by Mona Simpson
He was a French Jew, he was born in Paris. But he spoke beautiful, beautiful English. Morgenstern was his name. His father had been one of the moviemakers over there, but when I met him, he didn’t know anymore where his mother and father were. He was living with a family who had a farm there in Normandy. They sheltered him. You could tell he shouldn’t have been on a farm. He had such slender, slender hands. He was real delicate, you know. But he’d learned to milk goats and make cheese. He joked about it. He’d been there already a year and a half.
After we were married, we went to Paris. I had my discharge and we were both going to go to America. The Americans had France then and we were supposed to take a boat that went to Texas. We had our tickets and all.
There in Paris, he left me in a candy store. I suppose he thought that’s where a young wife would like to go. He was going to meet a contact from the Resistance. The man was to give him a handgun. He would go over into Germany and attend a parade from a street corner, where he could almost touch the Führer and then he was supposed to shoot him and run.
He was there that day at the parade, with the gun in his pocket. He told me later, there was a blond girl standing in front of him, with hair that had tints of green underneath the yellow. He didn’t know her, but for some reason, he lifted his hand and touched the little girl’s hair. Hitler rode by on the car four feet in front of him. He could have reached and kicked the metal of the fender. But instead, he stroked the hair of an unknown child, touching the gun in his pocket.
Hitler rode away, the parade went by, and before he came to fetch me, he slid the gun down the dirty toilet of a public rest room. That afternoon, we left for America, Texas.
All the boat ride, he was sick. Did I say before how weak he was? He wasn’t in good health for a long time then already. He couldn’t sleep at night and I stayed up with him. He had his coat and my coat and still he couldn’t get warm. Later on, he complained about the boat ride. One day, he climbed down to the storeroom. He took me to see: there were rats in the barrels of oatmeal. After that, I never once made my children eat things they didn’t want to eat. I had fights galore with Jimmy over that, but for once I stuck to my point.
We landed in Texas in the morning and there was this huge, huge horizon. I had never seen it like that before either. Black men moved with ropes there working the docks; that was something he hadn’t seen. And a few minutes later, I was opening my purse for American money to buy chewing gum, my husband’s first discovery in the New World.
We took a train from Texas that went all the way up to Wisconsin. Oh, was that something. It was all army. People standing up, women with little children and babies, trying to feed them and change their diapers. And my husband was still real sick. I had to ask people to give up their seat for him. And they did. Quite a few offered. Well, he died right there on that train. Yes, he died. It was the scariest thing that had ever happened to me in my life.
Later, the army did an autopsy and said it was a heart attack, but at that time I didn’t know what to think. Here I had this young husband, he was twenty-seven then. He just passed out in his seat. It was mostly all women on that train and they all helped. I just cried and cried. I didn’t know what to do. I was twenty-six years old and here I was just married and my husband was unconscious on the train. I couldn’t think. All I could imagine was if he would only just wake up. I was so unrealistic. And then the terrible thing was nobody could do anything until the train’s next stop. I still don’t know how long that was because the woman in the chair next to him got up and gave me her seat and would you believe, at a time like that, I fell asleep? Yes, I did. I slept.
The next stop was some little place in Oklahoma called Gant. Three of the women, one with children, woke me up and led me out. They kept patting my hand and telling me it would be all right. “Poor dear,” I heard them whispering. They got me into a hotel and I didn’t even see him. They’d carried him out first and somebody had taken him to the army coroner’s office.
They had him cremated. They thought that was the best thing. I’ve thought many times since, I wish I’d had the presence of mind to see that he was buried. Then there would be some place where I could know he was.
It was nice of those women, they stayed overnight two days with me in that hotel. The morning we left, we took his ashes, they came in such a box like this, and we threw them out in the fields by the tracks. They kept asking me if there was anywhere special I wanted them and I said, no, no, I didn’t care and I really didn’t. I just wanted to get it over with and get back on the train. You see, I didn’t connect them with him. The place in Oklahoma, the box, it was all funny. I felt like I was just going along with it. I knew those stones weren’t really him.
Then it was a long ride north on the train and I had a lot of time to think. And I thought and I thought, should I tell my mother and dad that I’d been married. I didn’t see what would be the good in it. I’d planned to just bring him home and introduce him, this is my husband. We’re married. I knew they wouldn’t be so happy about it, but I thought they would like him when they got used to him. Now, there wouldn’t be any point.
And I thought I might forget about him faster if I didn’t tell anybody. That’s what they said in those days. When a girl was jilted, the mother would say, now, stop talking about him and pretty soon, you’ll stop thinking about him too. Now I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s true at all. But then I did. I remember straightening my hat and gathering all my things neat together when the train pulled into the South Bay Station. I’d be going home alone, there were people for me, family. I thought the army was another world I’d been in—and in this one it wouldn’t be so hard not to mention it. Not just him, the whole war. I didn’t really feel like talking about any of it.
Now I wish I’d talked about it then when I could, then right away, when it was natural. So many years later, if you don’t forget, if you haven’t forgotten like I haven’t, you’re too ashamed to bring it up. And then it’s always your secret. I imagine the war is a lot of people’s secret; you know, what happened to them then.
Paul was his name and he was a beautiful boy. He looked real, real young, much younger than I did. It’s so long ago now; nobody could be as good as I remember Paul. And you know, it’s not a good thing to have a secret like that. Something you care about so much. A person you idealize who’s dead. Because it takes away from your regular life. You compare and it doesn’t do you any good, because no matter what you want or think, he’s dead. You’re better off forgetting him and trying to be happy with what you’ve got.
And here I think of him the way he looked then; well, if he still looked like that, who knows, the way I am now, he wouldn’t even want me. But I kept thinking of Paul for such a long time, then I couldn’t even stop it when I wanted. Every time I’d have a minute alone, my mind would sort of drift and I would picture things with him. I always imagined that it had been a mistake, that it wasn’t his bones and ashes we threw away at Gant and that he stayed in a little hospital there—a small stone building run by nuns. I had the whole thing in my head, oh I was so silly, his room with the plain walls, a cot with a navy blue blanket, just a simple wooden cross above the bed. There were dandelions growing in the grass outside his room. That’s what he saw when he looked out the window during that long time he was getting well. And every day, the nurses brought him food and stood there while he ate it. They didn’t talk much. They folded their hands on the front of their habits and they looked out the window, too. Sometimes, in that field, there were cows.
Then, I always imagined, he found me. He wrote me a long letter or he called me on the telephone and I had to get rid of my life and of Jimmy. That was never too hard. In my daydream, that part never took too long. Sometimes I confessed and told everyone. And then the priest had to come and tell my parents and Jimmy that since my first husband turned out to be still alive, Jimmy and I weren’t really married. On other days, I didn’t tell a thing to anyone. I
just got in my car before supper and drove away. What I spent the most time sitting and dreaming about was when we’d meet together again. He had thick lips and the top one sort of pulled up over his teeth. If I knew how to be a sculptor, I could still make his face. He had a smooth forehead, no lines, high cheekbones like a woman’s, and that straight, plain, even nose. It was with him I understood that just the plain, the regular, was beautiful. It didn’t have to be something special. It was just the ordinary, not having anything wrong. I suppose he had what people might call a weak chin. His face came to a point and the chin was small and hard, like the tip of an eggshell.
Oh, I’d close my eyes and think of us pressing together, kissing against the wall in a room. I always pictured behind us, one single bed, made up, the cover smooth. I tried to imagine the first instant, that urgency, and then after that—that ohgh—I couldn’t do it anymore, I couldn’t picture. I’d have to open my eyes and be wherever I really was. In the house or the yard, Mom’s house or the water softener store. And then the air and the light in the room where I was seemed thicker and staler than before. I remembered each time then he was dead. That went on for a long time, for years. It didn’t really stop until Benny was born. And then, I don’t know why, it went away. I guess it was hard to want to imagine giving up my babies. And they were Jimmy’s after all. And by then, too, it was just such a long, long time.
I don’t want to make it all sound bad. I had good times when I came home, too. After V-J Day, the young people flooded back to Bay City. There were lots of parties that winter, lot of dances. It was a happy time. Overall, I think the war was a good thing for a lot of people’s social lives. Of course, there were some wounded, but you didn’t see them much. And then there were those like Phil Brozek, who went over to Bikini Island. When he came back, he picked up his milk route again that he’d had before the war. The swelling in his legs, the cancer, all that from the radiation, that didn’t show until much later.
I met Jimmy on the golf course. He had been in the service, too, in New Guinea and then in Australia. He jokes that he should have met me before the war, when I was still a virgin. He knows that much, that it happened with both of us in the war. He grew up in Bay City, too, and we graduated high school the same year, but I never met him. He went to Central High and I went to Catholic, the Academy. We only met the boys from Premontre. He says he wants to go back to Australia sometime and see how many kids look like him; he says there weren’t any women in New Guinea, just those natives, but there in Australia, apparently, they had their fun.
I don’t know, do you think I should have married him? I don’t know either, I often wonder. Then, at the time, I suppose I thought, why not. I needed something new. Here I was back living at home again, sharing a room with my little sister. And she got into everything—oh, God, was she a snoop. She’d open your mail, go through your drawers, anything. One day she told me she stopped reading my diary because it was too boring to keep her interest up. Oh, she could be a little brat.
And my mother wasn’t the same with me, either. I never told her I was married, but she knew something was different, she could tell. That last year, I didn’t write as much. At the beginning, I’d sent presents from everywhere, but towards the end, I just wasn’t thinking about home anymore. I remember on the train, I was an hour away, and I realized I was coming home with no presents for anybody. I got out at one town, I had only a few minutes, and I bought the first thing I saw that would do—a box of cookie cutters. They were nice cookie cutters, all unusual shapes and good stainless steel, but she must have seen that they were just from around here. But at least I had something to give them when I came off at the station.
I remember that night, the lanterns lit, it all looked real pretty and the town had changed so. I felt happy and sleepy all of a sudden. They took me out to Dean’s for a sundae and they had the hot fudge, like it always was, in the little silver pitcher. The sky outside over the river turned violet, the lanterns and the piles of sulfur were that real pretty yellow. And you know, I was almost relieved to be alone. I was so tired I felt like a girl again.
But that didn’t last. Pretty soon I couldn’t stand it anymore. After all the excitement of the war, the travel, the uniforms—you know, sometimes it was like one long parade, you were always sort of tired and excited and you were usually around so many people—Bay City just didn’t seem like much anymore. That first night when I was exhausted, it felt perfect, just the way you’d want a town to be. But then when I got some sleep it seemed too small. And here I was plunked back in the same house on the same road. I was shampooing and styling again at the Harper Method Beauty Shop.
And one thing I can say for Jimmy, he knew how to take a girl out on a date. He always took me to a nice supper and then after we’d do something; we’d go to a club and hear music or we’d go dancing. And every couple of dates I’d get a corsage. I have them all here, pressed in the dictionary. And he always had a big crowd of friends and they gave parties. Twenty, thirty people over for fish fry or chicken bouya. And my parents never did that. We didn’t have as many friends.
So we went ahead and got married. We had the service at Saint Phillip’s. Jimmy was a Catholic, too, so that was never a problem. I think my mother and dad liked Jimmy, if they didn’t, they never said anything. And I was already twenty-eight. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t get any better.
And wouldn’t you know my little sister managed to ruin my wedding. She was a bridesmaid, with two others, my two best girl friends from the Harper Method. I wore Granny’s wedding dress. See, my mother never had one. It was a beautiful dress, that old-fashioned pearl-white satin with a long train. Adele walked behind me holding it up. I remember she had a white dress, too. I’d wanted the bridesmaids in pink or mint green, but no, Adele said it was either black or white. And so the others had to be white, too, they all had to match. She herself got married in a suit, I remember.
It was a small wedding, a hundred, hundred fifty people. We had the reception at my parents’ house, in the backyard. We had tables spread out with white tablecloths and white and green balloons tied up in the oak tree. My dad’s men from the mink had rented tuxedos and they stood behind the tables pouring champagne. There was champagne everywhere and trays of food. My mother had been baking for days.
She’d made the cake herself. It was a lemon cake inside, real moist and tart, with a beautiful, fluffy white frosting. Adele had decorated it that morning—and I have to hand it to her, it was beautiful, she covered the whole thing with sugared flowers, real flowers, violets and pansies from the yard, and with cookies in shapes from those cookie cutters I brought home. She was always good at such stuff. But then, she didn’t want us to cut it. She made them take about a hundred pictures, before she’d let us touch it. We have more pictures of that cake than of the rest of the wedding put together.
I do have a picture of the women, when I threw the bouquet. I still had my big nose in the pictures, so we don’t put them out anywhere in the house, but we still take the book down and look at them once in a while. Jimmy says he liked my nose big, he says he didn’t mind it.
All Granny’s sisters were there from Malgoma and Granny, and all the neighbor women. My mother was wearing a peach-colored dress with a corsage. My dad had bought us each special corsages, he had them in the refrigerator when we woke up that morning.
Well, we didn’t have a balcony or anything, so I threw the bouquet from the porch. It was just those couple of steps. In the picture, the ladies are all standing on the grass in a line; the married women closest to me, with their hands at their sides, they’re not trying to catch it. My mother is the most beautiful one in the picture and you can barely see her, she’s standing behind two of the aunts. She really had a perfect profile, like that on a coin, so even, and her hair grew thick and nice. Even then when it was turning gray, it turned that beautiful silver white. And I think she was happy for me. All that day, I’d looked at her from somewhere, when I was going down the ai
sle at church, later, on the lawn during the party, and her face was so nice, she was glad for me. She’d worked so hard on all the food and the house. And her cake turned out so good.
In the picture, she’s got her hands behind her back and this big gorgeous smile. You hardly ever saw her smiling big like that. She was shy. She wasn’t a smiler. You know, of my mother and my sister and me, I was the only one with a regular wedding and it made her happy, I suppose. In the picture, the bouquet is blurred in the air. It looks like I’m throwing it to my mother.
Two of my bridesmaids are in the front, crouched and ready like football players. Their knees bent, their arms out, their eyes are on the bouquet. They were both single girls and my age, they were ready, I suppose. Would you believe I don’t know who they are anymore? My two bridesmaids, and I can’t remember their names. And Adele is standing there, coy, her hands intertwined together. She is looking down at her shoe in the grass.
And she was the one who caught the bouquet. Seventeen years old and she caught the bouquet, sure enough, and without hardly trying. My dad was mad, he thought she was too young to even be in the line for it and he wanted me to throw it again. But she said, nothing doing. She wouldn’t give it back.
Then she pulled her real stunt: she locked herself in the bathroom and took a shower! Well, all those people drinking all afternoon and only the one bathroom in the house. Pretty soon they were lined up into the kitchen. Adele was in there humming in the shower. Oh, ye gods. She washed her hair and set it, and so she was in there a long time, hour, hour and a half maybe. And was I mad.
Some of the men walked up the dirt road and went in the field by the barn. But a lot of people just drove home. The party started breaking up. The neighbors ran down the road to their own bathrooms. My father stamped in and rattled on the doorknob—we were afraid he’d break the door down. That was their worst fight I ever saw. When he couldn’t get the door open, he went around to the other side of the house and yelled at her through the window. The next day, we went out and my mother showed me: he trampled her whole bed of lilies of the valley.
