Scenes from Village Life: Chapter Sixteen 1964
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Scenes from Village Life: Chapter Sixteen 1964 Just before Christmas, a family of four walks across the stone courtyard of a Park Avenue apartment house. A man and a woman, a boy and a younger girl. They carry red and green packages. Snowflakes fill the air; the streets will be white by morning. The man whistles, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," then breaks off, coughing. Frank has come down with his annual Christmas cold. They take a cab home. "Merry Christmas," they say to the driver. They cross Park Avenue and walk the half block to their apartment house. "Merry Christmas," they wish the elevator man as they give him his Christmas envelope. Three weeks later, at the same time of day, a few snow flakes falling, three of the four people cross the same courtyard to the taxi Minna has ordered for them. They have just come from tea at the Delafields' following Frank's funeral. Olivia's mother and half-sisters left earlier to prepare the evening meal that no one wants to eat. Olivia remembers very little about the funeral. Malcolm gave the eulogy. At some point they walked beside still waters and God spread a table, but not for her; not for her, who now and henceforth had joined those in peril on the seas. At the Delafields' Olivia stands by the fireplace, capable only of small gestures, an inclination of her head, a handshake, the offering of her cheek to be kissed. Her hearing, however, is like an auditory vacuum cleaner: "First rate lawyer - turned down an appointment with the SEC to manage Malcolm's next campaign." "....Only forty-one. Such a tragic loss." 198 "I thought people didn't die from pneumonia any more." "Frank was allergic to antibiotics." "Does Olivia have family to fall back on?" "A mother and two younger half-sisters.” Who have been trying to get into Olivia's life since they could walk. Delia is short to dwarfishness, with teased dyed hair and sharp, mismatched features which give her the look of a peevish elf. Doreen could pass as pretty, although she also has their mother's witch's chin, and the voice that drives Olivia crazy. Someone comes up to Olivia and gushes, "So dreadful, my dear, but at least you have your children to live for." As though Laura is not standing on one side of Olivia, and Steve on the other. "I talked to Rose last night. She sends her sympathy," James Lippincott said. What have I to do with roses, Olivia thinks wildly. Only Malcolm appears to occupy the same purgatory as Olivia. He stands with her for some minutes. At last he mutters, "I didn't do Frank justice. Not nearly. I had more written, but I couldn't - I couldn't read it all." "Olivia, my dear." Porter Delafield joins them. "Good man, Frank. You two were married here, in this room. I gave you away. It seems like last week." Porter's mind is clear this afternoon, perhaps sharpened by the death of a much younger man, Olivia thinks meanly. But she tries to smile her thanks to at Porter. "Good man, good lawyer. Wanted him for Delafield & Lambert, but it was not to be." As Olivia and her children leave, Porter says, "Stephen, take care of your mother." In the taxi Laura wails, "I don't want to go home without Daddy." 199 "Me, neither, Laura." Back in the apartment Olivia's mother waits, eager to match her sorrows to Olivia's, showing them to be of a superior age and weight. "I don't know why everything's so slow," Olivia complains as they wait in their lobby. "First our taxi, then the elevator." "The taxi ride only took eleven minutes. I timed it," says Steve. "I didn't mean that," Olivia snaps, but she doesn't know what she means. She puts an arm around each child. It's hard to tell who hugs whom. "Personally, I don't approve of alcohol," Mrs. Smith welcomes Olivia to her own apartment. "But you didn't touch a thing at Mrs. Delafield's so I thought perhaps a wee drink might give you an appetite." Mrs. Smith hands Olivia a martini that is half vermouth. "Delia will have dinner on the table before you can say Jack Robinson." An old Smith family joke. Olivia is supposed to ask, Who's he? She adds gin to her martini. Steve and Laura flee to the study to watch television. Doreen turns the pages of the current Vogue. "Livvy, do you remember when you were a very little girl before Doreen and Delia were born and you would climb up on my lap and beg me to read you a `stowey?'" Olivia doubts that she ever did. She has made up her own stories since she was three. "I used to think you weren't listening, but later, when Doreen and Delia came along I'd find you on the couch, with a little one on either side, telling them stories from Mother Goose. I'm sure it's why you read aloud to your children now." At bedtime Olivia reads the first chapter of The Railway Children to Laura. It's a poor choice, because the fictional father is mysteriously absent. Laura begins to cry, but not in the torrents of the past four nights. Olivia holds her until she falls asleep. 200 Then it is Stephen's turn. She opens to a chapter of Kim. (Steve’s too old, she decides; he only listens to humor me.) "What did Uncle Porter mean by telling me to look after you?" Steve interrupts the reading. "What am I supposed to do?" Olivia sighs heavily. "Put up with me, I guess." The way your father used to. "Mum? Why didn't you warn us that Dad was so sick?" "Nobody realized that he - was that ill." "By then he was in an oxygen tent, you said. But why couldn't we see him?" Steve hunches up against the headboard, his boy's amorphous face wrenched into a scowl. "Uncle Malcolm got in to see Dad, and he isn't even related. Olivia sighs again. "Children weren't allowed to visit." "I wanted to see him. If I had, I could believe he's dead, but now it's - he isn't anywhere...." "Steve, it's okay to cry." She gathers up her son into her arms, smelling his clean pajamas and the shampoo that hadn't been rinsed out of his hair. She hugs him tightly while he sobs out an elegy for Frank, how his dad was okay, he never got mad, he let you finish talking first, even when you were wrong, and he always listened. Unlike your surviving parent, Olivia thinks sadly. She aches from her head through her neck to her lower back, but even for Steve she cannot bring up tears. After Steve allows her to tuck him in, Olivia returns to the living room. Her mother sits crocheting squares for an afghan in sour shades of mauve and yellow. "It's for Delia," Mrs. Smith explains. "She has her own apartment now. But, Livvy, if you'd like it I can make it for you." "That's very sweet of you, but no thanks." "You don't mind, do you, if the girls watch television?" 201 “Of course not,” Olivia says. They aren't girls, but women. Doreen has even been married and divorced, the way you'd try on a sweater. "It wouldn't be in bad taste for you to watch. It might take your mind off F - off your loss." “Not tonight." Olivia shakes her wrist, suspecting that her watch has stopped, but the clock on the mantelpiece also reads 9:49. Four days, two hours and seven minutes since Frank died. "Livvy, I do know what you are going through. After your father was taken from me I couldn't understand what happened to the time. It seemed to take forever for an hour to go by, and each day was like a month to get through." Olivia notes that her mother's rouged cheeks are wet with tears. Furiously crocheting, Mrs. Smith continues: "A minute is a minute, you'd think, but not when you lose a loved one." Olivia fixes herself a drink. "I never expected to go through it twice. When Orville passed away I said to myself, you just have to keep on, that's all you can do." The flat-soled little voice, the voice that Olivia has successfully excised, drones on and on. "You get up in the morning. You go to work. You come home and make dinner. The year Orville died, Doreen was at business college and Delia last year in High, and I had to be, well, not cheerful, but you can't pull a long face in front of youngsters. They have their lives ahead of them....Now Stevie is kind of withdrawn, but it must be a comfort that he looks so much like F - like his daddy. And that Laura, she's the same princess you were as a child in that dear little white lapin coat." Olivia has never owned a white rabbit coat and muff, only longed for one. She bursts out, "I know I have Laura and Steve to think of, but how am I going to live without Frank?" 202 "Dear, should you have another drink? Now you can't take the tranquillizers the doctor gave you." "You're right." Olivia touches her cheek to her mother's.