The Wedding (25 page)

“I am doing no such thing,” Della said haughtily, putting her bags down on the floor. “I did not risk my life flying to this accursed piece of sand just to turn around and leave. I am at least going to spend the night.”

Lute raked his hands through his hair and pulled them down over his eyes. He stared at her through splayed fingers. “Why are you here, Della?” he growled. “Do you even know yourself? You think you can beg a man to be in love with you? Threaten him to be in love with you? Why don’t you just let go, and get on out of here before you make more of a fool of yourself than you already have.”

Della’s face crumbled and turned ugly, the pure ugliness of a woman who has lost everything, a woman who has offered up all she has and been found wanting. She snarled at him like a cornered dog that had been kicked once too often. “The entire plane ride I kept thinking about the call you made the first night you got here. Remember those words? I believed you, you bastard. I waited for you. I’m not leaving this island until I see for myself what it was that poisoned your head so fast and turned your heart to ice.”

Lute looked at his watch. It was ten minutes after ten. He had fifty minutes to get Della to the airport or all his lies about having already divorced her would float to the surface like drowned bodies. Della may have given Lute teasing glimpses of upper-class life among whites, but with Shelby he could share the same existence, only openly, with his
daughters a part of it. He would not let this woman ruin everything he had worked for all summer, for himself and his family. “Della, please. You shouldn’t have come. There’s nothing for you to see here. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

“What’s wrong?” she mocked, her blue eyes blazing. “You act as if you were ashamed of me. You mean you haven’t been bragging on me? You haven’t been telling this island all about me? Are they going to be surprised to learn that you are still very much a married man?” She bent over, picked up her suitcases, and started to walk to the stairs.

With a low snarl of desperate rage, Lute hurled himself at her. She dropped her bags and clawed at his face with her nails, furrowing long red trails into his cheeks, but he fought his way through her arms and pinned them to her sides. He stuck his jaw in her face. Sweat dripped from his nose. “If you don’t get off this island right now, I’m going to
kill
you, you hear me? I am not messing around, woman,” he hissed quietly, the veins in his neck bulging. “I’ll kill you and feed you to the crows.”

Della drew up a wad of spit and hawked it in his face. It hit his chin dead on and ran off onto the floor. “As long as I am still your wife, you have no right to order me around. How easily you forget who paid for this cottage. I’ll leave when I’m damn ready.” As she spoke, Lute ratcheted her pinioned arms back sharply, putting excruciating pressure on her shoulders. She drew in a sharp breath, eyes closed tight against the pain. “Let go of me,
nigger.”

Releasing one of Della’s hands, Lute hauled back and laid a brutal open-handed slap across her face. She partially
blocked the blow, but it still struck her with enough force to send her sprawling to the floor, where she lay, momentarily dazed. With a savage effort, she raised her head off the ground. Flecks of blood mottled her lips. “I’ll see you put in jail for that, chair maker,” she hissed, her voice rising to a screech on the last word.

Tina huddled behind her bedroom door, her hands pressed to her ears, her mind blank with fear. This was the way Barby had told her Daddy acted with mothers sooner or later, but before now she had never believed her. The quarreling below grew more bitter. Tina did not know what to do, but she knew that she could not stay in the house a minute longer. She had been drawing a picture for next door’s mother and could wish no better time to present it. The expected hug and kiss and gentle stroking of her hair would quiet her palpitating heart. Throwing caution to the wind, she opened her bedroom door, scampered down the stairs, pushed open the screen door, and sprinted out onto the lawn. Neither Lute nor Della noticed her run past.

Blind instinct guided Tina down the hill to the safety of next door mother’s house. Tina knew she didn’t want a mother named Shelby Coles, and she knew she didn’t want a mother named Della. What she wanted was a smiling brown mother like the woman next door.

Lute stood over Della, arm raised. “Don’t make me slap you again,” he yelled. She wouldn’t. He had slapped her more than enough, had beaten her into stunned submission. He snatched at the front of her blouse and jerked her teetering
to her feet. Grabbing her bags with one hand, Lute shoved her toward the door. Sullenly, but without argument or resistance, she allowed herself to be led to his car, a midnight-blue 1949 DeSoto. He took her bags and put them in the trunk, and she stood unsteadily in front of the passenger-side door. Closing the trunk, he looked at her impatiently. “Get in,” he snapped. “It’s unlocked.” She obeyed, slumping down in the soft leather seat.

Lute had used his car so infrequently that summer that he was worried it would not start, but the engine caught immediately. Pressing hard on the gas pedal, he backed out of the driveway with a lurch, then threw the gearshift into drive and shot forward down the grassy lane.

On this too-early hour on this day of all days the mother next door was totally unready for a visitor. Reluctantly, she had tried on the dress she had bought for the wedding months before, some sixth sense telling her that she had gained weight beyond its capacity to hold her inside it. Her doubt was soon borne out, and in her understandable agony she was totally unable to take time with a child who did not know what real agony felt like.

For the first time in their loving relationship, her voice was impatient; her face had no trace of a smile. “I’m very busy today, Tina. You go play with your sisters. I’m sure they’re not far.”

Mutely, Tina handed her the crayon drawing of a smiling brown woman, not knowing what else to do with it, and quickly left the house. Then, not knowing why—perhaps because it had watched her defeat, perhaps to release some
unbearable pain inside herself—she picked up a fair-sized stone and threw it at her dog Jezebel to make her yelp in the same way next door’s mother had made her yelp inside herself.

She was immediately sorry, and she ran after him— unseen on one side of Lute’s moving car just as Lute suddenly saw the dog on the other side. Lute swerved to avoid the dog, and at the same time he heard Tina’s wrenching scream.

As if underwater, he drove both feet into the brake, his mouth curled open in a moan of dumb despair. The wheels locked. The car slowed, but not enough. Tina’s waiflike body soared up with eerie grace, head back, arms out. She seemed to hang in the air at the top of her body’s arc, frozen against the soft summer sunlight flickering through the trees. Then, like a marionette with its strings cut, she fell to the ground.

Tina died in the nest of next door’s mother’s arms, too numb with pain to feel it or know she was dying, she who did not even know that children could die before they grew up to be like real people. Next door’s mother held her to her breast, sobbing softly, clutching in one hand her crumpled crayon drawing.

Barby and Muffin heard the sound of their sister’s scream from a distance and they ran to the road and to the sight of their father standing slack-jawed, arms straight at his side. They gathered around him and stared down at Tina. Muffin, young enough to still know what life meant but too young yet to know what death meant, stared in silent
incomprehension, but Barby understood. Tina wanted a brown mother like next door’s mother. Brown mothers hugged you a lot and made you laugh a lot. White mothers made you feel sorry and sad. Barby began to cry. “You know how to make her stop dying. Make her stop dying. Make her stop dying. Don’t you love her? Don’t you love her? She’s my sister. I know it scares her to be dying. I don’t know how to make her stop dying. Oh, Daddy, please.” She looked at her father wildly. “You don’t like mothers. You make them die. All Tina wanted was a mother and you made her die to make her stop saying it.” She began to beat Lute’s legs with both fists.

Lute started to cry. He had not cried since he was a child. At first he cried for his children, and then he cried for himself.

A crowd began to form around the car, and soon it swelled to encompass almost every family in the Oval. Suddenly, a woman pushed her way through the crowd from the edge of the road. It was Shelby. In a single glance, she absorbed the scene in front of her—Lute’s white wife huddled inside the car, Lute with his daughters, two alive and one dead. A roiling fireball of rage and grief engulfed her, and she sank to her knees, hands drawn involuntarily to her mouth. The scales had fallen from her eyes. All of Lute’s words about remaining true to one’s race, all his subtle slurs, his sly digs, all were lies, pretexts. All of his deception and envy had led to this: the death of an innocent, a small girl who wanted a mother more than anything else in the whole
world. Shelby could only thank God that it was not too late for her and Meade. Color was a false distinction; love was not.

From the porch of the Coles’ house, Gram, Liz, and Laurie watched the crowd begin to disperse. Laurie began to cry, softly at first but then loudly. Her mother tried to quiet her, but she wailed on. Gram raised her head and studied the baby gravely. Then, without saying a word, she turned to her great-granddaughter and extended her hands.

Liz placed Laurie gently into Gram’s wrinkled arms with a small, sad smile. Gram cooed softly as she rocked the infant back and forth, her finger tickling its dark chin. She felt the baby grow quiet in her arms, and she thought of Josephine, whom she had held the same way so many years before. She could not turn the clock back. She could not change the past or do much about the present. But she could spend the little time she had left on earth making things a bit better for the future. Liz put her arm on Gram’s shoulder, and they turned away and walked back into the house.

D
OROTHY
W
EST
founded the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine
Challenge
in 1934, and
New Challenge
in 1937, with Richard Wright as her associate editor. She was a welfare investigator and WPA relief worker in Harlem during the Depression. Her first novel,
The Living Is Easy
, appeared in 1948 and remains in print. Her second novel,
The Wedding
, was a national bestseller and literary landmark when published in the winter of 1995. A collection of her stories and autobiographical essays,
The Richer, The Poorer
, appeared during the summer of 1995. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard.