The Wedding (10 page)

Liz snorted. “Gram will live to be a hundred. She’s past the age for cancer or coronaries. And now she’s getting too mean to die. She wants to pick up her marbles and go home. I guess it
is
easy enough for you to take Gram’s side, now that you’ve become the apple of her eye, the hope for her future. I only hope your kids won’t think they’re better than Laurie because their father belongs to the chosen race.”

Shelby blushed vividly at Liz’s insinuation, and at her premature reference to parenthood. “Liz, I haven’t any kids. At this moment, I haven’t even got a husband. I didn’t know you felt that way about Meade.”

“What way? I didn’t say how I felt. He’s not for me, but I honestly think he is wonderful for you.”

“Why isn’t he wonderful for you?”

“Because I’ve got a man of my own.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

“Well then, to be crude about it, I just can’t see a white man in bed. There’s nothing about a white man that excites me. Maybe I put too much emphasis on sex, but that’s what I think.”

“Do you mean I don’t put enough?” Shelby said sharply.

Liz groaned. “Here we go again. I was talking about me.”

“Well, how do you feel about me?”

“I wouldn’t have you any other way.” Liz chuckled, a small smile flitting across her face.

“What does that mean?” Shelby demanded. “Tomorrow I’m going to be married, so please let’s not be cryptic. Do you mean I’m cold?”

“Little virgin sister, don’t
you
know?”

“How
could
I? … Oh!” gasped Shelby as she finally understood the meaning behind Liz’s words. She blushed in surprise and embarrassment.

“You can ask the
obvious
question,” Liz said kindly. Shelby took a deep breath. “Wouldn’t you have married him even if you hadn’t been sure?”

“Shelby, before I answer, will you remember something? You and I are two different people, neither of whom will always have the answer for the other. I’m your older sister, married, a mother, but still a long way from maturity. First off, I could never marry an artist. I wouldn’t care
what
color he was. Popping out of bed because an idea popped into his head and leaving me high and very dry.”

“But would that mean I was cold and didn’t care? I thought it would mean I was understanding. Oh, Liz, now you’ve worried me.”

“Don’t be a ninny. Who says I know best? Who says I’m good for Linc? I don’t seem to do very much of what he asks except go to bed with him, and after a while that may not be enough. I shouldn’t have spent the summer here. I should have stayed in New York and cooked my husband’s meals. I didn’t come to this island for my baby’s sake, I came because Mother has two maids. I was tired of being both of them at home.”

“You’re not lazy, Liz,” Shelby said loyally.

“No, maybe not, but I’m not a real wife either. I’m still a lover girl, who thinks the rest of marriage is a drag. I’m as worried as you are for a very different reason.”

“When Linc comes, won’t he be here sometime today or
on the first boat tomorrow? Why not go back with him? The summer is almost over.”

“Linc’s not coming,” Liz stated flatly, trying without success to hide her keen disappointment. “I called him last night to tell him about boat connections, but he wouldn’t change his mind, as I’d hoped he would. So that, I regret to say, is that.”

Shelby felt let down, but she said quickly, “Well, after all, Liz, my wedding’s very important to me, but the clinic is very important to Linc. You two didn’t have a fancy wedding, so I don’t see why I should expect Linc to be excited about mine.”

“No, maybe not, but he has exposed me to myself.”

“Mother fits in there somewhere.”

“He’s not married to Mother. That’s the whole point. I left home and Mother to marry him, and now I’ve come back.”

“Does Linc expect you to give up your family?” Shelby asked in disbelief. “He’s not that unfair.”

“He thinks
I
am. I’m living in Mother’s summer house, letting her support me.”

“But Linc sent you money, for yourself and Laurie.”

“Not enough to live in style in the very house Mother wouldn’t let Linc be married in.”

“Liz, don’t exaggerate. Mother was planning your wedding up to the moment you eloped. She didn’t expect you to substitute a stand-in.”

“She expected Linc to substitute his friends who were doctors. She thought it was enough to have his mother coming
from the stockroom at Macy’s instead of a teacher’s schoolroom. But she drew the line at his aunt and uncle. They are a cook and a butler. If their money was good enough to help him through med school, Linc thought they were good enough to see him get married. Since Mother didn’t, I made Linc elope with me before he changed his mind about marrying into my stuck-up family. I’d had a hard enough time persuading him to propose to a Coles. If you’ll forgive me for gloating, I think it serves Mother right that Meade’s family has thumbed their noses at her. In fact, I think it’s perfectly lovely.”

The day Liz had proposed to Linc and was accepted, she was skeptical about waiting until summer to marry him in the Oval, even though in her teenage years she had romanticized about such a day and constantly demanded that her mother cross her heart in consent. In the months between proposal and performance, her mother found a thousand ways, little and big, subtle and blunt, to pressure her into considering the consequences of marrying somebody nobody knew, that is to say, nobody anybody knew. Her mother blew the trumpet of praise for marriage to her own kind, if not color, the right color being preferable but not as mandatory as the right class. That class and the posture it demanded had given her the self-assurance to feel that no barrier was insurmountable, and to say with ease that she looked white but wasn’t.

Liz recalled that during their courtship Corinne had delicately suggested that she was seeing too much of Linc to the exclusion of more social young men. It wasn’t fair to let him
think that she was serious when, of course, such a serious young man might keep her from having the fun her youth entitled her to have. Linc had known very well that he and Liz might never have met, or at least might never have progressed beyond introduction had they met at some charity affair that one of his more socially ambitious doctor friends had bludgeoned him into attending. That their meeting was professional got him started on a footing that did not scare him off. They met in an operating theater and fell into casual conversation. Linc introduced himself, and Liz’s name, when she said it, made him instantly aware that she was one of the Coleses for whom he had a great deal of professional admiration. He knew that all Coleses and their sons were doctors, and now apparently their daughters were too.

Liz was just beginning her internship at the hospital where Linc was in heart research. That Liz had entered medicine was indeed in keeping with the Coles tradition. Since Clark and Corinne had no son to propagate the faith, Liz had always known that she, the elder daughter, could follow no other course. After her marriage to Linc, however, Liz had given up medicine, choosing the more traditional roles of wife and mother instead.

The baby had fallen asleep in Shelby’s arms, lulled by the rise and fall of her breast. One hand had curled around Shelby’s ringer, and Shelby’s eyes grew tender with compassion at the sight. After four months of life on earth, the long span of years to come still had cast no shadow. Shelby looked up at Liz. She knew she should somehow defend Meade’s parents, even if she felt a funny twinge in her side at the
thought. “Liz, do you have to be so honest? Meade’s parents weren’t crude about it. They begged to be excused with polite regrets and a present. If their explanation was an out, at least it wasn’t outright rude. Meade says his father does have high blood pressure, and the long trip here at this time of the year wouldn’t help it any. Meade made the joke, a bitter joke, that our wedding plans had probably put him in bed for a week. And of course it wasn’t really a joke. In his wildest nightmare I’m sure the poor man never had a dream about Meade getting married to a colored girl. If he had to sit through the real thing it might be more than that blood pressure could bear. He’d likely go into shock.”

“Well, I think it’s just a beautiful thing that you can be so understanding,” Liz said wryly. “When I pinch myself, I don’t feel colored. I just feel the hurt of it—maybe that’s what being colored means for most of us. You feel the hurt of it.”

Liz got up from the foot of the bed and went to the window. She stared out at the Oval. She had loved it so in her childhood, this safe, contained world where she had come every summer except for the summer past when her marriage and two-week honeymoon and getting settled into her small flat gave her no time to wish she were here. But when Laurie was born in April, and the flat seemed smaller and the Harlem streets noisier, then the sentiment grew in Liz that Laurie should spend her first summer on earth in the quiet Oval, in a large convenient house where gracious living was taken for granted.

She had asked Linc to join her for two weeks in August to share the week’s gaiety preceding the wedding and the
restful week following it, when her mother would take charge of the baby and free her and Linc to do what they pleased, when they pleased. But Linc said without apparent regret that he couldn’t afford a vacation. The first year of their marriage, after the expense of furnishing a flat and adding a member to their family, had put a considerable strain on their by no means endless supply of money. When Liz had countered that his vacation would cost him nothing but his fare, he reacted as if she had insulted him by offering him her family’s hospitality, refusing to see it as the gesture of reconciliation that he was in no way ready to accept. And now he was not even coming for the day of the wedding, despite the pleas in her letters and phone calls, even if it meant embarrassing her before her Ovalite friends. They thought they could easily guess why he had no wish to insert his dark face into the family picture.

With her back still turned to Shelby, Liz said quietly, “When I knew I was going to have a child, I wasn’t happy about it. I wasn’t ready to be a mother. I wanted more time to be a bride. Then Laurie was born, and I was ready to resent her. They brought her to me and put her in my arms, and I saw that she was brown. She was a completely colored child, without the protective coloring of the Coleses. I can’t tell you how much I loved her at that moment. I wanted to fight the whole white race for her. She looked too small and helpless to fight it alone.” She let out a deep breath. “But in the nature of things she must. It’s a private and internal struggle. And to win she will have to fight back without bitterness, not replacing her hurt with hate but letting that hurt enrich her experience.”

She faced around to Shelby. “There’s a bitterness in Linc against whites, against near whites, as he thinks of our kind, against anyone with whom he’s never related socially. But I sometimes wonder if Linc isn’t confusing class with color, or using old yardsticks to make his judgment. He can’t accept unless he sees, and race relations and class distinctions and color differences are too subtle for any dim view of them.”

Laurie stirred and kicked in her sleep. “He didn’t take a dim view of you,” Shelby said with a smile.

“That’s because he insists I’m exceptional. He isn’t ready to admit I’m standard Oval product, no better, no worse than the friends I grew up with. He can’t divorce me from my family. I’m everything that’s gone into making me, and that includes Mother, who might even have beat me to bed with Linc if she had met him first.”

Shelby rolled her eyes resignedly. “Liz, I wish you wouldn’t, but you always will. You’re only guessing about Mother. There’s nothing you really know.”

“I had bigger ears than you when we were kids, and more interest in the sex life of my elders. I’m pretty sure I know about Mother. And I know I know about Dad, time and place.”

For a moment there was silence in the room, except for the sounds of the Oval rising in fuller volume outside the window, responding to the perfect day. Shelby stared at Liz just as she used to when they were children and Liz had a secret to tell about the mysterious ways of adults. Somehow Liz’s secrets seemed to sap some of the joy from growing up, driving her to her family of dolls as the only sphere of order and understanding she knew.

Liz grimaced with an attempt at insouciance that neither believed. “When Linc and I were on our honeymoon cruise, we saw Dad and Rachel on one of our stopovers. They were across the room in a restaurant, looking like lovers in spite of Dad’s fifty and Rachel’s surely forty years. I thought their affair had dwindled away to nothing, that they were a couple of old shoes, with no romantic nonsense between them, but there they were. Anyway, they didn’t see us. And I got away fast before Linc could see them. Told him I’d had too much sun and felt sick to my stomach. When you see your own father with the other woman it has that effect.”

But Shelby hadn’t had the jolt of seeing her father at fifty in youth’s arena. She didn’t believe that reflective middle age would allow itself to flirt with irrevocable folly. At most, she thought her father was guilty of a brief excursion in self-deception. “All you really saw, Liz, was Dad in a moment of nostalgia before you and Linc could make him a grandfather. He didn’t do anything fatal to Mother, like falling in love with somebody much younger. He had a holiday with Rachel, who’s never been a threat to Mother’s marriage. They were probably more wistful about the past than expectant about the future. Nobody’s been hurt. Mother doesn’t know, and Dad’s settled down to being a grandfather.”

Shelby suddenly remembered a dance she had been to back home in New York. Her escort for the evening was a young intern whom her father knew well. The dance was a fashionable charity affair in a fashionable hotel downtown that had found, after years of viewing them with alarm, that colored people with money spent more of their money than whites with more money to spend.

To Shelby and her escort there had been too many of the middle-aged on the dance floor trying to make up for the years when they could not afford to dress up in diamonds and go to expensive places. Their faces fell apart before the evening was half over, and everything rebelled, their feet, their heads, their backs, even their smiles that had to work harder and harder to amount to anything.