Bomber's Law (16 page)

“But then Peaches had the heart attack that killed him, and about two weeks after that, Dad had one of his own. Course I think a sprained ankle would've done it. If his heart hadn't attacked him, he would've found something else to die of. He'd just reached the point where he'd lost interest in the whole thing. It was time for him to go. People know that, feel it or something, recognize it right off, too,
what the signal means. And it's like they just sort of excuse themselves, get up from the chair in a room where something's still going on, isn't over yet, and just leave. Answering a summons that only they could hear. If you didn't happen to be paying attention, you wouldn't even notice they'd gone until you got up yourself, and since most of the world isn't paying attention when most people vacate their places, hardly anyone usually notices. And not many of those who do notice remember for very long afterwards.

“Virginia was different,” Dennison had said. “She wasn't as old as Dad was, of course, but she grew up in a generation where women who were strictly wives and mothers really didn't make a lot of friends, of their own. Not after they were married. After that the female friends they had, except for the women who lived next-door to them, were the women who were married to the men who were friends with their husbands. The next-door women never liked their husbands, and the husbands always knew this, sensed it, so they of course didn't like the next-door women.

“But, see, they couldn't very well just come right out and say it. That that was the real reason why they never wanted to have anything socially to do with Joe and Isabel, like take in a movie, maybe, or just go out for a pizza or something for a change some night, instead of just staying home all the time and cooking dinner every night all the time, the same old thing, old thing, old thing, always the same old thing. They couldn't say it because their wife was absolutely right when she said it seemed as though they always got along all right with Joe, swapping tools and stuff back and forth with him on the weekends, and when it was only a matter of sitting down over a couple beers after they finished waxing the car or cutting the grass on Saturdays, they seemed to like each other well enough.

“Because they knew if they did that, did come right out and say it, that the reason that they didn't want to go out with Joe and Isabel was because Isabel didn't like them and they knew it, they always knew it, knew it the first day they met the broad, and they didn't like her either, their wife would feel like she had to defend Isabel, or whatever the woman-next-door's name happened to be, and the only way she'd be able to think of to do that most likely would be to attack her own husband.

“She might even actually come right out and say that there were
lots of times, as a matter of fact, when she'd thought to herself that if Isabel didn't like their husband—which Isabel'd never come right out and actually
said
, mind you, but if she had've done that—well, she had plenty of good reasons not to like him. Always being so rude to her and acting like she didn't even exist, they couldn't even see her when she saw them in the yard in the morning and said hello to them or something. Which would promptly make him just as mad as she already was, so that he would say something like: ‘Yeah, in that goddamned yellow house-dress that she wears all the time, and that blasted kerchief she's always got on there, tied around her head. She ever take that damned thing off and
wash
it? I don't care if she is your friend. I can't stand that woman.' And then the two of them would have a good fight, when all she'd been trying to do was get out of the house and the kitchen for one night and talk to somebody besides him for a change, and he was just so selfish that he never understood that she needed to get out after spending all day in the house. The upshot of which would be that neither one of them would get laid at all that night, and most likely not for the next week or so, either, until finally one of them got so horny that the fight was over with because it had to be or else no one was ever going to get laid again. Well,
fuck
that. Which no one of course said aloud then, but they muttered it deep in their hearts, boys, they said it deep in their hearts.

“So what the husbands did was find a
different
reason to explain why they didn't like the next-door women. And the one that they generally came up with was that the women next door were stupid. As in fact they quite frequently were, and their wife would have spotted this already by herself, so she would have a pretty hard time defending Isabel, and would therefore maybe not even try. She would not be happy, but she wouldn't be all pissed off, either, with a big hair across her ass that'd be there until the snow flew and the Christmas lights went up, and at least there would still be at least a possibility—maybe not too good a one but still a possibility—that when a man came home from work he might get laid that night.

“So once the sun went down or when the weekends came, these women who were wives and mothers never socialized with the next-door women who were doing the same thing. They were just daytime friends, and those're not the kind you keep.

“The years began to mount up, and the husbands started dropping off, one by one. And therefore so did most of the friendships of their grown-up years. They vanished,
poof
, into thin air, the same as all the friendships that they'd had when they were girls, and they were friends with other girls who went to school with them. Or when they were young women and they'd worked together with them in the same stores and offices. The ones they shared all those secret giggles about boys with for quite a while, and then with the ones that they knew later: knowing nods and smiles about young men. Not much later they got very jealous of those disloyal ones, though, the little bitches who stabbed their best friend in the back, by getting their engagement ring
first
, before their best friend did—‘Never speak to
her
again.' Back when they were young, before they found their own husbands—those friendships that they'd had back then just disappeared. Like blocks of dry ice melting; not even a dirty little puddle on the floor to remind you they'd been there.

“It was sort of a paradox, really. You had all these women who'd followed the pattern and'd gotten themselves involved in marriages of almost complete dependency, and then as the dominant partners, the men, died off, there they were, all those women, suddenly expected to be completely
in
dependent now. Having no choice except that, really. No choice, no preparation, and after all those years, no protection, either. What they might've preferred didn't matter. Not one soul in the whole spinning world cared.

“Well, that was what'd happened to Virginia, had been in the process of happening to her long before that lovely June Sunday when Tory and I'd driven down to David's champagne open-house and then, not close to tight but wined and dined and nicely-mellowed, on over to Westport to Virginia's. Just a casual ‘right-down-here-in-the-neighborhood-and-thought-we-might-as-well-drop-in' call, and if that doesn't teach me never again to make another visit like that to
any
one,
any
where,
any
time, no matter how long I may live, then I am beyond even a chance of reclamation, let alone hope of measureable improvement. You might just as well lead me out of the barn now down to the back forty, and have the hired man shoot me point-blank in the head. And then fire another one, just to make sure, we really did get it all over with.

“Virginia was out in the yard,” Dennison had said. “She was really
good with flowers, good enough and knew enough so that if she hadn't put her mind to not becoming one, she could've become a really preachy pain in the ass on the subject. Like one of those anally-compulsive men who's obliged by the rules to retire when he hits a given age even though he doesn't want to, but being the type he is, he sees it coming and prepares, years ahead—as Brennan doesn't seem to've, at all, and that may be another part of his problem; or: another problem: that he's suddenly realized he's still facing flatfoot retirement flatfooted, and there isn't enough time left to do much about it now. So when they finally give him the watch and kick him out he knows an indecent amount about golf, or flyfishing; bridge, stamp-collecting—which he'd never call ‘philately'—or some other goddamned thing that then becomes the only thing he does, and all he talks about. A guy in my wing in Vietnam had a father-in-law that he really got along with fine while the two of us were there and the old guy was back here and working every day, but then we both came back and the time went by, and pretty soon, it seemed like, the old man retired. What'd been up 'til then a nice, pleasant,
interesting
hobby that the two of them'd shared, became the old man's total occupation, and now here was Billy with his wife, her name's Rachel, and three teenagers, two of them in college and the third one headed there, his own career to think about and get as far as he could in, before his own time was up, so he'd have a decent pension to look forward to, at least, and his father-in-law wouldn't leave him alone, would not give him a minute's peace.

“Birding,” Dennison had said. “The old boy'd always had a soft spot in his heart for spending a May morning tramping through wet pumpkin-vine underbrush, spying on prothonotary warblers catching errant woodstocks, and that was all right then. But once he was completely on his own, he did it every fucking
day
, and a good part of most nights. Billy'd be in his office at Three-Em there, out in Minnesota, getting his work done, he was general counsel by then, and the phone'd ring on his desk: It was Ted, and it was important. So he'd interrupt his train of thought, stop what he was doing—because he did like the old man and Rachel's mother, too, something might've happened to her—and pick the phone up to discover that his dear wife's father'd just added to his Lifelist a least-plum-busted dingbat, very rare 'round Chapel Hill, at least at that time of year. ‘This kind
of entertainment,' Terry told me, ‘well, put it this way: No matter how much you like watching the birdies, or your loving father-in-law, it can get on your nerves very fast.'

“Well,” Dennison had said, “Virginia had the potential to become that kind of pest. She knew just as much, at least as much, about flowers as Billy's father-in-law knew about the birds, and she could've done it, easy. But she didn't. It was something that she did, that she'd always done, and that she'd always liked doing and knew how to do very well, so she did it. She belonged to three or four of the garden clubs around Taunton during the years that she lived there, and then when she moved down to Westport she found one or two down there, and she would go to them from time to time. When the winter started to run down every year so it was getting on toward spring, she would make arrangements to get herself to the Flower Show in Boston, one way or the other—couple years, Tory took her—and those were pretty much all the things she did about what she liked to do. With flowers. All of them. And that really was all of it, too. Because she liked growing flowers for that, for what it was to her. Not as something she could use to make a damned nuisance of herself, to bedevil other people with.

“So when you saw her outdoors or in, working on her plants, something to do with her plants, you knew that Virginia was happy,” Dennison had said. “As happy as she ever got, anyway, up to her ass in dirt. And that day, the Sunday in June, when we turned in her drive and went up toward that goddamned house, and I saw her standing there beside the front door, just standing there and looking down at this flower bed she had there, these beds of beautiful tall, white and yellow, blue and red, flowers,—what they were I couldn't possibly tell you to this day, and of course they're all gone now, just as dead as she is, even after only one year of no one taking care of them; that's all it took—on both sides of the door, I looked up that drive, and I saw her just standing there and looking down, and that was when I knew. That the time had come. Now it was all over. What we'd known was coming: It'd come, and now it was there.

“Because that's all she was doing, see?” Dennison had said. “She wasn't working on them. It'd never struck me until then, that I'd never seen her just, well, doing what I guess I would've done, if flowers'd been my thing. Just standing back and looking at them,
enjoying what my work, all my skill and care and hours, 'd made come from the earth. No, there was always something more, she was working on. But not now. Not that Sunday. Now there was some reason, what it was I didn't know, and specifically, well, I never did find out exactly what it was, but something had been working on her down inside there, and now it'd finished what it'd set out to do to her. May've had a slight stroke; may've fallen and had a real hard time of it; getting up: any one of those things, it could've been. But something clearly had happened, and she was not going to put on her knee-pads and her cloth gloves and get down her hands and knees again and take care of her flowers any more. And she knew it. That was the end of it. She couldn't do it, grow the flowers, anymore.

“She had this look on her face that I'd never seen before, when she heard the car come up and turned around. The closest I've ever come to describing it to myself is
surprise
, and it wasn't surprise to see us—we quite often dropped by, or at least Tory did. No, this was almost a look of … of astonishment, I guess. Wonderment, maybe? I don't know. A kid-on-Christmas-morning look, only what was on her face was not delight—more like dismay. Virginia knew what I knew, too, and she'd found it out just like I had. It was like she'd just happened to stop by, 'd seen herself standing there by the flower-beds at the door, and quite unexpectedly found out. She hadn't been prepared either. Even though she'd also known that it was coming, lots better'n I did.