The Story of a Marriage

by Andrew Sean Greer

  Holland chose—as men often have the luxury of choosing—to do nothing. His registration deadline came and went and the brown paper, stabbed with a rusted thumbtack above his bed, grew blond in the sun. His mother, knowing what it meant to let time pass, came into Holland’s room one morning and, after pulling down the shade, ripped the registration form off the thumbtack. As she walked back out of the dimmed room, Holland sat up and asked what she was doing. “I’m throwing it away,” she said.

  “But I was going to send it in,” he told her.

  She stood in the hallway, wiping her hands on her flowered Hoover apron. She was a farmer’s widow, used to saving what the world tried to take away. “You can’t send it in,” she said.

  “I’m going to.”

  “I already told the neighbors you left this Monday. Keep that shade down, and stay upstairs, you hear me? I’ve made up my mind, it’s done.” Without another word she went downstairs and he was left in his bedroom, darkened except for a shaft of light coming through a hole in the shade, dustily illuminating a pack of cards. Holland stared at the shade for a moment. And then he closed the door.

  How did you survive it? Your world was as cramped as a sailor’s: just a sunless bedroom, a chamber pot, and the three feet of hallway that could not be seen from the road. You were forbidden to go outside at all, to stand at the window, or sing, or bounce a ball against the wall—forbidden, in other words, to be a boy. You were a monk, with your silence and the books I brought you, sequestered from the dangers of the outside world. How did you not break into pieces, knowing that if a neighbor caught sight of you, by nightfall the whole town would be there with yellow paint to pour over you and pots to bang in a fury at a slacker like you, a Negro coward? I know you studied every battle of that war, every ship of colored soldiers headed out across the Pacific and blown to smithereens. You kept track of figures and death tolls as any other boy would follow baseball statistics, and I know it was to touch the real world now and then, to have it hurt you, to feel alive. You lived behind the looking glass, in the hollow of a tree, in the deathless world women had made for you.

  I visited that prison, wallpapered with newsprint. I arrived a few times a week with sheet music in my hand. His mother would sit downstairs alone, playing the bad piano I was meant to be learning—“Rock of Ages” over and over—while I went up and visited her son. I always brought books hidden in my sheet music; I must have checked out everything in the library. And we would read together, in silence or in whispers, until it was time for me to step back into the strange, bright sunlight of a day you never saw.

  I memorized each corner of your room. Of course I did; I was a girl in love. The lariat that hung beside the window like a snake; your metal bed, painted a sanitary white, sagging like a prison cot; the shadowless statue of a horseback Indian; your copper-rivet jacket that I borrowed on cool afternoons. And I memorized your face in that dim light, your smile glowing when I entered. Your muted silhouette as you stood against the pulled shade: broad-shouldered with skinny legs and hair grown out. How you mouthed hello and motioned for me to sit beside you. I committed your room to memory. I told myself it was so that, on thundercloud days, I could navigate the stuffy darkness as in a game of blindman’s bluff. Really it was so that later, in my own bed, I could close my eyes and imagine myself beside you in the hushed foxhole that was your world. I loved you like a field on fire.

  Did you love me? It was hard not to wonder, lying awake those nights after Buzz Drumer’s visit, thinking of those months in your dark room. Love of some kind, I suppose: love of a lion for the tamer, a coin for the pocket. But not what I had hoped. Not, I was terrified to realize, the love you had for that white man.

  There was a romance to it, at least. A childish romance warming into an adolescent one, as we sat together day after day; fumblings with books become fumblings with hands. It was the dream of my youth to be locked in a room with you, with handsome Holland Cook, but once it had come true, I did not know what to do. Young people are inept at love; it is like being given a flying machine, and you leap inside, ready to set off as you’ve always dreamed, yet you don’t have the first notion of how to make it start, much less how to move it. That was true of us, in that humid room. Staring at each other as the sunset lit the window shade like a cinema screen, the one rip burning flaming red. It set the tone for our lives together, those days in a warm sealed room, reading books in a whisper, terrified of discovery. Is that what made you marry me, I wondered? Children hiding from our country, that angry father.

  We did our war duty, his mother and I. Somehow, on one set of ration stamps, she managed to run the farm without suspicion: she punched up oleo in a bag to make it look like butter, and gathered milkweed pods with the colored ladies’ auxiliary (for soldiers’ down vests), and I ordered a poster to hang in our window, of a blue house with great red letters: THIS IS A V HOME—WE SALVAGE, CONSERVE, AND REFUSE TO SPREAD RUMORS! We did not merely act the part of citizens in war, all the better to hide our beloved boy. We were good people; we never doubted the need for “mock” apple pie so the boys could have real apples. It was a righteous war. But it was not our war.

  Holland, you nodded when we told you colored men were used as cannon fodder; if they were not dispatched on fatal missions, they were sent to mess halls to be blown to bits with the white boys they served. No one should blame you. They might as well blame everyone else who hid, like the men who took up cod fishing because it meant a deferral, or the women who counterfeited rations for a wedding cake; we are all willing to cheat to some extent, and you didn’t do it just for butter. Later, you did your part.

  If he hadn’t taken ill, he might have lasted out the war. I sat by his dark bedside, holding his volcano-hot hand, whispering to him to hold on, hold on—his mother half demented from grief, constantly asking me: “What do we do, Pearlie, what do we do?”—until, just before dawn, I announced we had to fetch the doctor. The decision was all mine. It was not the doctor, though, who told. He was a kind, old-fashioned, whiskey-smelling white man who stopped toothaches with melted rubber and sewed catgut stitches with the precision of his seamstress mother. It was the neighbors who heard him driving to the house that morning and saw a healthy old widow standing on the porch, motioning to help someone inside. Within twenty-four hours the police were there with a draft officer and Holland was pulled, still sweating from sickness, into a waiting Ford while I screamed from the living-room window as if the nerves had been ripped out of me. In my mind, I had killed him.

  “Did your mother make you do it, boy?” the draft officer asked. Holland sat in a perfectly square little room with one long window; on its frosted glass, the shadow of a holly tree waved back and forth.

  Oh no, Holland told the man without looking at him. Then he pointed out it wasn’t something he did; it was just something he neglected to do. His mother had never said a word.

  “Was it philosophical beliefs?”

  He didn’t know, and wondered why he had to put anything.

  The man looked up at Holland and a terrible green reptile fury flashed over his features. “Boy, I can’t put down that you’re just a goddamn Negro coward. I can’t have that in my district. It don’t mean you’re not going to war.” Then, after making a few notes on his pad, he added, “I wouldn’t come back here, boy.”

  He was drafted after all, and put on an army bus; his mother could barely look at him to say goodbye; she was so cocooned in grief and shame and the waste of it all. She gave him a kiss and I gave him an old charm that he later lost in the ocean: a tarnished silver feather. I did not know what else to give a boy headed to purgatory. He hung it around his neck and tried to smile as the military bus began to rumble, pulling away from me and our hometown. He never saw Kentucky again or his mother, who died from a bad heart the following spring. He would never have seen me again if blind chance had not led me right by him on the beach. He never wrote in all those years.

  And then I was alone. Not only becau
se I had lost Holland, which seemed like an unclimbable mountain of grief, but because of how things are in a small town. I was as smeared with yellow paint as Mrs. Cook, as much as Holland himself. My own family was ashamed of me, and it was this shame that sent me away from them forever.

  It was 1944, and his unit had been at sea only two weeks before they were blown to pieces and Holland found himself naked, his brown skin burning in the oily middle of the Pacific. He floated along on a bamboo chest, a 1-A Ishmael, staring at a sky all green and saffron and cotton wool, treading and waiting. Did it occur to him this was all because a girl back home had tried to save him? A girl who blamed herself for breaking the spell, for deciding to go for the doctor? I wonder what went through his head in those mad hours before they found him. A drowning man, grasping for any hand. Perhaps he never left that sea.

  The sun sank, with the ship, into the raisin-colored water. Glowworm lights of rescue boats arrived, echo-yelling in the darkness, and Holland was discovered babbling about a feather; he was taken to a medical boat, then to the overcrowded hospital where he was mistakenly assigned a white roommate who lay asleep for days until one morning, as Holland smoked out on the balcony, the stranger awakened and Holland said, laughing: “The dead have arisen.” That was it: the moment. When the love story passed from me to the man in the bed, staring at the vision before him. The moment, like the smallest gear of a hidden machine, that set our lives in motion.

  Did you love me? I wondered as I remembered it all over again. I had to go over every image, pick it apart for clues. I had not thought about it, not in years. I had wrapped my story in tissue and put it away. I had never told it to a soul. Not until the day I walked with Buzz along a boardwalk by the sea.

  There weren’t many places where a white man and a colored girl could meet in 1953. I could not leave Sonny too long with the aunts, and Buzz knew only his part of downtown, so on my suggestion we met by the ocean, at an amusement park called Playland-by-the-Sea.

  It covered the ocean edge of Golden Gate Park, like the fringe of a scarf, and if you were foolish enough to stand in the chilly Pacific and look back on the city, you would see it laid out before you against the sky: roller coasters like sentinel dragons flanking the games of chance and restaurants. Hot House Tamales! Salt Water Taffy! Chocolate-Dipped Bananas! They lined up like a cartoon strip, on what would be the finest beach property in America if it wasn’t for the fog, so that only a few braved the seawall: Russians remembering their lost homeland, pairs of secret lovers, and people, like us, who sought its cloud-cover to hide.

  I told him my story, there with the foghorns singing to the west of us and calliopes singing to the east. And when I was done, Buzz removed his soft hat so that his gold hair lay shining and motionless in the wind. How hollow, to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You’re boneless as an anemone. Children ran by, racing for the fun house, half delighted and terrified. I watched his face very carefully, but I did not know him well enough to recognize his moods, a crinkling of his eyes that might be a sign of anger or of doubt. I tried to see what my story meant to him. He had always thought of Holland as a war hero, a beautiful wounded soldier, and I wondered if this story might warp that image: a flame placed too near a wax statue.

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” I said firmly.

  “How did your parents not know?” Buzz asked after a moment of frowning thought. “Going to piano lessons, disappearing all the time with books. They must have guessed.”

  “They didn’t pay too much attention to me.”

  He said that was foolish, I was their daughter.

  “I wasn’t …” I began, pulling my coat close around me. “I wasn’t quite what he wanted.”

  “It must have been awful for you,” he said, but I could not look at him, so I didn’t know which he was talking about, my father or my husband.

  “It was worse for Holland. For everyone to see him like that, dragged out of the house.”

  “I don’t know,” Buzz said. “I think it might have been worse for you. It’s always worse for the one who stays.”

  We wives are such territorial creatures. Not just where our husbands and sons and houses are concerned, but over the painful past. Like the Chinese soldiers bricked into castle walls to make eternal guardians of their ghosts, we are bound to protect that past, though we are helpless to do anything but moan and shake our chains. This man had come to take away my husband, and what I needed to tell him was that he, too, was wrong; there was another Holland Cook he didn’t know. Though Buzz might have returned after years to claim his old lover, he knew him no better than I.

  “Why did you tell me that story?” he asked.

  “I thought you should hear it.”

  “It does make sense of things,” he said. He was facing me as we walked, head bent down close to mine.

  “I gave up my youth in that town to take care of him,” I said hotly.

  “What I—”

  “I gave up any kind of love they had for me, I had to leave. And I lost him.”

  Buzz said he understood. He looked around; perhaps I was too loud.

  “No, you don’t,” I said in a struggling voice. Buzz put his hand on my arm and the fabric was so thin that I could feel the unsteadiness of his pulse. “I don’t think you possibly could. No matter how well you think you know him.”

  “I don’t claim to know him.”

  “But you said—”

  “When I met Holland in the hospital,” he said, keeping his hand on my arm, “the Section Eight hospital, the one he never told you about, I’d never seen anyone so beautiful. Or so in pain. He was shell-shocked.” That was when he released me and I moved away. “He’d recovered a little by the time I got there, but he was like… a plaster cast of a young man, just the outside and nothing within. He was very fragile and quiet and I took care of him. I was hardly able to take care of myself, but he was worse off, I think. It wasn’t knowing him that made me fall in love with him.”

  “He never mentioned me, I guess.”

  Buzz shook his head. “He talked about Kentucky like it was a million years ago. But I knew who you were.”

  “But not what I’d given up.”

  “I didn’t know about the war. You’re right, I can’t possibly understand what it’s like now, I mean. To give up everything again.”

  We passed an automated tableau of the Last Supper, a crowd of alien-eyed apostles with wind-torn beards moving mechanically, our Savior sitting among them and spreading His arms in benediction. He moved slowly, gracefully, as if swimming through the fog.

  “But you’re not doing it for Holland, or for me.”

  He took off his hat, rotating it in his hands like a driver making a long slow turn. “I wouldn’t have come to you for that, I wouldn’t have ever dared. I tried to let it go and forget, that’s what they tell you to do, isn’t it? Travel and forget, meet new people and forget. Do you think I sat there all those years and thought: I want to ruin a marriage? If he was happy, if I thought you were happy—”

  “Before you came, I thought that I was happy.”

  He stopped on the boardwalk and looked at me. “That’s not the same,” he said, “as being happy, Pearlie.”

  We did not move, and so the crowd had to flow around us, some complaining rudely. A peanut vendor bullied his way through the mass of people.

  “You called me,” Buzz was saying. “You know what you’re doing. And it’s not for any of us, probably not even for yourself. That’s not what you’re like.”

  As the vendor passed us, I saw, reflected in the dented metal of his cart, the two of us standing there together on the boardwalk. I was surprised at how we looked together.

  He said: “It’s for Sonny. And that I do understand.”

  “You don’t have children,” I said, turning away from the image to face the real Buzz.

  Buzz grimaced. “No, I don’t.”

  “Then I’m not sure you ever could under
stand.”

  “It’s why I came to you,” he told me, squinting his eyes against the sudden appearance of the sun. “I felt I could trust you. I’ve been watching you.”

  When he came to our doorstep with two birthday presents, pretending he was lost, he had been watching me carefully for weeks. Sitting on a bench, or at a bus stop, his collar pulled up, observing little Pearlie Cook, that minor character, as she went about her day. Apparently this is what love will do.

  He’d seen me in the mudroom beside the laundry basket—high and wheeled like a perambulator, all steel and Sanforized cotton—dropping clothespins into the sewn-in pocket: a wifely poltergeist, invisibly doing the laundry, the dusting, the dishes. He’d seen me sitting in my own hallway on the chartreuse gossip bench, telephone-talking, and he must have known from the way I played with the nailheads of the upholstery, and pulled at a rip in the leathery vinyl, and cast my eyes up at the ceiling as if the stars were there, that it was Holland I talked to, and what Buzz supposed he recognized, in this static slide show of my life, was someone who would listen.

  “And what did you see?” I asked.

  “Someone trapped under a heavy stone,” he told me. “Someone who would help me.”

  My story proved it: a girl breaking the law to save a boy from war. An accomplice to a crime, not like other women. Fleeing to the ocean to scrub the yellow paint from her skin, the condemnation of her people, her parents, her country. A criminal who might be called from her retirement, one last time, and not for any fortune he might offer. That would not move her. He would offer a new life, but also the chance, as in her youth, to save someone. She would save her son.