A Wedding on the Banks (20 page)

“No!” he told her. “Now shoo! Git!” He looked at her as if she were a fly and he wanted to swat her.

“I've waited my whole life for someone to belong to,” Goldie said. “I don't look a bit like Mama or the man she married. But I got your eyes and your cheekbones. And I got your nose, don't I? And I bet your hair was blond once. That's why you can't even look at me.”

Mildred's old boyfriend rose up out of his chair when Goldie said this and tried to hit her. He swung something dark and rattling at her. As Goldie pulled back to avoid the impact, she saw that the weapon in his hands was a rosary.

“You've cursed yourself, old man,” Goldie whispered. “I'd have taken you out of here. After all these years of
nothing
from you, I'd have taken you home. But now you've cursed yourself. That rosary ain't long enough to keep you out of hell.”

Goldie ignored the receptionist at the front desk who asked if she'd be coming for the Father's Day get-together, and if so could she bring a covered dish. On the trip back to Mattagash, Pike had driven into a station to get some gas. There were only the first three kids back then, Irma, Priscilla, and Little Pee, and they were asleep in the backseat. They'd tired on the long drive down and were fussy and unhappy in the heat. Goldie was relieved when they finally drifted off, their little heads all golden and curly. This was like no Gifford hair she'd ever seen. The curls, yes, but that fine yellow flaxen was not at all like the dark chestnut hair of all their Gifford ancestors. And no one in Ed Plunkett's family had such hair. It was Goldie's own hair she was seeing on the heads of the children. As she shooed a fly away from Irma's sleeping face, she noticed the little shop next to the gas station. While Pike was pumping gas and checking the oil, Goldie got out and went into the shop to browse. An old woman with a stiff leg came clumping out of a back room, wiping her hands on her sweater. She was just browsing, Goldie told her, while her husband gassed up the car.

“We got us a six-hour drive over a bumpy road,” said Goldie.

“I make all this stuff myself,” the old woman said. “It's how I get by. That little check the government sends me ain't enough to feed the cats. That little government check wasn't worth getting old for.”

So Goldie shopped among the pot holders and tea cozies, the dish towels and doilies and throw rugs. She walked past terry-cloth curtains and facecloths with “Maine, Vacationland” embroidered on them with bright red stitching. And in the back there were dried-apple dolls and pine cones tied with red ribbons. There were little crocheted Santa Clauses with cotton batting beards.

“Them's left over from Christmas,” the old woman said. Goldie picked up a dusty set of salt and pepper shakers with a pine cone and tassel poorly painted on each. The old woman squinted at them.

“Them's the state flower,” she said, and spit on a finger to wipe away the dust so that Goldie could better see the little tassels. “Just between you and me,” she added, “that's a sorry flower for a state to have.”

The little front room was full of the old woman's treasures, some dusty and yellowing, some fairly new. Handkerchiefs and kerchiefs. Little throw pillows. Violets stitched on place mats. Crocheted slippers. Mittens. Knitted wool scarves. On one wall Goldie saw a handsaw with a varnished handle. On the blade was painted a scene of a brook surrounded by trees in autumn. There were birds far off, doing something in the sky, and a small doe, almost too brown in color to be real, was drinking at the brook's mouth, its velvet lips pressed like petals to the water.

“I never would've thought of that,” said Goldie, running a finger along the edge of the saw. “What a pretty thing to do to a handsaw.”

“There's pictures in everything,” said the old woman. And as Goldie looked past the white dinner plates, which had more scenes on them, which had rabbits, and a moose, and a pulp truck, she thought of the old woman's house as a special kind of museum. She thought of it as a gingerbread house in the forest where a good witch lived.

“Them can be used for ashtrays,” she said when Goldie lifted a plate and admired it. “Or candy dishes. Or to hold little cakes of soap.” The old woman looked at them lovingly, imagining all their uses. On one plate was painted a picture of a little house sitting alone, a gray house with a single light in the window, with a Christmas wreath on the door, and all around it were globs of white-paint snowflakes swirling and whirling in a frenzy to come down. There was an expectancy about the little house, and the lone candle, and the deep green pines billowing in around it. There was a sadness.

“That's my favorite, too,” said the old woman, rolling a pair of socks into a ball and tossing them into a basket where something stirred and stretched, and Goldie saw that it was a huge yellow-striped cat. And she realized that in the dark corners of the room, even among the pot holders and little rocks painted to look like Easter eggs, among things Goldie didn't recognize—colored strips of cotton a foot long and hemmed neatly, maybe bows for a little girl's braids—among the sachets and hanging chimes made of painted wood chips, were countless cats curled into round balls: tigers, calicoes, blacks, whites, grays, tortoiseshells. Cats dozing among the subtle shapes and colors. Goldie thought of the old woman's house now as a gold mine, and of all the cats as sleeping booby traps. If someone should try to take anything, there would be a quick snarl, a fast claw to the hand.

“That little check don't even feed the cats,” the old woman said again, and she turned her face up to Goldie, and Goldie saw that it looked like the dried-apple dolls on the shelf, all brown and wrinkled, the juice drained out.

When Goldie saw the Christmas angels, she knew she would have to buy one. To help feed the cats. To help keep the wheels turning. The factory rolling. To keep alive the stitching, tatting, crocheting, knitting, embroidering, gluing, painting, hemming, cutting, pasting. And so she bought one. There were several of them, nearly identical except for one. Its hair was blonder. Its face sadder.

“Their bodies is cardboard,” said the old woman, whispering. “And their dresses is from an old lace dress I had years ago.” She was telling Goldie precious secrets. And she was excited about the sale.

“Them wings is angel's hair left from some Christmas when my kids was small,” she said quickly, just in case Goldie might change her mind and put the angel back. She counted out the change, wetting each bill with a finger spitty from her mouth, so as to be sure, counting each smooth coin tenderly.

“Once,” she said, trying to raise herself up to Goldie's ear. “Once,” she said, dry-throated, tearful, “they all caught on fire. All my things. I lost plenty, I tell you. Lost all the angels but them you see. And when I come to rescue them, they had raised their arms up to heaven.”

When Goldie took her angel and went back out into the sun, the door tinkled behind her as she closed it. Back in the car she couldn't be sure if it had really happened, if the old woman really was in that shabby house, sitting there in the sun like a mushroom. A house full of sleeping cats, and angels, and dark secret corners. A storybook house. So Goldie
imagined
her inside, an old troll shuffling through the tiny rooms, arranging her trove. And every Christmas Goldie had remembered the tiny old woman. Every year she had wondered if she was now dead. If someone was feeding her cats and watering the plants. Dusting off the other Christmas angels. And every year the secret of her father sank deeper within her. She told no one, not even Lizzie, who
was
Ed Plunkett's daughter, that she had found her real father. It was her secret. And the angel's. And, in part, it was the old woman's secret.

Alone in her bedroom, with Vera's lights blinking happily at the bottom of the hill, Goldie thought about fathers. She had always wanted to possess one, hadn't she, the same way she had longed for her own pet. Ed Plunkett had paid for her food and her clothes, but he offered her little else. And Goldie had wanted to give her children a father, too. Vera's cruel words hadn't hurt, not in the way they were intended. Goldie knew she wasn't headed for some eerie kind of limbo, as Vera had prophesied. What did hurt was the whole notion of fathers. Of family. Of her never having had one as a child.

“Even dogs do,” Goldie thought. Her own children were basically fatherless, but they weren't motherless. Goldie looked at their school pictures, scattered about on her dresser. Their heads of blond hair glistened in the reflections of Vera's Christmas lights like little yellow clouds. Halos. Even Little Pee had one. Goldie smiled. They reminded her of the Christmas angels she had seen in the old woman's house. They were Goldie's angels, bad as they were. And someday she would share her secret with them. One day, when they were ready, she would say, “You got that blond hair because you got Swedish blood in you. You can trace it back to New Sweden, Maine. From there, you got to go across the ocean to the old country. But that's the secret of the yellow. That's your hair, explained.”

When Miltie came up an hour later to snuggle in for the night next to his mother's warm body, he found Goldie already sleeping peacefully.

“If I had to drive over these potholes and frost heaves for the rest of my life, I'd be forced to start wearing a bra. As it is, I have to steer with one hand.”

—Monique Tessier, to the startled clerk at Betty's Grocery

Junior awakened to his first Mattagash morning in almost a decade. He checked his watch through squinted eyes and discovered it was only nine thirty. Saturday. There was plenty of time to lounge in bed now that Marvin Sr. wasn't peering out of the funeral home like some kind of watchman, waiting to see if his son would get to the office on time. Junior had even thought of launching into his own business, but he never had the chutzpah, or the moolah, to do so. Now things were looking brighter. The evening before the Ivys set out for Mattagash, Marvin had beckoned Junior inside his leathery office and there had looked his son in the eye.

“I'll put it to you this way,” Marvin told his son. “You see to it that our old secretary stays gone, and you've got your own business in Watertown, Maine.”

“Watertown?” asked Junior, at first disappointed to be offered a goody that lay so far north it would be frozen six months out of the year. Watertown was just thirty miles away from being another Mattagash. But then he began to ponder the future consequences. There was only one funeral home in Watertown. Surely, with Junior's years of citified expertise, he could easily swallow up all business until he had complete funerary control of northern Maine. Even Mattagash had stepped, albeit gingerly, into the twentieth century. Except for a few diehards, if Junior could use the pun, who were still holding wakes in their living rooms, most of Mattagash and St. Leonard were now availing themselves of professional undertaking. Junior would become a mogul. He'd be rolling in his own dough within a couple of years, and then good-bye northern Maine. He'd be off for Bangor, maybe, or Lewiston. It might even be time for a big city like Boston.

“You see that Miss Tessier keeps walking, son, and it's as good as yours,” Marvin promised.

“Yes, sir,” Junior promptly agreed. “You bet she'll keep walking. If
I
have anything to say about it.”

“Good for you, son,” Marvin said, and patted his shoulder. “The wedding's on Sunday. We'll go first thing Monday and take a good look at Cushman's Funeral Home, Watertown, Maine.”

“Thanks, Dad,” said Junior.

“You know, son.” Marvin was feeling more magnanimous than he could ever recall. “I almost gave up on you a thousand times.”

“I know, sir,” Junior squirmed.

“But I didn't.”

“No, sir, you sure didn't.”

“Not many forty-year-old men have a business tossed into their laps.”

“Not many at all,” said Junior.

“We'll get Thelma straightened out next,” promised Marvin. He was feeling more and more like old Joe Kennedy as the days went by.

“Good idea,” agreed Junior.

“But keep an eye on her up in Mattagash,” Marvin warned. “Gossip travels fast in Aroostook County. It ain't good for business to have potential clients talking about your family matters.”

“I'll keep
two
eyes on her,” Junior offered generously.

“Okay,” said Marvin. “But you gotta promise me one thing.”

“What, sir?”

“About Miss Tessier.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I wanna see dust coming from that whore's heels at all times.”

“I'll keep her walking,” Junior had promised.

Junior reached out a hand to touch Thelma, but no one was in the bed with him. He sat up and looked about the small room.

“Thelma?”

He found his pants and slipped into them. He pulled on a bulky sweater and slid his feet into slippers. Goddamn cheap-ass Pinkham could at least install a telephone in the room. What if there were an emergency and Junior needed a phone desperately, only to discover Albert not at home? And even if Albert were home, Junior mistrusted that German shepherd. He looked as if he might have been Hitler's own personal guard dog. And he seemed just as two-faced as Albert Pinkham.

Outside on the cement walkway, Junior found Thelma. She was lounging behind the wheel of the big Cadillac, sunglasses on, staring straight ahead at the Albert Pinkham Motel. When Junior opened the door, the smell of gin wafted out. It was barely morning and she was already plastered.

“Thel?”

“Wha'?' asked Thelma.

“Come on back inside, sweetheart,” Junior said. “It's nippy out here and you'll catch a cold. Come on now.” Thelma squinted her eyes.
Come
on
now. Come on down, Thelma Parsons Ivy of Portland, Maine!

“Come on, Thel, feel your arms. Aren't you cold?”

“Cold?” Thelma asked quizzically. They were supposed to ask her how much a can of pinto beans cost compared to a bottle of Windex. They were supposed to ask her how much cars, and skillets, and vacuum cleaners cost. What was this “cold” business?

“Come on,” Junior urged, and tugged on her thin arm.
Come
on
down!
Then she remembered. This wasn't Bob Barker, the host. This was Junior Ivy, the cheat.

“No!” Thelma shouted. “Can't you see that I'm very, very busy?”

“Let's go in, hon,” Junior tried again.

“No!” screamed Thelma. “No! No!”

“Damn her,” Junior thought. If it wasn't his mistress, it was his goddamn wife.

“Thelma, get to hell out of my car,” he said as quietly as possible. But it was loud enough that Bruce soon got into the action. Suspicious, he trotted around Junior's creamy Cadillac. After depositing a half pint of dark yellow urine on Junior's expensive and beloved hubcaps, Bruce began to bark.

“Will you
shut
up
!” Junior shouted.

“I will not,” said Thelma, and began to weep.

“I was talking to the
dog
,” Junior said, and tried to calm his wife. If Thelma caused him to lose his funeral business, so help him, Junior would kill her. He'd have no place to lay her out, granted, but he would kill her.

“I said I was talking to the dog,” Junior said again. “Quiet down now.”

“See?” Thelma cried. “I can't even tell when you're talking to me or to a dog!”

When Albert Pinkham came outside to check on the commotion, Thelma was weeping loudly.

“What's going on?” Albert asked as he calmed Bruce's barks with a few loving pats.

“Nothing,” Junior said, and yanked Thelma out of the Cadillac by her bony arm. If he had known what was going to eventually develop, he'd have pulled her back into number 1 before she had the opportunity to become hysterical.

“My wife jammed her finger in the car door is all,” Junior explained. He dragged Thelma by the arms over to the cement sidewalk and waited to catch his breath.

“Therefore, she can't
walk
?” asked Albert, as he and Bruce watched the citified goings-on. If he lived to be a hundred and ten, Albert Pinkham would never figure metropolitan folks out. Nor would he want to.

“I want my television set!” Thelma screamed. “Give it back! Give it back!”

“What?” asked Junior, startled.

Albert Pinkham had seen fussy tourists in his day, as had Bruce, but here was a grown woman weeping and kicking her feet on his cement walkway because he, the proprietor, had seen fit to keep the modern nuisance of television out of his establishment.

“I live to learn,” Albert muttered as he watched the fracas.

“I want my TV!” screamed Thelma. She knew very well why Junior had dragged her to the northern hinterlands and stuck her in a primitive motel room. He was jealous of Bob Barker. And Thelma would have driven back downstate, would have driven with the incoming dawn all the way to Portland, to Bob, had it not been the keys to her little yellow Corvair she had been trying since 7:00 a.m. to insert into the Cadillac's ignition.

“I can rent you a radio,” offered Albert in what he thought was a burst of generosity. He didn't want to kick these nitwits out again, at least not during the dry times he was experiencing. “Same price as a hot plate,” Albert said. “Buck fifty a day.”

Junior ignored the offer and instead concentrated on pulling Thelma across the walkway. He'd left the door to number 1 ajar, and now he kicked it wide open.

“I'd watch what I kicked,” Albert said, as sternly as he could risk.

Junior backed into the room, his arms firmly locked around Thelma, his eyes on her flailing feet.

“By the way,” Albert said to Junior, “there's the matter of Miss Tessier's bill.”

As the color left Junior's face, Thelma burst into laughter.

“You mean she
charges
him?” she cried.

Junior thought he had dropped Thelma, but when he emerged from his three-second blackout, she was still in his arms.

“I'll be right back,” he said to Albert. Then he kicked the door shut in the owner's face.

“I'd watch what I kicked,” Albert warned again as Bruce growled. Then they went back into the house, where Bruce could chew on the ham bone from last night's boiled dinner and Albert could read the
Bangor
Daily
News
.

Junior got Thelma undressed. He fumbled through his shaving kit and came up with the little bottle of sleeping pills Dr. Phillips had given him for emergencies such as this.

“Keep her off the Valiums, whatever you do,” he had told Junior. “But see she gets some rest. Give her a couple of these only if necessary.”

By the time Junior came back with a glass of water, Thelma had already passed out and was snoring.

“What the hell do you mean?” Junior spit the words into Albert Pinkham's astonished face. “Where did you get that name? Who put you up to this?”

Albert stepped out on his front steps, closed the door behind him, and surveyed Pearl McKinnon Ivy's son with a steady eye.

“I'd calm down if I were you,” Albert suggested, a bit of April's ice in his words. “Now just what is it you want to know?”

“Who told you my secretary's name?” Junior hadn't calmed down.

“She did,” said Albert. “Who else? She also said that since this was a business trip, you'd be paying her motel bill.”

“I don't believe you,” Junior said.

“Then why don't you ask her yourself?” said Albert, and pointed to the car that had just roared off the main road and pulled to a squeaking halt in front of the motel. Junior felt his breath catch up fast in his chest, as though a heavy punch had been thrown there. It was the blasted Buick, with Monique behind its wheel. Junior saw Cushman's Funeral Home disappearing on an ice floe, far down the thunderous Mattagash River.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered, as Marvin Randall Ivy III, his own son, Randy, popped out from the passenger side with a bottle of Coke in his hand.

“Hey, Dad!” Randy shouted, his eyes bristling red from his own drug of choice. He scratched his crotch, rearranging a few of the living burrs he'd brought from Portland. “Like, you're not gonna fuckin' believe who I ran into, man.”