Authors: James Jones
They turned back to the desk, both of them, suddenly close in their very apartness, closer by far, Dawn thought suddenly, than they had ever been before—and went over for a last time the list of notes Agnes had made. Of the six bridesmaids, all from Dawn’s class in high school, only one had stayed in Parkman to attend Parkman College. Agnes would call them all for her, and Dawn herself would write them from school. The maid of honor would be Shotridge’s older sister, Susan, a senior at Illinois and in Champaign also. Agnes would call her, too.
“I’ve already talked to your father,” Agnes said, “and he’s going to buy all the bridesmaids’ outfits. That way, we’ll be sure they all can afford to come.”
“Ohhh, Mother!” Dawn said, and clasped her hands between her breasts.
Agnes smiled, her eyes still speculative, and laid down her pencil. “I just wish you could have waited till June. You’d have given me a lot more time,” she said. “And I just wish you could have picked somebody a little more in keeping with your own social status.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the Shotridges’ social status!” Dawn said fiercely. “They own the oldest and biggest real estate firm in Parkman.”
Agnes smiled. “Well, it doesn’t matter, I guess, as long as you really love him. And apparently you do.” She picked up her pencil. “I guess I’ll have to get out my Emily Post,” she said smiling. “And check up on details.”
As for the bridal dress, when she came to this item, Agnes checked it and said, “Your father and I talked about the wedding a long time last night, and I’m going to be flying to New York for the dresses.” Once again, Dawn was both surprised and thrilled and clasped her hands up against her breasts—and immediately afterwards was once again, as she had been the first time she slept with Shotridge, struck with a kind of dumb awe at her own sheer audacity. The talk of flying to New York brought home the reality of what she was doing more than anything had done before: It was all in action now; its own momentum would keep it going to the inevitable conclusion. It was no longer in her hands. For a moment, she thought she might cry, but underneath that sudden sense of fright was still that sure sense of safety, and of control, with Shotridge; and this sustained her. And a deep sense of love for Shotridge, and of responsibility for her power over him, gave her an almost holy feeling of sureness.
“Being in love certainly has changed you a lot,” Agnes said, eyeing her.
“I suppose being in love changes everyone a lot,” Dawn said, and made a mental note not to clasp her hands up against her breasts anymore.
After they finished with their lists, they went back out to the kitchen where Frank and young Walter were playing checkers, Frank boisterously and with a pre-lunch drink beside him, young Walter gravely and in silence, speaking only when spoken to. He was a strange, reserved youngster, and Dawn had not got to know him at all the last two days. Watching Walter as he began to win again—without any help from Frank—Dawn had again the feeling that she had had a number of times yesterday: that Frank might be the child and Walter the aged parent. He was like a quiet, little old man. Agnes had written her back in February that less than a week after they had gotten him, even though there was a six-month probation period, Frank had had all the signs at the store changed to read Frank Hirsh & Son, Jewelry, instead of Frank Hirsh, Jeweler. Looking at him now, from her own vantage point of maturity and forcefulness and her new security, Dawn felt she could forgive him for always having wanted a son so badly. She looked down at her father, who would be spending this fabulous sum on her wedding, and smiled at him. Quite suddenly, for the first time in her life, she realized all at once why her mother had married him.
Frank winked back at her and got up, conceding the checker game happily, and announced that they—
the family
—were going to drive her to Indianapolis this afternoon to catch a plane for Cleveland. If Jim Shotridge could fly to Cleveland all the time to see her, there wasn’t any reason why she couldn’t fly herself. And another thing, he announced: For a wedding gift, he was going to give them a car; he already had one in mind and picked out, down at the Dodge-Plymouth Sales where he was a silent partner—a last year’s model Dodge sedan. Just one more thing, he added: Since Dawnie was a grown-up woman now and getting married, she might as well have a couple drinks with them before lunch like any other grown-up married woman.
So saying, he strode over to the cocktail stirrer while young Walter silently picked up the checkers and the board and put them away.
So, while Agnes got them all out some inch-and-a-half-thick deep-freeze steaks and had her own drinks while she cooked them, Dawn had two manhattans with her parents in a kind of private little ceremony. Feeling the two drinks very definitely, and amidst all the laughter and talk and high spirits, Dawn felt once again that liquid smooth transparent membrane of censorship slide silently down over her mind, carefully filtering everything she said. Laughing, happy, the very picture of what a blushing eager very-much-in-love young bride should be, she could safely say anything that popped into her mind without worry.
In the new Cadillac on the way to Indianapolis, sitting in the backseat with young Walter, she tried to get acquainted with her new foster brother. He was so damned quiet. And Dawnie wanted to know what made him tick, what he was really like.
It was, as she discovered, a hard job to take on. Walter sat quietly in his corner and watched the drizzly March countryside interestedly. When she would ask him a question, he would turn and gaze at her with his little old man’s face and answer it and then go back to his interested perusal of the landscape. He volunteered nothing himself.
Agnes had told her what a wonderful little housekeeper he was. She had never been one. But he made his own bed every morning, cleaned and polished his own shoes, kept his clothes hung up neatly in his closet, and always put away afterwards any of his toys that he got out to play with. His room was always immaculate. And in addition to that, he cleaned up the dishes and the table after every meal all by himself. And the first thing he did every evening when he got home from school before he went outside to play was to empty and wash all the ashtrays in the house.
Suddenly, Dawn was struck by the really odd strangeness of it all: Here was this little boy whom she knew almost nothing of, not his background, not his ambitions, nothing, and whom she would probably never get to know. And yet he was legally her little brother—or soon would be. In a way, though, of course, he couldn’t know it, he was partly responsible for her leaving, and getting married, and everything else.
“How do you like it at school, Walter?” she asked, smiling.
One hand still resting on the window ledge, he turned and gazed at her gravely. “I like it fine,” he said. “We have a real fine second-grade teacher.” He waited, politely, and when she did not say anything more, started to turn back to the window.
“Well, I guess you’re not much used to going off on long rides like this,” Dawn smiled.
“No, I’m not,” Walter said, turning back to face her.
“Well, it’s lots of fun, to live like we live,” Dawn smiled.
“Yes, it is,” Walter said, looking at her gravely.
“Mother says you’re a wonderful housekeeper,” Dawn said.
“Yes, mam,” Walter said. “They taught us at the orphanage to do things for ourselves.”
Dawn was embarrassed. “Well, this is beautiful country, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” Walter said.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen rolling country like this up north?”
“We drove over to Indianapolis to get some new clothes when I first came to your house,” Walter said politely, “and I saw it then. But I can’t remember all of it.”
“Well, I guess I can’t remember all of it myself,” Dawn said, a little startled. “And I’ve driven it lots of times. It’s beautiful country.”
“Yes,” Walter said. He continued to gaze at her, gravely, politely.
“Well, you go ahead and watch the country,” Dawn said, unable to think of anything else to say. “Thank you, mam,” Walter said and turned back to his window.
“You come from around Chicago,” Dawn said, after a minute, “don’t you?”
“Yes, mam,” Walter said turning to look at her. “When I was little, I lived in Lake Forest. With my
old
parents.”
“Oh!” Dawn said. “That’s a fine, rich town.”
“Yes, mam,” Walter said; “but my parents wasn’t rich.”
“Oh,” Dawn said, embarrassed again.
Walter gazed at her thoughtfully for a moment, then began to talk. “My old father worked in a garage,” he explained. “Him and my mother was divorced and he left. Then when my mother died, they could not find him, and I did not have any other relatives. So they sent me to the orphanage. I was there for a year before I was adopted.”
“I see,” Dawn said, somehow nonplussed.
“What’s going on back there?” Frank said jovially from the front. “Don’t you let that big sister of yours give you any guff, Walter. You doing all right, bub?” Dawn listened, thinking it was strange how none of them ever seemed to call him Walt, or—her mind froze, suddenly—or-Wally-or-something-like-that.
“Yes, sir, Dad, thank you,” Walter said. “We were just talking about me before I was adopted.”
“Well,” Frank said. “Well, that’s fine.”
“Do you like it at college?” Walter asked her suddenly, almost as if he had figured it out that he should ask some questions himself to be polite.
“Yes. I guess,” Dawn smiled. “I’ll be transferring though, to Illinois, once I’m married.”
“I’d like to go to college,” Walter said. “I want to be an engineer.”
“A train engineer?” Dawn smiled.
“No, mam,” Walter said. “An electrical engineer. I’d like to build big dams.”
“Oh,” Dawn said.
As if he had done his duty, Walter turned back to his window. And after that, Dawn did not try to question him anymore and watched the country herself.
They were a wonderful family, she thought suddenly. And they were doing so much for her. She missed her Shotridge. At the airport, after she had kissed them all, including Walter, the last thing she did before getting on the plane was to remind them not to forget to invite her old chum Wally Dennis to the wedding along with his mother whom Agnes would be inviting.
W
ALLY
D
ENNIS RECEIVED
his formal engraved wedding invitation on Monday just exactly a week and six days before the wedding on Easter Sunday. His mom received hers on the same day. Wally had long ago formed a habit of taking a break from his work to look over the mail when the mailman came, and on this particular day as soon as he heard the mailman’s heavy feet hit the porch, he switched off the light beside his typewriter and went downstairs.
His mom already had the mail as usual, and as she always did was sorting it out on the little hall table, one pile for his and one pile for hers. This time, there was only a couple of mailing list items for him about camping equipment and this one pure white square envelope postmarked Parkman with no return address. He took it all out with him to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee and open it.
All his Randall knives—except the #1, of course, which he kept upstairs—were still lying on the lazy susan (despite his mom’s repeated protest) and he picked up the #8 Trout and Bird knife and unsheathed it and opened the three envelopes.
As soon as he saw the inner envelope of the Parkman letter, he knew it was some kind of damned invitation or something, and he looked at his own name “Mr Wally Dennis” written in ink and slit that envelope, too. When he slid out the contents and opened the single folded double sheet and shook the tissue paper and two cards off it, he forgot entirely about the other mail and sat down at the table. The script-engraved invitation read:
Mr. and Mrs. Franklin L. Hirsh
request the honor of your presence
at the marriage of their daughter
Dawn Anne
to
Mr. James Harry Shotridge
on Sunday, the seventeenth of April
One thousand nine hundred and forty-nine
at four o’clock
Parkman Methodist Church
Parkman, Illinois
Wally took it all in at one fell glance, his eyes focused on those two words there:
Dawn Anne
—his heart suddenly beating frighteningly and his eyes narrowing on the beautifully printed lines of script. The whole sheet seemed to swell and recede in time with the beating of his heart. He laid it down and picked up the tissue paper and fished the two cards out of it. One, the bigger one, said:
Reception
immediately following the ceremony
The Cray County Country Club
The favor of a reply is requested
608 North Bancroft Street
The other, a personal greeting card, read:
Mrs. Agnes Towns Hirsh
608 North Bancroft Street[/ext]
And in the lower left-hand corner, written by hand:
[ext]
within the ribbon
We want you both to be with us.
Wally laid them down alongside the invitation and spread all three of them out and looked at them. But it was the invitation that seized his eye. The rectangular sheet with its beautifully centered, neatly spaced lines of script across it. And that was where the words
Dawn Anne
were. Dawn Anne— Wally picked it up, his hands trembling with some unnameable fear like nothing he had ever felt before, and his heart continued to pound remorselessly in his ears. Dawn Anne—request the honor of your presence—Mr. James Harry Shotridge—at the marriage of their daughter— It was all so
official.
That was the most disturbing, most frightening thing of all. So already
done.
This was
official.
This was
legal.
And only last Christmas, they had both of them sat right here, at this very same table, both nude, and then they had— Wally heard his mother coming down the hall, and quickly laid the invitation down.