Nobody's Fool

developing strategies for coping with Sully in the unlikely event that he should become an issue, and each time he turned up at her door, usually at her foolish husband Ralph’s instigation, with plans to take Peter somewhere, Vera was terrified that he would suddenly love the boy. What would she do then? What
could
she do?
    It was this irrational concern that had so often led Vera’s judgment to falter. Recalling how homesick she’d been in college at Oneonta, how out of place she had felt, how hard it had been to focus on her studies, she decided to spare Peter North Bath’s suspect high school by sending him to an all-boy prep school in New Hampshire. The decision had been an agonizing one because she’d known that even as the strategy protected Peter from his father, it also separated the boy from herself. In the end she decided the risk was worth it, telling herself that the better educated and more refined he became, the less appealing he would be to his father, the less likely Sully would be to come to his senses and love his own son.
    Some would call it justice, she supposed, the way things had turned out—file under “Be careful what you wish for.” As she had hoped, Sully showed even less interest in their son after he went away to prep school. It occurred to Vera too late that this would have happened in any case. The responsibility and burden of affection had always weighed heavily on her ex-husband. Given half a chance, he gravitated naturally to the easy camaraderie of the lunchroom, the barroom, the company of men, of another man’s wife. By sending her son away, Vera had prevented something that did not need preventing, and at a cost to herself. Her attempts to protect Peter, her devotion to him, had once again, just as it had with her father, set into motion the law of unintended consequences, along with the cruel laws of irony and paradox. For Peter, in becoming a son to be proud of—an educator like her father, a college professor at home in the very environment that had intimidated Vera—had learned to lose his interest in and affection for her, coolly dismissing the books she recommended to him, smiling his ironic smile at her political views as if to suggest that she was incapable of any opinion or observation that wasn’t entirely typical or predictable. There was so much she would have liked to tell him, now that they were both adults, and he wasn’t interested in any of it. He seemed more pleased to spend time with Ralph, her husband, who had no views at all, than with herself. That her son remained capable of affection but could spare so little for herself was the crudest twist of all.
    Today, at their Thanksgiving dinner together, Vera had seen more clearly than ever before what a terrible thing love was, or at least the kindof love that had rooted most deeply in her own anxious heart. Knowing how difficult it would be, she had planned the day carefully. Yesterday she’d baked the pies and then had risen early this morning to stuff the turkey and prepare her father’s favorite squash. Then, midmorning, she’d driven to Schuyler Springs with Ralph to gather Robert Halsey from the dreadful veterans’ home, not an easy task because they had to transport not only the fragile man but also his breathing apparatus—the portable oxygen tank and mask—which they could not just put in the trunk, since her father might need it on the drive back to Bath.
    For a while it had seemed the day would work. Back on Silver Street they’d been able to get her father, who was having one of his better days breathing and required the oxygen only sporadically, installed in the living room. Peter, who had always been fond of his grandfather, had drawn up a chair, and the two had swapped teaching stories, Peter suppressing for once his cynicism, along with, at Vera’s insistence, the fact that he’d been denied tenure at the university. Ralph had turned the football game low, and horsey Charlotte had managed to keep the horrid little Wacker, a truly monstrous child, from tormenting his brother and everyone else. Vera had stayed in the warm kitchen, humming over the final dinner preparations and allowing herself to become intoxicated by the smells and sounds of food and family and terrible, terrible love and longing. If she felt a fear, it was the distant one that Sully might show up and spoil everything, since Peter had informed