But as it turned out, Christmas Day was not so different that year from any other. Mrs. Jordan came, along with the foreigners. The children contributed their share of excitement (Claudia’s six and Lucy’s three, combined), and Doug’s Polaroid Land camera flashed, and the cat made choking sounds behind the couch. It was disconcerting, in a way. Last Christmas Daphne hadn’t been born yet; nor had Franny. Now here sat Daphne chewing a wad of blue tissue while Franny stirred her fists through Agatha’s jigsaw puzzle. They both seemed so accustomed to being here. And Danny and Lucy had completely vanished. Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.
The day after Christmas, Sid at the movers’ phoned to see if Ian could help out over vacation. Their man Brewster had left them in the lurch, he said. Ian told him he’d be glad to help. School would not reopen till mid-January and he could use the extra cash. So Tuesday morning, he reported to the garage on Greenmount.
LeDon was delighted to see him. That Brewster fellow, he said, had just up and walked away in the middle of a job. “He say, ‘See you round, LeDon.’ I say, ‘Hey, man, you ain’t ditching me.’ He say, ‘All day long I’m ditching you,’ and off he go. Well, he weren’t never what you call real friendly.”
They were moving an old lady from a house to an apartment — lots of old-lady belongings, bowlegged furniture and mothballed dresses and more than enough china to stock a good-sized restaurant. Her son, who was overseeing the move, had some kind of fixation about the china. “Careful, now! That’s Spode,” he would say as they lifted a crate. And, “Watch out for the Haviland!” LeDon rolled his eyes at Ian.
Then at the new place, they found out the kitchen was being remodeled and they had to set the china crates in the living room. “What the hell?” the son said. “This was supposed to be finished three days ago.” He was talking to the cabinetmaker — the deaf man Ian had come across last summer, as it happened. “How much longer?” the son asked him. Any fool could see it would be way longer; the kitchen was nothing but a shell. The cabinetmaker, not looking around, measured the depth of a counter with a steel measuring tape. The son laid a hand on the man’s forearm. The man turned slowly, gazed a moment at the son’s hand, and then lifted his eyes to his face. “HOW … LONG!” the son shouted, exaggerating his lip movements.
The cabinetmaker considered, and then he said, “Two weeks.”
“Two weeks!” the son said. He dropped his hand. “What are you building here, Noah’s ark? All we need is a few lousy cupboards!”
The cabinetmaker went on about his business, measuring the counter’s length now and the height of the empty space above it. Surely he must have known the son was speaking to him, but he seemed totally absorbed in what he was doing. Once again, Ian envied the man his insular, impervious life.
On New Year’s Eve Pig Benson threw a big, rowdy party, but Ian didn’t go. Cicely was baby-sitting her brother and it was her last night home. (Her college worked on a different schedule from Ian’s.) So they set all the clocks an hour ahead and tricked Stevie into going to bed early, and then they snuck upstairs to her room, where Ian unintentionally dozed off. He was awakened by church bells ringing in the New Year, which meant her parents could be expected at any moment. As soon as he’d dressed, he slipped downstairs and into the frosty, bitter night. He walked home half asleep while bells pealed and firecrackers popped and rockets lit the sky. What optimism! he found himself thinking. Why did people have such high hopes for every New Year?
He practiced saying the date aloud: “Nineteen sixty-seven. January first, nineteen sixty-seven.” Monday was his birthday; he’d be nineteen years old. Daphne would be one. He shivered and pulled his collar up.
That night he dreamed Danny came driving down Waverly Street in Sumner College’s blue church bus. He stopped in front of home and told Ian, “They’ve given me a new route and now I get to go anywhere I like.”
“Can I ride along?” Ian asked from the sidewalk.
“You can ride along after you learn Chinese,” Danny told him.
“Oh,” Ian said. Then he said, “Chinese?”
“Well, I like to call it Chinese.”
“Call what Chinese?”
“You understand, Chinese is not what I really mean.”
“Then what do you mean?” Ian asked.
“Why, I’m talking about … let us say … Chinese,” Danny said, and he winked at Ian and laughed and drove away.
When Ian woke, Daphne was crying, and the room seemed moist as a greenhouse from her tears.
Agatha’s school reopened Tuesday, and Thomas’s nursery school Wednesday. This should have lightened Bee’s load, but still she looked exhausted every evening. She said she must have a touch of the flu. “Ordinarily I’m strong as a horse!” she said. “This is only temporary, I’m positive.”
Ian asked, “What’s the word on Tom Dean, Senior? Any sign of him?”
“Oh,” his mother said, “I guess we’ll have to give up on Tom Dean. It doesn’t seem he exists.”
“Then what’ll you do with the children?”
“Well, your father has some ideas. He’s pretty sure from something Lucy once mentioned that she came from Pennsylvania. Maybe her first marriage was recorded there, he says, in which case—”
“You’re stuck with them, aren’t you,” Ian said.
“Pardon?”
“You’re stuck with those children for good.”
“Oh, no,” she told him. “I’m certain we’ll find somebody sooner or later. We’ll just have to. We’ll have to!”
“But what if you don’t?” Ian asked her.
Her face took on a flown-apart, panicked look.
Two of the children weren’t even Bedloes, and he wondered if it occurred to his parents that those two could simply be made wards of the state, or whatever — popped into some kind of foster home or orphanage. But he suspected that with Daphne, they wouldn’t feel free to do that. Daphne was their dead son’s child, and an infant besides. She wasn’t already formed, as the other two were. She hadn’t yet reached the knobby-kneed, scabby stage that only a mother could love; she was still full of dimples, still tiny and beguiling.
Thomas, on the other hand, could cause a serious puncture wound if he accidentally poked you with his elbow. Holding him on your lap was like holding a bunch of coat hangers. Which didn’t prevent his trying to climb up there, heaven knows. He had the nuzzling, desperate manner of a small dog starved for attention, which unfortunately lessened his appeal; while Agatha, who managed to act both sullen and ingratiating, came across as sly. Ian had seen how grownups (even his mother, even his earth-mother sister) turned narrow-eyed in Agatha’s presence. It seemed that only Ian knew how these children felt: how scary they found every waking minute.
Why, being a child at all was scary! Wasn’t that what grownups’ nightmares so often reflected — the nightmare of running but getting nowhere, the nightmare of the test you hadn’t studied for or the play you hadn’t rehearsed? Powerlessness, outsiderness. Murmurs over your head about something everyone knows but you.
• • •
He finished moving a family into a row house on York Road and went home from there on foot, passing a series of shabby stores. The job had run unusually late. It was after seven on a dismal January evening, and most places had closed. One window, though, glowed yellow — a wide expanse of plate glass with CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE arching across it in block letters. Ian couldn’t see inside because the paper shade was lowered. He walked on by. Behind him a hymn began. “Something something something lead us …” He missed most of the words, but the voices were strong and joyful, overlaid by a single tenor that rose above the rest.