All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  “Don’t you think the gloves are a bit much?” I’d asked my mother after our first meeting with Ruth Ann.

  “Peh,” she said. “That girl is a type.”

  My mother always called women girls, no matter how old.

  “What type?”

  “They never marry. They compensate by doing other people’s weddings. Occupational hazard, I guess. Destined to be one in the army of women.”

  “A lieutenant in the army of women,” I added. “Poor Ruth Ann. Ruth Ann Middleton, lieutenant first class.”

  “It’s sad, dearie,” she’d say. “Don’t make fun.”

  It was late June, still a slight chill in the air the morning Beatrice came to “do something” about my dress. A few people walked the beach in sweaters, long pants rolled up their calves, some with dogs trotting alongside.

  When she arrived, Beatrice thumped a bolt of lace up the staircase and down the long carpeted hallway to my mother’s bedroom. The bedroom was large, with French doors that gave out to a deck with a view to the sea. As the day warmed, a soft wind blew through the open French doors.

  Beatrice brought her bolt of lace into the middle of the room and stood beside it, holding it firm so as not to let it teeter and fall. Then she laid the bolt on the rug and unraveled a simple inch, then a yard; finally an intricate pattern emerged, the delicate fabric lopping across the pale pink carpet.

  Mostly, looking at the lace that was to cinch my wedding dress, I thought of old aunts with secrets, and spiderwebs, and the passing of time. It smelled softly of tea and roses. I tried to feel respectful of all these meanings, and believe I could wear this delicate lace and pull it off. I had heard tales of girls, girls more sedate than I, losing arms off antique wedding dresses when they started to drink and dance. I was relieved to know there were girls who had dresses that fell apart at their wedding receptions, and yet in their gay dishevelment they went right on.

  “This is so feminine,” Beatrice said as she looked at the lace, now unfurled along my mother’s carpet. To my mother she added, “There is something so feminine about your daughter’s taste.” She gently shook her head, a quiet gesture of appreciation.

  On her head Beatrice wore a purple straw fedora that matched her purple-and-yellow sundress. She wore bright fuchsia lipstick and seemed impatient with my muted tones. “Let’s try more color,” she suggested quietly, unraveling pink and orange satin sashes she kept neatly coiled at the bottom of her canvas tote.

  “All she ever wears is black,” my mother agreed. She sat on her bed pulling on the tassel of one of her silk throw pillows. It was an embroidered scene, a prince and princess wearing silver crowns, dismounting from a carriage. Each of her pillows, which ran along the headboard of her bed, depicted a different fairy tale. In another the prince was kissing a sleeping princess while in the background a naked cherub played a lute.

  My mother was tall, taller than I; her face had not softened with age but grown more angular, more defined. Her skin was delicate, aged over time like a sheet washed and dried too many times in the sun. Though now slightly stooped, she still strode with the assurance of someone who held herself strong against the world, someone who was used to getting her own way.

  At Children at Play, her bedroom was her command central. The bed in the room was enormous, two queen beds pushed together, though for years no one had slept in it but her. By her side of the bed, a pink princess phone hung on the wall within easy reach for late-night chats with her sister in Florida or one of her children. Next door, my father slept in his study, adjacent to the bedroom. It was decorated by my mother in a forest green plaid, the shelves and tables filled with his well-thumbed language books, the leather bindings cracked at the spines. My father would spend entire mornings with his books, a can of Budweiser by his side, his glasses in a slow slide down his nose.

  My mother’s closets were organized by category. One had only tennis dresses, another her entire collection of bright Lilly Pulitzer shifts. Long A-line muumuus that she wore for dinners at home were hung in a closet with slatted sliding doors for proper ventilation. Another closet was only shoes, mounted vertically on shelves so that the shoes—flat sandals in shades to match the Lillys, a few grass-stained Tretorn tennis sneakers, satin slingbacks, and white summer pumps—appeared to be climbing the wall. Another closet was arranged in color-coded stacks of sweaters and sharkskin slacks for colder summer days. The doorknob of the tennis dress closet was employed to hang a necklace made up of numerous strands of tiny freshwater pearls, hung there to keep the strands from getting into the frenzied tangle that would be inevitable if left to their own devices. When she wore it, as she did often in the summer, the eruption of pearls hung in tiers of zany frivolity from her neck and looked, my sisters and I would tell her, as if an oyster had had multiple orgasms on her chest.

  “I’m wearing blue to the wedding,” my mother told Beatrice as she pulled on the tassel.

  Beatrice nodded. “That’s a lovely color for the mother of the bride,” she purred encouragingly.

  “Not really a robin’s egg,” my mother went on, “but darker, an almost, I don’t know, a no-color blue.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. I was standing at the mirror, a sash of cantaloupe silk looped around my waist over my jeans. I looked to the dressmaker. “Beatrice, does that make any sense to you? ‘No-color blue’?”

  “Oh,” she replied. She spoke softly. “Every color is a color. Blue is one of our very true colors. We depend on blue.” She looked at the silk tassel my mother was worrying with her hand. “That, for example, is a periwinkle. From the periwinkle family. A periwinkle is also a very true blue.”

  My mother did not like to be corrected, particularly by someone she was paying to be agreeable. “No-color blue,” she repeated. “It’s the color of my dress for the wedding.” She flitted her hand. “A color worn only by me.” She looked at the clock at her bedside.

  “Let’s get this done with,” she said, “Betty.”

  Though the dressmaker’s name was not Betty but Beatrice, my mother had persisted in calling her Betty since the day I found my wedding dress at her shop in SoHo in the late spring.

  “Peh, come on,” she had said to me that day as I rode uptown with her in a cab. “She’s an out-and-out Betty, there’s nothing even remotely Beatrice about that girl. She’s just trying to be pretentious.” She looked down at her manicure as she spoke. “She’s a very common girl, if the truth be known.”

  We drove another ten blocks or so, the cab threading through the late-morning traffic. “And, I might add, I am not an ‘automatic Pat.’”

  “A who?”

  “You heard her, don’t act like you didn’t. As soon as she saw my name on the checkbook, she took it upon herself to call me Pat.”

  I had heard her, and my heart had frozen when Beatrice called her Pat. There were certain things guaranteed to irk my mother, things other people would never imagine gave offense, like taking a seat on what she considered her side of our living room couch, or saying “folks” when you meant “people” or “drapes” when you meant “curtains” or “hose” when you meant “stockings” or “gift” when you meant “present.” The “automatic Pat” offense was the worst of them. Beatrice now was sunk, and try as I might, I would never be able to redeem her in my mother’s opinion.

  “Ma, to be fair, it is your name.”

  “Not automatically it’s not. I’m Mrs. McCulloch until such time as I say otherwise. As, I can assure you, I will not in the case of this girl Betty who owns a thrift store in the bowels of SoHo.”

  She watched out the window, hands in her lap, one gesturing ever so slightly from time to time. It was a vague twitch her thumb and forefinger made, rising up in sudden small darts from her lap. This was evidence that she was carrying on a conversation in her head, often in French. Clearly she had a few more words for an imaginary Beatrice that required a change to a more imperious language. My mother’s spoken French was not
entirely fluent, but when she constructed imaginary conversations in French in her head, her command of the language was perfect and her repertoire full of chilling mots justes.

  After a time, she took my hand. “Listen to me,” she said. “Listen to your old ma. We’re going to get through this damn thing with grace and style, baby girl, even if it kills us.”

  Apparently I owe my entire existence to a ladies’ lunch that took place late in 1956. My mother was reluctant to have children. So the story went, at least. She was thirty-seven when she had me, a relatively unusual age to be having a first child in the late 1950s. According to legend (a.k.a. my mother’s college friend Nancy), my entire conception, not the act, of course, but the promulgation of the act, was decided over lunch on the Upper East Side of Manhattan sometime late in 1956. My father had proposed to her the day earlier, in a taxicab going over the Triborough Bridge, and in a panic my mother convened her two best friends, Nancy and Mu. I don’t know what they ate, but I do know they were at Gino’s, which was in its day an institution: a classic Italian spot on the Upper East Side that drew a regular crowd from its opening in 1945 until its ultimate closing in 2010. The décor never changed; zebras (allegedly 108 of them) leapt along on a tomato-red background on the signature wallpaper that ran from the kitchen in the back all the way to the front door. The menu never changed from classic Italian red-sauce fare, and the clientele ranged from a handful of local celebrities to tourists hoping to spot them, and a steady inflow of the East Side ladies who lunched (it was after all just up the block from Bloomingdale’s). Hence the three-way huddle in 1956.

  At thirty-seven my mother had black hair that she wore in bangs across her forehead and in an even row of flip curls along her jawline. She was working in the publicity department at Dior, and shared an apartment with Mu in the East 50s. They were two bachelorettes in careers in Midtown at a time where women in their late thirties were usually long settled. The fact that she was probably, if you do the math, which I did as soon as I knew how many months it took to have a baby, already pregnant with me notwithstanding, she was apparently in need of counsel. Marrying an older man who did not work concerned her, is how the story went, and her two lifelong friends, Nancy and Mu, talked her into it.

  A word about these women at this ladies’ lunch. They had met at Sweet Briar College in the ’40s and liked to refer to themselves, with a nod to Gilbert and Sullivan, as “the three little maids from school.” Nancy, who was short and sassy, was a journalist at Life magazine. She was married to a famous journalist of the day, though he would be only the first of five husbands. Mu—her real name was Muriel, but she couldn’t stand it and preferred this moniker suggestive of a cow—had long, luxurious brown hair she wrapped in a twist on her head. At the time of the ladies’ lunch, Mu had met and later married a lawyer she originally came to know because my mother had so many parking tickets, she had hired him to get her off the hook. When he did, she brought him back to the apartment she and Mu shared for a celebratory drink. He took one look at Mu, with her mane of hair and hourglass curves, and fell instantly in love. Nancy and Mu regularly came with their husbands to visit us at the house by the sea, and the three women would do exercise classes together on the lawn, poking their pedicured pink toes into the air for a few minutes to tone their legs, then breaking for a cigarette. Nancy wore a bikini and her reading glasses all day long until it was time to dress for dinner, when they all three put on brightly colored muumuus. In the evenings, they played hands of bridge with the husbands, or bent over one of the thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles on a yellow table by the piano.

  Back in 1956, at a November conference at Gino’s, the advice from Nancy and Mu would translate in today’s argot roughly as “Go for it, girl. Have the baby, marry the man, have more babies—it’s now or never, if you catch our drift.”

  So I was born, and my two sisters followed in relatively quick succession. As creation myths go, we all three owe our lives to a ladies’ lunch in 1956 at Gino’s.

  III

  Camden, Maine, August 11, 1983

  In Camden, Maine, two days before the wedding, my future mother-in-law, Helen Jackson, sat on her bed in the early morning, surrounded by piles of clothes. Her dress for the wedding was laid out on the bed. It was silk, and it was one she hoped would coordinate with the dress my mother was wearing. All my mother had said about her own dress was “no-color blue.” Whatever that meant. Helen thought this might be a dodge to confuse her. “No color” was not a color. She was a home economics major from Skidmore, class of 1953, and there was not a color called “no color.” She would bet her diploma on it.

  They would never be friends, these mothers, but Helen was determined to be cooperative. The dress she had chosen was the color of a tropical sea, and from her background, she knew the color of her own dress had a name. Sea foam. It had a high collar and a scarf that looped around the neck and tied in a loose cravat under her chin. The dress offset her light gray hair. “I think I could have fun in it,” she’d told me over the phone. She’d laughed and raised her voice to a lilt: “Comfort and ease, that’s all I asked for in a dress, honey. That’s how to have real fun.”

  Camden, a harbor town on the Maine coast eighty-five miles north of Portland, was where my fiancé, Dean, grew up. The main street through town hugged the harbor, with small shops on either side punctuated by Cappy’s Chowder House just off the town landing. The view from the window booth at Cappy’s looked out on the town dock, where at day’s end lobstermen in rubber overalls docked to unload their bounty from traps all over Penobscot Bay. Black lobsters squirmed in bundles of fishing net on the dock at sundown.

  Dean’s family lived in a white saltbox house just a quarter mile up Route 1 from the center of town. On the third floor, up a narrow flight of stairs, the view from a tiny triangular window in the attic gave out onto Camden Harbor. On a clear day, the boats anchored to the town slips were visible, their masts switching rhythmically in the current.

  Helen’s husband, Raymond, my future father-in-law, had packed for the wedding easily, promptly. He was like that; he packed very little, and he packed efficiently, folding everything into the smallest possible duffle. A Navy man, Raymond had spent his early adult life on the sea, and from that experience he had developed an appreciation for efficiency, for punctuality, and a fondness for PET milk.

  Raymond and Helen were leading a caravan of cars, neighbors they’d invited to the wedding from Camden, down Route 1 to I-95 to New London. Helen and Raymond and their “hard core,” as they called them, their closest friends in Camden, Don and Nelly, Rick and Jan. There they’d meet up at the ferry dock with Helen’s brother, Phil, and his wife, Anita, who were bringing Helen’s mother, called Nonnie, from Westerly, Rhode Island. They’d ride across the Long Island Sound together, the “hard core” drinking beers and eating hot dogs on the deck while the cars sloshed in the hold below. The directions to the house sounded simple enough: follow Route 114 all the way from the dock in Orient Point across Shelter Island and into East Hampton, take a right as the road ends, continue around the slight bend on Ocean Avenue, turn right onto Lily Pond Lane. Raymond had it all clear in his mind and timed, but they could not miss their ferry or there would be hell to pay. They’d not easily get four cars onto another one in the middle of August, the height of tourist season, and who could say they wouldn’t have to pay extra for rescheduled reservations.

  As long as things stayed on schedule, Raymond believed, life proceeded as planned with no curveballs. Raymond was not big on curveballs.

  Sitting on her bed, trying to pack for the wedding, Helen warded off panic. She called me on the phone.

  “I want to be on board for all this, honey,” she told me. “Meanwhile Raymond Jackson is downstairs having a fit that I’m not ready.”

  I pictured her, phone wire dangling, seated on the patchwork bedspread of their four-poster bed with her clothes all around her, Raymond pacing in the front hall below.

  “‘No co
lor,’” she said, lowering her voice a register, as if with each breath losing confidence. “I mean, let’s just start right there. Oh, brother.”

  “Mother!” Raymond called up the stairs. Ever since they’d first had children, Raymond called his wife Mother and not by her name. She in turn often called him Daddy. “Mother!” Raymond called. “There’s a ferry to catch. Damn it.”

  “O-kay,” she shouted, and then to me she sighed, “Let the show begin.”

  The first time I visited Camden, I got a new name. “This is the city girl,” Helen would say, introducing me around to the butcher, the greengrocer, the postal clerk, her hand resting lightly on my back.

  “Can I ask a city girl to pick beans?” I overheard her say one day on the phone. She was at the kitchen table with her back to me as she said this, sliced apples for pie in a bowl at her side. The afternoon sun was in a golden slant across the linoleum floor, and the room smelled clean and fresh from the fruit.

  As I walked in, she turned and waved, but there was never any more talk about the beans. Apparently, she decided way back then I was not the bean-picking type.

  “‘City girl,’ please,” my mother commented after my first visit to Camden. She called in from Paris, where my parents had rented a flat on the Place du Marché Saint-Honoré, a small cul-de-sac where the smell of fresh bread floated up from the boulangerie down the block in the mornings, and where, because it was a weekend, I could hear the distant cries of the footballeurs in the background practicing on the roof of the parking garage across the street. “Merde,” they were crying, and “Pas ma faute!”