Looking Back

  Peter said nothing, which seemed an odd reaction. He seemed to be staring over her shoulder into empty air.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “Two acres? A miniature estate! I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what you can be thinking of, Cele.”

  “You’re talking about the price? Nothing. It’s a present, a wedding present to us.”

  “Oh, no, Cele. That’s far too much. We’ve had enough presents already.”

  “But how silly! This is a lifelong gift, a home. Lots of people do that for their children if they’re able to.”

  “Maybe they do, but I don’t feel comfortable with the idea. We’ll start out next month in the apartment we both liked and take life step by step.”

  “Peter, listen. As I told you, this is not an elaborate house. It’s quite simple. Quite suitable for us. I promise.”

  “By your standards, perhaps. But I’m not a rich man, I’m never going to be one, and I don’t want to live like one at somebody else’s expense.”

  This decisive reaction was startling. It was puzzling, and it was hurtful.

  “That sounds almost nasty, Peter,” she said softly.

  “I didn’t mean it to be nasty at all. I’m being honest. These are my honest feelings.”

  “And what if”—she hesitated—“when my father’s time comes, what will you do then?”

  “Right now your father is still young, healthy, and able to work. I’m the same, except even younger than he, and I don’t want to have him or anyone working to pay my bills for me.”

  Peter’s mouth, set in a firm line, was unsuited to the rest of his face. She had never seen it like that before and was discomfited by the sight of it.

  “Won’t you at least look at it?” she asked.

  “No. There’s no purpose in seeing it when my mind’s made up.”

  His voice had risen ever so slightly, with a tone that caused a passing couple to glance at him, and she knew that they looked out of place standing there in front of a window filled with porcelain and silver.

  “Let’s get away from here. I’m awfully disappointed, Peter. You don’t know how disappointed I am. You really could go look at it. That’s not much to ask, is it? You might change your mind if you were to see it.”

  “To begin with, Cele, you’re not even being practical. You’re not even thinking about the cost of maintenance. It’s one thing to have a house given to you and another thing to maintain it.”

  “I would do all the gardening myself on weekends. Anybody can push a lawn mower.”

  “Now you’re really talking nonsense. You going to mow the lawns! Of all the silly, childish—come on, let’s go. This is our last afternoon on the beach, and we’re using it up on a sidewalk.”

  Cecile was beginning to feel a rise of something close to anger. It was not only that she had fallen in love with the house, with the old trees and the rose garden, barely glimpsed from the roadway. But it was also the fact that her father’s loving generosity was being so abruptly rejected. And she said so.

  “Frankly, I think you are being very thoughtless. What am I to tell my father?”

  “You won’t have to tell him anything. I’ll do it. I’ll say that I deeply appreciate the offer, which I do, but I can’t accept it.”

  “Don’t you understand that he’ll be terribly hurt?”

  “I don’t think he will be.”

  “How can you ‘think’? You don’t know him. I do.”

  “Then I’m sorry, Cele. I like your family very, very much, but I don’t want to be one of their dependents. Keep your money to buy all the girandoles you may want. But it’s my job to supply shelter for the family that we now are. My job, Cele.”

  The way he talked! He sounded like some Victorian husband, with that ring of authority. You’re a hundred years behind the times, she wanted to say, but did not say it.

  “Do you want to go back now and buy those things?” Peter asked. “It’s only around the corner.”

  Now he was appeasing her, his childlike, delicate little wife.

  “Since we’ll have no place to put them, there’s not much sense buying them, is there? So, no, I’m not going back,” she added, with emphasis upon the “not.”

  “I only asked,” he retorted, with equal emphasis upon the “only.”

  And there they were, still standing there staring at each other as if they were strangers who had been thrown together in some unusual circumstance and had no idea what to do about it.

  “I don’t understand you,” Cecile said.

  “Try.”

  “Why don’t you try?”

  “I already do understand you. You’ve seen something that appeals to you, it’s within your reach, and I’m being stubborn. I’m sorry to deny you, but—”

  His slow, deliberate speech made her so impatient that she had to interrupt.

  “But why? Why?”

  “Pardon me,” a woman said curtly in her attempt to get a better view of Cecile’s girandoles.

  “Let’s go, Cecile. We’re in everyone’s way.”

  At the corner they waited for a taxi. Tourists whizzed by on motorbikes, many of them hooting, laughing, and obviously inexperienced. For no logical reason, their silliness depressed her, and she said coldly, “We haven’t been on a motorbike once since we came here. I want to do it now.”

  “No motorbike. I’ve told you that before. I’ve never ridden one, and I’m not going to experiment with you riding behind me. We’ve already seen three bad accidents.”

  He was making sense. It was his scolding manner that infuriated her, that and the stern set of his lips. In silence she followed him into a taxi, and in silence they rode all the way back to Great-Aunt Susan’s house.

  For the sake of some abstract principle, he had upset her loving plans. In idle moments during these last weeks, her thoughts had been turning to that surprise, to the spacious rooms in that home: the bedroom they would have and the bed, no king-size in which two people lie apart, but rather an original double bed, in which they lie close; the bookshelves painted spring green, where they would combine their individual troves; the comfortable workroom, where Peter, undisturbed, would draw his plans. How could she ever have imagined that he would negate the whole thing? And adding insult to injury, now apparently he was upset with her because she dared to be upset. Now as he sat beside her in the taxi ostentatiously examining his sketchbook, he was apparently waiting for her to speak first. He was just going to wait.

  They went into the house. Cecile, finding Sally in the kitchen, gave her the sweater and lingered purposely long to talk about Sally’s children. If Peter was waiting for her to join him on the beach, let him wait.

  Tonight was their last night, which was to have been a celebration for two. Instead there were guests, a younger-generation couple among Great-Aunt Susan’s friends who had telephoned today to invite them to dinner. Adroitly, she had turned the invitation inside out by inviting them to dinner; in that case, Peter would have no choice but to participate as host. It would annoy him no end to spend this evening with these strangers. Let him be annoyed.

  Late that evening she was reading in bed when he came into the room. With folded arms he stood looking down at her.

  “You missed a perfect afternoon on the float,” he said.

  “I wasn’t in the mood.”

  “You were cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

  “It happens that I was very content to sit alone on the beach with a great book.”

  “No, you weren’t content, you were seething with anger. Then you thought you’d get even with me by inviting those people. The funny thing is, I liked them and I had a nice time. You didn’t think I would.”

  “I didn’t think one way or the other.”

  “I went outside on the porch with Mark, and man to man I asked him a question, whether he and Rose ever had fights. I told him I was new at this business.”

  Was he actually twinkling at her?

>   “He looked at me as if he thought I was an idiot. ‘Fifteen years married and you ask whether we ever have fights? Listen, young man, if anybody starts telling you he and his wife don’t have fights, he’s a sap or a damned liar, either one.’”

  “On our honeymoon,” she wailed. “A fight on our honeymoon, when we’ve never had one before.”

  “We never spent so much time in one place together before this, either, you know.”

  “You had such a furious face—”

  “People don’t make pretty faces when they’re angry, Cele. Not that I was all that angry, really. It’s you who were angry. I was just being very emphatic.”

  “We always agreed about everything. This is the first time—”

  “Did you think we were going to go through life like a reflection of each other? I’m sorry if I was harsh today, and I’m sorry about the house. God knows, I want to give you whatever I can, Cele. But I just can’t give that. It’s a streak of independence, a need to prove myself. I don’t know why, but it’s the way I am, that’s all. Please understand me.”

  Two large tears arose against her will and slid slowly down her cheeks.

  “Ah, Cele, there’s no reason to cry. Has this hurt you so much?”

  Yes, it had hurt, yet not nearly enough to cause these tears. She wanted to tell him that all of a sudden a window had opened before her, that she was looking out upon the vast plain of life, seeing the long road on which two small human creatures would travel and, bound to each other as they were, would sometimes hurt each other and be sorry.

  “Put the book down,” he said, and with his fingers, wiped the two tears away.

  Then she opened her arms.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lawrence Balsan, who liked to linger over a second cup of coffee at the table, was in an expansive mood this evening. “I think I’ve already mentioned that you’re welcome to use the yard,” he said. “It’s certainly spacious enough for a small wedding. I must have had weddings in mind when I bought the double lot twenty-three years ago.”

  He was feeling expansive because Larry had closed a very profitable deal that afternoon. By now, Amanda was well on the way to an understanding of him, and indeed, of the family’s dynamics.

  “Of course, you will have to keep it small,” he repeated. “Unfortunately”—this with a kind of good-humored mockery—“we can’t have anything like that Newman wedding you went to. That must have been a spectacle. Who all was there? Anybody I know?”

  “I saw at least a dozen people you know,” Larry said. “Bates from Century Mortgage, Ralph Fried, the O’Connors, Alfred Cole, and—”

  “In another words, everybody who is anybody. It must have cost plenty. Glad I didn’t have to pay for it.”

  Yes, Lawrence, Amanda thought, I’m well aware how disappointed you are. A daughter-in-law like Cecile Newman is what you wanted. I know it, and what’s more, you know that I know it.

  His haughty, aquiline face had an ironic expression, as though he were trying to conceal some secret laughter. At the moment, he was judging her; his penetrating eyes seemed to be boring through her, or roving over her; he made her feel as if her face was smudged with the raspberry sauce that she had just finished, or as if her blouse had come unfastened.

  “And you’re sure you don’t want to invite your people, your parents at least?” Lawrence asked, addressing Amanda. “We’ve plenty of room to accommodate them.”

  She would not expose her family to this man’s keen scrutiny or his chilly courtesy. They would simply not fit, he with them or they with him and all his relatives. So she was about to say, for the third or fourth time, that they were unable to leave their work, when Larry answered for her.

  “We’re planning to visit them instead.”

  They had made no such plan at all. It was he who had suggested it. But even though he was surely no judge nor snob, how could she let him see the derelict, rusting car in back of the barn, or Lorena’s latest baby crawling about in his unchanged diaper, or the greasy pot of stew in the center of the supper table?

  “Whatever your plans are,” Lawrence said as he rose from his own mahogany table and left the room, “I should think you both had better start making them.”

  “You don’t have to have a wedding here,” Larry said when they were alone. “I know you don’t want to.”

  “That’s true, I don’t.”

  Either you did the thing the right way, which meant family, music, flowers, and friends, or you didn’t do it at all. There was no beauty in a meager compromise.

  “You know, Amanda, I’ve been thinking that a quiet elopement to some country town, with a justice of the peace, is really much more personal. It’s more romantic, when you come down to it, than all this public fuss. Of course, women do like satin sleeves and lace veils, I know that,” Larry said with a tolerant smile.

  The smile was also a little worried. He understood her.

  From her days and nights at Sundale’s, she had saved a few hundred dollars. Since it was already August, whatever remained of summer clothes was on sale in the shops, thus allowing her money to stretch.

  “Take swim stuff,” Larry said. “This place is right on the lake. I was there once, and I know you’ll love it.” So, well equipped with her own clothes for every day, new dresses for dinner, two negligees, and a blue linen suit in which to be married, Amanda was ready before a week had passed.

  Actually, Larry had asked her where she wanted to go on their honeymoon, and she, having never been anywhere, had replied with a question: “Bermuda?” But he had explained that Bermuda might better wait for a time when they could stay away longer, so she had left the choice entirely to him.

  The night before they left, he smuggled their suitcases into the car, and after putting a note on the breakfast table, they crept out of the house without making a sound, at dawn.

  “They won’t mind,” Larry said. “They’ll probably be relieved by our little trick. My father’s overwhelmed with work this month, and Norma isn’t crazy about weddings, anyway.”

  In a portable refrigerator he had put an old-fashioned bouquet in paper lace and two bottles of champagne. “The bouquet is for now. The champagne is for later, when we get where we’re going.”

  Larry was right, Amanda thought. There really is a kind of clandestine excitement, a Romeo and Juliet effect, in running away together like this. They were heading north. After a drive of four hours, they arrived at the town where, by Larry’s prior arrangement, a justice of the peace and two witnesses were prepared for them.

  They climbed a few steps at a small, drab building, probably, Amanda supposed, a town hall. Her impression was vague, for all of a sudden the delightful excitement had left her completely, and a flooding of fear took its place: No matter how easy it is to get a divorce, this is still so final. Divorce was certainly not part of her life’s pattern. Her parents were celebrating their twenty-ninth year together—if you could call it celebrating. Well, maybe you could. Probably you could. And Lorena was waiting to take her worthless man back.

  What am I doing with these thoughts at a moment like this?

  No doubt it was the dreadful thought that caused her to stumble and drop the bouquet.

  “Take it easy, honey,” Larry said in his kind voice as he put the flowers back in her hands. He is the soul of kindness. Amanda held up her head and walked with him to where an old man stood waiting behind a table. There was a young man in the room too, probably one of the witnesses, and she saw in his eyes that she was beautiful…. When she placed her hand on Larry’s arm, his mother’s diamond flashed rainbow colors. The ring said: Permanence. It said: Goodness. Honesty. Truth.

  It was strange to compare the few quick words of this ceremony with the solemn, long injunctions of a clergyman. Still, the result was the same. Two rings were exchanged, a kiss was exchanged, and they left the commonplace little room just as married as if they were marching away to the tune of the Mendelssohn wedding march.

 
“Are you feeling any different?” asked Larry after the first few minutes of dumbstruck silence as they drove away.

  “I don’t know. I’m probably numb,” she said, which was true.

  “Read the license to me.”

  “Funny. It looks so—so official, like the income tax: Amanda Louise and Lawrence Daniel.”

  “I always wanted to be called Daniel. Dan. Doesn’t it sound better? Don’t I even look like a Dan? Larry’s a name for a kid on the soccer team in junior high. It’s a name for a junior. But my dad likes having a junior, and it’s not worth a squabble and hard feelings to change it.”

  He was sensitive. You wouldn’t think so to look at him. You wouldn’t think he would care that much about a thing like a name. Now, when you looked at a man like Peter, for instance, you could easily imagine that he might care. Funny.

  “You’re going to see some mountains, honey. This inn’s practically on the Canadian border. You didn’t forget a swimsuit, did you? The lake’s a little gem. The whole area’s filled with lakes, from Canada right down to our own Great Lakes.” Nervously, he prattled. “The food’s wonderful at the inn. Some nights they have a campfire. And there’s trout, fresh from the brook. Do you like fish? There’s so much I still don’t know about you.”

  Of course he was thinking about the night that was only a few more hours away. Of course he could hardly wait. It was almost unheard of today that people’s first time in bed together and their first night married were one and the same. And it wouldn’t be the case here either, she thought, if Lawrence’s bedroom didn’t happen to be just down the hall.

  Larry was humming. “Remember that song? The melody keeps running around in my head, but I’m darned if I can think of the words.”