One Hundred Years of Marriage (21 page)

Read One Hundred Years of Marriage Online

Authors: Louise Farmer Smith

Tags: #Literary Fiction

“I was a little shocked when your father showed up,” he whispered.

“Sorry about that.”

“We had a good talk.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet.”

“No,” he said. “We connected at little.”

“What on Earth did he say?”

“He said he’d been lonely since Ernest left.”

“What! He and my little brother have
never
had one intimate moment together unless it was the day they took a canoe out of our upstairs. Ask Ernest.”

Josh shrugged. “He told me about the time you made a mud pie for him.”

“When was that?”

“He said Livvie was just an infant, so you were two or three. He said you wanted him to take a bite and he did.”

I would have argued, but Mother was waiting.

“Mother, this is Josh.”

She stepped forward to extend a trembling hand. “How do you do, Josh. We’re so glad you’re here.”

“Well, I figured it wouldn’t be much of a wedding without the groom.” We laughed.

“We’ve heard only the most wonderful things about you from Patricia.”

“Ah, well,” Josh replied, holding Mother’s hand, “time will straighten out all that.” And then they paused, holding hands—the orphan and the most selfless mother in the world. And I stopped breathing, sorry, so sorry I hadn’t told Mother more about him. Busy walling Oklahoma off from my Washington life, I hadn’t even thought about Mother and Josh becoming close.

I had talked a little about her to him. “She rose from the grave,” I’d said one wintry Sunday morning. The jazz brunch Josh played at the Club Mediterranean didn’t start till one, and Josh and I had been lying awake sleepily murmuring to each other on his Madras covered mattress half under the grand piano in his studio apartment. “Finally given permission by God, Mother went out, got a job, and prepared to divorce her husband, but then before she could go through with it, she felt God rescinded the permission. She’s amazingly strong, but she uses that strength to hold herself in.”

Josh had risen up on his elbow and stared down at me. “You’ve got to give me the details on this, otherwise I won’t know your family.”

But I didn’t want him to know us that well.

* * *

My matron-of-honor, Olivia, skipped the rehearsal as well. I hadn’t seen her since her wedding last summer. What a mess that was! I had rushed home from Washington, and we all hauled ourselves out to this cow pasture in the August heat. The stench. The flies. The groom, a jerk with no identifiable politics beyond growing a filthy beard, made no effort to be gracious to our family or worse, tender toward the bride. My first thought was that she must be pregnant, but that was a year ago, and she was only three months along now.

Actually I was glad she was skipping my rehearsal tonight. Such blatant disregard for me, to say nothing of Mother, increased her thoughtlessness, and made it easier for me not to long for her to be here. I had been closer to her even than to Mother. After the War, when we were five and three, when Mother seemed unable to prevent The General from treating us like soldiers, I still had little Livvie. We were alone in the same boat when The General was home between the WW II and Korea.

* * *

We didn’t really have a rehearsal dinner because Joshua didn’t have any parents to host it, and Grandma Vic—one of the chief recipients of this wedding—was too frail to attend. Instead of a banquet with place cards and speeches, the family and the grooms’ men and the bridesmaids went to supper at the local steak house. But even this modest attempt to bond the wedding party came to nothing. Like a pinball, every attempt at conversation ricocheted off glares from The General or helpless gasps from Mother. A family with a number of things they definitely weren’t going to talk about—anything to do with Vietnam or politics or civil rights, the absence of a blood relative who had snubbed us, or the hurt feelings of her parents—we couldn’t seem to bring up anything else. We were seated, fed, and out the door in fifty minutes—just as efficient as it could be short of having us file down a cafeteria line, eat standing up and throw away our plates—which I’d always imagined would be my father’s idea of how to feed guests.

But he had paid for everything—this dinner, the flowers, the reception—without my ever seeing him do it. And I needed to thank him, this man I didn’t like. That woman whose hands he held that day on Kemper Street had liked him and must have looked up to him. Why wouldn’t he go to her or others like her, women who would be awed by his being the city engineer, an army officer, a man to whom the city provided a late model car, a man who could explain electricity.

While everyone stood in the hot wind in front of the restaurant saying what a lovely time they’d had, Josh and I snuck behind the air-conditioning compressor, a spot not ideal due to a floodlight overhead. In our first moment alone Josh touched me under both ears with the tips of his forefingers then traced the edge of my jaw lifting my chin and brushing my lips with his. Then he cupped my cheeks in his palms and we kissed, deeply, and my eyes closed imagining ourselves back in Washington, alone. “Queen of my heart,” he breathed. I looked into his beautiful dark eyes, as the wind whipped my flowered skirt against my legs.

“I wanted to tell you before tomorrow,” he said, “I quit the Federation.”

I wasn’t expecting this and took a breath before saying, “You did?”

“Yeah, I gave notice. By October I’ll be a free man. It was the right time. The Jazz Festival is in October, and it’ll make a great honeymoon for us.”

“October? The Senate will be marking up the Defense bill right then. I couldn’t take off.” The June bugs knocked into the lamp above us and fell heavily into the parking lot.

“Ah.” He shrugged. “My peace warrior.” His gaze was soft, admiring, then he glanced in the direction of the farewells and slamming car doors. “Well, anyway, as soon as I get back from the Festival, I’ll get another job. You know that.”

“Of course, I know that, Josh.” I looked down. The whirling wind pressed the flowered skirt against my legs and swept the dazed June bugs toward the curb.

“It won’t be a problem. I’ve got good recommendations. Maybe I’ll find an environmental group that isn’t run by Prussians.”

“You’re an artist, sweetheart. It may take awhile.”

“But there’s always the job at the club. Moh says I’ve got a lifelong gig, right?”

“Sure.”

“So, you’re not worried or anything?”

“No, Josh, no. Of course not. You’ll get another job when you get back from the Festival, an event you shouldn’t miss anyway. I’m just glad you’ll be free to go for the whole thing this time. Then, when you get back—”

“You are something, Patty, the best in the world.”

“And the folks at the new job, whatever it is, will be very lucky to get such a smart guy.” We kissed again, and I held him and pressed the blue flowers against him.

Back home I rushed upstairs, peeled off my dress and slipped out of my shoes. Sandy, slumped down on the other bed, looked beat. “Pa-at,” she wailed, trying on an Oklahoma twang.

“Wha-at?”

“Are we ever going to have a fucking drink?”

I giggled. “I forgot.” I pulled my dress back on.

“Forgot?”

“I mean I just kept telling myself I couldn’t because I was home. Come on. Let’s go to Smokey’s and retox.”

As we tip-toed past the front bedroom, Mother’s voice came out of the darkness. “Pat? It’s past 11:00, honey. You’re going out? That’s fine. Of course. On your way back could you pick up some 2%? If it’s easy.”

Sandy and I leaned on the bar at Smokey’s and each silently downed a mojito. We had almost finished before Sandy asked, “So what’s next?”

“A wedding. Two o’clock tomorrow.”

She sighed. “The nuptials, themselves, huh?”

“Eternal vows.”

“Great.” She sounded exhausted, and I knew I’d misused her, pushing her out in front of me, an ill-dressed alter ego. See this, I was saying to the Oklahomans, here is my sole intimate and she is not one of you. Unfortunately my buffer was showing wear and tear.

“Sorry,” I said.

“So why are you doing this? Putting yourself through an exhaustive ritual you don’t even believe in?”

I took a long drink and stared into that murky mirror that’s always behind a bar, so you can keep an eye on yourself. I swiveled to face my best friend. “Sandy, my mother has sacrificed her whole life for all of us. I’m doing this for her. She’s thrilled. She told me how wonderful it was for Daddy to be able to invite all the civic leaders and his friends in Kiwanis to a real wedding. To say nothing of his snooty relatives.”

“I see. So you’re doing it for her and she’s doing it for him. Why are you both so nice to him?”

“He needs to feel in charge. I have to pick my shots.”

“You passed on the one where he ran over to the motel ahead of you.”

I didn’t want to think about that scene. “Sandy, we’ll live through this.”

“He’s pulled all of you off track. He’s a raging compulsive personality.”

“All the more reason to be kind.”

Sandy lit another cigarette and blew the smoke above our heads. She swung her bar stool around a few times then rested her arms on the bar. “You know, Pat? You sound depressed. Are things okay with you and Josh?”

“Oh yeah. We’ve already worked through all our issues.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the emotional, cultural, psychological stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for one thing, we’ve decided we don’t need to reproduce ourselves. The world doesn’t need more consumers, more white westerners who’ll use up more of the world’s precious resources in one year of their privileged lives than a whole third world village will in a generation.”

“Well, thank you for the policy statement.”

“Sandy! Population is going to be the biggest issue of our century. Besides, Josh isn’t really settled in what he wants to do, besides music, a day job.

“He works at the Wildlife Federation, doesn’t he?”

“He’s given notice.”

“When did he do that?”

“Yesterday or the day before.”

“He quit his job and then flew out here to get married?”

“Look, Sandy,” I swung around to face her. “He wasn’t happy there. He shouldn’t be doing anything but playing the piano. I love the fact that he isn’t a hard charging, go-getter like my father, that he doesn’t have to be busy, busy, busy all the time, working, working even when there isn’t any work that needs doing, just working because work is all he has. The talks Josh and I have—My parents never talked, not in a deep searching way. Josh and I want to keep our intimate relationship just as it is, not get whipped up into being mommy and daddy, not falling into stereotyped roles, his marching out the door to slave away nine to five.”

“But it’s okay if you keep working?”

“You know what I mean.”

Sandy half laughed and signaled the waiter for another drink. “Boy, good thing you’ve worked through all your issues.”

“What do you care whether or not we have children?”

“Your resistance to becoming a parent might be a little over-determined, don’t you think?”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, there’s your mother, and then there’s your father.”

“I just want to get this over and go home. Okay, Sandy?”

“Sure. It’s too late to unfuck your life now,” she said.

“Go to hell.” I whispered.

We sat at the bar without talking. Finally Sandy took a long swig from her glass. “Pat, Josh is probably the right guy for you. I’m crazy about him myself. But when we got off that plane, you turned into a zombie.”

Sandy might be right about some of this, but I was feeling disoriented, and I sure didn’t need her to stir my anxiety further. All families had problems. We were doing all right. Mother had worked her way out of depression with the help of her psychiatrist. Ernest had grown into a splendid man of character and good humor. Olivia had chosen a life for herself, and I had found a mate. Only The General had shrunk. I leaned my head in my hands. I should let Sandy drive.

* * *

“Grandma Vic is here, ready to go,” Ernest said in the morning when I emerged from the bathroom.

I looked at my watch. “It’s only ten o’clock.”

“Mom said your flying in at the last minute made Grandma so nervous, she’s been running three to four hours ahead all week. She’s sitting in the living room.”

“Do you think she’s bothered by the Jewish thing?” I asked.

“No more than if you were intermarrying with an Episcopalian, which is to say, yes, she thinks it’s a shame you couldn’t find a nice Methodist boy to marry. She’s ninety-six years old, Patty. Mom, on the other hand, is delighted with the Jewish thing—our own bona fide link to the champion underdogs.”

I looked at my brother, trying to see his little boy face behind the beard and glasses. “Do you remember the day we took the canoe out of the attic?”

“Sure.” A slow grin formed inside his beard. “Happiest day of my childhood.”

I smiled back. “I better go say good morning.”

In the soft light through the sheers at the bay window my Grandmother Victoria, dressed for the wedding, looked like a faded painting. She had taken off her lace gloves and clutched them on the head of her cane. I moved to her side and kissed her cheek.

“You were my best student,” she whispered so none of the generations of other watercolor students could hear her praise me. “When you were a very little girl you had a flare with the brush, a freedom. During the war we had such fun. But then you tightened up, and I couldn’t get you to paint the way you had when you were four and five. ” She always told it the same way. I inhaled the fragrance of her Madame DuBarry face powder. She squeezed my hand, but kept her eyes to the floor. Her chest rose and fell uncertainly.

“How’s your angina?” I asked.

She didn’t answer nor did she look up. Suddenly, I knew. It was my Mexican wedding dress. Late yesterday afternoon before the rehearsal, she’d walked the three doors down the block from her little house to stare at my selection— ruffles of gauzy cotton alternating with wide lace. I stepped up onto the tattered embroidered footstool that had belonged to Grandma Vic’s own mother in North Carolina. I held the dress in front of my jeans to display it.

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