An Independent Woman

by Howard Fast

  Freddie was relieved. It went better than he expected. Adam, in a jovial mood, stood tall enough to kiss Judith’s cheek, while Eloise was thinking that Judith was wearing the same perfume Freddie always gave her at Christmas, and which he must have bought for her.

  “And this,” Freddie said, “is my aunt Barbara, who writes books and gets involved in wars and revolutions, and who runs Gloria Steinem a close second in the women’s movement—”

  “Freddie,” Judith said, “I know very well who your aunt is, and I’m delighted to meet her.”

  “And I’ve heard a great deal about you, Judith, and I’m glad to finally meet you”; and with that, Barbara kissed Judith and embraced her. Philip, standing beside Barbara, nodded in agreement and gave his hand to Judith, and said words to the effect of how good it was for all of them to be here on this happy occasion.

  Birdie MacGelsie couldn’t wait to get Barbara away from the receiving group. “This is more important,” she declared. “Who is she, and where did Freddie find her?”

  “I believe he found her in the Fairmont Hotel. Her name’s Judith Hope.”

  “Well, what is she? Come on.”

  “She’s a woman. Isn’t that obvious?”

  “Barbara, don’t play games with me. I’ve known you too long. She’s gorgeous. Is she in films?”

  “She’s a model, Birdie. I can’t stand here talking. I’m a hostess here. Poor Eloise is overwhelmed.”

  “I should think so. Is Freddie going to marry her? Is this for real?”

  “You’ll have to ask Freddie.”

  “I must meet her. Hello, Philip,” she said belatedly. “Congratulations.”

  But it wasn’t easy. Judge Horton had already staked out his ground, as a companion in color, and others moved in around Judith and Freddie.

  Barbara sighed and turned back to the arriving guests, and Philip wondered whether they shouldn’t seek the same seclusion that was granted to May Ling.

  “Absolutely not. You have a dozen people from the church whom Eloise does not know, and there are others, and I will not leave her to this alone.”

  “She is beautiful,” Philip said softly. It was the first time she had heard him comment on another woman’s appearance, and he was not talking about Eloise.

  “I’m glad you noticed,” Barbara said shortly.

  Now the guests were flooding in, and Eloise, caught in that trap of amnesia that more than ten guests always brought upon her, was struggling with names. Abner Berman appeared with his ex-wife, Reda, who explained quickly to Barbara, “I couldn’t miss a double wedding, not even if it meant coming with Dracula.” And Abner grinned and shook his head and kissed Barbara and whispered, “What could I do? The dragon lady’s the dragon lady.” Carla, Candido’s daughter and now president of the Bay Area Chicano Union, turned up with her new husband and asked, “Where is the Black Beauty? No, I’m not going to make a scene. This is my husband, Diego. Freddie’s safe,” she assured Barbara. Barbara’s son, Sam, and his wife, Mary Lou (in a blazing designer dress), and their child, Jean, who immediately dashed away, kissed and hugged her; then Jean joined Danny and half a dozen other children whom Eloise and Barbara had not even counted on. Sam had to whisper, “Mother, marriage is a terrible habit.” And Father Gibbon, in full regalia, who turned out to be a former classmate of Philip’s, shook hands with Philip and insisted, “We must talk, Phil. We must.”

  Consuela Gomez, Freddie’s secretary, sat at a small folding table, checking off the list of names, and she had reached a point of utter confusion. She pleaded with Barbara for a moment of attention and then said hopelessly, “They don’t even stop for me. Ms. Lavette, I have checked off two hundred names, and there must be twice that many here.”

  “They feel at home,” Barbara said. “Forget the list.” She turned to Philip and begged him, “Take over, darling, please. I must talk to Mr. Cohen.” Adam, smiling benignly, his white beard giving him the appearance of an Old Testament patriarch, told Barbara not to worry. He and Eloise had everything in hand. Eloise had taken refuge in a continuous smile and had surrendered on the problem of names, and Adam simply smiled and nodded.

  Barbara raced over to the trucks and found Mr. Cohen sitting on a folding chair, drinking a cup of coffee, and calmly smoking a cigar. “Do you see those kids?” she asked. “We should have put ‘no children’ on the invitations, but how could we?”

  “On a Sunday,” Mr. Cohen said sagely, “baby-sitters are hard to find. We haven’t been in this business almost a hundred years for nothing. I always bring twenty folding chairs like the one I’m sitting on. I always bring a box of frankfurters and frankfurter rolls. They won’t eat salmon, anyway. We’ll make the kids a picnic on the side. They’ll sit on the grass and be happy, and meanwhile, my guess is that you got four hundred people at least and maybe more. So I have the folding chairs for an emergency. Please don’t worry. It’s ten minutes to eleven. Who is first, you or your niece?”

  “We’re first, then my niece. Ours is a very simple ceremony.”

  “All right. Now, you bring the minister or rabbi or whoever is doing it up to the lectern—”

  “She’s a woman.”

  “So she’s a woman. I got an open mind. When I see her there, I got a steam whistle on my big truck and I give three short blasts. That will stop the talking and moving around and then she can tell them on the microphone to take their seats. I see half of them are already seated. When the ceremony is over, Mr. Levy tells me, wine will be served at that long table. Three of my girls will serve the wine. The name cards are already on the tables, where Ms. Sally, placed them. Extra guests, extra chairs. We squeeze them in. Ms. Gomez, Mr. Lavette’s secretary, is going to help. So you go ahead now, and don’t worry.”

  Philip and Barbara had chosen their marriage ceremony from those published in the church pamphlets, as had May Ling and Harry. When Philip told Reba Guthri, his assistant minister, what his and Barbara’s choice was, she was somewhat perturbed. “The Wine Ceremony is rarely used, Philip, and you are the minister.”

  “It’s Barbara’s choice,” he explained. “The Highgate winery is the single thread that runs through her whole life. It has tied the two families, the Levys and the Lavettes, together for three generations. They’re somewhat like the old farm families used to be, yet different. I didn’t object, because in the Catholic Church, where I was trained, wine is venerated. So I can understand what she feels.”

  Reba Guthri, a stocky woman of fifty or so with iron gray bobbed hair, was already at the rostrum, poring over some papers with Philip. Barbara told her about her talk with Mr. Cohen and took Philip’s arm. “You’re the groom this time, so let’s get back and get ready to march up the aisle.” She hurried Philip through the crowd, and they had barely gotten into place when the steam blasts sounded. As Mr. Cohen had said, there was a moment of silence, and Reba Guthri suggested that the guests be seated.

  “As you know,” Ms. Guthri announced, “there are two weddings to be celebrated here today. I am Reba Guthri, Philip Carter’s assistant minister, and I shall perform the marriage of Barbara Lavette and Philip Carter. As soon as you are all seated, we will begin.”

  Barbara had given Candido’s Mexican band severe instructions. During the ceremonies, only the guitars, two regular and one bass; no conga drums, no trumpet. Her bridal march was to be a moody Spanish love song called “Always.” To be sure that her instructions were understood, she delivered them in impeccable Castilian—which surprised the musicians. Now the soft Spanish music began, and Barbara and Philip walked down the aisle, Barbara hatless in her white cotton ankle-length dress, her straight white hair shoulder length and loose, and Philip in his white dinner jacket. She had rejected any thought of a bouquet or bridesmaids or anyone to give her away. She was senior in the family, and in two months she would be seventy; and Eloise, sitting with Adam, was already in tears, whispering to Adam, “How beautiful she is.”

  Reba Guthri was holding a silver chalice of wine,
and when Philip and Barbara stopped in front of her, she said, “Barbara and Philip, will you take each other as man and wife, to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love each other and comfort each other in sickness and health, forsake all others, and be faithful to each other as long as you shall live?”

  Both answered, “I will.”

  Then, holding up the chalice of wine, Reba Guthri said, “The years of our lives are a cup of wine poured out for us to drink. The grapes, when pressed, give forth the good juices of the wine. So, too, under the winepress of time, our lives give forth their labor and honor and love. Many days you will sit at the same table and eat and drink together. So drink now, and may the cup of your lives be sweet and full to running over. From this time forth may you find life’s joys double-gladdening, its bitterness sweetened, and all things hallowed by true companionship and love.”

  Reba handed the chalice to Barbara, who drank and then handed it to Philip, who drank and gave the cup back to Reba. Then he took Barbara in his arms and kissed her, and the audience applauded, and the trumpeter in the Mexican band, unable to contain himself, sounded a wild fanfare.

  Adam was overwhelmed. There were tears in his eyes as he embraced Barbara, and then she took her seat between Eloise and Freddie, who was whispering to Judith that there could have been three weddings. Judith said to Barbara, “It was so beautiful—just so beautiful.” Philip, who kissed Reba and thanked her, called out, “Please keep your seats. You will have time to greet and kiss the bride after we are finished. By now I am sure you all know who I am. I am the minister at the First Unitarian Church, and I shall now celebrate the marriage of May Ling Lavette to Harry Lefkowitz.” The band struck up the Wedding March, and May Ling, tall and slender and lovely in her wedding gown, on the arm of her father, Dr. Joseph Lavette, walked down the aisle, and following her, Harry and Sally.

  IT WAS OVER. At long last, the weddings were over. Freddie had written out a check and had handed it to Mr. Cohen. The salmon had been a great success, and the children had gobbled down the frankfurters and rolls. The wedding guests had gone, and Mr. Cohen’s crew had picked up the last bit of rubbish, and Mr. Cohen’s two catering trucks had departed, and the sun was dipping to the gentle slopes of the Valley; and Barbara was as forlorn and depressed as ever she had been in all her life. Philip, who had not slept the night before, had gone to their room for a nap; and alone Barbara was walking slowly through the vines, heavy with ripe grapes, on the path that led up the hillside to the little clearing where long ago—or so it seemed—she would sit with Eloise and talk about everything and nothing.

  Where was the joy that a bride was supposed to have? But she was not a bride; she was an old woman who asked herself why on God’s earth she had allowed this to happen. She felt trapped and filled with hopelessness, and as she reviewed the last few months, she felt like someone caught in a hopeless morass. She recalled an incident years ago when a mouse had appeared in the big kitchen, and with a broom Cathrena chased the terrified little creature trying so desperately to flee from the giant foe.

  Barbara was sick and tired of people telling her that she was still beautiful. She had never taken proper care of her skin, scorning the endless advertisements and persuasions for this or that cream that took twenty years off one’s age and miraculously made one young and beautiful overnight, and her face was covered with a network of fine wrinkles. Eloise had urged her to use a rinse that would turn her hair ash-blond, to which she replied that she had never been an ash-blond and had no intention of becoming one now.

  Last month her son, Sam, out of his omnipotence as physician and surgeon, had told her that she must begin to take Premarin, and that he would give her the proper prescription; otherwise, he warned her, she would develop that bowed, hunched look that so many older women have. She resented this, even as she resented all of Sam’s warnings and commentary about her health, and she threw the prescription away—her own small assertion of independence. Was it all about independence? Then why was she lonely? Did she love Philip, and what was love? Where did it come from? She remembered her first love, Marcel, the newspaperman she had met when she was living in Paris, who had left to cover the Spanish Civil War and whose thighbone had been shattered by shrapnel; and she remembered the passion she had felt for him, the feeling that he was a part of her, the joy in their sex, her screams of pure rapture when she had an orgasm, and his pleas of “Quiet, quiet, my beloved, or the landlord will cast us out of here as depraved creatures,” and she remembered the utter desolation that had overcome her when he died.

  She would never forget the day he died in the hospital in Toulouse. The world ended and hope passed out of her life. And this brought to mind the thought of how she would react if Philip died. She would weep, but she would also be free; and that thought turned her against herself and filled her mind with contempt for herself, as she felt herself to be utterly heartless.

  She had reached the clearing and she sat down on one of the benches in front of the open fireplace, arguing with herself that she loved Philip, that Philip was the best man she had ever known, that there wasn’t a bone of hate or anger or resentment anywhere in his body—” And that’s the whole damn trouble!” she said angrily, “I don’t want a man to love me in spite of what I am. I want a man to love me because of what I am.” And after that small outburst, she felt somewhat better, and decided that she would tell Sam that she had lost the prescription for Premarin, and that she would begin to take it as he had suggested; and she took comfort in the fact that she would not be alone anymore. She recalled that on the nights when she had a dinner date with Philip, she would wait for the doorbell to ring and be anxious if he was delayed and came late. She told herself that she did love him; he was sweet and kind and gentle, and she remembered how delicious it was to have a warm body next to her at night, and when she woke at night to feel him there beside her and roll over and press her body to his; and he never resented being awakened at four in the morning by her embrace—and you don’t do that with someone you don’t love. Her thoughts wandered, and she shivered with the increasing chill of the night.

  Suddenly Philip appeared, carrying a woolen serape, which he folded over her shoulders. He had changed into blue jeans and a sweater, and he told her that Eloise had suggested that he would find her here. “I looked everywhere else, and for a moment I thought you had fled. But your car was still here, so I decided that you were hiding. Not that I blame you.”

  “I didn’t mean to hide, Philip. I wanted to be alone and think.”

  “About our marriage being a great mistake?”

  She stared at him in bewilderment.

  “It’s a very common post-wedding feeling,” he said.

  “Is that how you feel?”

  “No, but I’m not Barbara Lavette. I’m the luckiest man in California, and that makes me nervous.”

  She smiled. “Philip Garter nervous? That will be the day. I never told you how good you were with May Ling and Harry. It was an absolutely beautiful ceremony.”

  “Thank you, my dear. It’s getting cold and in a little while it will be dark, and I have no confidence in being able to make my way down that path in the dark. Eloise told me that there will be supper in the kitchen—she and Adam, whom I have come to like enormously, and May Ling and Harry, and Freddie and that incredible woman of his, and you and me—if you can ever forgive me for leaving you and falling asleep. I only meant to lie down for a few minutes. Eloise promised to wake me, and she let me sleep for an hour.”

  “I think I can forgive you, Philip.”

  “Yes, bless you. Harry and May Ling are leaving for Paris tomorrow. Danny will stay here until school begins next week, and then he’ll be with Sally. You see, I’ve integrated myself with the family. Now all I have to do is to prove to you that our marriage is going to be a very happy one.”

  Barbara rose and threw her arms around him, and he kissed her gently.

  “No!” she said. “Don’t kiss me like that!
Open your mouth and kiss me as if you want to crawl inside of me.”

  He did, and then they walked down the path to join the others in the kitchen.

  IT WAS A STRANGE DINNER that evening at Highgate, and Barbara was both the observer and the observed, intimately entwined yet apart from it, thinking that it was some sixty-five years ago that Jake Levy, newly discharged from the service, and Clair Harvey, his bride, had driven down the Silverado Trail and bought Highgate for a song from a bitter old Irishman who spent his days cursing the Volstead Act and staying drunk. Sixty-five years—what a long, long time! Her father, Dan Lavette, had brought her there for the first time at age eight—Jake was his partner’s son—and Jake kept a saddle horse. Dan had swung her up in front of him, and up the path to the hilltop they went, until the whole Napa Valley was spread out before them.

  And now, after all the rejoicing, the family was strangely silent around a dinner table that always bubbled with sound. The toasts were over. They were confronting America’s agony, a black woman who sat among them. Barbara asked herself, If I were Judith, what would I be thinking?

  Adam was carving a leg of lamb. Dinner was late. It was nine o’clock—but Barbara had only pecked at her lunch, and a glass of wine had given her a strange, heady feeling. Freddie filled her glass again, and she rose, glass in hand.

  “Am I permitted another toast?” Barbara asked. “I will make it short because I am hungry. Somewhere in the Bible—which I must confess I have not read in more years than a duck has feathers—it speaks of the stranger within your gates. But there are no strangers here. When you break bread at this table, you are part of our family. Judith, I toast you and welcome you. I am the senior member of this gathering, and I thank whatever gods may be that I have lived long enough to welcome a beautiful black woman into our hearts.”