The Amateur Marriage (40 page)

Her eyes filled with tears again, but this time she went on facing George. “I see now that I always imagined the whole lot of you right where I left you,” she said. “Mom in her miniskirt. Dad wrestling with that old lawnmower. You and Karen kids still.”

“Pagan’s here in Baltimore,” George blurted out. He felt ashamed of his earlier impatience.

Lindy watched him steadily.

“But he lives at the school where he works. That’s why he’s not in the phone book. He teaches an experimental music program for autistic children. He married his college sweetheart and they have a baby boy.”

“I’m a grandmother,” Lindy said. And then, “Does he hate me?” For a moment, it seemed she was asking whether her grandson hated her.

“He never mentions you,” George said.

That sounded so harsh, though, that he hurried to add, “But I don’t know. Who can say? He was so little at the time, I’m not sure he remembers you. Or, rather . . .” Because that, too, sounded harsh. He started over. “When Mom and Dad first got him,” he said, “he didn’t mention
anything.
He was . . . kind of silent. Kind of deaf and dumb.”

Kind of autistic, in fact—a thought that hadn’t occurred to George till this very moment. Did that explain Pagan’s choice of careers, which George had always viewed as discouraging if not futile?

“But gradually he warmed up,” he said. “With Mom, for instance—I remember at first he acted as if he didn’t know she existed, but every time she left the room you could see him sort of stiffen, and then he would relax again when she came back.”

“So he adjusted, by and by.”

“Oh, yes! By and by he settled in and had a perfectly normal childhood.”

It seemed, though, that George couldn’t leave well enough alone. He felt compelled to go on. He said, “The only thing I’m not sure of is, has he really forgotten you? Or does he remember and just not let on? Because sometimes I get the feeling . . . well, sorry to say this, but . . .”

Why
was
he saying it? But now he was forced to finish what he had begun. “I get the feeling he’s sending the message that we’re not allowed to bring your name up,” he said. “It’s like he’s silently forbidding us. Though of course I could be imagining things.”

He stole a glance at her face. At least she had stopped crying; she was listening to him calmly. “I could very well be mistaken,” he told her.

She said, “I don’t know which to wish for: that he remembers, or that he’s forgotten. We were so close, once. We did everything together! We were all each other had. But once—”

She looked at the lamp again. This time the pause was longer.

“Once I threw him down a flight of stairs,” she said.

“Oh, well. Well, now!” George said. He shifted in his seat. “Gosh, I’m sure you—oh, why, these things happen! Gosh. Anyhow. So—”

“And how about you, George?” Lindy asked.

“Me.”

“Are you married? Do you have children?”

“Why, yes, Sally should be home any minute, in fact.” He wished she would hurry. He and Lindy had had ample time alone, he felt. “We have a son at Princeton, and a daughter still in high school. I’m a vice-president with a firm that facilitates mergers for small businesses.”

“Mergers for small businesses,” Lindy repeated. George glanced at her suspiciously, but she seemed merely to be turning the phrase over in her mind. “You used to make model airplanes covered with tissue paper,” she told him.

He gave a short laugh and said, “Not anymore.”

“And Karen? Is she married too?”

“Nope. She’s a hotshot lawyer, something to do with the homeless.”

He expected Lindy to be impressed, and might even have been trying for it. (Karen wasn’t really as hotshot as all that.) But she wore the distracted expression of someone preparing to speak the instant the other person shut up; and almost before George had finished she said, “Please, George, will you call him for me?”

He didn’t have to ask whom she meant.

“Please?” she said. “And then if he wants—if he doesn’t say no—I could get on the line.”

“Well,” he said.

“I couldn’t bear it if
I
called and he hung up on me.”

No convincing excuse came to mind. He couldn’t explain even to himself why he was so reluctant. In the end he had to say, “Well, all right, Lindy.”

He rose and waited for her to rise too. “The phone’s in the den,” he told her.

“Oh,” she said, but she went on sitting there. Then slowly, like a much heavier woman, she collected her purse and hauled herself up and wrapped her layers of sweaters more closely around her. “I’m scared to pieces,” she told him. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”

He led her back across the front hall without answering.

In the den, he switched on a lamp and settled her in a leather recliner. Then he sat down at his desk and reached for the phone. It was a newfangled phone with automatic dialing—a mystery to him, but Sally was good at these things and she had programmed it for him. All he had to do was punch a single button. In Lindy’s presence, this felt like showing off: See how effortlessly I, at least, can get in touch with your son? And it was misleading as well, because Sally was the one who kept in touch with the family, most often. Still, when Pagan answered, George did his best to sound hearty and familiar. “Pagan. Hi. It’s George,” he said.

“George? What’s up?”

Somehow, the Antons had reached the stage where a phone call meant bad news; you could tell it from the apprehensive note in Pagan’s voice. It must have been Pauline’s death that had led them all to that expectation. So George drawled his answer out long and slow and easy. “Oh, nothing much. Not a whole lot. Can’t say much is doing at
this
end, but . . .”

Oddly enough, he felt his heart start to pound. And Lindy, perched on the edge of the recliner, was gripping her bag so tightly that he could see the waxy white of her knuckles beneath the skin.

“. . . but I do have something of a surprise for you,” he said. “You’ll never guess who I’ve got sitting across from me.”

“My mother,” Pagan said flatly.

George said, “You knew?”

Lindy raised her chin and watched him.

“No,” Pagan said, “but who else would it be?”

“Right. You’re right. So. Would you like to tell her hello?”

“Why not,” Pagan said.

George passed the receiver to Lindy and then (against every inclination) rose to leave. He was nearly out of the room before she spoke. “Hello?” she said.

He hung around in the hall long enough to hear her say, “Oh, I’m fine. And you?”

In the living room, he sat back down in his chair and stared into space. The unreal feeling still buzzed around his head. He searched his mind for images of the Lindy he had known—a bony child, all knees and elbows, forever clambering over him or nudging him aside or reaching past him for something. Her shins covered with bruises from roller-skating and stoopball. Her hair matted and tangled, no matter how often their mother tried to comb it.

He remembered how they’d compete with each other, fight over every candy bar and comic book. “Me first!” Lindy would tell him, and he would say, “No fair!” and their mother would call, “Stop that, you two!” He saw Lindy playing jacks on the sidewalk in front of the store, snatching up ninesies and tensies in a heedless, all-out swoop that kept the backs of her fingers perpetually scraped raw. He pictured the bedroom on St. Cassian Street that he and his sisters had shared, which had formerly been their parents’ room and long before that, their grandmother’s—he and Lindy in the double bed and Karen in the crib. At night Lindy whispered stories to him. “Once there was a man with no eyes who died in this very house, did you know that?” He would clap his hands over his ears but then remove them, horrified and intrigued in equal parts. “And then what?” he would ask.

Maybe the woman in the den was an impostor.

The front door slammed, and Sally called, “George?” He heard her heels tapping across the parquet. When she appeared in the living-room entranceway she seemed to have come from a whole different planet, with her ash-blond hair as sleek as brushed aluminum, her cheeks bright from the cold, the collar of her cashmere coat standing up around her face. “George, is Sam home yet? I forgot to tell her—what is it?”

“What’s what?” he said.

“Why are you looking like that?”

“I’m not looking any way.”

“What’s going on, George?”

“Nothing’s going on!” He stood up with elaborate slowness and loosened his tie. “Though one thing I guess I should mention,” he said. “Lindy’s here.”

“Lindy who?” Sally asked.

“Lindy, my sister.”

She stared at him. She said, “Here in this house?”

“She’s on the phone just now with Pagan.”

At that moment, Lindy arrived in the hall behind her. Sally spun around.

“How’d it go?” George asked.

But she appeared not to hear him. She was looking at Sally with a strangely blank expression. Just as George was realizing that he ought to make introductions, Sally rushed over to her and seized both her hands and said, “Lindy! Oh, this is so exciting! This is so unexpected! I’m Sally, by the way—George’s wife. I am so, so happy to meet you!”

Lindy used to hate it when people fussed like that. (Their own mother, for instance.) But now she took it in stride, or perhaps didn’t even notice. She allowed Sally to lead her to the couch.

“Have you been here long? Where’d you come from? How’d you find us?” Sally asked. She perched next to her, still in her coat, so that she seemed to be the one visiting. “What do you think of your brother? Would you know him? You don’t much look like him, do you? I guess you got your dad’s coloring.”

George said, “Sally, could we just hear how her talk with Pagan went?”

“I’m sorry! Listen to me run on!” Sally cried. Then she sat up straighter and laced her fingers together and waited primly for Lindy to speak.

Lindy said, “Oh. Well.”

“Was it very emotional?” Sally asked. “I can’t even imagine! All these years, and then, why, you must have had so much to say to each other!”

“Not really,” Lindy said.

“Was he just speechless with amazement?”

George said, “For God’s sake, Sally, let her talk, will you?”

Sally blinked. Lindy said, “That’s all right.”

She spoke somehow without moving her lips, her face stiff and numb-looking. “His voice had changed,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing you don’t think to brace for—that he wouldn’t have that clear little sweet little voice anymore.”

“But what did he say?” Sally asked, and then she shot a quick glance at George.

“He was perfectly polite. He asked how I was; he said it was nice to hear from me; he said yes, he had a family now . . . I said to him, I said, ‘Do you think maybe we could meet?’ He said, ‘Meet.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t really see the point, do you?’”

Sally said, “Point!”

“Well, I suppose that’s understandable,” George said.

Both women looked at him.

He said, “In view, I mean, of the . . . you know, circumstances.”

“No, we do
not
know,” Sally told him, and then she turned back to Lindy. “I hope you convinced him otherwise.”

“No, I just said, ‘Fine,’” Lindy said. “I said, ‘In case you ever might want to get in touch, though, I’ll leave my number with George.’”

“He was just taken unawares,” Sally decided. “He’s very kind-hearted; believe me, he is. It’s just that he wasn’t expecting this. He’ll call back! I promise he will. That phone’s going to ring any minute.”

“No, I don’t think it will,” Lindy said. She gathered her sweaters around her. She said, “I should be getting home now.”

“Right now? But we’ve barely met!” Sally cried.

“I do have a husband waiting.”

“You’re married? Where do you live? I don’t know anything about you!”

“George will tell you,” Lindy said. “I just seem to be really, really tired. I have to go.”

She rose and started toward the front hall, holding her bag in both hands. She moved as if her feet hurt.

George said, “Wait.”

She paused, not bothering to look at him.

“What about Dad and Karen?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to see them?”

“Maybe some other time,” she said.

A tantalizingly familiar mixture of frustration and bafflement swept through him, and he said, “Suit yourself.”

But Sally said, “Lindy. Please. Reconsider. They’ll be
desperate
to see you! Couldn’t we just phone them and invite them over? Just for a little visit? A few little minutes, maybe?”

“You know,” Lindy told her, “I really feel I might be about to die of tiredness. I’m sorry. You seem like a very nice person. But all I want to do is go home and go to bed. George, I left my number on your desk pad if Pagan wants it. But he won’t.”

The peculiar thing about it—the unjust thing—was that everybody blamed George. Sally said he’d acted so passive, he’d given up so easily, he had seemed almost pleased when Pagan turned Lindy down. “Pleased!” George said. “Excuse me, but who was it who phoned him, may I ask? Who told him she wanted to speak to him?”

“I swear you looked downright satisfied when you heard he wouldn’t meet her in person. You said, ‘Oh, well, I suppose that’s understandable.’” (Here Sally made her voice sound booming and pompous, really nothing like George’s.) “Admit it: you were on his side.
You
didn’t think he should meet her, either. You’re an unforgiving person, George Anton.”

“All I meant,” he told her, “was that it might have been anticipated that a three-year-old thrown to the wolves by his mother would possibly not have much to say to her all these decades later.”

“He’s not a three-year-old anymore; he’s twenty-five. And of course he has things to say to her, even if they’re angry things! You should have called him right back, George, and told him to get himself over here. You shouldn’t have left the den in the first place. Lindy probably said everything wrong out of nervousness.”