Ladder of Years (43 page)

“It’s a dopey dress,” Susie said, but she turned and crossed the room to fling open the closet door. White chiffon exploded forth. Both twins rose, as if pulled by strings, and floated toward the closet with their lips parted. Susie slammed the door shut again. A filmy white triangle poked through on the hinge side.

“And your veil? Show her your veil,” Eliza urged.

Obediently, Susie stomped over to the wastebasket.
“Here’s
my veil,” she said, and she pulled out several tatters of gauze and a headband of white silk roses snipped into jagged shreds.

The two aunts sucked in their breaths. Spence said, “Great God Almighty!”

“Allow me to model it for you,” Susie said. She clamped the headband around her neck, then let her head flop to one side and half closed her eyes and stuck out her tongue.

“Susan Grinstead!” Linda shrieked.

“So,” Susie said calmly, removing the headpiece. “Driscoll and I are sitting downstairs last night, watching a movie. Folks had made this big federal case about how I ought to spend my final unwedded hours in my ancestral home.”

“Well, how would it have
looked
?” Linda demanded.

Susie dropped the headband into the wastebasket. “So the two of us are in the study like old times,” she said, “and the phone rings. It’s this high-school-sounding boy; you can tell the call is taking all his courage. He clears his throat and says, ‘Um, yes! Good evening. May I please speak to Courtney, please?’ I tell him he has the wrong number. Not ten seconds later:
ring!
Same boy. ‘Um, good evening. May I please—’ ‘You must have misdialed,’ I tell him. So we’re just getting settled again—Driscoll had rented
Nightmare on Elm Street
; he thinks it’s the major motion picture of our time—when sure enough:
ring! ring!
Driscoll says, ‘Let me handle this.’ He picks up the receiver. ‘Yeah?’ he says. Listens a minute. Says, ‘Tough luck, feller. Courtney doesn’t want to have anything to do with you.’ And slams the phone down.”

“Oh! How mean!” Delia said involuntarily, and Eliza clucked her tongue. Then everyone looked at Driscoll’s sister. “Well, sorry, Spence,” Delia told her, “but really! That poor boy!”

“Yes, it
was
mean,” Spence said complacently. She prinked her skirt out around her. “But that’s how guys are, Sooze. What can you do?”

“It is not how guys are,” Susie said. “Or if it is, all the more reason not to marry
anyone.
But for sure I’m not marrying Driscoll. And don’t you defend him, Spence Avery! There is nothing you can say that will make him look good to me after that.”

Thérèse said, “Couldn’t he just apologize?”

“Apologize to who? Not to me; I’m not the one whose feelings he hurt. No, I see it all now,” Susie said. She was drifting around the room
without apparent purpose, wearing her T-shirt and pajama bottoms. She stopped in front of the mirror to yank at a handful of hair; then she continued her travels. “All these things I’ve been trying not to notice all this time. Like when we get ready to go out and he says, ‘How do I look?’ and I say, ‘Fine,’ he just goes, ‘Thanks,’ and never mentions how
I
look. Or when I’m telling him something that happened, he won’t let me tell it my way. He always has to interrupt, to sort of … redirect. So I’ll say, like, ‘This patient of Dad’s came into the shop today—’ and right away he’s, ‘Wait a minute, you know who your dad’s patients are? Isn’t that a violation of confidentiality?’ and, ‘Now hold on, she asked for this by brand name? Or not,’ and, ‘What you should have told her is …’ Till I feel like saying, ‘Just shut up! Shut up! Shut up and let me get to the end of this story which I’m sorry now I ever began!’ And speaking of my shop—”

What shop?
Delia would have asked, except she didn’t want to sound like Driscoll.

“He has never for one minute supported me on that. Oh, at the start he did because he thought it was just a whim, you know? He figured it would pass. But then when I borrowed the money from Gram—”

Eleanor had lent Susie money? (Eleanor didn’t believe in lending money.) Susie must have noticed Delia’s bafflement, because she said, “Oh. I’ve started this kind of like, business. House in a Box, I call it.”

“A darling little business!” Linda chimed in.

“Got a mention in
Baltimore
magazine,” Eliza said, “two and one-quarter inches long.”

“I’d moved to an apartment,” Susie told Delia, “after that bust-up with Dad. Me and Driscoll found a place on St. Paul Street. Well, I couldn’t have afforded anything by myself. And I was looking for a job, but first I wanted to settle in, you know? Buy supplies for the kitchen and all. We had some furniture from home but no incidental stuff, skillets and stuff; didn’t own so much as a spatula. So there I was, running around the stores, spending a fortune I didn’t have, finding one thing one place and another thing another place. … I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if they sold a kitchen in a
box?
Kind of a one-stop purchase?’ And that’s what started me thinking. So now I’ve got this little showroom out past the fairgrounds; well, it’s only about three feet square, but—”

“It’s darling!” Linda said.

“And I sell these boxes: Kitchen in a Box, Bathroom in a Box …
just things I buy in bulk and combine in a kit and deliver, you know? I’ve tacked an ad on every campus bulletin board for miles around. I’m open seven days a week and I’m slaving away like a dog; that’s why I set the wedding for a Monday. Didn’t want to miss the weekend shoppers. As it is, I’m closed till Friday, which I hate. But Driscoll acts like this is some kind of hobby. When he heard about Gram’s loan he was, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t want to get in over your head, hon.’ He was, ‘Wouldn’t want to bite off more than you can chew, now, hon.’ So discouraging and dampening; he doesn’t think I’m up to this. Doesn’t credit me with the brains to buy a simple shower curtain for college kids and a few damn rings to hang it with.”

“Now, Susie, that is just not fair,” Spence told her staunchly. “He’s only trying to protect you.”

“Plus he leaves spat-out fruit pits all over the apartment,” Susie said.

Eliza suddenly set the mug on the bureau, as if this were the last straw.

“So I stopped
Nightmare on Elm Street
,” Susie said, “and I gave him back his ring and sent him packing. And then I phoned the realtor, but I guess it was too late at night. And I’m sorry you all came for nothing, but I said to Dad, I said, ‘Which is more trouble: calling off the wedding or suing for divorce?’”

“Where
is
Sam, anyhow?” Eliza wondered.

Delia was glad she hadn’t had to ask that herself.

“He went to dress for the wedding,” Susie said.

“But you did tell him—”

“I did tell him I’d changed my mind, but he just shut his eyes a minute and then he said he had to go dress for the wedding.”

Yes, that was Sam, all right.

Delia stood up. She said, “I should get busy.”

“Doing what?” Linda demanded.

“I have to phone the realtor.”

She started for the door (the nearest phone was in Eliza’s room), but Linda said, “Delia, my stars! Are you just going to accept this?”

“What else can I do?” she asked. “Drag her by the hair to the altar?”

“You could reason with her, for God’s sake!”

“This is not a now-or-never proposition,” Delia told her. (Really she was telling Susie, who stood leaning against the bureau, watching her with interest.) “If Susie isn’t sure she wants to marry Driscoll today, she
can marry him tomorrow, or next week, or next year. What’s the hurry?”

“She
can say that,” Linda told the others.
“She
didn’t fork over an arm and a leg for three airline tickets.”

Delia latched the door quietly behind her.

At the same time, Sam’s door, catty-corner across the hall, swung open and he stepped forth. He was tugging down his shirt cuffs. He caught sight of her and stopped still. They were separated by the stairwell, with its varnished wooden balustrade, and so she waited where she was. He said, “Why, Delia.”

“Hello, Sam.”

His suit was that slim, handsome black one they had bought on sale several years ago. His face looked thinner. It was all straight lines—straight gray eyes and an arrow of a nose and a mouth that seemed
too
straight until (she knew) you saw the upward turns at the corners. His glasses happened to be slipping, the way they had a tendency to do, and when he raised a hand to adjust them he appeared to be doubting his eyesight. She said, “Didn’t you know I was coming?”

“I knew,” he said.

“Well … I guess you heard Susie’s not going through with the wedding.”

“She’ll go through with it,” he said. He rounded the balustrade—no, not to approach her (though already she had taken her first step forward to meet him), but to start down the stairs. “We’ll proceed as planned,” he sent back as he descended. “She’ll come around.”

Delia gazed down at him over the railing. She could clearly see his scalp through the fair hair on top of his head.
If I glimpsed him in a crowd, I’d say he was just another worn-out, aging man
, she thought. But she didn’t really believe that.

She made herself turn away and go into Eliza’s room.

Here, too, she sensed a difference. The furniture was the same, but there wasn’t a single object on the bureau, and only the gaunt, old-fashioned black telephone sat on the nightstand. Had Eliza changed rooms, or what? This one had been hers from the day she was born.

I knew
, he had said.
We’ll proceed as planned
, he had said.

Well, no point dwelling on it. Delia propped the realtor’s card on the nightstand, lifted the receiver, and dialed.

“This is Joe Bright,” a man announced thinly. “I can’t come to the phone right now, but you may leave a message after the beep.”

“Mr. Bright, this is Delia Grinstead calling, Susan Grinstead’s
mother. Could you please get back to me as soon as possible? It’s very important. The number is …”

As she hung up, she heard the doorbell ring downstairs. “Hello, come in,” Sam said, and next she heard one of those drawling, gravelly, Roland Park matron voices. Instantly, she lost all her confidence. She wasn’t wearing enough makeup and her dress wasn’t dressy enough, and when she looked in Eliza’s mirror, her face seemed unformed and childish.

But she might have just imagined that, because when she started down the stairs (planting her feet just so and holding her head very high), everyone looked up at her with the most respectful attention. The pastor—a tweedy, shaggy man—said, “Mrs. Grinstead! What a pleasure!” and Driscoll’s parents broke off their chitchat with Sam.

“It’s a pleasure to see
you
, Dr. Soames,” she said. (Considering she attended church only on major holidays, she was impressed that she remembered his name.) “Hello, Louise. Hello, Malcolm.”

“Why, hello, Delia,” Louise Avery said, as if they’d last seen each other yesterday. She was a leathery woman with a lion’s mane of gold hair rearing back off her forehead. Her husband—older, smaller, crinkly-eyed—said, “I don’t guess you could have brought some sunshine with you.”

“Oh,” Delia said, and she glanced past him toward the door. “Is it raining?” she asked.

“No, no, we’re sure it will hold off till later,” Louise said. “I was telling Malcolm this morning, I said, ‘At least this is one good thing about a home wedding.’ Can you imagine if they’d planned a big formal church affair? Or something out on the lawn?”

“No, I certainly … can’t,” Delia said.

She looked over at Sam, but he was fitting Dr. Soames’s rolled umbrella into the umbrella stand, and he didn’t meet her eyes.

Maybe they would just have this wedding without the bride, she thought. Was that the plan?

In the living room, all available chairs had been lined up facing the fireplace. That must be where Dr. Soames would stand. In the dining room, Linda and Eliza were setting out platters of pastries. In the kitchen, the twins were gazing enraptured at Driscoll; he was discussing the honeymoon. “I told Sooze we ought to just head to Obrycki’s for crabs,” he said. “Call
that
our honeymoon, in keeping with the general tone of the wedding. And she said, ‘Or why not carry-out?’ but in the end we settled for three days at—Oh, Miz Grinstead! Hey there!”

“Hello, Driscoll,” Delia said. She was puzzled to see him looking so cheerful. He was dressed in a navy suit with a white rose in the lapel, and his face had a scrubbed, fresh, oblivious look. She said, “Ah, have you … talked with Susie this morning?”

“Oh, can’t see the bride before the ceremony, Miz Grinstead!” he said, wagging a finger.

“Yes, but just to talk with her—talk on the phone, maybe,” Delia said.

“Say! Where’s those ushers of mine, Miz Grinstead? Any sign of them yet?”

“Ushers?”

“Ramsay and Carroll!”

“Well, no, I … gosh, I hope someone thought to wake them,” she said. Neither one of the boys had yet lost the knack of sleeping till noon.

“Maybe you should give them a ring,” Driscoll told her.

With her mind on wedding matters, she thought for an instant he meant the kind of ring you wear on your finger. She looked at him blankly. Then Eliza, sailing past with a three-tiered cake stand, said, “Why they need ushers anyhow, with no one but family attending and seats for not more than a dozen …”

“It’s so these glamorous bridesmaids will have somebody’s arm to hang on to,” Driscoll said, winking at the twins. Marie-Claire giggled, and Thérèse sent him a solemn, worshipful stare and stood straighter inside her tepee of mint lace.

Delia gave up and left the kitchen. She would go see if Susie had decided to get married after all. Who knows, she might have. (For it was easy to believe, in such company, that she was at this moment adjusting her magically reconstructed veil.) And if so, then Delia would check on the boys, make sure they were awake and dressed.

But the boys were already downstairs, standing by the front door in their suits. They looked astoundingly grown-up—Ramsay square-jawed and almost portly now, Carroll as wiry as ever but taller, with something more carved about his face. With them were Ramsay’s girlfriend, Velma, wearing an upside-down pink hollyhock of a dress that ended just below her crotch, and her little daughter (who? oh, Rosalie) in aqua. Ramsay said, “Hi, Mom,” and kissed Delia’s cheek, and Carroll allowed her to hug him, and Velma said, “Well, hey! How was your trip?”