Steps to the Altar

by Earlene Fowler

  Perhaps someone who works for Garvey on the ranch. I’ll speak to him about it tonight. And I’ll try to send money to Mama again though I know Daddy will make her send it back if he finds out. I miss Mama so much these days.

  October 3, 1942

  California is not at all what I imagined, though I must confess I didn’t have any idea what to expect. The people aren’t as welcoming as I had hoped. Though Garvey has many friends, not many of them have taken to me though I have done my best to be pleasant and interested in their lives. There is a large group of his old school chums who have made it clear that I am not of their class. I am lonely sometimes. Garvey is still very busy with all the building projects because of the war and with the cattle ranch in the north county. He was sweet enough to find me a job at the Tribune. Though many of the people there are only nice to me because I am the wife of one of the paper’s owners, they are starting to warm up to me. I brought in a batch of my molasses cookies and one of the women who writes for the society column actually asked me for the recipe! I want so badly to make a good life for Garvey, be the best wife he could imagine having, not have him regret one moment that he plucked me out of a train station cafe. I love him so much! But sometimes, I can’t help wondering why he chose me. He goes away without me for weeks at a time to the ranch even though I have begged to go along. He says it is no place for a lady. I even talked Mitch Warner into giving me horseback riding lessons in secret so I can surprise Garvey with my ability to ride. Maybe then I can share that part of his life.

  December 25, 1942

  I am sad and utterly without hope. Our first Christmas together and Garvey disappeared three days ago without telling me anything more than he was going up to the ranch. I begged and begged to go along with him but Garvey insists on going alone. Is this normal for a man to spend half his time away from his wife? I had no one to ask about it since I have no friends here. When I casually brought it up to the woman who asked me for my cookie recipe, Lois Hartman, she said it sounded like he might have a little on the side, if I wanted her honest opinion. I was so shocked by her words that I left and went straight home. I refused to believe that about Garvey who is as devout a Catholic as I’ve ever seen. A man who attends Mass faithfully twice a week when he is here in town would not do the thing that Lois suggested. Oh, am I being naive? What do I know about men? What do I know about their needs? Am I a good enough wife for him? If I was, why does he need to leave me so often? What am I to do?

  I read through all thirty entries. She told about writing her columns, the few times women would ask her to lunch, dates she prepared for and worried over as if they were her wedding day. None of them ever asked her again, apparently their duty fulfilled. Garvey was such a powerful man that I’d guessed that the wives of San Celina local society had been requested by their husbands to include Maple Sullivan. But you can’t force friendship on people. Or love, for that matter. Her loneliness and the isolation she must have felt brought tears to my eyes. The only thing that kept her going was her job at the paper and her growing friendship with Mitch Warner.

  July 12, 1944

  Garvey gone again. He says he is going to San Francisco on business but I fear it is more than that. I have no proof, of course, but I fear I have lost him long ago to a faceless woman there. When he comes back from the city, he never comes to our home but goes to the ranch. Mitch tells me not to worry, that Garvey loves me, wants to protect me, but as kind as Mitch is trying to be covering up for his friend, I have long realized the truth, that it was a mistake for us to marry. But he is Catholic and now I am too so I know he will honor our marriage, at least on paper. Mitch has been a good friend. He makes me laugh, a rare occurrence these days. We went for a ride last Sunday afternoon and I saw a bald eagle! His majestic wing span left me openmouthed with wonder which Mitch has not let me forget. He’s such a tease but it’s nice to have someone to pal around with. I spend a lot of time at the Red Cross these days as they are in continuous need of volunteers and I’ve a new project, writing down the stories of local women and how the war has affected their lives. Maybe that will be my life’s work, a recorder of women’s history. It has amazed me the willing sacrifice that the average woman has given to support the war. It needs to be remembered. My work and my faith are all I have left.

  January 10, 1945

  Mitch and I rode again today. He says I am becoming quite the cowgirl. It is so easy to talk to him. How I wish that Garvey and I had the friendship Mitch and I enjoy. But that is not to be. I do love my husband. For all his silences and his deceptions, there are times when he becomes the man I met in that train station cafe back home, a gentle, listening man whom I trusted enough to leave my family and like a pioneer lady, come West. I laugh at myself for comparing my situation to the real dangers those women faced, their true bravery. I took a train across the country to become the wife of a rich man while they fought disease and snakes and bears and starvation to come West to their men. How I wish I could have talked to some of them. When I look at some of their quilts displayed down at the Carnegie Library I am amazed that they could find enough joy in their bleak lives to create such perfection. What have I done in the three years I’ve lived in San Celina, wrote a few stories, typed some letters at the Red Cross, served doughnuts at the USO. I do have my ladies histories, though. Of all I own, next to the letters Garvey wrote me which I still read to recapture the feelings I know he had for me, those histories are my treasure. Must finish now, I hear Mitch downstairs kidding with Garvey. Sometimes he is the only person who can make him smile. I should hate Mitch for that, but instead, I am grateful. Their friendship is a life saver for both of us. He is a treasure, without a doubt, one richer than rubies.

  That was the last entry. A month later to the day, Garvey was dead and Maple and Mitch had disappeared.

  I lay there in the glow of the lamplight, tears streaming down my face. What had happened among the three of them? I didn’t want to believe that Mitch and Maple did what everyone assumed. I wanted to believe that their friendship was just that and that eventually everything worked out between Garvey and Maple. But of course, it didn’t. Garvey was killed, Maple and Mitch disappeared, the war ended, and the Sullivan dynasty was another small footnote in history. Still, deep in my heart, I felt the real story had never been known. And maybe never would be. And really, what did it matter? Everyone in this sad tale had probably been dead for years, their secrets along with them.

  Next to me, Scout stood up and started whining. My stomach twisted slightly in apprehension. I was normally not an easily frightened person but this house was still unfamiliar to me and empty enough to cause a small echo when I said to Scout, “What is it, boy?”

  He stood up and trotted over to the window that overlooked the street. In the hollow quiet of the house, I could hear the mantel clock downstairs chime three times. I’d been reading for two hours straight. I crawled out from my sleeping bag and followed Scout to the window. He put his front paws up on the window seat, the window seat that was the one single thing that had sold me completely on this house. I had imagined sitting in it and watching my husband stroll up the walk from work.

  The street was empty. A half moon seeped through the treetops, making black lacy squares on the sidewalks.

  Scout whined again and pressed his nose against the cold glass.

  “No one’s out there, boy,” I said, scratching behind his left ear. “Everyone’s asleep except for us.”

  I sat down in the window seat for a moment, looking out on the desolate-looking street, wishing I were back at the other house, curled up next to my husband, hearing his sleepy murmurings and surrounded by his nighttime scent. I closed the shade, turned off the Tiffany lamp, and crawled back into my sleeping bag, feeling at that moment more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.

  Then the doorbell rang.

  18

  GABE

  HE STOOD IN the shadows across the street from the house and watched Benni’s ghostly face
in the window, wanting to go to her as badly as he lusted for Del. He’d been walking for the last hour, since leaving his senior officers to take care of the last of the Mardi Gras revelers as they straggled out of the Lopez Street bars. It was almost 3 A.M. and he was tired, but he couldn’t face going back to the Spanish bungalow across town, where he would lie in their empty bed under quilts made by her aunt and gramma feeling like his life had ended.

  So, mano loco, go to her, a voice inside him said. A voice that sounded suspiciously like Father Mark’s. But he couldn’t. If he went to his wife, they would have to talk and he wasn’t sure yet what to say. He was still confused about his feelings for Del. They’d eaten dinner together again tonight and she had come right out and asked him back to her hotel room.

  “What’s the big deal, Gabe?” she said, laying her hand over his. The warmth caused his stomach to tighten in anticipation. “For old times’ sake. I’m not looking for a diamond ring and a picket fence. Just someone to hold me for tonight. What could it hurt?”

  He pulled his hand from under hers and reached for his wineglass. He hesitated, then chose the water glass instead. “Not tonight.”

  She laughed, a throaty sound that seared right through him. “You always did like to play hard to get. That’s part of the reason women want you so bad.”

  He looked over his glass at her, hating that she laughed at him, but still wanting her so badly he could imagine the feel of her slippery lipstick on his throat. “I have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll sit by the phone in anticipation,” she said, her chocolate eyes shiny with amusement. She reached over and tapped a long-nailed finger on the back of his hand. “But hear this, Gilberto, I won’t wait for very long.”

  He focused again on the house’s second floor. Sometime in his musing, Benni had moved away from the window. What had caused her to gaze out to the dark street at three in the morning? Did she sense his presence out here? Like him, was she unable to sleep?

  Go to her, the voice said and he recognized it this time as his father’s. How ashamed his father would be of him. Like that was something new. He had spent his life doing things that would have shamed his father. He knew if Rogelio Ortiz were standing here next to him, he would have called him foolish, would have scolded him in his strong Spanish-accented English.

  “Mijo,” his father would have said, shaking an oilstained finger at Gabe, a gesture that even remembering it to this day made him feel as sullen and stubborn as an adolescent. “You can never serve too many meals a friend. Or tell a woman too much you love her. Women need tu corazon.” He would tap the blackened finger to his chest, marking his gray workshirt with a smeared finger. “Your heart,” he’d repeat in English, so Gabe could not fake misunderstanding. “No matter what your mistakes, they will hold you in their arms when you are dying if you give to them your heart.”

  His heart. An organ that had never failed to bring him trouble. It beat fast and hard in his cold chest, feeling twice, three times its size.

  “Go to her, mijo,” his father’s voice insisted and he knew he had no choice but to obey the command, even if he had no idea how she would receive him.

  He rang the unfamiliar doorbell once, then waited. After a minute or so, she opened the door.

  They stared at each other for a long, silent moment.

  “What do you want?” she finally asked. Her red-blond hair was wild and tangled in that way that drove her nuts, but always caused a ribbon of desire to course through his body. It reminded him of the first time he’d seen her standing outside the folk art museum throwing pebbles at a San Celina patrol car, her hair full and damp and wind-whipped, her face pale with fear and fatigue. He had wanted to take her in his arms that night, hold her to his chest, sink his face into all that hair, take her home to his bed.

  He’d never told her that, how he’d fallen in love with her the first moment they met.

  “What do you want?” she asked, the words coming out with a small stutter. Next to her, Scout whined, his tail moving slowly in a tentative wag.

  “To talk.”

  “I think you’ve said enough. More than enough.”

  Anger bubbled in his chest. “Is that all you think of our marriage? You won’t even let me try to explain?”

  Without a word, she turned and walked away, leaving the door open. He came inside and watched her go up the stairs. He shut the door quietly behind him, wishing he had some kind of script about what to say and do next.

  The living room was filled with boxes. The only touch of hominess was the mantel clock, which chimed the half hour. Three-thirty. In another three hours he will have been up twenty-four hours and his body was beginning to feel it. The back of his eyes sizzled with fatigue.

  He found Benni upstairs in their future bedroom. She sat under the multicolor glow of the Tiffany lamp, her chin resting on her drawn-up knees. He shut the door of the room, leaving a whining Scout on the other side.

  “Querida,” he said. “Hear me out.”

  She didn’t look up. “I told you not to call me that.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  She turned her face up to look at him. “Ridiculous? Just because someone doesn’t see things exactly how you do, Gabe, doesn’t mean they’re stupid.”

  “I didn’t say you were stupid.”

  She jumped up, pointed a finger at him. “It’s your attitude. If someone doesn’t agree with you, you give them that look.”

  He felt heat on the back of his neck. “What look?”

  “That superior look. That look that says you know best, that your way is the only way. You discount other people’s opinions and feelings. You make them . . . you make me . . . feel like I don’t matter.”

  He started to say again that was ridiculous, then caught himself. “Why are you turning this into something so complicated?”

  She stared at him in amazement. “How can you not see how complicated it is?”

  He knew she was right, but he didn’t know how to explain to her how he longed for the safety and reality of their love and yet was still undeniably drawn to the danger and excitement of Del and everything she represented.

  He crossed the room until he was inches away from her. He took her face in his hands, his thumbs caressing the softness of her cheeks, and looked deep into her tearfilled eyes.

  “Querida,” he whispered, deliberately ignoring her request to stop using the endearment. He kissed her softly, then with more insistence, forcing her mouth open to accept his tongue. If they could just make love, he knew this would all blow over. He could put Del and those memories behind him.

  She moaned deep in her throat in protest, but he knew her desires, knew how to seduce this woman. He’d spent two years learning her vulnerable spots, finding the way around her heart. He moved his hands down her neck, down the front of her, along her hips, tracing the shape of her body, this body he knew almost better than his own.

  “Mi corazon esta llen dear amor por ti. Mi amor, mi amor . . . Desde el dia que to conoci supe que eras alguien especial . . . Te amo, carina, te amo . . .”

  She pulled away with a jerk, her hazel eyes glossy with desire. He was slightly ashamed of the triumph he felt.

  “No words,” she said, her voice cool, emotionless. “I don’t really want to hear your voice.”

  He froze for a moment, her statement an unexpected splash of cold water. With those words, she’d somehow managed to snatch back the control he’d had . . . or thought he had. This woman never failed to surprise him. Desire exploded in his gut and he lowered his head, taking her lips with a desperation that surprised him.

  They made love in silence, though he fought the urge to cry out in Spanish, the language in which he’d always made love. A small part of him felt rejected, but he admired her show of pride. It was something he might have done.

  Afterward, while she lay on her back with her eyes closed, he studied her naked body. She still wore the platinum horseshoe necklace h
e’d given her for their first anniversary. Surely she would not still be wearing it if she intended for their marriage to be over.

  She was so physically different from Del, from most of the women he’d taken as lovers. He’d always been attracted to tall women with long legs, full breasts. Benni was compact and wiry with short, strong legs, muscled arms. She was as agile as a gymnast, with an energy and openness that delighted him from the first time they made love. But it was the softness of her skin that never failed to crack his heart and the rich, deep, sweet-apple scent of her hair. Hair that now lay in a fan around her head. Everything would be okay now. She’d made love with him. They were back. The foolish words he’d spoken this afternoon erased.

  “Benni,” he murmured.

  Her eyes opened and she turned her head slightly to look at him.

  “Will you come back with me tonight?” He laughed softly. “I mean this morning. All my clothes are at the other house.”

  Without answering, she stood up and started gathering her clothes. He watched her pull on her underwear, sweatshirt, sweatpants. When she was dressed, she faced him, looking down at him with an unreadable expression.

  “This doesn’t change what you said in the library garden.”

  He jumped up, his chest tight with anger. “What do you mean?”

  “Are you in love with Del Hernandez?” she asked, her face still expressionless.

  He hesitated, still not certain about his feelings toward his ex-partner. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore.”