One Hundred Years of Marriage Read online

  “Come on. You’re going to be a lawyer in another semester.”

  “You think lawyers have high minds?”

  “Well, you can’t tell a joke like that at the country club.”

  “That’s where I heard it. Professor Rutherford told it. Now the guy and girl are sittin’ on the fence watchin’ the ruttin’, and the guy says, ‘Boy, I wish I was doin’ that.’ And the girl says, ‘Go ahead. It’s your cow.’”

  I clamped my hand over my mouth to hide a smile. “Oh, Lordy, Tom, are you just being naughty so I’ll scold you? Don’t make me be your mother.”

  “Never, Patticake, never.” He rose up on his knees and took my ankles in either hand to drag me down the bed, pulling my head off the pillow, and spreading my legs. “Not what I had in mind,” he said.

  *

  Throughout the heat of July, Olivia, Ernest and I maintained scrupulous attention to our duties. When I wasn’t sitting by Mother’s bed or cooking, I read up on depression, menopause, existentialism, and psychoanalysis. I consulted the great thinkers I’d heard about as a freshman: Sigmund Freud, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, as well as Ladies’ Home Journal.

  Daddy, of course, went to work every day as City Engineer, served on the church finance board, and discharged his duties as Republican town chairman. At home he repaired the gutters, cleaned out kitchen drawers, and rearranged all the coils of wire and cable into a new pattern on the garage wall. It was hard for someone who’d commanded a whole battalion of men in Korea to settle for being in charge of so few people. He inspected our work, commended us for our performance, shined his shoes, brushed his suits and went to meetings. Sometimes I would see him standing before his highboy mirror carefully arranging his heavy graying curls. The last time I saw him so deeply involved in this activity while Mother lay right there in the double bed they shared, her eyes staring at the ceiling, desperate for relief, I had imagined myself clocking him with a monkey wrench.

  *

  For all my reading I still could not figure out how to help Mother. When I’d come in, her face would be a great puddle, eyes full, cheeks soaked and often panting from a wave of heat generated from inside her. She seemed to be trying hard not to move at all. God, for her was the Great Physician, and she believed if she lay still enough, prayed without demand, hoped without vision, opened her heart to Him, He would take mercy and raise her up. She read from a book entitled, Let Go and Let God. When she was sleeping, I slipped it from her fingers.

  The only complete and sure cure for your bad nerves,

  as you call them, is to relax in the hands of God and

  know that He is now looking after your troubles, that

  He is now guiding you into the quiet waters of inner peace.

  The book shook in my hand. All my life I’d choked down such language and imposed it on others as I led devotionals at church. But now, standing beside her bed, seeing between her eyebrows the crease that didn’t smooth out even in sleep, I realized my mother’s strengths—determination, initiative, creativity—were being paralyzed by what amounted to religious knockout drops. Surely God didn’t want her mindless, helpless, in total surrender, not even taking responsibility for her own troubles. Surely ours was the God who helped those who helped themselves. I hid the book in the back of my closet.

  When she stirred, I was standing there. I watched her hand search the bed beside her. “Have you seen my book?”

  I spoke softly, trying to sound casual. “You know, Mama, the ideas in that book sound good, but maybe they’re for a person with another kind of problem, someone who’s too high on himself, arrogant, whose ego is getting between him and God’s will. Your poor little ego couldn’t get between you and a breeze.”

  “No, no. I’ve been too proud,” she blurted, “trying to handle everything myself. For years I’ve been praying God would change Daddy, make him calm, a more loving person.” Her face broke, red and rubbery. “I’m the one who needs to change. I need to learn to wait on the Lord. God promised. Marcus Mapple says we underestimate God.”

  “But maybe Rev. Mapple meant that another way.”

  “Oh, please, darlin’, let me have the book. Please.”

  All I’d ever wanted to be was the one who made her happy. Obediently, I went for the book and gave it to her. Her breathing calmed; she patted my hand to let me know it was all right to leave her alone. I felt dizzy as though spinning in a swing.

  As I quietly slipped out of her room, Ernest burst in the front door, panting. “Patty, I need a ride! Fast! They’re unpacking a huge refrigerator in the alley behind the biology building.”

  I grabbed my purse and keys. We piled into the Buick and sped off to the campus. Finding the thin slats needed for the canoe walls was getting harder and harder for Ernest, who searched alone through alleys and trash heaps. We got to the alley where he’d seen the refrigerator being unpacked, but the crate was gone. At the far end of the alley, we saw a huge trash truck turning the corner, noisily changing gears, accelerating, bearing away the precious building materials.

  “Step on it!” Ernest yelled.

  We were a mile out of town on a two-lane highway before I could pull alongside the speeding truck. Ernest hung out the passenger window, pushing his gangly body up high enough to be seen by the driver. “Stop! Stop! Please!”

  The driver helped us rip the crate apart to get it into the Buick’s big trunk.

  At home with a bundle of slats under each arm, I climbed up into the thick heat of the storage room. There, between the banks of taped-up boxes, cast-off toys and abandoned art projects, propped on sawhorses and old chairs, running fifteen feet long, was the skeleton of the Orange Crate Canoe. I was aghast.

  “Big isn’t it?” Ernest said, beaming.

  “Ernest, it’s huge. Did you know?”

  He shrugged. “The plans made it look little. I thought, something just big enough for me. But look. We can all get in.”

  I was looking at it, all right, and it was plain the swell of its widest part could never pass through the little door to the storage room. “Ernest, honey, it’s so hot up here. You must roast.”

  “Yeah,” he made a tiny smile, embarrassed by his situation. “I take off everything but my underpants.”

  “You don’t have to do this, work in all this heat. You could wait for fall or just chuck the whole project.”

  “I wanted to, but Daddy said he’d be very disappointed if I didn’t finish what I started.”

  “Have you shown it to him?”

  “I’m waiting until I get some of the walls on.”

  *

  As I pushed through Freud’s An Outline of PsychoAnalysis, reading and rereading the clinical language, looking up in the dictionary at least four words on every page, I’d grown more and more sure that this Viennese doctor wouldn’t give two hoots about the pressures on an Oklahoma woman. But when I came upon the line, “Holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness,” I hugged that little library book to my chest. Mama was the perfect example. To her way of thinking, the role of women was to be a great sponge of aggression, just soaking up the poison men spewed out, thereby keeping the environment clean and safe for children. The problem was Mama was now over-saturated.

  She’d always behaved as though The General’s temper, always so close to the surface, was her responsibility. She’d dance around, cooing and patting his sleeve—”Now Cecil, don’t concern yourself.” “I’m sorry for this, Cecil,“ she’d apologize for the traffic or a story in the newspaper or someone else’s ill-judged comment, trying sweetly, frantically to keep the lid on, never getting angry herself. Aggressiveness in women was, after all, in poor taste. Every time I watched this, I wanted to scream.

  *

  “Mama, what are you angry about?” I asked when she’d had some morning coffee.

  “Nothing,” she gasped, stricken I’d suggest such a thing. The room was already hot, and the smell of plaster dust burned my nose.

&nb
sp; “You’re sure? Something long ago, maybe?”

  “Oh, darlin’, I had the most marvelous childhood.” She relaxed back on the pillow smiling. “So many sweet people loved me, and my parents had a wonderful marriage. Never once raised their voices in anger.”

  “Didn’t Grandma Vic ever complain that Granddad wouldn’t get a job?”

  “Never. Not once. She always took up for him.”

  I’d heard all this before and knew what was coming, but I listened more carefully this time.

  “Once, during the Depression,” she began, “times were so desperate. I’ve told you. We had three grown cousins down on their luck living with us. I was in college, working full time, trying to help feed everyone, and I heard about a teaching job Daddy would have been perfect for, but he wouldn’t even go see about it. I yelled at him. ‘How can you just sit there, when there’s no food in this house!’ Mother heard me, and she got up out of her sick bed to come in and say to me, ‘Alice, I’m ashamed of you, talking that way to your sweet father.’”

  I never liked that little snippet of family history, always told to laud my grandparents’ perfect marriage. “Don’t you get tired of staying quiet when Daddy starts yelling?”

  A chill passed over her face, and I knew I’d gone too far. I stared at her through the thick air, and she looked back as unsmiling as I was. Finally I asked, “Have you had any dreams lately you can remember?”

  *

  By the end of July I realized I no longer had any friends. The girlfriends from high school who’d called for a movie or a swim at the beginning of the summer didn’t even call to talk. I wouldn’t, of course, have talked to them about Mama. Everyone knew you weren’t supposed to talk about family matters outside the home. Of course, at our house, we didn’t talk about family matters inside the home either, and the only secrets that were mine to tell were about sins I had committed myself or misfortunes that had befallen me. It was best, of course, not to talk about these either.

  Poor Ernest banged away every day in an airless room, as though he was actually going to have something to carry him down a river one day. And my own project—Mother’s recovery—seemed just as doomed. I felt her sinking as though into a subterranean vault, lying still, waiting for the sod to cover her.

  She spoke sometimes of her beloved grandmother, Olivia Jane Hale, a woman who pioneered first in Nebraska, then in Oklahoma, living in a dugout. Ever since I’d been a little girl, this woman had been my model, a distant star of perfection. “The sweetest creature who ever lived,” Mother said, “What an angel, never raised her voice or argued or spoke ill of anyone, and if someone was criticized in her presence, she would come to his rescue: “Wendell may be a little shiftless, as you say, but he’s so pleasant to be around.”

  The greatest compliment I was ever given was years ago when my Aunt Fel said of me to Mama, “She’s going to be another Olivia Jane.”

  Oh no! I thought now. Not another sweet, long-suffering woman. Surely there was another great grandmother back there in time I could take after. I knew nothing about Grandma Vic’s mother except that her name was Margaret and she was from North Carolina. Maybe she was a real southern belle, fiery like Scarlett O’Hara.

  *

  I lay on Tom with my total, sex-drugged weight, our bare bodies sealed with sweat. There was no breeze through the open window, and we breathed a thick mixture of each other’s odors. “Tom?” I looked up into his eyes. “I need to ask you a question.”

  “Shoot,” he said. I could hear his heart’s deep, steady ka-thumping and wished I were a girl with nothing on her mind.

  “How do you feel about anger?” I asked. “I mean people getting really mad, yelling at each other, saying mean, exaggerated, hurtful things.”

  With both hands he lifted my heavy face from his chest. “Patty, are you angry at me?”

  “No, never!”

  “Cause if you are, let’s get on the cycle right now and head for the woods, so we can wrestle and yell.”

  “Oh, Tom.” I could see it: Tom and me crashing around in the trees, him tearing my clothes and me throwing him off and standing my ground, spitting it all out, every big hurt and petty aggravation about my family, hurled into his teeth—everything, including that excruciatingly long list of those things that weren’t mine to tell.

  I laid my head back down and panted, my cheek slipping minutely back and forth in the sweat that sealed me to his chest hair. I wanted to marry him right then, and my throat tightened as it might have if I were going to cry.

  Mother’s crying had dried to a silent, black grief that felt contagious. The other members of the family began avoiding each other. Olivia finished her laundry duties earlier and earlier. Ernest stayed in the storage room, sometimes working. I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings. The General did not mention my malingering.

  *

  “You’re going to the doctor, Mother!” Freud had completely let me down. His explanation for weak egos in women—feeling inadequate regarding their plumbing. Ridiculous!

  “Oh, darlin’, I’d be too ashamed to face Dr. Tilghman.”

  “So I’ll call another doctor.”

  “No, no, I just need to be patient and stop telling God what he should—”

  “Mother, maybe God wants me to decide what we should do.”

  She looked shocked but didn’t answer back.

  Dr. Whittle, usually our third choice, put her in the hospital and prescribed sedatives. “We’ve got to help her shut off all this crying,” he said.

  The General visited her every evening alone. Afterwards, he said he drove around for a long time to clear his head. So I imagined they discussed important matters, things about their marriage. I didn’t ask, of course. When I visited her in the afternoons, she was asleep or too groggy to make much sense.

  The hospital was on Tom’s side of town, and I always managed to drive past his boarding house, going and coming. I knew I wouldn’t see him, but it was a comfort to see the motorcycle leaning against the garage and think of him at his desk in the back, his sleeves rolled up tight, perhaps stopping now and then to think of me. In the daylight the street looked pretty poor. A few other boarding houses and some bungalows slumped behind unkempt, junky yards.

  One afternoon as I cruised down this street, I saw my father and Olivia on a porch. I pressed the horn before I saw that it wasn’t Olivia, just a young woman who had the same long blond hair. He was holding her hand in both of his. I floor-boarded the Buick.

  Unbelievable! Another woman. Driving around to clear his head, huh? This secret side of him and whatever it meant was what Mama must lay buried under. An outsider might have said I had very little evidence, but that scene at that shabby house shifted so much of what I had taken for granted, I knew there was a lot more to discover.

  Should I tell Olivia what I’d seen on Kemper Street? Shoot, Olivia was probably onto him years ago and knew tons of stuff I didn’t. Keeping it from me could be what kept her step so light.

  *

  Under the kitchen window in back of our house was a hiding place. As a little girl I figured out that if I sat on the box that housed the gas meter, no one could see me when they looked casually from the driveway because of the way the enclosed back porch stuck out. And if someone glanced out the window, they’d look right over my head. I had remembered this as a high perch from which my legs dangled down, so I was surprised how low it was now.

  I listened to my father’s car pull in beside the Buick, and I heard him inhale as he opened the screened door to the back porch. His keys dropped, clank, on the dryer as usual. Then nothing. He was searching the rooms, not calling my name, just quietly looking for me. I waited.

  It was getting towards supper time, and I could hear him begin to open some cans and bang pans, but I didn’t rush in to help, just leaned back on the white clapboards and gazed into the long shadows gathering in the old orchard. The happiest time of my life was the Second World War when my father was away in the
Philippines. I was four years old when Mama returned to the house she’d grown up in. Her sister, Aunt Felicity, had moved in as well with her two kids and their little dog, Fluffy because Uncle Harold had shipped out to Italy. We used to play war right there in the orchard. Harold Jr., seven years older than me, taught us to goose step and salute like Nazis and to make the screaming-bloody-murder cry of a kamikaze pilot crashing into one of our carriers. Fluffy went wild when Howard, up in a gnarled old peach tree, bombed us girls with green peaches.

  Aunt Fel and my mother taught us kids to do the Charleston and play ukuleles. They peeled all the old greasy paper off the walls in the kitchen and put up big, beautiful pink roses. The man at the store had told them that rose wallpaper was meant for bedrooms, but they put it up anyway and painted the woodwork pink. Then they took Grandmother Brady’s old walnut china cabinet and painted it pink too and the round oak table—pink like a birthday cake sittin’ there in the middle of our rosy kitchen. They said they were wild women. They laughed like crazy and had to put down their paintbrushes to wipe their tears and blow their noses.

  *

  Scraping sounds of spoons getting the last of the stew out of the bowls let me know it was time to leave the meter box and go inside. I’d heard The General tell Olivia and Ernest I was at my friend Deanna’s. I hoped he thought I had hanged myself.

  I slipped in the back door and smiled at Olivia and Ernest. My father’s eyes were wide and he was breathing through his mouth. I went to the sink and began to scrub the pan.

  “Let me do that, Patricia,” he said. “Then we can take a walk.” I hung onto the pan when he tried to pull it away. He raced around the kitchen, snatching the bowls from in front of Olivia and Ernest. I worked slowly at the sink, all but sterilizing each dish before I put it in the dishwasher.

  “Want a Dairy Queen?” Olivia whispered to Ernest and within thirty seconds the Buick roared out the driveway. My father and I were alone in the kitchen.

  “Let’s sit at the table, Patricia,” a thin version of his commanding officer voice said, trying to make me a child about to be disciplined. He’d spanked me after I was twelve—old enough to be totally humiliated. “You need to understand some things,” he said. “The city is widening Kemper Street. As city engineer I have had to visit every property owner. I can show you the blueprints at the office. Please sit down.”