The Wedding (2 page)

But no one else was in Addie’s shoes. She was mired in debt to her doctor and druggist for needles and pills that tried and failed, and to her patient grocer for the food on his shelves that failed too. These were debts of honor she could not bear to leave behind unpaid. And there was her funeral, likely come fall, with her small insurance not enough to cover it, and God knew she did not want to lie disgraced in a coffin for which some well-meaning meddler had passed the hat among his friends.

Her only salvation had been to rent her cottage, accepting the first extravagant offer, not caring, too frightened to care, whose signature was on the check, so long as the bank would honor it.

T
he signature was Lute McNeil’s, written in a bold, semi-literate hand. Yet that hand had a graceful elegance with the tools of his trade. Lute McNeil was growing rich in Boston as a furniture maker. The demand exceeded his supply. He was buying the four-story building in which he had once rented loft space, in which, before that, he had slept in the basement.

Success in business had not been Lute’s boyhood dream. He had gone to vocational school and learned a trade mainly because he was an incorrigible who had been kicked out of secondary school. From his roaring mid-teens, succcess with women had been his only compulsion. Until the summer of the wedding he felt he had achieved it. Until the summer of the wedding, his values had never crystallized.

Lute McNeil, with his household of little girls, all of them by white mothers, none of them by the same white mother, with his succession of housekeepers, who sometimes were no more than that, and sometimes were much more than that, with his current wife, Delia, refusing his demand for a quick divorce, and he threatening to expose their secret marriage to her Beacon Hill family—with all these complications in his life, Lute McNeil, the outsider, who had never set foot inside the Coles cottage, who did not even have an invitation to the wedding, was determined to stop that wedding because the woman he wanted was Shelby.

In the Addie Bannister cottage a screen door opened and banged shut. A honey-colored cocker spaniel, fat and elderly, waddled across the porch, took several sniffs of the morning, and settled down to survey it. In a moment the screen door opened and banged shut again as three little barefooted honey-colored girls, in T-shirts and shorts, the eldest carrying brush and comb, filed out and joined the honey-colored dog on the top step, the four of them solemnly and serenely waiting for Lute to begin their day.

Lute appeared on the porch, bursting through the door as if no door were there. The dog and the children swiveled their heads as one and looked up at him, the dog’s tail thumping against the wood porch. From their Lilliputian perspective Lute stood giant size astride the world he had made for them.

He was tall, clean-limbed in his T-shirt and shorts, lean, lithe, nut-brown, with firm, well-cut features, dark, deep-set
eyes that could hold and disturb, and close-cropped hair, wiry and strong.

McNeil was a borrowed name, borrowed by his mother from the man who was his father, or who she supposed was his father. For she was rough and ready, and nothing surprised her more than getting knocked up with a baby. She named him Luther after her father, who had thrown her out of his house for her wantonness, which made her rather proud of him for his stern stand on righteousness. She farmed her baby out to friends, who farmed him out to friends of theirs, until finally he ended up a state ward, his mother’s whereabouts unknown.

Lute gave the dog a gentle nudge with his sandaled foot. “Go on, Jezebel, and take care of your business. You wouldn’t move from dawn to dusk if somebody didn’t make you.”

Jezebel, who really did have business to take care of, got up and slowly descended the steps, giving Lute a downtrodden look, awash with insincerity. She dragtailed down the road in search of some suitable underbrush where her traces could be hidden, looking back once, her look again filled with wretchedness.

The group on the porch pretended not to see, and, as expected, Jezebel’s tail abandoned its droop. Her nose made delighted forays in a zigzag course across the park, where the rabbits had romped under last night’s moon, and her waddle increased to a fairly respectable trot as she abandoned herself to her joy in the morning.

With a swooping motion Lute caught his oldest daughter
around her middle, sat down in her vacated place, and settled her between his knees. She handed up the comb and brush, and Lute set to with careful strokes to free Barby’s hair from its tangled sleep.

It was long, lovely hair, paler gold than her sunburned skin. With her wide green eyes and delicate features, Barby was an enchanting eight-year-old, though no more appealing than her sisters.

Seated on either side of Lute, six-year-old Tina and three-year-old Muffin—her own corruption of her given name, Maria—waiting their turn to be brushed and braided, were like children from a painter’s easel. Tina’s hair was golden brown, shot through with silvery strands. Her long-lashed eyes were gray-blue. Muffin had chestnut hair that looked like burnished bronze after a brushing. Her round, inquiring eyes were dark violet.

“Daddy,” said Barby contentedly, “you brush better than anybody.”

“Daddy,” echoed Muffin, “you brush better than anybody.”

Lute was working expertly, smoothing out the waves, brushing away from Barby’s face whatever stray locks were forming curls on her forehead.

“That’s just because I’ve done it longer than anybody,” Lute said. “But mothers are the best. You’d be surprised how good mothers are at everything.”

“Isn’t GiGi our mother?” asked Muffin, who had no idea what a mother really was.

“Of course not,” Barby said with a weary sigh for Muffin’s ignorance. “She’s our housekeeper.” And Mrs. Jones
really was just that, Lute having got rid of the one who was something more soon after seeing Shelby.

“She’s our housekeeper,” Muffin repeated agreeably, though she still didn’t know the difference.

“Did I ever have a mother?” asked Tina shyly. She was terribly afraid it was a stupid question, that she ought to know the answer. But it had puzzled her all summer to hear the children in the Oval talk about their mothers as if they had always had them.

Lute was plaiting Barby’s hair now, weaving it into two tight braids. If before the day’s end her hair, or her sisters’, cascaded free, adding allurement to the beauty of their faces, at least Lute was trying to teach them modesty.

“All of you had mothers,” he said to Tina, making his voice very matter-of-fact.

“Where are they?” asked Muffin in surprise, involuntarily looking around, half expecting they must be somewhere.

“They’re divorced,” said Barby calmly, not knowing that was a sad thing for a child to say.

“They’re divorced,” said Muffin happily, pleased that she had learned a new word.

“What does that mean?” Tina demanded. She did not want it to mean that they were dead, just when she was finding out that anybody could have one.

“That means Daddy wanted us and they didn’t,” said Barby, not minding.

Lute tweaked Barby’s braids, the signal that he was through with her and ready for Tina. She and Tina shifted places, crawling over Lute like puppies.

He settled Tina between his knees. Reflectively he rubbed the back of the hairbrush along his nose, trying to figure out how to explain.

“It doesn’t mean they didn’t want you, mothers always want their babies. It means that when a mother and father get a divorce they can’t divide the baby, so they have to draw straws. I was always lucky enough to draw the long straw.”

“How many divorces did we have?” asked Tina, not sure she approved of them.

“Well, going on three,” Lute said, trying to make them sound like perfectly normal happenings.

“Three,” said Tina wonderingly. “Three divorces and three mothers.” Next door there were three children and only one mother for all of them. Somehow she liked that arrangement. She knew that she would have hated it if she and Barby and Muffin had had three fathers. It was better to have just one of each. Except that they didn’t have even one mother, for all that once there had been three. She wondered if Barby wanted a mother. Muffin never wanted anything but dolls so that she could boss them the way the housekeepers bossed her. But if Barby wanted a mother, maybe Daddy would do something about it. Daddy always said Barby had the most sense.

But Barby would never want a mother. She knew about mothers. They cried. She could not remember the face of her mother, but vividly, chillingly, she remembered the sound of her sobbing and, after her, Tina’s mother’s wilder sobbing, and now the one Daddy called Delia, who was probably Muffin’s mother, because in the night she sobbed too.

She said bluntly, before Tina could even ask, “I don’t
like mothers. They make me nervous. They cry too much. They get mad too much, they call Daddy ‘nigger.’”

It was a harsh word, an ugly word, a word that no one had ever heard her say. But she had to say it for Tina’s sake. She could trust Muffin not to want a mother. But she was beginning to be doubtful of Tina, who was seeing too much of next door’s mother. Tina didn’t know what mothers were like when they were crying mad. She had been too little to remember—just as Barby had been too little to understand.

Lute said carefully, “Sometimes mothers say things when they’re mad that they’re sorry for when they’re not mad.”

But the children were not comforted. Muffin had clutched his arm while Barby was speaking, and Tina, even inside the nest of Lute’s knees, moved uneasily. They were frightened by the forbidden word. Barby had heard their mothers say it. No wonder Barby didn’t like mothers. Muffin screwed up her face in utter rejection of this species of woman. Tina tried hard to but somehow couldn’t. The image
of
next door’s mother intruded.

Next door’s mother never cried. Whenever she looked at Tina, she smiled. Whenever she spoke, she said words that were loving. Every day she gave Tina a hug and a kiss, sometimes more than one, sometimes more than two. Tina had spent the shining summer in breathless expectancy of this ritual.

The children next door were only oblique excuses for going over to visit. Barby was scornful of them because they were boys who pulled her braids. Muffin beat them with her fists when they dangled her dolls out of reach and made her
say please. But Tina pretended that boys were fun to play with, although she was terrified if they played rough.

The way to heaven was not always easy, but getting there was worth the bumps and bruises. For next door’s mother came to comfort. She was soft and round. To lean against her felt so different from Daddy. It felt safe, as if she could sink so deep into that warm and breathing softness that she would be hidden forever from everything that frightened her.

Next door’s mother said Tina was the little girl she had always wanted until she gave up trying. It was plain that boys were not what she wanted. When she hugged them, they giggled silly and wriggled away. Tina didn’t. She stood very still, mute and malleable. Time after time Tina got an extra hug from the love left begging by the boys.

Next door’s mother had found Tina after she stopped trying. It was funny how things happened. It was wonderful how things happened. There never was a summer that had kept so many promises.

M
uffin suddenly burst out laughing. “Look at Jezebel,” she squealed, doubling over with delight.

They looked at Jezebel. She was picking her way across the park, walking slowly and sedately, with a large, unwieldy pancake suspended from her mouth. Presently she stopped, lifted one paw, and scanned the park for spies. Then she carefully put the pancake down and dug a hole beside it.

It was her morning custom to make the round of the cottages. As the only female dog in the Oval, she could walk across lawns and scratch on screen doors without fear of being chased by the males whose province she was invading. That she was old and spayed and oblivious to their overtures did not lessen their appreciation of her presence among
them. She was a diversion from their daily squabbles, and her favors, such as they were, were impartial.

Jezebel took everything that was offered her and buried everything that wasn’t a bone. What pleased her palate she ate on the premises. The rest she carried to the park. That she accepted, even begged for, what she did not want was greed. That she saved room in her stomach for what she did want was good planning.

The Coles place was her favorite and final stop. Having lost their old dog the winter before, the Coleses were partial to Jezebel. They did not give her table scraps; they gave her solid chunks of meat. Even in her own home Jezebel did not have it that good. A dog who has to live with children has to have a lot of messy leftovers mixed in with her daily rations.

Jezebel, her task completed and the earth packed back as neatly as if it had never been disturbed, now made straight tracks for the Coles place, panting in her lumbering haste.

Lute had bound Tina’s hair into braids. He tugged at them, and her face bent back to him, its innocence dream-washed with love for next door’s mother, even Jezebel’s antics not wholly erasing it.

Impaling the love on that lifted face, Lute kissed Tina so hard that her teeth caught in the flesh of her lip, and a little trickle of blood filled her throat with nausea. As she clambered over Lute’s knee to give her place to Muffin, he caught her in a bear hug that took her breath away. She gasped from the pain of it. Her ribs felt crushed.

“That hurts, Daddy,” she said on a sob.

Barby turned beet red. “Stop it, Daddy,” she said
fiercely, while Muffin beat on his arm, her hand being quicker than her tongue.

“You know I wouldn’t hurt Tina,” he said, trapping Muffin’s fist and lifting her high above his head to make her laugh. “Tina knows how much I love her.”

But no one knew really. It was immeasurable. Every man has a child that is his heart’s child. For Lute it was Tina, born of his second wife, a Polack waitress, fresh from her chastity on an upcountry farm, her eye compelled to Lute’s dark handsomeness in the row of amorphous white faces across the counter of a cheap beanery.