Blessings by Anna Quindlen

West a decade before.
    The first few months after she had discovered she was pregnant, when the new wedding band, while slender, felt like some unexpected weal on her finger, the cries had seemed to be the spectral calls of the child within. That was after she had moved her things from her parents’ house in the city to Blessings for what she had vaguely thought of as a wartime interlude, Benny’s letters on transparent airmail paper arriving in the old rural-route mailbox.
    And then Meredith had been born, and the cries had been real, yet somehow as foreign as their imaginary counterparts. Slowly she would struggle through the veil of her dreams to the momentarily sinister forms of the lamp, the dresser, the highboy, and the desk ranged around her bedroom, and for a moment she would wonder whose baby that was, crying. Her legs would struggle with the sheets, the blankets, and then there would come the even tap tap tap of the footsteps of the baby nurse that her mother had hired and sent out from the city, a thin woman with cropped hair and a faint middle-European accent who played solitaire in the kitchen in her off-hours. Lydia Blessing could remember, in those early weeks, thinking she would not be able to go back to sleep, hearingthe tick of the mantel clock, feeling the soreness where she’d been stitched straight up the middle after the Caesarian birth. And then she would waken again to the bright clear light of full day through the branches of the maple outside the bedroom window. She never slept that deep sleep now, and her bedroom in the dark was as familiar as the dimpled face of the moon over the pond.
    In the last two weeks the cries had come again, more plaintive and more demanding even than those she had heard when there was truly a baby in the house. Sometimes she thought she was dreaming of those days, sixty years ago now, when Meredith had cried and been comforted, in some fashion, by that foreign woman, who carried the small flannel-wrapped bundle under her arm like a loaf of fractious bread. Sometimes she would start awake, then realize she was hearing the sound of a radio faintly from the garage apartment. She had told Nadine to put a stop to that.
    Tonight she could hear nothing but the steady timpani of thunder rolling in from the northeast. She went to the window and peered out into the darkness, but the storm clouds had muted a half-moon. Most of the time she could see one corner of the barn roof from the sleeping porch off her bedroom, one green-shingled curve and one of the lightning rods, a horse in full canter in copper faded to a dull brown. She had put the horse atop the rod herself, held around her waist by her father at the top of a long, long ladder held steady by two of the men who had built the barn. “Must everything be a show?” her mother had said in the dining room that morning when her father had suggested it. Ethel Blessing had not even come down to watch. She had stayed on the long front porch, in a rocking chair, while everyone, the servants, the workmen, the gardeners, had come to see Lydia lift the glowing copper horse into place. She remembered that it had been warm in her hands. Sunny had been at Benny Carton’s house in Rhode Island that day, she remembered. It was her only disappointment.
    Her father had built the barn in the summer of 1930, when there were no jobs in Mount Mason. The father and an uncle of one of the girls in Lydia’s class at Bertram’s had killed themselves after the stock market crash, and two of the girls in her classhad gone elsewhere even though Miss Bertram had offered them scholarships. But Lydia’s mother had never believed in the stock market, or even banks for that matter, and somehow all of the money from the business she had inherited from her father, which had once been called Simpson’s Dry Goods but was now called Simpson’s Fine Textiles, was safe. They moved not long after the crash from a narrow house on Seventy-seventh Street near