The winds made Robert nervous. So did the Pacific. They went to Seattle and then Portland (“I’ve never seen them,” the Old Man said), and somewhere between them they made a special trip to see the Pacific. They stood on a bare crumbling cliff and looked down over the brown beach to the ocean. The surface rose and fell, waves like breathing. After that day, Robert never looked at the Pacific again—he felt somehow that it would not have been safe.
They were gone almost four months. The Old Man never mentioned business to Robert. Maurice Lamotta came several times, stayed overnight and left. Otherwise nothing. The Old Man did not even seem to be on the phone very much. It was, as he said, a complete vacation.
By the time they returned to New Orleans, Robert was engaged to the Old Man’s daughter Anna.
HE WAS never sure how that happened. He did remember thinking: She’s seventeen and she has a blouseful and she’s ready for a man. He did not remember mentioning marriage, but he must have. He was positive she hadn’t suggested it. She was too gentle and too polite. Even her voice was soft and hushed and lingered in the air after she had stopped talking.
Robert wondered. She wasn’t vague, she wasn’t silent. She spoke well and intelligently. She, like her father, loved the mountains—Robert could feel the excitement shaking her body. She was young and beautiful, and he had the feeling that at any moment she might turn into smoke and disappear.
Maybe that’s why, Robert thought, restless already with his unusual introspection, I have to try. …
He would marry this beautiful girl. No more muddy gardens and standing in the dark.
He tried to imagine what it would be like, a wife waiting for you at home. A place of your own. He’d never had that—even when his mother was alive they’d lived with relatives. A series of cousins’ houses, all strange, all smelling of other people. His place now would smell of him alone. It would be his and nobody else’s.
The Old Man seemed neither happy nor unhappy. “It’s time for Anna to think of getting married,” he said, and that was all.
And Anna herself, she seemed no different, except that her color was higher, her smooth olive cheeks had a tiny spot of pale pink. Now and then, when she put her hand on Robert’s arm, a gentle soft gesture, he felt a twinge straight through his body, all the way back to his stomach. And he decided, after a couple of jolts like that, he was very much in love with her.
Back in New Orleans one evening, he sat in his stuffy bedroom where moths beat against the lamp, and considered the whole thing, carefully. When his vague wordless thoughts receded and only the slap of moth wings and the buzz of an occasional mosquito disturbed the quiet, he decided that everything he’d ever wanted was within his reach, and waiting for him. For the first time, it’s enough. It feels like it’s enough.
Anna
EVER SINCE SHE COULD remember, Anna had planned her wedding day. Even her dolls were brides. She had hundreds of dolls in those days; her aunts and uncles and cousins brought them regularly. They were all sorts and sizes, large and small, fair and dark, soft-bodied babies and hoop-skirted ladies. Anna did the same thing with all of them. She stripped off their clothes (throwing those into the kitchen garbage) and put the naked dolls carefully on shelves and in corners. When she was six, she told her father: “My dolls need new clothes.” The very next day her dressmaker, Miss Evelyn Boissac, arrived and settled into the big sewing room. Little lady, what would you like? I have scraps from your dresses; would you like your dolls to wear dresses just like yours? “I want them to be brides,” the child Anna said, decisively. All of them? “Yes.” When Miss Boissac hesitated, Anna gave a bellow of rage. Her Aunt Cecilia (who acted as housekeeper, because Anna’s own mother was always pregnant and worried about the health of the baby, and everybody knew she needed quiet and rest so the little unborn thing might go to its natural term) flew in the door scolding with rage: Miss Boissac, you know what the doctors said. … Miss Boissac nodded and her thin lips grew thinner. For the next week she sewed nothing but wedding dresses for the dolls, all of them, even the baby dolls. They were made of every kind of white material, shiny soft satin to stiff organdy. There must be a hundred dolls, Miss Boissac complained. “I have never counted,” Anna answered calmly.
One by one, in their long white dresses, with their veils thrown back to reveal their painted faces, the brides lined the shelves and filled the corners. Anna never left the room— it was summer vacation—day after day, while Miss Boissac drank glass after glass of iced tea, she stayed right beside her and watched the darting needle of the sewing machine, or rummaged through stacks of materials selecting the next dress. They were sewing the morning when, in spite of the quiet and rest, Anna’s mother went into premature labor. The house filled with weeping, bustling relatives and black-skirted priests praying in rows in her empty bedroom. Anna looked at them once and returned to Miss Boissac. “It won’t work,” she said, flatly. What won’t work? “The baby won’t live, it’s got bad blood.” What a terrible thing to say. “I was healthiest because I was first; my sister was smaller, you see that. By the time the others came, the blood was so bad they couldn’t live.” Who told you that? Who ever gave a child ideas like that? “Who?” It had been the Negro cook, but Anna, suddenly secretive, said calmly, “God told me.”
Anna kept those dolls for seven or eight years, then packed them all into many boxes and sent them to St. Vincent’s Orphanage. She was no longer interested in them. By that time she was filling sketchbooks with ideas for her wedding.
She was a clever artist, a good draftsman. She studied fashion magazines, books of design; she gathered details from all of them, combining them to suit herself. She even went to the public library to copy the wedding dresses of ancient Rome. Her shelves, emptied of dolls, filled with sketchbooks, all neatly arranged and organized. One book for flowers, this done in watercolor. One book of dresses for the maid of honor—all selected to minimize her sister Margaret’s stockiness. One for the bridesmaids. Another for the ring bearer, a slender small boy—Anna was sure that among her many cousins she could find one to approximate the appearance of her sketch. Another book for the cake, sketches adapted from the Larousse Gastronomique, for the endless buffets. Another for the wedding celebration itself, the entertainments, the pavilions, the gardens, the ballrooms. And finally book after book of brides’ dresses, of every possible style.
She began, with infinite care and precision, to acquire her household goods. At fifteen she had an entire convent of Guatemalan Carmelite nuns doing her needlework. They embroidered, they monogrammed, they did draw work, they tatted. They worked steadily for years to her order and design. When the finished things arrived, she smoothed them inch by inch, and put them away in boxes lined with blue paper. … A Belgian convent stopped everything but prayers to make her lace tablecloths. Slowly, steadily, her closets and chests began to fill.
Anna felt a great sense of happiness, of readiness, at the accumulation of these things. She felt part of the endless line of women who had gathered dowries in chests and boxes, sealed away against the coming of the unknown bridegroom.
At sixteen she ordered her china, her own design, executed by Minton. It took two years and arrived barely in time for her wedding.
At sixteen too, she bought her house. She found it one afternoon, while on a pious outing with her convent class. They visited the site of a small miracle by St. Jude—some flashing lights and a weeping holy picture—in a small dark house that smelled of urine and mold and cabbage. The woman around whom these remarkable things happened, a cripple with a stiff hip and a fingerless hand, lay in her bed, snuffling with a cold. The uniformed convent girls filed by her bedroom door, staring, but she did not open her eyes. On the way back to school, as Anna looked idly out her window, she saw the house, half hidden behind its iron-fenced garden. That one glance was enough. Her father bought it the next day, paying triple its value. She planned the remodeling with her usual thoroughness—more sketches, more books. Two years later, w
hen she was engaged to Robert, the plans were complete, but no actual work had been done. She had to hurry. She hired two crews, who worked well into the night while the neighbors complained. Every day, after school, she tossed aside her books and went to check their work. The men grumbled at her demands; some quit, but others stayed and the house took shape as Anna intended.
ANNA COULD never remember a time when she had not planned her wedding—and she couldn’t remember a time when she had not gone to the Ursuline convent. She knew every one of the nuns, from the ancient dying ones in the infirmary, to the novices with their young round faces. She knew every inch of the dark building: the huge echoing attics and the narrow between-wall climbways; the time-suspended stillness of chapels and vestibules, the cold formality of the parlors. For twelve years she had been contented and happy, a good student, quiet, well-behaved. (Her sister Margaret set off firecrackers in the library, lit all the vigil lights in the chapel at once, poured ink in lunchboxes, played truant, blew spitballs filled with BB’s in class.) Now, in her last year, Anna was restless and anxious. During her Latin class she decided among the dress designs that crowded her sketchbooks, during rhetoric class she rejected her decisions, during French she almost cried with frustration.
The dress she finally selected was ivory white, without a train, high-necked, long-sleeved, seed pearls worked over its entire surface. She adapted that design from an illustration in Ivanhoe. She would wear no jewelry except earrings of her own design, a long cascade of pearls, made by Tiffany.
Once she’d decided, she felt much better, but she still had no time to study.
At midterm she was called to the Mother Superior’s office. The crackling wimple, shiny with starch, the dusty folds of black wool skirt—Anna thought: When I first came here, I was so scared of them. The rustle of that coif would make my neck prickle, and the clack of their big wood rosaries would send me scurrying around a corner out of their way. I used to think they were a mixture of God and a black ghost and I’d have nightmares about them. … Everything in the convent is black; the halls have no windows and the floors are black linoleum. The chapel is dark wood with only a vigil light or two (makes it seem darker, those shivery single points of light) and the red sanctuary light hanging and swaying in the drafts. All darkness for God’s presence. Except twice a year. Midnight on Christmas, red and green. And Easter, white and gold. … She half-heard the lecture on improving her grades. Then she said quietly: “I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether I graduate or not. I’ll be married in June, and Robert and my father don’t care.”
She saw astonishment on the nun’s face, then stony concern. She went on demurely, “I’ve had my schooling, and whether I sit on a stage and carry some flowers doesn’t really matter.”
She kept on smiling vaguely, deferentially. And went her own way. “I have to get a house ready,” she explained. “Robert and I need a place to live. It’s so very important to have it nice, don’t you know?”
In February she stayed after school every day for two weeks for tutoring in math and Latin. Then she stopped. “I’m very grateful,” she said politely, “but there is so much I have to do every day after school.”
The tutor, a round red-faced nun, nodded silently.
“I’ve been wondering, why don’t I drop school altogether; it would be easier for you, don’t you think?”
The nun’s calm red face said: “I think it would be a great pity, my dear, not to finish something you’ve started.”
Anna smiled her great new bland smile. “But I’m not quitting. I’ve started something else.”
Wrapped by its starched bands, the flushed face smiled very slightly. “I think tutoring has helped you quite a bit. I suspect you will manage to pass.”
“I do hope so,” Anna said. For that one moment she meant it.
Then she forgot all about it. She was so busy with her house and Robert. She thought about both constantly during that last semester of high school: Robert’s face floated among the rugs and curtains and sofas and chairs. She read her Shakespeare without seeing, scanned her Virgil with random squiggles, while she contemplated the shape of Robert’s ears, the way his hands were shaped: short square nails, little tufts of hair on the fingers. … Sometimes he met her after school. When she saw him waiting, there were prickles along her scalp and a little singing in her ears. It was all she could do to keep from throwing down her books and running. Of course she did not; she behaved with propriety and dignity.
“I believe my fiancé is meeting me this afternoon,” she said to the nuns; “yes, I see him there.”
They crowded the windows behind her as she walked slowly out to meet him. She could feel their eyes running over her, passing over her like tiny fingers.
The next day they told her: “A fine-looking young man; you make a lovely couple.” She nodded, smiling shyly, not minding in the least that they said the same to every girl. Because it was pleasant to feel their disinterested admiration, their far-off window-limited glances.
SHE GRADUATED in May with the rest of her class, white dresses and bouquets of red roses. Her father sat in the audience, Robert next to him. How lucky I am, she thought. My father is so distinguished-looking, nobody in the auditorium is as tall as he is. And Robert is so handsome, with shiny black hair, shiny black eyes. … They are both wearing the same beige silk suit. Different ties. My father’s is darker. … They look like the same family already. …
Anna looked at her cousins and her aunts and uncles sitting row after row on all sides of her father—and she decided that there was not a single person in her mother’s family she really liked. I will be honest, Anna promised herself, after I am married; I will stop seeing them, gradually but firmly.
There were times when you put things behind you. Like giving away the dolls you’d kept all your life. Like opening doors to closed rooms. … After her mother’s death—of a broken heart for the last dead baby, the family said—her bedroom door was kept closed. Anna and Margaret always tiptoed by it, hurriedly, just as they had done when she was alive. That door stayed locked, year after year. Once Anna’s grandmother took her inside. (Margaret, the younger, was not invited.) Her mother’s clothes still hung in the closets, already slightly out of style to Anna’s quick eye, protected by little bundles of vetiver against the nonpresent moth. On the bed, under the spread, the slightly wrinkled pillow on which she died. Her book permanently face down on the table. Her shawl folded and waiting on the chair. … “You see,” Anna’s grandmother said. “Just the way your mother left it.” And a single tear ran down her cheek. Anna, with a child’s calmness, watched the tear leave a shiny trail across the broad cheek and wondered how long you grieved, how long there was pain. She herself felt nothing. She had scarcely known her mother alive, how could she miss her dead? She had no memory of the woman whose ghost inhabited this room, whose clothes hung in the closet, whose shoes lined the polished wood floor. Like paper from which dolls are cut, these were the marks her mother left behind. The silver brushes on the dressing table: “The last thing your father gave her, she almost never used them, but look, here in the bristles, the long hair, see, that’s hers. You see how long her hair was, see how black. No, don’t touch it. We never do; we dust and put it back, that’s all.”
Anna looked carefully around the room, wrapped within its always drawn shades. The spicy smell of vetiver in the still air made her pant for breath. In the closets dresses hung limply, the hems sagged unevenly. The shoes tipped a bit on their heels, leaning on each other.
“Mama is happy in heaven,” Anna said. She had been taught that, by whom? “Everybody is happy in heaven.”
And when another tear wriggled its way in the path of the first, Anna stared, not understanding.
ONE DAY that special shrine was gone. Simply, completely. One day after school she found the door open, and the gray fall sky shining beyond the curtainless windows. She went inside, curiously. A new spread was on the bed, she peeped beneath: all fresh
linen. The dresser was cleared of perfume bottles and brushes and vases. She opened the closet: empty. Her father said nothing; her grandmother did not come to the house for a very long time. Anna did not question the change.
She learned that it was part of life, this putting things behind you. Her father had taught her that.
ANNA FELT a vague fondness—tinged with pity—for her grandmother. That poor old woman who dried her tears only to have them creep back.
She died in April of a sudden attack of jaundice. She suffered patiently and silently in her hospital room, with flowers and holy lights. She was eased toward immortality by the massed chanting of six priests, all her relatives. Her gasping yellow body was surrounded by her entire family—latecomers were left in the hall, unable to crowd into the small room. They carried chairs and boxes from all over the building, stood on them to peer through the door. When the Archbishop came, he too had to climb on a chair and send his blessing to her over the massed backs of her family. Perhaps if he had been wearing his full ceremonial robes and his mitered hat—perhaps then they would have made room for him. But perhaps not, for death was a family business and they had their own priests.
Anna, trapped inside the room, felt her skin creep with horror at the presence of the unconscious woman. Her sister Margaret said, “I’m going to throw up,” and dropping down on her hands and knees she crawled out of the room, pushing through the forest of legs. Anna stared at her engagement ring (a square sapphire: “Diamonds are so common, Robert”), and saw Robert and her future in its blue depths. She hardly heard the shrieks and cries when the old woman’s breathing finally struggled to a stop.
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