The noon sun was bright on the concrete beyond the hard shadow of the metal roof. The air was crisp and new and full of the stirrings of life out in the fields behind the station and the brambles and woods across the track. Mary Bet could feel herself breathing, her lungs filling and the breath going out and her lungs filling again. She glanced back through the window of the station office, but Mr. Dalton was in there now and she could not see the grieving woman.
She folded the telegram, then folded it again. But instead of putting it away, she kept a tight hold on it. “We’ll go home now,” she said to Flora.
THE PARADE IN Raleigh was the grandest she had ever seen, with four brass bands supported by booming bass drums. She stood with Flora and the Thomas brothers and some others from Williamsboro who had driven over in a caravan, and they waved as the top officers drove slowly past in fine open-top cars. Then came the color guard, flags rippling in the brisk air. And now the soldiers came, marching in their peaked caps and olive-drab jackets past the shops and department stores of Hillsborough Street.
It was Flora who spotted him first. They called out and waved, and he smiled and saluted and marched on with his unit. Mary Bet didn’t know him. He was nearly in the middle of a row, a face that was somewhat familiar, a little less rounded, the deep-set eyes older, more distant. It seemed the strangest thing to wait all this time for his return, and then see him march past until he was indistinguishable from a hundred other uniformed soldiers, as though they were only replicas of men performing a ceremony instead of real men with lives waiting for them at home. She didn’t want to see him there, she just wanted to go home and think about whether she wanted to see him at all. The smells of engine exhaust and horses, the excitement of the crowd on this cool and wonderful day of homecoming was almost more than she could stand. She could feel her heart banging high in her chest with the echoing drums.
But it was a trifling thing to wait and say hello. After everything the boys had been through. The crowd surged upon the reviewing stands along Edenton Street, and Mary Bet’s group found a place beneath a bare maple, where they could see the capitol, with its giant stone pillars and green dome, bright in the afternoon sun, and they could hear the speakers if not see them.
They found him afterwards in a clump of green-jacketed compatriots. He was saying something, and then the men were laughing, and Mary Bet held back as the others went forward to shake hands. She watched Leon grip his brother’s hand in both of his. Then Leon was rising in the air in Sid’s bear hug, his face opening in surprise and delight. Bob stepped up quietly to shake his big brother’s hand, and then the three cousins who had joined their group, one of whom was a big-talking, gum-chewing twenty-year-old girl that Mary Bet didn’t much care for. She went up and practically jumped into Leon’s arms.
“Go on up there,” Flora said.
“She just threw herself at him,” Mary Bet said.
“Well, don’t do that, but if you don’t say something he’ll think you’re stuck-up.”
“Maybe I am, a little.”
“I’ve never known you to be.”
And then, with his cousin still clinging to his neck, he saw Mary Bet. She felt old and unattractive, standing there in her thick-soled walking shoes and her winter coat. She smiled but didn’t move a step forward. He slung his cousin over to the side and came up, removing his cap. “Hello Flora,” he said. “Did y’all have a hard time getting through all this crowd?”
“No,” Flora said. “We were happy to.”
Now he looked at Mary Bet. He opened his mouth, but whatever he had prepared to say stood still on his tongue. “Did you get my telegram?” he asked.
Mary Bet bit her lower lip. She nodded, feeling a bigger fool than she ever had in her life. Why could she say nothing? All this time waiting for her soldier to come home, and now not one word in greeting. She started to say something just as he did, and he laughed and said, “No, no, please, what were you going to say?”
She shook her head. “I thought you’d—I didn’t think—” She sniffed in, ashamed of herself, and he reached over with his thumb and wiped the tear from the outside corner of her eye. “Well, you’re here,” she managed. “And I reckon that’s a good thing.”
He bent down and kissed her on the cheek. Then he turned to everybody and said, “We just got word we don’t have to go down to Columbia for the demobilization. I’ll be home in two days.” Everybody came up again and patted him on the back and said how good he looked, and Sid tried to bear hug him again but Leon wrestled him to a standstill. Then Sid said they’d have a proper wrestling match at home and the biggest dinner he’d ever seen. “I’ll eat anything,” Leon replied, “as long as it’s not corned beef. If I see another can of corned beef I’ll send for the sheriff.” Everybody laughed, and he nodded slyly at Mary Bet.
“Don’t look at me,” Mary Bet said. She suddenly wished Hooper were there. He had been assigned a different regiment and was coming home in a few days. She thought, here I’ve built up seeing Leon again—I’m just nervous.
Then he was back among his fellows, and Mary Bet’s group wended their way through the crowd and out Hillsborough to where they’d left the cars. All the way home they talked about what a fine parade it had been and how good Leon and the others had looked, and Mary Bet could feel the kiss on her cheek and she wondered if it was real and if it was possible that she would soon become a man’s wife.
CHAPTER 32
1919
A WEEK LATER LEON proposed. She thought about it for two weeks, and then on Palm Sunday she said yes. She had spent the fortnight staying up late with Flora, talking, laughing, crying, and then, alone in her bed, praying to God and sometimes talking to her father. “I don’t have a good reason for saying no,” she told Flora.
“That’s no reason to say yes,” Flora responded. “Are you in love with him?”
“I think so. And I think he loves me and will make a good husband and father.”
“All right, go on then, or you’ll end up like me.”
Mary Bet came and put her arms around her friend, tears starting. “I’d be lucky to end up like you, strong and independent. I admire you more than anybody I know. I just don’t think I could—well, this may be my last chance for a family of my own. I don’t know if it’s the right thing, but I’ve let Leon wait long enough. I love him about as well as I think I can let myself love anybody. For now.”
“He can wait, if you’re not sure.” Flora turned back to her machine, her foot hovering above the treadle, waiting for a response.
“I’m not sure, but tomorrow I’ll tell him one way or the other. If I do get married, I’m going to buy you an electric machine.”
Flora shook her head, the treadle and needle already clanking and bobbing. “What makes you think you’ll be able to do that?”
The next day after church, she and Leon went out for a ride in Leon’s new Model T, paid for with an advance on his salary, and they ended up almost in Hartsoe City. When they stopped at Love’s Creek Cemetery and Mary Bet asked him if he knew her folks were buried there, he said he’d heard that, but that he just wanted to stop at a quiet place and take a look at the river. They got out and walked a ways, and she glanced at the graves of her family but didn’t point them out. Beyond them lay a newly plowed field, and then the rocky river’s edge.
“I’ll marry you,” she said.
The words had come from somewhere beyond her, and she felt herself shimmer with the certainty that she was part of something much larger than herself, a force untethered to her comprehension, from deep within the ground and the trees and the river and the blue sky. A closed loop, her grandfather had insisted. Yet he had been wrong. With no outside energy, the wheel would stop. She felt the strength of her legs and her bones on this tilted ground, and when Leon took her hand and they began walking back to the car she felt herself giving up some of that strength to him and gaining back something unknown. She hoped. She hoped, but dared not put a name or a face to
the hope.
They wanted to have a small wedding, but they kept having to add more and more guests to their list, until people were saying it was the biggest event since the electric lights were turned on in Williamsboro last fall. It had all come and gone so quickly, she was left with a handful of images colliding in her mind. She wanted to sit down with everyone so that she could piece together the scenes into a kind of mental scrapbook, but for now she would have to content herself with a few random snapshots: the way Flora had smiled with tears in her eyes, standing there in her pale yellow dress, her maid of honor, and Clara a bridesmaid, and Amanda and Mr. Hennesey, and Mrs. Gooch and Mrs. Edwards seated together, and Mr. Witherspoon and Miss Mumpford, and the Cadwalladers, and, of course, Hooper Teague, looking so sharp and proud in his gray morning suit. Her uncle Crabtree had walked her down the aisle. And there was a man she didn’t recognize, a man wearing a black suit with an old-fashioned cut to it, and a black-stock tie, his hat clutched in his hand, watching from the back row of the church. Who was he? She would have to remember to ask Leon.
They decided to honeymoon for a week in Wrightsville Beach, which meant taking a train to Wilmington. The day before they were to leave she received a letter from Wilmington, which she took to be a sign, though good or bad she couldn’t tell. She sliced it open with the silver letter opener that Clara gave her for a wedding gift, with her initials engraved, “MHT.” The letter was brief.
Dear Miss Hartsoe,
I am sorry not write before. Please excuse bad writing. Thank you for sending the letter about Siler. I cried when I read it, but good tears. I loved him very much. Yes, he was sad. I don’t know where he was walking. He sayed nothing about walking on the tracks. I wonder about it and now I hope you are not sad in your heart about your brother. He was good and sweet, but could not marry me because I am a Jew. I tell him I know this and I can not marry him. We laugh about this and cry. Maybe someday, we sayed, we will marry in heaven. But I am a wife now with a little boy. I am happy, thank you for writing, come visit us in Wilmington!
Love,
Rebecca Savage Teller
It would have to be enough, then, to know, as her father did, that grief lasts as long as memory, though the tissue of life grow around it like a wound protected from the world and shielded from the heart. Grief and love are the only things that endure.
The train for the East Coast left at five thirty in the morning. A dozen or so well-wishers met them at the platform to see them off, including Flora and Amanda and Mr. Hennesey, and even Mrs. Gooch, who had finally seemed to forgive Mary Bet for not bringing the Cadwallader boy to justice. The weather had turned cool for late May, but as the train made its way into the flat coastal plain and the sun rose, it became very warm. They slid open a window and watched the land flatten into long fields of new corn and hay, stretching to tree horizons.
As they pulled into Wilmington, Mary Bet was amazed at how big it was, with brick warehouses and factories and wide streets lined with tall buildings and shoppers and more automobiles than she’d ever seen. There were two cotton exchanges and a wholesale fruits and vegetables market, and at least a half dozen steeples punctured the skyline, which gave her some comfort. She wondered that her letter to Rebecca Savage had ever made it. They switched onto a smaller train for the short ride past the wharves and out over the causeway to Wrightsville Beach. The landscape grew even softer, with marsh grasses rippling in a breeze and actual palm trees, and Leon told her there was a pavilion where you could watch movies and go bowling and dance to a band into the small hours of the morning. There was even a movie screen out in the surf, and people waded in their bathing suits to watch. She could hardly imagine it—it all seemed too lush somehow to be good. And seeing the worry in her face, Leon assured her that they didn’t have to go dancing into the wee hours unless they wanted to, but that they were sure to eat and sleep well because they were staying at the nicest hotel in town.
She had not slept well the night before, worrying about the trip and what she’d forgotten to pack, and now her impressions became dreamy and fractured as she and her new husband, this strange man beside her, moved through an alien landscape. She watched a man shoving a skiff up a creek with a long pole until he was hidden in the reeds. They got off the train amid the excitement and bustle of holiday-makers, and a driver from their hotel met them and led them to a two-horse coach that could hold eight people and all their trunks and baggage.
And then they were driving beside a trolley line down a tunnel of big green trees from which Spanish moss dangled like hair, and she thought, “Just let him be gentle with me.” She felt his shoulder against hers and she sighed and relaxed into it. He was unusually quiet, almost nervous. “Just let him be gentle.” A warm noon breeze ruffled the tree beards, the air heavy and somnolent and briny. On the side of the road grew little purple flowers with waxy dark green leaves, and bushes with bright red flowers somebody said were oleanders. A dinner bell tolled somewhere behind them. Now they could catch glimpses of the ocean between the dunes, rippling green out to the edge of the sky. It was nothing to fear, yet her heart rose in her chest, and she felt herself swooning, resisting, swooning. She took Leon’s hand in hers, and he squeezed back. It’ll be all right, she thought, it’ll be all right.
Her mind turned to the wedding. All the people and the music and the food. The nervousness in the air because everyone wanted them to start out with a blast of happiness. It had been like life distilled, so swift and sure of its course—only later could you look at it and say that it was held together by each person there.
Now Leon struck up a conversation with the man beside him, and discovered that he and his wife were from Weaverville in the mountains and were also on honeymoon. Mary Bet knew he’d been eager to talk to the others and she liked that about him. She wondered if this was how they were to be as a couple—he going out into the world and she giving him permission. She wondered for the hundredth time if it was going to be hard to give up her independence, but then she thought of Mrs. Gooch and her new boarder, a pale young man with some kind of heart condition.
They pulled up to the Ocean Hotel, an L-shaped building of three gleaming white tiers; a turret rose from the corner, with three balconies where tourists stood under fancy arches taking in the view. In the greensward opposite the portico, a flag bearing the hotel’s name hung limp in the noon stillness.
They had a good dinner that night in the hotel restaurant—fried flounder with lemon butter, mashed potatoes, creamed sugar corn, and peach cobbler with ice cream. She let Leon order for her, telling him she wanted the same thing that he was getting. She thought she could never get used to a restaurant as fine as this one, nor did she want to, though it was all right for a vacation. The couple from Weaverville seemed to enjoy their company—they looked genuinely disappointed that Mary Bet and Leon would not be joining them in the ballroom later. Mary Bet had already told Leon she was tired and wanted to go to bed after dinner. She told him she had only danced a few times and wasn’t much good at it. “That’s fine, Mary,” he said, “I’m not much of a dancer. Maybe tomorrow we’ll just watch awhile.”
They climbed up the stairs of the turret to the first balcony and took a look at the dark ocean. Lights from the hotel cast a pale glow over the beach and the edge of the water where it frayed into foam. Music from the pavilion down the strand rose and fell in the night air, and Leon pointed past a pier to a light down the beach that he said must be the movie screen. The stars were out, but not as many as back home, on account of the hotel lights. The air was cool and damp, and not as fragrant as it had been on their arrival. She shivered a little, and Leon put his hand on the small of her back, and though she could barely feel it through her heavy sweater, it made her shiver again.
“The tide’s out,” Leon said. “You can see the line where it comes in high.”
Mary Bet looked, but she was not sure what to look for—in the darkness it was just sand and more sand. But she was glad Leon knew ab
out such things, and that he always had something to say. They went back to their room and she undressed in the bathroom. She thought that if she weren’t so nervous she would be amazed that each room in the hotel had its own private bathroom.
Under the covers he reached for her, and she lifted up her long nightgown to let him know it was okay. She was unafraid of him because they were both strangers here, adrift together in their strangeness. It was as it should be, and she was surprised to find that she was curious. She had not dwelt on it overmuch, even when Clara had given her unasked-for advice. She wondered if it was the first time for him, and she thought maybe she would ask him sometime.
She recalled the sweetness of her gardenia corsage, the clanging of the church bell as they stood there at the church door posing for the photographer and all their friends getting backed up, waiting to get out into the sun. The laughter and nervous excitement, the young girls looking up at her, thinking of themselves someday wearing their own wedding gowns, not knowing how afraid she was, how afraid all brides must be. Life was strange, rich, terrible, wonderful. Everything that had brought her to this point—it would never go away. Her memory was too good, and that was her blessing and her curse. She believed her future was written, and though she was afraid of it she still wanted to see what was going to happen.
He fumbled a bit, but she didn’t mind, because he was gentle and he murmured to her that he loved the smell of her hair and how soft her skin was. His breathing came hard as he went rigid inside her, and then the pulsing wet warmth in her core spread out through her limbs. Of course it was like that. Of course it was a good thing, not a sinful thing to be afraid of. Was she to be his now with no freedom to do as she pleased, had she not given up a perfectly good life for another go at the terrible burden of family love? “God, please help me,” she whispered. Already she could hear Leon’s heavy breathing, a sound that she must get used to. What if she couldn’t stand living with him, she thought, almost in a panic.
Love and Lament Page 37