Authors: Dorothy West
The Wedding (20 page)
When he rang rachel the night before, it had been after midnight, and he had winced with reluctance at the thought of shattering her sleep. He knew he had sounded embarrassed about how obvious it was that he was calling her at this inconsiderate hour because he had been lured into some unavoidable commitment by corinne.
It was true enough, though. Corinne had held a dinner party for those of her friends who had come a long way for the wedding. Not all of them had driven down, and not all of them were staying within easy walking distance of the oval. Corinne had asked clark to chauffeur these guests to
and from her party since taxis were hard to come by, their summer demand far exceeding their limited supply.
Rachel’s voice on the telephone had sounded flat and far away. The connection wasn’t clear. He mentioned it and she made no comment, as if it didn’t matter. He told her he would make a reservation for his car in the morning. Silence. Then, without any preamble, she told him that a letter would reach him in the morning.
He concealed his surprise at this breach of her accustomed behavior. He had no feeling of crisis, however; to write a letter to a tardy love was not a departure from love’s ways. Rachel undoubtedly knew there was little chance of discovery. With all the mail pouring in for the bride-to-be, and all hands needed to keep abreast of it, nobody would have the time to be interested in a letter addressed to anyone else.
But he was profoundly sorry that rachel had felt driven to write and remind him of his inattention to the woman who would be his wife—at least, and quite openly, his intended wife—as soon as the dust of shelby’s marriage had settled. He began to apologize for his busy week. But she interrupted to say, in a voice as dry as autumn leaves, “don’t apologize for the wedding. I believe in weddings. They should come before everything else, or everything else is nothing. But it’s much too late to philosophize. I’ll hang up now, if you don’t mind. Good night, clark, tomorrow, you’ll have my letter.”
He heard the finality of the click despite that second of hesitation when something affecting their future had been
weighed in the balance. But nothing had been settled. He had said nothing he’d rung her up to say. Didn’t she know that she hadn’t asked when he would be in new york, or how they were to plan their brief holiday? was her avoidance explained in her letter? had she given him an ultimatum, set a limit to his patience? marry me now or be my enemy?
With the end in sight and a new beginning in sight, why would rachel, who had always been so predictable, let a few lost days scratch the immaculate surface of their perfect understanding? there was nothing to prove in punishing him by pointedly ignoring the purpose of his call. To treat their love as if it were one and the same with their lovemaking, to dismiss their tryst as if that was the surest way to bring him swiftly to one knee in penance with a proposal of marriage on his lips and a ring in his pocket for when she said “yes,” was to squander the treasure of their mutual trust in a wholly feminine fit of pique.
For a moment she had seemed on the verge of recanting, or giving him equal time for rebuttal. Then there had been that negation, that “no” said to herself or to him, signifying some dark withdrawal from reasonable behavior. Always before when he had thought of this impasse he had turned his mind away from it in fear. Now, though, with the phone call, there was a new sense of urgency. He knew that he must act, however cruelly inappropriate the time and place. He would ask corinne for a divorce before he left the island. The morning after the wedding he would ask her for his freedom, agreeing to whatever terms she might impose to
punish him. With rachel, and his practice, and the end of secrecy, there would be nothing more he needed for fulfillment.
Inxs the summertime of the oval, when screen doors replaced solid doors, and everyone saw everyone throughout the day, a closed door would only bring solicitous inquiry. He would have to leave corinne exposed to whatever knowledgeable deductions were drawn from her altered look. The married, like the old, never know when they are next and cannot help but hope the plight of others postpones theirs. Many would sift through the ashes of a burned-out marriage, a few of them looking for a spark to rekindle it, but most of them looking for evidence of the other woman.
He drove home and got quietly into the twin bed on the other side of the room from corinne. It was corinne’s bedroom, which he was sharing only because his room had been borrowed for two of their house guests.
Corinne did not stir. The evening had been lively, and she slept soundly, her breathing audible. He had not even looked at her, not because of any distaste, but because he had been filled with an obsession for rachel greater than anything he had felt since the first tempest of possession. All through the night he had ached for her. He saw her in her nakedness. In his fitful sleep, he had dreamed of her in the dress that his daughter would wear at her wedding. In his dream, rachel had been as he had once known her: young as morning, a graduate from a nursing school. She had had no seasoning, but her eyes had implored him to let her try, dissolving whatever resistance he might have mustered, and her soft, unslurred southern
speech, so unlike the careful brittleness acquired by corinne, had completed his capitulation. Clark had been doomed from that point on because, while not everyone can see it, those who can know that there is no beauty like that of a brown-skinned woman when she is beautiful: the velvet skin, the dark hair like a cloud, the dark eyes like deep wells to drown in.
And yet clark would not have hired rachel if he’d known he was going to fall in love with her. It was not a calculated act. As young and expectant of life as she was, she was entitled to more than a married man could give her. He told himself that he was hiring her for a trial period in which she would have to prove her capabilities. What he was never able to tell himself was all the ways she reminded him so sharply, so powerfully, of sabina, with whom he had had that sweet and unfulfilled encounter, from whom he had taken the trust and expectancy of a proffered heart and traded them for corinne’s empty vows.
Now, however, as he sat in the station wagon in the crowded gravel parking lot by the dock, he wondered if he would ever be free of the questions that licked at his brain like flames. He looked down at the letter again, and again he took it in, hoping that it had changed since his first reading.
dear clark
,
In these long weeks without you, i’ve had time to do a lot of thinking about the past and the present and now the years ahead. I know the wedding has had to take first place in your mind in these last days of preparation, with all hands needed to meet the standard of perfection
of the coleses. The wedding has absorbed my mind, too, though for very different reasons
.
I’m thirty-nine, and in december i’ll be forty. Perhaps if i had already crossed that bridge and looked the same and felt the same as i had twelve hours before, i could thinly of myself as being only one day older instead of one year older, and the bond between us would still be secure
.
I’ve tried to cling to that hope, but every day my doubts diminish it. Clark, a woman still unmarried panics when her fortieth birthday comes due. She knows, as i know that i know too, that time will not turn back, and the next decade i’ll be fifty, and only god knows the number of my remaining years, with no children and no grandchildren to remember me when the counting stops
.
My children were never conceived. It was my choice even more than it was yours. I did not want to bear a child who would have no legitimate claim to your name. Your love was total compensation
.
When i turned thirty, you joked about my coming of age, and we both laughed. You said that i had grown prettier and only looked an inch or so older. It was my love for you that made my face glow
.
A man in his forties and into his fifties is considered to be at his peak in any performance, business or bed, but a woman’s ego is not treated likewise. That i was twenty when we met seems almost impossible. I was just out of my tiresome teens, out of nursing school, too, the top student in my class, ready to test my skills in the magic
city of new york, so distant and different from my small hometown. It was a long-time dream come true. That i would ever be forty was light-years away from my thinking
.
Then i met you, and how we met was as awesome as a miracle, i had never known or ever seen up close a colored man so self-assured and sophisticated, i fell in love with you instantly, but i tried not to let it show. My common sense told me that a successful and handsome man with your charm would hardly be a bachelor. And so i confined my wishing to hoping that one day through you i might meet some ambitious young doctor who could use the encouragement of a wife who knew his field and would help him climb until he reached your height
.
But the day that i fell at your door, i fell at your feet. And i knew that i was still a green girl helplessly falling in love at first sight, not yet a seasoned woman who could control her heart. Working with you and loving you and making love with you became my world. I was a grown woman who knew her own mind, or so i thought
.
zYou’ve talked about asking your wife for a divorce when your daughters were married and their husbands had replaced you as their protectors. But too often the dream turns into a nightmare. I don’t want to know if you might change your mind about marrying me. I’ve chosen to change my mind instead
.
Tomorrow, when you receive this letter, i will be the wife of jim logan. Just the two of us before a justice of
the peace. I’m sure jim’s name is not on the guest list of your friends, or on yours, nor is mine. Shelby’s wedding will be totally unaffected
.
Jim’s been a city employee all of his working years. When he retires, his pension, which is adequate, comes due. As for me, i am hopeful that some doctor or hospital will find my years of experience worth an interview, and that the outcome will be satisfactory
.
Jim’s wife died two years ago. We met years before at bridge parties and became close friends. I rarely spoke of these gatherings to you because your disinterest in them was apparent and understandable. His daughters know me and are fond of me because of my affection for their mother. They are married themselves with young children. Their jobs and their families leave them little time to keep in daily touch with their father and his quiet way of life. When he asked me to marry him, i think it was with their coaxing, and maybe their coaching. If they knew about you, they knew i wore no wedding ring, and persuaded their father that the risk was worth the try
.
I will sleep in my own bed, but he will not be unwelcome if or when he asks to come to me. He loved his wife. I can never take her place, nor can he take yours. He misses a wife’s companionship; i need a wife’s sense of security
.
I do not regret the years we were together nor will i ever forget them. I have rewritten this letter three times and it always comes out the same way
.
my best to you, clark. I hope you will wish the same to me
.
Rachel
Clark’s hands trembled as he finished reading the letter. He suddenly noticed the quality of the air in the car—through the closed window on his left the sun’s lancing rays seemed to shimmer before him. The fight thinned out the oxygen somehow, and he could feel a pressing on his temples.
Clark shook his head sharply, suddenly recalling why he was sitting in the ferry parking lot. Greeting corinne’s tiresome relatives, exchanging small talk, driving them to the oval … it seemed at that moment absolutely inconceivable—he had to get out of there. No, he decided. He’d face corinne’s wrath. With that, he flipped the key in the ignition and began the drive back home.
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN
C
lark’s car careened through the Oval. The two front windows were rolled all the way down, and the dirty wind rushing in clawed at his throat and scattered the papers that lay on his back seat—ledgers, receipts, a brown paper bag. He jerked the steering wheel to the left and guided the wagon—a source of pride, the first of its make on the Vineyard—up the gently sloping gravel path that ended in a semicircle in front of the kitchen door to the house. He took the path too fast and had to brake sharply, bracing his arms on the wheel as he did so. More unfamiliar cars were parked in the grass, more off-island visitors. Well, they could all go hang, he thought to himself. He turned off the car’s engine and slumped down in his seat.
Then a curious coolness came over him, and as he
looked down at the letter lying in his lap, it seemed far away somehow, like a ship on the horizon, or a penny glinting at the bottom of a well. He took a deep breath and raised his head, and he did the only thing a Coles could do in his position: he pulled himself together. Here was a man born into the finest family Harlem had to offer, a man sent to the best New England preparatory school there was, a product of Harvard Medical School, a successful diagnostician, the owner of a brownstone on Seventh Avenue and 136th Street that was the envy of most, the owner of all he now surveyed, a sparkling blue house with glassed-in porches, set back on an immaculately tended lawn. Here was a man not accustomed to questioning his assumptions.
Clark had bought this property, the most coveted in the Oval, almost sight unseen. As successful as his practice was at that time, the house would still have been beyond his means, except that its previous owner, an old spinster, had died suddenly, leaving it to a faraway brother who was anxious to sell.
Clark would not learn until after the house was purchased that the spinster was Miss Amy Norton Norton. Her father had willed his house to her, well knowing that on his death the others would probably scatter to other resorts if their mates expressed a desire for a change; knowing, too, that his spinster daughter would always have room for them all, while they, because of marital pulls, might not have room for each other. That
this
was the house that only a generation later Clark Coles was to buy for his family was almost too perfect. Clark was sure that his father would have disapproved of their annual summer hegira. His father would
have seen the whole enterprise as tempting fate, risking the wrath of an angry God who would not be amused by the indulgence implied by so much leisure time. Clark knew that Isaac was too much a product of his generation, the generation of colored people that had not yet learned to take vacations, let alone own a summer house. But Clark was the son who made real a dream his father never thought to have, the dream of owning a home on the island, and that by some happy coincidence it was the very home Isaac had summered in as a boy made it all the sweeter.
