What Love Sees (31 page)

It seemed like she was always looking for him. Once she couldn’t find him for a couple of hours. She walked through each room of the new house, called him, stood still to listen for any movement, heard none and went on. Was this a game, his new way to taunt her? The thought stirred ugly memories of the fly episode. She walked outside onto the patio. “Forrie?” No answer. She went to the garage across the gravel breezeway and called louder. No response. She didn’t know whether to be angry or alarmed. Neither felt very good. She called Mother Holly. He wasn’t there. She called Lance and Mary Kay. They hadn’t seen him. She called Franny Nelson. Not there either, but neither was Franny’s daughter, Judy.

Franny came over and looked, too. “Well, you haven’t missed him in any of the usual places,” Franny said. Then she checked the barn and corral, the brickyard, the pepper trees along the dirt road, the swings under the Chinese elm. She went into the old wooden house, empty and waiting to be moved off the property. The two children, barefoot, wearing sunglasses and talking gaily, sat on blankets and held open umbrellas.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Playing beach,” Forrie said, and giggled. Franny corralled them back into the house.

“From now on, Forrest Holly, you’re going to tell me where you’re going when you leave this house,” Jean announced.

“Do you actually think he will?” Franny asked when they went into the kitchen.

“No. But maybe he will sometimes.” She tried not to think of the potential disasters that lay in wait for unaccompanied little boys on a ranch—a fall from a tree or barn loft, an angry horse, even a rattlesnake. “I can’t keep him within reach or even within hearing range. You can’t do that to a little kid. I have to trust.”

“Last week when you couldn’t find him when Marge Baker brought her girl to piano lesson, she must have been shocked,” Franny said.

“Why? How do you know?”

“She talked about it and it got back to me.” Franny’s voice was apologetic.

A fly buzzed close to Jean’s face, hovering near her temple. She scowled and waved it off fiercely. “They just have to find something to occupy their minds in this forsaken town.”

Meanwhile she had dishes to do. She always had dishes to do. Willard Butters’ boy made more frequent deliveries. Trailings of jam left by Forrie on the sink drew ants, marching with undisturbed freedom through breakfast, sometimes through lunch, until spotted by Celerina—if she was there. If not, Mother Holly found them. Faith cried out for attention. As if aware of the chaos he was born into, Billy retreated into the shadows. In cluttered mornings his quietness made him disappear. He seemed to wait to be noticed; sometimes he wasn’t.

Jean stumbled over toys left in odd places where small hands had dropped them. She discovered a truck in the toilet when she went to clean it one day. Another day it was a child’s wooden block, swollen with water and stuck in the same toilet. Forrest tried to get it out with a brace and bit. Finally Ed had to remove the whole toilet.

Laundry stacked up. Diapers stacked up. Training pants stacked up. Sheets stacked up.

Jean walked outside to the clothesline one day, her loaded basket in front of her. Celerina was gone again and had been for several days. Someone banged on the piano. The noise didn’t bother her though she realized it would probably drive others crazy. To her it meant life, activity, family. It meant that Faith must be up from her nap. Billy would probably be next. Forrie was somewhere. Outside, maybe. More often now, he’d tell her where he was going when he went out, but often things distracted him and he’d wander off. He could be anywhere—and Ramona would be sure to notice. She could hear their criticism even though Franny tried to act as a buffer. Neglectful mother, neglectful mother—the dreaded accusation pounded in her head. She raised her hand above her head to find the clothesline. “There ought to be a law against people like that having babies.” She could imagine them saying it. People like what? she thought. People who, after years of being afraid they’d always be alone, love their children all the more? People who feed and bathe and clothe and teach them with more intensity and concentration than others could ever imagine?

She shoved the laundry basket along the packed dirt with her foot, pulled out a sheet and searched for the corners. Just let them try to do what I’m doing. She stretched it up to the clothesline with one hand, reached for a clothespin with the other. The damp sheet slipped and fell to the dirt. “Dammit.” She bent down.

A soft scraping sound came from behind and to the left.

“Forrie?”

“Yeah.”

She winced, involuntarily raising her shoulders. He must have heard her. “That wasn’t a nice thing for me to say. I shouldn’t have said it,” she snapped. She heard him scraping again. “What are you doing?”

“Digging.”

“Making a hole? It’s not a safe place for holes, not here near the clothesline.” She could twist her ankle in one. She’d done it before.

“No. I’m just scraping. I need some dirt.”

“What for?”

“Pop said I could build a dam near the pepper tree.”

They were so important to him, his dams and moats and forts. The precious urgency of Forrie’s make-believe world touched her and dissolved her annoyance. In such moments she felt included in a universe of trucks and caves and tunnels, the fluid world of a normal boy at play.

“A flood’s coming so I got to build it fast.”

“Really?”

“Aw, Mom, you know what I mean.”

She knew he didn’t want to admit it was only play. In his earnest absorption, he had unconsciously granted her a disclosure of the workings of his imagination. One comment by Forrie could lift her out of tiredness into the realm of fantasy where dams are always built in time to hold back the flood and caves invariably lead to adventure.

But for the most part, she was tired, too tired to do her own playing, too interrupted to read or play piano, too distracted to invite the women for bridge, too weary to make love or even concentrate on moving. When she was tired, she was less alert and she didn’t sense doors left open in her path. And now there were more little people around to leave cupboard doors ajar. She wore a constantly changing pattern of bruises and scrapes.

Forrest probably did, too. She only guessed that. They never spoke of those things. Their evening talks out at the swings after the children were asleep did not consist of bashes and dropped sheets. Only when blindness led them into humor was it ever alluded to.

“Poor, dumb old Mort,” Forrest told her one night, referring to his new horse. “What a numbskull. He’s as slow as a slug.”

“Is that why you named him after Father?”

“No. But it sure takes him just as long to catch on. Today I rode out past Lance’s, between the fields out to the oak trees. Thought I knew where I was going—done it a hundred times, but somehow I went further east than I meant to and ended up tangled in someone’s clothesline.”

“Whose?” Jean stood behind him as he sat on the swing, her fingers trailing through his cropped hair.

“The Bradley’s. I felt brassieres and panties flapping in my face. Big ones. I never knew she was so hefty.” They both laughed. “Had to wait there with Mort twitching under me like a nervous kid seeing a naked woman for the first time. Finally Mrs. Bradley came out to set me right.”

“Maybe Lance was right about Mort.” She traced the outline of his ear with her fingertips and giggled. “Maybe you paid too much for him.” She kissed him on the ear. She knew such episodes amused him, threw fuel onto his fire of life.

“Today in the brickyard some fella bought an order for a whole house,” he said. “He asked me if I knew someone who could build it for him.”

“Who did you tell him?”

“I told him I would.”

She nearly choked. “But you don’t know anything about building a house.”

“I can ask questions, can’t I? And Ed and the men can do the work, and I can do the planning and ordering materials and supervising. Ed’s due to get his contractor’s license next month. It’ll make more money than brickmaking and hauling.”

She thought he had the nerve of the ages, but she didn’t want to darken his hopes. He’d probably learned a lot from the crews building this house—he was always asking them questions—and he had built a garage for Mother Holly. Let him. That was his arena. Hers was children.

And soon there would be another. By the time Billy was potty trained, she was pregnant again. She couldn’t contain what she had to recognize as despair. Alone during the children’s afternoon naps, she collapsed on the sofa. How was she going to tell Mother? There had been a note of disapproval in Mother’s voice when she had told her of Billy, even her own mother implying that full blown motherhood would be too much for her. Now she had a couple more years of diapers and the nightmare of feeding all over again.

Maybe Mother was right. Three were enough. They were pushing their luck. But the pregnancy was undeniable. She buried her face in the sofa pillows, overcome with tears and self-reproach. There was something unseemly, maybe even inhuman, about not wanting another baby, the natural consequence of lovemaking. Shame at her tears made her sob more. Her stomach cramped and she contracted into a ball. If she had to let it out she’d better let it out now while Forrest was at work. This was one time she couldn’t bear to have him discover her. Her breath came in jerky, wet gasps and her hand pressed against a hard center of regret hurting in her stomach.

Chapter Twenty-seven

“Take him home, Mrs. Holly. I can’t do anything for him, but you can.” Dr. Lipe’s words lanced the wound she had tried to ignore. She knew something was different with this baby. Alanson Perry Holly felt different, like a bowl of jelly. He could bend back as easily as forward and seemed to slide through her grasp.

She slipped back into town quietly and tried to learn how to tend this difficult infant who would not eat and whose movements had an erratic discontinuity, as if he were spastic. More than the other children, his little neck lacked the strength to hold up his wobbly head. Gravely she thought somehow it must have been her fault in the birth, or in having a fourth child. In despair, she chased his mouth with a bottle, then with a spoon, sometimes with determination, sometimes in desperation. As much as she had with the other three, perhaps even more, she bathed him with love, exploring his limbs, his receding chin and slightly drooping lids, brushing the gossamer eyelashes with a lingering tenderness, yet in her loving there was a note of self-torture.

How had she come to this state of affairs? she asked herself one day. From opera in black velvet capes and tea served by a butler at a boarding school to this, force-feeding a limp, unwilling child in some remote town with turkeys squawking in the background and three other children moving around her, she wasn’t quite sure where until they tugged at her sleeve? Where was the calm order of her youth, the placidness that Harkness thought remarkable in a young girl? How had it eluded her?

For weeks she walked from room to room with a constant lump in her throat. So what would Miss Weaver have done, given this situation? She didn’t need to wonder. That woman was unsinkable. Oh, yes, Mother would coddle, Dody would understand, Icy would have suffered with her, but LCW would be adamant. “Of course you can do something about the condition of that child. It’s foolish to accept as permanent what you see. Now blow your nose and get busy.” Jean could hear her throaty voice conveying absolute control. “Of course you can.” It wasn’t the words themselves. They were simple enough, even superficial in themselves. It was the attitude they conveyed—that our frame of mind determines our experience, that it was absurd to accept obstacles as law. Instead, it was natural to go beyond limitations. Furthermore, not to be stalwart was shameful and might even transmit character weakness to the child.

Others voiced their worry. “How’s he ever going to sit up and eat by himself?” Franny shook her head. “I don’t think he’ll ever—”

“Oh yes, he will. He’s going to sit up and he’s going to walk. In fact, he’s going to walk me to your house every day. He can outgrow this. He was put here on earth to do some good, and I’m going to see that he can.” Declaring it might bring it to pass. She held his head firmly from behind and, using two fingers to open his mouth, thrust the spoon home.

To his own strange incompleteness the child was oblivious, Jean discovered with gratitude. His sounds had none of the crossness of Faith’s nor the sullenness of Billy’s. He gurgled through babyhood with a glee that spoke of his willingness to be in the world, on whatever terms. “He’s happy,” she said to Forrest one night, almost in wonder. And his name became Hap.

Other than feeding, he was easy to tend to. He stayed put on a blanket spread out on the floor. While Jean gave piano lessons to local children, Hap was content to be held and played with by accompanying mothers or older sisters who circulated the gossip—the Hollys had another child, one too many. Jean choked at their censure.

Once a girl was brought to her lesson by her aunt, a Mrs. Betty Kenworthy. Jean steeled herself against potential criticism from a new voice, but let the visitor in anyway. “Mrs. Holly, something must have happened to your son,” the woman stammered. “He’s got blood all over his face.” Her voice didn’t have the daggered edge of superiority that Jean had grown to expect, but only concern. It reminded her of a mourning dove.