A Wedding on the Banks (4 page)

“He'll probably die right on time, too,” Junior had said to his wife, Thelma. “He'll probably kick off at five o'clock sharp someday to go to that casket showroom in the sky.”

Junior squinted his eyes, gathering up enough afternoon light flitting past the thick motel curtains to read the digits. Five thirty.

“Damn,” he said.

“Mmmm?” Monique stirred beside him. It was most likely Marvin had already noticed that Monique was not at her desk in the reception area. The other female employee at the Ivy Funeral Home, the secretary-accountant, was supposed to cover for Monique if Marvin Ivy came around, smelling of sweaty tweed and calfskin and asking questions.

“Tell him I have a dental appointment,” Monique had begged Milly Bishop. So when Marvin Ivy turned up at four thirty to inquire as to Junior's whereabouts, Milly was ready for him.

“He had a business appointment,” Milly lied, “and will be back any minute.”

“Where's Miss Tessier?” Marvin had asked, noticing the empty chair and paperless desk.

“Dental appointment,” said Milly, too flustered with lying to look her boss in the face.

“Dental appointment?” Marvin asked. “That's the fourth one this month. How many teeth has the woman got?”

“Thirty-two,” said Milly sheepishly, as if Monique had urged her to say this as well if asked. “I think humans have thirty-two,” she repeated, and then went back to mailing coffin bills to the still-stricken relatives of houseguests.

“Damn!” Junior said again, and threw back the covers. Monique pushed brunette hair away from her eyes and then opened them.

“What?” she asked.

“The time,” said Junior. “The old man is gonna raise the roof over this.”

“Well, why don't we meet
after
work, sweetheart? Wouldn't that make it so much easier?” Monique walked her fingers among the forest of hairs on Junior's chest.

“You know why.” Junior grunted and lurched forward to a sitting position. The acquisition of belly that he had worked for all his life, a nest egg of fat tissues and fat cells and skin dimples, jiggled as he hoisted his pants up over his hips.

“You know damn well Thelma would have the fire department out looking for me if I came home ten minutes late.” Junior studied his face in the motel mirror. He hated the lighting in motel rooms. It had all the ambience of a police lineup. His image filled the tiny mirror, towered dark and heavy, like Citizen Kane.

“Well, let her then,” Monique said. “The trouble with Thelma is that she has nothing better to do with her time.”

“Don't start,” said Junior, and slipped his feet into his shoes.

“When she comes into the funeral home, she talks like she's drugged. I know those Valiums her doctor gives her keep her on another planet.”

“Don't start,” said Junior.

“And Randy would be such a nice boy if he only had a little discipline.” Monique said this as she pulled her cotton sweater over her head and then fluffed her hair. She took her skirt off the chair by the side of the bed and stepped carefully into it.

“I don't know why you don't just put your foot down,” Monique said. She applied a fresh layer of lipstick to each lip, then rolled them together to smooth the effect. “The girls will be space cadets too, with Thelma as a role model.”

“Don't start.”

“And where does that leave us? Sneaking off like high school kids. Hiding from your wife
and
your father. Why can't we go to dinner? Spend a weekend in Boston? See a movie now and then? We never do anything but go to bed in the middle of the afternoon at the same damn motel. Day after day after day.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Junior, as he opened the door for the Ivy Funeral Home secretary. “You're gonna start.”

***

Pearl brought Marvin's after-dinner coffee in to where he lounged in the living room. He was reading the obituary page like a broker scouring the
Wall
Street
Journal.

“Sicily called today in a panic,” Pearl said. “It seems some boy is stupid enough to marry Amy Joy. Can you imagine?” But Marvin wasn't listening to matrimonial news.

“I don't understand it,” he said to Pearl, who was milking his coffee the way he liked it. “They seem to be dying just fine in Bangor, and Brunswick, and Lewiston. What the hell is Portland holding out for?”

“People are living longer nowadays,” said Pearl. “People are healthier.”

“Healthy is one thing,” said Marvin. “Immortal is another.”

“Oh, it can't be that bad, can it now?” asked Pearl. She settled back with a large thump onto the sofa. Her body had deteriorated more this very year than any other. She could feel it happening, the joints stiffening with rust, the skin loosening, the yellow growing in her eyes as though they were gardens of weeds. Every morning since the twenty-fifth of January, when it had first occurred, she had awakened before daylight and lain beside Marvin Ivy and whispered to herself over and over again, “I am sixty years old now. I am sixty years old.”

And so she was. The Reverend Ralph C. McKinnon, her father, had seen her last when she was thirteen. Now she was sixty. Would he recognize her when her turn came and she died and went to heaven? Would he know that the graying woman, large and solid like the McKinnons, with the arthritic hip and crow's-feet smile, was the same little girl who wore the brunette braids in 1923? That was the day of good-bye, as the Reverend set out for China, never to be seen again. He had died there of a disease transmitted by an insect of some kind. Pearl could no longer remember what. But the Reverend wasn't her problem in the gray morning hours as the first light of dawn settled over Portland, over her house, over her very bedroom. It was her mother's face that got her up long before daylight and kept her awake long after Marvin's heavy snores were cascading from his side of the bed. She was little more than four years old when Grace McKinnon died giving birth to Pearl's younger sister, Sicily. Yet Pearl could see her mother's face, pure, calm, with the dream of life still unbroken. When she was not quite awake or not quite asleep, that's when it filtered in to her. A mother's face, awash in plainness, the skin pale and milky. The thin hair that fell along the sides like silver willows was soft with forgiveness. She was not a pioneer, Grace McKinnon, but delicate and sickly. And she proved that by dying as Sicily was born.

Sometimes her mother's face turned into her sister Marge's, dead a decade, who had raised Sicily and Pearl after the Reverend embarked for a career and death in China. Poor Marge. What a sad, lonely life for such a young girl. Pearl felt a twinge of guilt. She and Marge had not always been on the same team. Sometimes they hadn't even been in the same ballpark. But she missed her dearly. Marge had died of beriberi—had refused to eat anything but polished rice and Chinese tea as a tribute to the great missionaries of the world. Marge had died unmarried, unhappy, unfulfilled, and now Pearl wanted to tell her that—although she herself had a husband, a son, three grandchildren—she was feeling that life had dealt them the same round of cards, but in different games.

“This dry spell keeps up and I'll have to fire Barney,” said Marvin, and drank some more coffee. “It's getting to the point nowadays where nursing homes are teaching exercise and fitness. What do people want, for Chrissakes? To live to be a hundred?”

“Fire Barney?” asked Pearl. Barney Killam had been with the Ivy Funeral Home for thirty-eight years. Old Man Ivy himself had hired him. “Isn't he about to retire?”

“We've been saying that for ten years,” said Marvin, and turned to the sports page. Perhaps it was business as usual in that category at least. “He'll never retire. We'll just embalm him one day and stand him in the corner.”

“Good heavens, Marvin. It seems to me that firing Barney after thirty-eight years of service would be unfair.”

“Well, I can't let any of my new blood go just to keep Barney working,” Marvin said. Pearl thought about the situation.

“Well, don't tell Barney
why
you're firing him,” she said. “He may be tempted to bump somebody off.”

“You can't blame a man for loving his job.” Marvin put his shoeless feet up onto the ottoman. Pearl had come to accept almost every tenet and ism of funeralology over the forty years they'd been married. Had even grown used to her Mattagash sisters being unable to deal with death and its earthly ministers, the undertakers. “Funeral directors,” Pearl was still correcting Sicily after forty years. “Please, Sicily, not undertakers.” But some notions were harder to swallow. This was one. That white-headed Barney might slink in dark alleys in hopes of slaying potential houseguests in order to keep his job was too much. Pearl tried not to imagine him in court, bent as a willow tree, weeping about missing the embalming room. And he
had
been the best embalmer. A real artist. But now the trembling in his hands limited him to shaking hands with mourners and offering his condolences. Pearl realized that Barney's hands were probably incapable of murder these days. She imagined the raised silver knife glancing off the victim and skittering like a fish along the pavement. She saw the bullet refusing to go into the gun as brittle fingers pushed at it. The match unable to ignite with such a slight scratch of itself down an alley wall. Old Barney couldn't hurt a fly even if he were a spider and wanted to. He was too fragile with age, Pearl decided, and let the issue drop.

“Speaking of firing,” Marvin said, his voice tight with tension. Pearl's jaw grew taut. She waited. Nothing.

“Yes?” she asked, finally. “What about it?” The tension floated like a balloon between them, ready to burst at the first sharp word.

“If I ever run into Junior at work, I may just fire him.” Marvin said this quickly, hoping to make it sound as matter-of-fact as the possible firing of Barney Killam. But this was different. This was treading upon ground higher and taller than any sacred mound an Indian even conceived of building, for this Junior, this large, pinkish philandering heap, was, at thirty-eight years old, Pearl's one and only baby.
Juniorkins,
she had called him in his baby years, and on occasion she still slipped and called him this. Juniorkins. And it seemed, she was sure, to please him. She had done all a mother could to protect Junior for years. His classmates had been cruel, she knew, singling him out on the basis of his father's profession. So she had cradled him from those awful creatures all she could, had plied him with cakes and candies and high-caloric meals, insisting his bouts with unhappiness were a sure sign of low sugar. When Junior jilted her to marry batty little Thelma Parsons, Pearl had felt, family business metaphors aside, that a great grave had opened up wide and swallowed any chances for future happiness for her only child. Now Thelma Parsons Ivy had proved true to Pearl's expectations of her. She was battier than ever. She was driving poor Junior to his wits' end. Pearl knew this. A mother senses inner turmoil, regardless of how many layers of fatty tissue she must go through to reach it.

“And Monique, the secretary with the big tits, was gone again. Another dental appointment.” Marvin offered more evidence, but to Pearl it was even further proof of poor Junior's marital unhappiness. Thelma could have had breast implants. Pearl had seen her bras in the laundry room. Thirty-two A's. “Walnuts,” Pearl had thought, “could fit in these cups.” How then could Junior
not
be tempted when veritable melons were flaunted before him, day after day? Pearl did pale at the thought of Monique, a fortune hunter, a gold digger if she ever saw one, trying to finagle her way in through the showroom doors of the Ivy Funeral Home as Junior's second wife. And that was what Monique was after, to be sure. What woman wouldn't want to be first lady of Portland's largest, most academic funeral parlor?
Parlor.
Pearl grimaced. The last thing she needed that evening was the “we do not give massages” lecture. Pearl glanced over at Marvin, but he was staring straight ahead, still consumed with the anger he had brought home over Junior's habitual disappearances.

“All he thinks of is sex and food,” Marvin said. “In that order.”

Pearl wished that Junior would come to
her
for the food, and for some motherly consolation. She might not be able to compete with Monique Tessier in some departments, but she could hold her own with quick, drive-through restaurants and the seedy sort of menus one might find in sleazy motels. She would make her son a three-tiered sandwich of homemade bread, cut him a monstrous slice of cake, fill a glass of Shulman's Dairy milk up to a frosty brim. She would rub his shoulders and call him Juniorkins.

“Maybe it was just a coincidence,” Pearl said, of Junior and Monique's magical codisappearance.

“Any more coincidences like that and the woman won't have a tooth left in her head,” said Marvin. He finished off the coffee.

“This is Thelma's fault,” Pearl said, her eyes on Junior's bronzed baby shoes, which glittered on the top shelf of the bookcase. Pearl could, if she listened hard enough, long enough, still hear the lovely patter of those plump little footfalls. “My God, where does the time go?” she wondered.

“No. He's a grown man,” said Marvin. “It's no one's fault but his own. He has a business thrown into his lap, for Chrissakes, and he's still too lazy to do a day's work.”

So here it was, the continuing argument between Marvin and Pearl for years, between husband and wife, between father and mother.

“The funeral business makes him nervous,” Pearl said.

“Yeah, well let him shovel shit somewhere and see if
that
makes him feel any better. Any other boss would fire him anyway. He's lazy, Pearl. You might as well admit that.”