Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  She spoke with her father, who sounded weary and distant.

  “Can’t you wait till Monday?” Nancy asked him.

  “Nobody would come on Monday. They’d have to work.”

  “I’ll try to get there,” she said. “I just woke up. I’m looking out at the sea. It’s beautiful. We’re at this nice inn—”

  “I know how much you always cared for Granny, and you had always planned to come back for her funeral,” said Daddy.

  “Yes,” Nancy said.

  Jack was still sleeping. Telephone calls never alarmed him. Nancy instinctively feared bad news from the telephone. She was fourteen, on the farm in Kentucky, when the family first got a telephone, the same year they got television. Jack came from a different world— private school, summer camps. How did we ever get together? Nancy thought wildly, as she woke him up and told him the news.

  “Granny had some kind of fit,” she said. “It sounded unreal.” She remembered the way her grandmother lay curled up, barely able to turn, for so long. Nancy’s father had once said, “Old people get that way, drawed up like a baby in the womb.” They had attempted once to take her to a nursing home, but she had refused to go.

  Jack sat up on his elbows, looking disappointed. Jack, a photographer, had planned to make a wedding album for Laurie and Ed as a present.

  “Do you want me to fly down with you?” he asked.

  “No. It’s not necessary.” Jack was always uncomfortable in the South. The first time he went with her, in the late sixties, a truck driver had threatened to beat him up. It was Jack’s hair. Nancy said now, “You don’t have to go. I don’t want you to miss the wedding, and you were counting on seeing whales tomorrow.”

  “You may not even be able to get there because of the airline strike,” Jack said, getting out of bed and parting the curtains. “Oh, it’s raining,” he said. “I was going to run.”

  “Well, if I can’t get there, then I can’t get there,” said Nancy.

  “How would they feel if you didn’t go?”

  “I don’t know.” She pulled her sweat shirt over her head. Her face was still in her sweat shirt when Jack drew her to him and held her, waiting for her to cry.

  “Would you call the airlines for me while I take a shower?” Nancy asked. “This hasn’t registered yet. Look at me. I’m not even crying.”

  In the shower, Nancy realized that everything in the Blue Lantern Inn was blue. The wallpaper was blue. The rugs were blue. In the lobby downstairs, seashells on blue tiles were mounted on the wall. The inn seemed to be the ideal place she had aspired toward since her childhood, when she read about the pleasant, cozy tearooms in the storybooks. She tried to picture her grandmother’s face—the gentle woman she loved—but all she could see was a silhouette of an old woman hunched over her dishpan set on the gas stove to heat. In the stove, in a compartment next to the oven, would be food from dinner saved for supper. Miraculously, no one in the family had ever had food poisoning. Nancy pushed open the clouded-glass window in the shower and saw the ocean beating, gray in the rain. She dreaded the thought of flying in the rain.

  “The only plane that will get you to Louisville with decent connections leaves Boston in two hours,” Jack told Nancy when she came out of the shower. “And you’ll have to fly standby. There’s one from New York at six, but we’d have to drive to New York, and there’s nothing out of Louisville until noon tomorrow. I don’t think that one would get you home in time for the funeral. Anyway, all the flights are booked solid, and you’d have to take a chance on getting a seat.”

  “Let’s eat and think about this,” said Nancy. She had hoped for an evening flight so she would not have to miss the wedding. It occurred to her that Jack would have to drive back to Pennsylvania alone.

  “What are you feeling?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” She spread cold lotion on her legs. “I feel inconvenienced,” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t seem personal. She was so old.”

  Jack said, “I hope you’re relieved, Nancy. She’s been a terrible strain on your parents.”

  “I know it,” Nancy said, pulling on corduroy slacks. “She’s driven my mother crazy. If I cry, it will be for my mom.”

  “Maybe you should wait and go down in a week or two and spend some time with your parents. They might need you more then.”

  “That might be better—and I have that important meeting at work on Tuesday.” Nancy began to relax. Jack was always so clear-headed. She put on an Icelandic wool sweater she had bought in Scotland once when she and Jack went looking for the Loch Ness monster. Jack called the sweater her “sheep.”

  “Why don’t you go down later?” he said, looking happier. He did a few deep knee bends.

  Nancy gazed at snapshots of previous guests on a bulletin board in the dining room. On a paper plate thumbtacked next to the tide tables, someone had scrawled, YES, THE MOONIES ARE HERE. A smiling gray-haired man in a striped sweater said to Jack, “We come here every year. We were here all week and the weather was glorious until today.”

  “There’s an artists’ colony here as good as on the Cape,” a short woman, his wife, said, beaming.

  Nancy took orange juice, coffee, and a blueberry muffin from a sideboard and sat at the corner of the long table, facing the ocean. Jack sat down and handed her a napkin and silverware. “You forgot these,” he said gently. He chatted with the cheerful couple while Nancy ate and gazed out the window at the vacant sky and water. Her appetite surprised her. The muffins were homemade, according to the other guests.

  Jack brought Nancy another muffin. “Are you O.K.?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Do you know what you want to do?”

  “I don’t want to travel in the rain.” She spread butter on the muffin and watched it crumble. She said, “When my parents were young, they wanted to build a house of their own half a mile down the road. They wanted to buy a piece of land and build. Instead, they built that house next door, on Granddaddy’s land. Mom remembers how Granny fretted at the idea of Daddy moving half a mile away. She said, ‘Well, what if he was to get sick? Who would take care of him?’ She didn’t want her precious son out of her sight and didn’t trust my mother to look out for him. Mom bore that insult to this day. And she ended up taking care of Granny all those years.”

  “Think of how free your parents are going to be now,” Jack said.

  Nancy ate a bite of muffin. “I know I should go,” she said slowly. “But it seems to me that if you have a choice between a wedding and a funeral, you should go to the wedding.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “I know you want to take pictures, and we drove so far.”

  More guests were entering the dining room, talking about the weather.

  Nancy said to Jack, “Later I’ll double-check and see if there’s some way I could get there late tonight or tomorrow morning. And I’ll call home later today. They’ll be at the funeral home all afternoon anyway.”

  Suddenly, a small blond dog rushed into the dining room, followed by the woman who ran the guesthouse. She cried, “Tuffie—get back here! You know you’re not supposed to be in Blue Country!”

  The gray-haired man said to her, “It’s too bad you have to live in the back of the house, without this beautiful view.”

  “Oh, in the winter we always move into Blue Country,” she said, smiling and scooping up the dog from the blue rug. She tugged the dog’s ribboned topknot. “Bad boy, Tuffie.”

  “That dog doesn’t look half as guilty as I do,” Nancy said to Jack. The wedding had been planned for the beach, but because of the rain it was moved to a summer camp nearby. The redwood cottages, with elaborately carved cornices and red-painted trim, resembled a Russian peasant village. “Everything in New England is quaint,” said Nancy as Jack’s umbrella exploded into shape. They could hear the ocean roaring beyond a low, tree-lined hill. The clouds were rushing by, like something chased, so near they looked transparent as smoke.

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nbsp; The art studio, where the crowd was gathering, was unfinished inside, and spider plants dangled from two-by-fours braced together overhead. Some stretched canvases faced the wall, and the floor was paint-splotched. Nancy sat in a folding chair and scanned the crowd for familiar faces while Jack began photographing Laurie and Ed, who were already there. Nancy had not seen Laurie in four years, and they had met Ed only once, at a restaurant in Philadelphia when he was attending a computer conference. Someone was adjusting the flowers in Laurie’s hair. Nancy did not remember ever seeing Laurie in a dress. Laurie kept hitching up her waistband. Ed, in a dark tuxedo with red, embroidered lapels, was greeting friends and smiling broadly. Nancy remembered that at the restaurant in Philadelphia he had ordered baby octopus and that it had arrived intact, on a bed of pasta. Jack, who found Ed somewhat pretentious, had thought it was vulgar to order such a thing, but Nancy thought it had been adventurous.

  When the musicians—two guitarists and a violinist—began playing, Nancy recognized Gypsy music in the wail of the violin. She recalled a Nancy Drew mystery involving Gypsies. She used to read those books on Granny’s front porch. She sat on the porch swing, swinging as high as she could go and wishing hard that she could go someplace Nancy Drew went, and she begged Granny to run away with her, but Granny warned her against Gypsies and did not have a high opinion of unknown places. The violin was mournful at first, then sweet, then ecstatic, before shivering and retreating into a low moan.

  Jack sat down beside Nancy. “I think I got some good shots,” he said. “Doesn’t Laurie look incredible?”

  Two tall men walked with Laurie and Ed to the front of the room. One of the men took a white gown from his briefcase and fluffed it up. He threw it up in the air like pizza dough and caught it, then pulled it over his head. The other man, a rabbi, draped an embroidered vestment around his shoulders. Laurie tugged at her skirt.

  “The minister must be a friend of theirs,” said the woman sitting next to Nancy.

  The rabbi spoke in Hebrew and offered Laurie and Ed a glass of wine. Suddenly, in the front row, a man stood up and began talking to Laurie. She turned to listen. Then he faced the audience and said apologetically, “I couldn’t give Laurie away, because I don’t own her. But I ran across some things last week that I wanted to share on this occasion.” He thumbed through the papers in his hand, explaining that they were report cards and drawings he had saved from Laurie’s childhood. “I have this Valentine here,” he said. “It’s signed, ‘Love, Laurie.’ ” He cried, and Laurie, looking embarrassed, embraced him. When he sat down, a woman next to him stood up, her back to the audience, and read a poem titled “The Outermost Limits.” Nancy saw the rain splatter the stained glass, and somewhere a baby cried. The rabbi raised a glass of wine and sang. Laurie and Ed took turns reading parts of their marriage contract. Laurie had a theatrical voice; she was an actress and had once had a part in a soap opera.

  She read, “We join together in the bond of marriage, but we do so in protest against the established institution of marriage, an institution that enslaves women by making them property, thus denying them economic equality. We also protest against laws that prevent homosexual couples from marrying. Yet we join together, formally, in this bond, as an affirmation of the love that individual human beings can feel for one another.”

  Suddenly, Laurie and Ed were stomping on wine glasses wrapped in cloth napkins, and then with a cry of relief that the glasses broke successfully, they virtually leaped into each other’s arms. The Gypsy music began. Nancy was crying, at last.

  At the reception in the cafeteria, she found a price tag dangling on a nylon thread inside the cuff of her silk blouse. Jack bit it off, discreetly, and she pulled out the end of the thread.

  “Minnie Pearl,” he teased. Nancy smiled nervously. Umbrellas drifted past the windows. The stained glass over the doorway was an abstract design—broken lines like shattered glass.

  During the day, while Jack took more pictures, and the people milled around her, Nancy forgot for indeterminate stretches of time the news from home. When it occurred to her, rushing forward in a little replay of the conversation with her mother, she still felt awkward, almost puzzled. The rain was pounding harder outside, and the hum of voices blended with it. Everyone seemed happy. Two older women were thrilled to learn that Nancy lived in Pennsylvania. One of them cried, “Oh, we go to Pennsylvania! Once a year we go down to New Hope, and sometimes at midnight our friends take us across the state line to play Midnight Beano.”

  “It’s lots of fun!” said her companion, who had red lipstick smeared around her lips.

  “And then after that they take us shopping at a discount store there.” The woman grasped Nancy’s arm and said, “It was such a lovely ceremony, especially when Laurie’s father made that little speech.”

  “That was touching,” said the other woman. “I clean for Laurie. Ed has allergies and can’t stand a speck of dust.”

  “That poem was odd, though. Wasn’t it odd?”

  “Ed is very sensitive.”

  Nancy found Jack changing a lens. “The lighting’s wrong,” he said. “I need my bright lights. Look at all the shadows.”

  “It’s appropriate, though, for the weather today,” said Nancy, seeing the shadows, the jewel-light of the stained glass. The people, dressed for the autumn beach in wool and corduroy, looked like faded autumn leaves. She said, “I just talked to some women who go to New Jersey to play Midnight Beano after they go discount shopping! Can you imagine! They were delightful.”

  “You seem to be enjoying yourself,” Jack said.

  “Should I?”

  “Sure. It’s a wedding.”

  “It’s a wonderful wedding.”

  Nancy and Jack were laughing the way they had the previous day.

  They ate at a table with Karen Bordon, an acquaintance from graduate school. Nancy barely remembered her, but Karen said Nancy had once given her a ride to Pittsfield. Karen operated a camera for a Boston television station. She called herself a camera person. The man she was with, Malcolm, worked in color processing, and Jack and Malcolm and Karen talked in technicalities about film while Nancy concentrated on the food, which had been catered by a Beacon Hill restaurant Nancy and Jack used to go to. There was food at funerals too, Nancy thought. The neighbors would bring hams and pies and cakes.

  Later, Nancy telephoned the airlines, rechecking the schedule. There were still no seats available, and now flights were being canceled because of the weather.

  Nancy sat with the telephone in front of a window. She saw Jack out on the beach with his camera, aiming at the foggy scene. She imagined gray, empty space in the pictures.

  On the telephone, Nancy’s father didn’t protest when Nancy explained the difficulty of the travel schedule. She promised to come down later to help them get adjusted and to help her mother clean out Granny’s room.

  Nancy repeated to her mother, “The airline schedules are erratic because of the strike. I wish you’d put it off till Monday.”

  “We’ll get a better crowd on Sunday. We’ll just have a handful anyway. Everybody her age has died off. All the pallbearers on her list are dead, or else they’re down in their back. Remember that list she used to keep under her pillow? Oh, I wish you could see her! She’s beautiful, the way they’ve got her fixed up. She told your daddy she didn’t want an open casket—she didn’t want people to see her looking so pitiful. But she’d be proud if she could see herself. Those big flower sprays you put on top of the casket have gone up, so we couldn’t afford a big one. They cost about a hundred dollars, so we got the small one for fifty. If we’d had a closed casket with just that little spray on it—why, that would look tooty!”

  Nancy’s mother talked on, describing the expenses of the funeral, the arrangements, the relatives who had called. Nancy let her mother talk. Jack was still out on the beach, oblivious to the chill wind. The water dashed against clay-colored rocks that had been cracked into hundreds of slices by a powerful f
orce, probably glaciers. The slices had not separated. They made Nancy think of Droste chocolate oranges, which fall apart into perfect slices when tapped on the top.

  Mom said, “She’s just beautiful—she looks thirty years younger! Her hair’s fixed nice, and I bought her a pretty blue dress, a dress like she would have liked, with a Peter Pan collar and tucks.”

  “I thought she had a blue dress she’d been saving.”

  “Well, it was out of style, and they had these dresses at the funeral home, so I bought one, and bought beads. She always liked jewelry. And she has a corsage, and inside the casket lid is a blue spray. I hope somebody brings a camera. I want to get some pictures for you. She didn’t want all that money spent on her, but it was her money, and I’m spending it on her, to send her out in style.”

  “Are you going to be all right, Mom?” asked Nancy.

  “Well, they say you’re never prepared for anybody to die. And it’s true.”

  Nancy shifted the receiver to her other ear. She said, “Your life is going to be different from now on. You and Daddy can go somewhere together for the first time in years. You can come and visit me—at last.”

  “This morning he told me something that floored me,” Mom said. “He said, ‘Do you realize that last night was the first night we slept in a house alone together in forty years?’ I said no, but it’s true. Forty years! There was always somebody here to take care of. Oh, you should see all the food the neighbors brought.”

  Nancy’s mother described the food—ham, chicken, steak patties, three pies, two cakes, baked beans, three-bean salad, Jell-O salads. As she listened, Nancy kept her eyes on Jack out on the fractured rocks, a frail silhouette against the sea.

  Back at the reception, when Nancy finally cornered her old friend Laurie, who had once lived in a basement apartment below Nancy’s and played Doors albums full blast, she felt glad she had stayed. Laurie’s freckles danced around her smile.