by Joann Spears
Special thanks to CreateSpace for editing my book. Thank you also to Cathy Huskisson for talking me into starting the book, and to my son Bill and my friends Rich Polanski, Lillian Shaw, and Alan Levin for seeing me through while I finished it.
I cannot thank my Family enough for their love and support.
Copyright © 2011 JoAnn Spears
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1466324384
ISBN 13: 9781466324381
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61915-759-0
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One:
Wherein the Die Is Cast, and All Bets Are Off
Chapter Two:
Concerning a Golden Child—and a Golden Opportunity
Chapter Three:
The Heroine Being a Date Late and a Dwarf Short
Chapter Four:
Regarding the Sweet Smell of Six Exes
Chapter Five:
Dolly Believes She Is Not in Kansas Anymore
Chapter Six:
“Dissemblance, Ah Me!” or “Is That a Resemblance I See?”
Chapter Seven:
Dolly Gets Her Sea Legs Back—and Loses Them Forthwith
Chapter Eight:
Elizabeth of York Squares the Round Table
Chapter Nine:
Whereby the Ocean’s Roll Rocks Dolly’s World
Chapter Ten:
In Which the Queen of Hearts Stacks the Deck
Chapter Eleven:
Of Old Admirers and New Conquests
Chapter Twelve:
What the Kat Dragged In
Chapter Thirteen:
“It’s All Greek to Me” or “Latin-Lovers”
Chapter Fourteen:
Dolly Receives Instruction on the Mission Position
Chapter Fifteen:
Dolly Deigns to Aid an Old Maid
Chapter Sixteen:
As Pertains to Sisters Under the Skin
Chapter Seventeen:
Wherein Arabella Bells the Cat, and the Parrot Rings a Bell
Chapter Eighteen:
Memory Lane and a Sleepy Swain Revisited
Chapter Nineteen:
Of Real Estate Celestial and Terrestrial
Chapter Twenty:
The Chapter That Is All About Fashion
Chapter Twenty-One:
In Which are Discovered Two Peas in a French Hood
Chapter Twenty-Two:
About a Dead Ringer Who Was Saved by the Bell
Act Two
Chapter Twenty-Three:
“Enter the Gladiators” or “Stealing a Screamer March”
Chapter Twenty-Four:
Wherein the Wives Determine “Who’s On First?”
Chapter Twenty-Five:
Anne of Cleves Makes No Bones About It
Chapter Twenty-Six:
“A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down,” à la Katherine Parr
Chapter Twenty-Seven:
Of the Martial, In Addition to the Marital
Chapter Twenty-Eight:
Katharine of Aragon on Why Girls Rule and Boys Drool
Chapter Twenty-Nine:
Dolly Learns a Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
Chapter Thirty:
“Two Heads Are Better Than One,” as Told by Jane Seymour
Chapter Thirty-One:
Catherine Howard’s Tale of How Snow White Drifted and What She Set Adrift
Chapter Thirty-Two:
Ann Boleyn Holds Dolly Spellbound
Chapter Thirty-Three:
A Strictly Black-and-White Chapter
Chapter Thirty-Four:
As the World Turns On Its Ear
Act Three
Chapter Thirty-Five:
The Chapter Known Simply as “Over the Rainbow”
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Déjà Vu All Over Again” or “Something Old,
Something New”
Chapter Thirty-Seven:
“Speculations on the MO of an MD” or “What’s Up, Doc?”
Chapter Thirty-Eight:
As to Parting Shots and Connecting Dots
Chapter Thirty-Nine:
The Adventure of the Silly Kid and the Odyssey
Chapter Forty:
Harry Redux
Chapter Forty-one:
Beau Tied and Dwarf Morphed
Chapter Forty-Two:
Get Thee to the Church on a Dime
Chapter Forty-Three:
A Consummation Devoutly to be Wished—or Perhaps Not
Chapter Forty-Four:
Before, a Joy Proposed; Behind, a Dream
Chapter One
Wherein the Die Is Cast, and All Bets Are Off
Queen of the day, I reigned over my bridal shower in the usual way, crowned with a paper plate full of ribbons and bows that threatened to topple off my head at any moment. The queen’s customary wicker peacock throne was shaky, too. It tipped over completely at the height of the festivities, sending me—ass over newly unwrapped teakettle—to the floor. General relief that I had not broken my neck displaced any speculation about what sort of an omen my tumble might be.
The array of bridal gifts was splendid, but I was dreading heading to my wedding with all that excess bedding, and the pottery, crockery, and cutlery were going to be a headache, too, because Harry and I were moving overseas to England directly after the reception. More goods and chattel were the last things we needed, but my bridesmaids were bent on my having a traditional bridal shower. And one of them, my cousin Bella, was just plain bent.
Harry’s grandma Margaret, on the other hand, wasn’t bent at all. Tall and gaunt with a ramrod-straight spine, she was just the person to assume matriarch duty for the shower and scatter crisp tidbits of advice on sex, housewifery, and human relations in general.
“Dolly certainly waited long enough to do this,” she commented, to no one in particular. “I was beginning to think she’d see me dead before I’d see her married.”
I was way too fond of Grandma Margaret to point out that we still had about thirty-six hours to go till altar call or to remind her that life is uncertain at the best of times, let alone when you’re pushing one hundred. I was keeping my fingers firmly crossed against the big croupier in the sky calling her to cash in her chips until after I had safely tossed my bridal bouquet and run. Even so, I was glad she was present; I was mature enough to appreciate grandmas generally—and the ones who had known me from way back specifically. Plus, I had this one to thank for my nickname.
My mother had christened me “Cathy,” but when I was very small, Grandma Margaret gave me the nickname “Dolly.” My fiancé, Harry, remembers the occasion vividly. It had to do with the “dance with a dolly with a hole in her stocking” song and me having a hole in the toe of one of my knee socks. Harry swears that the occasion was the beginning of his lifelong stocking-and-garter fetish, but I had my doubts. I was not wearing a garter then, and, with the exception of the demure, lacy number I would be wearing beneath my bridal raiment for the wedding, I had never worn a garter—at least not outside of the house.
“I am just glad Dolly is getting married finally!” My cousin Kath has been minding my business ever since I was born, as big cousins do. She was in her element that day, unwrapping gifts and holding them aloft for all to see. If she had heard me say “housewifery” a moment ago, she would have told me, like Mammy in Gone with the Wind, that women who use words like that “mos’ generally don’t catch husbands.”
I can’t help it, really; being a history professor, words like that just pop out of me sometimes. But I knew enough to watch it around Kath. I can still see her holding up a newly unwrapped frying pan, a heavy, cast-iron one with neon red enamel on the outside.
She would not think twice about hitting me over the head with it if I got on her last nerve. After all, it’s not as if the blood would show on the pan.
“Thank God, the right girl for my Harry, at last!” My future mother-in-law, Elizabeth, had been gushing about me ever since we announced the engagement, and she never mentioned me without the “at last” and “thank God” bookends. I flatter myself that the “thank God” had something to do with my admirable qualities: sensible, smart, cool in emergencies, and still a size eight. The “at last,” I suspect, had more to do with Harry’s rather extensive romantic history, which was as littered with former flames as the California pine region.
Frequent bridal-shower fliers will be familiar with the variation on animal bingo that calls for guests to make animal sounds as the gifts named on their bingo cards are unwrapped. It could only have been my cousin Bella’s inspiration to put the party train on that particular track when all six of my fiancé’s exes were among the passengers. One ex clucked, and one howled back at her. One baaed plaintively, and one mooed with content. One gave a sexy, cat-woman meow, and one hooted like a wise, old owl. Like a train wreck, the moment compelled notice.
There are two pivotal questions here. The first: What is it, exactly, that makes grown women willing to moo, baa, and so on when assembled with other women at this kind of gathering? That question is, to date, unanswered. I think some dedicated research into the combined effect of tulle and Jordan Almonds might shed some light on it.
The second pivotal question, what I was doing with all six—yes, six—of my fiancé’s exes at my bridal shower, I think I can explain: The groom and I grew up in the same town. Our nearest and dearest married there, left for awhile, had kids, divorced, brought someone else around, got married again, had more kids, brought them around…you get the picture. It was a small, interconnected world, and Harry’s exes were almost as much a part of my world as they were of his.
As for the sheer number of them: I am, you see, a professor of Tudor history. Ever since I was a girl reading historical fiction by the ream, I have been fascinated—if not obsessed—with the story of Henry VIII and his six wives. A lifetime of that kind of exposure blunted the full impact of the six-ness of my own Harry’s wives; in fact, it made it almost seem natural. So there I was, volunteering for duty as number seven, in spite of the skeptics who warned me that with six chicks who’d already been nixed in the mix, I might be getting myself into quite a fix.
Harry’s sisters, Maggie and Molly Rose, were sitting at the bridal-suggestion box with their heads together, cracking themselves up as they wrote on heart-shaped index cards that they finished and dropped in the slot. Since Maggie had been married three times and Molly Rose two, they would collectively have had plenty of suggestions to make.
The gray-haired woman with the spiky hairdo who was watching them disapprovingly was Miss Bess, the doyenne of our old neighborhood. She was a distant relative, by blood or marriage, to just about everyone present. Having watched my generation grow up, she had had plenty to say about all of the marrying—or, in my case, not marrying—that had gone on up until then in our social set. Very little grist ever escaped her gossip mill. Miss Bess also wrote something for the suggestion box, something that I knew in my heart of hearts involved skinless chicken cutlets, nonstick cooking spray, and that cast-iron frying pan.
I do not want to sound jaded or ungrateful about the party that my bridesmaids had worked so hard to give me; it was a perfect bridal shower, complete with the requisite laughter, tears, and “Great Big Gift Gasp.” The GBGG from this crowd was, in fact, almost perfect, an impressively synchronized drawing of the breath marred only by a resounding cry of “holy shit!” from Bella. The über-gift in question was a striking, full-sized patchwork quilt. I didn’t even have to read the card when I opened the wrapping, because we all knew that it had to have been crafted by my Auntie Reine-Marie, the family needlewoman. She had designed it herself and made it entirely by hand.
For those of you who know your quilts, it was in a drunkard’s-path pattern, wedding-ring variation. Which describes, in a nutshell, the central tragedy of Auntie Reine-Marie’s life, quite a romantic and stormy tale and not at all what one would associate with the dignified lady who, as I opened the gift, was kindly offering to teach Harry’s two daughters how to quilt.
His older daughter, Mary, worried Harry, because she was turning out to be neurotic and irritating at an age when Harry was expecting her to be hip and stylish. He and I both worried about how those nerves of hers would bode for her future mental health. His younger daughter Lizzie was a real firecracker, and Harry worried about her a lot as well, because we all know how that usually goes. However, at that moment in time, the two girls were happy and optimistic about the upcoming nuptials. Truly, hope does spring eternal; chill it, grill it, spill it, or drill it, you just can’t kill it.
Just as truly, a wedding is not a wedding without those bastions of eternal hope, the bridesmaids. Mine were my dear friends and my faithful wedding wingmen. Two of them were cousins of mine: Jean and Bella. They made the perfect foils for each other: Jean charming, reserved, and ethereal, and Bella vivid and compelling. I first met my other four bridesmaids when they were students of mine—did I mention that I am a history professor? The members of the aforementioned quartet were my devoted research assistants during a long and exciting stint of Tudor research earlier in my career. By the time the project was complete, they were a part of my life, and I was a part of theirs; and we have always remained close. Oddly enough, all four of them have the same first name, which can get a little confusing for outsiders. Fortunately, we have enough of a mind-meld going among ourselves to keep all the Marias straight. It was a conscious decision on my part to stack my bridal party with exactly six bridesmaids, one to handle each of Harry’s six exes just in case the going got tough.
The inevitable and hideously white-ruffled bridal wishing well concluded the shower. My bridesmaids were pulling cards out of it, each of which contained a bridal wish from one of the shower guests. Like a bucket brigade, they were passing each card hand to hand, from bridesmaid to bridesmaid, until it got to my cousin Jean. (We had learned long ago that giving Bella public speaking privileges was not a good idea.) The usually quiet Jean came up trumps as Mistress of Ceremonies, singing out the wishes in rapid, musical succession as the author of each wish raised her hand or otherwise acknowledged her wish. Jean saved her own for last.
“From me, Dolly,” she said. “Happiness always, and never forget how much we all love you. Ever your loving cousin, Jean.”
A typical end to a typical bridal shower, I thought to myself, as Jean uttered her sweet and simple wish. Little did I know that the occasion of its next utterance would be anything but typical.
Chapter Two
Concerning a Golden Child—and a Golden Opportunity
You may be surprised to hear how closely my bachelorette night followed on the heels of my bridal shower. The shower was on a Friday evening, the bachelorette night that Saturday, and the wedding scheduled for the following day, which was June 6—the anniversary of D-Day. While this definitely qualified as haste, it was not of the unseemly shotgun variety; “whirlwind courtship” was really more like it. Although we had known each other all our lives, Harry and I did not start dating until the middle of March that same year. Then, three weeks before D-Day, Harry happened onto the fast-breaking business opportunity of a lifetime overseas in London and suggested that we wed here in the states and relocate to England together. Since I’m just a girl who can’t say no, I said “yes, dear” to him and “put a rush on it” to the necessary couturiers, caterers, clergy, and cake decorators. I would be a wife before the weekend was out—and on a plane to my new home in London to boot. I had the dress, the man, and the plane ticket to a place I had always dreamed of living. And, of course, all those newly acquired household goods.
Since history professors and whirlwind courtships do not exactly trip off the tong
ue together, you may be wondering why I chose to marry Harry at all. Really, the question was why Harry chose to marry me. His six formers would understand when I tell you that you do not so much achieve a relationship with Harry as you have it thrust upon you. So why, you may ask, did Harry thrust himself, so to speak, on me of all people?
As a rule, even though he is a big man, Harry likes small women, so I flatter myself that me still being a size eight had something to do with it. Brains? I have them aplenty, and Harry likes a smart woman, at least some of the time (his third wife was the exception that proved that particular rule).
Propinquity, I think, was definitely part of the Harry-plus-me equation. With one exception, Harry had chosen the women in his life from among a limited social circle of friends, a circle into which I, too, had the entrée. Our willingness to be chosen hinged, I think, on the fact that all of us (except for number four) had been primed by Harry growing up, had met Harry in his prime, or had been primed by stories of Harry in his prime while we were still in pigtails.
There really was nothing quite like Harry when he was a little boy. His dad was the mayor of our town, so Harry featured prominently at every local event of any note. One could see why his father always trotted him out on such occasions: Harry really was perfect, blond, blue eyed, and cherubic. As a tot, he wowed the crowd at his brother Arthur’s first Holy Communion by springing out of his mother’s arms, making his way to the front of the line of communicants, and demanding, as he tugged at the hem of the priest’s robe, a piece of the action. He only got cuter, if that was possible, as an altar boy in the selfsame church, with a blond, Prince Valiant bob and a couple of missing front teeth. Once those teeth grew in, his mother worried constantly about them being knocked out—and she had reason to be worried.
Harry grew into a sturdy, freckled adolescent who pitched (and won) the opening Little League game, not to mention quarterbacking for the state finals in the junior-high and high-school football leagues. Through all those years, and in the years to follow, there was seldom a moment when Harry was not on display, front and center and loving every minute of it. By the time he reached high school, Harry was all shoulders and had a waist smaller than mine. Those shoulders, and more slowly (but more dangerously) Harry’s head, only grew bigger through the high-school years. There wasn’t a varsity letter or academic credential he didn’t nail with ease. Lest Harry be thought too good to be true, I should mention that he was bad enough for rock and roll. He played in a garage band that you may remember, Good Company. The band got a good bit of airtime with a number called “All My Joy” and still has a cult following.
