by Trevanian
“What is it, Lorna, for the love of Christ?”
Ben returned from getting our luggage from under the bus in time to hear Aunt Lorna explain in a whining, don’t-blame-me tone that at the last minute Tonio had decided to invite his two brothers and their families for the weekend—to make a real family affair out of it, you see?—and he’d also invited a couple of business acquaintances who happened to be in town—but don’t worry, Tonio didn’t invite them to the wedding, just to the supper afterwards. Tonio hadn’t seen his brothers in a coon’s age, although they only lived down in Hudson Falls, and Lorna could hardly tell him he couldn’t have any of his family visit when she was having her cousin and her children and—oh, and Ben of course. Hi, Ben, nice to see you! Remember me? I’m Lorna. So! Well, the sleeping arrangements might be a little crowded. Both of Tonio’s brothers have kids.
“And the kids were invited to my wedding too?”
Lorna put a temper-soothing arm around Mother. “Oh, please, hon. Let’s not have any trouble. Things will work out fine and dandy, if you’ll just take it easy and not worry. I’ll take care of everything. Anne-Marie, you’re pale as a ghost. What’s wrong, honey? Had a bad trip up? Puke in the bus, did you?”
Mother looked inquiringly at Ben, who puffed out a long sigh, then put his arm around her and pressed her to his side. “Don’t worry, hon. I’m sure everything will be fine.”
With huge relief, Lorna kissed her cousin’s cheek noisily and thanked her for understanding how things were, then she herded us all towards their car—no longer new, so she was allowed to drive it. When Ben said something about the car’s ‘X’ sticker which allowed them almost unlimited gasoline, Lorna shrugged and said that Tonio’s friends could arrange things like that. Ben’s jaw tightened, but he refrained from comment.
At Lorna’s house we were greeted by a screaming herd of children ranging from two years old to ten. Tonio was sitting on the porch with his brothers, two younger, fatter duplicates of himself, even down to the dark Calabrian stains beneath the eyes from generations of vitamin-B deficiency. He waved a curt greeting but didn’t get up. We went into the house, wading through a tide of noisy, clutching kids, and met Lorna’s sisters-in-law: over-worked, distracted women whose youth and spirit had not survived the third child, but they’d gone on to have five each. We were escorted upstairs to drop off our suitcases, and I discovered that although the house had six bedrooms the only way they could put us all up was to give a bedroom to each of the couples with the biggest for the newlyweds (wink, blush), which left one bedroom for all the boys and another for all the girls. Including Anne-Marie and me, there were seven girls and five boys, and when I asked how five of us could sleep in one double bed, Lorna said we would sleep crosswise. It’ll be fun!
Anne-Marie and I exchanged glances. We doubted that.
The wedding was to be that evening, a simple ceremony before a Justice of the Peace with only Lorna there as matron of honor and Tonio as witness. There would be a wedding supper for all the family and the two guys from Troy that Tonio had invited. Aunt Lorna beckoned Mother into her bedroom to have a ‘nice juicy gossip’, and Anne-Marie and I drifted back downstairs where we found Ben, doing his best to play the social game. He declined a glass of wine and accepted lemonade instead, smiling half-heartedly at the single-entendre suggestion from one of Tonio’s brothers that Ben was trying to keep his head clear so he didn’t miss anything tonight. Right? Right? Am I right or not? Eh? Somebody tell me if I’m right or wrong here! Tonio’s nieces and nephews ran shrieking through the house, crashing into me, trampling my toes and clutching me with sticky fingers, using me as a pivot point and a shield. Like most children brought up to show a well-behaved front to outsiders, Anne-Marie and I had nothing but contempt for kids who were rambunctious in public, and for their feckless parents.
I managed to hide from the mob up in the attic with a book until evening came and we all had to gather on the porch to wish the wedding party well as they drove off to the Justice of the Peace, but not before one of Tonio’s brothers complimented Ben on his new blue suit, his blue and pink striped tie and his two-toned shoes, then he turned away and lightly tapped the side of his nose. I cannot recall how Mother looked, but I am sure that even after all these years Anne-Marie would be able to describe to the last detail her wedding suit, gloves and hat with a veil.
When the wedding party returned, dinner was served to the ravenous pack of kids in the steamy kitchen full of wonderfully complex smells. The women put up great writhing plates of spaghetti and meatballs with generous dollops of thick red sauce dusted with feathery ground cheese. The meatballs were made from a family recipe: beef and sausage ground together with bread crumbs that had been toasted with herbs, and each meatball had a bit of olive and a sliver of garlic buried in its center and was seared in smoking hot olive oil to seal it, then cooked in the sauce long enough for the bread crumbs to absorb its moisture and flavor. Ben was sitting with the men around the dining room table, six of them because Tonio’s two ‘business acquaintances’ from Troy had arrived for the wedding feast. Following the traditions of Tonio’s family, the men ate alone and were served first. Mother, as the bride and therefore, by rights, the star of the evening, resented having to eat out in the kitchen with the kids and women, and she was annoyed by the way Lorna kept jumping up to put her head into the dining room and ask the men if they wanted anything, then running to their service with bottles of wine, platters of sauce-drenched meatballs, and steaming bowls of spaghetti which she had fished from the cauldron that filled the kitchen with steam because it was kept on a rolling boil so that second and third helpings of pasta could be freshly cooked al dente. “Let them serve themselves, for Christ’s sake,” my mother said. “Their legs aren’t broken.”
Anne-Marie and I sat side by side so at least one ear wouldn’t be permanently damaged by the kids, whose voices soared to a volume calculated to crack toilet bowls. Much of this cacophony was cheerful animal high spirits, but the joyful noise was punctuated by yelps from kids who had been pinched or kicked under the table; and by that nerve-flaying whine ‘Ma-ma-a-a!’ ‘Ma-ma-a-a!’ of spoiled kids who repeat their complaining mewls until the mother finally breaks off her gossiping, wheels on the offender and screams, ‘What do you want! What? What? What?’, which rebuff makes the brat yowl even harder. Beneath the manic din were undertones of soft whimpering from little kids who had spilled their milk or wet their pants, and those taunting sing-song chants of teasing that make the victim finally roar in venomous rage, all this mixed with the voices of the women at their table in the corner, talking louder and louder to be heard over the kids, and over one another, and every once in a while one of the women, driven to exasperation by a child tugging on her skirt and whining for attention while the mother tried to talk through and over the interruption, would suddenly snatch the offending kid by the collar or the hair and thrust her face into his and scream, ‘Are you going to give me a minute’s peace? Or do you want me to slap that face right off you?!’ As the whimpering child pondered these options, guffaws and snorts came from the dining room where the men were exchanging blue stories. A kid experimented to see how far forward he could tip his baby sister’s chair. The girl fell out, split her lip and set up a bellow out of all proportion to her pain, but sufficient to get her brother cuffed around the ears by his mother. “That’s it! I’ve had it up to here! You want me to smash your head between two bricks?!” As she jumped up from the table to show her sisters-in-law that she was a firm disciplinarian and in no way responsible for the way her kids were behaving, this rattled mother upset a bowl of spaghetti sauce into Aunt Lorna’s lap, so the boy got slapped for that, too.
In short, an extended family having fun.
Anne-Marie and I finished eating and tried to excuse ourselves so we could slip away, but Mother whispered harshly that it would be impolite to leave, and it wouldn’t hurt us one little bit to stay and make friends with our cousins...cousi
ns that we might never see again, as we would soon be out west. I guess it was this promise that gave us the strength to sit at the table for what seemed like a geological age, our faces frozen in sickly grins that were as close as we could come to smiles.
But even the most enriching experiences must come to an end, so finally, butt-sore, cramped, stuffed and deafened, my sister and I were allowed to go up to bed with the rest of the kids, while the women collected the dishes and began to clean up the devastated kitchen.
“—but not you, Cuz!” Aunt Lorna said. “You’re the bride! You just sit there and talk to us! You and me, we haven’t had a good gab session in years!”
As I passed the dining room door I saw that the tablecloth had been removed and cards were being dealt out. There were glasses and wine bottles on the table, but no lemonade pitcher. I glanced at Ben anxiously. His new blue double-breasted suit jacket was hanging open, the top button of his apple-green shirt was undone, and he had tugged down his pink-and-blue tie. His face glistened with sweat, but he was smiling and seemed to be having fun, so everything would be all right. Maybe.
Some time in the middle of that night, I gave up trying to sleep and slowly picked my way out of the sweaty tangle of cousin-limbs. Sleeping crosswise hadn’t worked. The bed’s slack springs had made us all slide towards the middle, so it had been impossible to keep space between me and the next boy. For the first hour, there had been giggling and punching and pinching and threats to tell mothers and counter-threats about what would happen to you if you did. The oldest of my cousins demonstrated both his primitive idea of humor and his profound stupidity when he clutched the cousin next to him, farted, then pulled the blanket over their heads, sharing with his victim the effects of his droll prank. I took comfort in the knowledge that ‘Aunt’ Lorna and ‘Uncle’ Tonio had not been able to have children of their own, so these kids and I shared no common genes. They were ‘cousins’ by courtesy only.
I found Anne-Marie out in the dark hallway. She had disentangled herself from a crush of squirming girls, one of whom had wet the common bed. We sat together on the top step of the staircase and looked glumly down towards the light and noise of the wedding party, with its snorts and hoots, its harsh laughter and detached drunken words, until she fell asleep on my shoulder and I had to put my arms around her because she was shivering in her thin nightgown. I dozed off in that awkward position, my cheek against the wall.
In the small hours of the morning, my mother found us at the top of the stairs, shivering and clammy. My arm had fallen asleep under the weight of Anne-Marie, and it tingled painfully as circulation returned to it. Mother took us into her bedroom, into her wedding bed, where we all snuggled together to get warm. She and Ben had had a shouting row, and her eyes were red with crying. Characteristically, Anne-Marie reacted to the tension and anger radiating from Mother by withdrawing into a deep sleep, but Mother remained rigid with rage. Whispering into the darkness, I asked what had happened, and she told me that after drinking wine—“and he knows he can’t hold his drink”—Ben had played poker with the other men. The game had broken up with a fight. Ben had hit one of Tonio’s ‘business acquaintances’ from Troy, and when Mother and Lorna rushed in to break things up, the other friend had his back to the wall, a flick blade in his hand, while Ben faced him, his belt wrapped around his fist and about a foot of belt and buckle dangling like a flail. If Mother and Lorna hadn’t been there, things would have gotten nasty, because Tonio and his brothers seemed content with the role of interested bystanders. Uncle Tonio helped the fallen Trojan to his feet and persuaded both of his pals to go to a downtown bar with him and his brothers. Just to let things cool down a little, whaddyasay? Who needs trouble? They left grumbling about ‘bad losers’ and making threats against ‘four-flushing hicks’.
When they were alone, Ben confessed to Mother that he had lost more than half the money they had saved up for their cabins in Wyoming.
“Did you say those guys were from Troy?” I asked Mother.
“That’s what Ben said.”
“Jesus!” I whispered
“What is it?”
I remembered Uncle Tonio telling me about his ‘friends’ from Troy. He had bragged that he knew a couple of card sharks who could clean suckers out ‘slicker ’n shit’. They let the sucker win for a while, then: “...whadda you know?...his luck turns sour and he ends up stripped to the bone. And if the sucker complains...? Well, you don’t complain about these guys. They got friends, and their friends got ways. Know what I mean?” He had winked.
I told Mother about this, hoping she would see that it wasn’t all Ben’s fault. These men from Troy were professionals cheats. But although she had lived with my father for a total of only a few months, he had managed to infect her with the con man’s scorn for the mark: the stupid pigeon that deserves to be plucked. Losing money to a couple of card sharks made Ben contemptible in her eyes, and it’s hard to imagine a worse basis for a lasting union than contempt. Resentment is less destructive; even hatred. Realizing that nothing I could say would change her view of Ben as a sucker who deserves whatever he gets, I limited myself to asking where he was now.
“Who cares? Wandering around out there in the dark, probably. Feeling sorry for himself. I told him off good and proper for getting drunk and losing all that money! It was mine as much as his! Those cabins were my last chance to make something of myself...to be somebody!”
“And what did Ben say?”
“What could he say? He gave me some crap about marrying into a family of cheats and thieves, and he stormed out. Just like that! Left me cold!” She began to cry again. No sobbing, just tears flowing down her cheeks into the corners of her mouth. “When I think of the things we went without to save up that money! The gallons of potato soup you kids had to...” Her words squeaked and stuck in the back of her throat, and it was a while before she could add, “...and on my wedding night, too!”
When we went down to the kitchen the next morning the house was empty except for Aunt Lorna, who was busily...too busily...making our breakfast. The atmosphere was taut. She told us that Tonio’s brothers and their families had gone back to Hudson Falls first thing that morning.
“And those card sharks Tonio brought in to clean Ben out?” Mother asked.
“Well...I think they took the morning train back to Troy. But, hon, please don’t—”
Ben came to the back porch to speak to Mother, but he wouldn’t come in because, he said, if he did he might lose control and start busting up things...and maybe some people too. He must have had a bad night, because his new suit was muddy in patches and his trousers had a triangular rip at the knee, where his skin showed through, oddly pale and baby smooth. He told Mother through the screen door that he had spent the night wandering around, and he would be waiting for us at the bus station when she was ready to leave.
I wandered into the dining room, which still smelled of wine and stale cigarette smoke. When I came back into the kitchen, Aunt Lorna was bustling around, serving pancakes to Anne-Marie and babbling away nervously about how there was nothing in the world like a good breakfast to drive the blues away and make the world seem brighter. But Mother would accept only a cup of coffee.
“Well, sit down to drink it at least,” Aunt Lorna said. “Your bus doesn’t leave for ages.”
Mother didn’t sit. She stood at the back door, sipping her coffee and staring out across the muddy creek that ate a little further into their backyard every year. “So where’s that son of a bitch you married?” she asked.
“Oh, hon!” Lorna said plaintively. “Calling people names won’t help anything.”
“Don’t ‘oh, hon’ me! Where is he? Off getting his cut of blood money from his card-shark friends?”
Lorna explained that Tonio had been out all night long with them, making sure they didn’t come back looking for revenge. He’d done this to protect Ben because he had hit one o
f them, and that made men like that want to hurt people...bad.
“Oh, so Tonio’s a big hero, is that it?” Mother asked. “Trying to help us out, is he?”
“Hon...please! Don’t blame me. I never thought anything like this would happen.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know perfectly well those men cheated Ben!”
Aunt Lorna winced and turned away. I was embarrassed by the way Mother kept bullying Lorna, who was only guilty of marrying Tonio and accepting his domination.
“That was money I’d shrimped and saved for, Lorna! My children went without to build that money up! It was our future...our hopes and dreams! So what are you going to do about it?”
“Good God, hon, what can I do?”
“You want to know what you can do? You can make your slimy thief of a husband pay us our money back, that’s what you can do!”
“I can’t do that. Ben lost that money! He gambled and he lost. You can’t blame me. I didn’t know those men were planning anything like...Oh, hon, please!” Aunt Lorna buried her face in her palms and sobbed.
“Come on, kids,” Mother said. “We’re getting out of here!”
Anne-Marie and I swallowed last forkfuls of pancake and picked up our suitcases.
Mother turned at the door. “And you listen to me, Lorna. I don’t ever want to see you again unless you can tell me you’ve left that son of a bitch for good and all. You’ve buttered your bread, now you can lie on it! And don’t bother to write, because I won’t answer. From now on, I have no cousin, no friend, no nothing! I’m alone in the world!” She snatched up her suitcase.
“Oh...hon!”
And we left. I was the last one out. The screen door slipped from my grasp and slammed shut. I rushed to catch up with Mother and Anne-Marie, hoping Aunt Lorna didn’t think I’d slammed the door on purpose. Though they both lived to be old women, my mother never saw or heard from her cousin again.