During the afternoon, yesterday, there were several points at which I wanted to go to bed. Going to bed in the middle of the day is unheard of for me, because nothing would wake me up faster, or less agreeably, than the attempt to take a proper nap. Made fretful by a slight domestic inconvenience (see below), I had the sense to take my walk on the beach despite my lassitude, and after that, if I had been alone, I’d have scrambled some eggs, taken a pill, and gone to bed by daylight. As it was, I could hardly think to make for dinner for the two of us, and so I resorted to short-order cookery that produced something quick and agreeable for Kathleen and then something quick but different for me, with her being quite finished before I sat down.

But when it came time to go to bed in earnest — no; it was two hours past bedtime — I could not go to sleep, because I had rallied, now excited by the book that I had been reading all afternoon. Worse, I had taken Lunesta too soon, so that when I finally turned out the light, I could tell that it was no longer active. (Lunesta is an unsual drug in that it makes its presence noticeable by extremely slight absences. So I dared to take another, which worked right away, it seems; I have no further memories of fretting.) By now it was nearly midnight. Nearly midnight! I’d been turning in by ten at the latest for most of my stay here, at least when there were only one or two other people in the house. I blamed the whole cockamamie day on Trollope. Well, on Orley Farm. When I finally put the book down (and this was before the second Lunesta), it was in the middle of one of the last of those clotted, Greek-tragic scenes between Lady Mason and Lucius, the son for whose benefit she perpetrated the terrible forgery, and the son whose headstrong mismanagement of his fraudulent inheritance has triggered, at the beginning of the novel, a renewed and more deadly interrogation of his claim. As it happens, I cannot remember what becomes of Lucius in the end; it is one of the many little details that I have forgotten in the fifteen years since I read Orley Farm for the first time — details that are turning out to be a delight to rediscover. Lucius Mason is a good man but not a likeable one, and, no doubt because of his education at a German university, not an English gentleman. I have a bit more than 150 pages to go, which means that I have read nearly 650, almost half of that number yesterday.

At the end of the afternoon, the clothes dryer gave out. It croaked in a whisper when we tried to turn it on, to dry the umpteenth load of sheets and towels from the weekend. We contacted the genial landlord. I hoped that (as indeed turned out to be the case) the machine was simply overheated, having been put to constant use on an extraordinarily humid day, but my heart did sink, remembering how the last week of last summer’s stay (in the little house that we can just make out across the marsh that separates Ocean Beach from Robbins Rest) was spoiled by an stove that didn’t work because the propane tank had been knocked over by the hurricane, and no one would come and fill it on the Labor Day weekend.

***

My grandson is in a phase of clinging to his mother, of needing to know where she is at all times. I don’t know how much longer this phase is going to last, but I hope that I’m not being merely optimistic when I say that I expect it to wind down soon. It’s my impression that Will grasps that his baby days are really coming to an end, and that he is about to become a “big boy,” which is to say the very littlest kind of boy but an embryo autonomous male all the same. Because he is so tall — and his head, his mother tells us, it too big to put through necks of T-shirts that otherwise fit him — it is easy to forget that he is just a bit older than two and a half. Still a toddler, but probably for not much longer. If it were not wildly fanciful to think so, I would almost say that he is reaching for his mother all the more needily because he senses that he is about to stop reaching for her at all.

This is especially interesting to watch for me because it was at Will’s age that I suddenly had a sister, and not an infant sister but a nine month-old sister. Not a baby that slept all day by any means, but a blue-eyed, curly-haired cutie who laughed in the bathtub. I have always known that I did not take her arrival very well. A few years ago, an aunt who has since passed away told me that because “my nose was so out of joint,” she and her sister took me, for a week, up to a cottage that they had rented in Bedford. I remember the cottage (possibly from a later visit, although I don’t think so); it was a simple wooden house, with little or no interior plaster, and a bathroom that was always, but not unpleasantly, damp, and the very sharp soap that stood by the sink. Most of all, I remember a collection of glass vessels of the deepest ruby and cobalt hues. They caught and glowed with the light that filtered in from a window that may have overlooked a lake, and they deposited a permanent impression of beauty, and of the hopefulness of beauty, as arguably my first distinct memory.

I do not claim to have been just like my grandson. But suppose that I, too, was going through his phase when, without the warning of a pregnancy (and possibly without any warning at all, since the adoption of my sister, unlike mine, was contested by her birth family), my mother became distracted and unavailable. I am far beyond feeling sorry for myself at this point, but I am stirred afresh by the naive wrongheadedness of the world in which I was brought up. How could they have done what they did? They did not attend to little things like human development as honestly as we do, or as rigorously as Will’s mother does. They were, like all Americans after World War II, wishful, and ready to try anything that would create the appearance of happy, God-blessed prosperity. This appearance required stable homes with children, and as for doing their part, my parents had the help of organizations founded on the belief that unwed motherhood was an evil that could be solved by abduction (an abduction that my sister’s grandparents appeared to have resisted, unsuccessfully). The abduction almost always had the nominal consent of the mother, but I do not think that we today would place much value in that consent. My mother got her daughter, already a genuine darling, at the very moment when her son was not quite ready to be a little boy. It was the best that could have been done.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2012 at 8:44 am.