One Hundred Years of Marriage Read online

Against the very last purple light along the horizon he stood and wiped his hand down his mouth before folding open the hood of his old Ford. It served him right, this old car breaking down. But this was a bad spot. There wasn’t a house in sight and they must be twenty miles yet from Ada which wasn’t half way home. She pulled to the edge of her seat and watched his fingers checking the clamps on the hoses, tightening the cap on the radiator, and knew he wasn’t working on the problem yet. This was just the fiddling he always did, calming his mind while he thought about the problem. Was the throttle stuck? That wouldn’t be so bad. He could fix that.

  He walked back and handed his jacket through the window without looking at her. It was getting dark now. She opened the glove compartment, took out the big flashlight, and quietly got out to come around behind him and shine the light where his hands were working.

  “Higher!” he snapped, and she moved the light a fraction of an inch. His fingers were black up to the knuckles. He wasn’t working on the throttle. This was something more serious. A car approached. Maybe they should flag it down for help, but it wasn’t her place to suggest this. In another few hours Mother and Daddy would start to worry. The wind had come up and whipped the hem of her jacket and pressed her skirt against her legs. She should get Cecil’s jacket from the car. He was sweating and could take a chill.

  “Steady!” he barked and she switched hands with the flashlight and tried to breath lightly so the beam of the light came down steadily at just the right angle to cast the least shadows.

  “Don’t you have any tools in the car?” she asked as sweetly as she could. “Surely a few wrenches under the seat.”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference. I need a spanner. Couldn’t reach this with a wrench.”

  Maybe at a farmhouse down the road he could borrow a spanner. Maybe if he took the battery out he could reach down to whatever it was he needed to turn. Could her slim fingers reach down? Maybe they should find a house and telephone home to ask Daddy to come to get them. Cecil looked up and down the straight road. There wasn’t a headlight coming in either direction. The wind was loud now, rattling the dry corn stalks. Where was the house of the farmer who’d strung this fence?

  Cecil dropped his hands to his sides, and she switched off the flashlight. They were in total darkness. There was no moon, no stars, just Cecil’s labored breathing beside her. She shook with the cold and felt a little faint. She’d eaten so little at dinner and then the long walk and the shooting. Cecil didn’t care about her anymore; and the long black corridors between the corn stalks could hide any kind of danger. She felt the darkness choking her.

  Cecil was the phony. His family had no money. This car she’d taken for an antique, his hobby, was just old, the only thing he could afford. His father was a gambler whose estate was in ruin. She wanted to scream with disappointment. The wind in the corn stalks sounded like bones rattling, and she wrapped her arms around her waist.

  So Cecil was right about her. She did want a big house, one with radiators, a tight roof and a veranda, thank you very much. She wanted piles of silk stockings and heavy bond paper, a car that ran, and crystal that sang when you thumped it. Not having things at the moment didn’t mean you weren’t a materialist. She’d pretended she wanted an artist’s life. But whoever heard of Bohemians in Oklahoma? Who was she kidding?

  She wasn’t even the lady she’d thought she was this morning before she felt C.L. Brady’s leg against her hip, and realized she had a taste for recklessness. And a man like this, a gambler, a fighter, a big guy, one who clearly had a taste for her. It was in that distorted red moment, his body crouched around her, that she’d wheeled and aimed and killed the woodpecker.

  Cecil rested his hands on the open hood. She could barely see them against the old car. Closing the hood had always been the sign of success; his triumphing over whatever difficulty the machine had presented him. His wonderful mechanical ability solved the kinds of problems that so confounded Daddy. But this time he didn’t have the solution, and she knew his hands didn’t want to fold out the cover and fasten it down until he’d licked the problem.

  What were they going to do? She knew if he were alone he could sleep in the car until morning, then walk down the road easy as pie to borrow a spanner and fix the car and come home with a good story to tell—the joke on him for cleaning out the car, wanting it to be so neat as a pin, he forgot to put back the tools he always had lying under the seat.

  But she was there, weakening him by witnessing his failure and adding a huge responsibility. Staying alone together, huddled in the car wasn’t a possibility. Both families would be scandalized. He wouldn’t go for help and leave her alone on this dark road, nor could he call her father to come get them and admit he wasn’t capable of looking after her. She knew he’d rather slit his throat. She felt like a huge unwieldy package, a burden he no longer wanted. And she was shaking uncontrollably as the wind drove through the challis and the silk.

  Cecil’s hands still lay on the hood. Was he thinking of calling his father? Surely that was the answer. It would take a couple of hours, driving at night, for Mr. Brady to reach them, but he would come. He would come for her, the sure-shot, willowy college girl. She knew it. If Cecil had been alone, his father would have told him to hang on ‘til morning, this small son who wouldn’t gamble, who would never take the chances the high-rolling C.L. Brady had—not the man his father was by a long shot. That’s what his father thought. She understood now, that sense of struggle for place she’d felt in Cecil—not the darling baby of the family he should have been, not worth a trip in the dark.

  Swamped with a wave of pity for Cecil, she stepped up to his side and laid her head on his shoulder. He lifted his dirty hands, but dropped them back on the hood and laid his head against hers. He was warm, and she pressed herself against him.

  They sat inside the car and Cecil wiped his hands on the rag from the glove box. The noisy wind drove into every seam of the old car. Cecil took his jacket and wrapped it around her. “I’ve got only one idea,” he said, “and it’s kind of dumb and probably won’t work, but it’s all I’ve got.” In the dark she guessed he was looking at her, needing her permission or encouragement.

  “Hey,” she said, “Let’s give her a try.”

  From behind the seat he took the brown paper bag he’d carried when he left his folks’ place. He took out two apples then two large sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. “Here,” he said, “you eat now. I’ll eat after we’re rolling.” He’d probably made these himself in the kitchen while she walked back with his father. He was thinking ahead, thinking of her. He kissed her. His lip was moist with sweat.

  “To hell with them,” he said. “To hell with all of them.” Then he got out into the driving wind, and as he did, his flapping white shirt was illuminated by a shaft of moonlight as a cloud was swept aside. He looked up at the moon and then back to grin at her as though God had smiled on his cockamamie plan. He began to unwind a piece of wire from the fence post beside the cornfield. She watched as the wind blew his dark curls, and she saw him snap his hand back in pain then suck on one of his fingers for a moment before going back to twisting the wire off the post.

  For the first time, she thought of the small woman who’d taken her picture in the woods—probably a tenant of Mr. Brady’s, maybe one he wasn’t collecting the rent from, someone who’d known Cecil since he was a boy and wanted a picture of his girl. For a split second the idea danced on the edge of her mind that the woman with the camera was Cecil’s real mother. But she knew that outlandish thought presented itself because Sarah was the only woman to show her any respect. On the other hand that woman’s rough hands had smoothed the shoulders of Mr. Brady’s jacket—an undeniably intimate gesture. She looked at the top of Cecil’s head as he leaned over the motor. She would never find out the whole story about Sarah because Cecil wouldn’t know. He hadn’t the kind of mind where outlandish thoughts danced. And a grand, creative mind was not what she needed anyway, not with her
family in the shape it was in.

  Now he was very carefully twisting the fence post wire around something in the motor. He would try anything; whereas her father, would try nothing. Mother would scrape and scavenge and work all night to make something possible for one of her children, but Daddy held back from life and things. He could drive a car, but if it balked, he walked away from it. Cecil took everything apart and put it back together. Daddy opened only books. What she needed was a go-getter who wouldn’t let her down as Daddy did, sweetly, quietly, over and over. And a father who wanted to read all the time should have inherited money, instead of being a penniless scholar who refused to teach school.

  Cecil would get this car cranked up and rolling within an hour and have her home before midnight. Mother would be up sketching in the dim light of the front room or perhaps sewing, putting her dressing gown back together with another lining borrowed from something even older. But most important she would be waiting, eager for a report of Alice’s first visit with Cecil’s family.

  Thank heaven, Mother and Daddy hadn’t been there, so she was free to set the scene for her parents—a thousand tree-covered acres and the image of the cotton factor in whose oak paneled entry hall clients had long ago waited. She’d talk of the ceiling fan cooling the long damask-covered dining table and the Haviland china, and the beautiful Estelle, about to make such a promising marriage. She would mention Cecil’s father, how he struggled with his businesses, but rush on to tell of his gallantry toward her and discovering what a keen marksman she was. All the rest, she would forget—the missing silver, Miss Sarah, and the Gamma Phi Betas. And she would not mention Mrs. Brady’s lack of warmth or that no one mentioned the challis suit. There was so much she would try to forget, especially that before Cecil had called to her, he had seen that woodpecker in full flight and had to have known it for what it was.

  THE END

  THE INVESTMENT IN LILLIAN GISH

  1923

  What did little Alice absorb as she listened at the door to her parents’ conversations, what did she make of this marriage she knew intimately and didn’t know at all?

  “Think there’s anything you could do with this, Mrs. Hale?” Mr. Greenbaum said as he heaved the bolt onto the counter. Victoria watched him roll it out and could tell from the dust and the faded edges he’d had it on the shelf for years. How long had he waited for a day when she was the only customer in his store, so no one would catch Victoria Hale being offered his stalest piece of goods? She knew he meant her well—a good customer, a seamstress others copied, the best milliner in town. She couldn’t hide from him the hunger with which she waited for the remnants and sorted through his damaged goods. She had rubbed the wool jersey between her fingertips, soft and drapey. This would do.

  Mr. Greenbaum had given her the bolt for six cents a yard and let her put it on the bill. She’d washed it, her hands turning bright red in the cold water, squeezed the suds through it, and rinsed it in two different tubs, twenty yards of the heavy, water-darkened wool.

  “Now, Vic, what did you say you were going to do with this?” Dan laughed as he helped her wrestle it all onto the clothes lines, looping it back and forth like so many hammocks, miles of lank wool, pulling the lines low and causing the poles to lean toward each other so precipitously Dan had to drive stakes at the base of the poles, lest the wind come up and lash all her hard work about the yard.

  When, after three winter days it was all dry, she cut off the faded selvage. The fading on the fold, little more than a milkier shade on the cream would be lost in the gathering. With the ironing board at the head of the dining table, she’d pressed and lapped and pressed and lapped, sending Alice and Felicity back to the kitchen to reheat the iron and dampen the pressing cloth while she rested in the window seat, sewing feathers on hats for Mrs. Woodbury and her daughter.

  Dan, his sandy hair arcing over his fine freckled nose, had made tassels for her from fine string wrapped around one of his mother’s little volumes of poetry, so they all came out alike. “These go on the tie backs, right?” he’d asked after proudly turning out a couple of dozen.

  “No darlin’, on the edges of each pair.”

  “Floor to ceiling edges? Vic, that’ll take hundreds! I’m in the middle of Huxley’s new book. At this rate, I won’t get another word read ‘til spring. Wouldn’t you rather I read to you than just sitting here mindlessly wrapping up Keats in packing twine.”

  “You’ll talk to me.”

  “Well, of course, but—”

  “I’ve set my heart on this, Dan.”

  When the generously gathered draperies were tied back, the tassels hung with a delicate authority, framing the lilac bushes in the foreground, and then the prairie and the town of Chisolm in the distance. Every day the town prospered and the university and library grew and there were even moving pictures at the opera house. And when folks passed on the road or stopped to fish in the creek, she wanted them to see a gracious country home, not a farmhouse. She knew how to distract the eye from peeling paint with boxes of geraniums or petunias spilling from the porch railing. And inside, the soft light from a table lamp falling on a pile of books and bowl of pecans could create a sense of culture and leisure. She rested her fists on her hips and sighed. In another life she might have been supervising a team of painters and gardeners, a choice gone by.

  It had been a breezy day at a town social in 1910 when she, a spinster of thirty, had chosen Dan Hale over Karl Winberg, the well-to-do baker. Long tables had been brought out onto the Mayor’s lawn, covered with fluttering white tablecloths and heaped with pies and cakes. The boys had three large ice cream churns going; the girls took turns sitting on the gunnysack-covered churns to hold in the ice. She’d stood at the edge of the lawn—a new hat with cascading pink rose buds fastened onto her piled up red hair—and taken in the flurry of the social. What a picture! If she were a real painter, this is what she’d paint: white dresses moving against the green grass; little willows in the side yard shaking sunlight on old ladies in rockers; farmers on the wide porch, one foot up on the railing, hats tipped back from pale foreheads taking their ease of a Sunday afternoon. And all of it laced together with running, skipping children.

  Victoria smiled. Karl Winberg had been there, a man with a lot to offer, much of it light and sweet and packaged in the white boxes from his family’s bakery. Last year he had stood on her father’s porch holding the white boxes in chubby, outstretched hands—pastries, fragrant with cinnamon, apricot and apple. “Why, Karl, how nice,” she said each time, taking the boxes.

  His broad moist face reddened, his smile stretched his face painfully. “There’s no lemon this time,” he blurted.

  “Ah well, the lemon was lovely. But these smell divine. Tell your mother—

  “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with our lemon. It’s just this time—” Mouth open, he patted the sides of his jacket probably drying his palms.

  “Of course. Karl, I’d ask you in, but Father is napping.”

  Karl nodded vigorously, and stepped backward, doubtless eager to avoid the Judge. Now with his hands free, he whipped off his hat. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Your hat was fine—”

  “I’ll go.”

  “—on the porch. Father and Wendell will be pleased with the pastries. They say there isn’t another town in the Territory with such a bakery as Winberg’s.”

  “We’ll be a bona fide state soon. It’s already 1906.” Karl, having introduced a new topic, shifted his weight and clasped his hands.

  “My yes, within a year, they say.”

  “Maybe less,” he said

  “Ah.” She gave up on that and just smiled as he looked backward to keep from stepping off crooked, then put his hat on so he could doff it two or three times as he backed down the steps, still red and smiling. He’d been smart enough to let his mother take over the courtship after that.

  Now, thirteen years after Karl Winberg’s mother made her an indir
ect offer of marriage to her son, Victoria shook her head, wondering why that offer had plunged her into gloom. But today she smiled. The best part of that offer which included living in the finest house in town had been Mrs. Winberg herself.

  One hand on the ironing board, Victoria pressed her other hand into her arched back. She and Dan had worked late last night. In the spring she would cut forsythia or apple branches to place in her blue lemonade pitcher in front of the bay’s middle window, but even without flowers she was greatly satisfied with the effect. These draperies would never look new like the crisp organdy everyone else was putting up. Instead these looked grand and old and rich, like they’d been hanging there since her wedding.

  Hearing little Alice’s voice, she walked through the music room to look out just below the window where eight-year-old Alice lay in the yard, her head leaning against her sleeping white sow, Lillian Gish.

  “Do you ever think about heaven, Lillian?” Victoria heard Alice ask her pig.

  “I think about heaven all the time. Mother says whenif—that’s her word, whenif—whenif she gets to heaven, all the boys and girls will wear black, so the berry stains won’t show. But I know in heaven we’ll all wear white. All the girls and boys will get to bounce on the clouds, and all the fathers will have jobs and bring home pay every Friday.”

  Oh my! Victoria sighed. This was sad, but thank heaven for a pig who would never reveal that this little girl had to concern herself with a father’s pay. She watched Alice stroke Lillian’s sloping white shoulder and felt suddenly that she was eavesdropping on an intimate conversation. She should turn away, but then Alice chirped, her little voice full of excitement. “There’s a huge box from France under the dining room table. It came C.O.D. all the way across the ocean on a ship, then all the way from the Port of New York on the train to the post office in Chisholm, Oklahoma. The box is full of bisque. That’s china that hasn’t been painted on yet. Mother’s students will paint on it, but she will paint the best, biggest, most expensive things for Dr. Stevens. She’s created a special pattern just for him, all gold on white china. Their family has thousands of pieces now. And Mr. Amspacher, the grocer, has quite a bit. Mother’s in the china painting business.”