A Wedding on the Banks (3 page)

When Mattagash surmised through its complicated intelligence network of telephone calls, both the legal kind and the
rubbering
in
kind, through the countless cups of strong Canadian-bought coffee downed while in pursuit of some new clue, through the close scrutiny of car tracks so as to tell who'd been out of their yard on December 26 and who hadn't—when Mattagash set its mind to solve the mystery, it was just a matter of time until the icy finger of guilt pointed right up Goldie's long driveway to her house on the hill. And it was Vera, the sister-in-law whom Goldie loved to hate, who had come back from Watertown lightless and downhearted, who did the most effective sleuthing. She called the manager at J. C. Penney's to give him a verbal trouncing for exaggerating his sale. Madam, he assured her, there were forty boxes of the most colorful Christmas lights ever trucked to northern Maine. He had placed no purchase limitations on his customers. One lone woman had been there when the store opened and had bought them all. She was from Mattagash, he was certain. He had recognized the distinguishable old-country brogue that still survived in the accents of modern-day Mattagashers.

Once Vera remembered Irma's highly esteemed position at J. C. Penney's as a kind of clerk with tenure, it didn't take long to surmise what had happened. She put the phone down from bawling out the bewildered manager and marched out the door and up the hill to Goldie's. On the icy trip up, she pondered their relationship. She had tried time and time again to be friends with her sister-in-law, but it had been futile. It had been like spitting into the wind and getting it back in your face. The real clincher had come when Goldie announced she was
born
again.
She had spent a week in Bangor looking for her
real
father and had come back a Protestant. No one in Mattagash was happy about the conversion. The Giffords and a few other families in town were Catholic, and so hated to lose a sheep to the Protestants. The rest of Mattagash wanted no part of a Gifford in their fold, and they were certain God would feel the same way. Goldie's own husband, Pike, was most confused over the transformation.

“I don't know why anybody would want to stop being a Catholic,” he had stood in Vera's kitchen to announce. “Why would anybody wanna do anything wrong if they can't go and confess it?”

December 26, like all other wintry days in northern Maine, was freezing cold. Vera knocked loudly three or four times before Goldie came to the door, smoking a Virginia Slim and holding it precariously in her fingertips. The way Vera never held her Lucky Strike no-filters. The way no woman in Mattagash smoked a cigarette. Even though she was a Gifford by marriage, Goldie had always thought she was a peg above the other Giffords. It was Goldie who first brought the Jackie Kennedy hairstyle to town. She had to dye her goldish-blond hair dark brown in order to create the full effect. She had even lowered her regular speaking voice to a Jackie Kennedy whisper, but when Jackie married that little Greek man, Goldie forgot about her and went back to the gold-blond curls. She still, however, held her cigarettes as if they were needles. Vera
hated
Goldie.

“What are you doing out without a coat?” Goldie had asked, opening the door just a crack, then barring it with her foot.

“Never mind my coat,” said Vera. “I'm too hot to wear one. I'm fuming right now, Goldie. If I had on a coat, I'd set it on fire.”

“You ain't been here in years, Vera. You ain't even sent a Christmas card up this hill by one of my kids. So what are you doing up here?”

“I come to buy some Christmas tree lights,” Vera had said. “And I figure the only other person who owns more Christmas tree lights than you do is Nelson Rockerfuller. I don't know Nelson personally, but I do know you, Goldie.”

“You're off your rocker as usual,” said Goldie, and tried to shut the door. But Vera pushed until the crack came back again. Goldie had a shoulder and hip against the door, holding it, a single eye glaring out at Vera.

“Irma told you about that Christmas lights sale, didn't she?” Vera shouted, and pushed harder.

“You're a crazy woman!” Goldie screamed. Vera pushed harder still, but Goldie managed to hold her grip.

“I drove all the way to Watertown, over ice and snowdrifts, to buy three or four measly boxes of lights and I come home empty-handed to find out you bought all forty boxes!”

“You come home empty-headed, too,” Goldie had answered, almost in tears. She was losing her position in the doorway; she could feel her foot slipping, millifraction by millifraction. And she'd always been a little afraid of Vera, who was a large woman with broad shoulders and a violent temper. Goldie was even more afraid of her since she'd heard that Vera was in the midst of menopause.

“I want four goddamn boxes of Christmas lights!” Vera had shouted against the wind. “For my goddamn Christmas tree next year that I intend to stick next to my goddamn mailbox!”

Goldie was sure this was a sign of menopausal frenzy, although it seemed that Vera was always lit up like that. Even as a child she'd been a handful. Vera was a Gifford
before
her marriage to Vinal, who was a first cousin, and she seemed much more intent on being a true Gifford than did Goldie. Goldie would have been Jackie Kennedy in a flash, if she could have been.

“You can't even keep a
mailbox
standing because of Little Vinal,” said Goldie. “How are you gonna keep an outdoor tree?” Goldie had asked this question sincerely. She was truly wondering how Vera could believe, after all these years of knowing him, that Little Vinal, aged twelve, would allow anything not made of concrete and steel, and welded to the earth, to retain its original form and location. “Besides,” Goldie had continued. “I ain't got no Christmas lights. You're crazy. This is a hot flash, is what it is.”

“I'll give
you
a hot flash. I saw you dragging them in today.” Vera was angrier than Goldie could ever remember. “You was so damned scared someone might see you, you let Popeye chew up your hoity-toity hat.”

“
Someone
has to feed him,” said Goldie. “That poor dog looks like a washboard walking around on four legs.”

“He gets plenty to eat,” shouted Vera, who rarely knew where Popeye
was,
let alone if he was nutritionally satisfied.

“Hell he does,” said Goldie. “He lays in the yard all day eating the catalog. Even the kids joke about it. They say he's too weak to order anything.”

It was Pike, who had fallen asleep on the sofa during
The
Edge
of
Night,
who came to Goldie's rescue. He ordered Vera to go back down the hill and forget about the incident.

“Lick some Green Stamps and paste 'em in a book,” Pike suggested to his brother's wife. “Git your mind off this foolishness.” So Vera had loosened her grip on the door and retreated.

“She's so mad she's melting all the snow off the hill,” Goldie had observed to Pike, and then had gone back to packing away the boxes of Christmas lights, some to be used the very next holiday, others during the many holidays to come, when the very mountain top of Giffordtown would radiate for miles around.

For two weeks following the sale, Vera had made everyone in her own household miserable—all except Popeye, who was forced daily to eat bowls of chopped welfare Spam, mixed with powdered welfare eggs. The dining took place outside, and the sole purpose was to assure Goldie that his daily diet was a well-balanced, family-monitored affair. Popeye was delighted and, not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, added stomach weight so quickly that the entire length of his body turned round and wobbly.

“Now he looks like a big ball of yarn walking around on four toothpicks,” Goldie said, lifting a curtain panel with one finger ever so slightly and watching the activity at the bottom of the hill.

Pike Gifford was flattened out on the sofa, waiting for
Guiding
Light.
Like kings, the male Giffords never worked, and they engaged with the public at special functions only, the kings
at
court, the Giffords
in
court.

“She ought to be mixing up a little meat for her kids,” Pike had yawned. “It might stop that little one's nose from bleeding all the time. It looks like somebody stuck a pig in that house.”

While the snows fell and the land settled more serenely under the tonnage of winter, the battle between the two women became military. Encastled on the top of the hill with her small army, Goldie had in her coffers a treasure wanted by the angry army camped at the base of the hill. They waited. They spied. Since party lines still plagued Mattagash in 1969, McKinnon and Gifford alike, they listened in on each other's calls. Each and every time, after hearing the
one
long, two short
rings, Goldie would carefully lift the receiver.

“The blond witch is on the line, Maggie,” Vera would warn. “Be careful what you say.” And many times Goldie had to bite her tongue in order not to ask, “Who're you calling a witch, you gray-haired hag?” Instead she would wait her turn, wait until someone phoned
her,
knowing Vera would hear the
two
long, two short
rings and be unable to resist a listen.

“The biggest mistake Vinal Gifford ever made just picked up the phone, Lizzie,” Goldie would say. “Don't breathe deep. You might catch stupidity.”

Vera and Goldie also waged their ornamental battle through the children. “They're as bad as the Viet Cong,” Vinal commented to Pike one day, as the brothers sat before the final minutes of
Days
of
Our
Lives
. “The next thing you know, they'll be strapping grenades on them kids and sending 'em back and forth across the road.” But, quick to vie for parental attention, even if it came in the form of a slap, the Gifford progeny were happy to oblige. At school, one of Goldie's tripped one of Vera's on the playground. One of Vera's pulled a hank of hair from the head of one of Goldie's on the school bus. One tore up another's homework. Mittens were stolen. Swear words filled the air like old medieval curses. But those first weeks of sheer holiday rage cooled a bit when 1969 brought in the coldest February to settle down on northern Maine in a hundred years. It's difficult to stand outside, the Gifford first cousins soon realized, and cuss someone out when your nose is frostbitten.

But not even a windchill factor of sixty below could assuage the painful need Vera had to wrap her fingers around her sister-in-law's neck. By the time spring curled, doglike, about the crooked doorjambs, the peeling paint flecks, the weathered outhouses, the mud-filled driveways, Vera was still seething. Had Goldie found the time to plant a row of daffodils in front of the unsightly tires, Vera would've taken Vinal's old .44 rifle and blown the heads off every one of them.

Diplomats that they were, the two Gifford patriarchs managed to stay untouched and unruffled by what they considered female hysteria. A pile of new batteries might be a different story, but only women could get so emotional over glass bulbs that did little more than rocket electricity bills. So, when April came around with the ancient sound of water dripping from eaves, of car tires finally touching tarred roads, of rips rattling again in the Mattagash River, Pike Gifford lay on the porch sofa and listened to it all. God was in his heaven at times like this, when neither he nor Vinal was in jail. What more could a man crave than a comely spring, a little bit of freedom, and a daily diet of soap operas? And he could almost
smell
the disability check already in the mail, already on its sweet journey from Augusta to Mattagash. Pike lifted his head and gazed down to the bottom of the hill for a sign of his older brother Vinal. His eye caught the magnificent flash of hubcaps simmering in the warm sun, like a vein of silver dug up from all those early boomtowns he'd seen in westerns. He shifted himself onto his side and smiled when he heard in his pocket the soft sweet rattle of quarters and dimes and nickels that had, just the day before, been in a container for “Jerry's Kids” at Craft's Filling Station. He had also gotten some gossip from Craft's, gossip that wedding bells would be ringing in the valley soon. Wedding bells, like sirens, meant excitement. From his hilltop view of Giffordtown, Pike knew that all was right with the world.

“I've been so depressed lately that if it wasn't for my little packet of birth control pills, I wouldn't even know what day it is.”

—Thelma Ivy, to “Dear Abby,” one of thirty-four letters written from January 1969 to April 1969

Portland, Maine, like a favored heir and through some natural sort of special dispensation, had received its glorious spring a few weeks earlier. The ocean salt and sea breeze served to hasten winter into a quiet retreat, and already folks were tiring of the canary-yellow daffodils in their last death throes along the neat lawns and walks. Soon the rigors of summer mowings and prunings would replace all romantic notions of April, would push them back into the gray attics of people's minds until they were needed again, when the first daffodils birthed themselves once more out of a thawing earth.

At one particular yard, mowed and pruned to perfection, sprawled the brick Ivy Funeral Home, a structure more closely resembling an educational institution than a mortuary. Vines toe-hold their way across the gray bricks. Sagging, intelligent elms lolled on each side of the entrance, and shapely hedges squatted along the paved driveway and adjoining parking lot. A somber lull lay in the architecture of the building. It could easily have been Cambridge University, that place of great thought and deep learning, so much did the structure demand one's highest respect. Old Man Ivy, who designed the building himself, knew the architectural reasoning behind it all, knew it was no accident that the Ivy Funeral Home could pass as a university in its insistence on being paid an academic homage. He had researched buildings for six long months before he came up with the creative spark that had burst, finally, into full flame. When the smoke cleared less than a year later, the Ivy Funeral Home was welcoming clients at the cul-de-sac on the end of Maple Street. “There are two things on the planet that people are most afraid of,” Old Man Ivy once said to his son Marvin. “The first is a scholar. The second is a corpse. Put them together and you can sell a coffin for twice the factory price. Please remember that, son.”

And the notion worked. The institution threatened revenge on any weeping family member who might stop crying long enough to question the dollars and cents that were accumulating on the funeral bill. Old Man Ivy had seen, before his own demise, the long lines of reverent mourners filing into his chapel as though Leonardo had sculpted the J. C. Penney plaster of Paris statues about the altar and the fernlike designs on the heavenly ceiling. He had seen the faces, pale and divine, like pilgrims at Lourdes, their nostrils fluttering at the smell of flower shop carnations and gladioli. He had seen the eyes sneaking peeks at the floral banners: BELOVED UNCLE, CHERISHED MOTHER, DEAREST FRIEND, SON, DAUGHTER, SISTER, BROTHER.

“Schmuck,” the old man told Marvin one night, as they studied the newly arrived corpse of one of Portland's more prominent Jewish citizens. “They should print a banner that says BELOVED SCHMUCK.”

But his son Marvin was as oblivious to the professional tricks of the trade as were the clients of the Ivy Funeral Home. He was caught up in the promotional thrust of the scheme. Driving to work each morning, to what he called “the office,” Marvin Ivy felt like a professor about to enter the chalky halls of academia, where he might be prompted to deliver a lecture on Anglo-Saxon runes. Several years earlier he had begun wearing tweed suits and carrying a two-hundred-dollar calfskin briefcase to house his colored pamphlets on casket models and monument selections. He grew a small, fuzzy mustache. The secretary began finding vestiges of Grecian Formula on the restroom towels. Then an 8×10 photo of Winston Churchill appeared in his office, among toothy school pictures of the Ivy grandchildren. “You have nothing to fear but fear itself,” he began telling the secretaries and other “upstairs employees,” who were skittish about the embalming room. Another innovative splash in funeral jargon that Marvin Ivy had coined himself was “houseguest.” No corpse entering the Ivy Funeral Home was referred to as “the deceased,” or even “the departed.” Maybe behind Marvin's back his employees verbally roughhoused the bodies, calling them stiffs, or goners, or “Friday's paycheck.” But to Marvin Ivy's face, all incoming dead were to be referred to, politely, as houseguests. “We are not a
parlor
,” he told his melancholy group of employees, “because we do not give massages. We take in
houseguests
. We are
a
funeral
home
. Think of yourselves as
hosts
. And don't slump in your suits,” he warned, as they itched in their colorful tweeds and looked more like overgrown Scottish delinquents than workers at the Ivy Funeral Home.

It was in response to hearing this speech for the first time, the one about the employees being innkeepers of sorts, that Jimmy Driscoll was prompted to speak up and ask Marvin Ivy why he didn't put out a welcome mat and stick a candle in the window. Marvin said nothing in front of the others, but the very next day Jimmy Driscoll was sucking on a milk shake in the Portland Mall and talking about getting a job selling life insurance. So no one spoke up again whenever the home-versus-a-massage-parlor lecture came down. Marvin Ivy may have thought he loomed large and authoritative as Winston Churchill before his employees, but in truth he was barely in his car, on his way home from a busy day at the office, before the barbs began to fly. “Has anyone seen the boss?” they would ask one another. “He must still be here,” someone would say. “He left his calfskin briefcase.” And then a soft moo could be heard throughout the funeral home, until all the employees took up the chorus and a loud litany of moos filled the establishment. Once, a secretary, who was biding her time until an autumn marriage, told a prospective client who had phoned for information, “Sorry. There's no more room at the inn.” Everyone in the casket showroom had cracked up when they heard about it.

One more time before he died, Old Man Ivy tried to get some light to leak in through Marvin's tightly sealed lids.

“Don't let none of this fool you, boy,” the old man said. “This has been going on ever since the first caveman threw a few daisies onto a grave. Think in terms of dollars only, son, and you'll be all right.”

The advice had fallen on ears as receptive as those belonging to an Ivy Funeral Home houseguest. The old man's words had beat against the hard walls of the embalming room, had circled like doves around the chapel and then escaped into the wide sky over Portland, Maine's, finest funeral home. They must have been interred with the old man. They must have gone back to dust next to the rattling bones in his coffin, because they simply disappeared. Now, twenty-three months before his retirement, Marvin Ivy still felt a literary jostle to his gut while driving in to the office each morning. As he cut the sharp corner onto Maple Street, the first thing he saw was the building, vine-covered, kingly, aristocratic as hell. A building that had seen some things, this building, like the Tower of London. It occurred to Marvin Ivy that if his own son, Marvin Ivy Jr., didn't get his cow patties collected soon, rather than pass the funeral home on to the foolish boy, he would turn it into one of those historic monuments and charge tourists a buck apiece to tramp through it. That's just what those broke aristocrats did to their castles in England. That's how most of those English big wheels paid their light bills. Fifty cents here and there from Ohio and Missouri and Delaware. Yes, sir. Junior had better get his horse manure into a meaningful pile soon or Marvin would change the very history of the building. Maybe he'd do it anyway. Even if Junior got his dog turds rounded up it would be only a matter of years before Junior's son, Randy, Marvin's only grandson, would inherit the family business. When Marvin Ivy thought about his vine-clad business being passed on to Randy Ivy, when he thought of his beleaguered houseguests being invited in for their brief stay by his grandson, it caused a sweat to form all over his body, a dangerous thing for tweed.

As Marvin Ivy left the office for the day, remnants of spring were lounging, still, around the squat hedges and along the prim drive. He hoisted his briefcase under his arm and sighed a heavy sigh as he surveyed his empire. It had been a busy week last week: eight from the local nursing homes, a heart attack at the new mall construction site, three automobile fatalities on Interstate 95, and a stillbirth. Thirteen houseguests made a nice tidy number that would add silver to the pockets. But that had been last week. So far this week, every living soul in Portland seemed healthy enough to force Marvin Ivy into bankruptcy. Last week thirteen. This week nothing. That number
thirteen
could grab hold of a man's superstitions, if a man let it.

In the midst of his monetary reverie Marvin was bombarded by a hideous whine that had just cut the sharp corner onto Maple Street. The amplified sound of an outboard motor, he thought at first, or worse, a high-powered chain saw on wheels. It loomed out of the setting sun that had temporarily blinded him and burst up the drive in a deafening squall, loud enough, perish the thought, to waken each of the slumbering houseguests at the Ivy Funeral Home, had any checked in.

“Shhh!” Marvin said, a finger to his lips. He pointed to a sign near the door: QUIET, PLEASE. THIS IS NOT AN AMUSEMENT PARK. Marvin was proud of the sign. It was a minor example of the imaginative sparks that illuminated his lucrative career in funeral undertaking.

“We can't have one group bawling their heads off and disturbing another group of mourners,” he had said to his wife, Pearl McKinnon Ivy, when she inquired as to the tastefulness of the wording.

“Shhh!” Marvin warned again, as the wall of sound pushed itself off the paved drive and burst across the newly sprouted grass of the funeral home lawn. It halted before him, with a rude abruptness, an inch or two from his shoes.

“SHUT IT OFF!” Marvin Ivy bellowed. “SHUT—IT—OFF!”

“What?” asked Randy Ivy, his hair dirty and dangling down his back in a limp ponytail.

“I SAID SHUT THAT GODDAMN THING OFF!” Randy turned the ignition key and the sound melted away.

“How do you like my new wheels, man?” Randy Ivy asked. The flare in the legs of his jeans had been wrapped around his skinny ankles and bound there with elastics to avoid any transportation hazards. Randy Ivy had learned this during the years he was confined to the noiseless, smokeless bicycle.

“And don't call me
man
!” Marvin shouted.

“Gramps,” Randy said.

“That's worse,” thought Marvin. “What if the mourners hear him?”

“What do you think of my new Kawasaki, Gramps?” Randy asked. His eyes glowed red.

“Get it to hell off my lawn,” Marvin warned, wondering what chemical Randy was experimenting with now. He knew a little bit about chemicals himself. They all did the same thing to the dead
and
the living. They were meant to embalm the body. In Randy's case, the brain.

“You seen my old man?” Randy asked.

“Your
father
,” Marvin said. “He's your father.”

“Yeah,” said Randy. “You seen him?”

“No,” said Marvin. “I haven't seen him. I don't especially want to see him. And I don't especially care to see
you
. You're obviously higher than a Chinese kite. And you're tearing up my goddamn front lawn!”

“Cool it, man,” Randy said. “Calm down. You'll end up a houseguest.” Marvin stared at his grandson. Blaspheme his institution, would he, this product of the ungodly sixties?

“Listen, you greasy-haired little squirt,” he said, trying to sound menacing without disobeying his own sign behind his tweeded shoulder, the one outlawing amusement park activities. “You get your
wheels
to hell out of here. And your ass, too.”

“How's business?” Randy asked. “Anybody's grandmother croak today?”

Marvin Ivy stood, slack-jawed, his tweed turning almost a full-colored navy in the sun setting over the Portland treetops. Marvin stood in front of his establishment, which looked, as the sun turned gold as wheat, more like Cambridge University than ever. He looked away from his grandson to the lot across the street that had been purchased for the sole purpose of housing the Ivy Funeral Home memorial stones. He counted to ten, his eyes moving from one sparkling, highly polished baby's monument to another. He kept his eyes on those newly arrived kiddie memorials adorned with angel wings. The monument addition to the family business was another one of Marvin's lucrative ventures, and it had proved a wise one. It was just last month that he had decided to try out an entire line of children's markers, and now they lolled in the sun, the embossed lambs weary with waiting, the angel wings that embellished the tops too heavy to fly. One. Two. Three. His eyes counted until they marked off ten memorials. As he fought to keep his blood pressure from rising, he imagined what the tenth marker, with its granite wings fluttering, might say. MARVIN RANDALL IVY III. KNOWN AS RANDY. SADLY MISSED BY GRANDMOTHER ONLY.

“Do you see that sign?” Marvin was finally able to ask. “Right there?” He pointed to a mound that would soon be flowering with pansies, those somber yet summery flowers. The sign in question said in heavy black letters: STAY OFF THE GRASS! Randy read it slowly, thought about it.

“I'm trying to, man,” Randy Ivy said, reaching into his jacket pocket and taking out a Baggie full of what his grandfather estimated to be large chunks of parsley flakes. “But this shit,” Randy said, wetting a Zig-Zag paper to his lips and beginning to expertly roll a joint, “this shit is pure Colombian.”

***

Marvin Ivy Jr. turned away from Monique Tessier, in bed at the Portland Ocean Edge Motel, and checked his watch. He hoped to make it back to the Ivy Funeral Home in time to satisfy his father that he was just away on a short business call and would be back on the job until six thirty, his usual departure time. Marvin Sr. left the office by five o'clock every day, with a timed precision Junior had never been able to acquire.