by Unknown
Michael decided he’d get out of harm’s way, go pay a visit to Eustace. It was a custom of his, now that Eustace was subsisting on Social Security checks, to drive into the city from time to time and slip the old man a few dollars. So he left, calling, “Back in a while!” All right, maybe he didn’t make absolutely certain Pauline heard him. But he’d been remarking for several days that he planned to do this. She could have figured it out.
She didn’t, however—or claimed she didn’t. When he got home (feeling bloated from the Dr Pepper Eustace liked to serve), she met him at the door demanding, “Where in the world have you been?”
“At Eustace’s. I told you. Why?” he asked. He glanced at the clock behind her. Only four-thirty, and the party wasn’t starting till five.
But Pauline said, “You did not tell me! I’ve been going out of my mind! Daddy got here half an hour ago and he’s sitting on his own with no one to talk to but Pagan, and Karen went for ice and hasn’t been heard of since, and you haven’t even fired up the grill yet!”
“There’s plenty of time for the grill,” he said. But he was speaking to her back, because she had already flounced off.
From that point until the end of the evening, he didn’t have a chance to exchange two words with her. She was racing around in a thousand directions. But finally the last guest left, and Karen volunteered to put Pagan to bed, and that was when Michael realized that Pauline was still mad at him. When he brought a stack of plates into the kitchen she snapped, “I can do that, thank you very much!” and she grabbed the plates away from him and set them down so hard it was a wonder they didn’t break.
“Now, Poll,” he said.
“Stop calling me Poll!”
“Pauline, I’m sorry I went out this afternoon but I only went to see Eustace, and you know it would hurt his feelings if I didn’t sit a minute; what would he think if—”
“Oh, Eustace’s feelings; yes, by all means let’s consider Eustace’s feelings—some old man who quote-unquote worked for you a million years ago. Never mind that I’ve got an entire enormous party on my hands and a three-year-old child underfoot and poor Daddy wondering why nobody’s made him feel welcome!”
“Well, how was I to know your dad would show up early?”
“He’s family, Michael! He can show up whenever he wants to! But you think just your own family counts, your own cantankerous mother who I cared for till the day she died without a word of thanks and then you wouldn’t so much as lift a finger to help us look for my mother the time she wandered off and got lost!”
“I helped you look for her lots of times! Lord, those last two years of her life I swear I made a hobby out of looking for your mother! But one lone, single, isolated evening, when nobody else was around to close the store—”
“Oh, the store, the store! Always your precious store! What do you want?” Pauline asked Karen, who had appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Nothing,” Karen said hastily. “Just saying good night.” She ducked out again.
“Night, hon,” Michael called after her, but Pauline refused to speak. (The woman had no partitions; if she was angry at one person she let her anger spill over onto the world at large.)
“Even when your own daughter ran away from home,” she said, “where were you? At the store! The everlasting store!”
“Well, naturally. It was a weekday. Where would you expect me to be? While you, on the other hand, who had nothing on this earth to do but keep track of our three children—”
“Oh, that is low, Michael. That is low and base and unjust. You’re going to try and blame me for Lindy’s leaving? How about you? How about a father so cold and remote that his own children can’t wait to get away from him and find some affection elsewhere? That his daughter absconds with the first boy she meets and his son gets married before he’s through college and his youngest won’t even come home for summer vacation?”
Michael often reached a point, in his fights with Pauline, where he was overcome by such helpless rage that he had to leave the room. Pauline would call it withdrawing—further evidence of his coldness. But Pauline had no idea. It was either leave or choke her into permanent silence. Sometimes, he felt his fingers actually tingling with the urge to grasp that corded neck of hers tighter and tighter and tighter.
He spun on his heel and walked out the back door, letting the screen slap shut. On the darkened patio, where chairs still sat about in friendly clusters, he grabbed the farthest chair and slung it around so it was facing away from the house. He threw himself into it and tipped his head back, forcing himself to breathe slowly while he gazed up at the sky.
Behind him, the lights of the house blinked off one by one; he could tell by the way the night sky grew deeper and the stars began to show. He heard a series of doors slamming: kitchen door, bedroom door, and probably a closet door. But he sat on, willing his breaths to stay even.
Such a frantic, impossible woman, so unstable, even in good moods, with her exultant voice and glittery eyes, her dangerous excitement. Why, why, why was she the one he had chosen to marry? When it could have been some sturdy, sweet Polish girl from the neighborhood, or one of those kind young women at the Red Cross canteen in Virginia! Why had he headed instead for somebody out of control?
She had no right to criticize his relationship with the children. He’d been so much closer to them than his father had been to him, and so much more involved in their lives! And as for the store, well, where did she think the money came from for their camps and music lessons and college tuition and trips? Oh, she never had appreciated how well he’d done with the business. First she’d badgered him into abandoning the old location, even though it provided them with a perfectly decent income. (And it was an abandonment. He’d known from the start that the buyer planned to turn the place into a liquor store.) Then she’d wanted a full-fledged supermarket, one of those fluorescent-lit monsters with aisles so long that you couldn’t see to the end of them; but Michael had had the good sense to realize that what was lacking out here in the suburbs was a version of the old neighborhood grocery, small-scale and personal, with the emphasis on service. Clerks who greeted the customers by name and put their bills on the tab and offered cookies to their babies. Now he had a clientele that wouldn’t dream of shopping elsewhere. But did Pauline give him credit for that? No, to this day she continued lobbying for expansion, and when he argued she would remind him that she’d been right about moving the business, after all. She would point out what had happened in the city—the crime and the decay and lately those dreadful race riots. “If not for me, you’d still be there, wouldn’t you,” she said. “Selling three half-pints of milk every day to three old ladies!”
Sometimes he felt they were more like brother and sister than husband and wife. This constant elbowing and competing, jockeying for position, glorying in I-told-you-so. Did other couples behave that way? They didn’t seem to, at least from outside.
He believed that all of them, all those young marrieds of the war years, had started out in equal ignorance. He pictured them marching down a city street, as people had on the day he enlisted. Then two by two they fell away, having grown wise and seasoned and comfortable in their roles, until only he and Pauline remained, as inexperienced as ever—the last couple left in the amateurs’ parade.
He closed his eyes and wished for someone to discuss this with. But who? He had lost touch with most of the men in the old neighborhood, who anyhow confined their talk to baseball and the weather. His social life these days was a matter of prearranged gatherings—cocktail parties and sit-down dinners here in Elmview Acres. In fact, he had no friends. Did he even like anyone? Did anyone like him? Could it be true that he was cold and remote?
Wait, though. The screen door twanged open and gently closed. Bare feet padded toward him across the flagstones. Michael felt a melting sense of relief. You could always say that Pauline was his friend. She was closer to him than his own skin; she was the one who had freed him from his st
unted, smothering boyhood.
Except that this was somebody smaller, and shorter and lighter-weight. Somebody who made effortful sounds while pulling up a lawn chair; who had to struggle to climb into it. Michael opened his eyes. After a moment, he reached over and laid a hand on Pagan’s hand, and the two of them sat gazing up at the night sky.
6. Killing the Frog by Degrees
On September 26,1972, Michael and Pauline celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary with a small family dinner. It was a Tuesday—not the best night for a social event, as both George and Karen pointed out. But Pauline had strong feelings about observing the actual date. She liked the thought of announcing, “At this moment thirty years ago, your dad and I were just boarding the train to Washington for our honeymoon.” She would have liked it even better if she could have said that this was the moment when the minister had pronounced them man and wife, but since they’d had an afternoon ceremony that wouldn’t be possible. Neither one of her children was the type to take off work early. (George did something important with mergers, whatever mergers were. Karen was in her second year of law school.)
There were seven around the dinner table: Pauline and Michael at either end, Karen next to Pagan on the window side, and George and Sally on the buffet side with JoJo in a high chair between them. In Pauline’s imagination, a noticeable space gaped where Lindy should have been, but she fancied she was the only one who saw it.
JoJo was the reason they were eating at six p.m. He was only twenty months old. He was a darling, chuckly, dimply boy, the light of Pauline’s life, and she had flat-out refused to hear of his being left at home with a sitter. “If we don’t include our grandchildren, what’s the point of celebrating our marriage?” she asked when Sally apologized for Jojo’s spoon-banging during the blessing. Then she reached over and gave her other grandchild a little squeeze. Pagan was also the light of her life, although now that he’d turned seven he was less tolerant of cuddling. He grinned but ducked away from her, intent on the slice of bread he was buttering.
The menu was a total bore. She’d fixed the same old standbys, roast beef and baked potatoes and iceberg-lettuce salad, with a chocolate cake for dessert. This was her concession to Michael. “For you, sweetheart,” she said, raising her glass. “No experiments. Nothing gourmet. Not a mushroom or an anchovy or an artichoke to be seen. Everything plain and simple, just the way you like.”
Michael stopped chewing long enough to raise his own glass and say, “Well, thank you, hon.” The glasses had champagne in them, but that he didn’t object to. You couldn’t very well serve National Bo when a marriage had endured thirty years.
Michael’s hair was iron-gray now and his face had grown lined and leathery, although he was as lean as ever. Pauline’s hair was who-knew-what-color, probably pure white underneath the Miss Clairol blond. She’d kept a pretty good watch on the pounds, though, not counting the bit of a tummy that she didn’t seem able to do anything about. Yes, all in all she thought they were still a very nice-looking couple. And she was proud of the picture they made as a group: everybody in Sunday best, neatly combed, scrubbed and shiny. Even Karen, who could get sort of straggly when she was absorbed in her studies, had made an effort tonight. She wore pants, as usual, but tailored ones, with a top that matched, and she’d exchanged her unbecoming glasses for the contact lenses that she always claimed made her eyes itch.
It was Karen who presented their gift. First she caught George’s eye with a series of meaningful glances that her parents pretended not to notice, and then when George had excused himself and returned with a flat, tissue-wrapped rectangle she said, “Ahem! May I have your attention, please.”
“Why! What’s this?” Pauline cried, and Michael said, “Aw, hon, you-all didn’t have to get us a present.”
“Right,” Karen said sarcastically, and everyone laughed, because a longtime family joke was how Pauline put so much stock in marking occasions with gifts. Pauline made a shooing gesture with one hand (people tended to exaggerate her character, she felt), and Karen went on. “Mom, Dad, this is from all of us. We wanted to give you something to remind you of these past thirty years.” And she took the package from George and set it on Pauline’s lap.
Clearly, it was some sort of framed picture. Pauline could tell that from the squared-off edges and the indentation at the center. She supposed they’d enlarged a wedding snapshot, or maybe commissioned a watercolor version of one. So it came as a surprise when she tore away the tissue to find, instead, two black-and-white ovals set side by side in ivory linen. The first was a photo of a very young Michael in a rough plaid jacket, squinting against the sun. The second showed Pauline, also young, laughing and holding on to her hat. Both pictures were familiar to her—Michael’s from a shoe box of photos handed down from her mother-in-law, and her own from her sister Donna’s wedding album—but they looked so different as ovals, outlined in gilt and matted, that it took her a second to place them. Even then, she didn’t understand their relevance to her anniversary. “Isn’t that nice!” Michael said when she turned it his way, and he spoke so bluffly that she knew he too was at a loss.
Sally was the one who explained. “It’s you two just before you met,” she said.
“Before we met?” Pauline asked.
“Donna’s wedding was November eighth, 1941. And Michael’s picture has somebody’s handwriting on the back: ‘Thanksgiving 1941 at Uncle Bron’s.’ So it was just weeks—days, really—before you walked into the grocery store.”
“Is that a fact!” Michael said.
Pauline, though, was struck speechless. That those two photos should document, coincidentally, almost the very last moment of their lives as separate people . . . Oh, see what children they were, so innocent! Even the sunlight on Michael’s face seemed innocent—watery and gentle—and the lilting curve of the feather on Pauline’s hat.
“We didn’t have the faintest idea,” she said in a wondering tone. “We didn’t suspect a thing! There we were; nothing had happened yet. No Pearl Harbor, no war; we hadn’t laid eyes on each other. Our children didn’t exist. Our grandchildren weren’t imaginable.”
“Well! Happy anniversary!” George broke in.
“Remember when you plastered that bandage across my forehead?” Pauline asked Michael. “I thought you were so good-looking. I still think of that time whenever I smell adhesive tape.”
“You wore your red coat,” he said, “and when we went off to join the parade I lost sight of you for a moment but then I caught this flash of red, and it seemed like all the blood came rushing back into my veins.”
“And those crazy quarrels we had,” she said. “Once I jumped off a Ferris wheel because you’d gone to Katie Vilna’s birthday party without me, remember?”
“While it was still moving!” Michael told the others. “When we were still at least four feet above the ground!”
“The attendant had a conniption,” Pauline added, laughing.
“And the time I mailed all your letters back during special training,” Michael said.
“And the time I got so mad at you for calling me a butterball when I was eight months pregnant.”
“You set off for your parents’ house in your nightgown, remember that?”
Then Michael stopped speaking, and Pauline, following his gaze, saw that none of the others seemed to share their amusement. Only Sally wore a smile—a slight, abstracted smile that she directed at Jojo while she fussed with his bib.
“Well. In any case,” Michael said. “This was awfully nice of you kids.”
“Yes, thank you,” Pauline chimed in.
And all of the grown-ups stirred and sat straighter and reached for their champagne glasses.
“At this moment thirty years ago,” Pauline said, “you and I were just checking into the President Lincoln Hotel in Washington, D.C.”
She stepped out of her dress, gave it a shake, and slipped it onto a hanger. There was the teeniest little dot of pink powder on the collar, bu
t if she covered it with a brooch of some kind she could wear it one more time before sending it to the cleaners.
“A bunch of soldiers and sailors were milling about in the lobby, remember?” she asked Michael. He was emptying his pockets onto the bureau, scrutinizing each note and receipt before he laid it aside, and he didn’t answer. She went on, anyhow. “I sat down on a chair and waited for you to register for the two of us. I held on to my purse with my left hand so everyone could see that I was married.”
She’d been so nervous that her mouth had felt as dry as flannel. She’d kept trying to recall the advice from the book her mother had given her, A Young Woman’s Guide to Matrimony. “Relax,” the book had told her. Ha! “Trust your husband to instruct you.” From where she sat, Michael had looked tentative and awkward, the naked back of his neck as spindly as a schoolboy’s.
“It’s funny how something can seem so long-ago and yet so recent, both at once,” she said. “Why, I can still see the row of nail heads tacked around the end of the chair arm! Brass, they were, and hammered, so that they had this kind of dented feel when I rubbed my fingers across them.”
She gave him time to chime in if he wanted, but evidently he didn’t. He dumped a handful of coins into the china saucer she had set there for that purpose.
“And then this soldier came over,” she said, “a lieutenant colonel, as I recall. He said, ‘Miss? Are you alone?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m waiting for my husband to check us in’—the very first time I’d ever said those words in public, ‘my husband.’ And all of a sudden there you were, standing in front of me fit to be tied. I never did convince you I hadn’t been flirting! We rode up in the elevator with you in a sulk and me chat-chattering on so the bellboy wouldn’t suspect.”