Out in the street, men in work clothes began to pass by. A dark carriage rolled past and then an automobile, its bright windows gleaming in the morning light. In the distance, the sound of the interurban as it began its morning run. August held my hands and gave them a squeeze. Then he dropped them and sat over his steaming coffee and stirred milk into the cup. He held the pitcher out to me.
I spooned sugar into my cup and realized that for the first time in my life I could have as much sugar as I wanted. I tossed in an extra spoonful just because I could. Only someone long imprisoned could find so much joy in such a tiny thing. Then I added milk and stirred the coffee with my spoon. A man in a business suit came in and nodded at us. He took the table next to ours and the woman came over and took his order.
All of a sudden I was starved. When the woman brought our sweet rolls, I gobbled mine as if I had been famished all of my life. August watched me and laughed and ordered two more. Outside, the traffic on the street thickened. Men came along the sidewalk, in work clothes gone gray at the knees, in black suits with pin-striped vests and crisp white shirts, in dungarees and in canvas trousers, wearing shirts without collars and the plaid flannel and dark twill trousers of the Menominee. Men everywhere and the world belonged to them, and always had, and always would, and the very fact of this blinded them to the rest of us.
The clock tower across the square struck once, for seven thirty. Across town my father would have come home. He would be ready to go to bed. He would have let Martha have it when he learned that I had left. A tiny bit of joy rolled away from me when I thought of this. I set my roll on my plate. “August,” I said. He smiled when I said his name. “Tell me what happened last night.”
“Last night?”
“When you went to see my father.” A small knot tightened behind my ribs.
“At the bar, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“It was no problem.” He smiled at me again. “Like I said.”
“But tell me,” I said.
He lifted his cup and finished his coffee and then got the attention of the woman by the stove. He twirled his finger over his cup. She brought the coffeepot and poured. She looked at me and I nodded and she refilled mine. Then August said that he went to the bar directly from my house. He spent a few minutes combing his hair and straightening his clothes before he went in. The people who passed him on the street looked at him strangely, but he did not mind because what were people’s opinions anyway but their own misguided ideas about things? Meaningless. When he walked up to the bar, he thought right away that my father had been waiting for him. He took his apron off and led August into a back room, where there was a padded table and around that four chairs and a mirrored bar that was much smaller than the bar out front but stocked with better brands of liquor. My father held out a chair and told August to have a seat. Then he took two glasses from the bar back and filled them from one of the bottles. He brought these over to the table. He said that he knew this day would come and so he had been looking into things and had learned all about the Bethke family. Had learned all about the Bethke family ways. Knew that the family wasn’t the best but had quickly figured out that they weren’t the worst, either. Maybe not quite like everyone else but not so bad that they could not have a drink and entertain the future. That was what he said. Entertain the future.
August knew that what he meant was a very particular future and he said that this was why he had come to the bar on this rainy night, to have this very conversation. But he refused the drink. Once accepted, it would change things between them and he did not want that change to come before they had conducted their business. And so they had left the glasses untouched while they discussed what was to be done with me. My father pointed out that he had already told me that my days of wandering in the woods were over. August told him he could not agree more. If my father was surprised by this, he didn’t show it. He simply said that he was glad they were in agreement. But August knew that they were not yet in agreement and he said so and my father’s eyes hardened. He tried to stare August down but this was a ridiculous enterprise and had been tried by other men and they too had come to nothing with that approach. So August merely looked back at my father and eventually my father dropped his gaze and returned to the drinks, which he offered again. Still August said no. Still he said they had business to conduct. And my father raised his left eyebrow and asked what that might be.
And my father, much as August expected, did not burst out laughing when August said what he had come for, nor did my father say no. He merely drummed his fingers on the padding on the tabletop and explained that this was a place where men came to play games of chance—poker, mostly—and in this way, the whole room had the feel of a gamble about it, like any place where you could come and roll the dice or try your hand with Lady Luck. That dreams could come true here but they could also die. And he asked August which he preferred. August said that he did not gamble, for that was a fool’s errand, and he preferred things that had a great deal more certainty about them. And my father told him that there was nothing in the world that could assure certainty among men. He smiled in a superior fashion when he said this, and August realized that my father thought he had found the flaw in August’s thinking and things would naturally proceed from there. But that was not the way things were going to be. August told him that in this way of thinking he was very wrong, for there was one thing that would always bind one man to another and this had everything to do with the possession of certain things, and in particular, the possession of something that one man had that the other man wanted. This bond often meant the working out of exchanges. There was always a way to strike a bargain in such cases and this was what he was prepared to do. And he mentioned that perhaps my father had some need of a carpenter around the house.
August smiled when he said this. He explained that he had offered this first because he did not want to play his whole hand with the opening bid. As August expected, my father said that he had no need of someone who would only come and spend half his time sneaking into corners with his daughter. So right away they came to a dead end. August had waited for my father to make a counteroffer but my father had just fiddled with the rim of padding along the table edge and watched August. Again he offered him a drink and even took one of the glasses and moved it closer to August. He appeared to think this was a time of merriment rather than one of great seriousness. But August dismissed the glass. He said that they were like the two men he had described, already tied by something and my father well knew what it was. And my father had done exactly what August expected, which was not to mention my name at all but to go directly to the thing itself. He drummed the tabletop and then he stopped. He said something like, I suppose you mean money, and August nodded, and my father said, You think she is for sale. And this was a surprise because August had not thought that my father would be so blunt about the whole thing. On the other hand, if he wanted to speak plainly, that was fine with August. He shrugged and reached into his coat and laid a black leather pocketbook on the table. He asked my father what it would take to solve this whole dilemma. And my father looked at August and looked at the wallet and looked at the table and said there was no money in the world that could buy his daughter. That was when August told him that he was not trying to buy his daughter because after all he loved his daughter very much. Instead he was there to make the whole situation easier, to share what he had with a fellow workingman, to make it clear that he wanted what was in each man’s best interest. He did not intend to take anything away without bringing something to the table. That was all. It was not a matter of making a purchase. It was a matter of making something unequal equal, and each should take something that would make his life more pleasant. He would waive all claim to a dowry and he would walk away as soon as my father accepted the situation.
He was not surprised when my father picked up the pocketbook. The clamoring from the bar had gotten louder and he had taken to looking over his shoulder. He
knew he had to get back to work. He knew he could not stay away forever. He had to complete the transaction there and then or give it up for another night.
He told August that he wanted to hear of a wedding as soon as possible and that he should take good care of his daughter just as he himself had done for all these years. She was his treasured daughter and he would not stand it if he should hear of some mistreatment. And then they drank their drinks and shook hands and that was it. From the bar, August walked to meet his brother. Alfred told him that he had been to see their cousin as planned, and he did have three rooms to let at the back of his house, and this was where we would make our start.
“And of course, there was one more thing,” August said. “Your father did not wait for the final offer.” He grinned and reached into his coat. He pulled out an old brown leather wallet thick with bills. He dropped this on the table between us. “You see? All this could have been his.” He winked at me.
I do not know what I expected. Perhaps for my father to refuse or to threaten to lock me in my room or to track me down and beat me to a pulp. But I had not expected my father to give in so easily. To take the money and shake August’s hand, as if I were a horse or a head of lettuce.
William Oliver was wrong. The arrangements among men had nothing to do with physical might. Men were not wolves. They were bankers, adding and totaling and betting on margins and cashing in chips and swapping credit slips and taking loans and deeding property to each other. A passage of cash like this was an ordinary day. The man who came out on top was settled by determinations of value. Money was everything. People like me? We were nothing but objects to be passed hand to hand.
August tapped the top of the wallet. “Plenty more where that came from,” he said. He slapped the table once, for emphasis. He was pleased with himself and pleased with the story and he thought that I would be pleased with it, too. Perhaps he imagined that later we’d tell jokes about the way he’d gotten the best of my father and proved that he was the better man.
“You paid for me?” I said. “August?” My voice was so low that even I could barely hear it.
“What?” he said, startled. “No. No! It’s just that I could do it and so I did. I figured your father for exactly the kind of man he is. I greased the skids. I saved us some trouble. I set it up so things would work out fine.” He paused, a stunned expression on his face. Clearly, he had never for a moment considered how I might understand the story he had taken so much pride in telling, and it had never occurred to him that I might understand it this way. And then he drew himself up to cover his hurt but that did not work because I saw through him and I saw that my words had stung him. “I do not know what you think,” he said. “But I do not own you. If you want to go, you can go.” He waved his hand at the street. “There is the door.”
The man at the table next to ours used a roll to wipe up the grease from the last of his sausages. He sipped his coffee and looked past me out into the street and squinted at the passing scene. He sat so quietly and with his attention directed so fully elsewhere that I knew he had been listening to everything we said. I wanted to scream at him to mind his own business. To stay out of this, for the things that passed between August and me were private and belonged to no one but us.
But I knew that was not true. If anything, nothing about this was private at all. My father and August, establishing the rules and measures and boundaries of their trade, working out the details, figuring their gains and losses, locked in their dance: these in fact marked out the world in definite and definable ways. And the man sitting next to us had clearly recognized the story. It might have been his story for all I knew, and if not his exactly, then similar to ones he knew well. Surely he had paid for something he coveted himself. Surely he had put cash in the bank.
“Do you want me to go?” I said.
“No, I do not want you to go,” August said. He took my hands in his and rolled the bones in my fingers until I bit my lips to keep from crying out. He let go of my hands. “I want you to stay forever,” he said in a wretched voice, the words coiling slowly out of him as if he could not bear to say them. “The way we said.”
When I did not reply, he stood up and came around the table and dropped to his knees. He wrapped his arms around my legs. He buried his face in my lap. His voice was muffled but he told me that he had loved me since the very first day he had set eyes on me. All he wanted was for me to be happy. All he wanted was to go to the courthouse and stand in front of a justice and get on with it. Then he said that if my happiness meant that I should leave him right then and there, he would not stop me. He would step back and let me go. He would never darken my doorway again.
He said all of this in a very dramatic way and I was embarrassed. I am not the kind of person who calls attention to herself in public. The man at the table next to ours cleared his throat and signaled to the woman at the stove that he wanted to pay. A man in grimy overalls opened the front door and after him came two older boys with jackets slung over their shoulders. They stepped into the tearoom and looked at me and looked at August on his knees with his face pressed into my lap and then stepped around him and took a table near the back. I felt the damp heat of August’s words when he breathed them through my skirt. He was new to me again and I wasn’t sure I liked this part of him. But then he began to stroke my calves under my skirt, his palms gently cupping the curve of my legs, his fingertips lightly brushing my stockings and then sliding between my knees, and I felt that same quiver run up my body that always ran up my body when August touched me. My muscles softened and I sagged a little. At that moment, he was August again and any doubt I might have had rippled away.
Outside, the street had filled with wagons and men in dark hats on horseback and women with parasols, as if they expected the sun to be bright and hot this early in spring. Inside our own world, August breathed warm air onto my thighs and steadily caressed my legs until I told him again that I would marry him. It did not take long.
By the time we walked down to the courthouse, horses were tied up at the long poles in front, their wagons and buggies angled behind them into the street. August pointed to the doorway that led to the jail where he had been locked up, but of course I already knew where it was, since it stood next to the police station, where in the late fall I had stood in the cold, trying to think of exactly the right words to say when I told the police that my father had murdered my mother. As we crossed the road, I thought I saw Edwin moving toward me. But when I looked again, the sidewalk was bare and sunny and there was only a wooden Indian in front of a cigar store.
We climbed the main steps and passed through the wooden doors into a dim lobby with a polished marble floor. When a man dropped his key ring, the sound came over me like a shot. Above, a huge marble staircase led to the second floor. August took my hand and led me up the broad steps and along a wide corridor until we stood in front of a door that was half opaque milk glass and lettered in black and gold with the words Clerk of Court.
He squeezed my hand. “Are you ready?”
I leaned into him. I breathed in the smell of him. I put aside everything I thought I knew, the deal he made with my father, the way our future seemed a little less clear than it had before. I did not care about any of it. I just cared about the pounding in my chest. August’s touch on my skin. The next thing that would happen, the idea of which shuddered through me, as if I had already seen August naked in the light of day, already felt him pierce me to my soul.
“Yes,” I said. He put his arm around me and hugged me tight. Then he opened the door and we went inside.
When Martha and I were little, we played dress-up. We riffled through my mother’s trunk and wrapped ourselves in old tablecloths and bits of lace left over from the curtains she’d made. We strapped our waists with lengths of ribbon and fought over who got to wear the white, for there were only two kinds of ribbon in the trunk, white and a sort of ugly navy, and we both knew that brides did not wear navy. We wanted to put on the
se clothes and feel wholly and completely in our bodies, as if we had traveled through time to the day when we would occupy the places we were meant to stand. We walked around the house with napkins on our heads. We stomped through the yard and sang a song without melody, pretending it was the Wedding March. We had no idea what the Wedding March might sound like or if something called the Wedding March even existed, but we had the idea that when you got married, you marched like a soldier into a land to which you otherwise did not belong. You needed a marching song if you were going to do that. You needed a good strong beat, like an anthem, to drive you forward.
I had no wedding dress, no flowers, no ring, no father to give me away, no sisters dressed in pretty gowns to precede me down the aisle, no mother to weep when I went into the arms of my husband. I did not care. I had August. It was springtime, when everything begins and begins and begins. I felt slightly sick with excitement. I wondered if I could be undone by happiness.
The justice of the peace told us that he tended to keep these things brief and to the point and he hoped we didn’t mind. If we did, we might want to wait and go and see a preacher. But August said that we were ready now. The judge picked up a New Testament from the top of his desk and flipped to a place marked with a purple satin ribbon. He read the declarations and the vows quickly and in a straightforward way, without inflection or interest, as if he were reading the directions to a kit. August said I do and I said I do and the justice said, “By the powers vested in me by the state of Wisconsin and the county of Waukesha, I now pronounce you man and wife.”
The End of Always: A Novel Page 15