The Story of a Marriage (10 page)

“Hold me close,” Ethel wrote to her husband in Sing Sing, “my heart is heavy with wanting you.” What charmed circle had he drawn around her to keep her silence? As I read their passionate letters, and imagined her singing “Goodnight, Irene” to him from her adjacent cell, and stared at their photographed kiss, I longed to feel something for her. The good wife. The bad American. The bad mother. She looked, in her mug shot, like a woman from the last century: shirtwaist and cameo, hair wild and unset, an immigrant just arrived from a burning country, her eyes looking past the camera as if her vision pierced through walls and saw the chair awaiting her. Lips pursed in some twisted fervor that was worth her very life, her sons’ lives, worth all our lives. Silent, still silent long after it could be of any help to anybody. Who was she fighting for? Her beloved Julius? Herself?

“Poor Ethel,” was all I could manage to whisper, and my husband would look up from his clipped newspaper and put his hand on my arm: “Colored folks got their own problems.” That was true enough.

Holland Cook kissed me goodbye every morning at eight and hello every evening at six, as lovely and regular as the phases of the moon. I iced his drinks from the same howling freezer, pinned up his same laundry, and ironed our world as stiff and flat as ever. He held my hand and smiled at me with the sweetness of an old lover, and I smiled back. And yet none of it was real; after Buzz’s declaration, our movements felt like those of mechanical people once a penny is dropped in the slot. Or better: figures from a dream.

Today any woman would leave him, but divorce in those days meant finding legal grounds. Insanity, intemperance. There was always, of course, adultery, but the aunts’ stories had taught me how difficult getting the proof could be. In my doubt about Annabel, I considered following the lovers out to some trysting place, my husband and his supposed mistress fogging up the Plymouth with their eager breath. But Buzz persuaded me it was a crazed idea. There is no good explanation for why love compels this of us: that we must seek out and witness the very scenes that would destroy us.

Despite these mad revelations, I could not leave him. He was not just Buzz’s first love, he was mine as well, and so we shared that famous sickness; it ebbed and flowed through our blood like malaria. Who could leave until the last moment, and even beyond that, when he might still turn around and reach for her? Who wouldn’t wait for change long after change is possible?

I tried to convince myself I was past caring. Each cup of coffee, each starched shirt and matched sock; the thousand cords that bound me to my husband. I pictured a hot-air balloon bound to the earth. One by one, I thought, with these simple automatic tasks, I would undo each cord. This shame and panic in my heart would pass; I would feel it growing, daily, more buoyant. Free from pain. In a month, three months, I might scarcely care what happened to him at all.

And so our routine continued. It was early one evening; he and Sonny played on the living-room rug, toys spread out before them. The favorite was a paratrooper that, when tossed in the air, unfurled to reveal a parachute, printed with a hawk, as it floated gently to the carpet. Lyle, unfortunately, had gotten to the parachute and torn it to loving pieces, so Holland had to repair it with an old bread bag and some string. I had given Sonny my metal belt to play with. From the radio came talk of the war: the president, promising an end was near, that even those still being drafted were unlikely to see action.

I looked at my husband’s silhouette against the window; it had not changed. A memory; another knot to untie quietly: “Holland, you remember your room back in Childress?”

He turned to face me, saying nothing. His hair spiral-gleamed with pomade. The radio began to talk about a movie star.

“I don’t know what made me think of that,” I said, my face warm as he stared at me. “You remember how there was that one rip in the shade and we’d tell the time that way?”

“I don’t know I do …”

I touched his arm and smiled. “You took your mumblety-peg knife and you stabbed it in the desk and drew a little sundial around it and we’d watch it to know when the piano lesson was supposed to be up. And I’d stop reading to you. And your mother would come upstairs. You don’t remember that?”

Sonny started talking to his soldiers.

Holland looked down at my hand and covered it with his. “I remember you reading to me.”

“Mommy,” Sonny said. “It broke.”

“I’ll fix it,” I said, taking the belt and slipping it into the pocket of my dress.

“Poetry,” he said. “Countee Cullen.”

I asked which one.

“About the box of gold.” Then my husband did an amazing thing. It was akin to having the moon, which has lit every night of your young life, revolve in the sky and smile down at you. He stared at the floor in deep concentration and murmured: “I have wrapped my dreams …” I was a girl again.

His bronze face beamed with the pride of having memorized those poems in his long days of hiding. He began another: “I have a rendezvous with life—” then closed his eyes with sudden pain, leaning away from me into his armchair. He handed the soldier he had mended to Sonny, who threw him high into the air. The name “Yreka Bakery” floated above us for a breathless moment. Sonny was overjoyed, and wanted to try it again, but Holland said, “I don’t feel so well.”

“Is it your heart?” I asked very sharply.

All those years I asked about your heart, did you guess the harmless lie I had invented for myself? Or did you simply accept it as a quirk of mine? As full of wonder at my mysteries as I was of yours, forgiving them as willingly: two veiled people, leading each other hand in hand. Perhaps this is a marriage. You said, “I’m going to lie down for a minute. You think Lyle wants to join me?”

“I’m sure.”

“Lyle, you crazy thing, you want a lie-down?”

You deserved your rest. Men like you, who had risked their lives and seen the worst of human life, never wanted to talk about fear or think about it; you had fought for the freedom never to mention such things, not even to your private self. The shame I had felt; it must have pierced you deeper, letting the ocean water in. I had tried to understand it, and mistook for a transposed heart something either very simple—the secret of your life with that white man—or something far harder to comprehend. A search for some relief; a respite from the life you had.

A little lie-down. No more than any of us wanted—after the Depression, and the war. After all we had been through together, sacrificed for each other. This offer Buzz had made me. This man now falling asleep on our marital couch. Perhaps this was the all clear we had been waiting for.

But tell me—what scene played before your eyes when you lay with your mute dog, arranging himself at your feet? What comforted you on your way to sleep? Was it the shade drawn over your boyhood window with the glow of a shut eyelid? Or a hospital window, its shade pulled up to light a man in love?

Sonny was the kind of boy who held my hand as we walked, every day, to the playground, where babies cloudgazed from black old-fashioned prams and older children beat at the cold hard sand of the sandbox until it was soft as silk. Sonny never took part in any of this. He approached the park as cautiously as if it were a lake. A few steps and he was in up to his knees, then his waist, stopping to get used to the sensation (half in a dream, imagining waves softly soaking his clothes), then he would smile and produce a toy from his pocket—a soldier, a pig—and set it on the grass before him. All the time, his eye was on the other children. He never came close to their orbit. He would not be drawn in. He sensed, as the only child who wasn’t white, an unvoiced law, and (still an obedient boy) he would abide by it.

The hundred dollars Buzz gave me was quickly spent. I treated Sonny to trips to the zoo, the park, to an adventure on the L line: the tram, with its buttery shell and carved-out windows, seemed to him a rolling jack-o’-lantern. It took us a few blocks down Taravel to an upscale candy shop that I had spotted, near the Parkside movie theater. At the front, where a carved-wood Indian might have guarded a cigar store, stood an iron-and-glass gumball machine. A little boy took a penny from his fat, friendly mother and dropped it in, clearly hoping for a “ringer” that would set off a bell and win him a full-size candy bar. “Dang it,” he murmured as another ordinary ball clinked down, bumblebee-striped. The mother’s arms were crossed; they had been at this for some time.

The elderly shop owner was a relic: ruddy and mustachioed, chewing his dentures, pants suspendered above a round belly. He asked if he could help us and I smiled and said we were getting something for my son; the man frowned at me over his glasses. I leaned down to Sonny and asked, “Which do you want?” I caught the mother’s prying eye as Sonny took in the store and its expanse of wonders.

Luminous jars along the counter offered a seemingly endless supply of delight: long ropes of Bub’s Daddy gum in nuclear-age reds, greens, and purples; wax lips, fangs, and mustaches that could be worn only for a hilarious minute or two before puncturing and leaking an odious liquor into your mouth; flying saucers made of crisp tasteless wafers; Saf-T-Pops with the handle made into a ring (so kids might trip, but not choke) nestled among the real McCoys of bright handmade lollipops suffocating in their loose cellophane hoods; bubble-gum cigars and pistols for young hoodlums; lipstick candies that no boy would dare purchase; and, looped in their clean glass jar like nooses, my father’s favorite and his grandson’s horror, coils of blackjack licorice.

Sonny studied the jars carefully, like a Chinese physician examining his potions. He stared for a long time at the sugared fruits before choosing some cherries, the bland saucers, a pyramid of caramels, and others. They were delicately pulled from their jars (rare fish from a tank) until at last they lay glowing on the wax paper before him. Sonny, hands clasped, regarded them with awe.

The owner did not move at all but just said, “Those are fancy ones, you realize.”

“I can pay.”

“I hope you can.”

A long stare that neither of us broke. I slammed a five-dollar bill onto the counter, making the candy canes shake.

My son paused then whispered: “Which one can I keep?”

I wish I had a photograph of his face. The stunned look, within which one could easily see, like the developing details on a photographic plate, the image of his father. Which one? All of them, I meant to tell him, all of them from now until forever. There will be enough of everything. But my child had not yet comprehended his mistake, nor had the horrible man, so I looked up at that white mother, stuffed into her blue cloth coat, and caught her staring, entranced, at my cautious son, while her ungrateful lout dropped one accursed penny after another into his slot machine.

I brought myself down to the level of my son’s eyes, so serious, full of his prudent question, and I waited, savoring the moment, imagining those eyes brightening at what I was about to say.

If you went to a soda fountain today and said “I’ll have a Suicide,” the owner would probably call the police. But in an earlier day the soda jerk, his Adam’s apple working hard with every swallow, would have pistol-pointed his finger and said, “Sure thing, pardner.” A fluted glass under the fountain, the release of carbonated Coca-Cola, and then, going down the row, a trickle of poison from every flavor—chocolate, cherry, vanilla—until you had an ink-black beverage set before you, ruffled with foam and smelling like a potion. For this, a nickel.

That is what William the Seltzer Boy made for Annabel DeLawn at Hussey’s Colonial Creamery, a black flap of hair falling over his left eye, big hands resting on the pulls as he watched her drop a dime on the counter and make her way to a booth where her friend was waiting. Carbonation sparkled in the soda-shop air. Tacked to the wall, an auto-supply calendar left open to a month in 1943; possibly the man who used to tear the pages had gone to war and not come back, the modern version of those pocket watches in murder mysteries that always crack and fail at the hour of death.

I sat two pews behind Annabel, quiet as a widow in church, in the back of the shop where Mr. Hussey preferred his Negroes. A weary soldier smiled across from me, nursing his root beer as if it were real beer. What was I drinking? A lemon phosphate, thank you, William—tablet in a glass, quickly drowned by a flood of fizzing water. A decent married woman’s order. I forced myself to ignore William, the ugly term he muttered as I left. And there I sat, hidden in the shadow of a column, in my best hat and coat with the phosphate pricking my nose and glowing like an antidote. I had planned my confrontation only to realize we are as cowardly with rivals as with those loved from afar.