“You match the shop,” I said.
“Oh? Oh, yes. Well, it’s my shop. How can I help you?” A mask of professional competence replaced her questioning look.
I explained my lost luggage and my need for a dress that afternoon.
“A fiftieth wedding anniversary….” She mused out loud.
“Yes. One for an aunt and an uncle.”
“And you’re visiting … from New Mexico?”
“Yes.” I smiled. “There are so few of us now … so few of my mother’s people … only me, my two girls, my aunt and uncle and their son.” It seemed natural to talk to a stranger in Nashville about family. Everybody talks about family in the South. I talk about my own in the West, but being back in the city I was born in, I felt a surge of kinship like a loose electrical impulse suddenly connected. When I was younger I longed to be divided from the Moores; now I delight in claiming them.
I found a dress, a turquoise-colored cotton, cool and casual enough for the afternoon. As I stood in front of the three-way mirror in the main room, two other saleswomen gathered and made judicious remarks. That part of the ritual hadn’t changed. Nor had the magic mirror routine. I watched myself, watched their reactions and responded to them only through an exchange of glances in the mirror. When I first saw my mother do this, I must not have understood how it worked, but once I stood before the mirror myself, it seemed natural, as ordinary as talking to someone cutting your hair.
“You will enjoy that the rest of the summer,” the older woman said.
“That color sets off your tan. Doesn’t it, Dorothy?” The younger one turned toward the woman who’d welcomed me.
The blank screen that descended in my head when people first said their names snapped up. Still looking in the mirror, my eyes met Dorothy’s. She smiled slightly, nodded as if answering my silent question, and looked away. It was a strange moment, this instant of recognition, so circumstantial, so entirely unexpected.
“Now the right jewelry—” The younger saleswoman started toward a case in the back.
“And shoes—” said the other.
I stopped them.
“I have them both. I always carry on shoes and jewelry.”
They both nodded. I was in such a hurry to get back to the dressing room I hardly knew what I was saying.
Dorothy waited for me outside the door.
“You … you were Fergus’s wife, weren’t you?”
She smiled faintly and nodded.
“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.”
I’d met her only once at a reception Grandmother gave. Fergus and she simply married and went to his parents’ house to announce the fact afterward which appalled his mother. Uncle Phillip used to tease Aunt Lucy about crying when Fergus married, “You had a big boo-hoo right there in front of his bride! We thought you would run her off carrying on like that.”
“I hated missing his wedding. There are only two children in the family.” Her hopes were unspoken, but Fergus and I had always known we were supposed to marry, supposed to have children. Unions, Aunt Lucy felt, should be celebrated.
Fergus despised ceremony, seemed to fear it almost. I’m not sure why. Perhaps this fear was actually a long-standing rebellion against Aunt Lucy and Miss Kate, both of them excessively proper. To this day Aunt Lucy rises from her chair when an older person enters the room. Uncle Phillip usually insists she sit down again. Fergus was well mannered himself, however he didn’t like to follow anybody’s schedule except his own. Having to move through an established pattern, to follow someone else’s rote, made him balky. He hated ceremony. In fact Fergus avoided suits and ties. If he had to dress up, he wore western approximations—twill pants, bolo ties, a Stetson, a heavy silver belt buckle, well polished black calfskin boots. Fergus’s outfits were as uniform as other men’s suits though there was no use to tell him so. He probably wore jeans and boots when he and Dorothy married.
“Nineteen fifty-two or fifty-three, wasn’t it?” I asked Dorothy. Miss Kate was still alive then. She’d given a formal reception, one with a receiving line, to welcome Fergus’s bride into the family. He’d hated every minute of it, and all he’d had to do was stand still and shake hands. He didn’t have to drink the detested sherry, the only wine Miss Kate tolerated—mainly because she considered it a ladies’ drink—but he did. “Fortified, honey. Fortified.” He always winked at me when he said it. Our grandmother was the only one who could insist on such an occasion, the only one Fergus would have shown up for. I’d been in Vanderbilt intent on my own life. I went to the party and went back to school.
“Fifty-three,” said Dorothy, “and I weighed twenty pounds more. This business will take it off of you.”
“Does Fergus know you’re—?”
“Yes, but women’s retail isn’t exactly his field, nor his mother’s.” We both smiled. “I’d rather—” Her eyes met mine in the dressing room mirror. She was trying to make up her mind about something, and I wanted to give her time. So brisk at first, now she was tentative.
“How is Fergus?”
“Pretty much the same I guess. He hasn’t married again.” I didn’t ask her if she’d married again. One of the saleswomen called her. I watched her walk away, her shoulders straight, her hips hardly swaying, and remembered Miss Kate’s description of Dorothy.
“Prissy and a little precious,” a damning estimation since it implied snobbery as well as refinement to a ridiculous point. How could my grandmother, a woman so vitally interested in the appearance of respectability, ever call another woman prissy? I found Dorothy professional, and naturally, a little guarded.
Pulling off the dress, I put on my flying clothes again. I’d worn a pair of western boots and carried a jacket on the flight. Marshall wore the same though he kept his jacket on and usually carried his hat. We’ve been married twenty-eight years; we don’t look alike yet.
I met Dorothy again at the counter. The cash register was discreetly tucked away on a shelf behind it. Her two saleswomen were talking to another customer through the mirror. There was no one else in the shop.
“I want to ask you a favor,” she said after I’d paid my bill. “I rather you didn’t tell Fergus you saw me. Maybe it’s best not to mention you’ve been here.”
“I’m good at keeping quiet,” I reassured her with a partial truth. I’m just as good at gossiping; however, his brief marriage was one of the things Fergus and I didn’t talk about. How much he drank was another. His comments on women let everybody know he was still interested though for years he pursued a type Miss Kate called “chorus girls” and my daughters called “groupies.” Since we saw each other most often at funerals, the ceremony he hated most, I didn’t meet Fergus’s women often. If I went to his office adjoining the sound stage, they were there mixing a drink, answering the phone, coming in and out as if they were just passing by and had nothing better to do. All of them were pretty young girls wearing so much eye make-up they looked a little jaded. Marshall once accused him of harboring runaways.
“Over eighteen, every one of them,” Fergus insisted, “lots of them older.”
I used to think of those girls as pieces of Fergus’s doll collection like the porcelain figures our grandmother collected except his didn’t sit on shelves. Later he veered away from these to older women, several of them charming, likable people, yet every time he considered marrying, he swerved and ran. How had Dorothy held his attention for even two years?
“He doesn’t talk about me, does he?” She asked when we went out for coffee.
I shook my head.
“So many years ago. We don’t even know, do we, when we’re living our lives. I don’t regret it … that marriage. I’ve put it away for years, just put it in a drawer like you put up winter clothes in a cedar chest. We were so young—”
She shook her head and the beautifully chosen earrings just a shade lighter than her blouse gave off a pearly light. Over her shoulder was a mirror-lined wall. Behind me there was another, a small cafe
owner’s attempt to enlarge its space. I glanced at the one facing me then avoided it thereafter. Except when I’m trying on clothes or getting a haircut, mirrors make me self-conscious.
Dorothy seemed to be looking directly at me as she spoke though occasionally her eyes strayed.
“Oh well.” She said and laughed almost dismissing the subject. I had already told her about the loss of Miss Kate and Uncle George. I didn’t mention the loss of our son, a grief I couldn’t bring myself to announce.
She collected herself, held her hands with her fingers loosely entwined behind the coffee cup, shifted her shoulders a little forward. For the first time I noticed she wore a ring on her left hand. Her dark hair swung over her cheeks. Though small, there was nothing birdie about her, no quick inquisitive glances, no disconcerting twitch. She was quite calm, a good match—I would have thought—for Fergus who had a lot of nervous energy.
“It would be easy … if it had been something dramatic. You know Fergus. He drank. He chased women. You’d think it would be one of those. You’d think perhaps we parted over another woman. Or maybe he came home drunk one too many times. But that wasn’t it. Fergus cut his drinking down when we married. I made it a condition and he accepted. As far as I know, there was no other woman…. Eventually there might have been—In those two years I didn’t know of another. Nor was there another man.” She lifted both palms up, fingers widespread as if to let these possibilities slide through.
Beatings, impotence, kinky sex. All these were also possible though I didn’t want to think they were for Fergus’s sake. Dismal ideas will crawl forward anytime—on the edge of sleep, in dreams, in daylight sitting across the table from someone. Did I really want to know what had parted them? I liked Dorothy. I would have been happy if she were still part of the family. Maybe that’s why I glanced down at my ring and saw hers again. Had she married a second time?
“I’ve always thought Fergus has never married again partially because he’s never found anyone as suitable.”
“Oh, Marianne!” She laughed quickly looking a little over my shoulder toward the mirror, then with her lips held tight across her teeth she stared into my eyes. “That’s terribly flattering.”
I felt obscurely ashamed of myself as if I’d slipped into polite lying to evade something unpleasant. I must have been, for I sat wondering why? Why does she insist on telling me this? Was I the clean slate she wanted to write on, the emissary from the family who’d never heard her side? Did she want to set something straight? Or was she still angry at Fergus? Could she have held onto rage that long? I guessed she could have. Or did she want to talk simply on a momentary whim?
“I’m sorry I—”
“That’s all right…. Sometimes I wonder—I think people can be too suitable. I’m much that Fergus isn’t. In certain ways, we were too opposite. My mother used to blame herself, and I told her she had to stop it, absolutely had to stop. It would have happened anyway. That’s what I came to believe.”
“Your mother—?”
“You remember when we married Fergus talked me into going to a judge he knew, just dropping into his office. We got married there with two secretaries as witnesses. Fergus thought it was a fine idea, that we’d avoided a tiresome ritual, that my parents would be relieved not to have to pay for a wedding. I didn’t care. We were in love. It seemed like a lark. But my mother cared. She cared deeply. She wanted us to do it all over again … in church, with bridesmaids, and grooms, and the wedding march … the whole thing. That’s when your grandmother offered the reception … as a compromise.”
“I didn’t know—”
“Daddy came, but Mama, no. Not Mama. She still wanted the ceremony. Fergus thought it was the silliest—!” She shook her head and laughed.
I laughed with her.
“So that’s when we began divorcing, when he couldn’t remarry to please my mother. Finally he wouldn’t remarry to please me. You see I started wanting that wedding my mother had been planning for me ever since I was born. I was her only daughter. Later, when I married again, we had a small wedding … in church with musicians and singers and lots of flowers. My parents threw a huge reception at their club.
I was speechless. I leaned forward as if to question her more. It was so ridiculous on the surface. And perhaps that was it, a surface, something Dorothy had fashioned to explain a part of her life to herself. I slid my cup slightly in the saucer as if searching for the circle it fit within. When I lifted my eyes, I saw, without meaning to, my own middle-aged face for a second in the mirror over Dorothy’s shoulder, the familiar lines between my eyebrows, and those beginning to show on both cheeks.
“It’s hard to know, isn’t it, hard to look back and see it all.” Before she could answer, I added, “Fergus has never said anything.”
“That’s like him.” She turned her head, her pearly earrings reflecting the light softly, luminously. “It’s odd, isn’t it? Here you’re going to my ex-in-laws’ anniversary—How many is it?”
“Fifty-five. Fergus wanted to give them a party, for their fiftieth, but Aunt Lucy was ill then. Sometimes I wonder if Marshall and I will last that long.”
The party was held that evening out at an old log cabin, one with a dog run in the middle, surrounded by oaks, one of those places people rented when they wanted to surround themselves with history, or with the feel of history, a stage set borrowed for reflections it cast on people. Aunt Lucy, wearing a blue-gray dress she’d ordered, and Uncle Phillip in his usual dark suit, looking pleased with themselves one minute, the next looking faintly surprised to discover they were there, greeted their guests outside on a stone patio.
Marshall complimented me on my dress. So did Fergus.
“I got it at this little place your mother sent me to … or rather a friend of hers told her about it.”
Fergus gave a short laugh and walked off abruptly taking little steps toward the band hitting the patio stones hard with his heels.
The band was playing The Tennessee Waltz—not particularly appropriate for the occasion. I thought at first Fergus was angry about that. He didn’t stop to say anything to the musicians though. Instead he marched toward his mother who was too busy talking to someone to notice his approach. Just before he reached her he veered away to the bar where he stopped to pick up a drink and circled back to me.
“How was she?” There was an edge to his voice as if he were forcing out the words. He stood in front of me rocking back and forth on his boot heels.
I puzzled over his question for a long moment before I realized he could only be talking about Dorothy. “Oh….” I shrugged, still uncertain but not wanting to give her away.
“You bought that dress from her, didn’t you?”
Marshall had gone to get us both drinks, and on his way back I could see he’d stopped to talk to someone I didn’t know. I turned to walk a little way to a big oak on the edge of the lawn.
“Marianne—” Fergus was right behind me.
“Yes?”
“Dorothy sold you that dress, didn’t she?”
“Marshall could get by in jeans, but I couldn’t come to your parents’ party in them.”
“Oh, you couldn’t.” He raised his voice in a falsetto imitation.
His lower lip stuck out reminding me of the time he was a furious little boy who’d pushed me off the porch swing. I was five-years-old; he had been ten. I’d told on him, tattled immediately and without remorse. He was bigger then, older, and had known the rules longer. No hitting, pinching, scratching, pushing. And the most important, no mocking. For a moment I was five-years-old again, enraged and searching for Aunt Lucy so I could cry, “Fergus is being mean to me.”
He shook his head slightly. “I’m sorry, Marianne. I guess I was mad at Mother. She knew whose shop that was. She’s always known. I gave Dorothy the damn place, gave her half the money to buy it. Her mama and I did. We each put up half when Dorothy and I divorced … the only time the old lady was ever on my side.”
&nb
sp; “It’s only a dress, Fergus.”
“I know.” He nodded. “I just … just wanted to be—Sometimes I wonder if anybody’s ever through with anybody! Here’s Dorothy crossing my path today just because Mother thinks she may need the business. My ex-wife has one of the most successful shops in town. She doesn’t need anything.”
How did he know? How could anyone know something like that? He was only going on appearances and he hadn’t even seen her, not for years. But had I seen much more—the clothes she wore, a flicker of a knowing gaze in a mirror? And I had been told only what she chose to tell me. Could I blow into town and discover the elusive truth in a morning when Fergus and Dorothy may not have known it themselves? I took Fergus’s arm. Together we walked back to the patio to find Marshall who was looking for me in the crowd.
THE THEMES OF COUNTRY WESTERN MUSIC
Fergus’s business attracted women. A recording studio was a magnet for those possibly on their way to stardom as it was for those simply following their men. Some of the followers fell in Fergus’s lap. They were around his cluttered office waiting, hoping, while some young man, isolated from his band in a small glassed-in room, wailed again and again into a microphone.
The sound engineer—Fergus sometimes—and the producer, their ears clamped between headphones, sat in a larger booth facing both the singer and the band in another room adjoining. There microphones sprouted in front of guitars, drums, a bass fiddle, and wires looped around the floor like long gray ropes dropped by careless cowboys. In the darkened booth, lights, and sometimes candles, glowed. Fergus didn’t use candles, however some of the sound engineers liked them. They transformed the sound booth into a strange modern altar, one dedicated to making a perfect song, to be sent out to disk jockeys who might, or might not, like it and play it for listeners who might or might not request it again and again; a lucrative contract might follow. Fergus complained that I over-simplified his dealings with the uncertainties of agents’ promises, the dangers of drink and drugs, the failures of hope and goodwill in his iffy business, but it remained his business. I was just a visiting cousin. I did know that if the talents of the musicians, as well as the work of the agents and the choices of disk jockeys concurred, and if the audience happened to agree that elusive thing, a hit, a possibility already proven by the framed gold and platinum records lining a hallway, might be made.
Where We Are Now Page 11