Dear Doctor Lily (12 page)

‘See you again, some time, somewhere,' they had promised each other at Boston airport, but Ida did not believe they ever would. After a couple of postcards each way, and a Christmas card from Lily with a scrawled message Ida could not read, that was it.

When Bernie was born, Ida wanted to write to Lily, ‘Now I've got everything I wanted,' but Buddy, in a whirlwind mood, had been through the kitchen drawer where she kept papers, and Lily's address had been lost.

When Buddy brought home Lily's letter from the base post office, Ida was surprised. She turned it over a couple of times, fascinated by the huge colourful stamp, for she hardly ever got a letter from England. When she opened it, she was amazed.

‘Guess what?' she called to Buddy, who was upstairs changing out of his uniform fatigues. ‘I'm amazed.'

‘Guess what?' Bernie echoed. He could talk perfectly well, but he often parroted what she said. He copied what she did too, putting on her apron like a long skirt, and standing on a chair to wipe off the counter.

‘What the hell?' Buddy muttered. The walls were so thin that you could talk from one end of the house to the other, as if you were in the same room. You could also hear more than you wanted from the duplex next door.

‘This girl I know. Lily, you know, who I met on the aeroplane.'

‘Airplane.' Bernie started up the stairs to his father. ‘Puppa, kin I have…' the whine he put on for Buddy.

‘She's getting married to an American.'

‘Like you did.'

‘Yeah, like I did.'

Sort of. Lily was marrying the nice friendly man she had gone crazy about in Iceland. ‘All my romantic dreams come true,' she wrote to Ida. ‘Can you believe such luck? Secretly, Eye, I never forgot him in all those years.'

‘She's going to be married and live in Boston,' Ida told Buddy when he came silently downstairs in his sneakers, and tried to scare her by putting his hands suddenly on her hips from behind. She
was
scared, but she always pretended she was not, controlling the jump of nerves and keeping her voice calm.

‘Where are you going, Buddy?'

‘Down to the Fisherman.'

‘Working or drinking?'

‘Working, you cow.'

‘Cow,' Bernie said thoughtfully, through the candy bar his father had given him. He wasn't allowed candy before supper.

‘Get your ass in the kitchen, Ah-eye-da, and get me sump'n to eat.'

‘We got dogs and beans, that okay?'

‘What's Bernie going to have?' Buddy's plump face screwed up into an anxious concern he never showed for Ida or Maggie. ‘You know he don't like wieners.'

Taking his cue, Bernie went, ‘Yuck,' watching both of them with his bright brown eyes.

‘Well, it's what we've got, and he'll eat it or go hungry,' Ida said manfully. What a hope.

‘Come on, little boy, Puppa will fix you a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich.' Buddy ambled towards the kitchen.

‘He can't live on peanut-butter.'

‘Why not? I did.'

‘And look at you.'

‘Li'l boy gets what he wants when Poppa's home.'

‘You spoil him, just like your mother spoiled you.'

‘Sure.' Buddy picked up his five-year-old son and looked into the child's alert, inquiring face, his dark eyes liquid with a soppy love he never showed to anyone else.

They ate at the small table, messily. Ida was up and down all the time – ‘You'd think I'd lose weight at meals, not gain' – mopping up, fetching things her males wanted, picking up food the little girl scattered around her sticky high-chair.

‘I thought we were going to the club tonight,' she said, when Buddy found his car keys where Bernie had hidden them, and went to the door.

‘You shouldn't complain. I make money for you, babe. You shall have it all, clubs, champagne, furs, jewels, what is it they have – caviare.'

‘All I want is to see the money coming in, not going out to lay bets on the track.'

‘Shut your face,' Buddy said amiably. He was usually in a good mood when he was going out, whether it was to work (if he did go to work), or God knows where.

‘Bed, Maggie.' Ida extracted the three-year-old from the high-chair. Maggie's hands clung to her like rubber crabs. She nodded her head and made silly gobbling sounds. ‘Talk properly,' Ida said severely. She never let up on her. ‘Bed, Bernie.'

‘Not yet.'

Oh, well. She would carry him up when he fell asleep on the couch. Maybe he would be too tired to wake when Buddy came noisily home. If he woke, Buddy might get him up and bring him downstairs and play with him, exciting him past sleep.

Ida sat down in front of the television, which had been going all this time, and read Lily's letter again.

‘…going to marry my one and only love.'

‘You could knock me down,' Ida said to Bernie.

‘Down.' Bernie rolled off the couch, to make her laugh.

In the six years since she had lived in the United States, Ida had become quite Americanized. She had always been quick, and she picked up the accent and the sayings like a monkey. She had copied ‘you could knock me down' from Buddy's father, during the time she had to stay with Henry Legge and take care of the children while the hospital tried to find Verna's baby under all the layers of fat.

Ida and Henry had enjoyed quite a good time, playing cribbage and chatting about nothing very much on old wicker chairs, when the evening sun slanted on to the porch. Billy had fed the dogs and cats and chickens for Ida, but Phyllis had been jealous and lazy, although when her mother came home with Laverne, she complained to Verna that Ida had made her work her guts out. She was also jealous of Laverne, who was an amazingly pretty baby with fluffy silver hair, delicate as a moth in Verna's vast embrace.

Ida had to stay on to help for a few days, until Buddy came roaring up the hill in his car to demand the return of his wife.

‘I was never so glad to see you.' Ida ran out to the car, carrying the demoted baby Vernon, who had been having a hard time, raising his arms at his mother and crying, ‘Up! Up!' when she was, holding Laverne.

‘That's my girl.' Buddy pulled her and Vernon into the car across his lap. He was so pleased, that she did not tell him she was glad because she was sick of Legge Manor.

‘Where's my fella?' Verna came shouting out on to the porch. ‘Come on in and say hullo to your new baby sister!'

Laverne was in the scarred old swinging crib in which they had all rocked as babies. Buddy was so tickled by her that he put his hand on Ida's thin waist and started pinching, trying to find a fingerful of fat.

They had agreed not to have any children yet, but when Verna bent her great bosoms over the crib like a ceiling caving in, to pick up the baby, and asked with a wink, ‘You gonna put one of these in there, Buddy boy?' he licked his soft lips and crowed, ‘You bet,' as if it would be totally his achievement if Ida had a baby.

When she did, the following year, Verna did not come to help her, thank God. Sis came. She took Ellen out of school and stayed at Watkins for a week when Ida came home from the hospital with Bernie. Two and a half years later, she came back to take care of him while Ida was going through the terrible experience that she thought would kill her, when Maggie was born. Although it was lambing season, Jeff let Sis stay on the base until Ida was back on her feet, and later, Buddy took Ida and the children to the farm for two summer weeks of quiet hills and animal sounds and smells and hay and walks in the green woods.

They picked vegetables and salads from the garden, and Sis taught Ida how to make wholemeal bread.

‘Wish you hadn't.' Ida smeared a crust with honey from Jeff's bees. ‘I'll never get rid of the birth fat. If I have any more kids, I'm going to end up like Verna.'

They laughed, since Buddy was out fishing with Jeff, and could not hear. Sis would rather laugh about her mother than hate her. Ida wished she could do the same about her own mother, but if she tried to think about Clara Lott as comic, the dour figure, with ‘nothing under her apron', as they said in Staple Street, would not shape into a clown, and the old bitterness and spite spilled over the picture and washed it out.

All Ida's clothes were too tight, except the maternity things, and she had sold those, sick of them, at the Women's Exchange. Sis, who was larger than her, gave her a loose top and one of her long cotton skirts. Ida wore it with bare legs and feet and took off her bra, like Sis. Would Buddy admire this new image? Although he wanted her to be well-dressed at the Enlisted Men's Club, it didn't make much difference with him how she looked. He either fell on her or not, according to the urges of his moods.

Although he had leave, he did not stay in New Hampshire the whole time, because he got bored in the country. There was country around Watkins Base, but they did not go out to it much, beyond driving to some place along the highway to eat.

Ida and Sis became quite close, more like sisters. They told each other things about their lives, and Ida felt good, because Sis admired her and said she had guts and was a survivor.

It was while she was at the farm, that Ida first began to notice that Maggie was slower to do things than Bernie had been.

‘Don't worry,' Sis said comfortably. ‘Bernie was quick, like you. She'll come to it when she's ready.'

‘You think I should take her back to the doctor?'

‘Not until her next check-up. What can a doctor do that you can't do, Ida honey, with your love and patience? Why, Ellen here wasn't turning over by herself or taking the strained food when the book said she should.' Sis shook her thick hair, which had gold as well as red in it in the summer. ‘So I threw away the book.'

Ida had written to Lily that there was no way she could come to Boston, so when Lily had got used to driving in America, she dropped Paul off at the shop and then drove his red car up through unknown northern Massachusetts.

Watkins Base sprawled over a large tract of countryside. When Lily had got a pass from the sentry and some directions, she drove down a long straight road with no sign of any planes or hangars, and then turned past barrack buildings and a school and two wooden churches and rows of hospital huts and a high gaol fence marked, ‘Confinement Facility'. It was a city in itself: filled car parks round the Commissary buildings, and beyond, dozens of streets and hundreds of houses: white wooden boxes with flat roofs and two front paths to each. Some had fences enclosing a space at the back. Some had toys and bikes lying about on rough grass that sloped up to a low scrubby woodland, penetrated with children's pathways, like rabbit tracks.

1009 Pershing Street had a few daffodils and a flowering bush braving the general landscape of coarse grass and scrub oaks, hanging on to their brown leaves as if they did not trust green buds to ripen. Ida's laundry was neatly pegged on a carousel washing-line, big things, little things, nappies.

Lily parked under the carport between this house and the next, and went to the back door. She was suddenly self-conscious, and did not want to be seen walking round to the front, if Ida was watching behind the muslin curtains to see how much she had changed.

A little boy opened the door. He had Buddy's baby face that Lily had seen in the photograph, but without the heavy brows. Bernie's eyebrows were a delicate line, arched over bright, wide-open eyes. He looked Lily up and down with intelligent interest, and called out, ‘She's here, Ma!'

Lily went into the kitchen. Through the opening into the living-room she saw Ida turn round from something she was doing at the table, and push back her chair with a cry of surprise, as if she had not seen Lily's red car and heard her at the back door.

They had not kissed goodbye at the airport years ago, but now they went towards each other with open arms, and embraced. Lily had to bend down. Ida was even shorter than she remembered, but there was more of her, much more.

‘You've put on weight, Eye.' She had to say something, since it was so obvious.

‘Aren't I disgusting?' Ida patted bits of herself. ‘It was haying the kids. You wait.'

‘I'm too big already.'

‘No. You've lost. You look great, Lil. Remember how fat you were when he saw you in your slip?'

‘Was I so awful? I thought I was alluring.'

‘Uh-
uh
.' Ida shook her head. The springy curls had gone. She had cut a wide fringe, and her straight no-colour hair was pulled back behind her ears and tied with a thin piece of ribbon. ‘But you sure were romantic.'

She smiled with an open mouth, and Lily saw that her crooked front teeth had been straightened. ‘They fixed my dyspepsia too, here at the base. It's amazing what they can do in this country. I can eat all kinds of fried stuff, and I don't upset Buddy by not being able to drink.'

Her face was not so frail and bony, although the skin round her pale eyes still looked bruised. Her rose lipstick had become
red. She carried her head with a bolder tilt above a new and considerable bosom. She looked well: coarser, but with a lot more confidence.

‘I say, Ida.' Lily hugged her again. ‘America has done wonders for you.'

‘I was a mess, wasn't I?'

‘Don't fish.'

They both had more confidence, but otherwise, it was just the same between them. Ida made coffee and brought out a swiss roll, because she thought Lily might be homesick, and although they had only been together those two strange days in Iceland, they felt they had been friends for a long time.

In Iceland, Lily had felt like the leader. Now Ida was the old hand. Her varying grades of british accent, from broad to refined, were gone. She sounded quite American, except for occasional throwbacks, like ‘Don't be duft'. She called her son ‘Bernie', sounding the r, and the funny little fat girl ‘Myaggie'.

‘It slays me, you sound so English,' she told Lily.