Rogues' Wedding

by Terry Griggs

  As for her hair, that was merely a question of redistribution. Not all men were hirsute, shaggy as apes. Grif had packed a razor and so must needs shave, although Avice had never taken the opportunity to run her hand along his cheek, to discover for herself how far from boyhood his face had advanced. She stood before the dresser mirror and gazed at her own, then grabbed two fistfuls of her long, dark brown hair and held it up, tangled and in disarray after her troubled and sleepless night. The colour of muck, she thought, of mouldering leaves. Dark was better than fair—but what was to be done with it? If she wanted to play both Adam and Eve, she’d need to step back and forth through the screen of this hair. She could try to keep it tucked under a hat, but knew that the stuff fed too directly on her brain for that: it was wilful hair and was bound to make its own escape no matter how firmly she secured it in place.

  She snapped open Grif’s razor and began to cut, but carefully, preserving every strand, laying it down on the dresser. She decided to have it fashioned into a hairpiece, perfect for when she was the missus. Who knows, at some point she might even require an infant, a hair baby with knots for eyes, tightly swaddled and held close to her breast.

  Avice worked slowly and made a beautiful job of it, even she had to admit. Her hair lay in a curled mound, an animal newly formed. Light-headed, she leaned toward the mirror until the tip of her nose scaled its cool surface. A shrewd-eyed imp stared at her, close enough to kiss.

  She couldn’t help it. She arched back, hands gripping the dresser, and let out a yelp of laughter.

  By late afternoon a bribe or two had been dispensed, a few purchases made, bags (his and hers) packed and sent ahead. She was packed, although not in the usual sense, for she had stationed herself inside him, her male equivalent. She felt a bit like a tourist in her own body, peering out, ready to take in the sights with a fresh pair of eyes. Admittedly, she was nervous, fussing with last-minute preparations, straightening a cuff, dusting off her lapel, surveying the room one last time to see if there was any telling clue, anything of herself—or himself—left behind. She was ready, more or less. Smoking, swearing—she’d get the hang of these in time, these and whatever other useful male practices of bluster and release there might be. It was funny, when she thought of it, how women were expected to be so contained (as she was now) despite their reputation for sociability, for nagging and chatter. But no more.

  Pausing on the threshold of the honeymoon suite, she was amused to think how she would be carrying herself over it, like any bride entering a new life. Except that she was heading out, not in.

  She supposed that she had Grif to thank for this, but she was not planning on thanking him. Naturally, she would honour her marriage vows. How did they go … until death do you part, wasn’t that it? Fine. That was one vow she’d keep, the sooner the better. What had been conceived on their wedding night she’d gestate and nurture in the darkest, foulest part of herself.

  She stepped out the door, her new, pricey boots fitting like skin, adding a dash of confidence to her step. She sailed down the hall as one, a happy couple united in boldness, a pair who couldn’t have been closer, and more married, if they tried.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  free speech

  If certain ladies in the colonies were given to “hearing voices,” it was only because they were doing their best to keep up with the current spiritual fashions and predilections of their clever, trend-setting British sisters. With their heightened sensitivities and delicate equipment—ears cunningly designed, auditory canals slender as pinkies, receptivity sharp as that of bats—it’s not surprising that such would be the chosen conduits for heavenly news and information. It was a time, after all, when scientific theory caused many to turn a deaf ear to messages from above, and the telephone, fast becoming the newest appendage to the head, had no lines laid to the realm of the supernatural.

  Avice’s sister Cecile, dutiful and pious, was a woman who had the time and the inclination to heed the word of the Lord, or at least that of His minions, as direct speech from the Almighty might incinerate one’s head altogether. On occasion she did hear voices, and in fact, much to her dismay, one particular voice had become attached to her. This would not have been a problem, her faith being capacious enough to entertain the phenomenon, but the voice that dogged her was not very nice. It was brash and grating. It was full of boasts and brags. At times it wheedled and bullied her. It had a dry, sarcastic sense of humour. It lapsed into inferior foreign tongues in which it said, she was certain, the most disgusting things. Nor was there any predicting when it might happen along, when it might come to whisper its vile nothings in her ear, forcing itself and its unsavoury views upon her.

  While having tea one day with Mrs. Archibald Brunt and reading aloud from a letter sent by her newly married sister, Cecile shuddered slightly, recognizing the familiar irritating snicker of her unwanted spiritual attendant, its warm breath tickling her earlobe, inflaming her cheek. It was bad enough that she had to censor and “translate” most of Avice’s letter, without also having to listen to an undertow of rude commentary, a subversive counter-interpretation of it. Mrs. Brunt, she knew, would be shocked to hear descriptions of factories, of tenements, of streetcars packed with immigrants. Her sister had sent postcards depicting the insane asylum, a giant Garland stove as large as a house, a beer garden, a dance hall, a bath house, an establishment in the Merrill block that displayed freaks and oddities—a Wild Man, a Tom Thumb, a woman dressed in snakes and nothing else. Why Avice did not choose to write about the distinguished commercial buildings, the university, the churches, or even the art gallery—and surely there must be one even in that city—was beyond Cecile. It was not beyond her, however, to describe these more elevated sights herself to her flesh-and-blood guest, while fending off the undermining insinuations of her immaterial one.

  Don’t go to Michigan, that land of ills … the word means ague, fever and chills.

  With the letter before her, gripped perhaps a bit too firmly in hand, Cecile recounted the finer theological points of a sermon that Mr. and Mrs. T. Griffith Smolders had attended in the beautiful cathedral of St. Paul’s (surely every city had one) in that delightful, if unusual, honeymoon destination—Detroit. But, au contraire, Cecile heard a murmured disavowal, and tried her best not to listen as it recounted in sickening detail how the young couple had been enjoying other delights entirely, and had scarcely stepped outside their room in the Hotel Cadillac.

  In nomine fillii … et spiritus sancti … et furor uterinus.

  Noting the red blotches creeping up Cecile’s neck, not to mention her fixed gaze as she read the letter (was it memorized?), Mrs. Brunt secretly sympathized. It was not easy being an elder and unmarried daughter, and Cecile Drinkwater was stepping with some dignity into the comedic role of spinster. Soon—figuratively speaking, of course—she would disappear entirely, which in Cecile’s case might be an improvement, as she was alarmingly plain. A boiled potato had more evident charms. Mrs. Brunt was pleased to hear that Avice, the most spirited of the Drinkwater girls, certainly the most intractable, had finally come to her senses. Marriage had obviously done her some good, even if the husband was not exactly the sort of person you would want to invite into your own home.

  “The Russell House is the leading hotel in Detroit, I believe,” she said. “It’s where the Prince of Wales stayed in ’60.”

  “Fully booked, I understand.”

  “How unfortunate. Did you say they attended the opera?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And what was being performed?”

  Fellatio.

  “Something … Italian.”

  “Fidelio?”

  “Yes, that was it.”

  Porca Madonna!

  “Are you feeling quite well, Miss Drinkwater? You do look a bit feverish.”

  “A slight earache, I’m afraid, Mrs. Brunt. I should perhaps retire.”

  Indeed it was trying for a proper young woman to maintain the required
genteel glow while livid, or to retain her demure composure when all she wanted to do was smack herself on the side of the head, or tear off those coiled and tightly wound braids that were clapped onto her skull, serving her ill as mufflers but rather more as antennae sensitive to this most undesirable presence. How was one supposed to be an angel in the house when a devilish informant persistently tattled in one’s ear? And yet Cecile realized that there was truth in what she was hearing. She knew her sister was too headstrong and contrary to have become the sudden possessor of retiring wifely virtues. Nor did she believe for a moment that Avice was as blissfully wedded as she claimed to be in her cards and letters home. Lady Pride mounted on her high horse was the author of those.

  Equally incredible was her claim that she was having a glorious time in … Detroit. In an industrial city seething with filth and crime, teeming with socialists, and blacks, and Americans—people who spoke much too loudly and told you everything about themselves at the drop of a hat. The land of free speech; and heavens, it was that—too free entirely. Who in their right mind would go to Detroit for their honeymoon? A Fabian? A factory girl? The Drinkwater sisters had all urged them to go to Niagara Falls, and the fiancé had been willing enough, but the inarguable reasoning that everyone goes there had only caused Avice, typically, to declare that in that case they would travel in the opposite direction. Her decision—and it could only have been hers—was pure spite and perversity.

  What would become of her young sister? Cecile had to wonder as she watched Mrs. Brunt march down the front walk, her stately progress about to be undercut by a little mess that Pepys, the family dog, had deposited there. Nothing good, Cecile heard herself thinking, nothing good at all. For once she and her disembodied adviser were in complete accord. Mrs. Brunt slipped and went down with a loud shriek. Cecile clapped a hand to her mouth, trying to contain the wild shout of laughter bursting in her head.

  Avice herself would not give the time of day to any form of intercession from a higher power. The very idea! She was temperamentally incapable of receiving advice, whether from an earthly father (or sister) or a heavenly one—or from one of His tedious, prating go-betweens. Whatever religious sentiment she might have possessed as a child, she had chucked years ago. The Reverend Elias Bee was largely responsible for this, having sermonized her into an apostatic stupor. Sunday after Sunday, corralled in the family pew of St. Paul’s, she had listened to his righteous blather and sanctimonious twaddle with a glowering and growing resentment. Besides causing her a sinful amount of boredom, he did not even present a sample of manliness worth her study. His face was too large for his features, as if someone had given his nose a good yank and pulled his tiny mouth and eyes inward. It was like a platter with an insufficient serving of character upon it. He had child-sized hands that fluttered about like moths as he spoke, and a peculiar vanity about his feet, which, in moments when he thought himself unregarded, he gazed at with undisguised admiration. His voice was a vessel that spilled over with an unguent hypocrisy. Christian virtue? Justice? Prudence? He no more believed what he preached than she did. Except when he got onto the subject of Quebec and the French menace. That was his real religion: inciting hatred. He’d incited hers, anyway. So, while her sisters faintly sighed their affirmations, their Amens and So-be-its, she was given to muttering more unseemly expressions—“Good God!” and “Oh shut up, you fat arse”—against which the family who sat in front of the Drinkwaters had to close their ears and stiffen their backs like shields.

  The only voice Avice was going to listen to was her own. Not that this exercise hadn’t gotten more complicated of late, what with marriage and wanting to get to know her husband better, the onus being on her to generate that knowledge. She knew she could do it—why not? She wasn’t so encased in her own person, her own views, that she couldn’t entertain the prospect of his. She would be the very bridge (iron) linking the happy couple, the unifying structure (or steel) upon which their shared soul could shuttle back and forth. Any woman can dress in the guise of a man, but that was not enough for Avice. She wanted to be the mate who had deserted her. She wanted his endearments, his loyalty, his protection. She wanted to be the beneficiary of his masculine intelligence and authority (which she scarcely believed in, but in this case she would give him the benefit of the doubt). And later, when she caught up with him, her real husband, she wanted his hide as well. She wanted to hold up his shorn ears and tail, and shake them triumphantly in the air. You bet.

  Accordingly, when she was he, she tried to see things differently, exactly as he might. Cecile Drinkwater would have been gratified—her attendant voice chuckling away like a spring in her ear—to observe how her brother-in-law recoiled from the sights that met his eye, and the smells that flew up his nose, the moment “he” stepped over the American border. While his fellow honeymooners in Niagara Falls thrilled to the spectacle of tons of water thundering past, misting them to a state of damp, romantic receptivity, he found himself less enthrallingly engulfed. In the spring of 1898, Detroit, Michigan, was home to over nine hundred factories, and to all the social enlightenment that went with the times. The air was yellow with sulphur, thick with dust from streets not yet macadamized, clogged with the traffic of human misery: the halt, the sick, the insane, gaunt beggars, children dressed in rags, girls selling themselves for a meal. He was jostled and shoved, nearly run over by a rattling, clanging streetcar, and swept into a stream of striking workers who were surging down Woodward, bellowing and throwing rocks, a simmering violence barely contained. The women in this country, he noted, were large—and brassy. A herd of them nearly trampled him to death trying to get to a sale of shirtwaists—twenty-five cents each—at a towering store called Mabley’s.

  Most of the time he stumbled around, his new boots sealed with spats of horseshit from all the droppings on the streets, his skin furred with soot, his lungs bursting with “seegar” smoke, his head rattling with Yankee boosterism. Mrs. Smolders’ husband in honesty had to conclude that he had entered some rank, discordant underworld, and screwing his derby tighter onto his head, resolved to get his wife out of this hellhole as fast as their little heels would take them.

  Mrs. Smolders, on the other hand, was having a fantastic time. It’s not that she didn’t take in the noise and dirt and degradation, the sorry human scenery, but she knew that a person could see much the same in the shantytowns of Toronto or Montreal—if they cared to look. She simply responded more directly and fully to the spirit of the place, to the bustling commerce and confidence and American self-delight. The whole city, wealthy and poor quarters alike, crackled with life; everything seemed to be electrified and in motion. Striding briskly down Jefferson, she marvelled at how the fad of wheeling had overtaken this city. Surely every citizen who could get their hands on one owned a bicycle, for they skimmed by in packs—one a tandem built for ten—and were parked and piled everywhere, leaning up four deep against offices, stores, saloons, even churches. She saw Bloomer Girls by the score—all manner of women, as old as forty, wearing those “bifurcated nether garments” that old Bee had fulminated against so fiercely from his pulpit. Not only bicycles, but there were also numerous wheeled and unidentifiable vehicles, some with gasoline-powered motors attached, that flew by at phenomenal speeds. Fifteen miles per hour, or so she was informed by a waiter when she was in Swann’s Chop House on Larned, sampling a stimulating brown beverage called Pemberton’s French Wine Coca and trying the new flaked wheat cereal invented by a Dr. Harvey Kellogg. “Eat what the monkey eats,” Dr. Kellogg apparently advised. And, more ominously, “A housebroken colon is a damaged colon.”

  Invigorated, her appetite for novelty aroused, she climbed the two hundred and ten steps to the top of the city hall’s main tower and, along with the four Amazonian stone maidens stationed there in niches, gazed out over the city, taking in the clean streets, the elegant homes flanked by groves of shade trees, the river surging with traffic, Belle Isle, and the Dominion beyond—distant, cold, stodgy. W
hat she saw below her, though, was a cauldron of a country, hot and bubbling, rich with possibility, throbbing at this very moment with war fever and patriotic ferment. Even that strike her husband had briefly gotten enmeshed in was exciting, and appealing. She would not have ducked and run as he had, turning away the moment the police arrived with their truncheons and revolvers. She would have marched in inviolable solidarity with the workers, demanding her rights, demanding a ten-hour working day—never mind that she had never worked a day in her life, or that the laxity of such a shortened day, as her father insisted with an undeniable rationale, would cripple the economy and destroy moral resolve.

  Thinking of that strike, and of a few other of her forays into the city as Mr. Smolders, she bit her cheek to stop herself from grinning inanely. Truly, it was a joke, what she had gotten away with, and how she had so readily been taken for a male. Slap on a man’s hat, fasten a high collar over your plucked Adam’s apple, some loose clothing to dissemble the want, or largesse, of other telltale bumps … and you’re in, you’ve joined the boys’ club. Given her experience with this, she had to conclude that people didn’t notice much, really, outside of themselves. They saw what they expected to see. But she noticed; she was aware. Alertness was absolutely essential as she moved under-cover and warily through the city. If it weren’t for her, he’d be lying dead on the street. When those officers appeared, revolvers flashing in the sun, she hustled him out of there, slipped him swiftly down an alley, made him desert the strike as precipitously as he had joined it. Surely she wasn’t expected to be her brother’s keeper as well as her husband’s.

  She glared at him now, turned inward on himself, folded primly on the lyre-back chair in their room at the Cadillac. How insubstantial he was! She thought of that sculpture she’d seen at the Museum of Art, a stone man in a pose of thought, not wearing a stitch, and her blood quickened. Her husband simply could not compare. She wondered if she could do without him entirely, then supposed not. Without him she’d never be allowed to do half the things she’d done that day, including the trip out to Bennett Park to watch a baseball game. Reluctantly, goaded by his portable wife, he had paid his fifty cents to climb the scaffolding erected around the outside of the fence, a perfect vantage point from which to hurl insults and rotten vegetables at the team from Chicago, and spew wads of Mayflower “eatin” tobacco on the hats of the fans below. Not that he had joined in any of the fun—oh, it was galling in the extreme.