Authors: Nancy Thayer
Gary had drawn himself up at these words, offended. You little shit, he wanted to say. Instead he said, “If you’re worried about having to stay around to take care of your mother, you can be relieved. I intend to marry your mother as soon as my divorce from Pam comes through. This is private information, however. I don’t want it gossiped about.”
Johnny, blowing his nose in a wheat-colored linen handkerchief, had looked sideways at Gary; he seemed to leer. “Everyone’s been busy while I’ve been gone,” he
said.
“Your mother still needs your support,” Gary said. “I hope you won’t take that sarcastic tone with her.” He started up the car and drove away from the rec center.
“Don’t worry,” Johnny said, and sagged against the car door, resting his head on the window frame. “I love my mother. I’ll be as good as I can be. I can see her in a different way than I did before, but I still love her.”
Now they were all together in this church. Johnny sat on one side of his mother, and Cynthia on the other: the perfect children framing the perfect mother. Thank God the kids were almost grown and the insurance money would cover Cynthia’s college tuition for the next two years, Gary thought. Pam was not being nasty about the divorce—and she easily could be, she could sue Judy as a co-respondent and cause a scandal—but the price of her compliance was high. She wanted a lot of alimony, and a lot of child support, and the house as well. It was a good thing Judy owned her house clear and free now. It was a good house. Gary had always liked it. He could foresee how the next six months to a year would be difficult, as the town sorted out its feelings about this new separation and entanglement. He and Judy would have a private wedding; they would live quietly for the first few months. Then, he knew, invitations would begin to come, and before long, he would be sitting at one end of the table in Judy’s elegant dining room, sharing dinner with a dozen good friends, eating Judy’s delicious food, and after a while their marriage would seem as natural and acceptable as the one that was taking place right now.
“The church looks beautiful, doesn’t it, Mom?” Cynthia Bennett asked.
“Actually, darling, I think it looks rather tacky,” Judy replied. “All these homegrown flowers strewn about. It’s overdone. Almost cheap.”
“Oh,
Mother
,” Cynthia whispered, and with as much petulance as she dared display in such a public place, she drew herself up and looked away from her mother.
Cynthia’s jealous, Judy thought. She could understand that. She could remember a wedding that had taken place during her high school days and which had filled her with envy for that one day. Sonja Wallace had gotten married in the middle of her senior year, and all the girls had admired her so, and envied her wedding showers, lacy trousseau, and early admission into adulthood. But Sonja had gotten married because she was pregnant, and she hadn’t been able to go on to college like everyone else.
In fact, after the wedding no one had seen Sonja or thought very much about her
at all. But the
wedding:
well, it was an event, wasn’t it, and Judy had envied Sonja that one day and could understand Cynthia’s envy now. Cynthia and Mandy were the same age, and here Mandy was, Queen for a Day, marrying a boy who, in his own way, was almost as handsome as Johnny.
But he was so young, Michael Taylor, a year younger than Mandy, just
eighteen
—oh, they were fools, the parents, letting these children marry at this age. It was all so
inappropriate
. She didn’t really approve. But when the wedding invitation had arrived, she had known she must go. If she didn’t, people would think it was that she was too embarrassed and resentful because Johnny’s wedding had fallen through. No, she had to make a public showing, after all these months of crisis. She had to go with her head held high, and with her two children at her side, presenting a united front. To do anything else would be to admit failure, and she would not do that, for she could not see how she had failed.
She had
not
failed, her psychiatrist told her. She had
not
failed, Gary told her. Yet in these past months the suggestion that she had in some way failed rang through her daily thoughts like the refrain of some catchy tune that her mind wouldn’t stop replaying. How could she not have failed: her husband had embezzled money, then committed suicide, if Gary were to be believed, and her perfect son, her darling, had run off with that woman and left Judy to face the Staffords and the town alone. She
must
have failed to have the two men in her life treat her in such a way—and yet, what was it she had done? How exactly had she failed? What was it she should have done differently?
Now, for example, she could, with only a slight tilt of her head, study her daughter Cynthia, who sat next to her in the pew, gazing with foolish rapture at all the flowers. Judy had given birth to this girl, and had done everything in her power to help her grow into a lovely woman, yet here she sat, a lump, overweight, with bad skin and an unbecoming hairstyle, if you could call the simple hanging down of hair around one’s face a style. When Judy questioned Cynthia about her appearance, her daughter said that she was too busy with her studies to spend much time on her looks. “Oh, sweetie, even in this liberated age, a woman’s looks are at least as important as her mind,” Judy had said to Cynthia, gently attempting to win her over. But Cynthia had only turned away. She was always turning away. Yet she came home dutifully enough, for Ron’s funeral, for the various vacations, and although she could never be as lovely as Mandy, who had such undeserved beauty, she still was retrievable if she would only
try
, Judy thought. If she
would only lose weight, have her hair fixed in a feather cut, wear contact lenses instead of those dreadful thick glasses which hid her pretty eyes … It made Judy twitch with impatience to see her daughter; she looked like such a grind. It really was not necessary. Was it Judy’s fault?
This was the question foremost in her mind: was her daughter’s almost aggressive unattractiveness somehow a sign of failure on her own part? Judy could not see how it could be. She had devoted her life to making her home and family enviably attractive. She had surely taught her daughter how to face the world. And yet look at her, and at Johnny, who had run away, and at Ron.
Perhaps, Judy had almost concluded, it was simply that the number of people in the world who were willing to put forth the effort to live life decently was exceptionally limited, and perhaps one was just born with this strength of character, like a chromosome, or one was not, and no amount of parental guidance could change things. Oh, she didn’t really know, and the thinking made her tired, and she didn’t want to be sitting here at this wedding now, where people could see her and Cynthia and pass judgment on them. And if anyone dared to express any more
pity
toward her—well, the thought nearly made her weep.
It had taken her a long time to come to the realization of Ron’s death. So much cruel news had come at once that bitter day last October that for weeks her main sensation had been one of unreality. It really was bizarre that one night she would go to bed the mother of a perfect son, the wife of a perfect man, and wake up the next day deserted by one and widowed and shamed by the other. She had called her psychiatrist in Southmark immediately. When she said, “I do not think I can bear this,” he had prescribed the necessary drugs that kept her from feeling anything much at all for many days.
All the doctors she went to, her internist, her gynecologist, were sympathetic, and now she had a cache of wonder drugs that would see her through the next ten years. Getting through the funeral had been easy, even in its own way pleasurable, for she had an instinct for such occasions. She remembered Jackie Kennedy holding her head high behind her black veil, walking all that way behind a riderless horse, and she held that image of proud widowhood in her mind as a model. At Ron’s funeral she had held her head high and received condolences with dignity and dry eyes. The pills helped her, of course. She probably could not have cried if she had wanted to. She was so anesthetized
that at certain points during the day the grief of other people, the rush of tears, the contorted faces, seemed puzzling to her, even rather absurd, and sometimes embarrassing—so much emotion! She found herself smiling in response. That was the effect of the drugs, but still the funeral had been the easiest thing, because it was acceptable and universal. It would happen to everyone in this town at one time or another. That Ron had died in a car accident when he was still so young was tragic, but it was not curious; it did not reflect upon her.
Johnny’s leaving did. This she found harder to bear than Ron’s death. It had been the cruelest thing a person had ever done to her, and she would never forgive him. All that rainy October day while she and the town were absorbing the news of Ron’s death, Gary and others were making calls, trying to trace Johnny. At three o’clock in the afternoon, they had a phone call from a man named Lewis Pinter, who was a professor of English at the college in Londonton. He was not a close friend of the Bennetts, but he had lived in Londonton for years and attended the First Congregational Church of Londonton. That afternoon he had returned from a conference in Baltimore, and while he was at the Hartford airport, he had seen Johnny and Liza at the American Airlines ticket counter. He hadn’t spoken to them—he had been in a hurry to get home, and they had been too occupied with each other to notice him—but he was sure it was they.
Judy had been relieved: Johnny was alive. She had also been sickened, because he had run off with Liza Howard. Gary had driven over to tell her what he had heard, and Judy had just sat in her chair in her kitchen, looking at him. “I can’t think of a thing to say,” she said.
“At least he’s alive,” Gary replied. “He’s a fool, but he’s alive.” Then he had asked Judy if he could have access to Ron’s study; he wanted to check Ron’s private papers.
“Surely we don’t have to go through all these things now,” Judy said.
“I’m afraid we do,” Gary replied. “There’s a reason for it—there’s a problem, Judy. I think I can help you, I think I can figure it out, but I need to see Ron’s private papers. I am his lawyer, you know. Please trust me.”
She had trusted him. She had taken Gary into Ron’s study and sat in a wing chair silently, her hands folded in her lap for—how long?—hours, while Gary went through Ron’s papers. Finally he had turned and explained it all to her, all that had happened last night, all that he had discovered today. Ron had embezzled one hundred thousand dollars
from the rec center trust fund. Gary had already gone over the records and accounts in Ron’s office, and there was no money in any of the accounts there. It was as clear as day what had happened: Ron had taken the money, and when found out, he had chosen this way to keep his name from scandal, to pay the committee back, and to still in some way provide for his family.
Finally Judy had risen and turned from her chair slowly, searching. She was so stunned by all the horrors of the day that she was not even certain where the door leading from the study was; she was nearly blinded. She had gone upstairs to her bathroom and taken another pill.
Day after day Gary had been there, spending hours in Ron’s study, sorting through papers, calling Judy in the evening to tell her what queries had been sent around to locate Johnny, and sometimes just coming out to have a drink, to sit with her, to be sure she was all right. How wonderful he had been, and how different from Pam. Judy hated it when Pam came out with Gary, because then the atmosphere changed entirely.
“Look,” Pam would say, walking across the room and gesturing as she spoke so that her coffee sloshed from the cup onto the saucer, “you’ve got to make some plans. It’s been three weeks now and I don’t think you’ve gone out of the house. You can’t just
sit
here for the rest of your life. The church auxiliary is planning its Christmas bazaar now, and we need committee heads desperately, and the League of Women Voters is—”
“Pam,” Judy said firmly, “I don’t want to help anyone. I don’t want to see anyone in this town. I can’t bear all their drippy, smarmy pity.”
“Oh!” Pam said then, only slightly daunted. “Well, then, why not take a trip? It would do you good to get away from here. There’s certainly no reason for you to stay. Cynthia’s off at college, and who knows when Johnny’s going to show up again. Surely you’ve always wanted to travel somewhere, off to visit old friends or to see Europe …”
“I don’t want to travel. I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to stay here and have my privacy,” Judy said.
“But can’t you see that’s bad for you?” Pam said. “It’s not healthy to spend all your time grieving.”
But Judy was not spending all her time grieving. She did not mind that others, looking on, thought that was the activity of her life; it was the proper thing for a woman in her position to do. But long ago—long ago, when she was a teenager, losing an entire way of life because of her parents’ foolishness—she had learned absolutely the futility of
grief. It was a useless emotion, accomplishing nothing, changing nothing. She knew her life had been changed completely; she did not want it to be so, but there was nothing she could do to make it otherwise. Yet she did not see that she should have to give up everything, her entire style of living, and she refused to be drawn into the peppy circle of valiant widowed and divorced women who began to cluster around her in the weeks that followed Ron’s death. How she despised those women with their mawkish cheer, inviting her to movies, bridge parties, dinner parties, tea parties; how she hated them for their attempts to include her in their pathetic little group. She would not join them, she would not take up macramé or aerobic dancing or charity or table tennis. She would not join this disenfranchised, second-class, manless world. She would not wear her inferiority like some bright badge. She would rather die. She would rather sit in her house, where she remained inviolate and superior. She would rather wait.