Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

But now his voice failed him completely, and he covered his eyes with one shaking hand and bent his head. “So anticipatory!” he whispered into his plate, while Delia, at a loss, patted his arm. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he said. Everyone sat dumbstruck. Then he said, “Ha!” and straightened, bracing his shoulders. “Postpartum depression, I guess this is,” he said. He wiped his eyes with his napkin.

“Nat has a three-week-old baby,” Delia explained to the others. “Nat, would you like-”

“Baby?” Linda asked incredulously.

Sam said, “I thought Nat was your friend, Linda.”

“No, he’s mine,” Delia said. “He lives on the Eastern Shore and he’s just had a baby boy, a lovely boy, you ought to see how-”

“Most irresponsible thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Nat said hoarsely. “What could I have been thinking of? Oh, not that it was anything I planned, but… why did I go along with it? I believe I thought it was my chance to be a good father, finally. I know it was, or why else did I assume it was a girl? All my others were girls, you see. I must have thought I could do the whole thing over again, properly this time. But I’m just as short-tempered with James as I ever was with my daughters. Just as rigid, just as exacting. Why can’t he get on a schedule, why does he have to cry at such unpredictable hours… Oh, the best thing I could do for that kid is toddle off to Floor Five.”

“Floor Five? Oh,” Delia said. “Oh, Nat! Don’t even think it!” she said, patting his arm all the harder.

She should have realized at his wedding, she told herself, that someone so elated would have to end in tears, like an overexcited child allowed to stay up past his bedtime.

“Yes. Well,” Sam said, clearing his throat. “It’s really very common now, this more senior class of parent. Why, just last week I was reading, where was it I was reading…”

“The important thing to remember is, this is your assignment,” Eliza said in ringing tones. She was all the way up near Sam, and she had to lean forward, bypassing a row of tactfully expressionless profiles, to search out Nat’s face. “It’s my belief that we’re each assigned certain experiences,” she said. “And then at the end of our lives-”

“The New England Journal of Medicine!” Sam announced triumphantly.

Nat asked Delia, “Do you have a place where I might lie down?”

“Yes, of course,” she said, and she slid her chair back and handed him his cane. “Excuse us, please,” she told the others.

Everyone nodded, abashed. As she and Nat crossed the hall, she could almost feel the furtive exchange of glances behind their backs.

“There’s a flight of stairs,” she warned Nat. “Can you manage?”

“Oh, yes, if you’ll hang on to my other arm. I’m sorry, Delia. I don’t know what got into me.”

“You’re just tired,” she told him. “I hope you’re not thinking of driving back tonight.”

“No, I suppose I shouldn’t,” he said. On each stair step, his cane gave a tinny rattle, like a handful of jacks being shaken. His elbow within his tweed sleeve was nothing but knob and rope.

“I’m going to make up a bed for you,” Delia told him when they reached the second floor, “and then you should call Binky and tell her you’re staying over.”

“All right,” he said meekly. He hobbled through the door she held open and sank into a slipcovered chair.

“This used to be my father’s room,” Delia said. She went out to the hall closet and came back with an armload of sheets. “There’s still a telephone by the bed, see? From the days when he was in practice. Even after he stopped seeing patients, he could pick up his receiver whenever Sam got a call; chime in with a second opinion. He just hated to feel left out of things, you know?”

She was babbling aimlessly as she bustled around the bed, smoothing sheets and tucking in blankets. Nat watched without comment. He might not even have been listening, for when she went to Sam’s room to borrow a pair of pajamas, she returned to find him staring at the blue-black windowpanes. “In fact,” she said, placing the pajamas on the bureau, “I can’t tell you how often I made up his bed just the way I did tonight, while Daddy sat where you’re sitting now. He liked for his sheets to be fresh off the line, oh, long after we switched to an automatic dryer. And he would sit in that chair and-”

“It’s a time trip,” Nat said suddenly.

“Why, yes, I suppose it is, in a way.”

But he’d been talking to himself, evidently. “Just a crazy, half-baked scheme to travel backwards,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken, “and live everything all over again. Unfortunately, Binky’s the one who’s left with the consequences. Poor Binky!”

“Binky will be fine,” Delia said firmly. “Now. That door right there is the bathroom. New toothbrushes on the shelf above the tub. Can I get you anything more?”

“No, thank you.”

“A tray of food, maybe? You didn’t touch your supper.”

“No.”

“Well, you be sure to call me if you need me,” she said.

Then she bent to press her lips to his forehead, the way she used to do with her father all those nights in the past.

Delia was the next to go to bed. She went at nine-thirty, having struggled to keep her eyes open ever since dinner. “I am beat,” she told the others. They were all sitting around, still-even Courtney, although Paul had been picked up by his mother at some point. “It seems this morning took place way back in prehistory,” Delia told them, and then she climbed the stairs to Eliza’s room, so weary that she had to haul her feet behind her like buckets of cement.

Once she was in bed, though, she couldn’t get to sleep. She lay staring at the ceiling, idly stroking the curl of warm cat nestled close to her hip. Downstairs, Linda and Sam were squabbling as usual. A Mozart horn concerto was playing. Eliza said, “Why wouldn’t he, I ask you.” Wouldn’t who? Delia wondered. Wouldn’t do what?

She must have slept then, but it was such a fitful, shallow sleep that she seemed to remain partly conscious throughout, and when she woke again she wasn’t surprised to find the house dark and all the voices stilled. She sat up and angled her wristwatch to catch the light from the window. As near as she could make out, it was either eleven o’clock or five till twelve. More likely five till twelve, she decided, judging from the quiet.

She propped her pillow and leaned back against it, yawning. Tears of boredom were already edging the corners of her eyes. It was going to be one of those nights that go on for weeks.

Let’s see: if the wedding began at ten tomorrow, she supposed it would be finished by eleven. Well, say noon, to play it safe. She’d reach the bus station by half past, if she could catch a ride with Ramsay. Or with Sam. Sam had offered, after all.

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.

Where was she? Bus station. Catch a bus by one o’clock or so, reach Salisbury by…

The tears seemed not exactly tears of boredom after all. She blotted them on her nightgown sleeve, but more came.

She folded back the covers, mindful of the cat, and slid out of bed and walked barefoot toward the door. The hall was lit only by the one round window, high up. She had to more or less feel her way toward Sam’s room.