The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery)
Page 6
I let him peck me but squirmed loose before he could do anything to make Mama blush. “Not now.” I flicked my mussed brown hair out of my face and held several strands up for scrutiny. “Ugh. More gray. Anyway, lots of brides wear family gowns.”
“I like your gray.”
“Watch it, or I’ll start talking about your bald spot.”
He reached up to rub the top of his head like he was checking for bruises, then hauled himself to standing and offered me a hand up. I was fighting my gray one dye bottle at a time, and Lance had long since given up the war against the empty patch in the middle of his head.
“Bleach it, then nobody will know the difference when you color,” my mother advised. Mama’s hair used to be brown, like mine, before the gray set in. Now she dyed it a shade of blonde so bright that I called it “way-off-canary-yellow” and wore it in a stylish pixie. On her, the horrible color and adorable cut emphasized her femininity. It would have made me look like a prepubescent boy.
I tucked the offending strands behind my ears and let Lance help me up. “Anyway,” I said, “I’m more interested in the mortgage, the groceries, and trying to pay for this honeymoon. Spending a lot of money for a dress I’ll only wear one time doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Don’t let her kid you,” Mama said. “You and I both know she wouldn’t have invested money in a dress twelve years ago, either.” She pulled out her cell to photograph us standing awkwardly in front of the sofa.
“Oh, Mama, put that thing away,” I said. “We look absurd right now.”
But Mama snapped two more shots before popping it back into her pocket, where it promptly started ringing.
“Oh!” Mama said, “Oh, oh! Smartphones!” as if that explained something. Even though she had been dexterously tapping the screen a moment before to take pictures of us, she suddenly seemed all thumbs when forced to confront the same machine in another capacity. She juggled it from hand to hand, nearly dropping it while she tried to poke the right spot to answer.
“Mama,” I said, “You have to tap and drag. It’s . . .”
Before I could finish speaking, Mama’s finger finally connected with the screen in the right pattern. “There,” she said, then, “Hello!” Moments after that, the chipper edge faded and she said, “Oh.” She drifted back toward the kitchen, saying, “Yes, John, you do need to dispute the charges with a check card. It isn’t the same as a credit card at all. It’s a formality, dear.”
“Honey, get me out of this thing,” I had said to Lance. “I think it will work, and I feel like a ragdoll in it. I turned around to present my back so he could undo the row of tiny buttons around the neck.
As he started tugging, the front door opened, and a voice called, “Ding DONG!”
“We’re in the back parlor, Nana,” I said. Then, to Lance, I added, “Wait a minute. I want to see what she thinks.”
Lance smiled, and I turned to face the hall again. I turned a full circle as Nana entered the room, tugging on the train to keep it from twining around my legs as I spun. While I was turning, Lance sucked in his breath.
“What?” I asked him.
He tried to explain. “It still hangs and sags”—he gestured to my arms and chest respectively—“but . . .” He trailed off, still circling his left hand like he expected it to conjure words out of thin air for him. Then he said suddenly, “I like it. I like it very much.”
“But you said . . .,” I protested.
Nana cut me off. “No, dear. I agree with Lance. It looks nice. I’m glad someone will finally get some use out of it after all these years.” And I realized he had spoken entirely for my grandmother’s benefit. Whether Lance liked the dress or not, whether I liked it or not, Nana clearly loved it. All the memories and heartache, and she still loved her dress. She clasped her hands at her chest and quickly released them. Then she added, “Of course, in my day, the groom never saw the dress until the day of the wedding. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t made Bill wait. Maybe this would be a second wearing instead of a first.” At eighty, Nana still towered over me. Although she was stooped now and walked a little slowly, her green eyes shone with a joyful light, even in a wistful moment like this one, as she looked at me in her dress.
“What was it like for you,” I asked, “raising Mama alone?” It wasn’t a topic I had ever broached, but I suddenly couldn’t imagine why. My grandmother had been a single parent in an age when girls were routinely sent away for nine convenient months in the event of an unexpected pregnancy.
Franny Cox had laughed as she paced around me, gathering fistfuls of fabric to pull the hem off the ground and putting them in my increasingly overburdened arms. Nana was not troubled about stepping over the train, and the chiffon didn’t slip out of her grip, even while she was handing more of it to me. I resorted to tucking it under my elbows. When Nana was finished, I stood a little awkwardly, half clutching, half pinning the hem clear of the floor, while she stood behind me pinching the chest tight.
“It wasn’t that long ago, really,” Nana said at last, answering a question I had thought she might ignore. “Most people thought we’d eloped before Bill went off to Korea, and I let them lie to themselves. And I wasn’t alone, really.” Now she had moved on to the sleeves, tugging so they hung at my wrists, not down over the palms. No mean feat, especially considering that she did it one-handed without dislodging any of the tucked-up skirt or letting go of the back of the dress. She went on, “Mother was horrified, but she stood up in church for me. And that’s not something you saw every day. She was a very formidable woman, my mother. Very formidable. Your sister is a lot like her.” Last of all, Nana pulled the throat tight for a moment, then nodded once before letting it all go again.
“Yes,” she said, talking about the dress now. “Lenore and I can sew that.”
“Meaning I can sew that,” Mama said, returning from her phone call, stuffing the device once more into her pocket. “Mother, you know your eyes aren’t up to needlework.”
“My eyes are fine,” Nana snapped, pushing her glasses up her nose.
“You crochet,” Mama said. “But we’re talking about tiny stitches. When was the last time you even embroidered?”
“Stop it! Both of you!” I threw up my arms and dropped the cascades of fabric Nana had tucked up for me. “Or I swear I’ll get a tailor.” The two of them cackled, like they thought I was making some kind of a joke. “Lance, get me out of this thing,” I said, meaning it this time. I retreated upstairs to the sewing room as delicately as one can while trailing a wedding dress at least three sizes too large, and Mama, not Lance, followed.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
Now, two weeks later, that dress sat waiting for me on the dress form that actually had been a decent stand-in while Mama removed the skirt so she could raise the hemline and shorten the waist.
“Isn’t it bad luck to have your wedding dress fitted too many times?” Lance asked. He parked behind my mother’s car and we got out.
“Of course not,” I told him. “It’s very good luck, because it’s less likely to fall off you walking down the aisle.” I would have thought that Lance would be happier about my re-refitting. Waiting around one more time while Mama went over me with a pincushion looking for flaws put off the trip to find centerpieces. He started to grumble something else, and I added, “Anyway, it delays the trip to the craft store.”
“There is that.”
“After lunch, you get to tell my dad we’ll be back later to stay the night.” I walked in ahead of him, denying him the chance to retort.
As I had expected, our lunch conversation centered around Mama’s last-minute concerns. She was worried about the cake, because we had declined to go for a tasting sometime last month and had left the flavor entirely up to the baker.
“You didn’t at least tell them marble or yellow?” she demanded.
“Or chocolate,” Daddy added, sipping his coffee. “You might have ordered chocolate.”
Mama wasn’t sure about the plastic tablecloths currently sitting in her basement. “Why don’t we look at getting decent replacements today?” she wanted to know. “You got those other ones at some chain back in March.”
“And at bargain basement prices,” I added.
“Exactly. You have no idea what might be wrong with them. Every one already has a hole for all we know.”
“They’re fine,” I said. “It’s quite enough that we have to have centerpieces,” a detail I considered frivolous. “We can put any holes under those.”
And that brought the conversation back to its origin, and Mama’s real fussing point today. She was deciding between a central candle surrounded by ivy and a simple bowl with floating votives for each table. She wanted Lance and me to agree on one or the other. I didn’t like either, but found the votives less kitschy. Lance wasn’t much help. He sat with his arms crossed over his chest once he finished his sandwich. Then, whenever Mama asked a question, he waited for me to answer and agreed with me using monosyllables.
Mama said, “I’m sure the bowls should be clear glass, but they would need to be opaque to be sure we could hide holes in the tablecloths.”
“Mama, there won’t be holes.”
“How can you be sure?”
Lance ventured, “Opaque bowls will look fine.”
And Daddy backed him up, saying, “Exactly!” He was even more of a conscript than Lance and I at these festivities.
Everyone but Mama was finished eating by that time, and Lance and I started putting away the bread and condiments. “Go on upstairs, Noel,” Mama said.
“Oh, leave them alone, Lenore,” Daddy said. He got up. “I’m going back to my garden.” We would be getting married in that garden tomorrow. He was far more concerned with making the roses beautiful. The back door banged behind him, and I heard a chorus of barking from my parents’ dogs, who had been banned from the kitchen for the meal.
Lance and I got as far as taking the dishes to the sink before Mama finished her own meal. She waved to us and dusted some crumbs off her chin. “I’ll get that later,” she said. Then my Nana banged into the kitchen. “There you are!” Mama exclaimed. “I was worried something had happened to you.”
“Please, I’m only eighty. I don’t think we need to take away my car keys yet.”
“Noel, get her a sandwich.” Mama opened the refrigerator and pulled the ham back out.
“I ate before I came over.”
“But you knew this was a planning lunch.”
“Which is exactly why I ate first. Let’s go fit that dress.”
“You two get ready,” I said. “Lance and I are just going to load the dishwasher and I’ll be up.”
Mama started to say something, but Nana shooed her on out of the kitchen. I was grateful that my grandmother recognized my need for a few minutes alone with my fiancé. I knew they would both be waiting with needles outpointed if I didn’t hurry to join them. But I wanted just a few more minutes alone with Lance before the wedding madness ensued.
He frowned at their retreating figures, and I handed him a plate. Half of his problem was that he wanted to get the centerpiece search over with (if we had to have centerpieces at all), and the other half was that he didn’t really want anything to do with the process. He was trying very hard to be a twenty-first-century groom, but we both knew he couldn’t have cared less about the decorations. He stayed involved because he knew I didn’t care either. Every time we came to detail tension, I threatened to make him elope and swore the entire ceremony was for the relatives.
Lance and I tucked the last of the dishes into the rack and loaded the machine with soap. I was thinking about my mother and grandmother. I said, “I don’t understand those two. They snipe back and forth so much, but they don’t even seem angry half the time.”
“Who?” Lance asked. “Your parents?”
“No. Mama and Nana. But that’s another thing. Why can’t Daddy keep track of his cards? Mama whispered before you came in that he’s had another card stolen because he left it somewhere. Your mom has issues and my dad’s going senile. Crazy, isn’t it?”
Lance turned and walked toward the door, heading for Daddy and the rose gardens. Then, quite suddenly, he said, “I think your mom and grandmother learned to get by that way. It probably goes back to Franny having to be a single parent in the nineteen fifties. She was joking about it with you when you asked, but we both know your nana didn’t have things easy.” I loved how Lance had made the leap to a two-week-old conversation, knowing I would be there, too. He continued, “I think she and your mom learned to put up with each other is all.” Then he turned and went back out to make sure there was going to be room for us to stay here this evening.
As if that could possibly be a problem. Mama and Daddy had whole wings of the house to shut off in cold weather. Lance and I could have lived like the Mad Tea Party and slept in a different room every night if we stayed here regularly. Even with Nana staying for the wedding and my sister and her family coming in tonight, they would have space for us. Still, it would have been rude not to give any warning at all, and Lance enjoyed spending time with Daddy, even if he pretended not to know anything at all about the flowers.
Mama and Daddy lived in a huge old Victorian house that had once belonged to the town mortician. It came with an overgrown English garden for them to rehabilitate. Sophia only learned the house’s history when she came into town, and that was surely why she thought the place was cursed. I found her conclusion ridiculous.
In twenty-four years of living here, the closest my parents had come to a haunting was some mysterious attic scraping probably caused by squirrels. The building had been both funeral parlor and morgue, and Sophia most likely thought dead bodies last present seventy-odd years ago guaranteed lingering unhappy spirits. Some of those people died gently in their sleep, I fumed now as I mounted the steps to try on my dress one last time. Quite a lot of them did.
It seemed unlikely that Sophia was considering how commonplace a dwelling like this one would have been in the late 1800s. In the nineteenth century, it wasn’t at all unusual for the local funeral home to double as the morgue and be operated out of a person’s home. These buildings tended to be large to accommodate their dual role and allow for big wakes.
The town of Granton, however, burned in the 1930s, during the Depression. While this was one of the few homes and businesses to survive the fire unscathed, the funeral jobs had shifted when people drifted into the county seat of Ironweed only a few miles down the road, unable to rebuild in a time of need. By then, the county had a morgue of its own, and the funeral director simply moved his business out of his abode and set up an office in town.
When he died some years later, his home passed into other hands. Those hands all belonged to the same family for a few generations. My parents waited a long time for the house to come on the market. Daddy had his eye on the gardens. Mama had hers on the turrets.
Growing up in Ironweed, it had been one of those things I heard about for my entire childhood. We used to drive out to old Granton (which didn’t even rate its own zip code) to look at “our” house and plan our futures in it. Mama even took the step of giving the widowed owner our phone number and telling her we were interested if she ever wanted to sell.
Nothing came of it until my first year of college. Then, one day, my little sister got home from school and the phone was ringing. It was Mrs. Johnson calling from the bank, ready to finish a deal she considered my mother to have initiated some six years previously.
Within a week my family was moving.
At that point, I was not attending Ironweed U. I completed my undergraduate work at Midwestern
College, a couple of hours to the east. So I heard about the move while living in a dorm and came home at Thanks giving to find all my old possessions at the new house. Over two decades later, many of those belongings still sat in boxes in a closet in a room Mama had labeled mine. She wouldn’t throw them out, and I hadn’t needed them since before they were relocated.
Still, I liked this house. I had grown up looking forward to living here, and it felt like home to me. I enjoyed its character and thought my parents had done an excellent job making it their own, with restoration work on the interior and much planting in the garden. I lived with them for a lot of graduate school, and I found the house as comfortable as if I had spent my childhood in it.
Upstairs, Mama said, “You’ve left so many important things until so late.”
“The only things left are little,” I protested. “My dress, decorations, flowers, the caterer and the license. We got the license this morning, and I talked to the catering company last Wednesday. And I always knew the dress would be fine.”
“And now you don’t have flowers at all,” Mama snapped.
“Oh for pity’s sake, I have an entire rose garden full of them. Could anything in this whole world be more lovely than Daddy’s flowers?”
Mama had to concede that point. “But the caterer,” she fussed, looking to Nana. “You call the caterer a ‘little’ detail. You can’t expect much from a company you booked on a week’s notice.”
“They’ll be fine,” I said. “I know them.” They supplied the food for all of the center’s fund-raising events, and I didn’t think it really mattered much what we served. Nobody remembers the food at a wedding. And we booked them back when we set the date. We finalized the menu a little on the tardy side. I didn’t give Mama the satisfaction of knowing that the caterer shared her opinion about food chosen a week and a half in advance based largely on what was already on order.