“Oh, what a peachy peach!” exclaimed Rosanna, but she hardly said a word to Claire. On the other hand, Claire could walk around the yard with Gray in her arms (and him only in a sweater) and smell the apple blossoms and the grass and the chamomile that she trod upon as she made her way. Yes, now Rosanna was peering at her through the kitchen window, supposedly making lunch, though really cataloguing what Claire was doing wrong, but Claire didn’t care. It was so evident, looking at Gray, that she was doing everything right. She pulled down an apple branch and inhaled the fragrance of the blossoms. Gray’s smile was the thing about him that was not like Paul — it was big and so merry that sometimes Claire wondered what Paul might have been like if he’d had a father who let him get dirty once in a while.
Rosanna had heated up frozen chicken potpies, and Claire did not say a thing about it as she stuck her fork into the crust with her left hand — Gray was cradled in her right arm, staring and making little noises.
Rosanna held out a spoon. Gray waved his hand. Rosanna said, “The only toy Frank ever had was a spoon.”
“Oh, Mama! And the only toy you ever had was a mud pie.”
“No, I had lots of toys, because your granny Mary loved to crochet puppets and tie rags into dolls. Both your grandmothers were much more fun than I was. But I was too busy looking for black widows in the dresser drawers and starvation in the cupboard.”
“Lillian is like Granny Mary.”
“She certainly is,” said Rosanna. “I spoiled her rotten, and learned a lesson.”
“What?” said Claire.
Rosanna patted Gray on the head. She said, “You can’t spoil a good one.”
“Are there any bad ones?”
“You don’t find that out until later,” Rosanna said.
Claire knew she was talking about Frank.
Once she had broken through the crust and eaten most of that, the potpie was pretty bad, Claire thought. The pieces of chicken and carrot were tiny and flavorless, and the peas were strange, too. Suddenly, almost surprising herself, Claire said, “Lillian told me that Elizabeth—”
“Mary Elizabeth.”
“Mary Elizabeth was struck by lightning.”
“Oh goodness!” said Rosanna, setting down her fork with a ding on the plate. “Does she think that? Heavens, no. Lightning did strike. But she fell. Maybe the thunder startled her. It was bang-bang, like that, the lightning so close. The back of her head hit the corner of an egg crate. She died without a mark on her.” Rosanna shook her head. “I’m amazed to this day I can say any of that aloud. What is today?”
“May 1.”
“You know, she was born forty-one years ago. January 28. And she was no trouble, just like this one.”
But Claire didn’t want there to be any resemblance between that ill-fated child and this one, destined for greatness. Rosanna offered Gray the spoon again, and this time he curled his fist around it. Rosanna said, “I think that’s advanced.”
“Of course it is!” Claire laughed.
It was the ice cream that was good — it had been made by Lois, who was going through an ice-cream phase. It was peppermint, sweet and sharp. They ate it while Claire nursed Gray, and then Rosanna quietly washed the dishes (including the aluminum pie holders, for some reason). Then she went into the living room and turned her show on low. Sitting in the kitchen, gently rocking back and forth in her chair, feeling Gray draw the milk out of her and the ache subsiding, Claire thought that maybe, maybe she would forgive Rosanna, but she couldn’t remember what for.
—
LILLIAN TOOK the Mustang. Tim didn’t know she was coming, but she knew where he lived, and she could wait for him if she had to. She left a note for Arthur in the middle of his desk, where he might see it if he was not too distracted, and as she drove away — got farther and farther from the note — she began to feel freer and less anxious. She would have expected it to be different — closer to Tim, more worried. But there it was — farther from Arthur, less worried.
The road was one of the most beautiful Lillian knew of, much more romantic and rolling than any road in Iowa. As Arthur invariably pointed out when they went for a drive, the Land Ordinance of 1785 was way too late for Virginia, and so it was not laid out in a grid, but according to chance and convenience. This meant that Lillian drove through this town and that town, around this curve and over that hill, in the shadow of mountains, past farms and fences and thick stands of trees. Horses and cows grazed in green pastures and there weren’t many houses. Once she was past Culpeper, the few she saw looked like ones she knew back home — the plantations seemed to have been hidden away. Lillian liked the sweep of it, and the names of towns like Haymarket and Ruckersville.
When Bundy got back from Vietnam (and Arthur had almost gone with him, only kept home at the last minute by a bout of the flu), Bundy was a different man. The sight of the bodies at Pleiku had literally changed his appearance — whereas before he had been sharp but a tad removed, as if always calculating, when he got back he was sure of one thing — the Viet Cong had to be repaid. Sure, he phrased this in terms of strategy — yes, it could be done, a harder push, more bombs, take off the brakes and apply the gas, if they feel our resolve they will back off — but really his blood had boiled, his wrath had burned. At first, Arthur laughed and said, “Well, if they’d let me belt him in a nice straitjacket for a few days, just take him to a suite at the Hay-Adams and give him a shower ten times a day, I might have saved him.” But then Bundy had convinced Arthur, and the spring had been calm with conviction — the bombing was unfortunate, but necessary; it would soon be over; sometimes a wound had to be cauterized. The calm had been pleasant. Arthur had been more his old, pre-JFK self, bringing home flowers and lingerie, eating, going to Dean’s baseball games, not only admiring Tina’s paintings but discussing them with her. JFK had driven everyone crazy — he said this, then he said that, and never the twain should meet, but that was over, had been over for a year and a half. Thinking of JFK made her think of Mary Meyer, gunned down by the canal. (Had she really been his mistress? These days, the rumor mill was strangely silent.) Lillian shook that thought out of her mind and made herself pay attention to the scenery.
She drove through Gordonsville, and soon after that turned off 29 and onto Ivy Road, gazing over the fields to her right in hopes that she would see Tim. Two F’s! The lowest grade he had ever gotten before (though there had been several of them) was a C. She did a careful U-turn and headed toward the center of town, to find a Coke and maybe a sandwich.
Straight A’s were such a habit with Debbie that Arthur considered them almost a character flaw. When she brought home her report cards, Arthur would lower his brows and growl, “How much extra credit did you do, missy?” Debbie’s job was to grin and say, “Hardly any, Daddy!” He didn’t mind 800s on her SAT Aptitude tests, but 800s on the Achievements were a sign of a misspent youth. Tim had scored in the low 600s on his SATs, and when those scores came in the same week he crumpled the bumper of the Comet, Arthur was a little relieved. A boy had to be a boy had to be a boy.
But he didn’t have to flunk out of college. Lillian parked in a space in front of a drugstore and went in. The soda fountain was all the way in the back, and the girl working there was blond. Lillian perched on a stool and put her elbows on the counter, vowing not to tell the girl that she had worked a soda counter once herself. The few college students perched on the other stools did not remind her of the ones she’d seen protesting the war at the Capitol in April. Eloise had called her from California and said she had to go to the protest — with a hat and dark glasses so no one would recognize her, so that her picture would not cross Arthur’s desk. So she did. Eloise had participated in the Oakland protest in February, bringing along Rosa, the baby, and even the strange gambler husband, who was otherwise “apolitical” according to Rosa. Lillian didn’t believe there were twenty-five thousand protesters, as Eloise insisted from her vantage point in Berkeley — maybe half that number. But the D.C. protest had been exhilarating. If Arthur, Debbie, Dean, or Tina suspected she had gone, none of them had said a word.