Blessings by Anna Quindlen Page B

“Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you,” her father would sing in his clear tenor as he danced her around the drawing room of the house in the city. “Night and day, you are the one,” Frank had sung one night at a deb ball for one of his daughters at the club. There had been a breakfast afterward at the Askew apartment on Park Avenue, and he’d locked the door to one of the maid’s rooms and made love to her on the single bed, and all the time she had been able to hear Ella Askew down the hall, with her distinctive voice, loud and bright as dinner chimes, tell a long story about difficulties with the tent for her sister’s lawn wedding. “Beautiful,” Frank kept whispering. “Beautiful.” She was shamed by it all, flushed bright as a peach, but perhaps that had been the pleasure, too. At age twenty her body had seemed to have a mind of its own, to open of its own accord, as automatic as a heartbeat. It was hard to imagine now.
    Once she had said to Jess, when they had finished a bottle of wine out on the terrace during the long lunches they had had, the children grown and the men gone, when they were back to what they’d been as girls, “I’m sixty years old and I’ve never seen a man completely naked.”
    “Oh, Lyds,” Jess had said. “Oh, dear.” And then, “Well, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” They’d laughed till they cried. Just cried.
    Jess had come back to her then, for a few years. She had not meant to leave Lydia alone: she had simply done that most perfidious of things, made a happy marriage, with a good man who loved her and did everything he could possibly think of, from emerald earrings to keeping the children quiet on Saturday mornings, to show her that he did. They had both been married at the beginning of the war, she and Jess, and they had both been widowed during it. But Jess had made another life: two sons, three daughters, and Roger. And Lydia never had. Her life was a life in sepia and black-and-white with deckled edges, framed in silver, mounted in scrapbooks. It had been a former life even years ago.
    There was a clammy stillness to the warm summer air, as though the atmosphere were exhaling slowly. An enormous moth dancedon the window screen by the head of her bed, determined to get to the faint light filtering up from the hallway lamp downstairs or to die trying. His wings made a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled, and his feet clicked against the wire mesh. For a moment she thought she had dropped off to sleep, heard in her dreams the sound of those old trucks climbing the rise from the drive and then heading down to where the barn was being built, their gears straining with a deep rumble. Then she remembered that it was the Fourth of July, and that there would be fireworks in Mount Mason. That was how she had first met Jess, when her father had taken her to the big field behind the train tracks to watch the holiday fireworks. “The bombs bursting in air,” he’d roared, his car lurching along the dirt roads. Jess’s father had invited her to share his daughter’s blanket, and he and Ed Blessing had shared a bottle. “You should have come, Sunny,” she’d said next morning. “I met a nice girl.”
    “Whose daughter was that?” her mother had demanded, but her father had mouthed the words bank president and then it had been all right. But after that they had always had their own fireworks, and Lydia had done the same once the house was hers. One Fourth there had been thirty people staying at the house, sleeping on the patio divans, doubling up in the bedrooms, and they’d had starbursts and Roman candles at midnight, and then strawberry shortcake and champagne, sitting on quilts spread around the front lawn. She remembered that Jess had not liked the people who came from the city. She thought they drank too much, and one of the women, she thought it was Penny Lind, had tried to sit on Roger’s lap.
    There was another boom, and then