The Bride of Catastrophe (50 page)

“All day I thought about us, here,” he said, looking sheepishly back at the bed.

“Did we have a good time?” I asked grimly, and he shook his head and refused to meet my eyes.

“It's wrong,” he said, with dull insistence.

“We'd make rotten adulterers,” I said, to comfort him. There was a wild luxury in the word
we
. And it was something to be proud of, our innocence, our inability to lie.

“I
used
to be good at deceit,” Stetson said. “Real good.”

“I'm sure you were, angel.”

“But I can't, now.” He shook his head firmly and I felt him steel himself, the immense block of muscle life—work, that is—had made of him, against me, and what he called my rationalizations. A lot easier to call it sex, make it a craving like the others, not to be given in to by such a strong man. I felt a pulse of pain deep inside, where we ought to have fit together. If things had been different, if we didn't both live on thin ice, couldn't we have found a way across to each other?

“So, if I just hold you and say ‘I love you, I love you,' that's okay then?” I said, daring to trace the vein that ran down from his neck over his shoulder and along his arm, thinking how much of a man is visible—his bones and sinews, his erection—while a woman is a smooth vessel, a shape to be filled with dreams. “I love you,” I said, my voice failing me, because I was saying it for real.

“You have to go home,” he replied.

To another night of Lee's silent misery—comforting her, or pretending not to see, while we waited for the month to run down. I wished I could pass a hand over her face and make her forget me, return her to her crush on Reenie. They'd have been content with each other, content to the point of love.

Stetson and Tracy might be content, if I got out of the way. I hoped to be content someday myself. First, though, I had to repair the rift between my parents (not between the people, but between their voices in my mind). I turned Stetson's hand over and traced his lifeline across his palm—it was broken early, then ran straight and deep for a while until it diffused and trailed away. We could try to unite ourselves, make a true family—the hardest thing to do—but the combined troubles of our lives were so heavy, they'd sink the most buoyant love.

“I see your future, Stet. It's clear sailing from here,” I lied, and lifted his hand to kiss the truth away.

He laughed, or tried to, and stood up, with obvious relief. He needed to move, I needed to cry: it comes to the same thing. We were going to grieve for each other according to gender, the way we did everything else.

“You won't forget me—”

He laughed, looking skyward. Then he hugged me, reflexively, and I felt him kiss my neck, while I tried to get my arms around him one more time. I wanted to feel it all, there in his arms, but if I let myself, I'd never walk away. And suppose I did let my guard down, and he didn't?

So I put my lips to his with one little chaste kiss, walked out into the very nicely appointed hall of Riverview Heights, and pushed the elevator button, down.

“Beatrice!” he called, his voice raw, and I wheeled around.

“Don't push first floor, push lobby,” he said, laughing a little at my eagerness.

“Oh, okay.”

“First floor is really second floor,” he said. “That's the French way.”

“Thanks, Stet.” As soon as the door closed I put my cheek against it, for the cool, and thought: there, I've escaped a person who in a huge emotional moment starts talking about elevator buttons. Then I remembered how he'd said he never knew anything like real love, and thought how we'd made the beginning of a real love together, like children planting a radish seed in a garden, expecting something magnificent to grow. I thought that when I was old and dying and had forgotten everything else, I'd still remember the feeling in our kisses. In the lobby, I was crying, and I walked down Main Street crying in defiance, thinking everyone who saw me ought to envy me for having lost him, and for knowing what a loss it was.

Thirteen

“I
T'S OUT
of the ordinary, that's for sure,” I said, with what I thought was great generosity.

“What do you mean?” Ma said. “It's a June wedding. They're common as grass.”

Sylvie was getting married. I alone remembered how she'd brushed marriage off, saying she'd never get herself stuck that way. Now that Butch was in prison, though, things were different, and no one could believe I was so callous as to suggest Sylvie refuse his proposal.

“He
needs
me, Beatrice,” she said, with eyes flashing.

“It's a happy ending,” Ma said. “That's what
I
like about it. You three will all be together, and that's what matters in the end. I don't believe anything should stand in the way of love. Now, let's see. The dress is new, and this will do the rest for you.”

It was a gold pin in the shape of a lizard, with two sapphire eyes, and she fixed it to Sylvie's collar with fond ceremony: it had been her grandmother's.

“Something old and borrowed and blue!” she crowed.

We were standing in the parking lot of the Brimfield County Prison, where Butch was to be held for one more night before he went to serve out his sentence in the state penitentiary, which Ma and Sylvie kept referring to as “the pen,” much as, had he been off to Harvard, they'd have spoken of “the yard.” They wanted to belong somewhere, to speak the local patois, and if that meant using little pet names for various crimes and their punishments, so it would have to be. Sylvie was chain-smoking but still nervous; she jiggled baby Jesse in such frantic rhythm. I expected him to cry, but he slept peacefully in the crook of her arm, dressed in an elaborate christening gown and looking round and fresh as a scoop of ice cream.

“It's the dress,” Sylvie said. “I wish I could have gotten something more—” She tugged at it. It was thin polyester, pale green with white tendrils printed on, an elastic waistband that kept twisting and pulling up, and an enormous lace collar. No one at Sweetriver would have been caught dead in it. And Sylvie was so thin, from labor, anxiousness, smoking, that any dress would have looked like a costume on her.

“More traditional, I guess,” she said. “Jesse looks more bridal than me,” she said sadly. She looked at once too young and too knowing to be a bride. The wind blew her hair across her face and she kept pulling it back so it wouldn't catch the cigarette and burn. Finally, she took a last long draw and flicked the butt away—it bounced a couple of times, sparking on the cement, and when it landed in a puddle she said:

“Okay, here we go,” rather grimly and led us in. Butch was to be permitted fifteen minutes for the service, the vows, and a kiss.

A bailiff motioned us through a metal detector and took us into the prison wing. When the heavy door locked behind us, an instinctive terror swept through me, but Sylvie and Ma laughed happily, leaving me out of the joke, as usual. In the visiting area a justice of the peace, a severe woman with tight gray curls and a palisade of dentures, was already sitting at a table; in a moment, an inner door opened, and then another, and there was Butch in prisoner's orange, looking down, and moving as if he took every step under protest. Afraid and lonely, he'd begged Sylvie to marry him, but now he felt we'd come to witness his humiliation, to laugh at the sight—tough Butchy brought so low, he was willing to submit to love.

“Hi, Butch.” Sylvie sounded as shy as if he were still a boy she had a crush on.

She stood in front of him and touched her toe to his. Both he and the bailiff tensed, so Sylvie clutched the baby tighter and stepped back.

“Okay, on with it,” she said. “Where do we stand?”

The justice of the peace opened her book and they turned to face her. The ceremony took all of a minute, during which I thought only of Stet and Tracy.

Jesse awakened and began to fuss. Sylvie dipped her hand into the dress and lifted her breast out, holding it there for an extra instant, a defiant smile brewing on her face, before she popped the nipple into the baby's mouth—against a milk-swollen breast, there's very little anyone can do. If Sylvie was laughing in the face of the law, well, that's how nature goes.

“You may kiss the bride,” the justice said, but Butch was reticent.

“Go ahead, you dope,” Sylvie said with a laugh. “It's fourteen months till the next one.”

Once he did finally embrace her, he looked like he might be trying to climb into her body, to hide himself there.

“Time's up,” the bailiff said sharply, and Butch retreated into sullenness and the guard returned and ushered him away.

“Wait,” Sylvie said, but the doors closed, one by one, regardless … “I wanted him to hold Jesse,” she said. “Your son,” she called, but Jesse kept sucking and the doors kept closing and my mother was handing the justice of the peace an envelope, as we filed out into the green corridor again.

“I'd always hoped one of my daughters would have a June wedding,” said Ma, stopping just short, I thought, of sticking her tongue out at me. “The nicest wedding I've ever been to, I think.”

“Really?” Sylvie asked. I looked over to see the answer.

“Yes, really,” Ma said, sounding perfectly genuine, and a little shocked that we might question her. “And the most beautiful bride too.”

Sylvie basked and cradled the baby. “I'm so happy,” she confided.

A June wedding, a cold, brilliant day with lilacs bursting; the first time I'd smelled fresh cut grass that year.

“I'm so proud of you, for following your heart,” Ma said.

“You're proud of her for flashing her boob in a prison waiting room,” I said.

“
And
for following her heart,” Ma insisted. A terrible thought occurred to me: suppose Sylvie was just trying to entertain us, keep our minds off our own troubles by manufacturing such a troublesome life of her own? There was that sense, between us, that the one who died with the best story would win.

“It's just fourteen months, and he'll be home,” she said. “Now he knows he has a wife who
believes in him
,” she said. “Someone who'll really go the distance for him. He never had that before.”

She was a radiant bride, my sister, and she had gone the distance—all the way to the commissioner's office, to petition for this wedding—for someone, something she believed in: Butch Savione.

“What are you going to do now,” I asked Sylvie. “For a job?” She gave several possibilities, the best of which seemed to be taking over for Butch at the Nubestos plant.

“Do you still think you'd like to be a midwife?” I asked.

“Oh, gosh,” she said, with a little laugh like a cough, “you've got to have college for that.” She was living among people who never dreamed of going to college, and she'd forgotten such a thing was possible. But she'd gone straight to the commissioner's office; that hadn't daunted her.

“It's strange,” she said then, “to be having my wedding without … without everyone around.” She didn't mean Butch, of course, but Pop and Dolly. In all those dreams of love and weddings, she'd seen Pop walking her through the garden, Dolly and me, our arms full of daisies, Ma streaming with happy tears—the groom had been immaterial. In fact, when you thought about it, prison was just the place for Butch—there he could do nothing to disturb our notions. And disturbed though our notions were, we continued in them, like citizens of a small and embattled country who can no longer remember how their customs developed or what purpose they serve, but still have only those customs to rely on.

We squeezed into Butchie's little pickup, and after an hour on the gas line—it was an odd-numbered day—we were back at Sylvie's, where white crepe paper was looped wildly over the trailer awning, and around the fence where she kept the donkey.

“Sylvie!” I said. “This is some garden!” Just planted of course, but it took up the whole lot around the trailer, all fresh, dark, deeply spaded earth, with whorls of pale new lettuce and snow peas putting their fine tendrils out to each other. At the back, a little clump of primroses marked Springtime's grave.

“You like it?” she asked. “I worked my butt off digging it, I will say. And all those tomatoes had to be cuffed against cutworms. The whole back half is corn, though; I'm going to have a stand.”

“Sylvie,” I said. “It's a…”

“Farm,” she finished for me, pursing her lips in a dry, laughing submission to fate. “Yeah, it's a farm.” The ball field was just mowed, and the green smell in the cold air, the new wet maple leaves shaking out above, inspired me … just the way my parents had meant me to be inspired, when they moved to the country all those years ago.

“It worked, Ma,” I said, and though she couldn't have known what I meant, really, she gave me a quick, prideful glance.

“I told you it would,” she said. “I got a job, by the way.”

“No kidding!” I said.

“Well, it's thanks to you,” she said. “Without the letter you wrote, they'd never have hired me.”

Why this compliment settled with the weight of an anvil I can't exactly say. “You mean, sympathy for lost boys is an ideal quality in a car salesman?” I asked.

“Well, I'm sure the red suit helped,” she said. She was going to work selling Mercedes. “Do you know what the commission is, on a Mercedes?” she asked. I shook my head. I wondered how often a Mercedes got sold in rural Connecticut. “Diesel, that's the future,” she said.

Inside, Sylvie popped Jesse into his high chair, and bounced a ping-pong ball (red, white, and blue, our biggest seller) on the tray to fascinate him. There was a sheet cake, a baked ham, a pitcher full of lilacs, and five bottles of champagne.