Father of the Bride (11 page)

The place began to look like a setup for
The Lost Weekend.

•  •  •

Given enough ointment there is always a fly. Given enough presents there is always One-of-Them. They are as inevitable as death. The only thing that is unpredictable is the direction from which they come. Kay’s arrived one Saturday in a large wooden box, buried deep in Its nest of excelsior as if trying to hide Its shame.

It was a china lad in a china pink coat and a china maid in a Harlem pink skirt, crossing a china bridge which did not bridge anything, on Harlem blue china feet. As It rose from Its hiding place the family looked at It in stunned silence as the crew of a South Seas whaler might have watched a sea serpent emerge from the waters beside the ship. They knew, without the necessity of words, that this was IT.

Mr. Banks was the first to recover himself. “Who?” he demanded through clenched teeth. They pawed through the excelsior and fished out a card. “With love and affection from Aunt Marne.”

A composite sound came from the Banks family. It was the cumulative cry of man’s frustration through the ages. It might have been made by a Neanderthal father who, returning to his cave, finds a saber-toothed tiger licking his whiskers at the entrance.

Aunt Marne, of all people! The one member of the family who had been counted on to come across handsomely—preferably with a substantial check! She was rich, she was unmarried and she spent a week with the Bankses each fall. When Mr. Banks thought of all the evenings he had spent listening to Aunt Marne’s non-stop chatter he was sorry he had not given way to his instincts while the opportunity was at hand and regardless of the consequences.

This was the Great Betrayal. From now on the name of Aunt Marne would be coupled with those of Judas Iscariot, Brutus, Benedict Arnold and Tojo.

“What are we going to
do
with it?” wailed Kay.

“Do you want me to tell you?” asked Mr. Banks.

Mrs. Banks examined it at arm’s length. “I suppose we’ll have to put it with the other presents. She’s apt to come popping in any time.”

“Perhaps we could change it”—hopefully.

“I’ve been looking. It doesn’t say where it came from.”

“It would be a pity to drop it,” said Mr. Banks.

They put It on a card table in a far corner. They tried It on top of a chest of drawers. They hid It on a window sill behind an electric clock. No matter where they placed It, It was the first object which struck the eye when one entered the room.

The visitors’ opening gambit was unvaried. “My
dear
, I never saw so many lovely presents.” Then they would walk straight to the Thing and stand before It, picking up little objects in the neighborhood and laying them down. It was only a matter of minutes before they would have their hands on It. Operating on the theory that offense is the best defense, Mrs. Banks stepped in at this moment and explained that it was all a huge practical joke. Once they knew how excruciating it was everyone laughed heartily, but there was a malicious note in their mirth that Mr. Banks did not like.

Life was never quite the same after the arrival of Aunt Marne’s present. Gone now the simple note. Gone the spirit of guileless appreciation for a gift as such. Gone the impartial screams of pleasure as the wrappings fell away. He who deceives a trusting dog does harm. From this point on the contents of each incoming package were appraised with the cold commercialism of an Oriental bazaar.

“What is it?”

“Another tray.”

Deep groan from Kay. “It’s a stinker, too.”

“We can take it back. Where’s it from?”

“The Tucker Gift Shop.”

“We have almost enough junk from there, darling, to get something you really want.”

“The trouble is there’s nothing in the Tucker Gift Shop that
anybody
wants.”

Mr. Banks, the erstwhile cynic of the family, found himself cringing in the face of this cold brutality. His heart went out in sympathy to the army of bread-winners who would soon be tearing out what little hair was left over the bills from the Tucker Gift Shop.

“That’s a
nice
tray,” he would remark fatuously. “What’s the matter with it? There are lots of girls would give their eyeteeth—”

“Oh, Pops, you don’t know anything
about
it. Let them
keep
their teeth. They can have it for nothing.”

Mr. Banks hated to see Kay get hard.

•  •  •

Someone had given Kay a Bride’s Book for an engagement present.

A Bride’s Book is, to a prospective bride, what a score card is to a baseball fan. The statistics are as important as the game itself. Kay’s book was bound with white satin, already autographed with her thumb prints. It contained a quotation from Longfellow on the title page.

O fortunate, O happy day

When a new household finds its place

Among the myriad homes of earth.

Mr. Banks read this several times with interest. To him it put Longfellow in the running with the prophet Isaiah. Anybody who found a place for a new household in this cockeyed world would not only be fortunate and happy, but also shot in the pants with luck. Nevertheless, he thought it struck rather a gloomy note for a book of this kind.

It was only a matter of minutes before they would have their hands on It.

But Kay wasn’t interested in housing. Her competitive sense was aroused by the blank pages for listing each present and the name of the donor. A number was printed before each entry space, and in the back of the book were perforated sheets of corresponding gummed numbers to be pasted on the presents.

Kay had examined these sheets immediately to be sure there were enough numbers to meet her estimates. Although her memory for figures was notoriously bad, she knew exactly how many presents each of her friends had received since Sally Gross had led off the bridal procession five years ago.

Booboo Batchelder had held the record for the last two years at 234. Her friends had always regarded it as unfair competition inasmuch as Booboo’s father had once been a Senator. But statistics were statistics nevertheless.

Kay made no predictions. She was an ambitious young woman, however, accustomed to setting her sights high. Her motto was “235 or bust.” She had no Senator father to fall back on, but she had built up a clientele of her own over the years. From her point of view at the moment quality or desirability did not matter. It was quantity that counted.

•  •  •

True to the American tradition, the receiving of gifts, which had been started so simply and spontaneously, soon developed into an organized industry in which each person became a specialist.

Mr. Banks’ field was the disposal of empty cartons, wrapping paper and excelsior. No one appointed him to this important work. It merely seemed to fall to his lot by a process of natural selection.

Being a thrifty man, when left to his own devices, he foresaw a vague future use for all this material. He cleaned out a corner of the cellar by consolidating other objects for which he also had a vague future use.

Each day the debris was piled waist-high in the back hall. One by one he bumped the cartons down the cellar stairs, sorted out the wrapping paper, jammed the excelsior into a special box and nested the empties neatly.

The corner filled rapidly and, as the boxes began to cover the entire cellar floor, his system broke down. Now he merely stuffed the loose debris into the cartons, carried them to the foot of the stairs and kicked them toward the nearest available space. The restoration of order was clearly something to be deferred for a rainy Saturday afternoon. Ultimately his chief problem was to keep a passageway open to the oil burner.

His task would have been dull, but relatively simple, had it not been for gross inefficiency in the higher echelons.

“Mother, what in the
world
did you do with that box from Rose Wood?”

“You mean the one with the tumblers?”

“Yes.”

“Why, I don’t know, dear. I suppose I put it in the back hall.”

“But,
Mother
, I hadn’t finished
unpacking
it. I was called away. I
do
wish, Mother—”

The place began to remind him of the hold of a badly packed cargo ship.

“Your father will know, dear,” said Mrs. Banks soothingly, going to the head of the stairs.

“Stanley.”

“Yes?”

“Did you notice that one of those boxes you took down to the cellar wasn’t quite unpacked?”

Mr. Banks put down his newspaper. “Now listen, Ellie—”

“Well, won’t you just run down in the cellar and have a look, dear. It’s a box from Scranton. Just bring it up and we’ll go through it up here.”

Or again: “Darling, I’m afraid we’ve left a card somewhere in one of the boxes. A set of beautiful salad plates came and we don’t know who sent them. Are you sure there wasn’t a card in one of those cartons you brought down?”

Mr. Banks admitted that it was barely possible that he had carried a card down to the cellar without noticing it.

“Well, won’t you try and find that box, dear, and just run through it. It was from the Tucker Gift Shop, so it ought to be easy.”

Mr. Banks returned to the cellar. The place began to remind him of the hold of a badly packed cargo ship. Which boxes had come today, which yesterday or which a week ago was any man’s guess. And half of them were from the Tucker Gift Shop.

He plunged his hands into the nearest carton, came up with an armful of paper shavings and tossed them moodily onto the concrete floor. Half an hour later he reappeared dragging streamers of packing from either ankle.

Mrs. Banks called to him from the living room. “Oh, Stanley. Thanks, dear. Kay found the card. It was stuck between two plates. Mrs. Morley sent them. Wasn’t that sweet of her?”

“I’m going to take a bath,” said Mr. Banks.

The present-gazers began to arrive now in substantial numbers. Although their words were floated on milk and honey, they were obviously there for one, or all, of four purposes:

1. to see how their present stacked up with those of their competitors;

2. to find out if it was being given a favorable display position;

3. to judge if Kay was faring better in either quality or quantity than their recently married daughter;

4. to pick up ideas for cheap presents that look expensive.

Mrs. Banks, having been a present-gazer for years, knew only too well the importance of position. She became an expert at juggling the arrangement of the objects on the card tables. While she engaged her guests in animated chatter her eyes were on the door and her fingers were moving ceaselessly about the tables. As a result, by the time a donor moved across the room he would find his gift enshrined between Kay’s flat silver and the super-de-luxe china from Aunt Emily.

It was a woman’s world. Accompanying male present-gazers appeared only between five-thirty and seven. They would totter around the room behind their female convoys, staring over their shoulders with codlike eyes, until Mr. Banks took pity on them and put drinks into their hands. As their vicelike fingers closed over the cool, moist surface of the glass they would look at him gratefully murmuring, “Oh, I really don’t want this. Thanks.”

At this point male gazers abandoned all further attempts to examine presents. Mr. Banks talked to them at the other end of the room until their knees began to sag. Then he converted the living room into a kind of crèche and spread them around in vacant chairs until they were called for.

   11   

GENTLEMEN’S CATERERS ALL ARE WE

We must do something about the caterer,” said Mrs. Banks.

“The what?” Mr. Banks understood perfectly.

“Darling, did you think Delilah was going to handle the wedding reception all by herself?”

Mr. Banks couldn’t truthfully say that he had thought about the matter at all—or that he wanted to think about it now.