The Story of a Marriage (2 page)

Just after our engagement, Holland’s aunts arrived at my rooming house. Alice and Beatrice, not really his aunts, in fact, but elderly twin cousins who, when he came to San Francisco, announced they were his mothers now, and arranged themselves in his life like cats unhelpfully placing themselves in the folds of an unmade bed.

They took me out for an elegant lunch and they told me that I needed to know something about Holland before I married him. It was a beautiful setting. We sat in a special area of a department-store lunchroom, after being turned away by two others; it was four floors up from Union Square with a great stained-glass ship floating overhead and waiters, old men in jackets, buzzing everywhere, back in the days when department stores had rotunda art galleries and libraries of books to buy or rent. Imagine a time when you could rent a book from Macy’s! I sat in that glittering room with those pinched old women staring at me with odd, sad expressions. I was young and scared to death. “We need to tell you about Holland,” one of them said—I hadn’t yet learned the trick to telling them apart—and the other nodded. “He’s real ill. I’m sure he hasn’t told you.”

“He’s ill?”

They shared a glance—I was too young to know what it might mean—and Alice said, “There isn’t a cure.”

“It’s gotten better, but there isn’t a cure,” her twin repeated. I would later learn that the difference between them was that the elder had a birthmark, and the younger’s heart had been broken, thirty years earlier, by a married man. As if that, too, might leave a mark.

I looked down and noticed I’d eaten all the beautiful popovers.

“He’s had a hard life,” Alice cut in, and it made no sense to me. “The war, his mother’s death—” and then she broke off in a sob, staring out the great windows that looked down on a monument: Dewey’s triumph in the Pacific.

I asked them what exactly was wrong with him. The younger aunt put her hand on her lips, like an old statue, and told me it was bad blood, a crooked heart, that there was no cure for it.

“But,” I said, “but I’ll take care of him.”

“We heard how you took care of him in the war,” Beatrice said.

“Yes,” I told them carefully. “Yes, me and his mother.”

She looked at me with a shrewd eye. I was at that age when you believe all kinds of upside-down things, including that your elders are innocents and fools, and that women in particular are children, to be treated gently and kindly, and only you—who have, after all, kissed a soldier back from war—know anything of the world. So while I heard those women speaking in their haughty accents, I was not really listening to the words.

“Miss Ash,” the older aunt said and then used my first name: “Pearlie. We’re relying on you. Don’t you let him out of your sight. You know how he loves some excitement, and it’ll kill him for sure. I don’t like him taking our old property, out in the Outside Lands, it makes me nervous, but I guess it’ll do him good, far away, out near the ocean air. He won’t need to go downtown, or worry over the past. His family should be enough, Pearlie. You should be enough.”

“Well of course.” I could not guess what worry they meant. I was distracted by our waiter, a colored man, who was approaching, smiling at me, with a folded napkin in his hands. “I don’t know about any old trouble. We aren’t interested in frivolous things. That is not what he fought the war for.” I spoke very carefully; I thought I’d mention his war experience, as a kind of proof against this idea of weakness.

Alice, though, had got quite worked up over something. She was inhaling in long, loud breaths like a cave at high tide and stared directly at the table in front of her. Her sister took her arm and she began to shake her head. Her jewelry blinked in the gray sunlight. Then she said something that I decided immediately I hadn’t heard right, because it was so absurd, so crazed, and before I could get her to repeat it, we were interrupted. It was a friend of theirs, a woman in a fancy hat with a pheasant quill, asking the Misses Cook about the Daffodil Festival and whether they thought there would be more flowers this year or fewer. Fewer, it was decided, because of the winter weather. As they talked, the waiter arrived, opened his napkin before me, and presented, burnished as bronze armor, a pile of hot popovers. It was so good in those days to be young.

If you clenched your right hand in a fist, that would be my San Francisco, knocking on the Golden Gate. Your little finger would be sunny downtown on the bay, and your thumb would be our Ocean Beach out on the blue Pacific. They called it the Sunset. That’s where we lived, with our son, in an old property set like a rough stone among the thousands of new houses put up for returning soldiers and their families, in a part of the city no one really built on until the war was over. Then hills were flattened; soil was laid down over the sand; and they built a grid of streets and low pastel houses with garages and Spanish roofs and picture windows that flashed with the appearance of the sun, all in rows for fifty avenues until you reached the ocean. It felt outside of everything. Once, the
Chronicle
published a map of nuclear damage to San Francisco if it were hit, with rings of rubble and fire. The Sunset was the only district to survive.

When we first moved in, there were so many empty lots that sand always glittered in the air, and it could bury a vegetable garden overnight. Above the sound of the ocean, one could sometimes hear the early-morning roar of the lions in the nearby zoo. It was nothing like the rest of the city, no hills or views or bohemians, nothing Italian or Victorian to make you take a photograph. A new way to live, separated from downtown by more than just a mountain with one tunnel. It sat on the very edge of the continent, with fog so dense and silver you hardly ever saw a sunset in the Sunset; any glowing light was often just a streetcar emerging like a miner from that tunnel, making its satisfied way out to the ocean.

It was a Saturday. It was 1953, and weeks before we had all watched on television as President Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were sworn in as the first government we could remember neither to be led nor haunted by FDR. We watched that inauguration, full of worries about the Korean War, race issues, the Rosenbergs, the Communists hidden everywhere around us, the Russian bombs being prepared and inscribed like voodoo charms with our names: Pearlie, Holland, Sonny. We watched. And told ourselves:

Help is coming
.

People have an idea about the fifties. They talk about poodle skirts and bus strikes and Elvis; they talk about a young nation, an innocent nation. I don’t know why they have it so wrong; it must be the consolidation of memory, because all that came later, as the country changed. In 1953, nothing had changed. We were still so haunted by the war. Fluoridation seemed like a horrible new invention, and the Woolworth’s on Market a beautiful one. In those days, the firemen still wore leather helmets; William Platt the Seltzer Boy still left fizzing bottles on our doorstep, waking me with the ring of glass on concrete; the milkman still drove his old-fashioned wagon with gold script on the side—Spreckels Russell—and, impossible as it seems, the iceman still pulled blocks out with his medieval tongs like a dentist doing an extraction on a whale, making his rounds for those last households without a refrigerator. The rag man and the knife man, the fruit truck and the coal truck and the dry cleaners, the fish man and the Colonial Bread man and the egg lady—all came down the street with their echoing cries of “Rags bottles trash!” and “Grind your scissors! Grind your knives!”; a sound that’s gone forever. No one had ever heard anything wilder than a big band, or seen a man grow his hair longer than his ears. We were still trying to figure out how to live in a war after a war.

It was a medieval time for mothers. When he was three, my boy, Sonny, was playing with his loving father in the backyard when I heard shouting. I came running to find my son collapsed in the bower vine. My husband picked him up, rocking him in his arms, hushing his frightened boy, telling me to call the doctor. In those days, they had no idea what caused polio or what to do. The doctor told me it was “brought on by summer”—a magical diagnosis for a city without a summer. His treatment was leg splints, bed rest, and hot towels, which I applied carefully, and our only other solace was church services where weeping mothers held up photographs of children. It wasn’t a time of freshness and freedom. It was a time of dread; the war was easy compared to this. It’s a wonder we didn’t run screaming into the streets and set fire to one another’s houses.

Instead, we hid our fears. Just as my mother hid a lock of her dead brother’s hair in the throat of her high-collared Sunday dress, in a pocket she had sewn there. You cannot go around in grief and panic every day; people will not let you, they will coax you with tea and tell you to move on, bake cakes and paint walls. You can hardly blame them; after all, we learned long ago that the world would fall apart and the cities would be left to the animals and the clambering vines if grief, like a mad king, were allowed to ascend the throne. So what you do is you let them coax you. You bake the cake and paint the wall and smile; you buy a new freezer as if you now had a plan for the future. And secretly—in the early morning—you sew a pocket in your skin. At the hollow of your throat. So that every time you smile, or nod your head at a teacher meeting, or bend over to pick up a fallen spoon, it presses and pricks and stings and you know you’ve not moved on. You never even planned to.

“It is equal to living in a tragic land,” a poet once wrote, “to live in tragic times.”

Yet I have to admit I loved our house. I had chosen it, after all; in defiance of the aunts, I had pressed Holland to take that old Sunset property, and at first it was the fulfillment of our dreams. A house with a yard; a bedroom my son didn’t have to share; carpets and folding blinds and even a place behind the bathroom mirror for Holland to drop his razor blades. It was a miracle: a house that had thought of everything before me. You could never have convinced me, back when I was young, that all the real moments of my life would happen in that vine-covered house, just as a telephone installer can’t tell a young couple that their happiest and saddest news will come through that polished phone. It’s hard to think, even now, that the sweet ebony milkmaid that Holland’s aunts gave us in the first year of our marriage and that sat on the bookshelf would watch with its painted eyes every vital decision I ever made. So too the bamboo coffee table. And the “broken pot” that Sonny had made from a drinking glass, masking tape, and shellac. The yarn cat, the broken mantel clock. They watched the whole six months of that affair, and in the hour of my judgment they will surely be called together to account for things.

As for what Holland’s aunt told me on that afternoon of tea and popovers, I had decided long before to forget it. Marriage was all that cluttered my mind, and the new house, and the care of my child. I could not pay attention to the memory of an old woman shouting, in her muffled voice:

“Don’t do it! Don’t marry him!”

It was 1953. It was a Saturday.

Four years of happy marriage had passed, and the aunts were still in our lives. They’d grown stouter over time, and somehow their sharp-chinned heads seemed huger than ever, Duchesses from
Alice in Wonderland
, fussing with their enormous hats as they sat telling me a story at our kitchen table. Beneath it, hidden by the apple-red oilcloth, lay my little boy.