“I need to cash a check,” Forrest said.
She knew what Father was thinking—that he’d like to just give Forrest the money and not take the check in return. Father was like that—generous with people he thought worthy. She could feel the decision working in him. He could give Forrest the money easily. It would make little difference to his bank account. But she knew it would make all the difference to Forrest, the difference between trust that he could support her on his own, and doubt, the difference between pity and love. She held her breath and prayed Father would understand and suppress what he’d like to do. Surely, he must know the significance to Forrest.
“I can change it for you.”
Bless you, Father. You knew.
Forrest let go of her hand to do the business. It had probably taken him nearly a year to save enough for six cows. She waited, wondering what his face showed. He was probably unaware of Father’s agony of having to relinquish the role of provider. It took a long time, but then she heard him. “There’s two hundreds, then four twenties and two tens, with the tens on top.”
At the airport Jean hugged Father with more enthusiasm than usual. “Thanks, Father.” He just cradled her without speaking, holding her to him longer than he’d ever done before. She turned her face sideways so she wouldn’t get his tie wet.
Forrest and Jean stayed a few days at the Los Angeles Biltmore. Dody and other friends met them for dinner, for afternoon excursions, for evenings out. In between, there was the getting used to.
“Jeanie, I think I have to teach Chiang that she doesn’t have to protect you from me.”
“That’s a pretty big task. She’s trained to be wary.”
“How should I do it?”
“It might be a good idea for you and Chiang to be alone together,” Jean said.
“No, you’ve got it backwards. All I want is to be alone together with you, without Chiang.”
“At The Seeing Eye when we first got our dogs, we had to be alone with them in our rooms for 24 hours.”
“Too long.”
“I could go shopping with Dody.”
“And you’d forget about me here with this critter. No telling what she’d do. She hasn’t been without you for years.”
“I won’t forget you. We’ll only go for a couple of hours.”
“Why stay away so long? It’d only take a couple of minutes for her to make a mince pie out of me.”
That afternoon, the moment Jean left with Dody, Chiang leapt to her feet and bounded across the room for the closed door. Then she was still for half a minute, panting from the force of collision. She whined unhappily and repeated the attempt, determined to escape and find Jean. He imagined her eyeing the open transom above the door. He heard her jump. She couldn’t possibly. Too high. Then she tried running up the door. Scratches, pants and thuds. Too vertical.
He stood still listening to the commotion race from one side of the room to another. He was at a loss. Even his bull was easier to handle than this varmint suffering pangs of withdrawal. At least with Victor he had a lasso and plenty of space. The manager was sure to hear this ruckus. The door was probably scratched already. What in tarnation do I do now? he wondered. Shut her in the bathroom, that’s what.
He felt like a mouse trying to coax a cat into a cage. There was only one way to keep that animal from attacking the door. Pull up a chair right in front of it and sit there like a man. That would protect the door and keep the dog well below the transom and show that he was plucky and daring.
It was a bold stroke.
Chiang backed up to the opposite wall. Her whine took on a tone of desperation. Without warning, she charged for the door, the chair and Forrest, gathered momentum in flight, leaped on his lap and shoulders and made for the transom four feet above his head. The sudden impact thrust him backwards and the chair tipped over. This ain’t exactly the marital bliss I’ve been imagining all year, he thought as he picked himself up.
“The leash,” he muttered. “Get the leash and tie her up.” He rummaged among Jean’s things, found it, snapped it on Chiang’s collar and lassoed an overstuffed chair opposite the door with the free end. He let out a deep breath and sat on the bed. Then he pulled his legs up just in case.
Chiang still wanted Jean. Her voice alone told him that. It had reached a whimpering falsetto, the epitome of canine grief. Then he heard her lunge into her collar and haul the chair towards the door. “A-ha! Now you did it. Bad judgment, eh?” The two chairs and the narrow passageway between the bed and the dresser boxed her in. She couldn’t go forward or backward. Forrest guessed as much but was content not to explore. Instead he waited it out on the bed. The whines continued, but the commotion ceased. Forrest’s breathing returned to normal just as Jean and Dody edged their way back into the congested room.
“Boy, am I glad to see you! I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever come back,” he said.
“What happened?”
“The critter was heartbroken. She went crazy. Shamed me to my face.”
“How?”
“I can’t jump around and whine like that to prove how much I love you. When I proposed to you, I didn’t bargain that I’d be a stepping stone for some varmint.”
“Varmint! I do believe you’re jealous.”
“Well, I didn’t think I’d have to fight a dog for you. A father, yes, months of separation, 3000 miles, our mothers reading our mail, yes, even poverty, all that I could take—but a bloody mongrel?”
A few nights later Forrest’s cousin, Chester Henry Brown, and his wife arrived to take them to dinner and dancing at the Coconut Grove. Forrest followed Jean and Chiang out into the hotel hallway. “Forrest, what the hell are you doing?” Chester asked. “They’re not going to allow a dog in the Coconut Grove.”
“But this is a Seeing Eye dog,” Jean explained.
“And he’s a smelly nose dog, too.”
“You haven’t seen any guide dogs for the blind on the west coast?”
“Haven’t smelled any either. Until tonight.”
“Chiang goes everywhere with me,” Jean said flatly.
“But what do you do with her B.M.’s?”
“Take her outside. Obviously.” Forrest was surprised at the force in her voice. “Forward,” she told Chiang. Forrest hurried to follow, hand on her shoulder. Why couldn’t Chester be a little more delicate?
“I bet we look pretty swish,” he whispered to Jean at the doorway to the restaurant. “What color is your dress?”
“Amethyst.”
“Is that anything like ammonia?”
“It’s violet.”
“Sure feels silky.”
“Maybe because it is, silly.”
“Shall we tell them a party of five?” he said.
The maitre d’ was taken off guard. “No dog, not even a Seeing Eye dog, has ever been admitted to the—”
Chester slipped him a twenty.
The maitre d’ looked north as the five moved south to a table adjacent to the small dance floor. They sat down, four in chairs, the dog beneath the table.
“Pretty well trained animal,” Chester said with chagrin.
Jean snapped her leash to the table leg. “Of course she is.” Forrest straightened in his chair and grinned.
The music was the Freddy Martin Band. In between courses, Chester and his wife guided Forrest and Jean the few steps to the dance floor. With Jean in his arms, Forrest glided around in a small circle in rhythm with the crooning sax. “You’re an angel and a pretty smooth dancer, too,” he breathed in her ear.
Then he heard a loud scraping noise back at the table. “Oh, no. I don’t think we’re out here alone,” he said. “Betcha our table’s dancing too. Old lonesome Chiang’s hot on your scent, Jeanie.”
The table scraped across the dance floor and he felt Chiang come between his legs and Jean’s. The head waiter swooped down on them in a flash, directing them to a more secluded table in a corner, a booth in fact.
Forrest put his hands on the edge of the table and tried to wiggle it. “Feels like the table’s fastened to the floor,” he said.
“And it has a three foot mahogany fence around it, too,” Chester said.
The rest of the evening Forrest and Jean bungled their way through the crowd, bumping into other couples from time to time. “Bet Chiang thinks she can do better, but she doesn’t have the chance,” he said.
“Is that a little note of triumph I hear?”
He kissed her on the cheek and led her into a turn.
The next few days were less eventful. Forrest bashed his head on a storage door left open in the hotel hallway. After that he established the habit of walking down the hall with his hand out to the side along the wall, his other hand on Jean’s shoulder. This worked well until one day, walking this way, he reached out to the side and felt something soft and round.
“Hop up,” he said to Chiang and squeezed Jean’s shoulder tightly.
“Ouch!” Jean said. “What’s wrong?”
“Tell her to hurry.”
“Hop up,” Jean directed. They reached the haven of the elevator and scrambled inside. “What happened?”
“I had my hand out to the side and felt some woman’s catook.”
“No! How do you know for sure?”
“Unmistakable. I know one when I feel one. Must have been some chambermaid bent over with her nether end protruding.”
At the end of the week, friends drove them back to Ramona. With luggage and packages and gifts, there was not an inch to spare. The only place for Chiang was the window ledge behind the back seat where, of course, she fell asleep, snoring right behind their ears.
When they arrived in Ramona at the vacated frame house, Forrest said, “Jeanie, I want to do things just right, like any normal groom would do, including carrying the bride over the threshold. But we’re a different sort of couple—or triple. Should I carry Chiang, too?” he teased. “I feel like I married her when I married you.”
“I don’t think there are any rules.”
“What do you think Emily Post would suggest?”
“This is the West. Emily Post doesn’t live out here.”
“But I’ve got to be careful. I know the order of things—Chiang won your affection before I ever had a chance. Maybe I should carry you together over the threshold. No. That would be too much.”
“Physically or emotionally?”
“Maybe I could carry Chiang first, deposit her and then be free to do the act with more romantic stuff with you?”
His concern solidified into resolve. With a proud flourish, he gallantly whisked Jean off her feet, kissed her, and left Chiang whining on the doorstep. “For the first time I feel kinda equal. No matter where Chiang can lead you, she can’t lift you.”
Chapter Twenty
“When I’m finished, Jeanie, I’ll come back to get you and we’ll have breakfast at Mother’s,” Forrest said the first morning in Ramona. “I’ll teach you the way. It’s only a hundred yards past the barn.” He gave her a vaguely placed kiss on her temple and held her head in his big hands a moment before he turned to go out the door.
The screen door squeaked and then closed. His whistle got fainter as he walked away. For some moments, she stood still, a sense of separation engulfing her. She thought she heard the barn door creak open. Turkeys squawked. She’d have to get used to that. Chiang’s claws tapped on the bare floor of the empty house. It was the one sound familiar to her. There would be only one morning like this in all her life, she thought. Only one first morning as wife in a new house.
In the early quietness with the air still, she walked from room to room, her hands out to learn her way. The tiny frame structure was little more than a cabin. She measured the living room. Only eight steps across. An oil stove stood in the corner. She wondered if that was the only heat. A pair of rickety wicker chairs faced the wall, apparently the only furniture. Strange the way they were positioned. She felt the wall and found a window. That must be the reason. She wondered what the view was. She followed the wall until it led into the narrow hall to the second bedroom. She walked its perimeter, smaller than the other bedroom, then crossed it twice, her arms out widely. As far as she could tell, it was entirely empty. There were no lamps in the entire house. No matter. She breathed the stale air of the naked house closed up too long against the rural freshness on the outside. She looked for the window again, tried to open it, tugged, but it raised at a slant and then stuck.
At one end of the kitchen was a redwood picnic table with two benches. One of them wobbled. She felt the uneven surface of the table to see how large it was. A splinter of wood along one edge jabbed at her. Instinctively she sucked her finger. Tablecloths would be pretty important, but she’d have to wait six weeks before any of her things would arrive. There was no stove and no refrigerator. The used, three-burner stove Father had bought her in Connecticut and the old refrigerator from the basement at Hickory Hill were being shipped by freight train. It was war time. New goods were scarce. She was glad to have the ones from home. Her piano would arrive then, too. It would take up most of the remaining space in the living room.
She felt her way back into their bedroom and bumped her shin on the bed. She started to empty their suitcases into the dresser, but the drawers kept sticking and she had to wrestle with them. When she lifted the clothes, a few grains of rice fell to the wooden floor. It made her smile.
She yanked hard on the first drawer and something slid off the top into her arms—the one present that had been waiting for them at their new home. More thoughtful than all the silver and crystal and china from her New England friends was this practical gift from her new mother-in-law, a Braille cookbook. It was a humble present. She’d never read a cookbook before. She carried it to the wicker chair in the living room and settled herself to learn something of this enigma of making meals. She had memorized lists of German verbs, had remembered sonatas note by note. Now she turned her attention to memorizing the steps in making meatloaf. It didn’t seem too hard, she thought, once she could buy some measuring cups and spoons, and once she could decide how to organize a kitchen so she’d know where things were. But how would she get the things? How would she shop? A grocery store was as foreign as an Arabian bazaar. She didn’t want to be dependent on Mother Holly to take her. She slumped back into the chair. The wicker creaked. There must be a way.