The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “It’s the dress,” Sylvie said. “I wish I could have gotten something more—” She tugged at it. It was thin polyester, pale green with white tendrils printed on, an elastic waistband that kept twisting and pulling up, and an enormous lace collar. No one at Sweetriver would have been caught dead in it. And Sylvie was so thin, from labor, anxiousness, smoking, that any dress would have looked like a costume on her.

  “More traditional, I guess,” she said. “Jesse looks more bridal than me,” she said sadly. She looked at once too young and too knowing to be a bride. The wind blew her hair across her face and she kept pulling it back so it wouldn’t catch the cigarette and burn. Finally, she took a last long draw and flicked the butt away—it bounced a couple of times, sparking on the cement, and when it landed in a puddle she said:

  “Okay, here we go,” rather grimly and led us in. Butch was to be permitted fifteen minutes for the service, the vows, and a kiss.

  A bailiff motioned us through a metal detector and took us into the prison wing. When the heavy door locked behind us, an instinctive terror swept through me, but Sylvie and Ma laughed happily, leaving me out of the joke, as usual. In the visiting area a justice of the peace, a severe woman with tight gray curls and a palisade of dentures, was already sitting at a table; in a moment, an inner door opened, and then another, and there was Butch in prisoner’s orange, looking down, and moving as if he took every step under protest. Afraid and lonely, he’d begged Sylvie to marry him, but now he felt we’d come to witness his humiliation, to laugh at the sight—tough Butchy brought so low, he was willing to submit to love.

  “Hi, Butch.” Sylvie sounded as shy as if he were still a boy she had a crush on.

  She stood in front of him and touched her toe to his. Both he and the bailiff tensed, so Sylvie clutched the baby tighter and stepped back.

  “Okay, on with it,” she said. “Where do we stand?”

  The justice of the peace opened her book and they turned to face her. The ceremony took all of a minute, during which I thought only of Stet and Tracy.

  Jesse awakened and began to fuss. Sylvie dipped her hand into the dress and lifted her breast out, holding it there for an extra instant, a defiant smile brewing on her face, before she popped the nipple into the baby’s mouth—against a milk-swollen breast, there’s very little anyone can do. If Sylvie was laughing in the face of the law, well, that’s how nature goes.

  “You may kiss the bride,” the justice said, but Butch was reticent.

  “Go ahead, you dope,” Sylvie said with a laugh. “It’s fourteen months till the next one.”

  Once he did finally embrace her, he looked like he might be trying to climb into her body, to hide himself there.

  “Time’s up,” the bailiff said sharply, and Butch retreated into sullenness and the guard returned and ushered him away.

  “Wait,” Sylvie said, but the doors closed, one by one, regardless … “I wanted him to hold Jesse,” she said. “Your son,” she called, but Jesse kept sucking and the doors kept closing and my mother was handing the justice of the peace an envelope, as we filed out into the green corridor again.

  “I’d always hoped one of my daughters would have a June wedding,” said Ma, stopping just short, I thought, of sticking her tongue out at me. “The nicest wedding I’ve ever been to, I think.”

  “Really?” Sylvie asked. I looked over to see the answer.

  “Yes, really,” Ma said, sounding perfectly genuine, and a little shocked that we might question her. “And the most beautiful bride too.”

  Sylvie basked and cradled the baby. “I’m so happy,” she confided.

  A June wedding, a cold, brilliant day with lilacs bursting; the first time I’d smelled fresh cut grass that year.

  “I’m so proud of you, for following your heart,” Ma said.

  “You’re proud of her for flashing her boob in a prison waiting room,” I said.

  “And for following her heart,” Ma insisted. A terrible thought occurred to me: suppose Sylvie was just trying to entertain us, keep our minds off our own troubles by manufacturing such a troublesome life of her own? There was that sense, between us, that the one who died with the best story would win.

  “It’s just fourteen months, and he’ll be home,” she said. “Now he knows he has a wife who believes in him,” she said. “Someone who’ll really go the distance for him. He never had that before.”

  She was a radiant bride, my sister, and she had gone the distance—all the way to the commissioner’s office, to petition for this wedding—for someone, something she believed in: Butch Savione.

  “What are you going to do now,” I asked Sylvie. “For a job?” She gave several possibilities, the best of which seemed to be taking over for Butch at the Nubestos plant.

  “Do you still think you’d like to be a midwife?” I asked.

  “Oh, gosh,” she said, with a little laugh like a cough, “you’ve got to have college for that.” She was living among people who never dreamed of going to college, and she’d forgotten such a thing was possible. But she’d gone straight to the commissioner’s office; that hadn’t daunted her.

  “It’s strange,” she said then, “to be having my wedding without … without everyone around.” She didn’t mean Butch, of course, but Pop and Dolly. In all those dreams of love and weddings, she’d seen Pop walking her through the garden, Dolly and me, our arms full of daisies, Ma streaming with happy tears—the groom had been immaterial. In fact, when you thought about it, prison was just the place for Butch—there he could do nothing to disturb our notions. And disturbed though our notions were, we continued in them, like citizens of a small and embattled country who can no longer remember how their customs developed or what purpose they serve, but still have only those customs to rely on.

  We squeezed into Butchie’s little pickup, and after an hour on the gas line—it was an odd-numbered day—we were back at Sylvie’s, where white crepe paper was looped wildly over the trailer awning, and around the fence where she kept the donkey.

  “Sylvie!” I said. “This is some garden!” Just planted of course, but it took up the whole lot around the trailer, all fresh, dark, deeply spaded earth, with whorls of pale new lettuce and snow peas putting their fine tendrils out to each other. At the back, a little clump of primroses marked Springtime’s grave.

  “You like it?” she asked. “I worked my butt off digging it, I will say. And all those tomatoes had to be cuffed against cutworms. The whole back half is corn, though; I’m going to have a stand.”

  “Sylvie,” I said. “It’s a…”

  “Farm,” she finished for me, pursing her lips in a dry, laughing submission to fate. “Yeah, it’s a farm.” The ball field was just mowed, and the green smell in the cold air, the new wet maple leaves shaking out above, inspired me … just the way my parents had meant me to be inspired, when they moved to the country all those years ago.

  “It worked, Ma,” I said, and though she couldn’t have known what I meant, really, she gave me a quick, prideful glance.

  “I told you it would,” she said. “I got a job, by the way.”

  “No kidding!” I said.

  “Well, it’s thanks to you,” she said. “Without the letter you wrote, they’d never have hired me.”

  Why this compliment settled with the weight of an anvil I can’t exactly say. “You mean, sympathy for lost boys is an ideal quality in a car salesman?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m sure the red suit helped,” she said. She was going to work selling Mercedes. “Do you know what the commission is, on a Mercedes?” she asked. I shook my head. I wondered how often a Mercedes got sold in rural Connecticut. “Diesel, that’s the future,” she said.

  Inside, Sylvie popped Jesse into his high chair, and bounced a ping-pong ball (red, white, and blue, our biggest seller) on the tray to fascinate him. There was a sheet cake, a baked ham, a pitcher full of lilacs, and five bottles of champagne.

  “To marriage!” Ma said, and we drank. I w
ondered if she remembered at all how she’d felt the day she was married, how fragile and full of hope.

  “To family,” said Sylvie, with dreamy pleasure, gazing into Jesse’s eyes as if he were a crystal ball. The phone rang and she went into the kitchen to pick it up.

  “To the criminal justice system,” I said, and Ma laughed. Laughter was her saving strength.

  “A husband in prison is worth two in the bush,” she said. She wiped the smile right off though when Sylvie came back to say it was Larry on the phone. “You can tell him I’m not here,” she said, with a grand hauteur.

  “Ma,” Sylvie said.

  “All right,” Ma said, “don’t tell him anything. I’ll just hang it up.” As she strode over to it, Sylvie put a hand out.

  “Don’t, Ma, he didn’t mean any harm.” And Ma looked for a second as if she’d been struck.

  “I’m not going to let him,” she said. “No, my father can reject me and your father can reject me and Dolly can reject me, but that is enough and I’m not going to take it from him too.”

  “Ma,” Sylvie lowered her voice and clamped her hand over the receiver. “Ma, he stood you up, that’s all. He didn’t abandon you.”

  “There comes a time,” my mother said magnificently.

  Sylvie turned abruptly away from her. “She can’t talk now, Larry,” she said. “She’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” Then she thanked him—he must have congratulated her on the wedding, and then she said, yes, she’d love it if he dropped by the trailer sometime, it could get really lonely when you were home all alone with a baby. She was saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you,” and Ma’s face receded into darkness as if she had glimpsed something over Sylvie’s shoulder that had plunged her back into the world of fear and headache, the world she’d once thought my father would free her from, and then hoped he’d take with him when he left.

  That world, where we all used to live with her—in which the man you loved so tenderly might secretly be a torturer—descended from a long line, a nation, even, of torturers, so your children may have torturer’s genes. Ma’s intuition told her there was a danger out there, that there was a pernicious thread to be pulled out of even the simplest, happy scene. But just as the worst of this registered on her face, a flashbulb went off.

  “Gotcha!” Teddy said, and turned the camera on each of us in turn. “Like paparazzi!” he crowed. “Get together there, who knows when you’ll all be together again?” he asked. “Maybe a funeral. Maybe Pop’s funeral.”

  Ma laughed enormously. “Next week, let’s hope,” she said. And she’d loved my father once, so intensely, it seemed love was a magic power—a power to heal him, make him the whole strong man of her dreams.

  “Back to Nubestos tomorrow,” Sylvie said. “God, it’s dusty work. But you can’t argue with all that money, under the table.”

  “You’ll get hurt,” I said, and I saw a quick smile flick over her face at my innocence—yes, indeed, how protected I had been, that I saw some chance that she might not get hurt.

  “That’s what they say, the experts,” she said, with an ironic little laugh, a new laugh for her. What could we know or guess of the world she lived in? But it was her own world, and real.

  “Maybe you could go to school at night,” I tried. Where was she ever going to learn about the gun hanging over the mantelpiece and how it goes off in the end?

  “Maybe,” she said, without interest. “You know,” she said then, “things are great with me, Beatrice. Jesse’s so healthy and strong. I love my little trailer. I love my husband, and I’ll finish this Nubestos thing and then get another job—it’s not a problem. Fourteen months, that’ll go by in no time, and then we’ll be together, we’ll go from there.”

  Leave me alone, she was saying. She was proud of her abilities—who’d have guessed, a year ago, that she could do so many things: mother a child, fix the plumbing, grow her garden, and go straight to the commissioner to get permission for the wedding she’d used to insist she’d never have? This was her life, and if its possibilities were shrunken, her future smaller—small as a trailer or a linen closet—there was nothing I could do. I felt that I was waving to her from a ship—that we’d grow more and more distant now until we couldn’t see each other at all, until no one would guess anymore that we were sisters.

  The champagne popped, the camera flashed, there were cries of excitement, mock fear, more hugging, and Ma waltzed little Jesse around the room. His bright eyes took in everything as they whirled; he was the centrifugal force around which something of our family might hold firm. Even in the worst of Ma’s madness, Sylvie and I had known her love, and out of it, we’d begun to weave our own lives. I ought, in return, to “save” her, but I couldn’t, though I might possibly keep my own balance if I stopped trying to carry them all on my great, manly shoulders.

  And this thought, like most of my thoughts, led me back to Stetson. When you love someone, you think of them so intently, you might as well be praying. Dolly’s fury kept Ma always in her mind, her infirmity would make sure Pop was never completely abandoned. Stetson—or Josip, the real part of Stetson—might be thinking of me now.

  Which made me feel it was urgent, essential, that I speak to him right away. I had to tell him I loved him, in case he didn’t know, in case he was lonely, uncertain, or sad. All the books I’d read in my life were boiling together into a great speech in which I’d tell him that it would be a crime against our own lives not to take the chance on each other, that I wouldn’t give him up until I’d had a full tour of his life and knew what he murmured in his sleep and had gotten deeper under his skin than any needle could ever go. I thought how he’d looked in my eyes, how he stood with his arms just wide enough for me to walk into them … and how it seemed that when I did, I’d be walking back into the old house on that day we’d picked blackberries, with the jam bubbling in the pot and Ma blowing a wisp of hair out of her face, leaning back and laughing, as if every day from then on would be just that way.

  I shut my eyes and made myself think of Lee and how I’d harmed her, trying to live out some notion of love from my dreams. Not again—at least not yet. The future was in my pocket, in the form of a key to the Oxford Branch Library. Like Sylvie’s backyard farm, my work might give body to my parents’ dream—so they’d have left a real legacy after all.

  And that’s it, that’s all there ever is—the strands of the people you love, the way they weave through you. I thought of Stetson’s spontaneous pirouette, Philippa’s: “Beatrice, it’s a beginning.” This was my substance, my wealth. And whatever I’d learn tomorrow; I had that too.

  Acknowledgments

  Frances Coady has been a brilliant reader, kind friend, and staunch ally. Without her uncanny insight, this book would not be.

  Jennifer Carlson’s generosity of time, interest, and enthusiasm have been wonderful things for me. I’d like to thank Reagan Arthur for her excellent taste, among other great qualities. Blessings on my friends who are ceaselessly supportive, especially Margaret Carroll and Tom Lindsay who read draft after draft; and on my husband Roger and daughter Marisa, who have been so patient and forbearing. For the unfailing grace and love of my own parents, sisters, and brothers, I am very, very grateful. And particularly I’d like to thank my mother for teaching me when to laugh: always.

  Also by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Darling?

  The Rose Thieves

  THE BRIDE OF CATASTROPHE. Copyright © 2003 by Heidi Jon Schmidt. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  First Edition: October 2003

  eISBN 9781466886100

  First eBook edition: October 2014