The Story of a Marriage (4 page)

“Of course. No, I’m not from the government,” he said, “but I did know your husband in the war.”

“First Infantry?”

He gave a painful smile and dropped his hand, though he didn’t remove his eyes from my face, not for an instant. “I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “Looks like you got things to do this morning.” I realized I had a pair of scissors in my hand, and I dropped them into a pocket of my coatdress. I heard Sonny making his way down the hall. With his legs in their braces, he sounded like the Tin Woodsman. “That must be your son,” the man said.

I said it was, and turned to Sonny, who was hiding behind a console. “Baby, say hello to the man.”

“Hi there, my name’s Buzz Drumer.”

“Say hello to Mr. Drumer,” I said, but Sonny did nothing. “He’s usually chatty.”

“He’s a beauty, like his mother.”

This startled me. Sonny was a beauty, of course—“made from gingerbread,” I always whispered to him in the morning—but I assumed his looks came from his father, that my husband’s genes, like alchemical agents, could not be dulled by my own. It would never have occurred to me that my son’s eyes—more honeyed than Holland’s—might be anything but a gift of nature; might be mine, for example. “Oh he’s a handful,” was all I said.

“It must be hard.”

I could not imagine what he expected me to say.

“I mustn’t keep you,” he said. “I wonder if you could pass this on to Holland. Just something, well, I knew his birthday was coming up.”

“It’s next month.”

“Oh yes, that’s right,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t keep dates in my head too well. All the numbers run together. Just names and faces, the important things.”

I said nobody ever minded an early present.

“And it’s your birthday, too, ain’t it?” he asked, smiling.

I couldn’t think how a stranger might know my birthday.

“They’re a day apart, right? I hear in China that’s lucky for the woman. I hope I got that right, at least, because I got something for you—”

“You didn’t need to do that,” I said, unreasonably flattered and confused.

He nodded. “It’s how my mama raised me. Will Holland be home soon?”

For a brief mad moment I considered lying. Maybe it was the fog so low and soft over everything, or his eyes flashing that peculiar shade of blue, or because I could hear something in his voice, something more than what he was saying.

But I couldn’t stand in a doorway and lie to a stranger.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, he should be home any minute.”

“I knew Holland would marry a beautiful girl. Well, anyone could guess that. You’re his childhood sweetheart, isn’t that right? He talked about you all the time.”

An elderly German neighbor-woman had come out of her house to stare at us. I stepped aside and said, “Would you like to come in and wait?”

We sat a few feet apart on the sofa, and he happily drank a beer as I stroked Lyle’s ears. He told me stories about the younger Holland, his employee at one point, and said over and over how it was sure nice to meet me; I was exactly the kind of girl he’d always thought Holland would marry. Beautiful; he kept saying I was beautiful; it was as strange as someone telling me I was French. Eventually he forced his present into my hand—a little turquoise box no bigger than a slice of toast. I refused it at first. He had that way of trying to be too close to people too soon. But Buzz was a charmer, yes he was, and at last he coaxed me into opening it.

“Thank you, how beautiful.”

Five minutes later, the wrapping paper lay between us on the couch. I felt Lyle’s tail thumping against my leg; it was the loving premonition of Holland’s arrival. We heard the front door open, and then my husband appeared on the steps of our sunken living room. Lyle ran to him and we both stood as if in the presence of royalty.

Down he came, my husband. We watched as parts of Holland stepped into the circle of light, beginning with the polished wing tip of one leather shoe, then the second, and then the creased trouser cuffs of a suit, long legs in charcoal wool, a belt around the still-trim waist of a high-school track star, an uncharacteristically rumpled dress shirt, rolled up to show his forearms and the twin gleams of his watch and his wedding ring—“Hello? Hello?”—and then that face that I so loved, my husband’s dark astonished face.

“Hi there, sweetheart,” I said. “You got an old friend visiting.”

Holland stood very still, startled, hands open like a saint as his son and dog ran toward him. He was staring at Buzz. I watched as the look burned into something like contempt. Then he stared at me. For some reason he looked afraid.

“Hi Holland,” Buzz said. He stood there with his arms out in greeting.

As my husband turned back to his friend, I recognized what had seemed so familiar about this man at the door: he dressed like my husband. The tweed coat and foldable hat and long sleek trousers, even the way he rolled his shirtsleeves double up to just below the elbow. It was how Holland had always dressed since the war. And in a moment you could see that my husband, choosing his clothing so carefully from the stores we could afford, marching with a sale-rack tie over to the discontinued shirts, worrying over a scarf, was just a make-do version of this man’s style. And what I had taken as a personal touch, an extension of my husband’s general beauty, turned out to be an imitation. Like a reconstruction of a lost portrait, an imitation of a subject I had not seen until that day.

He turned to his old friend. “Hi there, Buzz,” he said evenly. “What are you doing here?”

“Just popped in my mind to drop by. Your wife is a beauty.”

“Pearlie, this is Mr. Charles Drumer, who was my boss—”

I said, “Yes, he told me.”

The two men regarded each other warily for a moment more. My husband said, “It’s been a long time.”

Buzz said, “A few years.”

Holland’s eyes dropped to the carpet where a piece of blue paper, torn in the shape of a lost continent, had fallen. I said Buzz had brought me a present, and he looked startled. There it lay on a bed of tissue on the table. “Did he?”

A pair of gloves, in white. It wasn’t until Buzz had encouraged me to try them on that I’d noticed, embroidered on the right-hand palm, a small red bird, tail high in the air, wings out, as if it had just been caught. If you stretched your hand, the creature would writhe in your palm like a living thing.

“Bird in the hand!” I said merrily to Holland, showing the bird to him, making it move.

“Bird in the hand,” Buzz repeated, hands in his pockets.

Holland, my old husband—you looked from me to your lost friend and back again. What did you see there? What went through your tender mind? We were certainly a strange pair to find standing in your living room. The last thing you expected. And then, of all wonderful things, you began to laugh.

No woman would ever refer to someone she lost touch with as “a good friend,” yet men will drop and pick up friends as cavalierly as amnesiacs. I assumed Buzz was one of those friends, an old army pal who had simply fallen away when the wife, the son, the job took over Holland’s adult life. I had seen enough of Holland’s lost pals to assume that, for both these men, the friendship was taken up as cheerfully as it was dropped.

Mr. Charles “Buzz” Drumer was in the corset business, among many more lucrative concerns. He supplied corsets, corselettes, and girdles wholesale to department stores; an old-fashioned profession even in its time, but if anything, I think, it gave him the enviable glow of a womanizer, along with his good looks and his unpadded shoulders. He knew our secrets. He could tell which women wore a grandmotherly boned nylon corset, and which wore the very last gasp (so to speak) of the nineteenth century: the belt-like perforated Waist-in. He took a private pleasure in recognizing the first evidence of circular-stitched bras (within months we all had these rocket boobs), or noting a woman’s wiggle which meant she longed to strip off her skirt and adjust her chafing corselette, or—best of all—seeing a shapely woman walk into a room and knowing at a glance that under her dress she wore nothing at all. It was as though he could see us naked.

His proudest invention: naming a new girdle “Persuade” and including with each purchase a booklet on Helena Rubenstein’s ten-day reducing diet. A hint of seduction, a promise of hope. I loved how he understood women.

After his first few visits, Buzz came by regularly. His presence gave our house a renewed grace and humor; I liked the idea that neighbors would see him come and go, and would admire the careful way he dressed and his habit, bred in every good Virginia boy, of removing his hat the moment I opened the door, as if I were Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt herself. And of course I enjoyed his company, as the lonely wife of any missionary appreciates a guest to her far-flung outpost.

One night I’d cooked a steaming lamb pie with peas and recalled there was a contest in the paper about the dish. “If you can name it, you can live free for a year on their dollar! How about that?” I smiled at my son, who stared suspiciously at the vegetables.

Buzz thanked me as I served him and asked what they meant by live free for a year.

“Two thousand dollars?” Holland guessed, winking at me with a smile.

I rapped my husband’s hand with a spatula. “Shows what you know about home expenses.
Three
thousand dollars is the prize.” I cut a little slice for Sonny, trying not to give him too many peas.

“Seems like you deserve more,” Buzz said.

“I’d enter, too, if I could think of a thing to call it,” I said.

Holland laughed and said I did live free all year; only it was on his dollar and not the piecrust company’s.

Sonny stared at his plate in despair.

We joked about names for it—Shepherdess Pie, Mutton Mutton Who’s Got the Mutton?—when my little boy sat up and asked Buzz: “Where your pinkie finger go?”

“Sonny—” I started.

He looked up, helpless. “He got no pinkie finger, Mama.”

“It’s all right,” Buzz said, wiping his mouth and looking very seriously at my son. “It’s good to ask questions. I lost it in the war.”

“Where you lost it? Alannic or Pacific?” Sonny asked, and we all laughed, because he couldn’t possibly have known what he was saying. It was a common question in those days; he must have heard it somewhere. He looked around, smiling as if he’d planned to amuse us.

“Now that’s enough,” I said. “Eat your pie.”

“Bo Peep Pie,” Holland added, seriously. “It’s worth three thousand dollars.”

Sonny looked at his plate and then, perhaps to forestall tasting it, looked at all of us. “Daddy was in the Pacific,” he announced.

“Buzz knows that,” I said.

I watched my husband very carefully. We’d reached the topic he always preferred not to discuss, but he cut into his pie and said, “We weren’t in the war together, you know. Buzz was CO.”

Buzz nodded.

“Now were you?” I said, astonished that Holland had just revealed such a startling piece of information.

“The Pacific Ocean,” my son murmured to his peas.

Conscientious objectors. “Conchies” was what we called them in Kentucky. A subject of shame, a taboo topic for dinner conversation. There had been a universal consensus in those days, when the country was girded up for war, that it was a disgrace to have men like this. Shirkers, cowards. It was as if a man walked to the altar and said, no, I’m not going to marry this woman after all. It was an extraordinary thing for a young man to be, a bizarre friend for my soldier husband to have made. I could not get my head around it. But war was, as we all knew, a time of secrets.

Buzz blushed at this confession. He began to make less sense to me, not more. How had he lost a finger if he never went to battle? Buzz looked me directly in the eye and said, “It was a hard time,” but I felt as if he were trying to tell me something else.

“This pea looking at me,” Sonny said, and I told him to push it to the side.

“You’ll eat that pea,” Holland pronounced.

“So how’d y’all meet? If you never went to war?” I asked Buzz.

“At the hospital, Pearlie,” Holland said and took a drink from his beer. He meant the hospital where he himself had gone after his ship went down in the Pacific.