“Why don’t you drive off the road?” she said. “We could curl up.” The warmth of the sun through the windshield, the subtle kicking of her unborn child, made her feel elemental and available. This sort of thing thrilled and shocked Teddy at the same time.
“Wouldn’t that be something,” Teddy said.
“Teddy,” said Jane Louise. “This wedding will be okay, won’t it?”
“It’ll be fucking hell,” Teddy said. “But that’s all right, since it won’t last very long.”
“It’s so strange,” Jane Louise said. “Here we are, married and having a baby and off to your half-sister’s wedding.”
“What’s the strange part?” Teddy said.
“Sometimes I feel I crept into your life,” said Jane Louise, staring out the window. This was not what she had meant to say, but she found herself saying it anyway. “I mean, I’m sort of the last person. I don’t know anyone I can say I’ve known all my life, but you can. Our wedding was full of your childhood. But here we are, enfolded into this family no one really belongs to.”
“Little Catherine or Heathcliff belongs to us. You belong to me, and I belong to you, don’t we?”
“Your half-sisters are related to you by blood,” Jane Louise said.
“You’re too hipped on blood and connection,” Teddy said. “It must be from having moved so much. You know me better than anyone in the world, including my childhood friends. You’re the only person on earth who knows me.”
That was all he intended to say, and Jane Louise knew that this conversation, which was at the moment so sweet, raised many not-so-sweet specters. She was hipped on blood and connection. Teddy, who had blood and connection to spare, was not. The idea that she was the last person he had let into his life and that he loved her better, and she knew him better, made her feel keenly the injustice of not having known him when he was little, or having been the first girl he ever kissed, or the pal he had had a secret hideout with over on Town Hill Road. Teddy found this bafflingly sentimental, but to Jane Louise, it was the expression of her wildest love.
Once during their courtship, Teddy had told Jane Louise his recurrent childhood nightmare: He was standing in a field. His mother stood in front of him, his father in back. Both had loaded guns. He had been told he had to move forward or backward, but if he moved forward, his father would shoot him, and if he moved backward, his mother would. Jane Louise had committed this to memory and had never again mentioned it.
She leaned back against the seat, and the air that filled her chest seemed golden and sweet. The idea of curling up like a cat in a warm place seemed very compelling.
She felt a bump and realized that she had fallen asleep. These tiny naps took her by storm. She rubbed her eyes, taking care not to smudge her mascara.
“Was I snoring?” she said.
“You never snore.”
“I read in one of those birth books that pregnancy can bring on snoring.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as it happens,” Teddy said.
“Teddy,” said Jane Louise. “Do you still love me?”
Teddy gave her a sidelong look that was more like a wince. How he hated these conversations!
“For crying out loud, Janey,” he said.
“I know it’s a hard day for you,” Jane Louise said. “But sometimes you seem very far away.”
“I am far away, for Christ’s sake,” Teddy said. “You can’t imagine how awful these things are. I really can’t stand them, and if I were alone, believe me I would have booked some trip to Africa to get me out of this. Look, we turn right here.”
Jane Louise smoothed her skirt. This wedding made her nervous, too. She was not very good with other people’s parents and fretted again about Cornelius. There was a good deal of dead air around him. He seemed more some stock character out of central casting than a real person. When Jane Louise looked into his watery eyes, she saw a kind of staginess and weakness, a need to be taken care of by a woman. She was constantly relieved to find not one speck of it in her own husband, who was a model of self-sufficiency.
Cornelius had been the baby of his family and had never outgrown it. Now white-haired and deaf in one ear from a war injury, he was a baby still. He had married Teddy’s mother for her self-reliance, her efficiency, her ability to deal with things. She looked like someone who would take care of him, and when she did not, he had turned to Martine, soft and overly made up, with the slightly battered air of someone used to constantly doing things for others.
Her half-sisters-in-law made her feel even more uncomfortable. They were younger, blonder, reproductive. Her Jewishness pressed in on her the few times she was forced to be around them. They all lived within driving distance from where they had grown up, with husbands they had known most of their lives. Their parents had never been divorced, nor had they been moved around. Instead, they had been rooted like trees, and they were stable, dull, feminine girls who liked to have manicures and go shopping. They talked about hair color, child care, baby-sitter problems, and their mutual friends. They sent their children to Little People’s Sunday School, where they were told about tender Jesus meek and mild, and each summer they had gone to the south of England, which made little or no impression on them as far as Jane Louise could tell, to see their paternal grandparents. In the winter they had been sent to Bermuda to play tennis with their maternal grandparents, and as a result each had a formidable collection of duty-free cashmere sweaters.
Jane Louise looked imploringly at Teddy, who looked so impassive that she wanted to throw her arms around him and kiss him until some true emotion issued forth.
“Don’t be so nice,” she whispered.
“What?” said Teddy. He was edging along the lane as one of the ushers directed him into a parking space.
“I said, Don’t be so nice,” Jane Louise said. “You have that look on your face.”
Teddy parked the car. He had wavy brown hair, his father’s high cheekbones, and his mother’s snub nose.
“Come on, Teddy,” she said, taking his arm.
“What is it you want?” Teddy said angrily.
Tears sprang into Jane Louise’s eyes. If she had wanted some true emotion from Teddy, this was it. He looked stricken, cornered, and truculent.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Don’t be mad at me.”
He took her arm. “I’m not mad at you,” he said. “I just wish I didn’t have such a complicated family.”
CHAPTER 25
The house was of formal flagstone with a low porch. On either side of the front door were topiary trees in pots. To get inside, it was necessary to duck under a rose trellis, whose tiny yellow fall roses had climbed into the ivy. From a low hedge in the front yard wafted the pungent scent of cat pee.
Teddy’s shoulders were bunched beneath his jacket. Jane Louise, who was intimate with the physical manifestations of his distress, longed to touch him, but this was never a good idea. Teddy’s feelings, which he so longed to bury, were not buried, and the lightest touch when he was upset made it worse.
As they passed under the rose trellis, they turned their heads to see Martine bustling toward them. She was dressed in fawn-colored chiffon, with a large hat dyed to match. Her square feet were encased in fawn-colored shoes with cross-straps, and she was carrying what Jane Louise believed was called a reticule, a tiny ornamental bag that looked big enough to contain a mint and a child’s handkerchief. She wore a bright pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. No matter how often her daughters got on her case, Martine applied the makeup of her youth. She kissed Jane Louise and Teddy, enveloping them in her heavy perfume.
“Ted, your dad is on the lawn with the photographers,” she said. “Go help him out, will you?” She turned to Jane Louise. “The girls are upstairs getting dressed, and they’re longing to see you.”
Jane Louise knew that there was nothing for Teddy to help his father with and that the girls were not longing to see her in the least, but she was used to Martine. Martine was li
ke her mother. She had an idea of the way things should pleasantly be, and she edited reality heavily to conform with it. Besides, Martine probably felt that in weddings of the royal family there was a proper and appropriate place for the pregnant half-sister-in-law.
Jane Louise followed Martine into the immense foyer and up a curving flight of stairs carpeted in a Persian runner. At the top of the stairs was a large pink dressing room, and in it were Martine’s daughters, getting dressed.
For a moment it was a pink-and-gold blur. The sun poured through the pink curtains, causing the pale room to glow. In the center stood Lisbeth and Moira in lacy pink full slips. They were pulling on lacy pink stockings. Their hair was every shade of blond, and their makeup was as pale and perfect as their mother’s was not. The dressing table was arrayed with pins, dusting powder, makeup boxes, brushes, and cotton puffs.
“Oh, hello! It’s you!” said Lisbeth. It was clear to Jane Louise that for an instant Lisbeth and Moira had no idea who she was. “Oh, gosh! Mum told us you were having a baby. It’s due this winter, right?”
Although Lisbeth was younger, Jane Louise always thought of her as older since she already had a five-year-old and a three-year-old. She belonged to a world of normal suburban matrons who married young, had babies young, had family holidays and huge parties in which thousands of children ran wild in the house. They had barbecues and birthday parties and bake sales. Their husbands went to business and the wives discussed child development.
“You all look so pretty,” Jane Louise said. “Where’s Daphne?”
Lisbeth propelled her into another room—the formal bedroom in the center of which stood Daphne in her wedding slip, still as a waxed statue. Her elaborate bride’s dress hung from the chandelier on a padded hanger. She did not move, even to smile. A little Cuban woman—the fitter—fluttered around her, smoothing and patting. On her wrist she wore a corsagelike pincushion attached to an elastic band. “Don’t move, don’t move!” she cried, but this was totally unnecessary, as Jane Louise had never seen anyone hold a pose for so long.
“Can I help?” Jane Louise asked.
“No, thanks,” Moira said. “We have to put these net bags over our heads so we don’t mess our hair, and Graciela will put our dresses on.” She motioned with her shoulder to the closet door from which hung two long pink dresses, stuffed with tissue paper and looking like disembodied girls.
“Master of the female half lengths,” Jane Louise said.
“Pardon?” said Moira.
“There’s a Flemish painter known only as the master of the female half lengths or something like that,” Jane Louise said. “Your dresses sort of remind me.”
Moira gave her the sort of look you might give to a silly child. She gazed out the window. “There’s lots of people out there. Daph, you ought to put your dress on. We ought to, too.”
Daphne was still unmoved. The fitter draped a net scarf over Daphne’s head while Moira helped slip her dress over it. She looked like an Elizabethan child being hung with cloth of gold. The fitter smoothed out Daphne’s voluminous skirt.
“Look, girls,” she said. “Here I put the train up like this, and this tie keeps it up. When she will walk down the aisle you let the tie go, like this. See?” She let go of the tie, and the train slipped out. “When you walk, please walk so carefully and do not step from the red carpet because the grass will stain and these never come out.”
She rearranged the train and then turned to Moira, whose sleeve needed adjusting.
There was no reason for Jane Louise to be in that room, and in her gray dress and her dark hair, she felt like Cinderella.
She remembered her sister Nora’s wedding to Jaime Benitez-Cohen so long ago: the white dress, the bridal attendants, one of whom had been the younger Jane Louise, dark, uncomfortable, taller than anyone else, and unhappily in love with somebody or other while her sister, radiant in the proper bridal clothes, which had set their father back quite a number of dollars, walked down the aisle to marry somebody absolutely perfect: Jewish, rich, and from a well-connected family. In her heart Jane Louise had known she would never wear a white dress, or be entitled to wear one, walk down an aisle, get married by a rabbi, or please her mother to this elaborate extent. Watching Martine she realized what sense of safety a daughter can bring to a mother. Although Lilly liked Teddy very well, he was not quite what she had had in mind, and furthermore, he was not second nature. Lilly liked money she understood viscerally. Flinty old WASP New England money was not something she knew by heart, only by literature.
Daphne turned her radiant face to them. She could move now, and she was very beautiful. Lisbeth and Moira had put their dresses on. Their pinkness, their blondness, their carefully streaked hair, nail polish, eyelash curlers, mascara, the heap of things that lay on the dressing table and that Jane Louise never used made her feel that they were women in a way that she was not.
“Oh, Daph!” sighed Lisbeth. “You’re so beautiful.”
Martine called from the top of the stairs. “Girls! Girls!” she said. “You must come at once!”
Daphne went first. She walked carefully and serenely, as if her parts were made of glass. Jane Louise gave her a smile and was greeted in return by an uplift of her lips. Her look said to Jane Louise: This is my perfect day. What are you doing here?
What these girls thought of their half-brother was unknown. He was some other element. He was older, a chemist, married to someone older, from a place they had never seen. What was the point of this sort of blood relation?
Daphne’s wedding books, of which she had read dozens, did not say what to do with halfs or steps. They were a minor burden, something that reminded you that life is never smooth or perfect.
Downstairs they were met by a young man from the florist’s who presented Daphne with her enormous bouquet, a mass of white roses, lily of the valley, and freesia, with long garlands of white-rimmed ivy. Moira and Lisbeth carried sweetheart roses, and Martine was given a long swaglike corsage to pin to her shoulder. Martine stood patiently while it was pinned and then turned and began to rummage through the florist’s box. There was a pink rose for Cornelius’s buttonhole, and an extra pink rose that she gave to Jane Louise.
“I’m afraid we haven’t a pin,” she said.
Jane Louise said it was perfectly all right and twisted it into her hair, although it was clear that this was not the orthodox thing to do. As the girls floated down the lawn, Jane Louise went off to find Teddy.
He was standing on the lawn with his father. Cornelius looked splendid in his morning clothes, which, he explained to Jane Louise, had belonged to his father. His top hat was collapsible and could be made to go flat. His hair was brilliant white, and his mustache gleamed in the sun.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Jane Louise said to Teddy.
“Family portrait, old boy,” Cornelius said. “We’ll be wanting you for one or two snaps.”
They followed him and stood obediently in the back row for two family portraits. Then they were released.
They walked into the rose garden, where they sat on a concrete bench and watched the goldfish swimming lazily in their pool.
“Did you secretly want all this?” Jane Louise said.
“You mean a big house with a goldfish pond?” Teddy said.
“I mean a big wedding with ushers and bridesmaids,” Jane Louise said.
“I didn’t,” Teddy said. “Did you?”
“I always feel bad that you had to marry a Jewess by a Puerto Rican judge.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jane,” Teddy said. “I wanted to marry a Jewess by a Puerto Rican judge. I can never figure out your free-floating anxiety about this. Nobody has to get married. At least, I didn’t. I married you because I wanted to marry you. Is there something wrong with me that you never seem to believe it?”
“No,” said Jane Louise in a small voice.
“Then maybe what I’m hearing is that you wanted all this, just like your sister Nora. Maybe you wan
ted me to be Jaime Benitez-Cohen with a big family and lots of money and a board membership in the synagogue.”
“Is that really what you think?” Jane Louise said.
“I’m beginning to wonder,” Teddy said. “Usually I just assume that you married me because you wanted to, but I might be wrong.”
He gave her a grieved look, a look that said, Don’t hassle me when I’m suffering. But it was this remote suffering Jane Louise wanted to cut through. She would rather have had him angry than distanced. The fact that he had snapped at her in some way made her feel better. How could you tell your husband, who thought you were a normal person, that you had never felt normal for a single minute in your life?
Teddy looked at her. He picked her chin up and saw that there were tears in her eyes. For an instant he scowled, and then his face softened.
“I married the best person in the world,” he said. “Is this real upset or just being pregnant?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane Louise.
CHAPTER 26
Jane Louise and Edie sat on the bus on a rainy day. They were on their way to buy baby supplies and they were talking about weddings. It seemed to them that although everyone cried at them, no one had anything very nice to say about them.
Jane Louise said: “When Daphne walked down the lawn, my throat closed up. I said to myself, ‘This thing is costing a fortune that would have been money better off in Daphne’s bank account,’ and then I realized I was just plain jealous because I could never even have contemplated any such thing being done for me. Or even wanting it.”
“Tut,” Edie said. “After all I did for you. My most beautiful cake.”
“You know what I mean,” Jane Louise said. “I mean, look at you and Mokie! City Hall, no rice, no flowers.”
“There were flowers,” Edie said. “You brought me that bouquet.”
“I did,” Jane Louise said. “I guess I kind of blur over where these things are concerned.”
A Big Storm Knocked It Over Page 15