actually,” he said, “it occurred to me that you might have misinterpreted my question.”

“Your question?”

“What I asked on the phone last time. About why you broke up with me. See, it wasn’t a… reproach. It wasn’t meant rhetorically. I really did want you to tell me where it was I went wrong.”

Rebecca said, “Will—”

“No, no, never mind! I withdraw that. I realize I’m being tedious. Don’t hang up!”

She started to speak, but then stopped. Anything she could think of to say seemed a mistake. In fact, speech in general seemed a mistake. It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said finally. “Let’s start over.”

“Start over?”

She said, “Maybe you would like to come here for dinner some night.”

She heard a caught breath, a kind of exclamation point in the airwaves. Then he said, “I would love to come to dinner.”

“Are you free, um…” She cursed tomorrow’s engagement party — the first Open Arms event in over a week. “Are you free Wednesday?”

“Wednesday would be wonderful.”

“Fine, let’s say six p.m. Now, here’s how to get to my house.”

She gave the directions with such assurance that she probably took him aback, because he responded with a meek “All right… all right…” And after she had finished, there seemed nothing more to talk about. “Till Wednesday, then!” she told him.

“Yes, all right… goodbye,” he said.

She tried to remember, after she had hung up, whether in the old days he had said goodbye at the end of telephone calls. He surely couldn’t have avoided the word altogether, could he?

Then she went on to try and remember their first meeting, since recently, first meetings had begun to seem so significant. But it was lost in the mists of childhood. They had probably met in kindergarten, or perhaps some play group in the little park by the river. Really, Will had just always been there.

Which had its own significance, she thought.

Outside, a wind was blowing up, buckling the warped black screens and wafting the gauze curtains almost horizontal. The air smelled of rain and damp earth. The room took on an eerie, greenish glow. A door slammed somewhere downstairs, and Rebecca felt almost afloat with the sense of possibility.