Blessings by Anna Quindlen Page A

Lexington Avenue to the larger house on Seventy-fourth Street near the park, a house that was sold at a considerable loss by a man who had had to be hospitalized at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital just before the Christmas holidays after he realized that all his capital was gone.
    The people in Mount Mason had been glad of the work, and the barn had gone up fast, the wall supports and roof struts laid out flat in the middle of the big grass gully next to the swamp that Edwin Blessing had decided upon for its site. He had also decided that Sunny should work on the barn with the hired laborers from town. “Make a man of him,” Mr. Blessing kept saying, as though even character could be contracted out. “Teach him the value of hard work.” Sunny had been thirteen years old that summer. His hair grew pale as sunlight, and his skin golden. Lydia thought her brother was beautiful.
    “I was so in love with him when we were children,” Jess had told her one day when they were waiting to have lunch until Sunny’s train came in, the children passing time playing Parcheesi in the library. “He was so dear.” Lydia remembered that Sunny had not arrived for lunch that day, had come on the last evening train smelling of gin, a fresh cut at the corner of one eye. She had put him to bed in his usual room. “I’m a bad boy, Lydie,” he’d muttered, belching loudly and then falling asleep as though he’d been given an anesthetic. Fifty years ago, that had been, and she could still see his tanned arm dangling from the single bed.
    Her sheets were cool as she slid back between them, shining white as a night-light in the dark room. In the years that Blessings had been hers and hers alone, she had never had a colored sheet in the house. She intended to keep it that way. White towels, too.
    She had not been down to the barn in many years. It was deserted now, empty of all but pigeons and mice and the odd foraging fox. There was a long steep slope down to it; the builder had said that was the disadvantage to the site, but Father had wanted it there, with a long back drive to the road and a deep pasture to one side. The wife of the farmer from whom he’d bought the cows wept in the doorway as they were driven into a truck with open slatted sides, and Lydia, who was in the old Lincoln with her father, had thought that the farmer’s wife must know each cow individually, and was sad to have them leave. Bessie. Brownie. Calico the calf. Perhaps she was saying good-bye in her mind. Years later Lydia had told the story at a dinner party, described the woman in the pink flowered apron holding open the screen door with her hip, wiping her eyes with the hem of the apron, watching the black and white cattle lumbering up the ramp, her husband prodding them with a sharpened broomstick. And Jess had left before coffee and dessert, and next morning had called Lydia and told her in that choked and breathy voice she used when she was angry that the reason the woman was crying was that the sale of the cows was the only thing that had forestalled foreclosure on a farm that had been in her family since before the Civil War. Jess had known because her father was the president of the bank that held the mortgage.
    “I had no way of knowing that, for pity’s sake,” Lydia had said.
    “That’s forever your problem,” Jess had said. “You ought to have known. There are always these things that you ought to know and yet somehow you don’t. Open your eyes, Lydia. You are not the center of the universe.”
    Those were the two people who had been the center of her universe: Jess and Sunny. Both of them gone now. And the people she had thought she’d loved were gone, too, her father, who had built Blessings and then lost it to his wife and daughter, and Frank Askew, still handsome and sleepy-eyed in his obituary photograph in the Times fifteen years ago, still married to Ella, still on the hospital board and the Bedford town council. Both men had sung toher.