Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  AUDREY

  It wasn’t as if Audrey had a lot of illusions about weddings. Her own was nothing special—she had a nice dress, and she still remembered the pale-pink pumps she had dyed to match it, even though you couldn’t see them in the one photo of the occasion. She remembered the feel of Harry’s arm through his uniform jacket as she gripped it tight going out of the chaplain’s office down on the base. There were only the six of them there—the bride and groom, Ellen and Wes, Marilyn as Audrey’s bridesmaid and one of Harry’s army buddies as his best man. Even so it had felt more like a wedding than today’s business in Judge Davis’s office.

  Stella cried in the car all the way downtown, and Henry was irritated. When she had first moved in with them he used to be so gentle with her crying fits, and Audrey would look at him and think that it might work out after all, that her boy was turning into a kind young man. Then Henry started getting short-tempered, and Audrey thought it was shocking, how he could be so unkind to the poor girl.

  Then, sometime around the third week of Stella’s stay, Audrey had started to get annoyed herself. Yes, the poor girl had it hard—barely sixteen, and pregnant, forced to choose between a shotgun wedding or being banished off around the bay to give up her baby. And yes, it was hard on her that her father had ordered the whole family to cut her off, so none of them could take her in or even come visit. But even so, you couldn’t spend every day sitting down crying, could you? You cried a bit—in private, if you could manage some privacy—and then you wiped away your tears and got on with the business at hand. That was how life worked. If you still had tears to shed you did your crying alone, and never let anyone know you were upset. That was the sensible way: Audrey’s way.

  But it wasn’t Stella’s way. Stella’s way was to sleep till ten or eleven every morning, fry herself two eggs and some bacon, then sit down and watch the television. Not even a bit of knitting or crochet in her hands to make use of the time, and her with a baby to prepare for. And whenever anyone came through the room, she’d start in about how she called her sister Mary-Louise but Mary-Louise hung up the phone, and oh my, what are they going to do when the baby comes, she don’t know nothing about babies?

  Stella had cheered up a little the last few days with the thought of getting ready for a wedding. She was almost happy when Audrey hauled her down to the Royal Stores to buy that nice little dress in the black-and-white hound’s-tooth check. But now, dressed up and ready to go, she looked at herself and Henry in the mirror and it seemed to strike her, just as it struck Audrey, what a mean, sad little excuse for a wedding this was. Stella’s response was to start another flood of tears that lasted all the way to the judge’s chambers. Audrey’s response was to say, “Let’s hurry up now, we haven’t got all day.”

  All the way in the car Stella kept glancing over her shoulder. “What are you looking at?” Henry asked, halfway down Long’s Hill.

  “Nothing. I only thought….”

  “You think your old man is coming after us? Going to try to stop the wedding?”

  “Nobody even knows it’s today,” Stella sniffled.

  “So there’s no reason to be looking out for him. In half an hour it’ll all be legal and you got nothing to worry about. There’s nothing he can do to us.” Henry didn’t sound like he was convincing even himself.

  As they waited outside the judge’s chambers, Audrey wondered if she should be more worried about her boy making a mistake that was going to change his life, maybe ruin it. Tony Nolan had threatened to have them up on charges for keeping Stella in the house. Bridget came over secretly to talk to Audrey, whispering as if she thought her husband had spies about the place, begging Audrey to change Stella’s mind. They had all gone cracked, as if being married young and having a baby was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.

  “It’s not just because he got her in trouble, it’s because we’re not Catholic,” Ellen told Audrey. “If that was some young Ryan or Malone that got her in the family way, they’d have the two of them bundled off to the priest before you could say Bob’s your uncle. It’s happened before, in both their families—in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Bridget herself was expecting when she married Tony. You think me and your father are old-fashioned about mixed marriages, but it’s the RC’s who are the worst about it—they think all Protestants are going to hell. Sure don’t you remember what Treese’s crowd were like? They came around in time, and I ’low the Nolans will too, once Henry and Stella are settled in together and that youngster is born.”

  Regardless of the difference in religion, a young girl getting pregnant like that was a terrible shame to any family, but Audrey thought that in Henry’s case a shotgun wedding might not be the worst fate in the world. Better if it were three or four years later, perhaps, but having a wife and child to provide for would steady him a little. Already he’d settled down to a regular construction job with Alf. The boy had never had any real get-up-and-go about anything except playing his guitar. And while Henry had a bit of talent, from what Audrey could tell, he was no Hank Williams. He would have to work whether he liked it or not, and this might be just the thing to make him grow up.

  So she told herself, anyway, papering those thoughts over the scraped-off shreds of doubt underneath. The secretary called their names and the three of them walked in. Stella said her vows in such a tiny, choked voice they could hardly hear her. She started to cry again as they left the office. “I’m sorry,” she told Henry. “It’s only—I thought Mom might come. Right up to the last minute I thought she’d be here.”

  “How could she be? We never told anyone!”

  Audrey understood the forlorn hope. Bridget probably would have come, if she’d known and if she could have gotten away. Tony Nolan announced to the rest of the family that Stella was as good as dead to them. Anyone who visited her or tried to talk to her would be the same. “I never knew he was such a hard man,” Bridget Nolan had whispered to Audrey the last time she visited. “I don’t dare come no more, he might put me out on the street too.”

  Then you’d be out with your daughter, and you could help look after her and the baby, Audrey thought. It wasn’t as if life with Tony Nolan could be such a picnic, that this woman would risk losing contact with her own daughter and grandchild just so she could stay with him. But of course she was a woman who’d gone straight from her parents’ home to marriage, had no trade or business, no way to keep herself much less help anyone else. A woman like Bridget Nolan was tied to her husband. Not for the first time Audrey felt a rush of gratitude: she wasn’t one of those women.

  There was no money to spare for giving the youngsters a honeymoon night in a hotel or anything like that—and anyway it seemed indecent, for a young girl who was already five months pregnant, to be thinking of honeymoons. Stella’s belly had bloomed overnight, just these past couple of weeks: she looked distinctly pregnant now in the hound’s-tooth maternity mini-dress, and not a soul in that judge’s office would have the slightest doubt why these two teenagers were in here getting married. They’re judging me more than they’re judging Stella and Henry, Audrey realized as she steered the newlyweds out past the pairs of eyes in the waiting room.

  On the way back up from downtown, Sonny James came on the radio singing “Take Good Care of Her.” Audrey turned it up: as good a theme song for today as any, she thought. She pulled the car over to the curb on Freshwater Road. “Anyone hungry?”

  “No,” Stella sniffled, at the same time as Henry said, “I’m starved.”

  “Let’s go get a plate of chips at Marty’s. My treat.”

  “I could eat a few chips I guess,” said Stella.

  “Go on, then,” said Henry. “Thanks, Mom.”

  So that was their wedding lunch—chips and vinegar in a booth at Marty’s. Henry ordered chicken with his, and told Stella about how the apartment they were going to rent upstairs in Donny Vokey’s house would be ready by the end o
f next month, and he was going to get the baby crib that Donny’s sister was finished using. “And we’ll be out from under yours and Nan’s and Pop’s feet before the baby comes,” he told Audrey.

  “It’ll be nice to have a place of your own,” Audrey said. “Make your own start together, like. Everything will be just grand, you’ll see.” The trick was to make it sound as if she believed it.

  musical interlude

  HENRY HOLLOWAY

  I play a C, an F, an F major seventh. Glance at the sound guy hoping he’ll bump the guitar up a little because I don’t think half the room can hear me. Time to talk over the intro.

  — Now, everybody laughs when I tell them this song reminds me of my ex-wife, but it’s true. Partly because she loved the song and partly because...well, you can figure out the rest.

  That’s all I need to say on this one. Strum a chord and start to sing, wait for them to laugh after the first word. Crazy...

  That intro always gets a few laughs, at least if people are paying attention and sober enough to get the joke. It’s all lies, of course. I don’t remember Stella liking this song. Mom was the one who listened to Patsy Cline, another doomed singer she loved. Not that I’m trying to sound like Patsy. A bit more Willie Nelson maybe. A man’s version, and I like the way his voice sounds rough and broke-up with it. Damn hard to do a cover without sounding like you’re trying to be someone else, and covers is all I’m any good for.

  “Crazy” was on the radio a bit when Stella and me were first going out, and I do remember this one time coming into the kitchen of that crappy little place on Graves Street, the baby screaming in her crib and Stella at the table crying. The radio was on and I’m almost sure it was playing this song. Or maybe I made that up because the song fits so well.

  The other lie, of course, is saying ex-wife. But that gets a laugh and the truth wouldn’t.

  That memory, that shitty little apartment, the screaming baby, all tangled up in my head while I’m singing. Probably shouldn’t even sing this one if it’s going to make me think about stuff like this. Trying to settle down the baby—wasn’t a mother’s touch supposed to do it? Because for damn sure the touch of a teenaged father coming in half-cut after stopping for a few beers on the way back from work, that wasn’t doing a thing.

  That whole year, it was all like something out of a soap opera or a bad sitcom, only with no laugh track. The stressed-out wife, the unhappy baby, the shiftless husband. Holding the screaming little thing and realizing she hadn’t been changed in hours, the stink of the diaper, screaming at Stella while she’s screaming back at me, both of us wondering what the hell the other was doing all day. All those old clichés.

  If it was a soap opera it would have ended with the girl taking the baby and running back to her mother. But she couldn’t do that, and didn’t she love reminding me that was all my fault, that she had no home to go to.

  And then that second verse about wondering what in the world I did, only I know damn well what I did, getting a girl knocked up—the worst sin you could commit, and the punishment sure as hell fit the crime. That night Patsy Cline might or might not have been singing “Crazy,” Stella was flying at me like a little tornado, then all of a sudden she was curled up in a ball on the floor and I couldn’t get a word out of her. I think that was the night I took my first shot at changing a diaper, and did a piss-poor job of it too, excuse the pun, and left the dirty one in the middle of the floor because I didn’t have a clue what to do with it.

  Trying to settle Stella down then, telling her things would get better, although how in the sweet frig anything was going to get better, I didn’t have a clue.

  There’s this other memory too—maybe that night, maybe one of those other nights. Maybe it was the night she hit me across the face and I hit her back. Maybe it was the night she had the knife and I thought she was coming for me till I saw the blood on her arms and knew this was way worse than I’d ever imagined. Maybe it was the night I brought the baby up to Mom’s and asked if they could keep her till things got better.

  I was out of work by then. Uncle Alf told me blood was thicker than water but not thick enough to keep a lazy hangashore on the job. We lost the apartment and moved into one room in a house with some fellows I was playing in a band with. Mom and Nan looked after the baby, blood thicker than water, blood and tears and Stella screeching and screeching. She used to scream at me that she couldn’t handle the baby and then when I took her away she blamed me for that too, for taking her baby away.

  We were yelling at each other almost all the time by then, and I thought she was screwing Nick, one of the fellows we lived with, because she damn sure wasn’t screwing me much by then. Only this one night I remember a crazy, screaming fight, and then the two of us going at it like wild things, like we were still in love and hungry for each other. I thought that was later, when we slept on a mattress on the floor in Nick and Chris’s place, but then I have this memory of Stella falling asleep in my arms, and the baby waking me up screaming, and me going out to find the dirty diaper still in the middle of the floor. So I’m not sure when that would have been, or if it ever happened at all.

  Anyway it’s not like it’s a story I’m ever going to tell between songs. That’s not one that will warm the crowd up.

  I don’t tell anyone that story. I don’t tell anyone about the night we had the last fight, when I called her a whore, the same thing her father called her, and she grabbed Nick’s car keys and ran out into the rain. But those are the pictures that flash in my head when I sing this song. Me standing there frozen, like I was at a fork in the road wondering what would happen if I did or didn’t run after her. By the time I ran down to the street she’d taken off in the car. She was only taillights in the rain.

  Taillights in the rain. Now that would be a country song, if I were any good to write a song. Like “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain,” only sadder. I used to try to write songs but they were all shit, none of them fit to sing. I’m better with other people’s words, other people’s feelings. Final verse now, Willie’s broken words and Patsy’s broken heart, and my own story wrapped up so tight inside there nobody will ever hear it.

  four

  CRAZY

  1967

  AUDREY

  Audrey just had the baby settled from her midnight feeding when she heard someone battering at the shop door downstairs. Just what she needed. The youngster, in her crib, stirred and whimpered. She wasn’t a good sleeper. She’d been two months with Audrey and Ellen now and they were finally getting her onto some kind of a schedule. Stella never seemed to keep her to any sort of schedule at all—no surprise there. The poor thing was put down and picked up at all hours and fed whenever her mother took it into her head to feed her. She had come to them with a diaper rash so bad that Ellen couldn’t even bear to talk to Stella for a while afterwards, she was so mad that anyone would let a baby get into such a state. “I don’t care what the poor girl is going through, she got no right to do that to a baby. I don’t think she’s a fit mother.” Some of the harshest words Audrey had ever heard her mother say about anyone, but then Ellen loved babies.

  Audrey did not love babies. She had gotten through Henry’s babyhood and expected never to have to do this again. Ellen would gladly take over all the responsibility, but at sixty-two she didn’t always have the energy to be getting up at nights with a crying infant.

  “What’s that racket?” Wes said, getting slowly out of his chair. He, too, moved more slowly and stiffly these days, and when the baby cried at night Audrey worried about her keeping Wes awake.

  “Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll go. Mom, keep an eye on her, make sure she stays down.”

  “You watch yourself, Audrey.” Wes had eased back into his chair but still looked worried. “There’s some hard crowd around here these days.”

  “It’s nothing, Dad. Probably Mike Walsh figuring he can’t get through the night without
another pack of smokes.”

  It wouldn’t be that, of course—none of the neighbours, even the drunks and the crazy ones, ever tried to come into the store at this hour of night. And a thief would have broken in the window and took what they wanted by this time. Someone in trouble, Audrey thought as she went down the stairs, fumbling for the light switch. Someone who would come to the door instead of phoning.

  Sure enough, Stella stumbled through the door when Audrey opened it. “Where is she? Get her dressed, I’m taking her!”

  Audrey put her hands on Stella’s shoulders. The girl was soaking wet, wearing only a thin blouse and a pair of blue jeans, no jacket on a night like this. “What are you, girl, crazy? That child is not going out of this house tonight, middle of the night in the pouring rain. Where’s Henry?”

  “I don’t give a damn where Henry is! I’m leaving and I’m not going back to him, and I’m not leaving my baby with ye crowd either!”

  “Oh, is that so?” Audrey pulled her hands from the girl’s shoulders, folded her arms over her chest. “And where would you be off to, young miss Stella? You may not be too fond of us at the moment but me and Mother Holloway are looking after your child, which is more than your own family is willing to do. I knows you’re not planning to take her home so where else would you be going this time of night?”

  “Out. Away. Away from here!” Stella’s last words turned into a howl, something garbled and barely even human. She was half-crying, half-yelling, shivering with the cold and wet and with something that might be fear or rage.

  Audrey’s impulse was to tell the girl to come upstairs, give her a warm robe to put on, make her a cup of tea. How many times, in the years that came afterwards, would she play out that scene, wonder how it might have ended if she had taken Stella upstairs? A thousand times, surely. Ten thousand. And she played out the other scene too—what if she had let Stella take the baby with her?