A Wedding on the Banks (6 page)

“Oh, that's another thing!” Thelma said, and then smiled. “Randy's in jail.”

“If Albert Pinkham had owned the only inn in Bethlehem, he would have charged Jesus for a hot plate.”

—Kevin Craft, after making a down payment on his honeymoon motel bill, 1964

Albert Pinkham finished sweeping the crinkly leaves of autumn off the cement sidewalk that encircled the Albert Pinkham Motel. He would need to repaint the doors to rooms 1 and 2, which faced the road. Rooms 3 and 4, hidden from view, could wait another year. By the time guests saw the peeling paint of the back rooms, they had already checked in, they were usually exhausted from the bumpy ride, and besides, Albert had no competition. His was the only place a weary traveler could sleep from Mattagash to Watertown, short of sleeping on the old-settler ground itself.

Albert had built the motel so that its end was pressed firmly against the side of his two-story house. There was no entryway between the two buildings, but Albert wanted what was his to remain nearby, close. He wanted to keep a proprietor's eye on his belongings. He had explained himself years ago to Ed Lawler, who once commented on the logic of the architecture.

“If I hadn't nailed the motel to the house,” Albert Pinkham had told Ed, “the Giffords would have carried it off by now.” But Ed Lawler had gone on, a year later, to commit suicide. So what did
he
know about motel architecture?

Hoping to keep up with progress, Albert added tubs and running water to his rooms in 1965.

“You have to be careful,” Albert said to a group of men at Betty's Grocery when asked why he still hadn't furnished his rooms with hot water. “City slickers are spoiled all year long. They appreciate a little inconvenience when they go on vacation. It makes them feel like they're really in the country. Makes them pretty damn sure they must be roughing it.”

But after a slew of complaints, Albert had taken it upon himself in 1967 to add hot running water to the rooms. Tourists complained about having to rent a hot plate to heat their own water and Albert conceded. And, of course, those who had paid for a large galvanized tub of bathwater had to come to Albert's house to retrieve it from the stove. On occasion, Albert's dog, Bruce, had bitten potential bathers as they knocked on the kitchen door. The most unfortunate bite occurred when Bruce sank his teeth into a white-water enthusiast from Baltimore, who then threatened to sue the Albert Pinkham Motel. But nothing came of it. The white-water enthusiast had gone back to Baltimore to bathe, a little less enthusiastic about H2O. Bruce had lost the tip of a good tooth and a little enthusiasm himself. Destined to miss out on many a juicy groundhog due to miscalculation of bite, he moped around the house for several days until the miniature poodle tied to a stake in Winnie Craft's backyard was besieged with estrus. Albert had learned a lesson from the near lawsuit. He decided to pipe the luscious hot water into the rooms, sparing both Bruce and the customers an unnecessary embarrassment. But if hunters and fishermen wished to dangle a tea bag in a cup of
very
hot water before they began their day, they would fork over a buck fifty for a hot plate. Albert also rented radios, his ancient pair of binoculars, kitchen utensils, electric fans on those two or three fairly hot days in the summer, and tire pumps.

“You're a
maniac!”
one Rhode Islander had shouted at Albert when the latter charged him fifty cents for the quick use of a pop opener.

“Yes, sir, I am,” Albert had answered with pride. “Born and raised right here in Maine. In God's country.”

It may indeed have been God's country, but it gave many a tourist pause as to why God would want to fill his country with so many mosquitoes and blackflies and no-see-ums. Bugs aside, Albert made a killing. Complaints from customers fell on deaf ears and rattled like coins inside the drums. It was all money to him, this motel business, and he had it wrapped up. For years. A mogul. A hostelry tyrant. Until the spring of 1969 came around and Albert cleared up the wintry aftermath as best he could to set his motel in order. He expected the sightseeing tourists first. The real nature enthusiasts who never hunted or fished but
walked,
for Chrissakes, in the woods and took short, meaningless canoe trips.

“The stuff city folks think up during the year,” Albert had said, many times, of these bird-tree-flower cultists.

But nobody came. Albert also expected to be getting phone calls from Macabee's Sporting Store in Watertown. It was at Macabee's that he had tacked a large sign firmly to the bulletin board.

Greetings
Fishermen, Sportsmen, and Newlyweds!

The
Albert
Pinkham
Motel

Welcomes
You
Greatly.

Beneath this sign was a black-and-white photo of Albert stroking the massive head of his aging German shepherd, Bruce, on the very steps of the motel. Beside the photo was a plethora of paper strips, Albert's business cards, waving in the breeze of Macabee's electric fan. Albert had taken a sheet of typing paper and had torn twelve strips, two inches long, on each side of the sheet. Then he had carefully scrawled his phone number on each—an idea he had gotten from babysitters who advertised their services at the IGA. It had worked wonderfully in the past. By March of each year, more than enough reservations had come in, roaring like lions. But the 1969 season was coming in like a lamb and goddamn dying in his front yard. He had not received a single nibble from the transient buyers of equipment and such at Macabee's. He was perplexed. Surely at this point in the game, ten successful years into the motel business, he would not be expected to, heaven forbid, pay for an advertisement in some newspaper or magazine?

“What next?” Albert wondered, as he dropped into his outdoor rocker and reached down to pet the tangled fur of his German shepherd. Bruce yawned in the mild sun that had splattered itself across the porch steps. Tourists could be fussy, if you let them. One woman from New Jersey had gone so far as to ask for a matchbook with “Albert Pinkham Motel” printed on it. For a souvenir!

“Get yourself a candle, lady,” Albert had told her, and slammed the door of his house in her face. There she was, covered with a hundred mosquito bites, a few moose fly welts, the catlike scratches of raspberry bushes, a huge grapelike bruise where she had fallen out of a canoe, and now she was wanting a
souvenir
of her vacation to take back to New Jersey with her. Let her take herself back. Let her take her wounds with her. Albert could envision her at the next meeting of her bridge club, bandaged like a mummy, saying, “And the mosquitoes there are large as butterflies.” Women. It amazed him that the government had ever agreed to give these creatures the right to vote. And nowadays, during deer season, some of them were even turning up in the woods with guns, shooting the branches off trees.

“Trying to impress the men,” Albert said, scratching now behind the dog's ears. Bruce yawned again, exposing his broken canine.

But one woman in Albert's past had been most memorable, a Miss Violet La Forge, a customer who neither fished nor hunted. A customer who did not care a fig for white-water rapids or walks among the thickly rooted pines. She had been a dancer, performing nightly at the Watertown Hotel, shedding her clothing as easily as reptiles shed skin. There had been no customer come to the Albert Pinkham Motel as exotic as this stripper who danced the light fantastic, the vision in black leotards, with eyes like real violets. He had barely opened his business when Violet drove up in her little Volkswagen and rented a room, number 3, beneath Albert's own bedroom window. And she had altered the outcome of his time upon the planet. How could he have known, on that red and orange and yellow autumn day, when he handed her the key to number 3, that he was handing fate the key to that door? His wife, Sarah, wanted Violet off the premises. Even when Violet had painted the bed and the walls pink, Albert held out. He cited money as the reason and, knowing him, Sarah believed it. But, oh, it was so much more delicate than money, this hold Violet had on him. It was pink as her room. Soft as the blanket on her bed. Pink as a flower bud. He had wanted to sink down into that softness, that pinkness, to nibble at it, collect it in one place like a pile of coins. He had wanted to own it. But Albert had been a sexual pawn, Violet's instrument to strike back at Sarah Pinkham and the Mattagash Eviction Committee that had formed to oust her. When Sarah caught Albert inside number 3, with his pants literally down, she had taken their daughter, Belle, and left him. That's when Albert changed the name from the Albert Pinkham Family Motel to, simply, the Albert Pinkham Motel. He had to, expensive as it was. He had no family left. The family had left Mattagash. At the time, Albert felt as though his life had shattered, an icicle falling. But he and Bruce had adjusted well to bachelorhood. Belle visited in the summers. And Albert certainly didn't miss Sarah's nagging, wagging tongue. After years of servitude, he was now able to toss his work shirts into a pile near the foot of his bed. To tromp all over the house in muddy boots. To allow the dirty dishes to pile up in the sink. To let Bruce paw the sofa at will. Albert was even known to put on a Sunday shirt while it was still Saturday night and sit out a few beers on a bar stool at the Watertown Hotel, leaving Bruce to wait outside in the truck.

Yet a little companionship would be nice now and then. Sometimes, and no one in Mattagash knew this, when Albert Pinkham had a beer too many, he found himself back at room number 3, sitting on the edge of the bed, remembering the wonderful pink moments in Violet's bed before Sarah had knocked. He had even let the room remain pink. Hunters didn't mind. It was just a lighter shade of blood. And on those nights, Albert often wondered what he might say to Violet La Forge if he ever had the opportunity to run into her again, face-to-face. He might say thank-you, even before he said hello. But no one at the Watertown Hotel ever knew what happened to Violet. Rumor was she got on the Greyhound bus for downstate, from whence she had come, and never bothered to look back. She was swallowed up by the new interstate that was slowly inching north to meet her. She was swallowed up by the passage of time. It had been ten years now.

“Skipped the light fantastic,” Albert told Bruce, as the dog rolled over on his side and placed his huge head on Albert's old brown boot. A breeze rushed through the budded lilac bushes, rattled the leaves, stirred them up like old memories. Yes, sirree, Albert Pinkham had fallen into bachelorhood just fine. Now if he could only figure out why his business was in the seasonal pits. He had just heard through the grapevine, which in Mattagash was the telephone wire, that Amy Joy Lawler was getting married. June Kelley had rubbered in when Sicily, distraught as hell, called her sister Pearl down in Portland and told her. May first. That could mean a motelful. The money would be nice, but Albert wouldn't count on any wedding guests as juicy as Violet turning up.

“Number 3,” Albert said musically, as he tugged a burr from last year's crop out of Bruce's coat. Bruce was perplexed. He raised his head and tilted it at Albert, questioning.

“The stripper with the big tits,” Albert reminded him, and Bruce yawned again, a long and lazy yawn, and remembered.

In the pines, in the pines

Where the sun never shines

And we shiver when the cold wind blows.

—“In the Pines,” a traditional American folk song

Amy Joy flipped through
Bride
magazine. She would have liked to browse, but none of the magazine's contents applied to her, really. How could she plan on ordering anything when her wedding was only two weeks away? This saddened her. She had always imagined herself in a swirl of delicate lace, the train falling like a path of pure Maine snow behind her. She had, many times, envisioned her name in silver letters, along with the name of her betrothed, on cocktail napkins. A day the whole town of Mattagash would be hard-pressed to forget. The Reverend Ralph C. McKinnon's only granddaughter, padding down the aisle of matrimony. But none of it was turning out the way Amy Joy had planned it all those late nights she lay in bed unable to fall asleep and listened to the Mattagash River beating itself against the river rocks, like a downpour of heavy rain. Her ancestors' river. The one that had brought the first McKinnon settlers, in hand-hewn pirogues, up from New Brunswick in search of white pine. That had been almost a hundred and fifty years ago. And now here she was, a product of that long ago journey, of those faraway people. Here she was, about to marry. It was something, wasn't it?

Amy Joy had even thought about starting a notebook of memories about her aunt Marge, dead ten years now. She had known Marge well, better than most knew her. She had lived with her those last months, before Aunt Marge died of beriberi. Her job was to pay close attention to her aunt's every whim. The truth was, and this pained Amy Joy now that she was an adult herself, she had kept a closer eye on Chester Lee Gifford, the infatuation of her teen years, than ever she did on Aunt Marge. And there was some guilt now that it had happened that way. But love and life had taken hold of Amy Joy at fourteen and shaken her so badly her brain was just now settling into place. At least Amy Joy assumed it was. According to Sicily it was looser than ever.

“A
Catholic
,” was all Sicily could mumble nowadays, from her bed. “Jesus, have mercy on us all. A full-blooded
Catholic
.”

Amy Joy opened a can of mushroom soup and stirred it into a pan along with a can of water. She stared out the kitchen window as the occasional Mattagash car drove by, and identified the owners. Cars were as recognizable as faces. In Mattagash, there were few secrets. In Mattagash, your greatest fears were memorized like license plates.

Amy Joy's main problem had been getting the invitations sent off in the mail, but she had done that and they were gone. A future bride had to invite three fourths of Mattagash, except the Giffords, whether she wanted to or not. There were usually that many relatives on the list. But the remaining one fourth would show up anyway if they felt like it. It was as if the whole town believed that they owned the Mattagash gymnasium, newly acquired in 1963, and that an eternal invitation was issued to Mattagashers concerning functions given there. The gymnasium had become like a large family living room, where all were welcome. And the Giffords presented a problem, as they did at any special function in Mattagash, from chicken stew dinners to fudge sales and town meetings. Amy Joy knew that the Giffords couldn't be bothered with the notion of a church wedding, but they would turn up at the reception to lurk in doorways and around the gift table, to push food into their mouths and, when the punch bowl had been sufficiently drained a few times and refilled, the big Giffords would end up in a brawl. This could be among themselves, with strangers, or with one or two local boys still testing their hormones. And the littlest Giffords had to be watched every second or the gifts would slowly disappear from the gift table until just the decorations were left. Little Vinal Gifford had carried off Patsy McPherson's toaster, waffle iron, electric can opener, and popcorn popper before the best man tracked him down and retrieved the merchandise.

Amy Joy stirred the soup. Should she marry Jean Claude Cloutier? Should she marry anyone? Amy Joy liked Jean Claude. He was a very nice boy. She knew this, despite what Sicily said about his leg length, his accent, or his religion. A person's real worth went deeper than all of that, although few people in Mattagash realized it. But she had heard her father say such things long before she understood the meaning of it all. And now she was trying desperately to remember what he had said. He had left lessons behind him, Amy Joy sensed, if she only knew how to retrieve them. His suicide hadn't been easy on his survivors. There had been jokes when no one knew Amy Joy was listening, in the girls' bathroom, on the school bus, at the swimming hole. There had been whispers and embarrassed glances for months after that bullet tore into her father's brain. And lately she'd been dreaming of the bullet, of the loathsome gun. She'd been hearing the
bang!
in all her best nightmares.

Amy Joy fingered one of the two silver strips of hair that lined her face, curled it around her finger.
Should
she marry? She left the mushroom soup popping in small bubbles to answer the ringing phone. It was Jean Claude, who must have divined by some sort of Catholic telepathy still unknown to the Protestants that Amy Joy was having second thoughts.

“Is dis Putois?” he asked. This was his pet name for Amy Joy, one he had chosen after careful deliberation of the two silvery Clairol streaks burning up the sides of her hair. Putois. Skunk. And Amy Joy liked it.

“It's me,” she giggled. It was a funny-sounding word to English ears. And it was a gift to the wedding plans that Sicily didn't understand French.

“Dis is Jean,” he said. Of course it was. Who else called her Putois? Sometimes, it seemed that Jean Claude was capable of living up to Sicily's low expectations of him.

“If she
had
to pick a Frenchman,” Amy Joy had heard Sicily telling Winnie Craft only yesterday on the phone, “couldn't she have picked one of the smart ones? There
are
smart ones.”

“I know who this is,” said Amy Joy. “Why are you calling so early? Is something wrong?”

“No,” said Jean. “I jus have some bad tots go in my head, me.”

“What kind of bad thoughts?”

“Da bad kine,” he replied.

“Oh well. That explains it, don't it?” Maybe she
should
marry one of the smart ones.

“I tink, may-bee, you and me, we break hup, hus.”

“Oh, honey,” said Amy Joy, and twirled the skunkish curl. “Don't be silly.”

“Caw-liss,” said Jean Claude. This was a French Catholic swearword, and it always made Amy Joy laugh to hear it. Caw-liss. Chalice, actually. This was the chalice used during the Catholic mass and apparently even a reference to it was a blasphemy. So was “ta-barn-nack,” the tabernacle of the church. Strange things to her Scotch Irish Protestant upbringing where a swearword was, by Jesus, a
swear
word
.
But Amy Joy didn't mind, not the way Sicily and Mattagash might. She rather liked the change.

“Maybe I'm becoming my father's daughter,” she thought, and smiled at the notion.

“Ta-barn-nack,” Jean Claude swore softly.

“What is it?” asked Amy Joy, and let the silver curl unroll from her finger.

“Hit's jus, well, my mudder, she doan want for hus to tie da knot, her.”

“Your mother don't want
what
?”

“For hus to get marry.”

“Well, to hell with her,” said Amy Joy, and opened a Pepsi to accompany her mushroom soup.

“Caw-liss,” Jean Claude swore again. “Vee-aje!” This last one was a Catholic verbal assault on the Virgin Mary.
Vierge
. Virgin.

“We're both plenty old enough to do what we want, Jean Claude.” Amy Joy was hurt. She thought Mrs. Cloutier liked her. But this religion thing ran deep, deeper than she imagined. “I already sent the invitations. Your mother can sit next to mine at the church. It'll do her good.”

“Caw-liss de ta-barn-nack,” said Jean Claude, and let a long, tired sigh pass over the telephone wires. “
De Vierge
.” He had just gotten off work from Thibodeau's Auto Repair, an occupation much desired over the woodsworking jobs of his father and brothers. “She's habout to send me crazy, her,” he told Amy Joy.

“Do you want to drive up, then, and talk some?” asked Amy Joy, knowing the bumpy, twisting ride was a long one. Jean lived and worked in Watertown, thirty long miles away. On weekends the trip didn't seem so terrible, but during the week that awful distance of thirty miles,
one
way,
of narrow, time-consuming turns and dips and frost heaves and potholes, worked on Amy Joy's guilt. How it would tire him after a hard day's work. What if he missed one of the jagged turns and ended up drowned in the river? She still hadn't shaken the memory of how Chester Lee Gifford died, twisted and gnarled as an oak, inside her cousin Junior's new Packard. But if he did drive up, they could sit in the car after Jean Claude had tooted her out of the house. Dates rarely came to the door in Mattagash, preferring to sit with a beer can between their legs, behind the wheel, and simply toot their arrival, a modern mating call. He could drive the car below the house, and they would sit together where the bright yard light on the telephone pole would not reach them, and they could kiss each other and feel each other's body heat, and listen to the occasional fade-in of songs from WPTR, nearly five hundred miles away in Boston.

There had been many of these moments in the three months they'd dated. They had met at a dance in Clair, New Brunswick, just across the river border from Watertown. What set Jean Claude apart from the other regulars at Perrault's Dance Hall was his extreme good looks. And he was tall and muscular, not short-legged as Sicily had described. A real Quebecer, Sicily had called him. But Jean Claude was by far if not the brightest then the best-looking boy in St. Leonard or Watertown, or on the Canadian side of the border. Or in Mattagash, for that matter. He had thick, rich hair, as Chester Lee had had. And eyes black and large as all of his old French ancestors combined. A handsome boy, at twenty-one, and it was most unusual that he was still unmarried. Such young men were snapped up quickly, unless they had plans to become a priest. Or go to Connecticut to work in a factory or in construction. Northern Maine was losing more of its young blood every day to industrial Connecticut. “We're making the toilet paper down there at Kimberly-Clark that you're wiping your asses on all the way up here in Mattagash,” Ronnie Monihan had bragged to a group of listeners at the Watertown Hotel, on his first Fourth of July vacation back home. Mainers always came home for the Fourth.

“Ain't that something?” Ronnie had asked them, and his listeners had nodded in awestruck agreement.

“Drive up and we'll talk about it,” said Amy Joy. Brains aside, she could smell, mixed in with a little Old Spice, a smell that caused an ache within her, a deep wish to marry and then propagate. As her ancestors had done. Maybe it was all linked to smell alone.

“I doan give a shit, me, what she say. May-bee we should halope, hus.” Jean Claude coughed into the receiver.

“Come on up, then,” Amy Joy said, and knew that by nine o'clock she would be sitting next to him in the front seat of the Chevy Super Sport, watching the orange glow of his Marlboro bob up and down. By 9:10 she would have talked him out of eloping and into a glamorous wedding on May first. And beyond the rolled-down windows of the car she would hear the perpetual sound of the river that had carried her ancestors to Mattagash where they would settle, and bear children, and die. That's what it was all about, wasn't it? A pirogue one day. A red Chevy Super Sport the next. But the script was the same. If it wasn't Old Spice back in those days, then it was something else. Maybe it was the sweet smell of fresh water combined with white pine. The dried, papery bark of the yellow birches, soft animal hides drying, the sticky resin oozing from the spruce tree. And dried sweat on a hardworking man, well, that hadn't changed a bit, had it? Even the antlike men whose bodies broke beneath the weight of the pyramid stones smelled sweet to some woman. And so did kings. Pirates. Old West cowboys. It had been going on a long time, this smell-and-touch-and-ache business. Amy Joy
ached
to see Jean Claude, to feel the water from his comb still beaded among his deep curls, holding them in place. She wanted to run a finger around the thick muscle of each arm, to trace the French jaw, to fill her nostrils full of enough Old Spice to drown her.

“Look out for the frost heaves,” said Amy Joy, and smacked a kiss into the receiver. Thirty crooked miles each way of potholes and frost heaves. There must be true pioneer blood still coursing within their veins. Sixty dangerous bumpy miles because of an
ache.

“Chalice de Tabernacle,” Jean Claude said.