Blue Money

by Janet Capron

  “Betsy and I have decided to give you a proper wedding,” he said.

  Then Betsy spoke up, and I understood immediately how much of this was her doing. She believed that life is better with a man in it.

  “I’ve already talked to the local Presbyterian minister. It’s true, I’m lapsed, but he seemed to welcome the business. He can’t marry you in the church, of course, but he agreed that the chapel would be fine, and it’s just down the road. He’s a jolly man. I think you’ll like him,” she said.

  Gunther and I looked at each other. A chapel, a Presbyterian chapel? Rayfield caught our expression.

  “I was married four times: twice by a judge and twice by a minister. Believe me, when the ceremony is performed by a minister, it carries a lot more weight,” he said.

  After he got over the initial shock, Gunther thought it was a great idea. So, it was decided. We made an appointment to meet with the Reverend Webb.

  By this time, I was dying to call the whole thing off. The reason I didn’t, even though I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into the most outrageous lie, is because I did not want anyone to think that I was not “a man of my word,” that I had no sense of honor. God forbid somebody might discover I was capricious. No, I had only proposed once in my life, and I was going to stand by it.

  One day, Maggie called. I had stopped talking to her again, as I did so often, shortly after I moved away.

  “Betsy said that you’re getting married. The least you could do is invite me to the wedding, Janet,” she said, sounding genuinely hurt and trying to disguise it with anger.

  “I’m really sorry. I’ve been meaning to call. Of course you’re invited.”

  “What are you doing for a wedding dress? I hope you’re not planning to wear jeans,” Maggie said.

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Well, in that case, I want to buy it for you,” she said.

  “OK, thanks, Mom.”

  “And what about the Times? We have to let the Times in on it, on account of who your grandfather was. Frankly, it never would have occurred to me, but Betsy and your father insisted,” Maggie said.

  “Fine, fine, put it in the Times,” I said.

  “I’ve got to know something about this Gunther. Where did he go to school? What does he do?”

  “He didn’t go to school. He’s a drug dealer,” I said.

  “I should’ve figured,” Maggie said.

  When the announcement appeared that Sunday, Gunther and I had no idea whom the paper was talking about. It’s true, I had attended Pendleton until it kicked me out, but Gunther was definitely not studying to become an engineer. He had no intention of becoming an engineer.

  “Where’d you get that one?” I asked when I called Maggie back.

  “Well, he’s German, so I thought ‘engineer’ had the right ring to it,” she said.

  “Sure, makes a lot of sense,” I said, feeling resigned.

  “How dare you complain, when the whole thing was just dumped on me? I had to come up with something, didn’t I?” she yelled through the phone.

  Now that my mother had gotten involved, my engagement took on a peculiar aspect. I felt as if I’d been herded and trapped by all of them, as if my family and Gunther were conspiring against me.

  The two of us, Maggie and I, went tearing up and down Madison Avenue, in and out of the tony shops, screaming at each other. Finally, defeated, I let her pick my dress. She settled on an overpriced faux naïf number in off-white. It was decided that the groom would be outfitted the same way, in an off-white, hand-embroidered shirt and off-white pants. Great, we were now going to be married in a Presbyterian chapel disguised as Mexican peasants. Well, everything considered, it seemed appropriate enough.

  Betsy and Maggie sent out announcements and invitations far and wide. I felt oppressed and ashamed to be suddenly exposed to legions of relatives and family friends. Fancy gifts from Tiffany and Georg Jensen—things I felt that, being an imposter, I didn’t deserve—were piling up unopened in the corner on the floor of my studio apartment. Often, I found myself gasping for air. I kept wishing that Gunther and I had snuck off to city hall, or, better yet, that we had decided to simply live together. It had gotten way out of hand.

  The only bright note is that Felicity had decided to throw Gunther a bachelor party. A bunch of us was planning to leap on him and ravage his body. But Gunther didn’t go for it. He was genuinely hurt.

  “You’re all I want, Janet,” he said.

  We killed the last week of our single lives awake on Gunther’s notorious etherized speed, flitting from saloon to saloon, saying good-bye to all my old friends. Gunther had gotten it into his head that he was stealing me away from these people. He imagined that all the men were in love with me. I didn’t bother to enlighten him.

  One night, when we were both drunk as hell, I tried to call the whole thing off. First Gunther burst into tears, said he’d kill himself if I left him. Then, as if to emphasize his point, he slapped me so hard, it was almost a punch. I went flying across the tiny studio room, smack against the wall. After that, he cried some more. The next morning it was like it never happened.

  Michael, in particular, had gone out of his way to befriend my fiancé, to emphasize that there were no hard feelings. He offered him work repairing the duckboards behind the bar upstairs at Slim’s Wide Missouri. The two of them agreed that Gunther would start work there right after the honeymoon. Everybody on all sides was taking him into the fold. I was the only one, apparently, who harbored doubts.

  Covenants

  On the eve of our wedding, we crashed. That was a big mistake. If you’ve been up for five days, you’re going to need at least two days to crash. It wasn’t like we didn’t know any better. We slept through the alarm, coming to at a little after eleven. We were supposed to be exchanging vows at noon. It took forty minutes up the Saw Mill River Parkway just to get to Cobb’s Wharf. We had planned to change at Rayfield and Betsy’s house and then march down the road to the chapel.

  Panicked, we ran out of the apartment and jumped into Gunther’s Volkswagen. Only after reaching Cobb’s Wharf did we realize we’d left our wedding clothes behind. The simple solution was to hold the reception first, sans groom, while Gunther raced back, got the clothes, and returned in time for the ceremony.

  Quite a few of the guests had already arrived and were sitting around waiting in the local historical society building, where they’d been told to gather before the wedding and where the reception would be held. Now I had to walk into that place alone. It was hell.

  The German Jewish side of my family had commandeered the corner nearest the punch bowl. Next to them, but keeping a discreet distance, was my father’s kin: children by former marriages, an unfamiliar cousin or two. Across the room sat Gunther’s folks, all in a row. It seems that none of them were speaking to each other, let alone to strangers. His marine colonel aunt had chosen to wear her uniform. She looked out at the rest of us as if she were planning a dawn raid on the premises. Gunther’s barmaid sister had come dressed for work in her uniform, too, a bright orange-and-black T-shirt with the words KARL’S PLACE: COLD BEER, WARM HEARTS scrawled across the front of it. Her five kids were running up and down, upsetting the chairs, throwing ginger ale at each other.

  Then a limousine pulled up out front. A few of us went outside to see who it was. The chauffeur, whom I recognized, came around to open the car door. Into the hot sun stepped my grandmother. She leaned on the chauffeur for a second, taking deep breaths while she accustomed herself to the open air. After that, she rose to her full height, all five feet of it, and looked around. She was a miniature tiger of a woman. People stood back while she stared at them like the Empress of All the Russias surveying her troops. The chauffeur took her by the arm, led her inside, and pulled up a chair for her smack-dab in the middle of the room. The grand widow herself, in a powder-blue suit to match her eyes, and wearing a hat with a little veil, sat there casting withering glances at the
rest of us. “Riffraff,” I actually heard her say.

  “Grandmother, how kind of you to come,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t’ve missed it. Who are those people?”

  “The groom’s relatives,” I said.

  “I see,” she said.

  Meanwhile, her own children had gathered around and were falling all over each other to get her some punch and make her feel at home.

  “Where is the groom?” my grandmother asked.

  “We forgot our clothes. He had to go back and get them,” I said.

  “I see,” my grandmother said.

  All of a sudden, in blew my crowd, my bridesmaids. There was Corinne, wearing a very wide-brimmed chartreuse hat that nearly covered her eyes and one of her dated, flowing outfits that made her look like a well-fed Blanche DuBois. Right after her came the rest of the gang: Felicity, who had dressed appropriately in a beige silk pantsuit, and Joey, who had not. Joey was wearing a miniskirt that barely grazed her crotch. She looked as if she were hoping to pick up a little business sometime during the long afternoon. Behind them, Ginger, the dogged rebel in her tight linen dress and high heels, seemed to be hanging back, as if weddings were contagious. Unable to postpone it any longer, she was slated herself to get married in another month.

  “Are these your friends?” my grandmother asked, staring at Joey.

  I didn’t bother to answer. “Is there anything else I can get you?” I said.

  “I’m just fine, as comfy as can be,” my grandmother said, with a vicious twinkle in her eye.

  After I ran the gambit, I made a beeline for Felicity. “I need to wake up,” I said.

  “Felicity brought you some coke, and I’ve got a bottle of Jack Daniel’s right here,” Joey said, patting her big straw purse. “Don’t worry, we’re going to help you make it through.”

  “Is there someplace we can go? I’ll turn you on,” Felicity said.

  But before I could load up on coke, which I sorely needed right then, Maggie made her entrance. She was already half in the bag. She walked right by me and over to the refreshment table, where the bowl of ice was melting in the by now intense heat. There was no air-conditioning in the Cobb’s Wharf Historical Society building. The lettuce in the little sandwiches had wilted. Maggie picked up one of these and threw it down again. She poured herself some punch. Then she came up to me, glancing at Joey in passing.

  “Leave it to the WASPs to make you suffer. Lousy punch. Where’s Gunther?”

  “He’s coming,” I said.

  “That would be the best thing that ever happened if you got stood up at the altar.” She looked over at Gunther’s sister, who was yelling and shaking a dirty kid. “Who are those people? Oh, hello, Mother,” she said, going over to where my grandmother sat surrounded by family.

  “You’ve been drinking,” Grandmother said.

  “So what if I have? It’s not every day your only child gets married.”

  The Reverend Webb came up to me. He was mopping his flushed, sweaty face with a white handkerchief.

  “I have to talk to you. Would you join your father and Mrs. Chace in the corner over there?”

  I followed him to where Betsy and my father were standing. They had grim expressions on their faces.

  “As I explained to your father, I am afraid I won’t be able to marry you now until around three this afternoon. You see, I have two other ceremonies scheduled today. June is my busy month, you understand. The next one will begin shortly; the other is at two,” he said, looking at his watch.

  Rayfield just shrugged his shoulders. “We’ll have to try and keep everyone entertained until then. That’s all we can do. I’ll make an announcement,” he said.

  “I am so sorry for this big inconvenience, I am truly sorry,” the Reverend Webb said. He shook our hands. Then he nodded at everyone and trotted out the door.

  It was not quite one o’clock. The old room was stifling. My prissy little cousins had found Gunther’s nieces and nephews. They were running in a pack, smearing each other’s faces with food.

  Rayfield went over to my grandmother and whispered something in her ear. Then he spoke to the room: “There is going to be a delay, about a two-hour delay, in fact. If anybody wants to go for a drive or something, that might be a good idea. One way to pass the time.”

  Nobody moved, except the kids, who by now were being ignored. My cousins’ little white shirts and little pink dresses were covered with grease. They were all shrieking. Otherwise, silence, stone silence. It was really too hot to make an effort. People walked outside, seeking the shade of the big sycamores in the garden.

  Finally, Gunther showed up. He walked into the hall and held our clothes, slightly wrinkled from the trip, high in the air.

  “Here I am,” he announced.

  He looked radiant. Well, no wonder. The bastard had gone and gotten high on crank without me, I thought. Everybody clamored around him, as if somehow his presence were going to make it all right.

  Grandmother took one look at him and started to grin. She loved handsome young men.

  “Come here, young man,” she said.

  Gunther threw our clothes over a chair and then leapt to her side. “You must be Janet’s grandmother,” he said, taking her hand and kissing it in a way that I found unctuous.

  But Grandma beamed. She was a sucker for that sort of con. “I think I like you. Please don’t take it personally if I go now. I’m too old to sit here for the rest of the afternoon. Now that I’ve seen you, I can give you my blessing, and I can leave,” she said.

  “Well, I wish you would stay, but I understand,” he said.

  Of course, Gunther didn’t understand; he couldn’t. He didn’t even know yet that the wedding had been postponed for two more hours, but he kissed the old lady’s hand again. “An honor to meet you at last,” he said.

  “I have an idea. Are you handy around the house?” Grandmother asked.

  “I could build a house single-handed, if I had the materials,” he said.

  “I thought so. I’m going down to Palm Beach early this year, in September, and I need a man around the place. Of course, there’s Fritz, the chauffeur, and the old gardener, but I need someone to run things. I want you and Janet to join me for the winter. My house is beautiful, gardenias in the pool. What do you say?”

  Gunther looked ecstatic. I knew what he was thinking: He’d be giving the slip to the two officers in the Drug Enforcement Agency who were still harassing him. He’d also be getting me out from under all my bad associations. Nobody was bothering to consult me. I was just the wife now. This was going to be even worse than I thought.

  “I’d love it, and I’m sure Janet would, too. It sounds like one long honeymoon,” Gunther said.

  “A honeymoon in paradise,” Grandmother said. “Janet, please go to the car and get Fritz. Tell him I’m ready to leave now.”

  On the way back, I grabbed my bridesmaids. “Let’s get me changed. And let’s, by all means, get me high,” I said.

  The rest of that day passed in a murky blur. I remember the men consuming the beer and the whiskey that Rayfield had supplied. They took off their ties and jackets and opened their shirts. My uncle Jack proceeded to get very loud. He was yelling at Maggie about something. She started to yell, too. Other people pulled them away from each other. A little while later, she came over to me.

  “Janet, why isn’t your father talking to me? What did I ever do to him, will you tell me that?” she said. She was good and drunk.

  “I can’t imagine,” I said.

  Betsy came up and steered her away. “Don’t worry, Janet, I’m going to suggest that your mother rest at the house for a little while,” she whispered to me.

  Gunther’s sister went and laid her bulk down on the grass outside. The old ladies from the neighborhood whom Betsy had invited sat along the wall on the porch there in the sun and fanned themselves, shaking their heads in open disapproval. The kids were running in the road by this time. Nobody paid any attentio
n to them. It was just too damn hot.

  I avoided Gunther and instead spent most of the time hiding out with my friends on the second floor, where, ostensibly, they were getting the bride ready. I was getting ready, all right. I was snockered. They had to shovel coke up my nose toward the end so that I could walk a straight line.

  When I finally got up to the altar, it occurred to me that Gunther was just as afraid as I was. Immediately, albeit temporarily, I felt reconciled to him. We were the only two people here in this particular circle of hell after all.

  I couldn’t look up above me, and neither could Gunther. We stood there, our heads bowed, feeling the eyes on our backs like hot branding irons. Everybody was expecting something big now after the long wait. I think the preacher sensed this. He stood there quietly, waiting for the crowd to settle down. Finally, he launched in by trying to read the John Donne poem I had given him, “The Undertaking.” The lines I particularly liked:

  If, as I have, you also do

  Virtue attir’d in woman see,

  And dare love that, and say so too,

  And forget the He and She...

  He mangled it. How could he have? “And forget the He and She.” What’s so difficult about that? It was as if the very sentiment of the poem itself were an anathema.

  After that, he got on with the traditional ceremony, sermon included, which we had agreed to let him do—to keep in the spirit of the thing, we decided. But we had had no notion, not an inkling, of what that man was suddenly hurling down at us from his pulpit, the force of the Protestant Almighty behind him. He bellowed, he intoned, and then he let the silence of eternity descend on the gathering. As he did so, he raised his hand and looked over our heads as if he were saluting a platoon of avenging angels. Then he hit us not only with vows but with covenants. Loads of covenants we found ourselves making. The irrevocable binding weight of them smashed right through the gauze of booze and coke. It decimated Gunther’s carefully crafted speed high. We started quaking. This fellow, the Reverend Webb, wasn’t kidding, apparently.