The Wedding

by Dorothy West

  “No, maybe not, but he has exposed me to myself.”

  “Mother fits in there somewhere.”

  “He’s not married to Mother. That’s the whole point. I left home and Mother to marry him, and now I’ve come back.”

  “Does Linc expect you to give up your family?” Shelby asked in disbelief. “He’s not that unfair.”

  “He thinks I am. I’m living in Mother’s summer house, letting her support me.”

  “But Linc sent you money, for yourself and Laurie.”

  “Not enough to live in style in the very house Mother wouldn’t let Linc be married in.”

  “Liz, don’t exaggerate. Mother was planning your wedding up to the moment you eloped. She didn’t expect you to substitute a stand-in.”

  “She expected Linc to substitute his friends who were doctors. She thought it was enough to have his mother coming from the stockroom at Macy’s instead of a teacher’s schoolroom. But she drew the line at his aunt and uncle. They are a cook and a butler. If their money was good enough to help him through med school, Linc thought they were good enough to see him get married. Since Mother didn’t, I made Linc elope with me before he changed his mind about marrying into my stuck-up family. I’d had a hard enough time persuading him to propose to a Coles. If you’ll forgive me for gloating, I think it serves Mother right that Meade’s family has thumbed their noses at her. In fact, I think it’s perfectly lovely.”

  The day Liz had proposed to Linc and was accepted, she was skeptical about waiting until summer to marry him in the Oval, even though in her teenage years she had romanticized about such a day and constantly demanded that her mother cross her heart in consent. In the months between proposal and performance, her mother found a thousand ways, little and big, subtle and blunt, to pressure her into considering the consequences of marrying somebody nobody knew, that is to say, nobody anybody knew. Her mother blew the trumpet of praise for marriage to her own kind, if not color, the right color being preferable but not as mandatory as the right class. That class and the posture it demanded had given her the self-assurance to feel that no barrier was insurmountable, and to say with ease that she looked white but wasn’t.

  Liz recalled that during their courtship Corinne had delicately suggested that she was seeing too much of Linc to the exclusion of more social young men. It wasn’t fair to let him think that she was serious when, of course, such a serious young man might keep her from having the fun her youth entitled her to have. Linc had known very well that he and Liz might never have met, or at least might never have progressed beyond introduction had they met at some charity affair that one of his more socially ambitious doctor friends had bludgeoned him into attending. That their meeting was professional got him started on a footing that did not scare him off. They met in an operating theater and fell into casual conversation. Linc introduced himself, and Liz’s name, when she said it, made him instantly aware that she was one of the Coleses for whom he had a great deal of professional admiration. He knew that all Coleses and their sons were doctors, and now apparently their daughters were too.

  Liz was just beginning her internship at the hospital where Linc was in heart research. That Liz had entered medicine was indeed in keeping with the Coles tradition. Since Clark and Corinne had no son to propagate the faith, Liz had always known that she, the elder daughter, could follow no other course. After her marriage to Linc, however, Liz had given up medicine, choosing the more traditional roles of wife and mother instead.

  The baby had fallen asleep in Shelby’s arms, lulled by the rise and fall of her breast. One hand had curled around Shelby’s ringer, and Shelby’s eyes grew tender with compassion at the sight. After four months of life on earth, the long span of years to come still had cast no shadow. Shelby looked up at Liz. She knew she should somehow defend Meade’s parents, even if she felt a funny twinge in her side at the thought. “Liz, do you have to be so honest? Meade’s parents weren’t crude about it. They begged to be excused with polite regrets and a present. If their explanation was an out, at least it wasn’t outright rude. Meade says his father does have high blood pressure, and the long trip here at this time of the year wouldn’t help it any. Meade made the joke, a bitter joke, that our wedding plans had probably put him in bed for a week. And of course it wasn’t really a joke. In his wildest nightmare I’m sure the poor man never had a dream about Meade getting married to a colored girl. If he had to sit through the real thing it might be more than that blood pressure could bear. He’d likely go into shock.”

  “Well, I think it’s just a beautiful thing that you can be so understanding,” Liz said wryly. “When I pinch myself, I don’t feel colored. I just feel the hurt of it—maybe that’s what being colored means for most of us. You feel the hurt of it.”

  Liz got up from the foot of the bed and went to the window. She stared out at the Oval. She had loved it so in her childhood, this safe, contained world where she had come every summer except for the summer past when her marriage and two-week honeymoon and getting settled into her small flat gave her no time to wish she were here. But when Laurie was born in April, and the flat seemed smaller and the Harlem streets noisier, then the sentiment grew in Liz that Laurie should spend her first summer on earth in the quiet Oval, in a large convenient house where gracious living was taken for granted.

  She had asked Linc to join her for two weeks in August to share the week’s gaiety preceding the wedding and the restful week following it, when her mother would take charge of the baby and free her and Linc to do what they pleased, when they pleased. But Linc said without apparent regret that he couldn’t afford a vacation. The first year of their marriage, after the expense of furnishing a flat and adding a member to their family, had put a considerable strain on their by no means endless supply of money. When Liz had countered that his vacation would cost him nothing but his fare, he reacted as if she had insulted him by offering him her family’s hospitality, refusing to see it as the gesture of reconciliation that he was in no way ready to accept. And now he was not even coming for the day of the wedding, despite the pleas in her letters and phone calls, even if it meant embarrassing her before her Ovalite friends. They thought they could easily guess why he had no wish to insert his dark face into the family picture.

  With her back still turned to Shelby, Liz said quietly, “When I knew I was going to have a child, I wasn’t happy about it. I wasn’t ready to be a mother. I wanted more time to be a bride. Then Laurie was born, and I was ready to resent her. They brought her to me and put her in my arms, and I saw that she was brown. She was a completely colored child, without the protective coloring of the Coleses. I can’t tell you how much I loved her at that moment. I wanted to fight the whole white race for her. She looked too small and helpless to fight it alone.” She let out a deep breath. “But in the nature of things she must. It’s a private and internal struggle. And to win she will have to fight back without bitterness, not replacing her hurt with hate but letting that hurt enrich her experience.”

  She faced around to Shelby. “There’s a bitterness in Linc against whites, against near whites, as he thinks of our kind, against anyone with whom he’s never related socially. But I sometimes wonder if Linc isn’t confusing class with color, or using old yardsticks to make his judgment. He can’t accept unless he sees, and race relations and class distinctions and color differences are too subtle for any dim view of them.”

  Laurie stirred and kicked in her sleep. “He didn’t take a dim view of you,” Shelby said with a smile.

  “That’s because he insists I’m exceptional. He isn’t ready to admit I’m standard Oval product, no better, no worse than the friends I grew up with. He can’t divorce me from my family. I’m everything that’s gone into making me, and that includes Mother, who might even have beat me to bed with Linc if she had met him first.”

  Shelby rolled her eyes resignedly. “Liz, I wish you wouldn’t, but you always will. You’re only guessing about Mother. There’s nothing you
really know.”

  “I had bigger ears than you when we were kids, and more interest in the sex life of my elders. I’m pretty sure I know about Mother. And I know I know about Dad, time and place.”

  For a moment there was silence in the room, except for the sounds of the Oval rising in fuller volume outside the window, responding to the perfect day. Shelby stared at Liz just as she used to when they were children and Liz had a secret to tell about the mysterious ways of adults. Somehow Liz’s secrets seemed to sap some of the joy from growing up, driving her to her family of dolls as the only sphere of order and understanding she knew.

  Liz grimaced with an attempt at insouciance that neither believed. “When Linc and I were on our honeymoon cruise, we saw Dad and Rachel on one of our stopovers. They were across the room in a restaurant, looking like lovers in spite of Dad’s fifty and Rachel’s surely forty years. I thought their affair had dwindled away to nothing, that they were a couple of old shoes, with no romantic nonsense between them, but there they were. Anyway, they didn’t see us. And I got away fast before Linc could see them. Told him I’d had too much sun and felt sick to my stomach. When you see your own father with the other woman it has that effect.”

  But Shelby hadn’t had the jolt of seeing her father at fifty in youth’s arena. She didn’t believe that reflective middle age would allow itself to flirt with irrevocable folly. At most, she thought her father was guilty of a brief excursion in self-deception. “All you really saw, Liz, was Dad in a moment of nostalgia before you and Linc could make him a grandfather. He didn’t do anything fatal to Mother, like falling in love with somebody much younger. He had a holiday with Rachel, who’s never been a threat to Mother’s marriage. They were probably more wistful about the past than expectant about the future. Nobody’s been hurt. Mother doesn’t know, and Dad’s settled down to being a grandfather.”

  Shelby suddenly remembered a dance she had been to back home in New York. Her escort for the evening was a young intern whom her father knew well. The dance was a fashionable charity affair in a fashionable hotel downtown that had found, after years of viewing them with alarm, that colored people with money spent more of their money than whites with more money to spend.

  To Shelby and her escort there had been too many of the middle-aged on the dance floor trying to make up for the years when they could not afford to dress up in diamonds and go to expensive places. Their faces fell apart before the evening was half over, and everything rebelled, their feet, their heads, their backs, even their smiles that had to work harder and harder to amount to anything.

  Corinne had been there, as she usually was, though Clark always seemed to take these occasions to have a last-minute emergency call. He and Rachel would drive somewhere distant and dine and dance in some little roadhouse where the management would make the prudent decision that it was better to serve a mixed couple, as the two appeared to be, than face a lawsuit the defendant would probably lose. The other diners invariably found more of interest in Clark and Rachel than in the dinners they were letting dry up on their plates. They were pretty sure what the score was with these two. They knew where they would go when they left, and what they would do when they got there. It was written on their faces.

  It was true that something was written on their faces, but it was not the obscene leer of desire but a deep relishing of the intimacy of dinner for two in a place where no one knew them and no one would run and tell. They were grateful for whatever their love was allowed. It had not been allowed a beginning before that uncertain hour on a day without a date in a year they could never agree on when Rachel’s doorbell rang and there was Clark, a drink or two inside him but not drunk.

  He had come inside her door and stood there staring, taking in the beauty of her brownness, which was like no other. A paler woman pales by comparison. Not everyone can see it, but those who can know there is no beauty like that of a brown-skinned woman when she is beautiful: the velvet skin, the dark hair like a cloud, the dark eyes like deep wells to drown in. He said her name softly, caressing her with it, and she was helpless. She began to tremble, and she could not hide it. It was like nakedness. He saw it, and he took her in his arms, and all the yielding that Corinne had denied him was in her incredible softness as if her body had melted into his. So it began, without a beginning, even if afterward they told each other that there had been a period of courtship, each wanting so much to believe that there was more to it than an hour of undammed physical lust. Not flags waving, perhaps, but perhaps other signs, secret yet unmistakable, and building up like an orchestra tuning up, each instrument unrelated until the fusion of triumphant sound established an eternal empathy, reechoing through time.

  Meanwhile, at the charity dance Corinne had given most of her dances to dark men. She liked it best when the lights were dim and the tempo slow, and the dark hand on her back pressed into her bare flesh, drawing her closer, audaciously closer, to the point of contact. And the ball of fire would burn between them until the music stopped, the lights came up, and Corinne walked decorously back to her box, her escort’s hand lightly touching her elbow. Many eyes would follow her because she was one of the Coles wives, and thus in this small circle truly above reproach.

  Clark would soon come to fetch her, and he and Corinne would ride home with their minds miles away. Both of them would hear other voices, and neither of them could reach out to the other for any understanding of their common compulsion.

  Liz was a realist and could therefore accept the truth of her parents’ infidelities, but Shelby could not. “What makes you think Mother doesn’t know?” she scoffed. “Wives know what their husbands are made of better than trusting daughters. Until last summer I never suspected that Dad’s been dividing his vacation between Mother and Rachel ever since we discovered that boys were more fun than fathers and didn’t need a month of Dad to have a happy summer. But I never did believe that he went off on a two-week fishing trip with some white sawbones each year just because he liked to go fishing; I just thought he was getting his kicks going places with white guys that he couldn’t go with colored. And all the time Dad was somewhere with Rachel, which makes a world more sense to me. As for Laurie aging his libido, I bet he’s champing for Mother to get this wedding over with so he can pop off someplace with Rachel for the last few days of his vacation.”

  Shelby sat up in bed with a grimace. “Listen, Liz, maybe I am a big fool. Maybe I’m just a dumb blind baby. But you know what?” Her eyes narrowed, and she jabbed her index finger at Liz like a knife. “I think only seeing the bad, only poking fun, only trying to lift up the rug and look for bugs underneath is its own kind of blindness. You hear me? You ever look around Strivers’ Row growing up, or the Oval?” She swept her arm in front of her in an arc. “I didn’t see a lot of kids we knew whose parents looked after them any better than ours. I look at Mother and Father and I see two people who’ve been good and kind and loving to us from the day we were born. We ever gone hungry? We ever needed for anything? Mother and Father may well have looked elsewhere for some things they couldn’t give each other, but I’d like you to tell me what that means to us, next to everything else.” Shelby’s pale eyes flashed wildly, and her uncombed blond hair—the hair whose color had caused her so much grief as a child—coiled itself around her head like a clutch of snakes.

  Liz chuckled dryly and took a step backward. “Easy, little sister.” She drew the words out slowly. “Easy. You’re wrong if you think I’m not grateful for everything we’ve been given. Lord knows, it’s more than most, and it didn’t come by luck. Just because it’s 1953, not 1853, doesn’t mean it’s that much less dangerous to be colored, and when we take the new car out I get more looks from our own kind than from whites. It’s easier to hate your own kind for what they have than to hate somebody far away for what you don’t. But, as glad as I am that we always had nice things as children, I’ll be damned if I’m going to eat that dish of humble-pie gratitude every day of my life, and let it blind me to things
that aren’t right. When something’s wrong it’s wrong, and all the maid-cooked dinners in the Oval won’t change that fact.”

  Shelby slapped her hands down on the bed. “No, Liz, that’s not my point. You don’t see—”

  “No!” Liz cut Shelby off with a wave of her hand. “If I have to listen to you tell me how ungrateful I am, you will hear me out too. Tell me that all those years you looked without seeing, listened without hearing. You’re quick to hit me with all the good lessons we learned from our parents, and God knows we did—hard work, pride, and manners, manners for every step we took in a day—but now I guess it would be beyond belief for you to think you might have learned some bad ones too? Did it ever occur to you that there may be more of a tie between what you saw from Dad and what you see in Meade than you’d like to admit? I know myself I wonder at times how I can even bring myself to trust a black man, but I’ll tell you, it feels like the sex and the doubt get all tied up with each other in my chest, and I can’t tell one from the other.”

  Shelby threw the sheets off her legs and swung herself onto the floor. She paused as if to speak, her face twitching with emotion, but then she thought better of it. She shouldered her way past Liz to the door.

  “Shelby, wait. I’m sorry.”

  Shelby clutched tightly at the doorknob, the veins popping in her forearms. She paused for a heartbeat and then swung the door open. Stale air rushed in from the hot, un-ventilated hallway. She twisted her neck to regard her sister. “You’re so proud of how much you think you know, Liz. Well, you don’t know everything, and you don’t know anything about my love for Meade. You might not trust black men; that’s your problem.”

  Liz turned her palms out in supplication. “Shelby, that’s not what I meant.”

  “Oh, yes, it is!” Shelby hissed, her words slicing the air like a razor. “How dare you, on the eve of my wedding, imply that I’m turning my back on my race?” Her voice caught and she ran into the hall, a flick of her wrist slamming the door tightly shut behind her.