The Story of a Marriage (19 page)

Off in the distance a creature, perhaps a coyote, made a break for it across a hill, streaking like a comet in the moonlight.

“Missus Cook?” It was the young man again.

“Sorry, yes of course. He’s a fine man.”

“A beautiful woman like you deserves one.”

We hit another stone and my hand fell between us, brushing Shorty’s. I don’t know why I didn’t move it.

The driver struck a match and we were briefly bathed in that warm light before he touched it, gently, to his cigarette and then, when that was lit, thermometer-shook the match to darkness, leaving only a smoky question mark. I stared out at a house as it went past, then turned to look at Shorty and he kissed me.

That memory is as fresh as yesterday: the sensation of his arm around me and his hand moving down my collarbone to touch my breast in its corseletted cup; the smell of hair tonic in his curls as he leaned down to breathe erratically, somewhat desperately, saying: “You’re so beautiful, you’re so beautiful, Pearlie, I just want to …” Everything about the moment was young—the awkward frenzy of it, the gibberish he was talking, my own heart thrumming like a mad cricket, the rush and excitement of it all—but I don’t think of us as young. In my memory, for those ten or twenty minutes, up to the moment I collapsed in laughter against the door and broke the spell, we were simply alive.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked, trying to smile himself while coaxing me back with his hands.

“Oh!” I said, but I couldn’t explain. Here was the future I planned for myself. The moon and stars, the friction of another body, a match in the night. Here it was; it had not yet occurred to me, as it never occurs to any accomplice what will become of them once the crime is finished; they are too attuned to their role, their duties. Here was my life alone. And the thought was so astonishing, so pleasant and free, that I started to laugh like a child and couldn’t stop, all the way back across the bridge. Shorty would take my hand and smile at me and try to kiss me, and once again I would convulse in laughter. Imagine that, with one of the most beautiful views in the world going by—that gemmy nighttime view of the city with great golden pillars of the bridge looming on either side and the magnificent fog billowing and glowing beneath—and all I could do was laugh. I had got everything wrong; he wasn’t “one of them” at all. He was a drunken young man grabbing a little joy while there was a moon and a paid driver and a woman he found beautiful. I could not guess what any man wanted; it was a tangle. And I forgave myself for laughing. There would be plenty of time when all of this was over, when I could breathe, and the inflamed, hopeful expression on Shorty’s face is an image I will never forget.

He let me out at my home and I had hardly stepped out of the car before he put his hand on my arm. I was desperate for no one to see me out here with a young man. I leaned in and listened.

“Pearlie, couldn’t you come back with me a minute?”

“No, no, I don’t think so.”

“Looks like your man’s asleep. Just a minute, so we can talk. Not overnight.”

It had never occurred to me to be with a man overnight.

“You gotta go,” I said, shaking my head. “You can’t just sit here.”

He leaned back in the car and looked at me. Then, as he held out his hand, I found myself stepping back.

“Good night, Shorty,” I said, signaling to the driver and spinning away. I swore I would not turn around; I swore I would not test the evening any further, but the thrill overtook me and I turned, briefly catching, from the speeding cab’s rear window, those glasses gleaming back at me. Then he was gone.

The streetlamps cast elongated orbs of light through the fog. Only one house, its usually mown lawn neglected, had its lights on. The night had become warmer in the last few hours, like someone who has changed his mind a minute too late.

Strange to enter the house and hear nobody. And, though I knew that Holland would be in his bed, I felt as if I were actually alone, without even the soft purr of radio static or the white blank noise of an open window. I walked through the hall and into the living room, undoing the top button of my cardigan and looking around at the still darkness, the lonely expectant objects in their darkness: the yarn cat, the broken mantel clock. Me and my son, this is what it would be like.

A man was standing in the room with his back to me.

Drink made my heart beat happily. I said his name and he turned.

“Pearlie,” he said.

“You’re back! You want something to drink? What are you doing in the dark?”

He ignored my questions, looking at me intently. “Got back early. Finished everything. And Holland called me.”

“Oh I see.”

Buzz lowered his head. “He said he needed to say something to me, and when I got here—”

I said, “We went out dancing, he said he was sick—” I thought of Holland’s dreaming stare that evening, the look of memory. “Well, good. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Pearlie.”

I laughed; I was still throbbing with drink and the touch of Shorty’s lips on mine. “I think I don’t mind anymore.” I considered Buzz in the glow of the window, pale as bone and as beautiful as I suppose he’d ever be. I said, “I’ve never seen you in moonlight. You’d make a handsome ghost.”

“Pearlie, something terrible has—”

“I said I don’t mind,” I repeated, smiling.

“There was an accident. With a gun.”

“What do you mean? What gun?” He said it again. I told him I needed to sit down, and yet I just stood there. “Is he all right?”

“Pearlie, I’ll get you a drink.”

I said I didn’t want a drink; I wanted to know what he was talking about.

In the war, a truck full of men used to drive around the Sunset with a bucket of brown paint and a ladder. They would climb up each streetlight and paint a dark hemisphere on the western half of the lamps so we couldn’t be spotted by Japanese planes. From the east, a blazing city; from the west, an outline dark as the ocean. And that is what I did that night with Buzz. I darkened half my heart so what he said couldn’t find me. I asked blankly: “Is he dead?”

He came toward me, saying, “They didn’t tell anybody until the government men left, but once people saw them coming up the drive—”

“Government men?”

Buzz drank some of the brandy he had poured, and then said, “It was a drill, just a regular drill, and I guess something was wrong with his rifle—”

I looked at him now: “Buzz … what the hell are you talking about? Tell me what’s happened to Holland?”

I have never seen a man look at me with such pity. It was a horrible expression. Every part of his face bent down with gravity and he put his hand on my arm. From the window, the glow of headlights came into the room and left again as if it had not found what it was looking for.

“Pearlie, it’s not Holland,” he said very firmly, his face white and grim, his gold hair shining in the light. “It’s William. In boot camp. William Platt, a gun went off in his hand yesterday morning—”

“William Platt?” I said loudly.

“Yes, in a training exercise, running uphill—”

“I thought … you said ‘he’ and I …
William Platt
…” and then I mumbled something before I burst into tears.

Buzz came up to me in the doorway, his hands out to comfort me, but I turned away, shaking and gasping, weeping helplessly, leaning against the windowsill. He was talking to me, but I didn’t hear anything else. I could only feel the warmth as he took me in his arms and held me, whispering things I do not recall. In my mind, William Platt marched gun-first up that Virginia hill into a great white mist, a quiet contentment becalming his face, young William Platt who once called me a nigger, and despite everything, when Buzz had said that poor boy’s name, all I could think of was my husband.

For I am a wife. And what I’d mumbled was: “
Thank God
.”

a
merica, you give a lovely death.

That same summer, Ethel Rosenberg was electrocuted. The last time she saw her husband was minutes before he was taken to the chair, in a room where a screen separated the traitors so they could not touch. They were left alone; no one knows what they said to each other. But when the warden entered the room and separated the couple, leading Julius away, it is said he found the screen blotted with blood. They had tried to reach each other through the mesh; in a moment we can only imagine, they had pressed their fingers together with such passion that blood flowed down their hands.

“Be comforted then,” she wrote her sons that day, “that we were serene and understood with the deepest kind of understanding, that civilization had not as yet progressed to the point where life did not have to be lost for the sake of life.” Julius died in stantly in the electric chair, and when they cleared his body away and led Ethel in, she was so small that the electrodes couldn’t properly fit her head. When I read that it took two electric shocks to kill her, I sat down at my kitchen table and cried.

Why, Ethel, didn’t you confess after Julius died? He was gone; there was no good to be done. I’ll never know why you didn’t pull the matron close to you and say anything to save your life, save your sons. Say anything they wanted to hear. You must know some secret I can’t guess.

What is a wife? If they take away her children, her husband, her house and belongings; if they send down a destroying angel to this female Job and tear one son from her arms and another from the schoolhouse so his textbook falls to the floor with a thud, send agents to drag her husband from his home; if they take away the telephone table in the hall; the geraniums wilting in the flower box and the greens that have to be used before they go bad and the new hat that she hasn’t yet figured out how to wear? If they take away the dog? If they take away her favorite wooden spoon? Her brother? Her ring? What is the smallest atom of a wife that cannot be split apart? Only you could ever say, Ethel, and you died silent.

Peace negotiations took place in a city in southern Korea, reestablishing the old borders; no treaty was ever signed, but the war was over. We did not win it, not in the way some wanted; we did not chase the Communists back into China and unlock that country for democracy, and men wrote to their local papers in disgust at our cowardice. But we were sick to death of war, and we had held the enemy back, so we left. Just one week after I heard about William Platt. The harm we inflicted—it was all for nothing.

William Platt did not die.

Only in my imagination did he fall down in that Virginia mud and never rise again. The loss of blood nearly took his life, but luck was always with William. After twenty-four hours his young heart beat regularly again; his eyes opened to the image of a lovely nurse arranging flowers from his family. The doctors came and he smiled, giving a thumbs-up with his remaining hand.

I watched my husband carefully. I might catch him listening to the radio, his eyes wandering from one object in the room to the next. I wondered what each sacrifice cost him. I wondered what Buzz’s arrival, Annabel’s temptation, William’s draft and injury cost him, in the end, because even a man who reads a censored paper sees the blanks and knows exactly how much has been cut to ease his mind. He must have known—the way a child knows—that all the strange events in his life were done for want of him, for possession of him. You couldn’t see it, of course, as he leaned and listened to the radio, elbows on his knees. He seemed merely the handsomest man for a mile. But I knew the panic hung inside him, somewhere; a bat trapped in the rafters, folded and quiet all day while the rest of us were stirring, but night would come eventually. It would claw its way out; it had to.

William Platt’s return was a neighborhood event, a hero’s welcome. I watched from my window as the government car turned the corner and stopped before his mother’s house, bedecked in patriotic colors. She ran out, a short woman with bright red hair, arms spread, but before William accepted her embrace, he turned to salute the driver with his left hand. His right arm ended, above the elbow, in a cocoon of gauze. Later, from infection, he would lose it all, and his young wife would lovingly alter his shirts, sewing the cuff of each right sleeve to his shoulder so it dangled like a flag. That day, Annabel ran to him, her blond hair curled in the rain. I remember how they embraced despite the downpour, how he grinned eagerly and she stroked his short hair desperately and he held her against his chest. Soon my window was speckled with rain, flattening the scene like a newspaper photo made up of dots. He was alive; he was a hero. I closed the drapes. It meant nothing; I had already taken on the guilt of a murderess.

There was a woman my grandmother knew, who owned nothing in the world but some pearls her great-aunt left her, and it was all she’d brought to her marriage: a strand of huge, luminous, beautiful pearls. Quite a treasure for a poor woman. One day there was a fire. The whole house burned down, and her sleeping husband burned with it. The woman came back from the trip she’d been taking, widowed, devastated to see the destruction and, picking through the wreckage, she discovered her scorched metal jewelry box. She opened it—and there were her pearls, as perfect, as beautiful as before only now absolutely black. The heat had done it. The friend who was with her wept: “They’re ruined!” “Oh yes,” said the woman, bringing them out, “they’re ruined.” But that was how she wore them, those blackened pearls; as a token, a holy relic around her neck.

The day William Platt stepped from that car, saluting with his one good arm, his wife sobbing beside him. The memory of that day. I wear it like that string of pearls.

People said that when America won the war, the burned-out marquee of the Parkside Theater relighted miraculously and glowed for a week. That was where I met Buzz at an ill-attended, midday double feature. It was one of our final meetings. We sat in the last row; a flash of sunlight brightened the movie screen above us. It was a war film. Prisoners stood in the cold white square of a yard, a warden addressing them in a language they did not know.

“What did we do?” Buzz whispered.

“It wasn’t us. It wasn’t our letter—”

“How do you know that?”

“There wasn’t enough time,” I said. “Things couldn’t work so fast—”

“I suppose so.”

“It’s crazy to think they would take that letter seriously, change their draft rolls. You know the army. It wasn’t us. It was chance.”

A popcorn-box airplane came floating overhead—from kids in the balcony who paid their entrance fee with 7UP caps. A few rows before us, a man I knew to be deaf and dumb watched with sad fascination the pictures that were still silent movies to him.

A winter prison camp that had no walls, no fence, no barbed wire, as the warden loudly explained. During the day it was heavily guarded, but at night there was just a square of bright light in the middle of nowhere, the prisoners pinned there like moths, and what kept them from escaping was the night, which built its own walls, because all they could see beyond the blinding whiteness of their prison was an impenetrable blackness. “It is the Black Forest beyond, but you will never see it!” the warden yelled. Their night was too black; their eyes would not adjust before they froze. He shouted: “You are blind men now.”

Buzz said it was his fault.

“It was chance,” I said again.

“I talked you into all of this.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“You hid a boy from war,” he told me, speaking close to my ear. “I … I stood up back then and wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t kill. I sacrificed things not to go to war. And now a boy—”

I shivered in the cold theater. “He never went to war.”

A pause, then a whisper: “He did.”

“What are you saying? It wasn’t war. It was an accident.”

He said, “We used him, Pearlie. Not in their battle but in our own.”

I turned to Buzz and saw in his eyes something I had never expected to see. Not in a man whose missing finger testified to his unwillingness to fight. A general, in his tent early in the morning, hearing the death toll from the push he has just ordered could not have looked as battle weary. So stricken and sorry. It was the only fight either of us was willing to join. The woman who hid her man, the objector who found him. We would not fight to kill in a war or to set the world aright, not for a country who disowned us, but together we had found our cause. A prize so small it could not be worth this sacrifice. Simply: ourselves.

“I could go away,” he said in a pained voice.

“What do you mean?”

He took off his coat, struggling in the seat, not looking at me but staring up at the screen. “If you asked me to. We’ve done something bloody and terrible and ruined a life. Two lives. I could leave tonight.”

“And where would that leave me?”

“You’d go on as before.”

“But I’d know he wanted someone else—not me.”

“Maybe you and I should leave,” he said. “I’ve sold everything, it’s all done, you and Sonny could come with me.”

On-screen, two prisoners played a pensive game of chess. Spotlights lit the parade ground as bright as a movie set, and within the bunkhouse bare bulbs hung glowing from the ceiling. In a flutter of death, one bulb extinguished itself. The prisoners stared at it, as did the guard, who paused a moment before shouting that a light had gone out.

“That’s foolish talk,” I said. “You didn’t come to take me and Sonny away somewhere.”

“I would do it.”

“You’d get one mile out of town and start to think of him. You want to make amends to me, but it won’t let you love him less. I don’t understand it, but I’ve seen it. What brought you here won’t let you leave.”

“Take Holland, too.”

I sighed aloud at that thought, and tried to see his face more clearly in the flickering darkness. I said, “No, Buzz. I can’t do that. Take what you came for and leave me and Sonny be. It’s too late.”

Boos erupted from the balcony; the wrong reel had been inserted and now a woman from another century, her long blond hair in braids, a basket on her arm, kneeled beside a lake and tossed grass at a young man. He pulled a strawberry from her basket and she laughed with the abandon of youth. Quite wildly, he took her in his arms and kissed her, while the children in the balcony raged and threw their popcorn in the air. She struggled in his embrace, succumbing—and then the girl and her lover were gone. Cheers from above. The screen was winter-white, trapping Buzz and me in its glare.

A prison made entirely of light. So bright, so white, you can not imagine crossing over into the frozen darkness that surrounds you. Nothing keeps you from it; there is no electric fence or wall around a life, a marriage. Nothing really stops you from saving yourself, your son. It is just light, but it stuns you. It whitens the edges of you like frost. Years pass. The only thing that could spring you from such a prison is an error; a spotlight sputters out, a bulb, and you have a glimpse of the world around you. For a moment, you have your bearings; you see things clearly: how life could be. You look into each other’s eyes, you nod, and in a fit of madness you take off across the border.

If Buzz left us, he’d return to the same starvation he had known once, years ago, but what we bear once we may not bear again. The bachelor’s apartment; the single-burner stove; the album of photographs under the bed; a harmless, lonely life—he could not live it again. It was what brought him to my door, to skew the world a little, because to do otherwise—to sit and take the life you are offered—can be unbearable. He wanted to please, wanted to live it, but he couldn’t. He did not take the step forward. And so the world lashed back—or no, it didn’t. It did nothing at all. It kept spinning, as beautiful as ever, and silently looked on. “They didn’t need to,” as he told me once, when I had asked if they had hurt the prisoners. “We did it on our own.”

The movie came back on; in the bunkhouse a shivering prisoner began to build a fire. Buzz looked across at me, and the space between us seemed as wide as a church aisle. He could not ask for what he wanted, which was a promise to stay with him, for someone to stay; if not Holland, then me; if not me, then the madness of solitude again. And he would not go back there.