“Why’d you do that? I wanted to lie on the grass, goddammit!”
“Oh, Dick, what a nice idea. Let’s.” She calculated how difficult it would be to get him down and up again. Very.
“Too late. You ruined it.” He pulled his arm away from her and brushed at one sleeve, then the other, as if he had fallen into the dirt.
“I’m sorry. I do want to lie on the grass, it’s a brilliant idea.” The cold earth under her cheek, the blades pressed into her skin, the scent of sun in the crook of her arm—how many hours of her life had she spent lying on the grass? With Agnes, mainly. So many deep conversations had passed between as they lay on their stomachs crushing grass that pressed crosshatched tattoos into their arms and legs. Dick never wanted to do anything like that with her.
“Never mind.” He crossed his arms and brooded.
“I really do want to, I just wasn’t prepared.”
“It’s important to be spontaneous!”
She held her tongue. He’d say anything in irritation, not meaning it. She could talk herself into ignoring the words, but a harsh tone abraded her for days afterward. She had to wait him out now. His annoyance with her would soon give way to his greater desire to explain his idea, it always did. In the meantime she looked at her borders, the flowers coming up right on schedule, the earth still dark from a yearly spading in of compost. She’d drop a note to Robert in the morning, asking him how her beds looked at Meadowlea. Did he have any ideas for something new?
It was time to pick the last daffodils, before they began to dry up. She counted them from afar, nine, twelve, seventeen? Some hid shyly behind others. Some leaned. She pushed her glasses up her nose, but rather than clarifying her view of the flower bed, her vision grew misty, as if a fog had rolled in. Then a shift, this world to another. She knew what was about to happen. The state was familiar but beyond her control. In spite of great efforts over the years she couldn’t willfully produce it. She had a few moments’ warning, that was all, like the pulsing auras she used to feel before migraines pressed her skull in a vise. She slowed, and set aside an acquisitive urge for the experience to come, waiting patiently instead, breathing restraint into the lope of her pulse. Then Lydia appeared.
Polly checked the impulse to raise her hand. No point waving to a ghost, and Dick would see. Lydia, Lydia. Favorite child. A preference she wasn’t meant to have, and didn’t among the boys—well, Theo—but Lydia was different in kind. Favorite daughter—she could think that without guilt. She looked at her across the lawn, hungry for details. She wore her blue-and-white Liberty print dress, just what Polly would have chosen for a spring afternoon. She gathered a bouquet of ghostly daffodils, shades of the living blooms in the ground, and smiled when the syrup from their stems ran down her arms. Then she swung her eyes around to find Polly, who nodded and smiled back.
Polly glanced at Dick. Had he noticed she’d slipped off for a moment? She half-wished that he’d see the ghost, too, so they could share Lydia again. But Dick was looking up at the distant sky, ruminating, his chin jutted out. She glanced back, but Lydia had vanished.
“I have an idea, Polly, a marvelous idea.”
She breathed the lilac scent. Until next time.
“Are you paying attention?” he bellowed.
“Of course. I’m very curious.” She ached, as she always did, after the ghost disappeared. Nonsensical as it was, she couldn’t fully invest in the unquestionable truth that it wasn’t real. Her yearning reified it.
Dick began to rove again. She kept pace by walking and trotting. It appeared he was going to tour the perimeter of the property.
“I’ve spent the last year looking at all my work and organizing it for publication. You know that.” She nodded. “As it turns out I’ve done a lot of work in my lifetime, most of it better than I remembered. Isn’t it too bad that people with the very kind of minds that advance civilization are often so occupied with their work that they don’t see what they’ve done? They forget they are exceptional. I forget! But I am always aware of my effort.”
“If only everyone knew how hard you work!”
“They will, soon. After making this assessment, I can safely say I believe, judging by the quality of my work—my thinking!—that I deserve more recognition than I got—”
He glanced at her for a smidge of it, a solicitation for which she was ready with a generous donation. She arranged her face into a reflection of pure admiration. Bolstered, he moved on.
“—but I got a decent amount. I was known in the best circles. People respected me, and still do, I think.”
He often spoke to her as if she hadn’t been there for every minute of it, didn’t know the entire cast, hadn’t read every word.
“Yes, they did and they do,” she agreed.
His expression brightened but his eyebrows were quizzical. He approved the message but withheld credit from the messenger. “They did and they do. But…”—his index finger bobbed instructively—“my real work, my illumination of pacifism—I wrote the definitive work on the subject! Where is my credit for that?”
“Oh, but that was just bad timing,” she said as she had a thousand times. It was their story, a tenet of their marriage, that World War II had ruined Dick’s career.
“Yes, it was. But now I see that I got scared off too easily, Polly! I should have stuck to my guns.” He raised his eyebrows at his joke, then went on. “I realize now there is no last word on pacifism. I backed off without a fight. I should have been tougher. I just didn’t expect”—he stopped, and she nearly bammed into him—“Hitler,” he finished, speaking the name as if it belonged to a relative with whom he’d had an irreparable falling-out.
“You couldn’t have, dear,” she said.
“Though I could blame Churchill—”
Here he was in danger of going off on a tangent about the true causes of World War II, a lecture that could keep them out until dark fell.
“Churchill has a lot to answer for,” Polly said, nipping the diatribe. “I’m just so curious about your new idea.”
“Yes. Good.” He got into a position to face her directly. He put his hands on her shoulders.
“Polly, I have decided to revise A Pacifist’s Primer. I’ll bring it up to date, and I’ll take on the Hitler question. I have to. No one else is in as good a position to do it as I am. My mind is as sharp as ever, and I’ll have time now. I’ll revise the book, add research about what others have said on the subject since my original edition, and I’ll add a foreword, describing what happened to the book the first time around. Then—drumroll, please!—I’ll make an argument for pacifism even in the face of Hitler.”
She listened with an alert expression, nodding encouragingly, but behind the mask she drooped with disappointment. There went her time with Dick. Damn Hitler and Churchill! If only Dick had gotten the glory he sought sixty years ago, he might care to be idle now. She was cold, and hungry. She hadn’t eaten much lunch, just half a BLT. It was too late to cook the chicken. “It’s a great idea.”