Free Fortunate Lives by Robb Forman Dew Page B

the air, he had been wrestling with
     the notion—as he transplanted the stringy little seedlings—thathe was at last getting a grip on something so much larger than his limited experience. Now he was abashed and infuriated.
     With one casual sentence his mother had made the need for
meaning
into a trivial thing that one merely cultivated on a sunny day.
    He had pinned his hopes on the belief that, if he was careful with his garden, the nature of things would be made perfectly
     clear to him. He had his own idea of how to go about discovering how things really were. He was looking for the plan of things
     to become apparent. It was unbearable to him to think that his desire for understanding was commonplace, and that his mother—in
     all about her that suddenly struck him as simplistic—was an insensitive fool.
    He was bereft as he looked at her with her sturdy smile and her graying-blond hair wisping free of the pins that held it back.
     How was it that he had never realized how oblivious she was to the consequences of what she said and did in the world? He
     turned his back on her and bent again to the tray of seedlings. He didn’t trust himself to say another word; in fact, he felt
     alarmingly suspended between sorrow and rage.
    For her part, as she made her way up the steps with her laden basket, Dinah was thinking how uncommunicative, how… cruel!…
     David was on this particular morning when she was going to so much trouble on his behalf and on Sarah’s, too. It shocked her
     when one of her children was unkind. And she was frightened that over the past year David’s newfound glibness and cynical
     humor—often amusing only by her sufferance, only if she agreed to be laughed
at
and not
with
—might be merely a veneer that covered some real dislike of her that she could not get at, that she could not fathom.
    Franklin M. Mount
    Dean of Freshmen
    Harvard College
    12 Truscott Street
    Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
    Dear Mr. Mount,
    Of course, I don’t know how old you are, or whether or not you have children yourself. If you do then you’ll understand that
     if you have a child of four who suddenly learns how to tie his or her shoelaces after weeks of frustrated attempts, then that
     child will be happy. (Although I do know that if you have a child of four, he or she probably has shoes with Velcro straps,
     but those were invented too late for my children. I’m simply trying to give you an example.) When your child is sick and running
     a fever you can give her Tylenol and spend time helping her connect a dot-to-dot picture, and she’ll be pleased and comforted.
    Well, I’m trying to explain that when I was the room mother for David’s first grade class, and the door decoration I made
     won the West Bradford Public School’s “Best Halloween Door Decoration Contest,” it seemed to me that I had done all I could
     do to be sure David was content with his life. And after each birthday party, and every Christmas morning, every time he made
     up with a friend or had some small triumph of one kind or another—after every one of those instances and many others, David
     was happy. And I also knew, just in general, that he lovedall the people in his life—his brother, his sister, his father, and me. But I may well have failed him, because it never crossed
     my mind, you see, to teach myself or to warn him that it might not always be so.

CHAPTER FOUR

MOONFLOWER
    S HE WAS TOO DISTRACTED by the problem of David’s strange mood to take much notice of the children’s prizes Sarah had left spread over newspapers
     on the table to dry. Dinah made an effort to turn her mind to lists, to chores ahead of her in the day, and she filled the
     sink with tepid water and added a handful of salt, swirling it until all the crystals dissolved. The loose-leaved lettuces—Winter
     Density, Boston, romaine, and escarole—fanned out gently when she immersed them, heads down, sloshing them plungerlike so
     the water reached