Blessings Read Online Free PDF Page A

she dozed off in the wing chair next to the fireplace in the living room, when Bertram’s seemed more real than the news in the paper she’d read that morning. The long linoleum hallways, the smell of starch in their uniform blouses, Miss Bertram’s lace-up shoes black against the red Turkish carpet in the head’s office when a girl was called in for insolence or bad temper or lack of charity or insufficient effort.
    The sins of the past seemed so venial in light of what she now read each morning in the Times that Nadine fetched from the newsstand in Mount Mason, stories about girls who had sex for money and got sick and died because of it, who killed their friends and their parents and themselves. There had not been truly bad girls at Bertram’s, or at least not bad in ways that mattered or were openly discussed. There was in each class one girl who was clever and slightly profane and who had what Miss Bertram referred to as “errant ways.” It was always understood among them that these girls would come to a bad end, but Lydia Blessing had noticed that it somehow always happened that those girls did very well for themselves. The girl with the errant ways in Lydia’s class, Priscilla North, had become an ambassador to one of the smaller European countries after her husband died, and was often asked back to the school to talk about the new American woman.
    Lydia Blessing had become outspoken only as she’d grown older, coming late to the realization that saying what she truly thought provided a certain satisfaction and had no material effect on how people treated her. As a girl she had been hugely obedient, especially when compared to her brother, Sunny. If she slammed the door of the house on East Seventy-seventh Street, she was sentenced to quiet reading in the library for half an hour. If shepushed one of the visiting children down on the lawn tennis court beside the boathouse, she was forbidden bathing in the pond for the rest of the day. She wore white all summer long at the country house, dresses, never pants or shorts. Sunny wore shorts, and when he was older, white twill pants that yellowed as they were laundered, just as the face of her watch had.
    Sunny was disobedient not so much in deed as in word. He once told one of their mother’s friends that he had never seen a dress that so closely matched the upholstery. He had already left the room before the two women realized what a clever insult it had been, so clever that neither said a word to the other, although Sunny was whipped by his father and the woman never again came to the Blessing home. It had been especially insulting given Mrs. Blessing’s taste in upholstery, which ran to dark brocades from the fabric business left to her by her father.
    Sumner was his real name, but Lydia called him Sunny when she was a baby, and then everyone else did, too. The gardeners had called him Master Blessing, and her Miss Lydia. There had been three gardeners when she was a child: one for the trees and shrubs, one for the perennial borders, and the last, the youngest, for the vegetables. Foster had overseen them all. The first Foster, not the second one.
    She sipped her coffee and looked from the window across the fields at the figure sitting hunched astride the riding mower. This new man must be made to sit up correctly. Mrs. Blessing thought of her own back as still straight. The faint hump was behind her, and so she did not notice it. She insisted her white blouses did not fit as they once had because tailoring, like everything else, had gone down in quality.
    “I think he’s settling in, this new man,” she said. “Except for the coffee.”
    “Been in jail,” said Nadine.
    “So was Thomas More,” Mrs. Blessing replied. She had set her lawyer to work, to find out if this was true and how serious the offense had been.
    “Kill everyone with knives.”
    “Oh, for goodness sake, Nadine. You can tell by looking at him that he’s not about to kill anyone.