The Short History of a Prince (4 page)

“Will you look at that?” Robert McCloud said to Walter, when Aunt Jeannie finally made her entrance at her own party at two-thirty. The unsuspecting guests were standing on the porch holding their shiny silver party plates. The sun, blurred by a haze, seemed not to have moved in the yellowy clouds since noon. It was too hot to be a glorious day and the sky was the wrong color. But the women from Aunt Jeannie’s tennis club, wearing girdles and stockings and slips under their flowered dresses, insisted that it was a perfect afternoon for an anniversary party. Never mind that it was impossible to make fans from the little limp napkins that said “Jean and Theodore” in silver cursive, that they weren’t much good for mopping a brow either. No matter that there were horseflies down at the lake, not so much as a puff of air from any direction—and who had noticed that the hostess was two hours late? It was a glorious day. A splendid day!

Robert McCloud was the only one who saw Aunt Jeannie appear at the French doors. She was standing with silver tears in her dark lashes, wearing the wedding dress she had worn exactly twenty-five years before. “The celestial body,” he murmured to Walter. “The comet streaking across the sky.”

The guests turned to look, to see what had glimmered in the corner of their eyes.

“Dad!” Walter gripped his father’s arm.

The gown had been stored at the furrier since the honeymoon. None of the beads were missing from the fitted bodice, the leg-o-mutton sleeves were crisp, and the mud had been cleaned off the train that buttoned up the back into a bustle. After six children and twenty-five
years of marriage to the manager of the Jewel Food Store in Oak Ridge, it was clear that Aunt Jeannie still had her figure.

She opened her arms. “Welcome!” she cried. “Welcome!” Someone, a plant in the audience, Walter guessed, clapped, prompting everyone else to set their plates aside, to put down the runny Jell-O and the deviled eggs that had been leached of their color in the heat. They all applauded. Aunt Jeannie clasped her hands at her throat and nodded her head, left, right and center. “It is every last one of you,” she declared, “who has made me the luckiest, the happiest, and the most satisfied woman in the village of Oak Ridge.”

She stepped down, bobbing and smiling, and stood for a moment before the Peg-Board where the family pictures hung. Uncle Ted had been told to get some help and carefully bring it out from the living room that morning. Walter turned to Susan, to explain. “She wants the visitors to appreciate the wonder of a family that has shared such an expensive place for so long and are still speaking to each other. She’s posing in front of the photographs, taking her place in the history that might just as well end with her, now, on this very porch.”

Walter was unable to pour the champagne, take in the spectacle of his aunt and keep his own sweat from dripping into the clean glasses on the table. His clothes were drenched, including the lining of the silver sequined vest his cousin Francie had made. Where was she? He assumed that Jeannie had not made her children serve, that it was important they be on display as model progeny. For an instant he felt so happy that he was his mother’s son, and not his aunt’s child. Francie had probably been locked in the sewing room with nothing but loose hay for materials, fretting about how she was going to come up with the vests by morning. He leaned over again, to Susan. “Aunt Jeannie’s taking a curtain call, not only for her entrance but for the performance that’s lasted twenty-five years.”

Susan smacked him on the hand. “She’s gorgeous,” she said, “and she’s not even perspiring.”

“Look at Uncle Ted,” he went on, unhindered. “Look!” Ted was in the corner drinking whiskey and dribbling pear Jell-O down the front of his tuxedo.

“You really are evil, Walter,” she said, snickering into her chest.

“What are you talking about? I didn’t invent these human beings. I’m showing them to you, in the same way people call your attention to the tiger and the seal at the zoo. They could do the same to us, except they’re too interested in themselves to—Look, look at my mother.”

Susan rose up on her toes to see through the crowd. “What about her?” She squinted at Walter. “What? She looks like she always does.”

“I know. That’s the point.”

Joyce McCloud was leaning against a post, staring out at the lake. Sue Rawson had been talking to her, but when Mitch passed with his platter of dates wrapped in bacon, Sue Rawson abruptly excused herself and followed him across the porch.

My mother, Walter thought, is entirely unto herself, serene, untroubled by the lunacy of her family. She was wearing a batik skirt, plain flat white sandals on her bare feet and a cotton blouse. Sue Rawson had been the unattractive smart girl in the family and Joyce had been the quiet, sensible one, the daughter who was at first overlooked, the child with the serviceable intellect. Aunt Jeannie had always had a gaudy suburban glamour. Even as a little boy Walter had felt there was too much of her. Too much blue on her eyelids, too much gold jewelry clattering on her wrists, too much sweetness in the rose perfume she always wore, her large hands stroking, stroking his arm, down, down the sleeve; too much sympathy, too much understanding, suffocating him with her concern. His mother’s dark hair was beginning to gray at the temples and her lipstick had worn off, but he couldn’t help thinking she was beautiful, and certainly the belle of the ball in the over-thirty category.

“Remember, Wally,” Robert McCloud said, “it’s your mother’s family, not mine.” He paused while Walter refilled his glass. “The kooky gene usually skips a generation.”

“Uh-huh,” Walter said, looking at his father, at the gap between his two front teeth, his short damp hair in spikes, the heavy lids over his brown eyes opening and closing slowly.

“You boys are all right, but you’ll want to have your kids checked at birth. Watch for heavy breathing, undue excitement when they come into the world. An overdose of enthusiasm is a dangerous thing, as you can well see.”

“I probably won’t have any children,” Walter said, wiping the rim of his father’s glass with a linen towel. “It looks to me like a pretty risky business.”

“I’m not raising you to care for me in my old age,” Robert said, in no relation to any conversation they had ever had, “so you can put me out on the ice floe when my time comes without feeling guilty.”

His father had drunk four or five glasses of champagne from Walter’s table alone and perhaps more from the others. At family parties he always drank in a burst at the beginning, and then slipped away to the parlor to sleep in an armchair. Sue Rawson had driven Mitch to the inner wall and was lecturing him on George Balanchine. She was telling him about the time she’d seen Diana Adams, Maria Tallchief and Tanny LeClerq dance
Apollo
. Walter could tell by the way Mitch was nodding and smiling that he wasn’t listening to a word Sue Rawson said, that the star male of the Kenton School of Ballet had no interest in a history of dance that did not yet include him.

“Father Flannery!” Aunt Jeannie screeched through the cluster of guests. “There you are.” The priest had come out on the porch quietly, without letting the screen door slam behind him. She rushed to him, clutched his arm and bore right into his pink face. Walter noted that two out of the three Rawson sisters on the porch were overpowering a helpless male simultaneously. His mother was the only one minding her own business. Aunt Jeannie had been born into the Presbyterian Church, but she’d converted to Catholicism before she married. It had been Father Flannery himself who had performed the wedding ceremony at Ascension Church in Oak Ridge twenty-five years earlier. He had come up from Indiana, for the repeat performance.

“It’s wonderful, so wonderful you’re here!” Jeannie’s hairpiece was quivering, the stiff curls slipping away from the pins. “Isn’t it a glorious day? Did you see the children? They’re delighted you could come!”

Walter doubted that his cousins would give so much as a fig for Father Flannery. His black robes looked to have given him prickly heat on his scrawny neck and possibly down below, underneath, on his spongy skin that never saw the light of day. Aunt Jeannie continued to fuss at him and he probably had no choice but to forbear. “It
rained on our wedding day all those years ago!” She was so wound up she was shouting. “Do you remember? It poured just as we came from the church, and you carried my train, you, by yourself, to the car. I’ll never forget that, never.”

Walter could see that even though he had God on his side, the pastor needed rescue. It was precisely for rescue that Aunt Jeannie had hired him. She had given the team careful instructions about circulation. He picked up his tray, made his way to the center of the room, and thrust the drinks between the bride and her priest. “Champagne, Father?” he asked.

“Not until after the ceremony, my friend.” He spoke reprovingly, as if it were common knowledge that saying a mass under the influence was not only dangerous but illegal.

“Ted! Ted!” Aunt Jeannie cried. “Where are you? Father Flannery is here! He’s here!”

Her husband was already standing at the dresser that had been dragged out to the porch for the altar, standing just as he should have been, waiting for his wife to come forward. The presents, wrapped in silver paper, had been stacked at his side. Aunt Jeannie swept through the porch, the living room, the kitchen. She shrieked down the hill, trying to find her two boys and the four girls.

It took half an hour to round up the six Donleavys and make them presentable. Francie, the oldest daughter, had invited an Oak Ridge boy named Roger Miller to go up to the barn with her to see the bats hanging from the rafters. She was sixteen and had not yet kissed anyone. She was a hefty girl, and her mother worried that too often she hid her sweet face behind her long straggly hair. They sat on the one bale of straw in the barn and Roger Miller explained how a bat uses radar to find its food. It was so interesting, Francie said. He had weak eyes, long pale lashes and fragile wire-rimmed glasses. She had the urge to do something protective, to hold his head to her breast, and she looked at him thinking how to do that, how to take his face in both hands and draw it to her. When Aunt Jeannie, in the search for her children, finally saw the couple heading out to the woods, she ordered five-year-old Peter to snag them. Her anger was immediately tempered by the fact that Francie was with the Miller boy, a young man who had a future in the medical profession and came from one of the
wealthiest families in Oak Ridge. “Hello, my dears!” she called gaily to Francie and Roger as they came down the path. “Come, you two,” she said, as if they’d always been together. “We’re going to have the mass now.”

She breezed onto the porch, and then lowered her head, demure all of a sudden, as she made her way to the altar. There was a hush as she slowly went to Ted and took her place before Father Flannery. “A faithful friend,” the priest intoned, “is a strong defense; and he that hath found such a one hath found a treasure.”

“Does everyone do this?” Susan whispered to Walter. “Replay their wedding?”

He moved close to her so he could speak right into her ear. “No, not everyone does this after twenty-five years of marriage. It’s optional. I think it’s like those Civil War reenactments. You get to dress up, fire your musket, have a bonfire, run around. It’s for fun, I think.”

“But it’s sort of beautiful. It’s not only reliving their day of glory, but it’s—”

“A way for Aunt Jeannie to prove that she’s thinner than everyone else her age and has a great hairdresser?”

“No! They’re renewing their commitment, making a pledge for the next twenty-five years.”

“And they get all these great gifts on top of it. Their children bought them a stereo. My mother spent a fortune on some silver teapot—”

“It’s a good thing you don’t have a sister, Walter. She’d be stunted with you as the big broth—”

“Shhhhh. Please.” It was one of the tennis ladies behind them.

“Let us celebrate this union by hearing again the vows made on August 10, 1947,” Father Flannery was saying.

It was difficult to hear Jeannie repeating after the priest, although the porch was much smaller than Ascension Church. She was choked up, dizzy with emotion, just as she had been the first time around. Walter reached for a drink, hoping Aunt Jeannie’s friends wouldn’t object to a minor’s having a taste. He drank through the vows, and the prayer of thanks for the day, for the family, for the continued good health of all of those present and for peace and prosperity. He was on
his third glass when Father Flannery announced that he would administer communion to the married couple and to anyone else who wished to come forward. Ted’s sisters had brought the loaves all the way from an Italian neighborhood in Chicago, and broken them into pieces in the kitchen. When Susan started up to the altar, Walter reached for her hand, pulled her back to him. “You can’t,” he said. “It’s a mortal sin if you’re not Catholic.”

She stopped and considered for a moment. “This will ensure my trip to hell?”

“Yes, that’s right. A mortal sin.”

“Good. That’s good, Walter.” She raised her own glass of champagne to toast him. “I’ve been pure, you know, up until this point. But if I do this one thing, then I’ll be secure. I’ll know that we’ll get to the same place, that we’ll always be together. I love Mitch, but I don’t think he’ll really last into eternity, do you know what I mean?” She kissed him on the cheek and got in line, swaying a little, closing her eyes, already bracing herself, Walter thought, for the flames catching her hair, burning her face.