Marry or Burn (36 page)

“Guess I better go in,” he said. “Better do that. Leave the ladies alone.”

“Goodness, Garvin,” she said. It was hard to see how he was going to get up, and he didn't. After a minute she made a little steeple of her hands and said, “Well, everybody, just enjoy yourselves. You just—enjoy the evening and the stars.” We all looked up, and the sky was spread with stars where none had shown themselves minutes before.

“Wait,” said Mr. Burney, putting his elbows to the tree trunk and finding the muscles that would take him to a standing position. But he wasn't leaving. “For it is customary. On the night before the nuptials. That I say a few words.” He threw his head back and surveyed the sky, as Mrs. Burney, in a kind of languor, took a backward step and then another. “It is,” she said. “He does.”

“I know she had you in there for her little talk. And I would hope, I would
hope
, that you listened. Because she knows what she's talking about. That's a fact. But let me tell you—here—” He leaned close to our father, got his balance and said in a stage whisper, “Don't worry!” He clapped our father on the back. “See,
getting along
? Don't sweat that. First place. It's not her you're dealing with, my good friend. It's not him, fair lady. Nope. It's life. You may not know, or like she'll tell me when we get inside, maybe you do know:
life
—is a thing—all to itself.” Here Mrs. Burney fished in her apron pocket and handed him a paper napkin. He mopped his neck and flourished the splint. “I won't say—what I could say—about
that
.”

Other than me, only his wife and Gerda had their eyes on him; everybody else was looking at the place where the campfire would have been if there had been one. “Just get ahold, oh, you already did it, you're way ahead of me, get that little hand in yours and say, ‘Hey! I'm gonna hold on.' Whoever it is on the other end. Some mean stuff is gonna come your way. Even at your stage of the game. So what you do is, you hang on. ‘Know what I'm saying? ' as our son used to say. That's what you do.”

“He means love,” said Mrs. Burney.

“Rose, Rose, I said what I mean. Would you say”—he bowed to Gerda—“I said what I mean?”

“I'd say so,” said Gerda. “But Rose is right.”

“I would not argue. Rose is right. We can agree on that. Some would say that I on the other hand could be wrong. Where, you may ask, did he get his information?” Here I think Mrs. Burney could have stopped him but she spoke not a word. “Experience, that's where. We lost a kid. That, I will not go into. But. Gone.” He tried to snap the fingers of the splinted hand. “The best kid, the best of the lot.”

“There's no best,” said Mrs. Burney without conviction.

“Rose, Rose. So ladies, gentlemen, keep the faith. Drink up. Tomorrow you will attend the nuptial vows of this fine pair.”

“Hear, hear,” said Diana, knocking back her wine.

 

“I'M SORRY,” I Said, “but what is up with her?” Shelley and I were in her cabin, talking in the dark. Diana had been gone for an hour.

“Jen, for God's sake. She does that. She goes out. She runs around.” Shelley had her eyes shut to keep the room from spinning. “She's
promiscuous
.” She said it the way a mother says of a kid, “He's active.”

“But . . .”

“That's the way she is.”

“I see, she doesn't mean anything by it.”

“Not that. It's just something to know about her.”

“All right,” I said. Shelley was possessive. This I did remember. For years, in the evenings when we came home from Karen's, she would make our father sit by her on the couch.

“She doesn't lie,” Shelley offered.

“What's so great about that?”

“Wait, I better stand up. Better lean.” She went over to the wall. “You didn't notice this before?”

“OK,” I said when she opened her eyes again, “but it's Gerda she's coming on to. Her—her stepmother-in-law-to-be.”

“Yeah.”

“Right. But it makes me mad. How can she be a feminist?” I sounded like Karen.

“You're kidding.”

“No.”

“A feminist? Not interested. No interest.
Nada
.”

“I see.”

“Look, her father was in jail. Her mother was an orderly in Cook County Hospital. Sold pills, messed herself up.”

“I do see.”

“So Diana was in foster care, she was in group homes. The rest of the kids in the family are all still doing that stuff. And she's out there doing . . . a lot of what she does is pro bono. She's a good person, Jenny. See, she's just . . .” She slumped against the wall, squinting at nothing.

I wished I could get up and play her “Beloved, You Looked into Space.” But this was the way she used to be about the ladder and the gorilla, far from any remedy of mine.

“Oh, God. Those things are streaming. Those holes.” She meant the knotty pine. “Whoa. They're going sideways. Fast. I hope I'm not going to throw up.”

“I don't think you will. How much did you drink anyway?”

“Too much for the drug.” She would always have to take something. I knew that, but I would forget. “Did everybody go to bed?”

“Not the Burneys, not Karen. They're in the parlor. Karen and Mrs. Burney are still at it. Stories. Burney's passed out in his chair. That was him playing the organ. Could you believe that? Did you hear?”

“Sorta. The high notes carry. That
vox humana.
”

Mr. Burney had sat down at the carved organ—actually Mrs. Burney had prompted him, though warning him about using his thumb, and we had steeled ourselves to listen—and pumped it full of sighs. This was around midnight, some time before Gerda and Diana went out to walk off the wine under the stars. He ran up and down the keyboard into “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and threw in a line or two of the lyrics with his stage smile. Then he stopped and asked for requests. Gerda
whispered to my father and he nodded. They wanted “Memories Are Made of This.”

To my surprise, Mr. Burney was like Eddie: he could play anything, even without the use of his thumb. Of course he was going to croon this particular song in the voice of Dean Martin, but he couldn't completely obscure the organ, which ascended during the “sweet-sweet” passages into a high delicate region of its own. All the music of the Sixties that had belonged to them, people the age of our dad and Gerda—all those songs, and this was what they asked for, as if the time of their own youth had passed beyond use, the time of my mother and Karen cross-legged on the floor with their guitars, singing “It's All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “What Have They Done to the Rain.”

Mr. Burney at the organ was like one of those collarless dogs you see in the city, panting and loping on an errand of its own. I wished Eddie could have been there to hear him, slouched over the keyboard and pumping away with his feet. And indeed the next day, with an amp set up on the porch, Mr. Burney would play Mendelssohn just as well as Eddie could have played it, for Gerda walking down the path in her pink dress with a son on either side.

“I don't know where Dad is now, maybe out looking for the bride,” I said to Shelley. “Are you going to have a fight?”

“You can't fight with her. She gets enraged and then she cries. She'll cry all night. It clears her head.” She gave me the helpless smile.

“Clears her conscience.”

“The next day she's OK, normal. Here she comes.”

“Shelley?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, don't get any ideas. Don't go up there.”

“Where?”

“The tree house. Or anything. Anything to impress her.”

Shelley knew how to climb without a harness. But she answered me, “Ha ha.”

 

GERDA PULLED HER husband, who weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, out of the shallows of the river where he had rolled. His clothes were soaked and heavy. She could feel a pulse in his neck. She took off her shirt and tried to wrap the open shoulder. One sleeve of the shirt she took off was torn but she thought the blood was his. On the other side of him she found the artery under the dangling arm, crammed her rolled-up vest tight against it. Propping him with a rock under his shoulders she fixed the arm tight to the vest and bound the whole mess to his chest with fishing line. She pulled him a few yards by his collar and then afraid of choking him she ran to the cabin for the sleeping bag, got his legs in and worked it up under his back, picked up the other arm from the rocks and stuffed it in, and pulled the bag up the hill to the car. By stages she got him onto the floor in the back. How that was done she couldn't describe to Diana. Some way. She started the car and drove nine miles to town on a dirt road. How fast? Fast. She knew at a certain point that he had died. A girl on a bike directed her to a clinic, which was closed, and then the girl, who had realized it was a Sunday and followed on her bike, yelled how to get to the doctor's house. She saw the girl glance down at the blood on the car. The girl rode up onto the sidewalk and streaked away. She had the doctor out of his house when Gerda got there, a big old man coming down the steps with the Sunday funnies in his hand. He performed CPR. His wife ran out with his bag and stood with Gerda, who was wearing only a bra with her bloody jeans. The bike girl stood with them. The doctor pretended to do things to stanch the bleeding that had already stopped, and after a short time he got to his feet and began tending to Gerda's arm.

All of this Gerda told Diana because Diana asked.

So of course Diana asked about the bear. The bear's eyes had no whites. They did not seem to be open very wide. The heat coming off the head and neck had a smell—no, there was nothing to compare it to. The broken teeth dripped a foamy red spit. The nose, the nose was the worst, two holes like toilet plungers. Yes, she could remember. She could remember everything. The whole time, she kept talking at the top of her voice to the lump on the ground. Of what? Of love.

Where did a marriage like this begin? This Diana failed to ask. What was the source of it, what made it get underway and continue and become a mighty thing?

At one point, at the car but not in it, he woke up. He was far gone, not in his right mind. It was hard to understand him. He said he wanted something salty. Could she give him something salty.

No one else, Gerda said, no one other than our father, had ever asked her about any of these things. People would tell her they had read it in the paper but that was it. Even her sons didn't ask. People cared, of course they did. But they didn't think she wanted to talk about it and they were right, she didn't. Yet she did. She had to admit it. She wanted to. She didn't want to join a group or anything like that. In a group, her friends told her, she would be safe. That's where it would be safe for her to talk. Both daughters-in-law said that. They said her sons were each attending a group, just dealing secondhand with the whole thing, their father in the jaws of a bear.

It was as if, Gerda said, as if . . . as if, if she were to talk in the wrong place, she would be in danger. Or somebody would. People let her know this without saying so. For a long time she felt as if she were up in a plane, at the controls, circling and circling. Bob was gone, the one who would have helped her land.

Then she met our father. Land.

And here she was pouring it all out again to Diana. “This isn't like me,” she told Diana. It was the wine. It was night, trees, wind. John's wonderful family. No, she didn't cry, she just stood there in the dark with Diana, who had run out of questions. Diana's impulse was to put her arms around Gerda, but one of the things Gerda had said was that for a long time everybody did that when they saw her, everybody. People wanted to, as if for luck. That's when she first laughed, weakly, because Diana, who had done exactly that, said, “You must have felt like you should open a booth.”

“That made her laugh.” Diana was talking to Shelley, who at a careful walk had crossed the room to the little sink. “And oh my God you should see her arm.”

“She showed you.”

“Her shoulder and arm. Like a fork went down a cucumber.”

Shelley had turned on the tap in the little sink. The pipes gurgled and the tap spat until she turned it off.

“I should go,” I said. I wanted to tell Diana to be careful what she said to Shelley. Shelley was not just anybody, a person you could tease and torment.

“Anyway,” Diana said, “after what she went through describing the whole thing, it would have been like trying to hug somebody who had just come out of an operation.”

“People do that with their dogs,” Shelley said.

In the end Gerda said, “But don't worry, I won't do this, you won't have to say, ‘Quick, hide, here she comes, don't let her get started.'” They began to laugh, both of them drunk, and laughed and stumbled as they walked back. Gerda asked Diana to forgive her for spilling out the whole thing like that, every bit of it. Diana said she was honored.

Diana said, “Shelley, I just happen to have been the right person for Gerda on this particular night. When she's leaving her old life behind. People tell me things,” she added with a look at me.

“They do,” Shelley agreed.

“It's not like I pump them.”

“No,” Shelley said.

I started to say something like maybe it was easier for Gerda to talk now that she had our father, now that the padlock was off the story, but Diana went on. “OK, so how come I bring that out in people?” She was throwing things out of her suitcase into the little rattling drawers, and it was true, tears shone in her eyes. “Maybe because I talk to them. Maybe because I don't just sit there staring into space. It's not like I go looking for these people.”