Ring of Fire II

  "We weren't just living together," Eden protested. "We were engaged. I wore the ring and all. Why did we decide to get married? The day we decided to—not the day we actually got married, because it took us a couple of weeks to pull things together and make sure Joe and Aura Lee could take time off from work to be our witnesses—was a little personal anniversary that we celebrated. Not when I moved in with him. That was in June. This was from November, a year and a half before that. When we started dating, Harlan kept taking me places that weren't exactly private."

  "Harlan," Eden's husband said of himself, "had a pretty clear idea of how Nat and Twila would react if he deflowered their tenderly cherished virgin daughter. The age of consent might technically be sixteen, which she already was, but given that they weren't likely to see it that way, good old Harlan believed in playing it safe and waiting until the girl was altogether of age and at her own disposal. There were still a couple of years during which Nat Davis could have made dramatic paternal gestures and said things like, 'Never darken the door of our home again, you villain.' "

  Eden picked up the story. "So there we were, up in the state park. There was a nature trail, about seven miles or so, and we picked that. It was a nice Sunday afternoon, sunny, not too cold, but not many people were out. Some, mostly families, but it wasn't crowded. We were about halfway along it, talking and holding hands. I kept feeling odder and odder. Finally I stopped. Harlan looked at me and I said, 'I feel really weird.' "

  "So I looked at her closely and thought, 'Gee, thank you, Mother Nature. Not only do we have to deal with me wanting to have sex with Eden, now we've got to deal with Eden wanting to have sex with me. Not romantic feelings; plain old physical ones. And she doesn't even know what's bothering her. Time for a little instruction.' So I tugged her off the trail a few feet, backed up against a tree to have a little support, pulled her up against me, and started to kiss her the way I wanted to rather than the way I thought I ought to limit myself to."

  "By the time we'd been leaning against the tree a while, kissing like that, with Harlan holding my hips against his, I figured out what the problem was. Which was a considerable relief. I had been starting to wonder if I was getting the flu or something, and I had tests in geometry and world history coming up on Monday."

  "Flu?" Aura Lee asked.

  "Well," Eden protested a little defensively, "It had been making me feel that wobbly. The health class at school told us something about the mechanics of it all but didn't say a word about the way a person feels while it is going on. At church they just warned us about places like the back seats of cars and the quarry. And the evils of dancing. They sure never said you could start feeling like that while you were hiking along a trail, wearing a down vest and boots, and listening to a guy tell you about improved standards and techniques for air quality measurement."

  "About what?" Dennis sounded distinctly startled. "Harlan, you didn't! What a courtship!"

  "Well, we had to talk about something. Other than the impact her bosom had on my testosterone, that is." Harlan put his arm around Eden's shoulders. "I was trying to minimize that train of thought about then. And it wasn't exactly courtship. That's when the male bird struts around displaying his plumage and the female tries to decide if she wants him. We had a done deal by that point. We were just working on procedures and implementation."

  "It was interesting." The tone of Eden's voice was fiercely protective. "All the stuff Harlan told me about it was one of the reasons that I decided on lab technology when I went to choose a post-secondary course later on."

  Dennis grinned at her.

  "Anyway, we decided to get married on the seventh anniversary of the day Harlan explained to me the importance of being eighteen, as far as he was concerned. What he said made perfect sense. At the time, though, I wished that it didn't."

  "I thought I might as well give her something to look forward to. I also told her that she'd get her engagement ring the instant she was of age and Nat and Twila didn't have to consent. Which she did."

  "By the time we decided to go ahead and get married instead of just being engaged, I was twenty-three. Maybe that's why we waited so long. By then, it didn't upset most people so much that Harlan was ten years older. The people at the courthouse didn't ask any questions at all. They just issued the license and the judge married us off. Now that I'm coming up on thirty, it bothers them even less."

  Eden stopped talking; then started again. "And I'm sure Noelle has found all of this very entertaining. But hadn't you all better get down to the business of why Aura Lee and I cooked this meal?"

  Dennis, Joe, and Harlan glared at her. They would have worked up to the negotiations more gently. Taken an oblique approach.

  Pat looked bewildered. The project was going to be a surprise for her, too.

  Finally, Aura Lee sighed. Men! "Noelle, they'd like you to think about whether you really want to keep on using the name 'Murphy.' Or if you wouldn't maybe rather be a Stull."

  "That could be a question, now that you've been exposed to us." Harlan grinned. "To the unexpurgated version, as they say."

  * * *

  "What the hell are you doing?" Joe asked. "Rooting around in those cabinets? Come on to bed, Aura Lee. It's past midnight."

  "I'm looking for the 1997 photo album."

  "Why on earth?"

  "I just wanted to check something." She closed one door and opened another. "Here they are, in this box. Someday, maybe, we'll get everything unpacked that we brought along when we moved into this house in 1998."

  "Check away." Joe knew one thing. The auditor in Aura Lee would not leave her in peace. If she thought something needed to be checked, she would check it. Even if it was midnight and they had to get up as early as ever in the morning.

  "I thought so."

  "What?"

  "Look. These pictures I took the day that Harlan and Eden got married. She was wearing the clothes that Harlan described this evening. The ones your ma bought for her to wear to church the Sunday after she moved in with him. At the time, I thought they weren't what I'd have expected her to pick. She looked pretty in them, but they were definitely a summer outfit and it was almost the end of November."

  "Harlan?"

  "Umm?"

  "At dinner, when you were talking about those clothes your Grandma bought me, I sort of started thinking. You'll still be here in Grantville Sunday, won't you?"

  "Yeah. 'Til Tuesday. Maybe longer if a few logjams in the budget discussions don't break up."

  "I've gone to First Methodist ever since I went that first Sunday wearing the pink top and the ruffled skirt your grandma picked out. But I've never switched. It's probably time that I did. If it's okay with you, I'll call the Reverends Jones and set it up for this week."

  Harlan sat up and looked her over. "You'll make a perfectly gorgeous Methodist."

  "What do they think, really, of having the Stulls as members?"

  He thought a minute. "Well, they say that everyone has a divine purpose in life. I guess having us in the congregation tends to take the minds of the ultra-righteous off whatever the Jenkinses are doing at the moment. In a way, that probably cuts the Reverends Jones a little more slack than they'd have otherwise."

  Eden attacked him with tickling fingers and they both collapsed.

  Joe Stull wandered into Tony Adducci's office first thing the next morning. "It was the damnedest thing. Aura Lee said that we wondered if Noelle would be willing to change her name to Stull. Pat crossed her arms on the table, put her head down, and started to sob her eyes out. Dennis picked her up and took her out into the hall. The rest of us stayed sitting there. I guess it was pretty obvious that we wondered what we had done to set her off."

  "Ummhmmn," Tony answered.

  "Then Noelle said, 'There's nothing wrong. She's crying because you want me, I think.' Then we all just stared at her."

  Tony nodded. "How much of it did she tell you?"

  "She said, 'There's no way you could know it
, but this is the first time I've ever been invited to anyone's family dinner.' That's all."

  Tony winced. "I told Carol Koch, a long time ago, that the Fitzgeralds were a bunch of uptight Irish Catholic Puritans. Except Denise, of course. It's not just that Patrick and Mary Liz Murphy wouldn't have her in their house. She's eaten with us and the kids, with Bernadette there sometimes. But she's never even been to Denise's parents' house. Or to Suzanne Trelli's. Because the Fitzgeralds, too, saw her as a child of adultery. So far, the facts that came out at St. Mary's haven't gotten them to change their minds. At least not as far as meeting her goes. That's one reason she keeps so busy at work, I think. And doesn't mind going to Franconia. Let me see if Denise can come downtown for lunch. You maybe ought to talk to her about this. Or maybe Aura Lee could talk to her."

  That immediately struck both of them as a brilliant idea, freeing them of further immediate obligations in regard to understanding the female of the species and permitting them to get back to fulfilling their respective public duties.

  "When we were retelling the Harlan and Eden episode of the Stull family history, I couldn't tell from her face whether she was going to laugh or cry." Aura Lee held out her mug so Cora could refill it.

  "She probably didn't know either," Denise got a refill too. "She's never had a date, so the . . . freewheeling . . . approach to it all in Dennis' family may have boggled her mind. The first time she ever went to a party was the staff Christmas party at her job, December before the Ring of Fire happened. She didn't want to face it by herself, but she did, and came through it okay."

  "Why no dates? Because of that nun idea she has?" Aura Lee frowned.

  "No. The 'nun idea' came up since the Ring of Fire. No dates because she wasn't willing to put out the payback that guys over in Fairmont expected from a girl with her background. From what I've picked up as her godmother. Ah, that was confidential."

  "Isn't that a bit overblown?"

  "Not when you add Patty's reputation as a party girl on top of Dennis and Pat."

  "Oh." Aura Lee decided not to comment on that.

  "Noelle told me once that when she was young enough to have dreams, back when she was fifteen or sixteen, she dreamed that some day she would leave Fairmont and go someplace like Denver or Seattle, where no one had ever heard of her family, and meet a nice guy at mass one day. Someone who had grown up in an orphan asylum and done well. That they'd fall in love and when she told him about her family he would say that he didn't care and didn't have any relatives who cared, either, and they would get married and live there and Pat would go visit them, but she'd never have to come back to West Virginia again."

  "That is as sad as hell," Aura Lee put her mug down. "Twenty-three and talking about when she was young enough to have dreams."

  "She was more like nineteen, then," Denise answered. "Instead of Noelle's getting to go away, Pat brought her to Grantville in search of affordable housing. Where she was even more in the middle of it. Going to mass at St. Vincent's, where Pat's relatives never acknowledged she was there. She finally had to give up her pretty daydreams completely when the Ring of Fire happened and she knew that she'd never be able to get away from people who knew about it all."

  She sighed. "But it's one of the reasons that Bernadette doesn't take the 'nun idea' all that seriously. It isn't that Noelle didn't date—doesn't date—because she was never interested in getting married some day. She just doesn't believe that she has any chance of it now. Not with a 'nice guy.' "

  Aura Lee frowned. "If you look at the available pool, she may not have much of a chance. I can't think of anyone I'd recommend for her. Not since she takes being Catholic seriously. The nice unmarried men within a reasonable range of her age, like Jim Horton or Danny Tipton, Gene Woodsell, maybe, are either Protestants or don't go to church at all."

  "The hell of it is, that neither can we. Tony and I've talked about it some, since we're her godparents. The only Catholic guy anywhere her age who is anywhere near worthy of her in the whole town is Lawrence Quinn, but there's no spark there at all. Not on either side. Bernadette won't have her, though. For the new order they're planning, I mean. She says that Noelle's daydreams may have been of marrying a nice Catholic guy, but Pat came up with Dennis, who didn't make any sense for her at all. Which certainly didn't stop them. She's sure Noelle doesn't have a religious vocation. Especially since she gave us such an enthusiastic description of putting Eden's two little ones to bed."

  "I hope it doesn't bother you, Denise, since you're Catholic yourself and all." Aura Lee dropped a couple of bills on the table to cover their coffee and a tip. "But that's a big relief from our point of view, the Stulls being Methodists. I'll mention that to Dennis and Joe, if you don't mind."

  Dennis Stull spread some apple butter on his pancake. "If Pat won't give you answers, I will. At least to the best of my ability. Where did I meet her? It was a square dance. The fall of 1962. She was there with a bunch of girls her own age from St. Vincent's. Maureen and Theresa O'Meara, I remember. Pat Scanlon, the other Pat, who married Joe Bonnaro. Jeannette Adducci. Two or three more. I cut her out of the herd, so to speak, and asked her to dance. She was so cute. Just unbelievably cute. About five-two. Blonde ponytail. Blue eyes. Tiny little waist. Every now and then, I'd return her to the bunch, with good intentions of leaving her there, but pretty soon I'd ask her to dance again.

  "Then, at the end of the evening, we looked for the others and they were gone. So I told her that I'd give her a ride home. Which was all that I did. Got a stony glare from Mary Liz when I took her to the door, but since it was less than ten minutes after the dance closed down, she didn't have any real grounds for complaint. I told Mary Liz that she'd gotten separated from her friends.

  "What happened to the others?"

  "Pat found out later that they were ticked off because she was dancing more than any of the rest of them and deliberately went off and left her, sort of hoping she'd get in trouble. She was only fifteen. Didn't turn sixteen until the end of December. Kids that age do things like that. They were all supposed to be dancing with a bunch of boys from St. Vincent's, but the boys weren't that interested in dancing, yet, so the rest of them only got out on the floor a couple of times."

  "And then you started dating her?" Noelle asked.

  "By taking her home, I learned where she lived. I was twenty, then, in college. I was going on a combination of state scholarship and work study, commuting over to Fairmont. Not a frat boy, by any means. I finished two years of credits in December of '63 and then went into the army. Figured that I might as well. My grades were okay, but not outstanding. Better the second year than they had been the first, but not good enough to guarantee two more years of deferment. I'd have been willing to ask her out, fair and square, but she said that if I did, her parents would send her to a nunnery. Which, after I'd found out a bit about the Fitzgeralds, didn't seem as melodramatic as I thought when she said it the first time."

  "It probably wasn't." Noelle picked up her toast and then put it down again, tucking one foot under her as she sat on the bench in the breakfast nook.

  "So we sneaked around. There's really no other way to put it. The next summer, she'd go to the drive-in with friends, get out after she got there, and get in my car to cuddle up while the film ran. Things like that. The other kids knew, of course. And since we were sneaking, we spent more time in places that were private than in public. With about the results you would expect.

  "I didn't push her into doing anything she didn't want to." He smiled. "Maybe I sometimes coaxed her into going ahead and doing something she did want to. Not before she wanted to, though. It was like that, between the two of us. I waited nearly a year for her to be ready enough that she would ignore her scruples. Not just about having sex outside of marriage, but about having sex outside of marriage with a Methodist who made it plain that he intended to use birth control. Those last two items bothered her a lot more than the first one."

  Noelle pursed her lips. "Ac
tually, I can see that. In a way."

  "The easiest place for us to go was over to Ma's. It was only a few feet from the driveway to the kitchen door. Our pa was gone by then, so Ma was working two jobs. Tom and Julia had married in August of '62, so he was out of the house and I needed to be home to watch Joe as much as I could, to save Ma from having to pay a sitter. So we'd sit at the kitchen table and do homework, all three of us. Me for college, Pat for high school, and Joe for grade school. Which, I think, is why my grades went up the second year. Playing cards or monopoly with him, sometimes. We sure spent more time doing homework than we did making love. There usually wasn't much time between when we finally persuaded Joe to go to bed and when Pat had to meet curfew on week nights. Sometimes none. Lord, but he was a little night owl. She got to stay out later on Friday and Saturday, though."

  "You're telling me that you . . . ? Right there?"

  "Yeah, that's what I'm telling you. A couple of times, Ma got home before we came back out of my room. The first time, Pat just froze. I don't know what she expected. I introduced them to each other. Ma said, 'pleased to meet you.' Pat barely managed to nod. When we got into the car, she was trembling like a leaf. And I thought that if she was that afraid of her own parents, it must be some house to live in.