The Amateur Marriage

by Unknown

  He said, “Yup.”

  “Well, it sure is a pretty place.”

  He said, “Mmhmm.”

  “We just got in from Baltimore, Maryland. This is the first time I personally have been west of the Mississippi.”

  No response.

  The silence made Michael feel self-conscious, so that he spoke in a soft, furry mumble when he picked up the tail of an argument they’d been having before they landed. “The trouble with going to the hospital first—” he confided to Pauline.

  “What, Michael? I can’t hear you,” she said in a bugle voice.

  He closed his eyes and then opened them and started over, more distinctly but just as quietly. “If we go to the hospital first, we’ll have to carry our luggage.”

  “So? It’s one little suitcase.”

  “Yes, but then if they let us take Lindy and she has luggage, too—”

  “Michael, I refuse to waste time unpacking my nightgown when I’ve got a sick daughter waiting.”

  “No one’s asking you to unpack your nightgown. All I’m saying is—”

  “Our daughter’s in the hospital,” Pauline told the driver, raising her voice even further. “We learned about it just yesterday.”

  “Retreat,” the driver said.

  “Pardon?”

  “They call the place a retreat, not a hospital.”

  Michael had thought, for a second, that the driver had been telling them to retreat. Even in these circumstances, he found the misunderstanding comical.

  Pauline said, “How do you know that?”

  “Everybody knows Nineteen Fleet Street.”

  “It’s a . . . retreat?”

  “It’s run by the brothers,” the driver said.

  “Oh, Catholic brothers?”

  “More like . . . yogis or something.”

  Pauline sent Michael a look he couldn’t read.

  “Hold on, there,” she said to the driver. “Are you telling me our daughter’s joined a cult?”

  “Naw, it’s not the kind of thing you’djoin,” the driver said. “They go out and pick you up. That’s their what-do-you-say, mission. They scrape people off the street and haul them in to tend them.”

  “Scrape people off the—”

  “Your drugged-out types. Your druggy, hippie, beatnik types on the LSD and the mushrooms and such.”

  Michael decided he disliked the man intensely. He turned toward Pauline and said, in a low, urgent voice, “We could go to the tourist home beforehand and leave the suitcase there. You said yourself the landlady said it’s an easy walk to—”

  “Actually, our daughter’s had a nervous breakdown,” Pauline told the driver. “We’ve come to take her back east with us. We’ve always been a very close, very loving family and we know that she’ll be fine once she’s in familiar surroundings.”

  The driver merely flicked his turn signal on.

  They were traveling through the city now. At first, Michael found the houses impressive. They were strikingly handsome antiques with lacy trim, turrets and balconies and widow’s walks, stained-glass windows, steep roofs. But gradually they grew seedier. As if the cab were swooping forward in time, the paint started peeling and the shutters started sagging and the gingerbread chipped and crumbled. The window curtains changed to Indian bedspreads or faded American flags. Then some windows were boarded over. A boy with long hair, in layers of rags, leaned against a lamppost with his eyes closed. The cabdriver punched down his door lock; so Michael and Pauline punched down theirs.

  Nineteen Fleet Street was just another worn-out house. Not even a sign identified it. Pauline asked the driver, “Are you sure this is the place?”

  He said, “Yup.”

  She was the one sitting on the curb side of the cab and so she yanked her door handle, apparently forgetting that she had punched the lock down. “Oops,” she said. Her mistake seemed to undo her. She slid lower in her seat and let out a whimper of a breath. Before Michael could come to her rescue, the driver reached back and pulled up the button. “There you go,” he told her.

  She yanked the handle again and stumbled out onto the sidewalk, her miniskirt rucked up and her purse strap catching briefly on the window crank.

  “Hope it turns out all right,” the driver told Michael.

  But Michael still disliked him. He gave him a measly dollar tip, even though the fare was astronomical.

  The man who answered their ring didn’t appear the slightest bit religious. He was tall and gray-haired and clean-shaven, good-looking in a weathered sort of way, and he wore a plaid flannel shirt and jeans and sharp-toed cowboy boots. “Yes?” he said, filling the door frame.

  “I’m Michael Anton,” Michael told him. He set down their suitcase. “This is my wife, Pauline. I believe you have our daughter here.”

  There was a pause. The man tilted his head.

  “Our daughter Lindy. Linnet,” Michael said.

  “In this house, all are free of labels,” the man told him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Family names, given names . . . The trappings of our old lives are cast off as we move forward.”

  So the man was religious after all. That earnest, jargony way of talking made it only too clear. Michael assumed an expression of courteous attention. “Isn’t that interesting!” he said. “Well, she was brought in about three days ago. I believe she, urn, freaked out. She’s about yay high and she’s got more or less my coloring: brown eyes, black hair, though I can’t say for certain what style of hair—”

  “Serenity,” someone said.

  Michael broke off. He stared at the boy who had materialized next to the man—a scarily thin teenager in a white gauze tunic and flowered bell-bottoms.

  “Right,” the man agreed. “That would be Serenity. She came to share our lives on Monday.”

  Pauline said, “Can we see her?”—jumping in too fast.

  “Ah, no,” the man said sadly. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. In this house, all are free of the bonds of home and family.”

  “Now, just a minute,” Pauline said.

  Michael said, “Hon. Do you mind?” He turned to the man, who fixed him with a dispassionate gaze. “I guess you don’t understand,” he said. “We haven’t heard from our daughter in over seven years. Till yesterday, we didn’t even know for sure if she was alive. We only want to pay her a visit, see how she’s getting along.”

  “And then take her home and make her well,” Pauline added at his elbow.

  Michael said, “Please. Pauline. Let me handle this.” He told the man, “We’ll just find out how she feels. If she wants to come home with us, well and good. Otherwise we’ll leave without her.”

  “I am so sorry, my friends,” the man said gently. “Serenity’s not available.”

  Pauline said, “What is this, some kind of prison? Are you holding our daughter captive?”

  “Pauline—”

  “We wouldn’t do her any harm! We aren’t one of those . . . damaging families! Just ask Lindy! Just let her come out for one second and speak to us! You have no right to shut her away from us!”

  The man took a step backward to reveal the room behind him—an entry hall furnished with a small, round, doily-topped table and nothing else. “Do you see any bars or locks?” he asked Pauline in the mildest tone. He gestured toward the boy. “Tarragon here can leave us any time he likes. Tarragon, would you like to leave?”

  The boy shrank back and shook his head.

  Michael said, “Naturally, we’re not accusing you of anything.” He felt Pauline’s glare of protest, but he kept his eyes on the man. “If you could just tell our daughter we’re here, though,” he said. “Tell her and see what she says. Offer her a choice.”

  “She’s made her choice,” the man said, still mildly. “She made it when she was brought to us.”

  Pauline gave an odd, strangled sound.

  Michael said, “Ah. Well.” He stood straighter. “So, what’s the procedure, exactly?” he as
ked. “You release people when they’re . . . themselves again? Is there a certain length of time involved?”

  “We ‘release’ them, as you say, when they decide they are ready for birth,” the man said. “When they open this front door and are born again into the world.”

  “Oh, God in heaven!” Pauline exploded.

  The man surveyed her benignly. Then he turned to Michael. “Perhaps you’d like to phone now and then,” he said. “Ask how Serenity is growing. We have no secrets here. We’re in the book: Fleet Street Retreat. My name is Becoming.”

  For the second time that day, Michael had to stifle an inappropriate guffaw.

  The landlady had recommended the tourist home for its location. It was three blocks from Nineteen Fleet Street and two from her own house, on Haight. Unfortunately, that meant it shared the same depressed surroundings. Michael vividly remembered the TV footage of Haight-Ashbury in its glory days—the bevies of “love children” thronging the streets—but now the place had an atmosphere of morning-after-the-party desolation. A few forlorn stragglers dotted the sidewalks, and wastepaper clogged the gutters. A starved-looking boy asked them for a quarter. (Not even Pauline responded.) An old man wearing a biblical robe sat on his heels in a doorway. Dusty store windows displayed muddles of merchandise: Mexican blouses, Chinese slippers, wind chimes, sticks of incense, and various tiny pipes and cigarette holders and Middle Eastern hookahs.

  Michael took it all in, intrigued in spite of himself, but Pauline trotted ahead with her shoulders hunched and her arms tightly folded. Twice she said she was cold; then finally she asked him to stop and let her unpack the sweater she’d brought. It was true that the air had a chill to it, as if San Francisco’s seasons, as well as its clocks, were lagging behind the East Coast’s. “Now you see I was right to want to keep our suitcase with us,” she told him as she wriggled her arms into her sleeves.

  Michael sighed, and she said, “What.”

  “The reason we kept the suitcase, Pauline, is that you were set on going first to Fleet Street.”

  “Well? So? Can you blame me?”

  “I’m not blaming you; I’m just saying—”

  Although now he wondered what difference it made.

  “I wanted to see my daughter!” Pauline cried. “I waited seven years, I flew clear across the continent, and then you asked me to wait some more just so you could dump your suitcase in some stupid rented room!”

  “Poll—”

  “And once we get there, what do you do? Stand there like a . . . Milquetoast. ‘Oh, excuse me very much, sir,’ you say. ‘You won’t let her out of your clutches? You refuse to let us see her? Fine, sir. Whatever you wish, sir.’”

  “She’s over twenty-one, Pauline. She signed herself in of her own accord, so far as we know, and their policy is—”

  “Oh, policy! Rules! What do I care about rules? I’m her mother and this is tearing me apart! It’s killing me! It’s eating me up! I can’t stand this anymore!”

  Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She spun around and took off again, her purse bouncing on her hip and her back stiff and indignant. Michael picked up the suitcase and followed, but he didn’t try to reason with her.

  What could he have said, anyhow?

  On the corner a couple much like themselves—late forties, the man in a sport coat, the woman in a short skirt—stood admiring a psychedelic poster that was peeling off the side of a building. The man raised the camera that was slung around his neck, and Michael suddenly felt the way he had when they visited Karen during Parents’ Weekend last fall: he was just one more in a pack of stuffy oldsters doing their best to keep up with the young folk. And Pauline in her minidress looked clunky and ridiculous, her feathered blond hairdo laughably ornate compared to the flowing tresses of the two young girls crossing the street ahead of them.

  When Michael had first heard about hippies—about the love-ins and the sit-ins and the antiwar protests, and tuning in and turning on and dropping out and such—he had secretly felt pleased. So Lindy had just been ahead of her time! And he and Pauline weren’t alone anymore!

  He wondered now if the couple with the camera had come in search of a missing son or daughter themselves. But no, they had the look of people on vacation. They wouldn’t be taking photographs if they felt the way he and Pauline felt.

  He caught up with her on the far curb and set his free hand on the small of her back. “That should be the tourist home, on the left,” he told her.

  It was another rundown Victorian, with gray wooden steps that buckled beneath their feet and a handwritten sign above the doorbell, DOESN’T WORK, and the woman who answered their knock seemed run-down herself, still in her thirties but slack-faced and sullen, wearing a housecoat of a type Michael hadn’t seen since he moved out of the old neighborhood. “We’re the Antons,” he told her. She turned without a word and led them toward the rear of the house. The door of the last room stood open, exposing two narrow beds pushed together and a low, ugly vanity bearing a very old TV. “Bathroom’s across the hall,” the woman said. “Payment’s in advance, no checks. Nine dollars even.” She held forth the flat of her palm, and Michael counted the money into it. “Take that key on top of the TV if you go out,” she said. Then she left.

  Go out? All Michael wanted to do was drop onto the nearer of the beds; never mind that it was barely past noon. He was so tired that even this bleak, stark room seemed like a haven. But Pauline said, “You want to use the bathroom before we leave?”

  “Leave for where?”

  “Michael! We have to go find our grandson!”

  “Right now?” he asked.

  “He’s waiting for us! Don’t you want to meet him?”

  No, he didn’t, really. This child had been sprung on them too suddenly. Most grandparents were given nine months to prepare themselves. Shoot, they were given years, as a rule, while their daughters courted, got engaged, had formal weddings . . . But Pauline was so eager, with her tears wiped away now and her face lit up and animated. So he said, “All right, hon,” and went off to use the bathroom.

  When they started out again, they disagreed about which direction to take. Michael knew for a fact that Haight Street lay to their right. Already the neighborhood’s general design was becoming clear to him. But Pauline said no, the landlady had told her it was a left. So they stood there on the steps while she dug through her purse for her notes. Out came her billfold, her cosmetic kit, her eyeglass case . . . and a tiny red metal fire engine still in its cellophane-windowed box. Michael pretended not to notice, but when she said, “Yes, turn right. Didn’t I say turn right?” he told her, “Sure, hon,” and reached out to cup her elbow as they descended the steps.

  The air smelled like chili con carne. It reminded him how long it had been since breakfast—if you could call that limp, stale pastry and canned orange juice on the plane a breakfast. “Hey, Poll?” he said. “Maybe we could take the little boy out for a hot dog.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “The landlady would probably be glad to get rid of him for a couple of hours.”

  “Couple of hours?” Pauline asked. She stopped walking and looked at him. “What are you talking about? He’s not the landlady’s responsibility; he’s yours and mine.”

  “Well, but—”

  “We’re taking him for good, Michael. We’re packing him up and taking him with us, because we are all he’s got.”

  Michael had known this, of course, and yet somehow he hadn’t absorbed the full implications. He said, “Right this minute we’re taking him?”

  “Where has your mind been?”

  “Well, it’s just that . . . I guess I was thinking, you know, we’d wait till we had Lindy too.”

  “When might that be, though?” Pauline asked him. “We can’t leave a child unattended in some rooming house! We have to collect him immediately. But what to do after that . . . I don’t know. I don’t know.” They started walking again. “That person at the retreat didn�
��t give us the faintest idea how long Lindy might be staying there.”

  “I’m going to phone the guy this evening,” Michael said. He had already decided that. Pauline was right; he had given in too easily. “Who knows, she may already be coming out of whatever it was. Lots of times, people have these flash-in-the-pan bad spells. But if she isn’t, I’ll say, ‘Look. We feel she would do better on home ground.’ Why, Baltimore’s got the best medical experts in the country! And if he still tries to keep us from seeing her—”

  “Here’s the place,” Pauline said, coming to a stop.

  She was looking at a house even more ramshackle than its neighbors, although it must once have been the height of elegance. The double front door had two oval windows, one with an etched, beveled-glass pane and the other covered over with cardboard. Lindy had climbed these very steps, skirting the one that was rotten. She had turned this very doorknob, which hung loose above a missing lock that was now just a shredded hole in the wood.

  “It’s the number she told me, all right,” Pauline said, clearly wishing it weren’t.

  They climbed the steps themselves, and Michael pressed the cracked rubber button to the left of the door.

  “How do I look?” Pauline asked him.

  “You look fine, hon.”

  It seemed odd to him that she would care, when they were meeting a mere child.

  A young girl with pale, stringy hair opened the door and cocked her head at them. She wore a blue gingham dress, long-sleeved and ankle-length like something from pioneer days. Another boarder, Michael assumed—maybe even another missing daughter. But Pauline said, “Destiny?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, hi! I’m Pauline. This is my husband, Michael.”

  “Oh, good,” the girl said. “You got here.”

  Pauline stepped into the entrance hall, but Michael felt he needed a moment to adjust. (The word “landlady” had conjured up an entirely different image.)

  “I didn’t want to call the welfare people if there was any way around it,” Destiny was telling Pauline in a low, confiding voice.

  “Welfare!”

  “I don’t trust those people as far as I can throw them. But I knew I’d have to do something. He just stays shut away in their room; he won’t leave it no matter what. Sometimes I hear him tiptoe off to the bathroom, but then when I start up the stairs he scoots back and slams the door.”