Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

couple of years before, she had written poetry, she had read the books Eileen was reading, she had seemed to have some vague idea of fashioning herself after her older sister. Not a chance.
    Which was foresighted of her, of course. Eileen had married Howie, the cranky journalist who had left her with a little girl to support. June had married Ewart and set about establishing their life. While Eileen’s life took shape any way at all, blown apart by crises, deflected by pleasures, June’s life was built, planned, lived deliberately, filled . There was a lack of drifting and moping. Occasions were made the most of.
    Was this another occasion?
    “This one Douglas helped me put in last week,” said Ewart, displaying to her a low bristly shrub. He used his son’s name exactly as June did, casually yet emphatically. Natural, unacknowledged delicacy and hesitancy made his emphasis less troubling than hers. He went on to talk about Japanese gardens. He told her that, at one time, in Japan, precise regulations had been laid down concerning the height of steppingstones. For the Emperor they were six inches high, and so on down to common folk and women who walked on stones of an inch and a half. He was putting in water.
    “The sound of water in the Japanese garden is quite as important as the sight of it. It’s going to fall over here, you see. It will be like a miniature waterfall, bisected by this rock. Everything is to scale. That’s how you get the extraordinary effect. If you look at it and you’re not looking at anything else—well, after a while it begins to seem like a real waterfall, a real landscape.”
    He talked about the arrangements for bringing in this water, the system of underground pipes. He had always such detailed, minute knowledge about his current projects, such firm enthusiasm. He always seemed to know more than even somebody who had made such things his life’s work would need to know. Perhaps it was because he himself did not really have a life’s work, he did not need to earn his living.
    An occasion, why not? An occasion to display, to air, to test those values that we live by. Ewart and June did live by values, they would tell you so. Why not? thought Eileen, listening to the discourse on pipes, and, when that was exhausted, to a discourse on shrubs. She preferred, did she, to see the fact of a death set up whole and unavoidable, in front of everybody’s eyes? Without religion, that could not be done. That is, it could not be done. And suppose her daughter, suppose Margot? She had thought of that at once, as soon as she heard, relief and terror peculiarly alternating. It was as if Douglas, by attracting lightning, had given everyone else’s child a breath of safety, at the same time reminding that lightning was there. Margot, who might at any moment be getting into a leaky boat, an about-to-be-hijacked plane, a bus with faulty brakes, might be entering a building where bombs had been set by terrorists, Margot ran more risk than Douglas living at home. And yet.
    He had been killed in a car accident. The three other boys with him had not been much hurt.
    A chunky boy. On the plane, Eileen had tried to get a clear picture of him. His fair hair was worn long, held with a band at the back of his neck, like his mother’s. But he did not share the preoccupations of the long-haired of his own generation. Altered states of consciousness, transcendental perceptions, were no concern of his. He attached himself stubbornly to temporal, material, scientific interests, to moon-flights, sports (as a spectator), and even to the stock market. He was like his father in his dogged, perhaps passionate, amassing and treasuring and reciting of detail. He enjoyed explaining. He had few friends. He walked around the house with a reserved and dictatorial air, drinking diet Coke. Ewart and June had always filled the weekends, the holidays, with family activities. They owned a sailboat. They went mountain-climbing and cave-exploring. They skied and skated and recently they had bought ten-speed bicycles. Eileen supposed that Douglas took part in all this, he could hardly avoid it; but his stodgy figure, his sedentary style, raised doubts as to how heartfelt, how thoroughgoing, such participation might be. He had gone to the experimental school which depended so largely on his parents’ financial support. The freedom insisted on there, the efforts on behalf of creativity, might not have been congenial to him.