The Story of a Marriage (25 page)

It was many years later that my grandson’s voice came over the telephone in my new apartment. Decades had passed since the operator would come on first, announcing: “Long distance, please hold.” I was in my seventies by then; the first time I realized my age was when I tried on a scarf in San Francisco and said it was a little bright for an old woman like me, expecting the clerk to contradict me—“You’re not old!”—and when he didn’t, I saw myself at last for what I was. An old woman. I have to say I laughed out loud.

“Nana?”

“Perry, did you get over your cold?”

“Olive has it now,” he announced to me, meaning his stuffed bear who was as real to him as his mother or me. Or else as imaginary. “It’s bad.”

We talked a little while about his bear and about his mother before there was a fumble on the line and my son came on:

“I’m going to be in town, Mama, next week for a conference of NGOs and donors.” He was the president now of a large non profit in New York.

“Are you bringing Lucy and Perry?”

“No, it’s too much trouble.”

“I’ve got to clean up the guest room—” I began. I had long since moved out of the Cook house in the Sunset into a part of town where everything was delivered. Just like the old bread wagon, the egg lady, the milkman, and the seltzer boy. Strange how the past returns in different clothes, pretending to be a stranger.

“Oh,” he said and I heard him pause. “They’ve got a room for me at the hotel. All the meetings are going on there, Mama.”

“Of course.” I bristled at the duty that “Mama” implied.

“Why don’t you come and see me there? We could have breakfast on the twelfth.”

“I’d love that.”

“The St. Francis.”

“I’d better air out my good dress,” I said and he laughed. Lucy came on for a moment to tell me about something she had read in the news and thought would infuriate me, which it did, and we chatted for a moment in self-righteous agreement. She was a white girl, and merciless when it came to the failings of her race. I liked her very much.

I took the early streetcar downtown, because I never went there anymore, and stood across the street from the St. Francis, looking around Union Square. The tall buildings surrounded it cozily, brightened by the signs of shops that had come from New York or Europe to claim a view on the square. One of the last remaining cable cars clanged by, headed uphill. People sat on steps drinking coffee or eating pastries from bags, watching a street performer: a boy who had painted himself in gold. Nothing remained of the former square except the single pillar in the middle, the bronze woman atop it, celebrating Dewey’s triumph in the Pacific. From that angle, I could see the old luncheon spot and, in the window, I imagined myself viewed through a fracture in time, being advised by two older women about my forthcoming marriage: “Don’t marry him!” The cycle of things. For surely that young woman, taking a popover from the waiter, would nod her head and smile. And go and marry him anyway.

Sonny was shyly ironic about being in his hometown, dressed so handsomely in a suit and tie, seated before a glass of champagne with his mother. “You wouldn’t know I’d blown up a post office,” he joked. I said he never blew up anything, and he shrugged. We were in the hotel restaurant, which sat slightly above the lobby, separated only by some palms and a brief set of stairs. Beyond the lobby’s elevators and groupings of leather chairs, we could see the hotel’s main entrance, and behind us another glass door led from the restaurant onto the street, where city life passed by in bright sunlight. I told the waitress that my son was an important man here for a conference, and he hid his face in his napkin. To hide the joy at his own success. He knew how proud I was.

Almost as soon as the waitress left, he leaned forward and asked: “Mama, who is Charles Drumer?”

I straightened in my chair and fiddled with my napkin, trying to calm the wave of warmth rising in me. I took in a long deep breath. A woman sitting across from us began to laugh. “That’s right,” I said. “His name was Charles. You don’t remember him?”

“A white man visiting our house? I’m sure I’d remember that.”

“Well.”

“Is he a secret from your past?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” I was trying to hold myself perfectly still.

“I bet you don’t! I was at a reception last week for this event, I spoke for a bit about housing, and a man came up to me and asked if I was the son of Holland and Pearlie Cook. He didn’t explain anything about himself. I said I was, and he handed me an envelope. He must have written it when I was talking. Here it is.” He produced a piece of cream stationery, with my name printed in shaky handwriting. “I found out later he’s a major donor, so I was glad I was polite.”

“Of course you were polite,” I said, picking up the envelope.

“I read it,” Sonny admitted, smiling. “It just says to meet him here in the lobby.”

My hand began to shake, and my silverware fell to the floor with a shattering sound. My son said it was all right, he would get it—and looked at me warily.

“Are you okay, Mama?”

“He’s here?” I opened the envelope.

“Of course he is. It was a reception for this conference.”
I
would love to see you … I’ll be in the St. Francis lobby at ten thirty
. It was nearly ten.

“I have to go,” I whispered, but my son gave me a sour look as our food arrived.

“Who is he, Mama? You don’t have to be so careful. Dad’s dead, nobody minds anymore these days. You were young. I can guess what must have gone on.”

“Don’t be silly.”

He leaned over. “Was he the one you almost threw everything over for?”

Sharply: “Did your father say something?”

Sonny smiled. “It wouldn’t surprise me if you had some man, years ago …”

I rarely thought of him in all that time. When I did, it was with the distant fondness of a childhood friend. I had no photographs; he had slipped out of our lives completely. Of course Sonny couldn’t remember the man who had visited our house for six months when he was little, the summer Lyle ran away. I was the only witness still alive, and so it was almost as if I had imagined Buzz. From the few newspaper items that found their way to me over the years, I learned he lived in New York, so the city took on the air of being
his
city. A party with drinks on a grand piano, a balcony with a view, a famous man in a corner, an infamous woman in the elevator. And, leaning over the railing with Buzz, a new lover. In my imagination, he had found happiness after all. He must have. How startling to feel him come alive again, in his hotel room, already straightening his tie before a mirror, and if he were to walk out of one of those elevators it would be like a character stepping out of the pages of an old, tattered book.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, he was the one.”

“Aha! Tell me about this old lover of yours—”

“What was he like?”

“You’re avoiding the question! Nice, happy enough. You’ll see for yourself.” The check arrived, and he gave them his room number, and then stood to leave. “Should I stay?”

He was longing to step into my past. “No, go on up.” I looked down at myself, my old flowered dress. “I can’t meet him like this.”

“It doesn’t matter, Mama,” he said. “He’s an old man.” And by that I understood that I was an old woman, and vanity was years behind me.

I was left alone in the restaurant, with the remains of our breakfasts and the attendant vase of daffodils, trumpets on high. The laughing woman was leaving with her party, heading out through the glass door to the street, but on the other side of the room stairs led down to the lobby, where those discreet pairings of leather chairs implied old-fashioned rendezvous and not the business appointments which were their current fate. I wondered what this seemed like to my son. The thwarted passions of another age; the fetters of a tragic time. As if his own time were the perfect one in which to be born, his choices utterly free, his life without a single regret—as if he didn’t have an illegitimate child who might even now be judging those choices seemingly made in another era. He was a man of fifty. Even his generation was ceding to the next.

My mind had wandered; there, in one of the lobby chairs facing away from me, I saw the neatly parted white hair of a man. He must have entered the moment before. A tall man, in an expensive gray suit, leaning toward the flower arrangement. What was this hurry in my heart?

Holland only mentioned his name once. We were at a memorial benefit hosted by a successful colored woman. It was sometime in the 1980s, in Sausalito, across the bay near where the Rose Bowl used to be, high on a hill overlooking the water and the dark outline of Angel Island. No house blocked her view; she owned the grove below her. For all that, it was a casual party of few pretensions, not especially either staid or raucous—it was, after all, to fund a memorial scholarship—so I was surprised, when it was time to leave, that Holland handed me the car keys and said he was in no position to drive. Not until that moment did I realize he was drunk.

He stood on the garden path, among the fragrant tuberoses, leaning against the gate and staring at the view. In the moonlight, his silhouette was the same at nearly sixty as in his teens. Age had taken none of his charm, his beauty; he had instead patinaed like old bronze. In his eyes, I saw that look of blindness that overtakes the old, who stand and stare at a tree or a house, unseeing; just the simple experience of memory.

“I’m sorry,” he said, holding on to the gate for support. I wondered how many glasses of champagne he’d had, and whether anyone else had noticed. My mind was still on the party, the plump charming hostess, the businessmen and their wives and what they thought of us, the Cooks. An unseen boat rang its bell on the water.

“It’s all right, you had a good time. I didn’t notice you drinking,” I said.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do it.”

I didn’t know what he meant.

He motioned to the house and the view, and his gesture included the tuberoses, the path, the moonlight and dark island before us. “I couldn’t give you all this.”

I laughed. “Well of course not! Let’s get you—”

“I should have!” he stated, blinking. “I should have let him give it all to you!” Then he shook his head. “But I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry. I know it’s what you wanted.”

That was when, out of nowhere, softly, surprisingly, with a pop on the first consonant and a hum on the last, my husband said a name I had not heard in thirty years.

Neither of us changed position: him looking out at the water, me looking at him. We were as quiet as parents in the room of a sleeping child. The clamor of the party was muffled behind the flowering bushes, and from an open window floated the sound of piano playing. I watched my husband as he listened.

“I did not want it,” I said.

His face turned slowly and surprised me. It was fixed in bewilderment. Of course it was. After all of our years, all my work to understand him, in the end, I was the greater mystery. The inexplicable Pearlie Cook. There was no fathoming the girl who sat by him in the dark room of his mother’s house; who found him on a beach; who clipped his paper and bought a barkless dog and a bell that cooed instead of rang. A glove with a bird in the hand. What a series of riddles! The whole episode, from the moment he saw me with Buzz in that living room until that night, sitting beside him by the radio, when he looked at me to ask what I wanted and I said nothing to stop him. Sitting with a glass of bourbon, his hand making the ice shake. And no word from me, no struggle. To have his first love—the girl he stared at in school and whose hand he took on a walk along the road to Childress, the girl for whom he committed a crime so he would not have to leave her—to have her say “Goodbye” and know that in an hour it would be over. What a lonely hour. How had I missed it? All those years of marriage, I thought I was studying him, but the entire time he was watching me more carefully, more ardently; like an old Kentucky dowser, stepping across the dry land with a forked branch, waiting for some sign of what lay deep below. The source of me. And all those years, poor man, he got me wrong.

“It was all for you,” I said quietly. “You wanted it, I was sure.”

We think we know the ones we love.

In his eyes I saw the doubt of many years resolving. “No,” he said at last. “No, I never did.”

There we stood, in the warm scent of the garden, the piano music drifting in. Around us spread the black water, the blacker island, and the years of misunderstandings and doubt. We stood looking at each other for a very long time. There would be more evenings like this, with the moon passing from the trees and the fog held back by the bridge like a curtain. Beautiful evenings, with Holland looking up at me with the moonlight on him. There would be more parties, more drinks and wanderings to find the car, more flowers, more boats, more bells, more death. More and more and more, until his kidneys turned on him at last. And it was I, the widow, who would choose what to put on his gravestone: that he was loyal, and decent, and served his country in a war. That is what Holland would have written down for you, and it is what I wrote for the stonemason. Just that. And if you came to see that grave, you might walk away and think it all dead ground without a flower. You would never guess.

“Take my arm,” I said at last, and he leaned on me as I guided him toward the gate. There would be more. But we would never talk about the past again. We had closed it up like a house too big and drafty for old people to live in, and instead we lived in the small warm place our marriage had made.

“This way,” I said, and he followed.

The hotel lobby, the man in the chair: one moment it was my old friend, and the next it was not. A mangled hand pulling out one of the flowers; or no, a play of light. Through the swinging door, I could see gingko trees blooming along the street and a silver balloon in one, almost within reach; a young man in a hat stretched for it, a girl watching expectantly beside him. I looked back at the man in the gray suit, still waiting. It was him. I stood up from my seat.