Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

At which point, the second couple arrived. “Why, here you are!” Sam had cried in relief. “Hon, these are my oldest friends, Frank and Mia Mewmew.”

Oh, Lord.

But Sam had been very understanding. After the party, he had drawn her into his arms and told her, speaking warmly into the curls on top of her head, that these things could happen to anyone.

How young he’d been, back then! But Delia hadn’t realized. To her he had seemed fully formed, immune to doubt, this unassailably self-possessed man who had all but arrived on a white horse to save her from eternal daughterhood. Around his eyes faint puckers were already evident, and she had found them both appealing and alarming. If he dies first I don’t want to go on living, she had thought. I’ll find something in Daddy’s office cabinet that’s deadly poison. In those days, she could say such things, not having had the children yet. She used to picture all sorts of catastrophes, in those days. Well, later too, to be honest. Oh, she’d always been a fearful kind of person, full of hunches and forebodings. But look what happened: the night of his chest pains, she hadn’t felt the slightest premonition. She had sat there reading Luanda ’s Lover, dumb as a post. Then the phone rang.

Although the news had not come as a shock, certainly. Listening to the nurse’s diplomatic wording, she had thought, Ah, yes, of course, while a dank, heavy sense of confirmation had solidified inside her. First Daddy, and now Sam. He would die and they would bury him in Cow Hill Cemetery and he would lie there alone till Delia crept up to join him, as on those nights when she stayed awake watching some silly movie and then climbed the stairs afterward and slipped between the covers and laid one arm lightly across his chest while he went on sleeping.

She sat against her headboard, jostling the cat, and switched on the clock radio. They were playing jazz, at this hour. Lots of lonesome clarinets and plinkety-plonk pianos, and after every piece the announcer stated the place it was recorded and the date. A New York bar on an August night in 1955. A hotel in Chicago, New Year’s Eve, 1949. Delia wondered how humans could bear to live in a world where the passage of time held so much power.

Nat and Binky were not going to have a June wedding after all. They moved the date up to a Saturday in March. Nat said he had exercised his seniority. “I used your basic how-much-longer-have-I-got approach,” he confided to Noah and Delia. “Your take-pity-on-an-old-geezer approach.”

Binky adapted cheerfully to the change in plans. “This way,” she told Delia, “I’m Mrs. Nathaniel Moffat three months sooner, that’s all. So what if we skimp some on the frills? They’re not such a very big deal.” The two of them were alone in Nat’s kitchen when she said this, leafing through cookbooks. (The wedding cake was one of the frills she was skimping on.) “And I do mean to be Mrs. Moffat,” she said. “None of this ‘Ms.’ business for me! He’s the first man I’ve ever known who’s just totally, totally loved me.” Then the skin around her eyes grew pink, as if she might start crying, and she turned quickly back to her cookbook.

“In that case, you ought to marry him this instant,” Delia said.

“Well, I wish his daughters agreed,” Binky said. “You heard Dudi cut all her hair off.”

“Cut her hair off?”

“Threw a tantrum when Nat announced our engagement; ran into his bathroom, grabbed up these little scissors he trims his beard with and cut every bit of her hair off.”

“Goodness,” Delia said.

“And Pat and Donna refuse to come to the wedding, and when I asked Ellie to be an attendant-purely out of niceness; I’ve already got my sister and my nieces-she said maybe she wasn’t coming either, she couldn’t be sure, she might or might not, so she’d better say no. Then she went and told Nat he ought to have his lawyer draw up a prenuptial agreement. I guess they all think I’m some kind of… gold digger. It doesn’t occur to them what an insult that is to their father, not to believe a woman might love him for his own self.”

“They’re just a little surprised,” Delia said. “They’ll get over it.”

Binky shook her head, smoothing a cookbook page with her palm. “They phone him and the very first thing, ‘Is she around?’ they ask. ‘She,’ they call me; they never use my name if they can help it. They hardly ever come to visit. Donna says it’s because I’m always here. She says I don’t allow them any time alone with him, but I try to; it’s just that-”

She broke off, blushing, and Delia wondered why until Binky mumbled the end of her sentence. “I do sort of, kind of like, live here now,” she said.

“Well, of course,” Delia hastened to say. “What do they expect?”

“Oh, well, I didn’t start out to bore you with all my troubles,” Binky said. “You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. No wonder you’re so popular!”

“I’m so popular?”

“Don’t be modest. Noah’s told us how you’re friends with half of Bay Borough.”

“Good grief! I hardly know anyone,” Delia said.

Although she was startled to see how her friends did add up, now that she stopped to count.

“You’re not just marking time while I’m speaking,” Binky said. “Not jiggling your foot till you get a chance to jump in with your life history.”

“Well, it isn’t as if there’s a whole lot I could jump in with,” Delia told her.

Last week at supper, Joel had asked what part of Baltimore Delia hailed from. “Oh,” she had said, “here and there,” and he had dropped the subject-or so she’d thought. But a minute later he had said, “Strange, isn’t it? A person who doesn’t discuss her past is automatically assumed to have a past, I mean more of a past than usual, something rich and exotic.”

“Is that right,” she had said neutrally. It had struck her as an interesting theory; she had considered it until, noticing the silence, she looked up and found his eyes on her. “What?” she had asked.

“Oh, nothing.”

Then Noah had reached between them for the salt-a disruptive swoop, a lunge forward on two legs of his chair-and the moment had passed.

Driving to the wedding, Delia kept glancing in the rearview mirror. She was afraid she might have put on too much makeup. “What do you think of my lipstick?” she asked Noah.

“It’s okay,” he said without looking.

He had worries of his own. Periodically he wriggled his fingers between the buttons of his winter jacket, checking for the ring in his shirt pocket.

“Are you sure it’s not too heavy?” she asked him.

“Hmm?”

“My lipstick, Noah.”

“Nah, it’s okay.”

“You look nice,” she said.

“Well, I don’t know why I had to get so dressed up.”

“Dressed up! You call a shirt and no tie dressed up!”

“I look like one of those yo-yos who sing in the school chorus.”

“You should just be thankful Nat didn’t make you buy a suit,” she told him.

“And what if I drop the ring? You know my hand will shake. I’ll drop the ring and it will clink real loud and roll across the floor and fall into one of those grate things, clang-ang-ang!, and we’ll never get it back again.”

“I wish I had a fancier outfit,” Delia said. “I look like an old-maid aunt or something.” Under her coat she was wearing her gray pinstripe. “Or at least a necklace or a locket or a string of beads.”

“You’re okay.”

In her jewelry box back in Baltimore was a four-strand pearl choker. Fake, of course, but it would have been perfect with the pinstripe.

How long before she could say that her Baltimore things would have gone out of fashion anyway, or fallen apart or been used up even if she’d stayed? When would the things she had here become her real things?