The Story of a Marriage

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Well what is it, Bea? We’re in suspense,” Holland said, smiling.

  Beatrice cleared her throat and, without looking at her sister, proclaimed there was going to be a wedding.

  “What?” Holland said, laughing into his napkin. “You’re joking.”

  “It’s no joke,” said the elder very sternly. “Alice is getting married.”

  “Well who’s she marrying?”

  They named someone I had never heard of, and Holland slapped his hand on the table in disbelief. Sonny, making no sense of all this, tried to go for another piece of cake before I stopped him, and he glared at me in hatred.

  The elder aunt proclaimed that her sister was in love and that was that.

  Buzz caught my eye, very amused by it all.

  “But you can’t get married! At your age … ”

  “Holland! You’re acting like a child. It’s a beautiful occasion and I want you to kiss Alice and congratulate her.”

  He stood up and kissed his aunt, who was not really his aunt, but all he had left of his family. It must have shaken him to see the presumably petrified aunts capable of change. Even the Rock of Gibraltar might topple. “I’m so happy for you,” he told her, and she fairly glittered with pleasure. He smiled and patted her shoulder warmly, and the other aunt nodded in approval. I heard Sonny’s voice, and Holland smiled and headed into the parlor, where he had promised to play moody room with Sonny and Buzz. The women were left alone.

  “I’m happy for you, too, Alice,” I said.

  Alice smiled and nodded her head; she hadn’t said a single word about the marriage since the announcement.

  “We’re all very happy for her,” her sister said, in plain contradiction of her manner. “Here’s your present, Pearlie, a bit early I know.” It was a simple silver box, containing an expensive cosmetic. It was one of those lipsticks with a little oval “lip mirror” attached to the case; they were popular at the time.

  “This must change things for you,” I said as I brought out the lipstick, venturing again onto the topic of marriage. “You’re so used to living together. Does your fiancé have a house, Alice?”

  She nodded very faintly and quickly, the orchid bouncing on her breast.

  “He has a house in Santa Rosa.”

  “But that’s so far!” I said without a thought.

  Both of their faces blanched immediately. “It’s not that far,” Beatrice said at last. “It’s thirty minutes over the bridge.”

  I noticed, in the little lip mirror, a reflection of the men in the other room. Holland and Buzz seated on the rug beside each other, faces to the light. Sonny must have been posing in a corner, and their watchful eyes narrowed in concentration. I could not see what my son was doing; I could only see the men, and I watched as both their faces burst into delight. One man’s hand went to the other’s shoulder, for balance, and remained there.

  “It’s thirty minutes over the bridge,” the eldest sister repeated. I realized this was going to be their line with everyone. “It’s absolutely nothing; sometimes it takes me thirty minutes just to find Alice where we’re living now!” They both giggled and I could see how they had been as girls.

  It took a moment, looking at the two of them, before I understood the very real and terrible story they were trying to tell me. A life together, bound by some treaty signed long ago and now, suddenly, at the last moment, abandoned. Forsaken. All for an old love Alice had given over years before, the one that had left its mark on her, the married man. Long forgotten, surely, by her older sister. Who knows what spinster scene occurred in that old house on Fillmore, the cats silent as jurors on the sofa. I felt so sorry for the one left alone, grinning at me so graciously. So late in life, she had not expected this particular tragedy.

  And the other: eyes darting around the room, orchid wilting on her breast, a Delphic smile.

  From the front room, I heard my husband shouting: “Passion! Passion!”

  “You look beautiful today,” Buzz told me the next time we met at Playland, then looked me up and down. “You’re wearing my present!”

  The corselette had arrived by courier the day before, thunderhead gray, packed in red tissue like a steel-boned heart. “I … I’m getting used to it.”

  “It’s a strange sensation, isn’t it? Freeing, in a way.”

  I asked if he had seen them yet.

  “Not yet. I was looking out at the ocean. But I heard they would be here.”

  I said, “I wonder if they even came at all … ”

  He produced a pair of field binoculars that he unfolded as tenderly as an entomologist spreads a moth’s wings. Through these he began to scan the crowd for Annabel and her beau.

  We walked down the boardwalk, Buzz and I, with the low fog blowing in veils around our shoulders. We watched the San Francisco characters go by: the gray-haired “gracious ladies” in long-sleeved prim flour-sack colors; the bulb-nosed salesman already three drinks into the day and smiling at everyone; the gangs of Irish boys bitterly walking around, hands in pockets; the girls in Dale Evans outfits; the sprinkling of Filipinos recently arrived and Americanizing themselves (every one of them, from grandfather to grandchild) by wearing the national headgear: Mickey Mouse ears. A Negro couple caught my eye in a moment of wary alliance.

  “Air-raid drill! Prepare basement plan!” A newspaper boy, shouting the headlines to us: “Air-raid drill coming!”

  “Do you think he’d marry her, if it came down to it?” Buzz asked.

  “I wonder if she would marry him.”

  “Oh she’s the marrying kind.”

  “You really think she matters? Removing her will make a difference?”

  “I’ve thought about it a long time,” he said, peering through the binoculars again.

  “It isn’t just for spite, Buzz?”

  He kept scanning the crowd, adjusting the dial at the bridge. At last he said, “No. I hope I never become someone like that.” His eyes snapped sideways. “There they are.”

  And there they were: at the very front of the roller coaster. It had just finished boarding and the announcer was telling them to

  prepare for the thrill of their lives. Young William was all grins, a quiet contentment becalming his snub-nosed face below his active eyebrows; he was dressed in a leather flight jacket, a tie, and a newsboy cap, which in a clever afterthought he snatched off his head and sat upon, goofily grimacing. Annabel was gay as ever in a nautical skirt and pearls. I noticed a pair of glasses tucked inside her breast pocket.

  “Yep,” Buzz said. “The marrying kind.”

  With a jolt they were off—Annabel nervously clutching William, charms all aglitter—and the car began its clicking ascent to the top. There weren’t seat belts or guardrails or any of the contraptions we have today. All that stood between Annabel and William and their death was a flat metal grid at the front of the car and their feet wedged in tightly below it. And so it was possibly with real terror, and real delight at the act of conquering death, that as their car tipped past its no-turning-back-now point at the top and her hair was flattened by a blind rush of wind, Annabel screamed ecstatically and raised an arm in triumph and I could see her brash appeal, her bright metallic strength. Anyone would melt in the glow of that glorious face. Then the coaster was lost in blind turns and coils among the wickerwork of the ride.

  Buzz said he had learned something about William. “From your neighbor Edith.”

  “You’ve been talking to Edith?” I asked. I was feeling slightly dizzy: the whirligig motion of the ride seemed to mirror the rush of my own blood.

  “On the streetcar. I learned he’s going on a trip next week. And that he’s not been drafted because of a mistake,” he said. “The army somehow got it into its head that his brother was a prisoner of war in Korea, and so when William went before the draft board they labeled him 4-G.”

  “Oh, the Sullivan boys.” They were five brothers who had died together in the war. The country felt the grief so deeply that the go
vernment changed the draft so no mother would have to bear it again. Any boy whose father or brother had died in combat was exempt.

  “He probably didn’t question it. He’s the kind of good young man who follows orders, and they told him to stay home and pray to his brother. That’s what Edith said.”

  I said, “He doesn’t have a brother.”

  “I know.”

  “He only has a nine-year-old sister, I’ve seen her at the park.”

  “Apparently it was a mix-up with names.”

  The unbelievable luck some people have. If Holland had gotten a deferral for such a simple mistake, it would have gone so differently. If a typewriter had jammed improperly in Washington, D.C.—giving him an imaginary brother—none of us might be here except Annabel and her boy. Holland would have stayed home with his mother, unbroken; Buzz would have had some other roommate, and some other love. But then there would have been no Holland trapped with me in a room, no whispered words, no kisses. I would have lost him anyway.

  Buzz made a casual suggestion. I pulled a notepad from my purse and, silent as a secretary, took down his words exactly. It seemed as harmless and impossible as all the rest; the action one might take in a dream. Later that night, I transcribed his words on our basement typewriter with its sticky T, folding the letter and placing it in its envelope. But by then, as if waking from a trance, my doubts would return. So there it would lie for weeks, abandoned, on our basement shelf.

  “What do you think?” Buzz asked me that day below the roller coaster. “Is it too cruel?”

  “No,” I said. “The war is over.”

  “A conchie and an accomplice, it doesn’t seem right.”

  “Something might happen all on its own.”

  “You mean Holland might change,” he said, frowning, and I read his mind: I was clinging to the past again, to fantasy. Holland had not changed from the minute he was dragged from the ocean, seaweed-striped. It was only my image of him that had changed, shifted in and out like a clumsily focusing lens. I understood from Buzz’s frown that change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean; that nobody was going to change, not Holland or the aunts or Annabel, that nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.

  “Those Selective Service mistakes are notorious,” Buzz said, looking out to sea. “They sent a CO like me out to a hospital of army boys.”

  “And roomed you with a Negro.”

  He nodded. “He wasn’t too popular there, I’m sure he’s told you. We were both so despised.” Then, out of nowhere, Buzz asked me if I thought he was a coward.

  “Well, I think William hasn’t even—”

  “I mean me.”

  He said it very calmly; he was used to people calling him a coward. Later, he would mention hitchhiking his way into town, when he would be stopped by cops who wondered why he wasn’t in uniform—boys his age were all in the army—and who, after seeing his CO armband, would drive off into the gloom as if they had met a ghost. Either that, or aim a gun until he ran off himself.

  “To tell the truth I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t understand you, that’s all.”

  “You said you weren’t ashamed of your husband for hiding from war. I wonder what you think of me.”

  “Why did you do it?” I asked.

  “It made sense to me. I didn’t want to kill, I couldn’t do it. I did a lot of reading, a lot of thinking about it. It seemed to me that it was what made us human. Deciding not to kill.”

  I asked if he just refused to go.

  “No, no,” he said, pausing. I expected him to be embarrassed, to balk at my asking him, but I saw something sharp appear in his eye. There was a reason he was telling me this story, but I didn’t understand it then. “I was actually called for induction in 1943 and I went.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was at a local school done up as a draft center. And we had to take off our clothes and stand around with all the other men, going from one doctor to another before they approved us and sent us on to a smaller room. We had to dress and stand in rows, waiting for an officer to arrive. I’d heard about that moment,” he said, holding my gaze. “I’d heard a moment would come when the officer would walk into the room, ask us to say the oath, and then to take one step forward to become a soldier.”

  “That’s how it’s done?” He nodded. It seemed so Roman to have your life decided by a purely symbolic act, but I suppose that’s how life is decided fairly regularly.

  “I didn’t take that step forward,” he told me. “All the others did, they all said the oath and stepped forward. But not me. So they yelled at me for an hour and sent me to a psychiatrist. They were pretty hard on me.” But he wouldn’t budge. Young men are made of the strangest stuff. He said they registered him 4-E and gave him an armband. Yellow, of course—he laughed.

  “And they sent you away? To the camps?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “No,” he said, very far away now. “They didn’t need to. We did that on our own.”

  I wanted to ask what he meant, but I saw the sharp, clever look leave his eyes. Instead, in an automatic action he would have prevented if he could, his right hand went out to rub the stump of his little finger, to soothe it like an injured child; it was his “tell,” as they say in poker parlors. It was the sign of some private pain that had nothing to do with Holland, or me, and yet might explain what had brought Buzz Drumer here.

  He chose not to go to jail, he told me. Selective Service offered other tasks an objector could still do for his country, including pulling stumps in a northern state, and that is what he did.

  How would you picture a camp for conscientious objectors back in 1943? Perhaps as a traveling tent show: a caravan of white dormitories, a great gold big-top. The word “camp” brings to mind swimming, painting, races; most Americans pictured it that way, full of cowards and traitors and spies having a wonderful time. But what Buzz saw, as he arrived by car down a muddy road, was an internment camp.

  It was run by the Quaker church “in the spirit of individual pacifism,” but they in turn took their orders from Selective Service, which reluctantly accepted the camps only as a way to keep these abnormal men imprisoned, working without pay for the duration of the war. Buzz had no idea. “You can bunk with the Quakers, the Catholics, or the Coughlinites,” he was told.

  He’d had a fantasy they would all be like him: misfits, pacifists, outsiders. He picked the Quakers out of instinct; he was raised Baptist, and the only other Baptist was a colored man who played the cello, and lived with the Quakers. There was only one colored man in the whole place, and only one Jew.

  The Jew was a problem for the Coughlinites. They were the followers of Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Detroit radio priest who felt America should not be fighting against that hero of the twentieth century: Adolf Hitler. These men weren’t pacifists at all. How had they convinced the draft board? Perhaps some psychologist had nodded his head at their ideas and stamped their forms out of unimaginable sympathy. And so there they were, living under a president they saw as a Jewish conspirator. The Coughlinites were loathed by their fellow Catholics, who hated them nearly as much as the do-gooder Quakers.

  So the Jew had to be kept away from the Coughlinites, who had to be kept away from the other Catholics, who had to be kept away from the Quakers. The colored man had to be kept away from everybody. In a pacifist camp. Those were the times we lived in.

  “It was a dull, strange kind of life,” Buzz said.

  The day began with the yelling of the night watchman to head to the work trucks. Work was pulling stumps from a field, and Buzz’s job was to coil the chain around the stump before another man turned on the winch to haul it away. The only satisfying moment of the day came when that stump would pop out, like a rotten tooth, and a secret hell of worms and Paleolithic beetles would gape before them. The stumps were chopped up into firewood, and stacked in a long wall in the woo
ds, where they rotted all through the war; nobody used them. The field was never plowed. It was the kind of work you imagine angels devising for uncertain souls, endlessly raking the clouds.

  Men went insane from the monotony, the wormy sky, and the wormy oatmeal, but mostly they went insane from the sense that they did not matter. The earth was burning itself to the ground, east and west of America, and they took no part in it. It drove some men to go AWOL, and some to join the army and go to war, or to sail away and die out on an ocean. Many others, including Buzz, sought another way out. It is surprising, he said, to learn that a man needs to matter.

  A chorus of screams silenced Buzz’s story; the ride had come to an end. Buzz crossed his arms and looked away. I wanted to say something to him, but the noise overwhelmed any talk, so we merely stood and watched them together: William laughing with just his top teeth showing, eyes hidden under the shadows of his thick eyebrows, arm now around his girl (it must have happened at a turn in the track), and Annabel slumped in hysterical false terror beside him.

  “Take your girl to the Limbo ride!” the barker beside us comically cried.

  “Yes,” said Buzz quietly. “She’s the marrying kind.”

  As the operator let them out of the gate, Annabel stumbled and grasped at William for support, holding his right arm, laughing, for once forgetting the cares of her father, her future. No one could ever wish her harm.

  “Come see Limbo!”

  It happened the day the dog ran away. Sonny was staying with the aunts at their house on Fillmore, Lyle was out in the backyard, and I came home to find Holland in the living room, reading. It was very still and quiet, as it often was in the Sunset; all one heard was a soft burring noise that sounded like a warplane nosing its way through the clouds but was just someone mowing his lawn.

  “Pearlie,” Holland said to me as I walked in and set my purse on the console.