The Amateur Marriage (20 page)

Pauline was the one who feared crashing. She wrung several tissues into shreds while they were waiting to board, and as she was kissing Sally goodbye she said, “If anything should happen to us, I’ve left a note in my jewelry box about what should go to whom.”

“Listen to you!” Sally cried. “Nothing’s going to happen!”

“I know it’s only costume stuff, but there are several pieces that different people have admired in the past.”

Sally hugged her. “You-all have a good trip,” she said. “Give Lindy my love, hear?”—although of course she and Lindy had never met. She shooed the two of them toward the door, and they turned to follow the others onto the tarmac.

The flight itself struck Michael as something of a disappointment. He had expected more of a sense of being airborne, but once the plane had taken off (laboriously, like some out-of-practice water bird), it was steady as a locomotive, and the rows of other passengers on either side of the aisle made him feel that he was just in an extra-narrow waiting room. He almost couldn’t tell they were moving. “Look!” Pauline told him, pointing out her window. (She was her usual dauntless self again.) He leaned past her and saw a river far below, long and winding and yet apparently motionless, reflecting a striated, silvery gray like the trail left by the broad side of a pencil lead. No highways or buildings showed anywhere; nothing but clustered tree-tops as green as broccoli florets. Hawks would have seen this sight, and bald eagles, when the country was unexplored wilderness. Then the plane climbed into a bank of clouds and the window turned white, and Michael sat back in his seat.

“I’m wondering if I should have brought Lindy’s medical records,” Pauline said.

“What medical records?” he asked.

“They must still have them on file at her pediatrician’s office.”

“Oh, hon . . .” he said. But he didn’t add that their daughter was long past the age for a pediatrician.

Pauline was quiet after that. While he watched, her eyelids began to flutter shut, and several times she blinked and sat straighter before she let her head nod against the window. Michael couldn’t sleep himself, although they’d had to wake up very early for their flight. He studied the emergency instructions he found in the seat-back pocket; he leafed through a
Newsweek
handed to him by the stewardess. Pauline gave a little snorting sound and her mouth fell open. She would have been embarrassed if she’d known. In honor of the trip she had put on a darker-red lipstick, which always made her look older, and powder that was caking in her dimples. He saw that her dimples were more like tiny dry incisions now—something he hadn’t noticed till this moment. And her eyelids had a crumpled look, and her stockinged thighs bulged like sausages below her miniskirt.

Back in 1957, for their fifteenth anniversary, Pauline had proposed that they dress up and have a formal photograph taken. She said that already she’d had to pluck four gray hairs from her head and that was just the beginning; she was starting to grow old and she would never, ever look this good again. Michael had been amused. Okay with him, he’d said, if that was what she wanted. So they’d gone to Aronson’s Portrait Studio—Michael in his suit, Pauline in her gray silk—and the photographer had arranged them in front of a velvet curtain that puddled in artful folds around their feet. “A little closer together,” he’d said. “Mrs., lift your chin a bit . . . Mr., put your arm around Mrs. . . .” Michael had obeyed, encircling Pauline’s waist and clasping her elbow just inside the hem of her sleeve; and something or other—the new sponginess of her bare skin, perhaps, or the unfamiliar scent of the silk—had made him feel for just an instant that he was standing next to a stranger. Who
was
this woman? What did she have to do with him? How could they be expected to share a house, rear children together, combine their separate lives for all time? The knob of her shoulder pressing into his armpit had felt like an inanimate object.

Yet the finished photo on Pauline’s bureau showed an ordinary couple: Mr. and Mrs. Perfectly Fine, standing side by side and smiling the same stiff smile. A gilt-framed commercial. An advertisement for marriage.

From the air, San Francisco looked beautiful. It appeared to be mostly water, so much so that for a moment, Michael thought their plane was going to miss dry land altogether; and Pauline pointed out a distant bridge that could be the Golden Gate, although it was actually red. Then during the cab ride from the airport, they saw more water and dramatic mountains with picturesque little settlements tumbling down their sides. Poor, plain, humble Baltimore wasn’t even in the running.

The cabdriver was an elderly man in a brown felt hat that rested squarely on his ears. He was not the talkative sort, although Pauline tried to get a conversation going once she’d given him the address. “Have you lived here all your life?” she asked him.

He said, “Yup.”

“Well, it sure is a
pretty
place.”

He said, “Mmhmm.”

“We just got in from Baltimore, Maryland. This is the first time I personally have been west of the Mississippi.”

No response.

The silence made Michael feel self-conscious, so that he spoke in a soft, furry mumble when he picked up the tail of an argument they’d been having before they landed. “The trouble with going to the hospital first—” he confided to Pauline.

“What, Michael? I can’t hear you,” she said in a bugle voice.

He closed his eyes and then opened them and started over, more distinctly but just as quietly. “If we go to the hospital first, we’ll have to carry our luggage.”

“So? It’s one little suitcase.”

“Yes, but then if they let us take Lindy and she has luggage, too—”

“Michael, I refuse to waste time unpacking my nightgown when I’ve got a sick daughter waiting.”

“No one’s asking you to unpack your nightgown. All I’m saying is—”

“Our daughter’s in the hospital,” Pauline told the driver, raising her voice even further. “We learned about it just yesterday.”

“Retreat,” the driver said.

“Pardon?”

“They call the place a retreat, not a hospital.”

Michael had thought, for a second, that the driver had been telling
them
to retreat. Even in these circumstances, he found the misunderstanding comical.

Pauline said, “How do you know that?”

“Everybody knows Nineteen Fleet Street.”

“It’s a . . . retreat?”

“It’s run by the brothers,” the driver said.

“Oh, Catholic brothers?”

“More like . . . yogis or something.”

Pauline sent Michael a look he couldn’t read.

“Hold on, there,” she said to the driver. “Are you telling me our daughter’s joined a cult?”

“Naw, it’s not the kind of thing you’d
join
,” the driver said. “They go out and pick you up. That’s their what-do-you-say, mission. They scrape people off the street and haul them in to tend them.”

“Scrape people off the—”

“Your drugged-out types. Your druggy, hippie, beatnik types on the LSD and the mushrooms and such.”

Michael decided he disliked the man intensely. He turned toward Pauline and said, in a low, urgent voice, “We could go to the tourist home beforehand and leave the suitcase there. You said yourself the landlady said it’s an easy walk to—”

“Actually, our daughter’s had a nervous breakdown,” Pauline told the driver. “We’ve come to take her back east with us. We’ve always been a very close, very loving family and we know that she’ll be fine once she’s in familiar surroundings.”

The driver merely flicked his turn signal on.

They were traveling through the city now. At first, Michael found the houses impressive. They were strikingly handsome antiques with lacy trim, turrets and balconies and widow’s walks, stained-glass windows, steep roofs. But gradually they grew seedier. As if the cab were swooping forward in time, the paint started peeling and the shutters started sagging and the gingerbread chipped and crumbled. The window curtains changed to Indian bedspreads or faded American flags. Then some windows were boarded over. A boy with long hair, in layers of rags, leaned against a lamppost with his eyes closed. The cabdriver punched down his door lock; so Michael and Pauline punched down theirs.

Nineteen Fleet Street was just another worn-out house. Not even a sign identified it. Pauline asked the driver, “Are you sure this is the place?”

He said, “Yup.”

She was the one sitting on the curb side of the cab and so she yanked her door handle, apparently forgetting that she had punched the lock down. “Oops,” she said. Her mistake seemed to undo her. She slid lower in her seat and let out a whimper of a breath. Before Michael could come to her rescue, the driver reached back and pulled up the button. “There you go,” he told her.

She yanked the handle again and stumbled out onto the sidewalk, her miniskirt rucked up and her purse strap catching briefly on the window crank.

“Hope it turns out all right,” the driver told Michael.

But Michael still disliked him. He gave him a measly dollar tip, even though the fare was astronomical.

The man who answered their ring didn’t appear the slightest bit religious. He was tall and gray-haired and clean-shaven, good-looking in a weathered sort of way, and he wore a plaid flannel shirt and jeans and sharp-toed cowboy boots. “Yes?” he said, filling the door frame.

“I’m Michael Anton,” Michael told him. He set down their suitcase. “This is my wife, Pauline. I believe you have our daughter here.”

There was a pause. The man tilted his head.

“Our daughter Lindy. Linnet,” Michael said.

“In this house, all are free of labels,” the man told him.

“Excuse me?”

“Family names, given names . . . The trappings of our old lives are cast off as we move forward.”

So the man was religious after all. That earnest, jargony way of talking made it only too clear. Michael assumed an expression of courteous attention. “Isn’t that interesting!” he said. “Well, she was brought in about three days ago. I believe she, urn, freaked out. She’s about yay high and she’s got more or less my coloring: brown eyes, black hair, though I can’t say for certain what
style
of hair—”

“Serenity,” someone said.

Michael broke off. He stared at the boy who had materialized next to the man—a scarily thin teenager in a white gauze tunic and flowered bell-bottoms.

“Right,” the man agreed. “That would be Serenity. She came to share our lives on Monday.”

Pauline said, “Can we see her?”—jumping in too fast.

“Ah, no,” the man said sadly. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. In this house, all are free of the bonds of home and family.”

“Now, just a minute,” Pauline said.

Michael said, “Hon. Do you mind?” He turned to the man, who fixed him with a dispassionate gaze. “I guess you don’t understand,” he said. “We haven’t heard from our daughter in over seven years. Till yesterday, we didn’t even know for sure if she was alive. We only want to pay her a visit, see how she’s getting along.”

“And then take her home and make her well,” Pauline added at his elbow.

Michael said, “Please. Pauline. Let me handle this.” He told the man, “We’ll just find out how she feels. If she wants to come home with us, well and good. Otherwise we’ll leave without her.”

“I am so sorry, my friends,” the man said gently. “Serenity’s not available.”

Pauline said, “What is this, some kind of prison? Are you holding our daughter captive?”

“Pauline—”

“We wouldn’t do her any harm! We aren’t one of those . . . damaging families! Just ask Lindy! Just let her come out for one second and speak to us! You have no right to shut her away from us!”

The man took a step backward to reveal the room behind him—an entry hall furnished with a small, round, doily-topped table and nothing else. “Do you see any bars or locks?” he asked Pauline in the mildest tone. He gestured toward the boy. “Tarragon here can leave us any time he likes. Tarragon, would you like to leave?”

The boy shrank back and shook his head.

Michael said, “Naturally, we’re not accusing you of anything.” He felt Pauline’s glare of protest, but he kept his eyes on the man. “If you could just tell our daughter we’re here, though,” he said. “Tell her and see what
she
says. Offer her a choice.”

“She’s made her choice,” the man said, still mildly. “She made it when she was brought to us.”

Pauline gave an odd, strangled sound.

Michael said, “Ah. Well.” He stood straighter. “So, what’s the procedure, exactly?” he asked. “You release people when they’re . . . themselves again? Is there a certain length of time involved?”

“We ‘release’ them, as you say, when they decide they are ready for birth,” the man said. “When they open this front door and are born again into the world.”

“Oh, God in
heaven!
” Pauline exploded.

The man surveyed her benignly. Then he turned to Michael. “Perhaps you’d like to phone now and then,” he said. “Ask how Serenity is growing. We have no secrets here. We’re in the book: Fleet Street Retreat. My name is Becoming.”

For the second time that day, Michael had to stifle an inappropriate guffaw.

The landlady had recommended the tourist home for its location. It was three blocks from Nineteen Fleet Street and two from her own house, on Haight. Unfortunately, that meant it shared the same depressed surroundings. Michael vividly remembered the TV footage of Haight-Ashbury in its glory days—the bevies of “love children” thronging the streets—but now the place had an atmosphere of morning-after-the-party desolation. A few forlorn stragglers dotted the sidewalks, and wastepaper clogged the gutters. A starved-looking boy asked them for a quarter. (Not even Pauline responded.) An old man wearing a biblical robe sat on his heels in a doorway. Dusty store windows displayed muddles of merchandise: Mexican blouses, Chinese slippers, wind chimes, sticks of incense, and various tiny pipes and cigarette holders and Middle Eastern hookahs.