Captain Saturday

by Robert Inman

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” the station manager bellowed into the telephone after the newscast was over.

  “Your new weatherman,” Will said. “I work cheap, and as you saw on the air, I can handle it.”

  “Do you own a suit?”

  “One.”

  “Well, get another one. Dark blue, single-breasted. Five blue shirts, five ties. Charge ’em to the station. Two hundred bucks max. And get a hair cut that doesn’t look like your wife did it.”

  “I don’t have a wife,” Will said.

  “Try not to,” the station manager said gruffly, and hung up.

  *****

  He didn’t see her at first. She was standing in the shadows next to the stairway as he started up toward his second-floor apartment.

  “Will,” she said softly.

  He stopped, hand on the railling, heart in his throat. She moved from the shadows and touched his hand. For a moment, that was all. He understood in a flash of revelation that this, as much as the still form of Grady Lee Potts on the studio floor just an hour ago, was the rest of his life. She waited. She waited for him. She had come for him, despite everything, and she was waiting. He hadn’t had anyone wait on him like this since he was thirteen years old. He turned his hand over so that their palms were together and gripped hers. And then he took her in his arms and things began to break loose inside him and the humiliation and the pain and the anger went away. Well, most of it.

  *****

  They drove to Nag’s Head on Sunday afternoon. Her parents were there, midway in a two-week stay at their cottage. They found Sidney and Consuela on the beach, perched in sand chairs under an umbrella. Consuela was absorbed in a novel. Sidney was reading a Wall Street Journal, the corners of which fluttered in the sea breeze. A stack of Journals was beside him in the sand. He was the first to look up, and then he said something quietly to Consuela and she very, very slowly closed the book with her finger keeping her place and turned to Will and Clarice as they reached the umbrellas. They stopped a couple of yards away and stood there, holding hands. Consuela looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to be stricken or to do her gay, lighthearted, this-is-of-no-consequence routine.

  Clarice didn’t give her time to decide. “Well, what’s it going to be?”

  Sidney cut a quick glance at Consuela, who didn’t return it. Will felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. This thing, this quite obvious struggle of wills, was between the two women, and he and Sidney were just bystanders. My God, she was magnificent. For all her air of vulnerability, the smooth curve and soft sheen and seeming pliability of her, she had incredible backbone, or at least she did here and now. He understood completely what was at stake. She was fighting for him, she was defying, not just her parents, but all of Old Greensboro. And Consuela Palmer knew it.

  “A good old fashioned Greensboro wedding?” Clarice asked. “At least six bridesmaids and a five-tiered cake? Or,” a long pause, “shall we elope?”

  Consuela touched her chin delicately with the finger that had been marking her place in the book. It fell to the sand. “Clarice, can’t we discuss this later?”

  “No, mother,” Clarice said, “we can’t. If a wedding is just too much for you, Will and I can drive to South Carolina tonight and get married. And then,” she smiled, “you can have a small reception for us later at the club. A chance for a few of your friends to meet my new husband.” She tightened her grip on Will’s hand. He felt a great rush of love for her.

  And then she said, “Will and I are sleeping together. My idea, not his.”

  Sidney made a small move, hands tightening on the armrests of his chair, and Will thought that he might suddenly heave himself up and chase Will down the beach, scattering gulls and kicking up divots of hard sand at water’s edge. But he didn’t. The tightening of hands and an almost imperceptible tightening of jaw, that was all. Then his hands relaxed. Consuela gave a tiny shudder. They had both taken the blow full-on and weathered it. It occurred to Will that it was the supreme test of all that it meant to be a Greensboro Palmer. They passed magnificently.

  “Are you…” Consuela made a little fluttering motion with her hand.

  “No,” Clarice and Will answered at once.

  “Well, that’s nice.”

  There was a long silence, undergirded by the splash of surf and the cry of birds. They were, the four of them, alone on the beach.

  Consuela took a breath. “A wedding would be just fine,” she said easily. She turned to Sidney. “Don’t you think?”

  Sidney cleared his throat, picked up one of the unread Journals, put it back down in the sand.

  Clarice looked to Will. His turn. “October?” he said without really knowing why.

  “How about November,” Consuela suggested. “So many people spend October in the mountains. Leaf season, you know.”

  “Or New England,” Sidney added. “Some go to New England.”

  “November,” Will nodded. “That sounds like a good month. When everybody’s back from the mountains and New England.”

  Sidney and Consuela rose now, together, as if cued by some off-stage manager. Sidney stuck out his hand and Will took it. Sidney’s grip was quick but firm. So was Consuela’s hug. Will tried to summon a sense of triumph. Instead, he just felt a flood of relief.

  *****

  The wedding was every bit an Old Greensboro production – stylish, graceful and Presbyterian without a hint of the kind of ostentation you would have expected had the Palmers been “new money.” Consuela engineered every aspect and Clarice gave her mother free rein – penance, perhaps. The crowd was mostly from Greensboro. Will was joined by a few of his Chapel Hill classmates. And Min and Wingfoot.

  Will was a little nervous about Min, but she arrived in Greensboro in good spirits, and after she had adroitly dropped a few tidbits of Cape Fear Baggett family history, she and Consuela got on well. Consuela helped with arrangements for the after-rehearsal party at the country club, which Min was to host as Will’s next-of-kin. Min pronounced Clarice pretty but a bit thin. Clarice just smiled.

  Min played the gracious hostess at the after-rehearsal affair. She rose to represent the Baggett family and welcome the guests, which she did quite pleasantly. But then she launched into a lengthy account of her one previous visit to Greensboro when she was eight years old. Her parents had brought her and Wingfoot to the city on a business trip. It was summer, and frightfully hot. They stayed in a rather fancy downtown hotel where children were sternly admonished by hotel staff not to run in the halls. “In fact,” she said, “they made it quite clear they didn’t like children at all. I felt like some sort of foreigner just off the boat.” At dinner in the hotel dining room, she had ordered seafood newberg and had been stricken during the night with food poisoning. A doctor was summoned. The hotel management apologized profusely, paid for the doctor, and offered an extra night of lodging at no cost. The Baggetts refused and decamped back to Brunswick County the next day with Min, still weak and disoriented, swathed in blankets in the back seat of the car.

  Min recounted the entire business with what seemed light-hearted good cheer. But Will knew better. He knew Min, who obviously had taken stock of the Greensboro crowd -- Palmers and all -- and found them not quite as bona fide as they might think they were. Not, in short, as bona fide as Baggetts. When Min finished and sat down, Clarice leaned over to Will and whispered, “I wonder what Daddy’s going to say to top that?”

  Daddy Palmer had, to his credit, been exceedingly gracious. “Miz Baggett,” he said with a smile, “I hope your future visits to Greensboro are more like this one than the first.” The pleasantly blank look on Min’s face said she didn’t expect to be making any future visits to Greensboro.

  Morris deLesseps was his best man. He would have asked Wingfoot, but he didn’t know quite how to locate him, and he didn’t care to broach that subject with Min. So he enlisted Morris and invited several other Chapel Hill classmates to be groomsmen. Morris and the res
t of the Chapel Hill bunch, to a man, got stinking drunk at the after-rehearsal party and afterward when they took Will out for a bachelor evening. He slipped away early. Morris and the rest turned up for the wedding the next afternoon pale but vertical and, observing the old-line Greensboro gentry who filled the church, were on their best behavior except for the giant pink foam rubber penis Morris stashed in the back seat of the honeymoon car.

  To his surprise, Wingfoot showed up. When Will and Morris entered the First Presbyterian sanctuary from a side door, there sat Wingfoot on a next-to-front pew next to Min. He was neatly dressed in a blue suit and burgundy tie, shaven and shorn. Will thought he looked quite handsome, and apparently so did a couple of unattached young ladies who gravitated toward him at the reception afterward.

  Will finally cornered him in a hallway of the country club. “Thanks,” he said. “For coming.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, Wingfoot, I don’t rightly know how you feel about things these days. We haven’t had a conversation worthy of the name in several years. How are you?”

  “I’m making it,” Wingfoot said. “In fact, I’ve moved back home.”

  “With Min? She didn’t mention it.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Are you two getting along?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Is Min all right? Last time I was over there she seemed…well, a little odd.”

  “As in…”

  “I don’t know. Distant. Moody.”

  “Well, that’s Min. I wouldn’t worry about it. Carry on with your life, Wilbur. That’s a helluva good looking woman you’ve got there. Can you handle her?”

  Will smiled. “I’m working on it.” He hesitated. “Wingfoot, I should have been better about…”

  “No you shouldn’t,” Wingfoot interrupted. “Look, you went off to school and made your own way, Wilbur. Hell, I understand you aren’t even Wilbur any more. Will, is that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Everybody has to hitch up his own britches and tote his own load in this world…Will. You’ve done that so far. Keeping doing it.”

  The Palmers mater and pater floated through the entire business on a cloud of elegant, reserved ease. Was it breeding or Valium? Will caught a final glimpse of them, standing at the top of the front steps of the country club, waving demurely as he and Clarice drove away in her car, a new Buick that had been a graduation gift from Sidney and Consuela. It would hardly have done to use Will’s ancient Plymouth, long in the tooth when he bought it four years earlier, now rust-riven and mechanically uncertain. It would have scandalized the Greensboro Country Club crowd. So he agreed to use Clarice’s car for the honeymoon, but declined Sidney’s offer of a trip to Bermuda. Instead, they would spend a week at the Palmers’ cottage at Nags Head. That much, he could afford himself. A new husband, he told Sidney, had to learn to pay his own way. He even offered to rent the cottage, but Sidney wouldn’t hear of it.

  The Palmers were the subject of their first serious argument, and it came on the second day of the honeymoon. Clarice was attempting hamburgers in the cottage kitchen. Will was in the den, leafing through an old issue of Southern Living. “Shit!” he heard from the kitchen. He flew to her rescue.

  She was at the stove, wearing nothing but an apron. He was wearing nothing at all and the sight of her incredible behind peeking out from the open rear of the apron brought him instantly to attention, even though they had made vigorous love only an hour earlier. He crossed the kitchen and cupped her globes with his hands.

  “Don’t do that!” she barked.

  He removed his hands. “What’s wrong, love?” Then he peeked over her shoulder and saw what was wrong. She had the grease far too hot and it was splattering as the hamburger patties sizzled in the frying pan, already quite overcooked and curling at the edges. “Grease on your tit?” he inquired, and instantly regretted it as she turned, full of fury, brandishing a spatula. He backed away a couple of steps.

  “We could have been in Bermuda!” she cried.

  His erection melted. “No,” he said evenly, “we couldn’t have been in Bermuda. We don’t have enough money to go to Bermuda.”

  “Just because you’ve got my parents stuck in your craw!”

  “Do we have to talk about this right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you turn off the stove first? I don’t want you getting grease splatters on that incredible derrier of yours. It would break my heart.”

  She turned back to the stove with a jerk, grabbed a pot holder, picked up the frying pan, marched to the back door, opened it, flung frying pan and contents into the yard, and turned back to him. He had never seen her truly angry before. It was a Clarice he didn’t know. “Now,” she said firmly.

  He drew a deep breath. “All right. Clarice, I have been an independent sonofabitch for a long time. I intend to remain that way. I will take care of you, provide for you, cherish you, love you until I draw my last breath. I will do it on my own. So help me God.”

  “You don’t like my parents,” she accused.

  “Not yet. But I’m trying. I will continue to try. I will come to like your parents in good time.”

  “But you don’t like them now.”

  “What do you expect, Clarice? They take me to lunch at the Greensboro Country Club, where it’s revealed that my father was a notorious golf hustler who relieved some of their friends of a considerable amount of money, and the look of horror on their faces would make you think I’d pissed on the tablecloth.”

  “You don’t have to be crass about it.”

  “And then they told you you couldn’t marry me because I was…well, what, tainted?”

  “You could have told me about your…history,” she said.

  “I don’t have a history, Clarice. Not in the way you and your family think of a history. I’ve invented myself.”

  “Your family has all sorts of history. Even if they are oddball.”

  “That has nothing to do with me.”

  “You think they’re snobs, don’t you.”

  “I think they have an incredible daughter with whom I’m deeply and passionately in love,” he said softly.

  He made a move toward her, but she turned away and bolted from the room. He heard her steps thundering up the stairs, and a minute or so later, back down again. The screen door at the front of the house slammed. Then there was silence.

  He gave her a few minutes, then followed her to the beach. She was huddled on the sand, arms tightly around her drawn-up legs, chin resting on her knees, staring out at the Atlantic. She was wearing shorts and a halter top now. He had pulled on a pair of bermudas. He eased himself down onto the sand beside her and they sat there for a long time. Finally he said, “Clarice, I love you.”

  “I chose you,” she said quietly. “I fought for you.”

  “I know you did. And that means you love me too.”

  “They’ve accepted you because I chose you. They want what makes me happy. Maybe they didn’t like the idea at first, but they’ve gotten over it. And now you’ve got to get over resenting them.”

  “I will. Give it some time. That’s all it needs, Clarice. Some time.”

  He reached for her hand. She gave it to him. He kissed her. They lay back on the sand entwined. Finally he said, “Come back to the house and put on that apron again.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Clarice got a job teaching first grade at the New Bern elementary school, but by the middle of their second year of marriage she was pregnant, so she quit teaching and stayed home to have Palmer. Home was a cramped efficiency apartment, and there wasn’t much money for anything extra, but they looked back on it later as a good time, a time of adjusting and settling into the habits of marriage and parenthood. Clarice learned to cook. Will became something of a local celebrity. People recognized him on the street.

  Clarice insisted on having Palmer delivered by the family’s doctor back in Greensboro, but Will sped back to
New Bern with photos which he shared with his audience. Clarice and the baby stayed in Greensboro for three weeks, and by the time they were ready to return to New Bern, Will had moved everything to a two-bedroom apartment.

  They stayed in New Bern for two more years -- first, because Will had promised the station manager not to run off at the first opportunity for a job in a larger market. Then too, he was learning a lot. In a small station you had a chance to do just about everything. He took over the kids’ cartoon show (wearing a cowboy outfit instead of a clown suit), emceed bicycle rodeos and beauty contests, and volunteered to answer the station’s viewer mail. He critiqued his weathercast every day, studying videotape to see what worked and what didn’t, honing his on-air skills. New Bern was an apprenticeship. When the right opening came up somewhere else, he would be ready. All in good time.

  Will also did what he had promised Clarice on the beach at Nag’s Head: he tried to like the Palmers. It was an uphill struggle, a work in progress. The problem wasn’t that they treated him badly. Quite the opposite. They were pleasant, even cheerful when he was around. They were ecstatic about the arrival of the baby, their first grandchild -- well, as ecstatic as the Palmers ever allowed themselves to be. But there was always an air of studied reserve about them. They measured Will because they measured everybody. He could never escape the feeling of being on probation.

  Will came to realize that they were not snobs. To be a snob, you had to consider the existence of people who were unlike yourself. Usually, they didn’t. If forced to, as in Will’s case, they simply pretended that you were enough like them to pass muster. But Will could never quite feel part of them. He was more like a small boy with his face pressed against the plate glass of a toy store, examining merchandise that was beyond not only his means, but also his understanding. The Palmers seemed to know exactly who they were. They were perfectly comfortable in their circumspect, steady, old-line lives. They were at peace with their history and their place. More than at peace, in fact. They thought it was damned splendid.