by Belva Plain
The rabbi smiles and nods and the music starts up. He recognizes the recessional, Mendelssohn, with a note of triumph in it. They walk down the aisle. Women have wet eyes, looking at the bride. A photographer stands at the end of the aisle, waiting.
“Smile,” he says.
Next is the reception line. Congratulations … I knew you before you were born … lovely bride … so happy … hope you … health … many years … thank you … thank you.
Then food and dancing; the orchestra lilts and crashes from waltzes to tangos and fox-trots. He dances with the bride, with his mother and her mother and all the bridesmaids, one by one. Creak of taffeta, smell of perfume and perspiration, jingle of bracelets, jangle of talk.
Marian is surrounded and admired. Her ring, her veil, her pearls, all are admired.
He is surprised that he can eat. He keeps on eating: chicken, asparagus, pineapple, wedding cake, all of it, as if starved. His best man teases him about his appetite.
“Getting your strength up, are you?” he says, having known Paul long enough to talk that way.
And it is over, the bouquet thrown, the blue garter revealed, and farewells said. They are alone in the Mayers’ Packard town car, alone in the upholstered shell of the passenger compartment. Paul wonders whether the chauffeur is snickering to himself. In the winter the poor devil sits outside wrapped in a fur coat and cap, as if he were going to the North Pole, and it probably feels like the North Pole, Paul thinks.
When Mimi reaches for his hand, he realizes that he has been too silent, even for a numb, bedazzled bridegroom.
“Well, it was a beautiful wedding,” he says, “your mother took care of everything.”
“Yes, didn’t she? And when we get home our house will be ready; she’ll supervise it all. Such marvelous presents, Paul! You haven’t even seen most of them yet, you know. Or the decorations, either.”
He has been surfeited with description: of carpets and draperies, pillows and puffs, swags, ruching, pleating and tucking, of ecru and café au lait and bois de rose, all of these apparently essential to starting life together.
The car stops at the Plaza, where they will spend the night before the ship sails in the morning. He hadn’t wanted the Plaza, but here he is; at least, though, the elevators are right at the registration desk, so he doesn’t have to walk past the Palm Court. He hasn’t been here since that day and never wants to go again, but will no doubt have to.
The suite is at the end of a long corridor. Their feet make no sound on the patterned carpet. The bellboy unlocks the door and places their luggage on racks; the luggage has the smell of new, expensive leather. Again there are flowers, tall gladioli this time, spread open like rainbow-colored fans on every tabletop. He will put them in the bathroom for the night. And there is more champagne. He has had enough today and Mimi agrees that she doesn’t want any either.
Not knowing for the moment what to do, they both walk to the window, to look out upon the park and the city lights.
“I thought the bridesmaids looked lovely, didn’t you?” asks Mimi. “And the tables were beautiful.”
After theater, he thinks, while riding home, one makes comments about the play.
“It was all wonderful,” he says.
They stand there looking at the carriage lanterns and, for some unknown reason, he thinks of fireflies on a summer lawn, of crickets and rustling leaves. He muses about fireflies until it comes to him that this is absurd; they can’t just keep standing there.
“Well,” he says, “I’ll take the other room.” And smiling encouragement, departs with his suitcase.
Then he thinks, I hope she understood I only meant to change. But, of course, she must have understood.
When he returns, she is waiting for him, having gotten undressed for the night, although it almost seems as though she has gotten dressed instead, since the negligee flows as voluminously concealing, as opulently lacy as the bridal gown. It is white, but no more so than her timid face, when she averts her gaze, as if she fears what she may find if she were to look at him directly.
She is so young, so frail, so scared. His impulse is to smooth the frilly petals of her collar, kiss her forehead, put her to bed as one puts a child to bed, and then go to sleep himself. Or go out for a walk in the mild, lovely evening. But now, wondering and expectant, she looks at him. Surely she has been told about the wedding night, and she waits.
He moves to her and takes her loosely in his arms. Willingly, she puts her arms around his neck, barely skimming his flesh. Her touch is light as feathers. He lifts and carries her to the bed, as he is supposed to do. Oh, this is the wedding night, and his heart isn’t pounding; there is nothing in him but gentleness and sorrow, because there is nothing in him but gentleness and sorrow.
He lays her down and holds her. She lies there, rigid and withdrawn, with just their hips and shoulders touching, nothing more. He wants only to sleep. Gradually she relaxes, and once more puts her arms around his neck. He holds her closer, but still there is nothing. Nothing …
And he remembers the heat and strength of Anna, pulling him to her; wanting him as he wanted her. Her skin had burned. He imagines what it would be to release her hair, how it would fall in a dark red cascade, all slippery and alive; he would bury his face in it and in her round, warm breasts; he would …
Oh, Anna, Anna, he cries silently. And suddenly now his heart does pound; it pounds so that he can hardly breathe with the fury of it, and cannot wait.
He reaches up to extinguish the lamp, and he is able.
2
On a fair summer afternoon, in a dull Serbian town, the Austrian archduke and his archduchess, bowing with regal grace and serenely smiling to the populace from their open barouche, were shot to death.
It was the work of an instant: the gun popped, bystanders screamed in horror, the horses reared, blood gushed on white silk, and all was over—except for the headlines that towered over the world and the four years of war that came after.
“Well,” Paul said, “Bismarck always predicted that it would start with some damn fool thing in the Balkans.”
For the next two months, the mails and telegraph wires between the capitals were burdened with pleas, propositions, and threats. In their striped trousers and top hats, the diplomats rushed from one foreign office and one chancellery to another, there to bluff and bargain; yet Austria mobilized and Russia mobilized; one by one, the sovereign nations followed, until in the end almost the whole of Europe had been driven into the heart of the storm.
It broke on the second of August. By the first of September, France had already lost more than one hundred thousand of her best young men in the anguish of that storm. Photographs reaching the newspapers in America showed dreadful scenes of soldiers departing by train, with their wives and mothers running alongside the tracks; of smoke rising from burning houses in Belgium as the Germans sped through; of fleeing villagers carrying children, chickens, and bedsteads in farm carts, while their milk cows stumbled behind them on the teeming roads.
A terrible fear swept through America: that she, too, would be dragged in, to be engulfed by this mad storm. And millions of voices—especially women’s voices—were raised now in a warning cry for peace.
Emotion was so profound that when the first peace marchers came down Fifth Avenue that August, there was not a sound from the crowd who watched. To the beat of muffled drums, they came down the glittering avenue behind the peace flag with its insignia of the gentle dove; in rank after rank of quiet women they came, dressed in black like so many mourning widows, with their feet softly shuffling on the pavement.
Paul stood with his wife’s arm linked in his.
“So awfully sad,” she murmured. “So helpless and sad.”
He looked down. Under the fashionable brim of her hat, known as the “Merry Widow,” Mimi’s eyes were wet. She would want to wipe them, for public emotion embarrassed her, and he gave her his handkerchief. In only a little more than a year of marriage th
ey had evolved so many of these small, intimate signals without words!
He, too, was deeply moved by what they were seeing. This past month had been hard for any thinking person, but for one who knew and loved Europe as he did, it was appalling.
And his mind went back to The Hague in 1907 when his father and he, on business in Amsterdam, had gone over to see what the peace conferees were up to. From tulip time to chrysanthemum time, they had been talking; the white-bearded gentlemen in their frock coats looked out of the windows of the parliament building, where the freshening winds blew from the North Sea through the old copper beeches, and went back again to talking. They were laying down rules as precise as those for a chess tournament: rules about the feeding of prisoners, and the bombardment of civilians (to be permitted or not?), the use of asphixiating gas and dumdum bullets. When they disbanded, the chrysanthemums were beaten down by rain, and gray clouds swam over cold gray skies. In four months, they had made one significant decision: They were to meet again in 1915.
Oh, the damned old men!
Now people were claiming it would all be over by Christmas. Nonsense, Paul thought, remembering the smokestacks and switching yards of Germany.
Then he remembered his cousin Joachim, following the score at the Bayreuth opera, hiking through the Black Forest pines, and lifting a stein to toast his emperor. The true-blue German! No doubt he was already in uniform, to fight for the emperor. Well, God spare him. God spare us all.
Mimi asked, “Do you suppose we’ll see Hennie?”
“I’m watching. They all look alike in their black.”
Still they marched, the old and the young; a few were pushing baby carriages; all faces were set and solemn.
“Hennie doesn’t seem bold enough to do something like this,” Mimi remarked.
“That’s true, but all her shyness goes when she’s in a group. Her conviction carries her. There’s Hennie now, there she is!”
“Where? Where?” Mimi stood on tiptoe.
“The third one in from this end, look where I’m pointing …”
And there she was, half a head taller than anyone around her, with chin up, stepping smartly.
A smile came to Paul’s lips. Good old Hennie! Damn, you couldn’t keep her down! Where did she come from? She wasn’t like any of the other women in the family. Like her grandmother, old Uncle David said. She’d be a valiant old woman, fighting for causes with her last breath.
“Well, now that we’ve seen her, let’s go home,” Mimi said. “If they’re all coming to dinner, I want to make sure that Effie does things right.”
The new Mrs. Werner was a meticulous housekeeper.
“I was taught,” she liked to tell Paul, “never to expect a servant to do anything you can’t do yourself.”
She knew how to bake, to clean, to serve, and to arrange flowers; she never did or had to do any of these things, except arranging flowers, but she knew how they ought to be done and saw to it that they were done right.
And what was the purpose of all this effort? The comfort of the master of the house, that’s what. He had only to ask once for something, an apple before going to bed or a new book that someone had mentioned, and the apple was there on the bedside table every night, while the book would be in the library, beside his chair, on the very next day.
The street was deserted. In this quiet area east of Fifth Avenue, there were few houses whose windows were not covered with gray boards; the owners were away for the summer. A fine dust lay over dry leaves on the trees that lined one side of the street, and a hot wind blew grit into their faces.
“Cross over to the shady side,” Paul said, thinking, Next summer she’ll positively go to the shore and I’ll commute by ferry or go down on weekends.
“You should be on the beach keeping cool in the breeze, Mimi.”
“As long as you’re in the city working, I’ll be here too. Weekends at the shore are good enough.”
“You’re very unselfish. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”
“I’m happy being wherever you are, Paul. Don’t you know that?” She squeezed his arm. Her eyes worshiped him.
“I know,” he said, patting her hand, thinking, I don’t deserve that you should say this to me.
He was at the head of his own table. So the generations march on, he thought wryly, recalling first the Biedermeier table, the red cabbage and sauerbraten at his grandfather’s house, and after that, the plum-colored dining room, the dreary, overstuffed opulence of his parents’.
This was a very different room. His mother-in-law’s contributions had, after all, not been as dreadful as he had predicted; the brightly flowered linens gave cheer to his own old English mahogany. On the sideboard there gleamed yet another silver tea service, the gift of Grandmother Angelique; they must have grown them on the plantation, he thought humorously. The evening sunshine made a clear pool on the bare parquet floor; it fell over Joachim’s wedding present, a magnificent crystal horse that stood on a pedestal in the corner, glistening as if it were drenched. Between the windows hung Paul’s prize, a small, radiant Cézanne, a landscape of billowing harvest fields cut into squares by rows of cypress.
To paint like that! What he would give to be able to create like that! In another life, perhaps. In the meanwhile, he would admire it; the sight of it every morning, appearing over the rim of his cup of breakfast coffee, was a pleasure almost physical in its intensity. And he resolved, as soon as he could afford it, to collect more such pleasures.
Dan’s forceful voice broke into these musings.
“… incredible shock that the masses flocked to the colors as they have. I never thought they would, that the workers would forget their common brotherhood.”
His face had fallen into folds, the flesh had sagged not two months since, and the lock of hair that always fell across his forehead now lay unheeded, brushing his eyebrows. He had grown visibly older.
“It’s been the most brutal disappointment of my life,” he finished in a falling tone.
Paul felt like saying that he was tired to death of troubles, the world’s and his own, that he just wanted to be free of it all for a while. The inner conflict of this past year had bled him enough. At the office there were other problems, heavy in their way, although not to be compared with his own doubt and guilt, God knew.
To be purely selfish, to feel pure joy again! And catching the inquisitive glance of Leah, who sat next to him, he thought that she must have been looking at him for several moments, and that his face must have shown an expression that had caught her interest.
“This is a wonderful room,” she said, drawing them both out of the general conversation. “The amber tone—it’s just right. Not too cool for a cold winter night, nor too hot, for instance, for today.”
Paul smiled. “You have an artist’s eye.”
“Not really. Just a good eye for color. And fashion, of course. That’s how I got my job.”
He was expected to ask her about the job. She had started it a month or two before, after graduation from high school. Actually, though, he was curious; there was something about the girl, he always thought, that reminded him vaguely—different as they were, yet there was something of that same vitality.
And he asked kindly, “Do you like the job as much as you thought you would?”
“Oh, yes! I’m at the bottom of the ladder, of course, but I’m learning. I’m allowed to baste in the fitting room, and I unpack the Paris samples that we copy. I can tell the difference between a Lanvin and a Callot or Redfern. Wonderful, wonderful clothes! They can transform a woman. Except that, sometimes, when I peek into the salon at the customers, and I see some of the old fat ones there, I think, nothing will transform you, madame,” And Leah wrinkled in distaste the little nose that Hennie called her monkey nose.
Paul laughed. She was refreshing. The thick hair was caught up with tortoiseshell combs; he was certain there was no rat in her pompadour, the hair was so heavy; then, his eye going to her waist, h
e was certain there was none of what he called “stuffing”; no mistaking the double swell of the breasts.
Mimi used stuffing, masses of ruffles under her dress.
“We have to stay out,” Dan said, waving his fork. “No matter who wins, I tell you it won’t matter. The victor will lay down the terms of peace, and what will happen? The loser will harbor vengeance that will only bring about another war. It will go on without end. No. America must stay out.”
“Everyone doesn’t think so,” Freddy said. “I know a lot of last year’s seniors who rushed to be commissioned in the British army.”
“Besotted fools!” Dan cried angrily.
“No,” Freddy argued. “German militarism must be crushed once and for all. H. G. Wells says once Germany’s thoroughly beaten, we’ll have disarmament and peace throughout the world. That’s what he says, and I agree.”
“If H. G. Wells said that, then he’s an ass.”
“I had a letter from Gerald this morning,” Freddy continued quietly, drawing it from his breast pocket. “It’s an inspiration. ‘I have the utmost faith that we are right … it is an honor to serve, and we march away in glory.’ ” He swallowed. His Adam’s apple, always prominent, jerked above his collar. “He goes on with details about training. Oh, yes, here. ‘I don’t want to miss the greatest adventure of our time. I’m confident that I will come back. Most of us will. After all, if by some chance I don’t, I can only say “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” ’ ” Silently, as if to allow the letter to speak eloquently for itself, Freddy folded and replaced it.
“With all respect to your friend,” Dan said, “that is the sheerest poppycock I’ve heard in a long time. Sweet to die for your country! When is it ever sweet to die for anything, pray tell me? Of course, if you say it in Latin, that makes it mean more, I suppose. A precious lot of idiocy you picked up in England, Freddy, not the least of it, while I’m on the subject, this whole classics business.”