The Wedding (21 page)

And yet it would have saddened Isaac to know that one story of his childhood that none of his family remembered was the role Miss Amy Norton Norton played in his life. She was the hand of God who had plucked him out of the Jim-Crow-riddled South and into a new life. So many whites had done so much to make the colored man’s life miserable that it was all too easy to forget the miraculous migration of white spinster schoolteachers, women—mostly Presbyterian or Unitarian—who flocked to the South, giving up everything they had to teach a generation of newly emancipated children, most of whom had less than nothing. It would have saddened Isaac to know that Miss Amy Norton Norton’s name would never be mentioned to his future grandchildren, one of whom was to be married in the ballroom in which Miss Amy had danced when she too was of marriageable age, though not of marriageable mind, having found no man whose name was worthy of substituting for hers.

As Clark thought about the ceremony that would take place in his house in less than twenty-four hours, a wave of bitterness washed up from within him. He had been too
preoccupied with planning his upcoming life with Rachel to pay all that much mind to Shelby’s wedding and its implications, outside of the formalities that it had been incumbent on him as father to dispatch in the past weeks and months, most of which involved his checkbook. But now where Rachel had been nothing but a hole remained, a gaping wound in his side that would never scab over. In place of that hole there had been a lifeline just a few hours earlier, an invisible cord that had always fed him, sustained him, no matter how far away he traveled. Without it, he felt himself transparent, insignificant, a shade of his former self. All he had left were his daughters.

A cool northern breeze blew through the car. It was such a beautiful day, Clark thought to himself grimly. He felt detached from his observation, the way he imagined an engineer might feel surveying a grassy knoll that was to be dynamited to clear the way for a road or a set of railroad tracks. A stillness in the air seemed to hum at his ears, and for the first time in a very long time it did not much matter to him what he did next. Clark had always felt a sort of perverse pride in the way his life moved from demand to demand, the way he stoically shouldered the weight of his responsibilities with his chin thrust out nobly. Now, though, when he considered the switchpoints and crossroads he had bulled through he had to ask himself what his life boiled down to. What was his life, really, but a series of missed opportunities, a succession of situations in which he had waited too long to act?

First there had been Sabina, and everything since then was in a way a curse on him for never apologizing to her,
never explaining. What explanation was necessary, though? In Sabina, he had never seen anyone more desirable as a woman; in Corinne, he had never seen anyone more desirable as a wife. She was everything his Brookline background demanded—she was fair, she would give him fair children, and her father was near the top of an honorable profession. No, his blood did not boil in Corinne’s presence, no, she did not set his skin ablaze the way Sabina did, but were such base urges the stuff of lasting relationships? Perhaps not, but now, Clark mused, he had thirty years of evidence that their absence was no guarantee of happiness either.

And now Rachel. Clark did not know where to go from here. He had held the revered position of Dr. Clark Coles for so long, he had rested for so long against the cool pillar of icy imperative and thought that at the end of the day that would somehow be enough to keep the demons at bay, he had stoically borne the burden of his parents’ expectations, but all at a terrible cost. Advanced social position did not come without an abnegation, an obliteration of the personal, the intimate, the hidden, the passionate. A balance had to be achieved, but that was a lesson learned at the expense of all too many of Clark’s generation, a generation half afraid that all the insidious white stereotypes contained a germ of truth, a generation mired in the self-hatred that was bigotry’s most monstrous crime, more damaging than a laundry list of physical indignities because it amounted to a mental rape, a theft of personal dignity.

Clark ground his teeth bitterly. Never to have a chance to defend himself … yes, fine, hard enough … but never to be able to say good-bye, never to win some sort of
closure, however heartrending,
that
was the crudest twist. Memories, images of the sweet, intimate moments they shared, danced in front of his eyes. He thought of obscure gestures of small, silent tenderness, tiny moments that contained within them an eternity, moments he had never shared with anyone before, and would likely not share with anyone ever again.

Clark opened the car door and stepped out onto the lawn. Perhaps it was too late for him. Perhaps he had passed his own personal point of no return long ago without ever realizing it. What was the word his pretentious friends so favored at cocktail parties? Karma?

It may be too late for me, he thought. But it might not be too late for my daughter.

S
helby looked up from her desk and put her pen down when her father strode into the room and closed the door behind him. He had a look on his face that she had never seen before. “Dad, what’s wrong?”

Clark stopped short in front of her desk, his hands twitching at his sides. He turned abruptly and began pacing from side to side, his fingers restlessly drumming his pants legs until he noticed them and laced them together behind his back to subdue them. He stopped in his tracks and turned to Shelby, a storm in his eyes.

“Shelby, I don’t know how to say this, don’t know that I have a right to say it, don’t know that it will make a bit of difference.” He paused, flustered. “I don’t claim to have been a wonderful father to my daughters—”

“Oh, Dad …”

“Let me finish,” he said tersely. “—don’t claim to have set a particularly wonderful example for you in terms of the institution of marriage. I know it must seem to you that Corinne and I are not as close as perhaps one might think we should be. And I’m not naive, I know that children have eyes, and ears, and a brain to read what their senses tell them. And so I know you’re probably aware that your mother and I, we …” Clark was in agony. He despised human weakness, and he could neither believe that he was responsible for the words coming out of his mouth nor stop himself from saying them.

“Dad, I don’t know what’s gotten into you.” Shelby picked up a seashell paperweight and placed it on the letter she was writing. She pushed her chair away from the desk. “But I’m getting married tomorrow, and I love you, and I love my mother, and I know full well”—she grimaced, thinking of the morning’s argument with Liz—“that the fire died for the two of you some time ago. But why you would choose now to unburden yourself is, I admit, beyond me.”

Clark drew himself up, a pained expression set deep in his normally impassive face. Just a few hours ago the idea of having this talk with his daughter would have seemed absurd, but now he could do little to quell the pain inside him that howled to be set free. “Shelby, Meade is a fine man. He is talented, and handsome, and decent, and you’d have to be blind not to see that he’s devoted to you. I see how he looks at you, and if there had been anything but love in his eyes I would have throttled him long ago. But he loves you, I can’t deny it; he does love you.”

Clark walked over to Shelby’s bed, Shelby following him silently with her eyes as he hitched up his pants and sat down. A few grains of wet sand still clung to his legs from his morning walk, and he brushed them off absent-mindedly and watched them fall to the hardwood floor. Utterly uncomfortable, he looked like what he was: a father mightily unaccustomed to arguing with his daughter about affairs of the heart. Having in the past always assumed that Corinne would make their daughter understand all of the personal, feminine things she needed to, when she needed to, he found himself treading on dangerous ground. “Now when I was your age, if somebody had asked me what I thought love was, I would have told them. I knew what love was. Didn’t everybody know? Right now, I might not be able to tell you how I would’ve answered that question back then, but I do know that I was a lot more sure than I am now. The fact is, sometimes I think romantic love is just another scourge put on this earth by the Lord, another measuring rod that no one thinks they quite measure up to, a simple idea that never seems to fit the two messy lives it’s assigned to cover.”

“Not to stop this fine sermon when you’re on a roll, but what do your doubts about love have to do with me?” Shelby was growing more and more indignant. “You yourself admit you’re hardly an expert on the matter.”

“And you are, my sweet young daughter?” Clark raised his eyebrows. “You’ve never given the time of day to a single black man who’s taken an interest in you.” He stared at the wall.

Shelby drew her breath and scowled down at the edge of
her desk. Her throat felt too choked with her indignation to respond to the accusation she heard on her father’s lips.

“But it so happens that the first white man who pays attention to you—”

“Stop it!
Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Shelby clenched her fists and pounded them down on the shiny surface of the mahogany desktop with a resounding thud. “You take the prize.” Her neck snapped back and she stared at her father. “I expect this from Meade’s parents, but even they might pause a little before laying in the night before. How dare you?”

Clark’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t coming out right. I just have to know the truth, is all. God knows what love means, but if this marriage is about love, then I won’t say another word. But I’ve never seen you give your trust to a colored man, and I can’t help but think that maybe that’s because you saw in the one you know best a man who can’t be trusted. And I’ve never seen you give your love to a colored man, and I can’t help but think that maybe that’s because the man who should be the most important man in your life never found time to show you the love he felt. And I’ve never seen you give your respect to a colored man, and I can’t help but think that maybe that’s some warped extension of this family’s social snobbery. And if that’s all true”— Clark’s voice rose—“then I will do anything in my power to make sure this marriage does not happen.”

The last word died from Clark’s lips, and this final exhalation of breath seemed to take with it all the life he had left in him. His shoulders slumped like a defeated toy soldier’s and he slowly put his face in his hands.

Shelby stared at her father in mute amazement. She had never seen him so broken, and an amorphous stew of pity, revulsion, and hatred stirred within her. As she pondered his words, the hatred won out. “I guess this is a thought that just occurred to you? Or did you think the whole wedding was one big joke, and you had to wait until now to make sure we were really going through with it?”

“I will not tolerate that attitude from you,” Clark muttered, head still cradled in his hands.

“You what? But I’m supposed to let you tell me your heart, call my emotions into question, today of all days? I
know
my heart, damn you. I can tell love’s deep roots from fear’s shallow scratching. My heart’s being pulled toward something beautiful; it’s not recoiling from something ugly, unless it’s you.”

Clark looked up with haunted, bloodshot eyes. “You’re sure?” he drove at her. “You’re sure enough to gamble the rest of your life on it?”

In a flash, Shelby snatched her seashell from the desk and hurled it against the far wall, where it shattered into tiny pieces. “Oh, God, what is wrong with this family?” she screamed. “I know my heart. I do. I do.” In one motion she flung herself out of her chair and toward the door. Clark rose up unsteadily to intercept her, but he was too late. The door slammed in front of him, and he slumped against it, spent.

S
helby pounded down the wide hall, her feet echoing in the stagnant air. She passed the open door to her parents’ bedroom, passed the perpetually closed door to Gram’s room, and slowed in front of her sister’s room. She slipped into it quietly and locked the door behind her, breathing a quiet sigh of relief that Liz was still out with Laurie. She braced herself for the sound of her father’s footsteps, but when after a few minutes she still heard nothing she turned and hurled herself onto her sister’s bed. Only then did she allow herself to leak the slow, hot tears that she had been too proud to shed in front of her father. Drained and exhausted by the ferocity of the emotions Clark had unearthed, she soon fell asleep.

She awoke to the rattling of the doorknob. At first she could not place the sound, but when she did she braced herself for another clash with her father.

“Shoot,” a distinctly feminine voice muttered from the other side of the door. “I
never
lock this door.”

“Liz?” Shelby cried out softly.

“Shelby? Is that you? Open this damn door, you fool sister.”

Relief and embarrassment swept over Shelby, and she quickly leaped to the door and opened it. Liz swept in, and Shelby closed the door behind her. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, and here I find you skulking in my room. What’s wrong with you? I thought you’d gone to the beach. Mom took a flock of cousins up island, Emmaline says, but she’s back now.” Emmaline was the Coleses’ cook, an enormous ebony woman who was known on the island as one of its worst gossips. “Someone begged to be shown some local color, so Mother took them sightseeing … serves them right for asking. It apparently couldn’t wait, not that people have anything else to do around here without Mom going to the ends of the earth to show off her island. Can you believe her?” Stopping to catch her breath, Liz turned to the window. “Listen to those pinkletinks go.” Shelby looked out the window, through which she could just make out the spire of the Methodist camp meeting rotunda in the distance, one of the few direct reminders of the time when this area was known for nothing so much as its summer revival meetings. The sound of the birds filtered up from the lawn below. Liz didn’t know what special quality these Vineyard birds possessed
that made them pinkletinks, but pinkletinks they had been, for as long as she could remember.