Ladder of Years Read Online Free PDF Page B

he’d first seen her when he came to dinner. It was true there had been such a dinner, on the evening of that same day. Eliza had cooked a roast and Linda had baked a cake (both advertising their housewifely skills), while Delia, the baby, still two months short of her eighteenth birthday and supposedly not even in the running, sat across from Sam and her father in the living room and sipped a grown-up glass of sherry. The sherry had tasted like liquefied raisins and flowed directly to that powerful new root of longing that branched deeper minute by minute. But Sam claimed that when he first walked in, all three girls had been seated on the couch. Like the king’s three daughters in a fairy tale, he said, they’d been lined up according to age, the oldest farthest left, and like the woodcutter’s honest son, he had chosen the youngest and prettiest, the shy little one on the right who didn’t think she stood a chance.
    Well, let him believe what he wanted. In any case, it had ended like a fairy tale.
    Except that real life continues past the end, and here they were with air-conditioning men destroying the attic, and the cat hiding under the bed, and Delia reading a paperback romance on the love seat in Sam’s waiting room—the house’s only refuge, since the office and the waiting room were air-conditioned already. Her head was propped on one arm of the love seat, and her feet, in fluffy pink slippers, rested on the other. Above her hung her father’s framed Norman Rockwell print of the kindly old doctor setting his stethoscope to the chest of a little girl’s doll. And behind the flimsy partition that rose not quite all the way to the ceiling, Sam was explaining Mrs. Harper’s elbow trouble. Her joints were wearing out, he said. There was a stupefied silence; even the electric saw fell silent. Then, “Oh, no!” Mrs. Harper gasped. “Oh, my! Oh, my heavens above! This comes as such a shock!”
    A shock? Mrs. Harper was ninety-two years old. What did she expect?Delia would have asked. But Sam said, gently, “Yes, well, I suppose …” and something else, which Delia couldn’t catch, for the saw just then started up again as if all at once recalling its assignment.
    She turned a page. The heroine was touring the hero’s vast estate, admiring its magnificent grounds and its tasteful “appointments,” whatever those might be. So many of these books had wealthy heroes, Delia had noticed. It didn’t matter about the women; sometimes they were rich and sometimes they were poor, but the men came complete with castles and a staff of devoted servants. Never again would the women they married need to give a thought to the grinding gears of daily life—the leaky basement, the faulty oven, the missing car keys. It sounded wonderful.
    “Delia, dear heart!” Mrs. Harper cried, staggering out of the office. She was a stylish, silk-clad skeleton of a woman with clawlike hands, which she stretched toward Delia beseechingly. “Your husband tells me my joints have just ground themselves down to nubbins!”
    “Now, now,” Sam protested behind her. “I didn’t say that exactly, Mrs. Harper.”
    Delia sat up guiltily and smoothed her skirt. She grew aware of the bunny ears on her slippers and the temptress on the cover of her book. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Harper,” she said. “Should I schedule another appointment?”
    “No, he says I have to go to a specialist. A man I don’t know from Adam!”
    “Get her Peterson’s phone number, would you, Dee?” Sam asked.
    She rose and went over to the desk, scuffing along in her slippers. (Mrs. Harper herself wore sharp-toed high heels, which she kept planted on the rug in a herringbone pattern to show off her trim ankles.) Delia flipped through Rolodex cards arranged not by name but by specialty—allergy, arthritis. … Nowadays, this office served most often as a sort of clearinghouse. Her father used to deliver babies and even performed the more elementary surgeries once