The Story of a Marriage (15 page)

We think we know them, the ones we love—for can’t we see right through them? Can’t we see their lungs and organs hanging like grapes under glass; their hearts pulsing right on cue; their brains flashing with thoughts we can so easily predict? But I could not predict my husband. Every time I thought at last I’d seen to the bottom of him—he clouded over.

For, just as he was undoing my buttons to reveal Buzz’s present, that corselette as spring-loaded as my heart, he said something that stopped me.

I pulled my blouse together and moved away. “What did you say?”

He sat up slightly. “I said, ‘Don’t ever change.’” There was that smile.

Don’t ever change: I felt a part of my mind burst into flame. For change was all that was called for; change was the only item on the menu. There was no other possibility, and yet here he stood and, smiling like a boy, commanded me never to change. Here at last I had thought he’d submitted to his life and was telling me so, in his quiet way. That he longed for change: for who could endure our lives as they were? I was prepared to give him what he wanted, if he would choose it. If, like the rest of us stepping toward the edge of thirty, he would figure out at last his heart’s desire.

“I’m too tired,” I said, sliding out from under him.

“Oh,” he said, surprised. I’m not sure anyone had ever stopped that handsome man from kissing them.

He looked at me expectantly, but I couldn’t say anything. If I tried to open my mouth there wouldn’t be an atom of oxygen in the room. The gun’s eye winked in the darkness. No. He was never going to change.

Of course he wasn’t. Why had I ever thought he might? It was not even possible; he was a fog that cannot change because it has not fixed a form. He was so used to being all things, pleasing all people.
Yes, yes, of course
, I imagined him whispering to Buzz, enjoying the odd flush on that man’s cheeks, never meaning a word of it. No, to change anything could only mean mortal danger—could only mean losing the ones who adored him, losing his wife or son, losing his own sanity if anyone strayed an inch from where they stood. No, nothing was going to change; he would bask in the admiration of an old lover, a young girl, his bewildered wife, who knows who else—this would go on forever until he was arrested or blackmailed or worse.

Then it came. The all clear—the hopeful, singing note of it—and in the instant afterward, we could hear neighbors yelling after our dog.

“Are they calling Lyle?” I asked, standing up.

“I guess so—”

“Do you think he got out under the fence? We should have fixed that hole.”

Holland looked very worried. “He can’t survive out there alone, he can’t even bark. Poor old thing.”

“Sorry?”

“I said he’ll never survive out there alone. He ain’t the kind.”

Those words shot like darts across the room. “Am I the kind?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Wait there.”

“What are you doing, Pearlie?”

I took what I needed from the shelf and held it in my hand. And then, as he looked at me with the tender bemusement of a husband, I decided to do what was necessary.

A moment later, I walked upstairs, out through the back door and into the garden, draped with vines. A crowd of untended roses lay bruised and blue in the dusk, alongside daylilies caught in the act of closing for the night. In one, a tardy bee engrossed herself among the shutting petals. Perhaps she would linger too late, become trapped in the mindless flower, struggling in there all night long, exhausting herself to death in that pollened room.

Holland was already in the street calling the dog’s name. He was crouched down, clapping his hands and yelling: “
Come boy!
Lyle! Come boy!
” He suggested walking to the ocean; it seemed like a place a mute dog might go, and so we went down Taravel to where the twilight sky opened up above us, packed with clouds and pink as a tongue. There I dropped an envelope into the little iron mailbox on the corner. And then, his face toward an ocean my ancestors had never crossed, a blameless ocean, his back to a country that did not love us, Holland sighed and looked at me, his eyes as trusting as ever.

I didn’t touch that gun on the shelf. Of course not; I am no murderess. It lay in the basement, as quiet as ever, deep in its long-deserved sleep from another war. And yet, though no one heard it, from that mailbox down on Taravel a silent bullet was already headed for its target.

a
month after the air-raid drill, the fog released its hold over the city and the sun began to reach as far as the Panhandle, and then to Kezar Stadium, and then at last into the Outside Lands. San Francisco isn’t a city for the twentieth century; its persistent cool is meant for women in horsehair crinolines and men in wool frock coats, not for a modern show of neck and leg. So all of us were out, taking advantage of the sun and warmth like children taking advantage of a parent’s jolly mood, and some of those days, walking with Sonny out by the ocean, I found myself imagining Lyle.

Who knows what voice whispers nightly to an animal until, driven mad by the air raid, he digs at the sandy dirt of our backyard and wriggles until he is free. Where would he go? To the ocean, I imagined. Every scent, every track must lead down to the ocean.

I imagined him running across the Great Highway with its rumbling trucks, onto the sand of the Pacific. Straight into the water itself—his breed had a love of water—wrestling aimlessly with the foam, tongue flapping, instinct telling him there was something to be done here. And, once done, he could come home. But for some magnificent reason he had forgotten home—he had forgotten me and Holland and his best friend Sonny, his allies (the bowl and the leash and a series of blue rubber balls), his enemies (the postman, the train set, the demonic black telephone)—and now was out in the world without a compass.

Golden Gate Park—surely that’s where he headed next. Into the tulip garden, where tourists dropped half-eaten egg-salad sandwiches, to the golf course with trails of spilled whiskey, in a loping run he crossed it with the wind in his ears and only a far-off trio of men to watch him, as the golden streak of him passed across the green, grinning as dogs grin, all memory of us utterly erased. All memory of shoes and socks and shameful errors on the carpet. Past squirrels in the park, fussing like accountants, and blue herons imitating statues in a muddy pond, and once in a while a hawk flying overhead, eye trained on a hapless mouse. Maybe trained on Lyle. Perhaps house cats, having slipped their keepers, lay hidden in the rhododendrons, and lizards and snakes and rabbits; perhaps whole colonies of them existed, burrowed deep under the lawn-bowling courts, or hiding all day in the Tea Garden and emerging at night to eat the remains of crumbled tea crackers. Pets, beloved, cosseted, having broken their chains, wandering the Outside Lands. Living together, wild, in the park, hunting in packs beneath a waxing moon. Some accidental frequency in the siren had lit a gene like a flare in their rib cages, freeing them—for what greater freedom could there be than to forget your home?

Buzz was out of town for a week, and the news was almost entirely taken up by the last throes of the war and by the approaching execution of the Rosenbergs. Their final Supreme Court appeal was sure to be denied and it seemed a foregone conclusion that they were going to die. I remember very clearly an image of Eisenhower (who refused them clemency) smiling broadly and how some newspaper artist had replaced each of his teeth with a tiny electric chair. But there wasn’t a single person in my neighborhood who doubted the Rosenbergs’ guilt, doubted that they had a console table made for photographing documents instead of one bought at Macy’s to hold the telephone, or doubted the system of justice that had tried and convicted them, or the highest court that would never hear their appeal. So the conversations in the Sunset weren’t arguments for or against execution—that talk was going on east of us, in North Beach, or even among the colored Communists out on Fillmore, none of whom we knew—no, our part of town experienced the dawn excitement of a mob, each of whom had brought a picnic for the hanging.

When we met again at Playland, I told Buzz I’d done what he’d asked. He seemed startled—a spasm of conscience—then put his hat on the seawall and said, “I’m sure it’s too late.” I said it was all I could think of to do. “Don’t worry, we’ll see what happens.” Surely nothing would come of it. Birds by the dozens were sitting on the sand and staring at us, chirping. We stood for a long time by the seawall, camouflaged by passing crowds, with nothing to say to each other. It was when we left the boardwalk that we were almost caught.

Buzz was discussing our next rendezvous—he had a movie theater in mind—as we stood beside that Limbo ride, about to be consumed by a crowd of popcorn-eating Boy Scouts. He was leaning very close to me so he could be heard above the boys tomahawking the air, when I saw two familiar straw hats with fluted ribbons emerge from the park.

“Pearlie!” they cried.

I immediately stepped sideways and let Buzz be swallowed by the Scouts (popcorn eruption, “Hey there, mister!”), and I kept moving until I faced the aunts alone.

“You’ve gone out for a walk!” one announced.

I said, “Edith is looking after Sonny.”

Another looked at me carefully. “Is Holland here?”

“No, he’s at work of course.”

“Then what are you doing with his hat?”

I looked down and there it was, Buzz’s two-ounce Dobbs that he was so proud of rolling up into his pocket and pulling out again unscathed; I must have picked it up off the seawall. A man’s felt hat in my hand. I could not think of a single plausible explanation. But people are not as interested in us as we think they are. And so they did not blink an eye when I answered, “I have no good explanation.”

“Well we heard the most terrible news,” said Beatrice.

I smiled. Buzz stood hidden among the boys like a figure in a burbling fountain. “You don’t say.”

“There was a jealous wife. In Fresno.”

“Didn’t the last story happen in Fresno?” I asked.

“Well that is apparently where these things happen!” she told me, indignant. “A jealous wife borrowed a plane and crashed it into the playground near her house. And there was a note.”

“Listen to this,” said Alice, wearing the glow of old love like a veil. “There was a note for her husband that said: ‘You told me once that everyone gets over everything. But it isn’t true and I’ll prove it.’ Imagine writing a thing like that.”

“I certainly can’t.”

“And to prove it, she took away the things he loved,” Beatrice said.

Her sister repeated: “The things he loved—”

Beatrice sniffled. “Only the awful part is, the awful part—”

The awful part was that their daughter had been in the plane, and the family dog as well; the things he loved. They had all gone down together in a flower of flame. It was not a radio show, this time.

One aunt was sighing: “That husband, to watch that plane go down—”

“That’s jealousy for you,” the other said and looked at me very meaningfully. “That’s what women are capable of. When in most marriages, you know, they can work these things out.” She stood there like a stone column, repeating: “Most couples can just work these things out.”

“How awful,” I said, “what a thing to think about before your wedding, Alice.”

“Well—” she began.

“And you know that friend of Holland’s, that nice white fellow,” her sister broke in. “Well I don’t want to spoil your friendship. But you should know that he’s a liar. A notorious liar.”

“Oh yes, Pearlie,” Alice said, nodding.

“He tells people he was an objector. But he wasn’t. He was a coward. A coward and a liar. He cut off his finger to get out of the fighting, oh yes he did, you can see it right there.”

“We wouldn’t have much more to do with him, if we were you.”

“Think of Sonny.”

I wonder what those women were up to. They must have known a great deal more than they were letting on. The lunch long ago, the “worry over the past” and the one’s cry—“Don’t marry him!”—made it clear they were paying attention. They could feel something changing, as the blind can sense a storm, and were working in their fumbling manner to stop us. In some terrified way, they were trying to help me.

It was only much later that I realized they must have seen to the marrow of everyone involved. They had spent their spinster hours knitting away in front of us, that generation of women who listened to nothing but watched everything, and they had seen our hearts’ desires. I am not saying they approved of them. I think those two women cared only to keep their nephew happy, or what they viewed as happy, and they would have done anything to save him. They had thought that I would save him, but they had begun to doubt. I hadn’t the instinct. I was the type that saw nothing, and then saw everything. I think to save someone, you have to be like the aunts, and look at life with half-closed eyes, and never waver. Yes, I think the key to that kind of life is never to waver.

The aunts handed me a gift for Sonny, a pretty pink little box, and said they’d be by at two, they could hardly think properly they were so upset, they might treat themselves to sukiyaki, and off they went like two beach balls rolling along the sidewalk, one in polka dots, one in stripes, smiling at each other. Sweet old cats, their conjoined life about to come to its end; the last of their mutual meddling.

I opened the box. It was a trio of knitted hand puppets: a tiger, a judge, and a wizard. I smiled and studied the beautiful things; they must have chosen these puppets so carefully from the shop, picked among the flawed handmade toys, and yet what scenario these three could enact together was a puzzle. A tiger, a judge, and a wizard … some nightmare divorce proceeding? And did they consider my Sonny a three-armed Martian?

“I’ll take my hat now, madam, thank you.”

Buzz smiled as he brushed popcorn from his sleeves. He led me out through the crowd and my heart fell back into its normal rhythm. He took my arm again and whispered, “The way you acted, you’d think we were the lovers …”

Two weeks later it happened at last; they printed his name on the page beside Weddings and Divorces:

Drafted: William Platt, Sunset District
…

Annabel DeLawn married William Platt on May 20, 1953, after only a week’s engagement; it happened more quickly than we’d ever expected. The ceremony was a small one at Yosemite Hall, attended by the surviving members of her father’s army regiment. I clipped the photo out of the paper. He was in his army uniform. And she was in a plain white dress with a long piece of lace over her head, the way my mother would lay a dish towel on a freshly baked pie to keep off flies. “The beautiful daughter of General DeLawn,” read the caption, and I had to agree. It was only the day after William Platt’s name appeared in the newspaper, on the draft rolls, that she announced she was going to marry him, though of course she didn’t have to. And it wasn’t in order to save him from the war; there was no exemption left for William Platt, and she wasn’t the type to hide a man from battle, anyway. Very few of us are that type. No, Annabel married William the Seltzer Boy—as I knew she would—because she loved him.

“I didn’t even know they were engaged,” Holland said as I showed him the announcement in the paper. He undid the noose-knot of his tie. His eyes revealed nothing.

“I guess they kept it secret. And then William got drafted, so the secret came out.”

He folded the tie around his hand. He said he remembered lots of boys getting married before they were shipped out.

“I remember that, too.” I didn’t mention it was for deferrals.

It was sure rotten to get drafted, he said, and gave a sad smile. If there was a last scene with Annabel, on a cliff by the roaring ocean, a grimace of canceled desire, some tearless goodbye—“I guess I’m going to be a good wife”—then he did not show it. No ice clinked in his bourbon; his hand was steady as ever. “He’ll be fine. They’re just training them these days, they won’t even ship him out.” He nodded and looked right at me. We did not speak, that day, of how a boy might hide from war.

No one ever wondered why William’s luck broke in the end. The notice just arrived one morning and the family acted as if it was the summons they had always expected, the fulfillment of some prophecy; there was no drama about it at all. The war was nearly over. Our president promised us: the mission was almost complete, and we had no reason to disbelieve him. He was, after all, a general. One last push and it would be finished; certainly no newly drafted troops would be sent. The joke at the wedding (among the ancient army men) was that William would not even get to sample Korean “cooking” (said with a filthy gesture) before he came home to good old American potatoes. Apparently William looked around, grinning; I don’t think he understood what they were talking about.