Marry or Burn Read online

  It would be good to be carried along tracks, instead of miles in the air with the destination rising up from below to stop her dead. She likes feeling herself pulled slowly away from where she has been, and all the steps of postponement.

  The last time she took the train was six or seven years ago, to stay with her older sister in Baltimore. It was when she was first alone. Her daughter had left for school. A daughter, her sister warned her, had to get out. She had to go to college; she couldn’t stay behind to manage for her mother. A daughter had to leave off being the steady little girl with an eye out for everything and everybody, steering her mother through the days into the blind evenings. This sister had stepped forward with an unexpected determination to get her straightened out, and she had agreed to it. It was something to try.

  For a while, at her worst, after the quickly ruined time with her sister and before her sons stepped in, she shared a place not far from the station in Baltimore with two women whose names she doesn’t like to remember, nor their red faces squashed in sleep, who tried to convince her to pack up and hop on a freight with them when spring came. They might know the switchman but what did they know about her? She was still major steps away from that.

  4.

  STATELY AS THE deep organ chords issuing from the keyboard, a little prow comes forward against her breastbone, or it may be the bone itself pressing there as she is borne to the heights of tenderness for her daughter. It doesn’t matter that two men, her sons, are in the row behind, with wives beside them who had been carefully seated too far down the row of wineglasses at the rehearsal dinner to make themselves heard if they spoke to her. It doesn’t matter that in their wallets are pictures of children who have not been told of her, and better so.

  Next she is escorted under the arbor of woven ferns and ribbon and led down the wide hall to the reception, the groom’s mother following on her usher’s arm with clear taps of her beautiful fawn pumps, not quite catching up. They are the first to arrive in the big echoing room; the bridal pair are behind a door in a private space where newlyweds can spend a few minutes getting their bearings before the reception. At the far end are waiters, with a forest of green bottles and the cake.

  A tall man stands apart from them at the long table laden with candles and real autumn leaves, banked platters and swirled fabric, red and gold. Instead of greeting them when they came in he turned his back. He may be the wedding consultant, passing a hand over his bald scalp as he scans the table.

  The guests will serve themselves and find tables of their own choosing. The real planner of the whole thing was the maid of honor, her daughter’s best friend who works for the mayor. It was to be a little like a church supper in the bride’s home town in West Virginia, she declared. But a sophisticated church supper, with wonderful food. This girl could imagine her way into a bride’s intentions better than any hotel wedding consultant. Everyone agreed she should start her own business.

  “Ohhh . . .” the mother had heard herself groan from the velvet couch in the bride’s dressing room. “Oh, I didn’t pay for anything.” What a ridiculous thing to say, in anguish or surprise, to the daughter who came for her and flew her here and groomed her like a child and got her dressed and pinned jewelry onto her.

  “Don’t worry about that,” her daughter said quickly. “You’re here.” Then her daughter pulled her close against the big white rustling dress and hugged her as if she were a little thing with stage fright.

  She knows the bride and groom are to enter and greet everybody and then give the band a sign and just dance out onto the empty floor. There is not to be a receiving line; why should anyone “receive” anyone else? her daughter had said, over the groom’s mild protest. It was exactly that, his assuming certain obligations could be laughed at but would be met, that got the best friend going with her changes.

  A receiving line seems to be forming up anyway, with the bride and groom trying to present to his parents various young women in black dresses with thin straps. Then the lights go down and the bridal pair starts the inaugural waltz, in which they are to dance until some signal allows a tide of couples to rise around them. Alone on the floor they dance slowly and beautifully. She is proud of her daughter’s dancing. On the porch of the house by the river, she had been the teacher, dancing with a thirteen-year-old stiff with grief, as she had danced with her husband in the evenings in summer before he was sick, with the record player lifted through the window and lightning bugs in the hedge, up and down the pine boards they had stripped and varnished themselves, around the corner and back, laughing and carrying on while the boys, joining in, jumped on and off the glider, bouncing the needle on the record, and the baby girl tried to climb up after them. Tipsy parents—waving to the neighbors. Tipsy, that unknowing pair, yes, but not drunk. There was no need to be drunk.

  Over by the bandstand she can see her second son, the shyer, less successful one who pays her rent, but he’s looking at the band and listening carefully to something his wife is saying. He’s a big man, tall, but not handsome like his father; he has a disappointed, fallen face. She thinks, I did favor your brother, just like you said. I did. I’m sorry. I’m sorry but he was so much ours. The first. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything that could happen.

  Finally after a long time during which she can see only the bountiful rafts of stemmed glasses sliding among the shoulders—for they are not going to hoard the champagne for toasting, they are going to drink champagne all night—a few couples venture onto the floor and step carefully into each other’s arms, and begin to rock slowly and move their feet in small squares, with concentrating smiles. As she watches them she feels a familiar sinking that means she needs a drink immediately. She will have to leave. Now. She’s trying to retreat, but slowly, feeling behind her with one hand as if she’s already had a few too many, or backed into one of the dreams she used to have, when each slow step led a few more inches back from some cliff or animal. She is suddenly so played out and heavy in the arms and legs that she thinks she might actually have to go to her room and fall down and sleep.

  She plays with the idea. She thinks, Then if I wake up it’ll be morning and I’ll hear the river. I’ll wake the kids. I won’t have this life on my hands. But of course she’s playing a game, a game of tempting herself. She knows she wouldn’t wake up in her old house but she thinks in stubbornness and perplexity, If I can’t I’ll die.

  But someone is asking her to dance. It’s the tall, thin man, the wedding consultant. He crossed the room to her, shook hands, told her a name like Rodney or Sidney. He must have identified her as a member of the bridal party because of her gardenia and seen that no one has spoken for her. Perhaps that is his function.

  She has not danced in years. When she gets out on the floor with him she is surprised at her memory of it, the alert that runs through her forgotten muscles. Some of that might be the man’s doing. But here are her limbs stretching themselves, giving up some of their weight. In one of the smooth turns he executes, something catches, attaching her to his dark suit. At first it seems to be the corsage pin, but then she sees it’s her other lapel, it’s the brooch, her daughter’s gift. Her daughter insisted that she take it, wear it, a big thick cluster of pearls in a setting the shape of a vase or basket with handles. “Lands,” she says, “my daughter gave me this pin and it catches on everything.”

  He holds her away to look. The bruised eyes don’t match his elegance. They seem to mock something, whether himself or her she can’t tell. He says, “Looks like a loose prong. My mother wore one of those and it was always getting her into trouble.” Then, so as not to place her in his mother’s generation—for he is roughly her own age—he says, “And now they’re all the rage again.”

  She decides he’s not the wedding consultant after all. “Which side are you on?” she says.

  “Which side . . . oh, the bride’s. I had the pleasure of working with her at one time.” The tray of champagne is tilting their way. He dances her away from
it, bracing her firmly as his steps lengthen. The brooch catches again. “Uh-oh. Here.” He pauses, and one hand secures her back as two long fingers of the other press her collarbone, lightly, while with the others he bends a tiny wire in the setting. She is flushed from the exertion and from having to arch backwards because of his height and stick with the conversation and keep her balance in a sequence that began simply but has grown more unpredictable as he feels her follow him. They start again, whirling a path through the crowd. “My daughter says it’s junk, but I don’t know, these don’t look like any pearls I ever saw, they could be real.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. Are you going to sell it?” he asks in a friendly way.

  She almost trips. “Why do you ask me that?”

  “Forgive me, I’m thoughtless, I was joking.” But he isn’t a smiler. He has her close, where without her glasses she can’t really see him. He seems to steer her with something small, maybe the wrist bone. “I must be carried away, dancing with the mother of the bride.”

  “How do you know, you weren’t at the wedding.”

  “I wasn’t?”

  “You were here in this room when we got here.”

  “Well, I’ll confess. I said to myself, ‘The prettiest dress. Eyes bluer than the bride’s.’ And I heard you speak to Mr. Weller there, the young groom, and I thought to myself—Voila! West Virginia!”

  “Well, what about you? You’re just as bad. You’re not from here, you’re from down south.”

  “So I am.” With his mustache and sad eyes he could have been another of those soft-spoken Southerners you ran into in boarding houses, always polite, showing you some pocket watch or worn-out leather book they carried around. He could have been, if you didn’t notice the halfway-mean pride that belonged to certain males looking to tease you into something—she was surprised to recognize it—and a kind of barely-held-onto patience.

  He spins her into the center of the parquet floor, three times, so that she lies this way and that like a dress displayed on an arm. “What took you from West Virginia to Baltimore?”

  “Things happened,” she says, trying not to show that the burst of energy is deserting her and she is losing her breath. “I had enough of the place. My sister—how do you know where I live?”

  With both arms he holds her in, against the strong outward pull of his wide steps in the turn. “I suppose I know everything about you,” he says.

  “I guess my daughter turned into a talker.” Out of the corner of her eye she keeps seeing the white dress of her daughter, wide skirts sloshing up and back. Even in this first dance, the dance to complete the wedding and start the new, married life, her daughter is keeping an eye on her.

  “No.”

  “She worked for you.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  She tries to lean back to look at him, but with his forearm along her back and fingers to her ribs he keeps her where she is. By now she needs her breath and doesn’t try to speak.

  Her ears are ringing so that she can’t hear much more than the big double bass thumping. That she could feel even if she went deaf. The man seems calmly, even selfishly, attached to the idea of circling the dance floor with her for the length of this waltz, so long-drawn-out that other couples have finally started to fall back and gather at the round tables with their champagne.

  “Well,” she says, raising her voice to be heard as they whirl to the bandstand, where the mute on the saxophone is opening and closing, “you never know.” She repeats it with each fluid triangle their twinned feet describe on the smooth wood. “You never know.” The dulled feeling has moved off again and she’s really dancing, breathing heavily but with ease. A wind has stirred up around them, holding the other dancers at bay. Even in stiff new shoes her feet move as if a current flowed under them, or from them, swaying her with little need for effort on her part. “You never—never—know.”

  “That’s right. My, my. I thought so. You must have been born dancing.”

  She is getting used to his unsmiling gallantry. She is past making the effort to smile herself. There is a pleasure foreign to smiles, coming out of nowhere and going again, just as there is the opposite, for which tears are just decorations. With closed eyes she says, “As a matter of fact I was.”

  AS SOON AS she could she left the ballroom purposefully, holding the slim black satin bag, her daughter’s, with both hands like a dowsing stick. She looked over the brass rail of the mezzanine down into the lobby where a boy of nine or ten was waiting for the elevator, repeatedly jabbing the button. He kept his back to her; he had a thin neck tanned amber pink, with a small cloud of bone coming and going just above the neckline of his sweatshirt. She played a game that if he turned around she would see the fixed eyes of her first child, the one who had just taken his sister up the aisle. He thought he had escaped her but he hadn’t. No, he had returned to her long since, un-grown, gazing over fat cheeks like a judge, or kicking with imperial joy, a baby again, on whom everybody stopped to congratulate them, tall husband, blond wife, and sturdy, golden baby, because of the seal on the three of them of his having been born at the earliest height of love.

  She herself is steady for the moment. She has made it through the wedding, she has danced, at the edge of the floor a man has placed her hand in her daughter’s, bowing. Her daughter has caught her in her arms and whispered, “My Meery.” Nothing so tender as this old nickname made out of her name by her daughter as a toddler, whispered on a soft breath that warmed her ear, has been said to her since an AA meeting years ago, back at home. Three or four years after her husband died—or it might have been five—she was feeling the stirrings of a deep terror. Her daughter was applying to college. A seedy old guy was looking at her, on the bleachers in the high school gym where she and a dozen others made their confessions. Of course some of them might recognize each other, even though the meetings took place in a bigger town across the county line. He said, “I seen you and your hubby a few times dancing at the lounge.” They weren’t supposed to allude to any possible connections they might have. “I told my wife, I had my wife then, I said, ‘That’s a sweet gal.’ She said, ‘Yes she is and I know you wish we was all like that.’”

  For that little space the tension had left her. She remembered that, leaning back until the knees of the person behind her on the bleachers cradled her for a second, and saying something like, “Oh, right, that’s all we need. More like me. More drunks.”

  “Just hear what I say,” the old fellow said. He was on his last legs. He had years and years on her, in the life she would have if she wasn’t careful.

  A cloud of gardenia encloses her face as she looks down at the boy until the elevator comes and he gets in. She stays with her hands on the rail, glancing neither left nor right as people come in and out of the reception hall. Her eyes, in which her daughter has put soothing drops, blaze the blue of her dress, her feet clench in the new shoes, she vows, as at her own wedding, eternal beginning.

  Trespass

  STARK BONNEY WAS listening to a patient’s heart when the woman took his hand in hers and placed it, stethoscope still in the palm, on her breast. He would have said he drew back, as a doctor accustomed to the occasional inappropriate comment or gesture from a patient, though in fact his hand stayed where it was. She took the other hand, placed it.

  “Three times I have come here.” The scope was still in his ears, the voice in it muffled and rather deep. The breasts seemed at the bursting point. “The orange aura that you have, I see it.” She had some kind of foreign accent with a relaxed, insolent sound in it. “From one time to the next I wonder if you recognize me? Why do you think I am here?” She let go of his hands.

  Of course he recognized her. “We’re looking into your heart block,” he said, holding her now by the waist. “By itself, it’s nothing.”

  “No, no. Because of you. I am not Mrs. So-and-so like you call me. My name is Katya. You said that you were going to take care of me. That is what I want you to do.�
��

  A long stormy affair followed, interrupted by her death.

  KATYA HAD BEEN a violinist. But she was not good enough, she said, to play with any of the ensembles for which she periodically auditioned, so she worked in a bank. She was good with numbers; numbers and music went together. “I play too much,” she said. “Not the violin. That, I do not.” And in truth he rarely heard her practice, though he had heard her cry in the locked bathroom after one of these auditions. “No, I play, you know, in life. I am not serious. Though I love most of all the serious musician. I am always dreaming about this one with the violin, this one with the cello.” From the start, she could hurt him. “Oh, you must not worry. A serious doctor—that is the same thing. I adore him, with his blue eyes”—she kissed his eyelids—“his clean skin.”

  He went into the bank, not his own bank, to see her behind her window in her loud silk and tight leather, her streaked hair pulled back from the small, carved face. “What do you do all day when nobody comes in?” Because everybody used the ATMs now.

  “I talk to the guard. This man is very sad. Not a good American. I gaze out to sea.”

  In Russia she had been a child of promise, taken from her village to school in Moscow, set apart for the study of the violin. But the collapse of the Soviet Union left her with no sponsor, no clear course to follow. She had no parents. Her mother had died in her thirties of an undetermined ailment, her father, “my beloved,” in the war the Soviets waged in Afghanistan. At ten, she and a friend lived and worked with the cook at their school; after the cook caught them taking rubles from her tin they lived in a man’s office, and in a downhill series of hideouts. The list shifted with each telling. “Don’t ask me this! We fell through the cracks. As you say.” She laughed. “Cracks! You know nothing.” At sixteen, she came to the United States with a man three times her age, and quite soon she had left him, but of course, she said with comic despair, he was still on her doorstep. Still plying his Katka with gifts. “Katka”: in Russian that meant someone more . . . more fun than “Katya.” The gifts she threw into a drawer, where even Stark could recognize the touch of a pawnbroker—engraved spoons, medals from the Napoleonic campaigns, lacquered brooches, old pendants of amber.