The Amateur Marriage (25 page)

Michael’s hair was iron-gray now and his face had grown lined and leathery, although he was as lean as ever. Pauline’s hair was who-knew-what-color, probably pure white underneath the Miss Clairol blond. She’d kept a pretty good watch on the pounds, though, not counting the bit of a tummy that she didn’t seem able to do anything about. Yes, all in all she thought they were still a very nice-looking couple. And she was proud of the picture they made as a group: everybody in Sunday best, neatly combed, scrubbed and shiny. Even Karen, who could get sort of straggly when she was absorbed in her studies, had made an effort tonight. She wore pants, as usual, but tailored ones, with a top that matched, and she’d exchanged her unbecoming glasses for the contact lenses that she always claimed made her eyes itch.

It was Karen who presented their gift. First she caught George’s eye with a series of meaningful glances that her parents pretended not to notice, and then when George had excused himself and returned with a flat, tissue-wrapped rectangle she said, “Ahem! May I have your attention, please.”

“Why! What’s this?” Pauline cried, and Michael said, “Aw, hon, you-all didn’t have to get us a present.”

“Right,” Karen said sarcastically, and everyone laughed, because a longtime family joke was how Pauline put so much stock in marking occasions with gifts. Pauline made a shooing gesture with one hand (people tended to exaggerate her character, she felt), and Karen went on. “Mom, Dad, this is from all of us. We wanted to give you something to remind you of these past thirty years.” And she took the package from George and set it on Pauline’s lap.

Clearly, it was some sort of framed picture. Pauline could tell that from the squared-off edges and the indentation at the center. She supposed they’d enlarged a wedding snapshot, or maybe commissioned a watercolor version of one. So it came as a surprise when she tore away the tissue to find, instead, two black-and-white ovals set side by side in ivory linen. The first was a photo of a very young Michael in a rough plaid jacket, squinting against the sun. The second showed Pauline, also young, laughing and holding on to her hat. Both pictures were familiar to her—Michael’s from a shoe box of photos handed down from her mother-in-law, and her own from her sister Donna’s wedding album—but they looked so different as ovals, outlined in gilt and matted, that it took her a second to place them. Even then, she didn’t understand their relevance to her anniversary. “Isn’t that nice!” Michael said when she turned it his way, and he spoke so bluffly that she knew he too was at a loss.

Sally was the one who explained. “It’s you two just before you met,” she said.

“Before we met?” Pauline asked.

“Donna’s wedding was November eighth, 1941. And Michael’s picture has somebody’s handwriting on the back: ‘Thanksgiving 1941 at Uncle Bron’s.’ So it was just weeks—days, really—before you walked into the grocery store.”

“Is that a fact!” Michael said.

Pauline, though, was struck speechless. That those two photos should document, coincidentally, almost the very last moment of their lives as separate people . . . Oh, see what children they were, so innocent! Even the sunlight on Michael’s face seemed innocent—watery and gentle—and the lilting curve of the feather on Pauline’s hat.

“We didn’t have the faintest idea,” she said in a wondering tone. “We didn’t suspect a thing! There we were; nothing had happened yet. No Pearl Harbor, no war; we hadn’t laid eyes on each other. Our children didn’t exist. Our grandchildren weren’t imaginable.”

“Well! Happy anniversary!” George broke in.

“Remember when you plastered that bandage across my forehead?” Pauline asked Michael. “I thought you were so good-looking. I still think of that time whenever I smell adhesive tape.”

“You wore your red coat,” he said, “and when we went off to join the parade I lost sight of you for a moment but then I caught this flash of red, and it seemed like all the blood came rushing back into my veins.”

“And those crazy quarrels we had,” she said. “Once I jumped off a Ferris wheel because you’d gone to Katie Vilna’s birthday party without me, remember?”

“While it was still moving!” Michael told the others. “When we were still at least four feet above the ground!”

“The attendant had a conniption,” Pauline added, laughing.

“And the time I mailed all your letters back during special training,” Michael said.

“And the time I got so mad at you for calling me a butterball when I was eight months pregnant.”

“You set off for your parents’ house in your nightgown, remember that?”

Then Michael stopped speaking, and Pauline, following his gaze, saw that none of the others seemed to share their amusement. Only Sally wore a smile—a slight, abstracted smile that she directed at Jojo while she fussed with his bib.

“Well. In any case,” Michael said. “This was awfully nice of you kids.”

“Yes, thank you,” Pauline chimed in.

And all of the grown-ups stirred and sat straighter and reached for their champagne glasses.

“At this moment thirty years ago,” Pauline said, “you and I were just checking into the President Lincoln Hotel in Washington, D.C.”

She stepped out of her dress, gave it a shake, and slipped it onto a hanger. There was the teeniest little dot of pink powder on the collar, but if she covered it with a brooch of some kind she could wear it one more time before sending it to the cleaners.

“A bunch of soldiers and sailors were milling about in the lobby, remember?” she asked Michael. He was emptying his pockets onto the bureau, scrutinizing each note and receipt before he laid it aside, and he didn’t answer. She went on, anyhow. “I sat down on a chair and waited for you to register for the two of us. I held on to my purse with my left hand so everyone could see that I was married.”

She’d been so nervous that her mouth had felt as dry as flannel. She’d kept trying to recall the advice from the book her mother had given her,
A Young Woman’s Guide to Matrimony.
“Relax,” the book had told her. Ha! “Trust your husband to instruct you.” From where she sat, Michael had looked tentative and awkward, the naked back of his neck as spindly as a schoolboy’s.

“It’s funny how something can seem so long-ago and yet so recent, both at once,” she said. “Why, I can still see the row of nail heads tacked around the end of the chair arm! Brass, they were, and hammered, so that they had this kind of dented feel when I rubbed my fingers across them.”

She gave him time to chime in if he wanted, but evidently he didn’t. He dumped a handful of coins into the china saucer she had set there for that purpose.

“And then this soldier came over,” she said, “a lieutenant colonel, as I recall. He said, ‘Miss? Are you alone?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m waiting for my husband to check us in’—the very first time I’d ever said those words in public, ‘my husband.’ And all of a sudden there you were, standing in front of me fit to be tied. I never did convince you I hadn’t been flirting! We rode up in the elevator with you in a sulk and me chat-chattering on so the bellboy wouldn’t suspect.”

“Yes,” Michael said, “that sounds about right.” At long last he turned to look at her. “Fighting on our wedding night, even.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say fighting, exactly. It was more like a misunderstanding. And we patched things up in no time. Why, it turned out to be a lovely wedding night! Remember, sweetheart?” she asked, and she was glad now that she had stripped to her slip, the sexy one with the ribbon threading in and out of the bodice.

But he didn’t appear to see it. “Jumping off Ferris wheels,” he said. “Running away to your folks. Did you hear us tonight, Pauline? Did you hear what we were saying? All of our remember-whens were quarrels. I don’t think I’d ever noticed before. Did you see our kids’ expressions?”

“Not
all
of them were quarrels, Michael. Goodness!” Pauline said. (Meanwhile, she was rapidly reviewing the kids’ expressions. It was disconcerting when Michael popped up with one of these uncharacteristically sharp-eyed observations.) “I was telling how you bandaged my forehead,” she said. “You were telling about my red coat—”

“Hauling forth yet again the one and only peaceful moment the two of us ever experienced,” he said.

“What?”

He didn’t answer. His mouth was a straight line and his eyes had that dark, dense look they got sometimes when his hip ached.

She stepped closer to him and set a hand on his arm. “Oh, Michael,” she said. “Why, that’s just not true! We’ve had all kinds of good times! Times we were romantic, times we told each other our fears and worries, times we laughed. The comical things the children used to say when they were little—remember? Remember how Karen used to call club soda ‘busy-water’? And the griefs we shared, all the troubles with Lindy, and how you were such a comfort to me when my mother’s mind started going . . . So what if we fight a bit? I just think that proves we have a very
spirited
marriage, a marriage with a lot of energy and passion! I think it’s been a
fun
kind of marriage!”

But he said, “It has not been fun.”

She dropped her hand.

“It’s been hell,” he said.

She thought even as she was hearing the words that she was mishearing them. He couldn’t be saying what she thought he was, could he? And not even in the heat of battle! In a perfectly reasonable voice!

“All this shouting and weeping and carrying on,” he said. “Stalking off, slamming doors, kicking furniture, throwing my clothes out the window, locking me out of the house—”

“Why don’t you leave, then,” Pauline said.

He stopped speaking.

“If you’re so miserable, leave! If I make you so unhappy. If your life is such a torment. Go! What are you waiting for?”

He looked at her a moment longer, and then he snatched his car keys from the bureau and turned on his heel and walked out.

So. Some anniversary night. Pauline took off her ribboned slip and rolled it into a tube shape to remind herself to launder it on Delicate in the morning. Her hands were a little shaky, she noticed. She felt weak and empty, as if she had gone too long without eating, and her heart was beating too high in her chest the way it sometimes did when she was afraid.

She took off her bra but not her underpants, and she put on a long-sleeved nightgown. (Any time she was anxious, she slept in her underpants and her most modest gown—a habit left over from girlhood.) She washed her face, brushed her teeth, removed her pearl button earrings and placed them in her jewelry box. She padded down the hall to Pagan’s room to make sure his light was off, and then she returned to her own room and climbed into bed.

He would be back. No question of that! As soon as he had cooled off he’d come back, but she would be sound asleep without a care in the world. He’d rattle around, shutting a drawer too noisily, dropping his shoes too heavily to the floor. That was how he operated, not apologizing but just pointedly presenting himself,
Here I am,
waiting for her to make the first move. He could be aloof and uncommunicative for days, and she’d say, “Michael, please don’t act like this!” and he’d say, “Act like what? I’m not acting any way.” Lying through his teeth. He was not an honest man. He fought in a dishonest manner. He didn’t have a tenth of her forthrightness.

Look at how he behaved with the children, for example. “Your mother says this,” and “Your mother says that.” “Your mother doesn’t want you out so late.” “Your mother wants you to phone us when you get there. You know how she frets.” Always putting her in the role of the bad guy; it was never “
I
want such-and-such.” He did that to this very day, with Pagan. As recently as tonight he’d asked, “Didn’t Grandma say it was bedtime, Pagan?” And then he got to look so easygoing, so lenient, so let-it-be by comparison.

She switched off the lamp and lay flat, pulling just the top sheet over her. It was a warm, humid night, more like summer than fall, and through the open window she heard the chitter and buzz of insects in the shrubs. A car swished past out front, but it didn’t slow or turn into the driveway.

And the way he called her “old lady” during those three months of every year when she was older than he was—thinking he was so witty although he knew, she had certainly told him often enough, that her age was a sensitive topic. “What?” he would ask, all injured bewilderment. “What did I say? I was only being funny. Can’t you take a joke?” So she would look like the humorless one; he would look happy-go-lucky.

When the truth was that he was as dour as a judge, and as lacking in feeling.

After they lost track of Lindy in San Francisco that time, Pauline had wanted to hire a private detective to look for her. She’d heard of a man named Everjohn, recommended by a friend of a friend, and she proposed to Michael that they call for an appointment. But Michael had refused. Why bother, was how he had put it. “She knows where we live. She knows we have her son. Suppose this guy managed to find her, what then? Would he rope and tie her and carry her bodily back to Baltimore? She doesn’t want to see us, Poll. So, okay. I don’t want to see her, either.”

Michael in a nutshell. Give up, as easy as that. Wash your hands. Never cared anyhow.

Once he’d told her, out of the blue, that he’d learned a new phrase from a customer: “killing the frog by degrees.” “Guess where it comes from,” he said.

“I don’t even know what it means,” Pauline said.

“It means doing something so gradually that nobody happens to notice. Like reducing the size of a cereal box; that’s what brought it up. ‘The prices stay the same but the boxes get smaller and smaller,’ this customer was saying. ‘They’re killing the frog by degrees.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ Guess where it comes from.”

“Where?”

“Seems if you put a frog in a kettle of cold water and light a slow flame underneath, the water heats up one degree at a time and the frog doesn’t feel it happening. Finally it dies; never felt a thing.”