Plantation (7 page)

“You look beautiful, chile,” Millie said, “you truly do.”

I put the small matching pillbox on my head and attached the tiny combs to my hair. Millie and Mother welled up with tears, and Mother got up from the chaise.

“My hair used to be even more blond than yours,” she said.

I thought she was coming over to give me a motherly last placement of a hair or to kiss my cheek. She opened her small beaded purse and handed me something wrapped in an old lace handkerchief.

“Now, Caroline,” she said, “before I give you this I want to know one last time if you truly, with all your heart, want to go through with this.” I saw her grip tighten.

“Mother,” I said, “I know you don’t understand me some of the time, but I
love
Richard.”

A long silence hung in the air while she searched my eyes for any glimmer of self-deception.

“All right, then,” she said, “if you change your mind later, you don’t have to give this back. This handkerchief was in the waist-band of your great-great-grandmother’s wedding dress the day she married Henry Wright Heyward IV in 1855. You do have to give that back. It has been in the hands of every bride in my family for good luck. There’s something inside from me.”

I took the handkerchief from her. In the true style that only my mother and Martha Stewart seemed to possess, the handkerchief, frail from the years, had been washed and folded like origami into an envelope and tied with an ivory ribbon. Inside was an 4 2

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k exquisite diamond pin, obviously very old, in the shape of a bow, its edges trimmed in tiny channeled sapphires.

“Oh, Mother!” I said, holding it in my palm, “it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Don’t touch the stones,” she said, “your body oil will dull them. Here, let me pin it to your shoulder.”

“Who did this belong to? I’ve never seen it before.”

“How should I know?” she said. “I bought it from Corey Friedman on Forty-seventh Street yesterday. That’s why I was late for cocktails!”

It was clear. She wasn’t going to waste an heirloom on a marriage she didn’t fully endorse. I didn’t mind that, really. She would come around in time. “Mother, thank you so much.” I gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“Careful, child, you’ll smudge Mother’s powder.”

I shot Millie a glance. She was wiping her eyes but burst out in a good-natured laugh at Mother’s impossible disposition. We just shook our heads while Mother stood back to survey her work.

“Good! Now you have a corsage!” She lifted my left hand to inspect my engagement ring, shook her head in disgust at its small size and modern style, and stood back again. I started to giggle.

Nerves, I suppose, but I’d not seen mother so cross in years.

“I love you, Mother,” I said, “and I’m not marrying Richard to annoy you.”

“Of course, I realize that,” she said, “but just remember, you can always come home if it doesn’t work out.”

“Why are you so worried, Mother?”

“Oh, Caroline, I don’t know. It’s just that you’re so different from each other! It’s going to make everything more difficult.”

I looked deep into her fading blue eyes and said, “Mother?

Richard and I are cut from the same bolt of cloth. Two peas in a pod—don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” Millie said, “my turn. Take off that shoe, missy bride!”

“What?”

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“You heard me! Gimme your shoe!”

“Which one?” I sat on the side of the bed.

“Get up or you’ll wrinkle the dress!” Mother said, a little too loud for my already rankled nerves.

“Mother!” I said. Nonetheless, I popped up like toast.

“The right one!” Millie snapped.

I balanced on one foot and slipped off my ivory suede pump. She reached down in her pocket and produced a small greeting card for me to open. Inside was a penny, covered in lace.
Love that man hard,
she had written,
but don’t forget to love yourself! Millie Smoak.
I knew instantly the penny was for my shoe. Tradition. As much as I shunned it, at that moment I loved every traditional thing in the world.

“I made that lace, girl,” Millie said. “Don’t lose it tonight or you have bad juju. And that penny is from nineteen sixty-one, the year of your birth.”

“Millie! Thanks so much!” I threw my arms around her and she hugged me back. “Isn’t it just like you to be so thoughtful?”

God, I loved Millie so much. “I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for coming and bringing Mother.”

“What? Me miss all this? All right then, we gone have us a wedding today? Or we gone stand around yanh yapping? I gone directly to your brother to see if it’s time.”

“Get Frances Mae too, okay?”

“Iffin you say so!” She gave me a wink and closed the door.

“Guess we have to.” This made Mother and me snicker. Everyone had kindly tried to spare me the torturous company of my sister-in-law again until the absolute last moment, and for good reason.

As you already know, Frances Mae was pregnant, but she wasn’t pregnant like a normal female of our species.

Last night at dinner she gave us enough material to keep us howling for a week. When she excused herself to go to the ladies’

room, she extended her stomach for attention, lumbering across the restaurant like an extra large-size model on a catwalk, holding her lower back.

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k For some unknown—but surely to be discussed at another time—reason her maternity clothes had revealing necklines to entice all the men with her “ready to lactate with champagne at any moment” mammaries.

Mother said that one night she begged my brother to rub her swollen feet after dinner in the dining room and it had hallmarked the end of Mother’s patience and composure with her forever.

Maybe Frances Mae thought she was a Trojan Horse whose belly held the Second Coming. Why Trip actually married her and how he could tolerate her was a mystery of karma. Maybe she had washed his leprosy sores in another lifetime. In any case, Frances Mae wasn’t pregnant, she was
so so so
pregnant! Jeesch.

By now the apartment was filled. I could feel the vibration of the voices. Some of my friends from the bank were here and a few of Richard’s colleagues. Outside in the hall and the living room, their voices were strong and melded together in a dull sound over the music of the chamber ensemble we had hired to play.

I turned to face Mother. Her face was a combination of resignation and melancholy. I felt my spirits sink a little. “Thinking about Daddy?”

“Yes, how can I not? Our only daughter getting married in an apartment instead of a church? Him not able to be with me and with you?” she said, telling me her sorrows.

“Mother? You’re practically an agnostic.”

“So what? A church wedding would’ve been beautiful.”

“Small problem. I’m not a member of any organized congregation. It’s not like I could have just used the Yellow Pages and made a reservation, right?”

“I know and I respect that but it just seems so odd to get married in your living room.”

“Mother? I’m going to tell you something I believe. Even though Daddy’s not here in the flesh, I really truly believe he’s here in spirit.”

“You sound like Millie.”

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“That’s fine. And, we’re getting married
here
because we are only having twenty people and because Richard really wanted a rabbi to perform the ceremony.”

“Great God! A rabbi?” She sank to the bed, shaking her head back and forth and looking at the floor. “I cannot, for the love of God, believe my ears! Do you mean to tell me that there is a Jewish minister here to perform this ceremony? Your father would spin in his grave!”

“I seriously doubt that. Listen to me, Mother, I don’t care where the ceremony is held because I believe God is everywhere.

Jesus said that when two or more were gathered in His name, that He was in our midst! Didn’t He?”

“He was referring to Himself and even I know that Jews don’t accept Christ.”

“Mother?” I was smiling now, trying to smooth her wrinkled brow. “God is God, is God. First person, second person, twentieth person, it doesn’t matter! Don’t you see that what does matter is I’m marrying the man I love and that he loves me and that we’re all here together?”

“I suppose so,” she said looking at me, almost agreeing. “You always did have an unorthodox view of the world, Caroline. You always did. And the older I get the less sure I am of anything.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. She just seemed a little lonely, I guess. The afternoon sun was pouring through my windows and the room was warm despite the February chill. I smiled again at her and just as I was about to tell her once more that I loved her, she snapped at me again.

“You’ve got lipstick on your teeth! Wipe it off !”

“I do?” Just as I looked back to the mirror, the door swung open and Frances Mae and Trip came in. I should say that Frances Mae’s swollen-with-life belly came first and that she followed minutes later, but that would be an exaggeration of fact. It just seemed that way. “Hi! How are you?” I said, as though she was my best friend, leaning forward to give her a hug.

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“Don’t you look beautiful!” she said, clutching her hands to her chest. “Trip? Darlin’? Gimme a tissue! I can just feel the tears coming! Why do I always cry at weddings?”

“I don’t know, Frances Mae,” Mother said dryly, “why do you?” Mother rolled her eyes to the ceiling and then to Millie, who stood by Trip, witnessing Frances Mae’s performance.

“Well, Mother Wimbley, I suppose it’s just the innocence of the bride and the hope of the future. Although in this case, Caroline’s hardly an innocent child bride, are you, dear?”

“Frances Mae?” I said with a straight face. “See the chandelier over the bed?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, dabbing the corners of her eyes, laden with ninety-two coats of blue mascara.

I whispered now in her ear so only she and Millie could hear,

“At night? I press a button and it flips to reveal a trapeze.”

“It does?” she said, like the poster girl for blond jokes.

“Yep, but don’t tell Mother, okay?”

“Amazing! You can’t even see the seams!”

Trip handed me my bouquet, Millie smiled, and, by the time we all filed out, Frances Mae had neck strain and had eaten all the lipstick from her lower lip.

We stood assembled in the hall. Trip took Mother and then Frances Mae to their seats. Millie stayed back with me.

“What? You think I’m gonna run out the door?” I giggled to her quietly.

“No. Just making sure we don’t have no uninvited company, that’s all.”

“Like Lois?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Lois, Richard’s first wife, who up until yesterday tried to talk Richard out of our wedding. I knew all about her campaign of phone calls and letters, but I also knew that Richard wasn’t interested in her. She drove him up the wall. On the other hand, Richard hadn’t been exactly forthcoming with Lois either. He’d P l a n t a t i o n

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never told her about me or us. She had no idea we were getting married until the invitations arrived three weeks ago at our friends’

homes. Some bigmouth told her. Anyway, I doubted that she would try to break in here and stop the ceremony. Even Lois wasn’t that brave. She was just a yenta with acrylic nails.

“I think you just want to see me walk in on Trip’s arm, right?”

“Right!”

Millie’s eyes twinkled in the low light of my foyer. I could see they were misty and she wanted to tell me something she couldn’t find words to say.

“Out with it,” I said, “we don’t have all day.”

“Okay,” she said, “look in your bouquet. I put a little gris-gris bag in there. I dream about chickens all last night and that ain’t good. Keep that man faithful to you! Got everything in there you need, including a piece of Adam and Eve root.”

“What?” I dug into the flowers and pulled out a two-by-three-inch red bag with a drawstring. This was too much. “Now, Millie?

You think it’s right to try to manipulate the fidelity of my husband?”

Trip came to take my arm. “Come on, sister, we gotta go!”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said to Trip and then turned back to Millie.

“Well?”

“Don’t you want him to behave?” She was dead serious.

I had no doubt of the potency of Millie’s magic. I had seen it work all my life. So I said, “Millie? I really appreciate this, but no.

If my marriage is going to work, I don’t want it to work this way.

It’s not honest.” I handed the small bag to her. “But you know I love you for thinking of me, right?”

“Lord, you got a hard head,” she said, then gave me a kiss on the cheek and sighed like only Millie could.

Suddenly, I was in a terrific free fall, hurling through the emotional tunnels of my heart. Walking through my foyer would never again be so life-changing. Doubt began to nag at me.
Did
we love each other enough to make a life together?
Did
we know each other well enough? Maybe it was arrogance or maybe it was nerves 4 8

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k or maybe I didn’t want to appear the fool. I began to tremble from head to foot, thinking I was going to faint from this sudden terror that filled and racked me like a tropical fever.

I was a Wimbley and therefore I would muster the wherewithal to proceed as planned. No matter what. I accepted my bourbon-breathed brother’s arm, walked bravely into our living room, where our musicians played Vivaldi with great passion, and married Richard—married him over the gulping sobs of Frances Mae, despite the serious reservations of my mother, and without the magic of Millie.

M i s s L av i n i a ’s J o u r na l
All right! Here I am in this infernal city, it’s one in the
morning, and I can’t sleep. Nothing but horns! Don’t these
people ever go home? It’s a good thing I brought my own
bourbon—the mini bar’s empty! Can you imagine such a
thing at the Pierre Hotel? At least they have goose-down
pillows, which is more than I can say for Amtrak.That little
sleeping car I had was no better than a jail cell! Moreover,
now my only daughter is Mrs. Levine. I wonder if she’ll raise
her children Jewish? He doesn’t seem to be religious. At least
she’s got some spiritual side to her. Well, she’ll find her own
way with this just like I did. She did look beautiful today.