The Amateur Marriage (24 page)

Tuesday he didn’t work either. He said he had a scratchy throat.

Wednesday he went down to the store at his usual hour.

They didn’t speak about it. There was no particular moment when one of them turned to the other and said, “I guess she isn’t coming after all.” They just grew quieter and more subdued.

And Pagan? For a while, any time Michael made a phone call he would find Pagan magically stationed beside him. But that stopped, by and by. Pagan started going to the swimming pool. He made friends with the little girl two houses down. Pauline enrolled him in day camp. His room became a tumult of train tracks and picture books, Matchbox cars, front-end loaders, the fire engine long since freed from its box, the brown felt kangaroo with her baby, Cracker Jack prizes, crumbled pretzels, plastic dinosaurs, and random arms and eyeballs from a Mr. Potato Head.

Michael had imagined that someday, when things had settled down some, Pagan would tell them a little bit about his life with Lindy. Bits and pieces would emerge, filtered of course through a child’s capricious memory but still revealing, still instructive. That never happened, though. Instead, Pagan’s past seemed to fall away behind him, and there came a moment when Michael realized that they would never know any more about it than they knew now. It had dissolved, as untraceable as Lindy herself. And Pagan was here to stay.

Driving him to day camp one morning, Michael lost patience when it turned out that for the second time that week, Pagan had left his blanket at home and wanted to go back for it. “Maybe you could do without it, just this once,” Michael said, and Pagan said, “But I need it, Grandpa. I have to have it.” So Michael slammed on the brakes and swerved into someone’s driveway, and just as he was reversing he had a sudden recollection of a book he used to read to his daughters.
Heidi,
it was called. Heidi was a little girl who was sent to live with her grandfather high in the Alps. As near as he could remember, the whole focus had been on Heidi’s adjustment to her new surroundings. Lots of goat milk and fresh air, new roses in her cheeks . . . But what occurred to him now was, How about the grandfather? Did anyone ask what the grandfather felt, adjusting to life with a child again?

Now the old man’s grace seemed heroic, and Michael was filled with a mixture of admiration and envy.

On Labor Day they gave their traditional barbecue. It had become just a family event, over the past few years, but even so the guest list was a long one. Karen would be there, having finished with her summer job in Ocean City, and George and Sally, of course, and Pauline’s father and her sisters and brothers-in-law, as well as those of their children who still lived in the area. Pauline had Michael set out the extra lawn chairs from the garage. Then she went into one of her preparty frenzies. She started worrying that they wouldn’t have enough food, and so she fixed a second batch of coleslaw and she telephoned George and asked him to bring more ground beef when he came, and minutes later she phoned him again and added hamburger buns. “I don’t know why we go on doing this,” she told Michael. “It’s not as if we enjoy it. I’m a frazzle!” And her face did have a strained, lined, wired look to it.

Michael decided he’d get out of harm’s way, go pay a visit to Eustace. It was a custom of his, now that Eustace was subsisting on Social Security checks, to drive into the city from time to time and slip the old man a few dollars. So he left, calling, “Back in a while!” All right, maybe he didn’t make absolutely certain Pauline heard him. But he’d been remarking for several days that he planned to do this. She could have figured it out.

She didn’t, however—or claimed she didn’t. When he got home (feeling bloated from the Dr Pepper Eustace liked to serve), she met him at the door demanding, “Where in the world have you been?”

“At Eustace’s. I told you. Why?” he asked. He glanced at the clock behind her. Only four-thirty, and the party wasn’t starting till five.

But Pauline said, “You did
not
tell me! I’ve been going out of my mind! Daddy got here half an hour ago and he’s sitting on his own with no one to talk to but Pagan, and Karen went for ice and hasn’t been heard of since, and you haven’t even fired up the grill yet!”

“There’s plenty of time for the grill,” he said. But he was speaking to her back, because she had already flounced off.

From that point until the end of the evening, he didn’t have a chance to exchange two words with her. She was racing around in a thousand directions. But finally the last guest left, and Karen volunteered to put Pagan to bed, and that was when Michael realized that Pauline was still mad at him. When he brought a stack of plates into the kitchen she snapped, “I can do that, thank you very much!” and she grabbed the plates away from him and set them down so hard it was a wonder they didn’t break.

“Now, Poll,” he said.

“Stop calling me Poll!”

“Pauline, I’m sorry I went out this afternoon but I only went to see Eustace, and you know it would hurt his feelings if I didn’t sit a minute; what would he think if—”

“Oh,
Eustace’s
feelings; yes, by all means let’s consider
Eustace’s
feelings—some old man who quote-unquote worked for you a million years ago. Never mind that I’ve got an entire enormous party on my hands and a three-year-old child underfoot and poor Daddy wondering why nobody’s made him feel welcome!”

“Well, how was I to know your dad would show up early?”

“He’s family, Michael! He can show up whenever he wants to! But you think just your own family counts, your own cantankerous mother who I cared for till the day she died without a word of thanks and then you wouldn’t so much as lift a finger to help us look for
my
mother the time she wandered off and got lost!”

“I helped you look for her lots of times! Lord, those last two years of her life I swear I made a
hobby
out of looking for your mother! But one lone, single, isolated evening, when nobody else was around to close the store—”

“Oh, the store, the store! Always your precious store! What do
you
want?” Pauline asked Karen, who had appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“Nothing,” Karen said hastily. “Just saying good night.” She ducked out again.

“Night, hon,” Michael called after her, but Pauline refused to speak. (The woman had no partitions; if she was angry at one person she let her anger spill over onto the world at large.)

“Even when your own daughter ran away from home,” she said, “where were you? At the store! The everlasting store!”

“Well, naturally. It was a weekday. Where would you expect me to be? While you, on the other hand, who had nothing on this earth to do but keep track of our three children—”

“Oh, that is low, Michael. That is low and base and unjust. You’re going to try and blame me for Lindy’s leaving? How about you? How about a father so cold and remote that his own children can’t wait to get away from him and find some affection elsewhere? That his daughter absconds with the first boy she meets and his son gets married before he’s through college and his youngest won’t even come home for summer vacation?”

Michael often reached a point, in his fights with Pauline, where he was overcome by such helpless rage that he had to leave the room. Pauline would call it withdrawing—further evidence of his coldness. But Pauline had no idea. It was either leave or choke her into permanent silence. Sometimes, he felt his fingers actually tingling with the urge to grasp that corded neck of hers tighter and tighter and tighter.

He spun on his heel and walked out the back door, letting the screen slap shut. On the darkened patio, where chairs still sat about in friendly clusters, he grabbed the farthest chair and slung it around so it was facing away from the house. He threw himself into it and tipped his head back, forcing himself to breathe slowly while he gazed up at the sky.

Behind him, the lights of the house blinked off one by one; he could tell by the way the night sky grew deeper and the stars began to show. He heard a series of doors slamming: kitchen door, bedroom door, and probably a closet door. But he sat on, willing his breaths to stay even.

Such a frantic, impossible woman, so unstable, even in good moods, with her exultant voice and glittery eyes, her dangerous excitement. Why, why, why was she the one he had chosen to marry? When it could have been some sturdy, sweet Polish girl from the neighborhood, or one of those kind young women at the Red Cross canteen in Virginia! Why had he headed instead for somebody out of control?

She had no right to criticize his relationship with the children. He’d been so much closer to them than his father had been to him, and so much more involved in their lives! And as for the store, well, where did she think the money came from for their camps and music lessons and college tuition and trips? Oh, she never had appreciated how well he’d done with the business. First she’d badgered him into abandoning the old location, even though it provided them with a perfectly decent income. (And it
was
an abandonment. He’d known from the start that the buyer planned to turn the place into a liquor store.) Then she’d wanted a full-fledged supermarket, one of those fluorescent-lit monsters with aisles so long that you couldn’t see to the end of them; but Michael had had the good sense to realize that what was lacking out here in the suburbs was a version of the old neighborhood grocery, small-scale and personal, with the emphasis on service. Clerks who greeted the customers by name and put their bills on the tab and offered cookies to their babies. Now he had a clientele that wouldn’t dream of shopping elsewhere. But did Pauline give him credit for that? No, to this day she continued lobbying for expansion, and when he argued she would remind him that she’d been right about moving the business, after all. She would point out what had happened in the city—the crime and the decay and lately those dreadful race riots. “If not for me, you’d still be there, wouldn’t you,” she said. “Selling three half-pints of milk every day to three old ladies!”

Sometimes he felt they were more like brother and sister than husband and wife. This constant elbowing and competing, jockeying for position, glorying in I-told-you-so. Did other couples behave that way? They didn’t seem to, at least from outside.

He believed that all of them, all those young marrieds of the war years, had started out in equal ignorance. He pictured them marching down a city street, as people had on the day he enlisted. Then two by two they fell away, having grown wise and seasoned and comfortable in their roles, until only he and Pauline remained, as inexperienced as ever—the last couple left in the amateurs’ parade.

He closed his eyes and wished for someone to discuss this with. But who? He had lost touch with most of the men in the old neighborhood, who anyhow confined their talk to baseball and the weather. His social life these days was a matter of prearranged gatherings—cocktail parties and sit-down dinners here in Elmview Acres. In fact, he had no friends. Did he even like anyone? Did anyone like him? Could it be true that he was cold and remote?

Wait, though. The screen door twanged open and gently closed. Bare feet padded toward him across the flagstones. Michael felt a melting sense of relief. You could always say that Pauline was his friend. She was closer to him than his own skin; she was the one who had freed him from his stunted, smothering boyhood.

Except that this was somebody smaller, and shorter and lighter-weight. Somebody who made effortful sounds while pulling up a lawn chair; who had to struggle to climb into it. Michael opened his eyes. After a moment, he reached over and laid a hand on Pagan’s hand, and the two of them sat gazing up at the night sky.

6. Killing the Frog by Degrees

On September 26,1972, Michael and Pauline celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary with a small family dinner. It was a Tuesday—not the best night for a social event, as both George and Karen pointed out. But Pauline had strong feelings about observing the actual date. She liked the thought of announcing, “At this moment thirty years ago, your dad and I were just boarding the train to Washington for our honeymoon.” She would have liked it even better if she could have said that this was the moment when the minister had pronounced them man and wife, but since they’d had an afternoon ceremony that wouldn’t be possible. Neither one of her children was the type to take off work early. (George did something important with mergers, whatever mergers were. Karen was in her second year of law school.)

There were seven around the dinner table: Pauline and Michael at either end, Karen next to Pagan on the window side, and George and Sally on the buffet side with JoJo in a high chair between them. In Pauline’s imagination, a noticeable space gaped where Lindy should have been, but she fancied she was the only one who saw it.

JoJo was the reason they were eating at six p.m. He was only twenty months old. He was a darling, chuckly, dimply boy, the light of Pauline’s life, and she had flat-out refused to hear of his being left at home with a sitter. “If we don’t include our grandchildren, what’s the point of celebrating our marriage?” she asked when Sally apologized for Jojo’s spoon-banging during the blessing. Then she reached over and gave her other grandchild a little squeeze. Pagan was also the light of her life, although now that he’d turned seven he was less tolerant of cuddling. He grinned but ducked away from her, intent on the slice of bread he was buttering.

The menu was a total bore. She’d fixed the same old standbys, roast beef and baked potatoes and iceberg-lettuce salad, with a chocolate cake for dessert. This was her concession to Michael. “For you, sweetheart,” she said, raising her glass. “No experiments. Nothing gourmet. Not a mushroom or an anchovy or an artichoke to be seen. Everything plain and simple, just the way you like.”

Michael stopped chewing long enough to raise his own glass and say, “Well, thank you, hon.” The glasses had champagne in them, but that he didn’t object to. You couldn’t very well serve National Bo when a marriage had endured thirty years.