Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years

But Sam was jubilant. Oh, he could hardly fit in his patients between visits from repairmen. Electricians, plasterers, and painters streamed through his office with estimates for the many improvements he planned. A carpenter arrived for the shutters, and a man with a spray for the mildewed shingles. Twenty-two years Sam had lived here; had he felt so critical of his surroundings all along?

He had first walked into her father’s waiting room on a Monday morning in July, some three weeks after her high-school graduation. Delia had been sitting in her usual place at the desk, even though it was not her usual time (she worked afternoons, mostly), because she was so eager to meet him. She and her sisters had talked of nothing else since Dr. Felson had announced his hiring. Was this person married? they had asked, and how old was he? and what did he look like? (No, he was not married, their father said, and he was, oh, thirty-two, thirty-three, and he looked fine. Fine? Well, normal; perfectly all right, their father said impatiently, for to him what counted most was whether the man could ease his workload some-take over house calls and the morning office hours.) So Delia rose early that summer day and put on her prettiest sundress, the one with the sweetheart neckline. Then she seated herself behind the spinet desk, where she ostentatiously set to work transcribing her father’s notes. At nine o’clock exactly, young Dr. Grinstead stepped through the outside door, carrying a starched white coat folded over his forearm. Sunlight flashed off his clear-rimmed, serious glasses and glazed his sifted-looking blond hair, and Delia could still recall the pang of pure desire that had caused her insides to lurch as if she had leaned out over a canyon.

Sam didn’t even remember that meeting. He claimed he’d first seen her when he came to dinner. It was true there had been such a dinner, on the evening of that same day. Eliza had cooked a roast and Linda had baked a cake (both advertising their housewifely skills), while Delia, the baby, still two months short of her eighteenth birthday and supposedly not even in the running, sat across from Sam and her father in the living room and sipped a grown-up glass of sherry. The sherry had tasted like liquefied raisins and flowed directly to that powerful new root of longing that branched deeper minute by minute. But Sam claimed that when he first walked in, all three girls had been seated on the couch. Like the king’s three daughters in a fairy tale, he said, they’d been lined up according to age, the oldest farthest left, and like the woodcutter’s honest son, he had chosen the youngest and prettiest, the shy little one on the right who didn’t think she stood a chance.

Well, let him believe what he wanted. In any case, it had ended like a fairy tale.

Except that real life continues past the end, and here they were with air-conditioning men destroying the attic, and the cat hiding under the bed, and Delia reading a paperback romance on the love seat in Sam’s waiting room-the house’s only refuge, since the office and the waiting room were air-conditioned already. Her head was propped on one arm of the love seat, and her feet, in fluffy pink slippers, rested on the other. Above her hung her father’s framed Norman Rockwell print of the kindly old doctor setting his stethoscope to the chest of a little girl’s doll. And behind the flimsy partition that rose not quite all the way to the ceiling, Sam was explaining Mrs. Harper’s elbow trouble. Her joints were wearing out, he said. There was a stupefied silence; even the electric saw fell silent. Then, “Oh, no!” Mrs. Harper gasped. “Oh, my! Oh, my heavens above! This comes as such a shock!”

A shock? Mrs. Harper was ninety-two years old. What did she expect? Delia would have asked. But Sam said, gently, “Yes, well, I suppose…” and something else, which Delia couldn’t catch, for the saw just then started up again as if all at once recalling its assignment.

She turned a page. The heroine was touring the hero’s vast estate, admiring its magnificent grounds and its tasteful “appointments,” whatever those might be. So many of these books had wealthy heroes, Delia had noticed. It didn’t matter about the women; sometimes they were rich and sometimes they were poor, but the men came complete with castles and a staff of devoted servants. Never again would the women they married need to give a thought to the grinding gears of daily life-the leaky basement, the faulty oven, the missing car keys. It sounded wonderful.

“Delia, dear heart!” Mrs. Harper cried, staggering out of the office. She was a stylish, silk-clad skeleton of a woman with clawlike hands, which she stretched toward Delia beseechingly. “Your husband tells me my joints have just ground themselves down to nubbins!”

“Now, now,” Sam protested behind her. “I didn’t say that exactly, Mrs. Harper.”

Delia sat up guiltily and smoothed her skirt. She grew aware of the bunny ears on her slippers and the temptress on the cover of her book. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Harper,” she said. “Should I schedule another appointment?”

“No, he says I have to go to a specialist. A man I don’t know from Adam!”

“Get her Peterson’s phone number, would you, Dee?” Sam asked.

She rose and went over to the desk, scuffing along in her slippers. (Mrs. Harper herself wore sharp-toed high heels, which she kept planted on the rug in a herringbone pattern to show off her trim ankles.) Delia flipped through Rolodex cards arranged not by name but by specialty-allergy, arthritis… Nowadays, this office served most often as a sort of clearinghouse. Her father used to deliver babies and even performed the more elementary surgeries once upon a time, but now it was largely a matter of bee shots in the spring, flu shots in the fall; and as for childbirth, why, these patients were long past the age. They were hand-me-downs from her father, most of them. (Or even, Sam joked, from her grandfather, who had opened this office in 1902, when Roland Park was still country and no one batted an eye at running a practice out of a residence.)

She copied Dr. Peterson’s number onto a card and passed it to Mrs. Harper, who examined it suspiciously before tucking it into her bag. “I trust this person is not some mere snip of a boy,” she told Sam.

“He’s thirty if he’s a day,” Sam assured her.

“Thirty! My grandson is older than that! Oh, please, can’t I go on seeing you instead?” But already knowing his answer, she turned without a pause toward Delia. “This husband of yours is a saint,” she said. “He’s just too good to exist on this earth. I hope you realize that.”

“Oh, yes.”

“You make sure you appreciate him, hear?”

“Yes, Mrs. Harper.”

Delia watched Sam escort the old woman to the door, and then she dropped back onto the love seat and picked up her book. “Beatrice,” the hero was saying, “I want you more than life itself,” and his voice was rough and desperate-uncontrolled, was the way the author put it: uncontrolled, and it sent a thrill down her slender spine within the clinging ivory satin of her negligee.

Maybe, instead of running into Adrian, she could just sit still and let him track her down. Maybe he was even now dwelling on his image of her and cruising the streets in search of her. Or he had looked up her address, perhaps; for he did know her last name. He was parked down the block at this very moment, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.

She took to stepping into the yard several times a day. She seized any excuse to arrange herself on the front-porch swing. Never an outdoor person, and most certainly not a gardener, she spent half an hour posed in goatskin gloves among Eliza’s medicinal herbs. And after someone telephoned but merely breathed and said nothing when she answered, she jumped up at every new call like a teenager. “I’ll get it! I’ll get it!” When there weren’t any calls, she made a teenager’s bargains with Fate: I won’t think about it, and then the phone will ring. I’ll go out of the room; I’ll pretend I’m busy and the phone will ring for sure. Shepherding her family into the car for a Sunday visit to Sam’s mother, she moved fluidly, sensuously, like an actress or a dancer conscious every minute of being watched.