The Amateur Marriage (8 page)

His mother said, “How old would Tessie be now, I’m wondering. Twelve? Thirteen? Michael,
you
must know”—trying to rope him into the conversation.

But Michael just said “Nope” and helped himself to another slice of bread.

“His hip has been acting up,” Pauline explained to his mother. “I’ll bet it’s going to snow. Did you notice how he’s been walking today? And he couldn’t finish his exercises this morning.” As if he weren’t in the room; as if his mother didn’t know the real cause of his behavior.

And his mother went along with it. “Oh,” she said, “I can
feel
the snow! Every joint in my body is giving me fits.”

“Did you take your pills?” Pauline asked her.

“I forgot! Thanks for reminding me.”

“I’ll fetch them. You sit still.”

“No, no! Stay where you are!”

Like partners in some elaborate dance, both women half-stood and appeared to curtsy to each other. Then Pauline sat back down and Michael’s mother rose all the way and shuffled out of the kitchen.

“I should have thought to remind her earlier,” Pauline told Michael. “It’s a whole lot easier to stave off pain than to cure it once it’s set in.”

Michael said nothing. He tore a bite-size piece from his slice of bread and set it on Lindy’s high-chair tray.

“But of course, you’d know that better than I would,” Pauline said. “Accustomed as you are to living with your hip.”

He was silent.

“Michael?”

“Try some bread, Lindy. It’s delicious,” Michael said.

“Michael, aren’t you going to talk to me?”

“Yum, bread. Can you say, ‘Bread’?”

Lindy grinned at him, showing two tiny bottom teeth coated green with mashed asparagus.

“Please don’t be this way, Michael. Can’t we make up?”

“Bread,” he told Lindy distinctly.

“I didn’t mean what I said, honest! It’s just I was feeling so under the weather. Michael, I can’t bear it when you’re mad at me!”

“I’m not mad at you,” he said. He was still facing the high chair; he seemed to be addressing the baby.

Pauline said, “You’re not?”

“I’m just fed up with you. I’m disgusted. I’m sick to death of you and your nasty disposition. I never should have married you.”

This time the silence was sharper—a sort of hole in the air of the kitchen.

Then his mother’s footsteps came fumbling out of her bedroom. “Found them!” she called in a loud, carrying voice.

She entered the kitchen holding aloft a blue cardboard pillbox from Sweda’s. Michael said, “Well, good,” and Pauline sat up straighter and asked, “You want something to take those with, Mother Anton?”

“No, thank you, dear, I still have my water,” Michael’s mother said, and she lowered herself into her chair.

Michael picked up his fork and resumed eating, but Pauline went on sitting motionless with her hands at either side of her plate.

When the meal was finished, Michael’s mother said she would do the dishes. “You two just clear out of here and go relax together,” she told them. But Lindy was fussing by then, which meant she was nearing her bedtime; so Michael said, “I’ll make up her bottle.”

“Oh, I can do that, dear. You two run along.”

As if she hadn’t spoken, he went over to the rack of sterilized bottles on the counter. His mother offered no further argument.

Pauline carried Lindy off to the bedroom to change her while Michael filled a bottle with milk and set it to heat in a pan of water on the stove. He stood with his arms folded and his feet planted wide apart and watched the water start to simmer. Behind him, his mother scraped plates and collected glasses. “Don’t let that
get
too hot,” she told him after a while, and he said, “Hmm? Oh,” and hastily plucked the bottle from the pan, burning his fingers. “Damn,” he said. For once, his mother didn’t comment on his language. He held the bottle under the sink tap while she stood back, and then he went off to the bedroom, shaking the bottle vigorously.

Nobody was there.

Lindy’s crib was empty. Her blanket hung crumpled over the railing. The rubber sheet that Pauline always spread on their bed before changing her was still folded on the bureau.

He crossed the hall to the bathroom. Nobody there either. He even poked his head into his mother’s little room, but of course they wouldn’t be there.

They must have used the outdoor stairs. Not the safe, sheltered indoor stairs at the rear but the rickety metal fire escape that ran down the Porter Street side of the building. Pauline must have climbed through the bedroom window onto the landing, which was an open grid, and carried a wet, hungry, sleepy six-month-old baby down the slick steps and into the cold winter night with a north wind blowing up and a promise of snow before morning.

He went back into the kitchen and set the bottle on the drain board. His mother, swishing a handful of cutlery through the rinse water, sent him a questioning look.

“I guess they’re taking a walk,” he said.

She stopped swishing the cutlery.

“Having a little stroll around the neighborhood before bedtime,” he said.

She said, “Ah.”

She placed the cutlery in the dish rack. Michael picked up a towel and began to dry the spoons, thoroughly polishing the bowl of each one before putting it away. When he got to the forks, he started humming under his breath in a jaunty, carefree manner. Then he noticed what the tune was: “People Will Say We’re in Love.” But it was too late to change it.

Oh, and her inconsistency; had he included that fault on his list? Her fickle, irresponsible unpredictability. How would Lindy learn what a proper bedtime was, if she was carted off into the night whenever Pauline took the notion? By now it was almost nine o’clock; they’d been gone for more than two hours. Children needed schedules. They needed routines.

Wandering back to the crib on one of his restless journeys, he took Lindy’s blanket from the railing and shook it straight and folded it. They needed neatness, too. You couldn’t raise a child in chaos and then expect her to view the world as a stable, secure place. They needed the edges matched and the corners squared. They needed to feel certain that things were where they belonged.

He heard his mother emerge from the bathroom, hesitate in the hall, and then proceed to her own room—her slow, vague footsteps in heavy shoes. He should go back out to wish her good night, but it required too much effort. He heard her door latch shut in a way that seemed to him reproachful and resigned.

Lindy’s blanket was one Pauline had sewn when she was pregnant, binding a length of pale-yellow wool with yellow satin on all four sides because, she said, babies loved to run their fingers across something smooth and slippery when they were trying to go to sleep. She somehow knew things like that. She knew that very young babies worried they’d fall apart; they liked to be wrapped into cylinders like stuffed cabbage leaves. She knew the level of voice they preferred—higher-pitched but not shrill—and she knew that while a swaying motion could be soothing, an up-and-down motion would cause a baby to stiffen every muscle.

Michael had no idea where she had learned all this. He suspected that she hadn’t learned it—that it came from a natural, inborn fund of empathy.

He laid the folded blanket at the foot of the crib. He adjusted the green cloth frog that sat at the head. It was Pauline’s frog, from her childhood. It had a faded, floppy, rubbed-bald look; you could tell it had been well loved. A gap at one corner of the stitched-on mouth turned its smile into a lopsided grin. The right arm had been reat-tached with brighter-green thread.

She was a rememberer and a saver and a compulsive souvenir keeper. She still had the red tin cricket from the box of Cracker Jack that he’d bought her on their first date. She had a cone-shaped paper cup, flattened now into a pie wedge, from the train they’d ridden on their honeymoon trip to Washington, D.C.

He circled the room, gathering further evidence of what kind of person she was. The laughing, affectionate faces of her friends in the snapshots tucked in the mirror. The fountain of maidenhair fern burgeoning on the windowsill. (She could grow anything, anywhere. Her victory garden in the backyard—a yard the size of a scatter rug! packed as hard as a pavement!—had produced so many vegetables last summer that they had had extras to sell in the store. Although half the time, she had spontaneously given them to the neighbors before Michael could collect them.)

In the evenings, often, she and his mother put their heads together over one of her magazines and they would get the giggles. Anything might set them off—an extreme fashion photo or a ludicrous household hint. “‘Saving your silk stockings to donate for the war effort?’” Pauline would quote. “‘Crochet this lovely drawstring sack embroidered in a botanical theme to store them attractively out of sight!’” His mother would double over and make little snuffling sounds, shyly covering her mouth with one hand, her eyes two merry slits. Michael couldn’t remember seeing his mother giggle before, not even when his father and his brother were alive. Only Pauline called up that sense of mirth in her.

He heard the tin alarm clock ticking away on the nightstand—every hollow, slow tick. Other than that, the room was silent. It was a silence that seemed directed toward him personally. “See there?” it asked. “See how little you would have, if you didn’t have Pauline?”

He took his jacket from the closet, and he opened the bedroom door and walked out.

Yes, it was surely going to snow. He could tell by the color of the sky—a pinkish tinge underlying the gray, like the pink in a hand-tinted photograph. There was a flinty smell to the air. The few pedestrians hurried past in a bunched and huddled manner. Each time Michael pegged the sidewalk with his cane a metallic sound rang out, as if the cane’s rubber tip might have frozen solid.

He experienced Pauline’s absence as a torn feeling deep inside him. It would not have been a great shock to discover he was bleeding.

When he was away in boot camp, he used to keep the scarf she’d knitted him folded beneath his pillow. He would pull it forth at night and press it to his face and inhale. At first, it had smelled of Pauline, or he had imagined it had—her almond lotion, her spearmint breath, and even the applesauce scent of her mother’s kitchen. But by the time he shipped out to California, those smells had faded, and the only one left was the yeasty smell of wool. He began to associate the smell of wool with Pauline. It got so
any
wool—Army blankets, a bunkmate’s watch cap, the mittens some misguided ladies’ club sent to his unit in June—called up in him an ache of almost pleasurable melancholy. He wrote her “I’m making myself sick over you” and “I really don’t think I could live without you”—lines that sounded extreme, he knew, but every word was painfully, absolutely true.

And Pauline wrote back “Miss you!” and “Love you!” and “Wish you could have been here last night when all of us went bowling!” Then her letters grew farther apart and even those few personal remarks, unsatisfying as they were, dwindled to almost nothing. She talked more and more about the canteen where she served coffee and doughnuts to soldiers. She spoke of these soldiers as buddies, “nicest guy from Nebraska” and “the redheaded fellow named Dave, I think I told you about him”; but even so, he couldn’t help worrying when she not only went bowling with them but roller-skating and dancing. “Have to do my patriotic duty!” she said about the dancing. “If jitterbugging’s what it takes, then jitterbug I will!” He read her letters with a narrow squint, struggling to see behind her words. He wrote, “You’re not starting to forget me, I hope,” and she wrote, “I would never forget you! But I can’t just sit at home nights, I’m 21 years old, what do you expect?” In fact, he thought that sitting at home sounded like a fine idea, but he kept that observation to himself.

It didn’t help that he hated the Army. The outdoor life made him miserable, and the lack of privacy drove him to distraction, and nearly all of the time he was afraid. He feared not only combat but the exercises meant to prepare him for it: crawling through scratchy underbrush, twanging between strands of barbed wire, lunging with his bayonet while too close on either side his fellow trainees, grunting hideously, lunged also. In boot camp his secret prayer had been assignment to someplace stateside and safe—to a service battalion, say, in charge of foodstuffs. Wouldn’t that make sense for a grocer’s boy? But he could tell from what they taught him in California (all having to do with explosives) that the Army had other ideas. Special training was just more of the same; in fact he still, ironically, had to bunk beside Private Connor from Virginia with his everlasting cough.

Pauline, meanwhile, was dancing with soldiers and whispering secrets to her girlfriends and fluffing up her hair in front of mirrors. The image of her snug, lacy world filled Michael with longing, though at times it crossed his mind that it was her fault he had enlisted. Well, not her
fault,
maybe, but her influence—the influence of her admiring and expectant gaze. No, cancel that. A man had to take responsibility for his own decisions.

That was what he’d told himself, and yet daily his resentment against Army life had grown until he lived in a permanent state of barely suppressed rage. He raged against the itch of flying insects on the exercise field, and the increasing weight of his weapon as he stood rigid throughout some officer’s interminable speech, and the infuriating hawk and gargle of Connor’s cough. One night, after Pauline had allowed eight days to go by and then sent only a breezy note describing a visiting captain’s “cultured” Boston accent, Michael leapt from his bed shouting “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” and clamped a pillow on Connor’s face and held it down with all his might. It took three men to pull him off. Connor sat up, blinking in a dazed and disbelieving way, and Michael sank back on his cot and buried his head in his hands.

After that, the other men shunned him. He hadn’t made any friends in this new camp anyhow, and now the few who’d been minimally polite began to leave a wide space around him. His superiors observed him too closely, and Connor (a loutish sort) made a point of harassing him every chance he got—”accidentally” upsetting Michael’s coffee mug or jostling him out of formation. Then they took a hike through scrub and Connor’s rifle went off and shattered Michael’s left hip. Nobody even pretended it might have been a mistake. The only mistake, Michael knew, was that he’d been wounded rather than killed. But he was not so naive as to press charges.