by John Gardner
“Don’t get up,” Callie said. She was wet, and she was breathing hard; she’d been running. When she reached the door of his room she stopped and leaned on the doorpost. She said nothing for a moment, catching her wind. Then: “I’m sorry to bother you. I saw your lights were all off, and I thought—”
Henry looked down.
She came into the room and stood by the window. She rubbed the back of a book with her thumb, making the binding gleam, but her eyes did not seem focused on the book. Henry watched the self-conscious movements of her hands. He would hurry her home before her parents woke to worry, he thought.
“You want to sit down, Callie?”
She’d left the door of the diner open, and he could feel cool air sweeping across his chest and back. The rain had stopped now. She went on rubbing the book, looking at nothing.
“What is it, Callie?” he said.
Then suddenly she came to him and pressed her wet head against his chest, her fingers digging into his fat. Her back under his hands shook with her sobbing. As always, only his hands could communicate. “He’s a good boy, Callie, and you love him,” he was whispering hurriedly, senselessly now, as though the weighted heat in his chest could be pushed off by words. He’d said these words before with her wet hair against his shirt; but no, that was wrong. Never. And yet she was looking up now as he’d known she would, saying, “No, I don’t. I didn’t. Stop talking, Mr. Soames. Please. I hate you when you talk. I can’t help it, I truly hate you. I’m sorry.” Her face was close, and she hissed it at him, every word increasing the heat in his chest. He thought, if only she could get away someplace, to rest and straighten things out in her mind. He had money, after all; all the money she would need.
She said, “When I saw your light was off I was certain something had happened to you. I couldn’t stand it, you’ve been like a father to me, almost like—” She broke off. His hands stopped moving on her back. After a long time she said, “Mr. Soames, have I led you to believe—?” She drew back, looking at him, frightened.
“It’s all right, Callie,” he said. “It’s nothing, nothing.” His lips were trembling, stretching out like a sad clown’s, and he remembered that with his glasses on he looked like a Russian spy. She pressed close to him again, clinging to him as if in horror. “Oh, boy,” she whispered. And then, as if on second thought, “Oh, Holy God.” The burning in his chest was like fingernails cutting into his skin, blocking out the light and the candle flame and the blistered, dirty, brown-paper shine of the old hotel room walls. Her hands had gone limp with the pain, he remembered all at once, and yet even while she sobbed she had reached for his hand. It came to him now why she’d laughed.
“I love you, Callie.”
“I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I was out of my mind.”
“I know how you feel, Callie. I only wanted—”
“You don’t know how I feel at all. Let me think.”
14
The fog had pounced suddenly, from nowhere. Henry sat for five or six minutes at the end of his driveway, just off the macadam, his arms resting over the steering wheel. The girl, wrapped in an old army blanket, sat hugging her knees, breathing deeply, like a child. Her face, framed by the window, was gray as lead. The Ford’s headlights seemed to bore only a few inches into the fog. Gray, airy arms moved over the hood and seemed, sometimes, to be lifting the car, turning it so that Henry wouldn’t know where the highway lay. A drunk was knocking at the front door of the Stop-Off, shouting, “Henry, hey, Henry, git up!” Henry kept from turning his head. Somewhere off in the hills to his right a semi whined. Someone he knew, probably, driving against a deadline. A yellow glow appeared on the hill, moved closer, then changed abruptly to a gray-black shadow shooting past to vanish, swallowed up by the fog. The trucker would kill himself, letting her roll that way. Poor bastard. Poor, stupid, vicious, fat bastard. Breathing shallowly to cut down the burning, Henry nudged the Ford out onto 98, heading south—but not for the hills and Nickel Mountain this time—driving into the fog. He’d have to raise Frank Wells and his wife, and get Doc Cathey after that—or no, get Doc in the morning, perhaps; not as a medic for once, thank God. All quickly, before the click.
There would be time, though. Might have years left yet. A whole new life. No sense driving with the window open, all the same. Made breathing harder. Be realistic.
He was tired, soaked with sweat inside the great black suit.
(Nickel Mountain. That was where the real hills were, and the river, cool, deep with echoes of spring water dripping into it and sliding from its banks!)
Callie’s head came to rest against his shoulder, and her hair had a young, clean smell. (He must have been teasing me, he thought. Surely he was.) Her head on his shoulder was pleasantly heavy; heavy enough, almost, to crush bone.
II
THE WEDDING
1
Callie Wells stood in what was normally the sewing room, just off the parlor. Both doors were closed behind her. She was wearing the old Welsh wedding gown, but she seemed hardly to know it, standing with her hands folded, looking out the window. The room, the weather, the round blue mountains in the distance all seemed to defer to her stillness. The house around her hummed like a hive, but Callie scarcely noticed that either.
It seemed to her the first chance she’d had to be alone in weeks. Every time she turned around there was something to be fitted for, some decision to make—where to put Uncle Russel and Aunt Kate (who were coming from Cleveland after all), what to do if the rings didn’t come from the place up in Utica in time for the wedding, how to get Aunt Anna to the rehearsal since she flatly refused to ride in Uncle Gordon’s truck. But it couldn’t be weeks, or anyway it couldn’t be more than two, because it was just two weeks and three days ago now that they’d decided.
Her father had come into the kitchen blinking like an owl, holding up his flannel pajama bottoms with one hand, scowling, cross enough to eat roofing nails, and Henry had said formally, holding her hand, “Mr. Wells, I’d like your permission to marry your daughter.” Callie had glanced up at him sideways and had seen again, as if it were a new discovery, how much she truly admired him, comical as he might seem to some, and she’d felt awe that he should be going through all this for her. He was painfully embarrassed, and scared as well, though he was older than her father. He was feeling, no doubt, as ridiculous as he looked—a great fat creature in steel-rimmed glasses, his ears pressed flat to his head as though he’d spent his whole life in a tight-fitting cap.
Her father said, “At two A.M. in the morning? You crazy?”
“I’m serious, Frank,” Henry said. All the house and the surrounding night seemed to echo his earnestness. He’s serious.
She’d broken in quickly, holding Henry’s hand more tightly, “Daddy, I’m going to have a child.”
His face went white, then red. He was angrier than she’d ever seen him, angry enough to murder Henry (but Henry could break her father in half as easily as Prince snapped hambones between his teeth). Her father began swearing but she broke in again, “Not by Henry, Daddy. By somebody else.” He just stared at her then, and then at Henry. Then he pulled out the chair from the kitchen table and sat down. His stubbly cheeks were hollow and there were shadows between his ribs. He chewed his lip and wrung his hands, tears washing down his nose and whiskers. After a minute he called her mother, and she came in at once—she’d been standing just behind the door—her plump white hands catching the bathrobe together.
She said, “Mother, we’re going to be married.”
Her mother’s face squeezed into a grimace and she started crying with a great whoop, splashing up her hands and running to her, falling on her, hugging her tightly and sobbing. “Oh, Callie! My poor baby! We’ve failed you!” Immediately Callie was crying too, sobbing her heart out. It must have been two minutes they cried like that. Then it came to her that Henry was there, and that they didn’t understand at all.
“Mother,” she said, “I love
Henry. I’m happy.”
“Child. My child!” her mother said, and a new burst of sobbing overwhelmed her.
She felt a strange sensation: as if the floor were moving, shifting gently, carrying her somewhere, as in the old story, and telling her something. She accepted her mother’s tight embrace but felt unresponsive, separated in a way that in a moment there would be no repairing. Her mother felt it too, or realized that Callie was not crying now, that something had changed.
“Mother,” she said again, “I love him.”
After a moment her mother drew back to look at her, trying to read her face like a word left by Indians. She said, “Love, Callie! You’re only seventeen years old.”
Callie said nothing.
Her mother was baffled; grieved and frightened, but more than that, filled with an emotion too deep for separation into grief and fear: as though Callie had gone down to a small boat at night, and her mother stood on a towering ship that was drawing away and could never turn back. Without words, Callie knew—with a sinking feeling—that her mother could never know for sure—anymore than she could know of her mother—that she was happy. For the first time now, her eyes still baffled, Callie’s mother turned to look at Henry. She stared as if she’d never really noticed, in all her years, that he was grotesque. He endured the look in patience like an elephant’s, an enormous hulk of misery, his hands folded behind his back, huge belly thrown forward, his head slightly tipped and drawn back a little. (Could she see that, inside that suit like a mortician’s, he was a gentle man, and a good man besides?)
Her father said, “This calls for a drink!”
Everything called for a drink, to her father. Her mother said, “I’ll put some coffee on.”
“Hell,” her father said, “it don’t call for coffee. Damn coffee, that’s what I say. Is that what you say, Henry?”
Henry smiled, showing his overbite. “Mmm,” he said, noncommittal.
“Don’t curse, Frank,” her mother said.
“Right,” her father said. “Fuck cursing!” He got out the Jim Beam and two of the painted glasses from the gas station and some ice. He was so nervous he could hardly get the cubes from the metal tray. He waved Henry to a chair and opened the bottle.
Her mother went over to the stove. When she’d turned on the butane under the pot she looked around, horrified, weeping again. “I forgot to say congratulations!” She came back to Callie and hugged her as tightly as before, and now once more both of them were sobbing, but happily this time, Callie anyway, her mother still undecided.
“Congratulations, you two!” her father said, exactly like someone on television. He stood up and reached over to shake Henry’s hand, his other hand clutching the pajama bottoms.
They’d sat up all night after that, talking, her father and Henry drinking whiskey, she telling her mother how happy she was, and looking fondly at Henry (growing more and more erect and dignified as the drinking wore on, smiling more and more foolishly, his speech increasingly labored and solemn—her father’s, too). She had wanted to shout, Oh Mother, look at him, look at him! And every glinting glass and dish in the cupboards understood. But how could her parents understand it? What was important was unspeakable, both on her side and on her mother’s. And so instead they had talked about plans, and she had wondered, Is that what everybody does, in every marriage. She and Henry had meant to be married by a justice of the peace, but her mother insisted on a wedding in church. You only get married once, she said; a church wedding was a sacred thing; the relatives would be hurt. Aunt Anna would be the organist, because it wouldn’t do for her own mother to be organist at her own daughter’s wedding. Callie would wear white. “Mother, I’m pregnant,” Callie said, “I’m already beginning to show.” “People expect it,” her mother said. She’d given in to everything. It didn’t matter. In fact, she was secretly glad she’d be married in church. She’d said, “Henry, what do you think?” “Ver-y good,” he said, nodding, judgmental. “A ver-y Solomon cajun.” When dawn came and the robins started singing, Henry and her father were fast asleep, her father lying on his arms on the table, Henry sitting erect and placid, mouth open, like a sleeping child.
From that day to this she’d been running every minute. When they’d told Aunt Anna it was to be in two weeks, she’d looked instantly at Callie’s belly, her old eyes as sharp as when she threaded a needle, and she’d said, “Well, well, well, well.” Callie’s mother had cried as though the sin were her own. (Sin was the only word for it in Aunt Anna’s house, pictures of Jesus on every wall, sequin and purple velvet signs reading Jesus Saves and I Am the Way.) Then, to Callie’s astonishment, Aunt Anna’s wrinkled-up leathery face broke into a witchly grin.
But all the preparations were over, finally—the rushed-out wedding invitations, the fittings, the telephone calls, the far-into-the-night planning of housing arrangements for relatives and transportation to the church. All the relatives were assembled, mostly from her mother’s side, more Joneses and Thomases and Griffiths than she’d seen in one place in all her life. It was like an Eisteddfodd or a Gymanfa Ganu. Her father said you couldn’t spit without knocking down fourteen Welshmen. (Great-uncle Hugh had liked that. He’d slapped his knee and rolled it over and over on his tongue, getting it wronger every time he said it. Her father would be quoting it for the next fifty years, the way he’d been quoting for the last twenty-five, “Fool Ahpril, Bill Jones! Fly-horse on door-barn! Fool Ahpril!)
And so at last she could be alone. In half an hour Uncle John would drive her to the church, and there would be the last-minute bustle, the anxious fuss, the fear that every minute detail might not go perfectly, according to proper ritual. She thought: We should have gone to a JP and told them afterward.
In the old Welsh wedding gown she felt unnatural—false. It would be different if you were pretty, she thought. She’d been shocked when she’d seen herself in the mirror the first time, trying it on. The gown was scratchy and tighter than she’d expected. It was yellowed by time, yet, in spite of that, mysteriously pure, she thought; serene. But at the lace cuffs her wrists were bony, and her hands were like a man’s. With the veil lifted up her face showed angular and grim: She looked neither innocent nor gentle and wise, merely callow. She had said, “It doesn’t fit.”
“Don’t be silly, Callie,” her mother had said. “We just need to alter it a little, that’s all.”
She’d said frantically, “I mean, it isn’t right for me.”
Aunt Anna said, “Breathe in.”
When they had it pinned up, her mother stepped back to study her, and she smiled, teary, blind to how terrible Callie looked. And now her own tears came gushing. “Mother,” she said, “my feet are too big.”
“One wedding I played at, the girl tripped and broke her wrist,” Aunt Anna said.
“Mother, listen to me,” Callie said. “Look at me once.”
“Hush,” her mother said. “Callie, you look lovely.”
She had clenched her teeth. But she had given in, to the gown as to the rest. Soon it would be over.
It was a beautiful day. She stood as still as the glass of the window, with her hands folded, the veil drawn over her face. Across the road lay golden stubble where Mr. Cook’s wheat had been, a few weeks ago. Off to her right the land dropped sharply, falling away toward Mr. Soames’ diner and the lower valley, at the end of the valley gray-blue mountains rounding up into blue-white sky. It was pleasantly warm, a light breeze moving the leaves of the maples on the lawn. She watched the bakery truck slow down at the mailbox and turn in. A beautiful day for a wedding, she thought. She meant it to be a happy thought, but she couldn’t tell whether she was happy or not. Children were singing, around the corner of the house, out of sight.
Karen is her first name,
First name, first name,
Karen is her first name,
Among the little white daisies.
The song made her remember something. She had whispered to her friend that her boyfriend�
�s name was David Parks—knowing perfectly well the rules of the game, that all of them would now find out that Callie Wells liked David Parks—but when her friend turned and told the others, and when the whole ring of children began to sing it, their voices gleeful and merciless, she felt sick with shame and believed she would never dare look at him again. The memory brought a sudden, fierce nostalgia, a hunger to be once again and forever the child she could now see with fond detachment, loving and pitying her, laughing at her sorrow as once her mother must have laughed. For some reason the memory triggered another, one that was intimately related with the first, but she couldn’t think how:
Poor Howard’s dead and gone,
Left me here to sing his song. …
Panic filled her chest. It’s a mistake, she thought. I don’t love him. He was ugly.
2
All around the room—everywhere but in front of the closed doors and the window where Callie stood—the wedding presents were laid out for show on borrowed card tables covered with linen cloths. With the sunlight streaming in (burning in the great, red, antique bowl from Cousin-Aunt Mary, gleaming on all the silver plate, the silver candlesticks, the cut-glass napkin holders, lacework, china salt and pepper shakers, glass and china bowls, mugs, painted vases, popcorn poppers, TV trays, steak knives, wooden salad forks), the presents seemed too beautiful to be real. Like the gown, they had, to Callie’s mind, a serenity and elegance she could not match. They overwhelmed her—the hours that had gone into the crocheted antimacassars from Aunt Mae, the expense of the candlesticks from Uncle Earle, who had bought them, she knew, without an instant’s hesitation or so much as a fleeting thought of the expense: In all her life she would never crochet as Aunt Mae could, not if she worked at it week in, week out, and she’d never be as rich as Uncle Earle, or as calmly, beamingly confident of all she did. Why had they done it all? Over and over that question had come to her; not a question, really, an exclamation of despair, because she knew the answer, no answer at all: They had sent the presents—hardly knowing her, hardly even knowing her parents any more—because it was her wedding. She thought: Because brides are beautiful, and marriage is holy. Again and again she had watched them come down the aisle, transfigured, radiating beauty like Christ on the mountain, lifted out of mere humanness into their perfect eternal instant, the flowers they carried mere feeble decoration, the needless gilding of a lily too beautiful for Nature; and again and again she had seen them later, making their first formal visits as wives, the lines of their faces softened, their eyes grown shrewish or merry. How she had envied them, she the poor virgin, novice, barred from their mystery! She knew well enough what it was, though not in words. She knew it was not the marriage bed, was only feebly symbolized by the bed. They went up the aisle white forms, insubstantial as air, poised in the instant of total freedom like the freedom of angels, between child and adult, between daughter and wife, and they came down transformed to reality, married: in one split second, in a way, grown-up. It was that that the relatives lifted up their offerings to: the common holy ground in all their lives. But that common beauty would not be for her. Her marrying Henry Soames was almost vicious, an act of pure selfishness: she was pregnant, and he—obese and weak, flaccid in his vast, sentimental compassion—he had merely been available.
