The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “Are you sure?” Gerald asked.

  “Yes.”

  They were married four months later, in the backyard of her parents’ summer home in the Berkshires. When Gerald proposed, he gave her a slim gold chain along with the ring. Without a word, he slid Nathaniel’s ring off her finger and threaded the chain through it, then draped the necklace around her neck and clasped it shut.

  They never discussed whether Nathaniel would have approved, because they both knew the answer. They realized other people viewed their situation as the scandal of the season. At school one morning, as she stepped into the front hall of the building, Evelyn heard one of the other teachers say, “And the groom is the first husband’s best friend! It’s not right, if you ask me.” When Evelyn rounded the corner, the woman turned red.

  But she didn’t care what anyone said. She and Gerald had fallen in love, as unusual as the circumstances were. And if Nathaniel was like an invisible third person in their marriage, it was only in the best sense—the thought of him and the briefness of life smoothed over any dispute or disagreement.

  She got pregnant on their honeymoon, as she had hoped. They named their son Theodore Nathaniel, and at first it seemed almost like he had Nathaniel’s heart and soul in him—Teddy was such a happy baby, so full of laughter and wonder at the smallest things. When he was born, Evelyn had loved those first few moments alone with him. It was the first time in her life that a stranger felt so utterly familiar. Later, when Gerald was allowed to come into the room, she thought of how the last time they’d been together in a hospital was the worst moment of their lives, but now there would finally be happiness.

  She could still see Teddy as a child, sitting under the willow tree in the backyard, reading his Superman comics, X-ray glasses strapped over his eyes. She had tried to lavish attention and affection on him, nurturing his interests and his hopes. Since he had no brothers or sisters, she and Gerald made a point of playing games with him—Clue or Chutes and Ladders in the parlor after dinner, so different from the almost businesslike way in which her own parents had treated her.

  But as Teddy got older, Evelyn lost him. He had a bad temper, and often got into fights at school. At Harvard, he was constantly being disciplined for fighting, drinking, vandalism. Finally, he was dismissed altogether for cheating on a history exam. He responded with anger, as though someone had wronged him. After that, there were gambling debts in the thousands, and more fights. Far too much alcohol, and God knew what else. He never had a real job, instead bouncing from one harebrained idea to the next, often with Gerald footing the bill. He had once stolen a blank check from Gerald’s desk, making it out to himself for ten thousand dollars. Later, he apologized and said he’d pay them back. He never did, but they forgave him even so. Her sweet little boy grew into a man she didn’t recognize, and she could never quite figure out why.

  Gerald said there was no rhyme or reason to it, but she believed that a mother’s love was paramount when it came to shaping a child. So what had she done to ruin Teddy?

  A pediatrician had once told her that perhaps she held him too much as a baby. As soon as he was born, she wanted to hold on to him for dear life, forever. When Teddy reached sixth grade, Gerald’s family was adamant that he should be sent away to prep school, but Evelyn refused to let him go. Maybe it was because she had lost so much already, or simply that he was her first and only.

  She sometimes wondered if Teddy had come to resent her because she started teaching again when he was twelve. Was he angry with her for giving other children her love? There were some students, especially, whom she had taken into her heart. A boy with a drunk for a father, whose mother was dead, was caring for three younger brothers on his own. His name was Adam, and one summer Evelyn took in the lot of them until their grandmother arrived from Memphis to care for them. There was a girl, Sabrina, who could not read much. Evelyn worked with her after school three times a week. She did it at the house, because sweet Sabrina was so worried about the other children at school discovering her secret. When a child was at risk, Evelyn made sure to keep an eye on him long after he was out of her class, even beyond graduation. She wrote letters. She had them over to dinner. But did Teddy not realize that she loved him more than all the rest combined?

  Whatever the reason, things had gotten muddled, and now here they were, with Teddy thinking he wanted a divorce, when his wife was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Evelyn loved her son, but there was something she had never said aloud, not even to Gerald: though she was grateful for it, she had often wondered what had made Julie fall in love with him. Teddy wasn’t a kind man, not chivalrous, or even particularly charming. She had long worried that someone would come along with dollar signs in her eyes and marry him just for his inheritance. But Julie had seen something in him.

  Maybe what Julie saw wasn’t real and never had been; maybe every good quality she imagined in Teddy was simply part of herself reflected back.

  When the doorbell rang at quarter past one, Evelyn walked slowly down the front hall as if approaching the guillotine, her hands balled up into fists at her sides.

  She didn’t want to hear his explanation. She never should have allowed this visit in the first place.

  Just as her hand touched the doorknob, it turned on its own, and Teddy pushed it open from the other side. He looked much the same as he had the last time she saw him, five months earlier, not a hint of shame on his face. He held a bunch of browning pink carnations wrapped in dripping paper.

  “Mom,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek. “I’d like you to meet my girlfriend, Nicole Standish.”

  Evelyn froze.

  He had brought the other woman.

  1987

  While Maurice waited inside for his burger, James went around to the back of the truck, opening the doors. He could still smell the stench of the homeless guy. The smells were one of the worst parts of the job, worst of all in summer.

  He pulled the sheet off the stretcher with just the tips of his fingers, the same way he might when one of his kids wet the bed. Twice in the past year he had gotten head lice from the same bum in Central Square. He opened a bottle of alcohol and poured a quarter of it onto a thick towel. As he scrubbed the seat, he thought of his wife, the way she liked to tease him when he washed the dishes, saying, “How about some more elbow grease there, McKeen?”

  They dated for three years in high school. Afterward, Sheila thought he should go to college, for a deferment if nothing else, but as soon as he had that diploma in hand, James only wanted to get his band off the ground in a serious way. They were called Ulterior Motive. James played bass guitar and wrote all the songs. For eighteen months their junior and senior years, they tried to squeeze in practices wherever they could. James worked at the Stop & Shop deli counter four days a week after school and on Saturdays, which left only Friday nights and Sundays free. It was a point of contention between him and the lead singer, Chip McIntyre. Chip couldn’t understand what it was like to have a single mom who needed help paying for groceries. His father was a doctor who owned a big house on Hospital Hill, and only lived in Quincy in the first place because he had grown up there and felt nostalgic about it or some shit. James thought Chip was a dick, but he’d been brought in after the other three got together by the drummer, Frank Rogers, and he liked the sound of the thing. They were playing covers when James joined, but now they did almost all their own stuff. It felt real. Important.

  James knew college wasn’t for him. Even if he could have somehow afforded it, he had always hated school. How many hours had he wasted watching the hands on a clock move so slowly that they seemed to defy the laws of space and time? How many algebra and chemistry classes had he sat through, writing songs in his notebook, pretending to pay attention? He had gotten caught once, and Mrs. Pierce (American history) had called his mother about it. She looked disappointed and tired when she got home from work that night. “Jimmy, why are you fooling around when you’re supposed to be studying,
huh?”

  He wanted to tell her how he knew in his gut that music was the thing that would save him. The only thing he was any good at. That it was impossible to imagine himself growing old and fat behind a desk. But he just said, “Sorry, Ma, I’ll quit it.”

  Some spark in his mother had fizzled when Bobby got sent to Vietnam. James knew he was all she had left, at least for now. He thought she would come around when the band started to make it. When he bought her a big house and a new car, and took her on vacation to Ireland.

  School came to an end, and they were able to practice more often, though James now worked full-time at the store. They recorded a demo with money borrowed from Chip’s dad, and they dropped their tapes off everywhere they could think of. They started getting gigs. They played actual clubs in town. They were written up in the Phoenix as “rising stars on the local rock scene.” They drank and got stoned some too, but that was part of it.

  Sheila enrolled in nursing school. They hung on for a couple months past graduation, but eventually she dumped him, saying he wasn’t serious enough about his future. She didn’t understand what James was trying to do. She thought it was silly, a pie-in-the-sky kind of thing. He thought those were her father’s fears, not hers, but he couldn’t seem to change her mind. James hated being apart from her. He knew he had to get her back, even if it took a record deal, a song about her landing at number one on the Billboard charts.

  He never went out with anyone else. He fucked some girl in the bathroom at Dee Dee’s, the only girl he’d ever had sex with other than Sheila. Later that night, after five shots of whiskey and who the hell knew how many beers, he wept in Dave Connelly’s dad’s Cutlass and punched out the passenger-side window, ending up with fourteen stitches in his hand and an order to stay away from the Connelly house that lasted until his first kid was born.

  Sheila started dating a guy from her class—a male nurse, of all things. Connelly tried to cheer James up by calling him the Murse. That had hurt, but not so bad as the next guy, a law student at BC.

  Debbie, Sheila’s sister, had told him when she came to the deli counter one afternoon.

  “How’s it going, Jimmy? Pound of ham, and a half pound of American. You still living with your mom? Did you hear Sheila’s dating a lawyer now?”

  The August after graduation, Ulterior Motive was approached at a gig by a guy named Marty Klein. He had managed the Snowmen and Negative Attention, local bands who had ended up with recording contracts and national tours. He said he wanted to work with them, to get their demo some real airtime.

  James quit his job and finally got the balls to go to Sheila’s apartment and make a plea: she had to come back to him or he’d die. He was about to hit it big. But he couldn’t do any of it if she didn’t believe in him. He had never felt so high in his life as he did when he stood there, delivering that speech. Especially when Sheila wrapped her arms around him and said yes, she’d take the leap, she still loved him.

  She dumped the lawyer, and they moved in together a month later, a fact that they somehow managed to keep from their parents.

  But the demo never got any play, other than on a couple college stations. The guitar player went to jail for knocking a guy unconscious in a bar fight. Frank Rogers got drafted. Fearing his number would get called too, Chip McIntryre’s parents forced him to go to school. And James was alone. The whole thing had seemed right on the brink of happening, but somehow it never did.

  He moped around for almost a year, smoking joints in their apartment, keeping the place neat and fixing Sheila’s lunch so she wouldn’t get sick of him and throw him out. Then one day she told him that the boyfriend of a friend of hers worked for the Lynn fire department and they were hiring. She mentioned that these positions were sought after, that the pay was great, the job security fantastic. All you had to do was take a multiple-choice test.

  Lynn was a shithole, and it was at least a forty-minute drive.

  “You really want me working in that place?” he said. “You know what they say. Lynn, Lynn, city of sin; you never come out the way you went in. Sorry, I’m not interested.”

  Sheila told him if he didn’t go to the station and apply, they were through.

  So James became a firefighter.

  The guys he worked with were former high school athletes, built like Mack Trucks. He was scrawny in comparison. A weakling. He started lifting weights in the firehouse between calls. He put on ten pounds.

  Some guys in the station had been to Vietnam and back. They all knew someone who had died. At home, they hardly ever talked about the war, even though his brother had been, and lots of their old friends from high school. James was terrified by the thought of being drafted. The only way he knew how to deal with that was just to ignore it. There was an apartment complex on Storrow Drive in Boston that advertised with a billboard that read, If you lived here, you’d be home now. In August of ’72, someone had altered it to say If you lived in Vietnam, you’d be dead now. James would go ten miles out of his way not to have to drive by the thing.

  But in October, Sheila’s cousin Fred was killed by a bomb in Quang Ngai. James came home from work that night to find her curled up crying on the sofa, an empty wine bottle on the table.

  “That could have been you,” she said. “That still could be you.”

  “No,” he said. “This whole stupid war is almost over. The government won’t draft any more than they already have.”

  “That’s what Nixon said four years ago, and look where we are now.”

  “It’s awful about Fred, but worrying about what-ifs won’t help. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Let’s get married,” she said.

  “You can still get drafted if you’re married.”

  There was a day seven years earlier when, without notice, Lyndon Johnson changed the policy that kept married men safe from the draft. He decreed that only men who were married by midnight that night, or men with children, would be exempt. Moving forward, all men who were married without children would be treated like single guys. Johnson announced his plan at five o’clock Eastern time, too late for anyone on their side of the country. The only place on the West Coast you could marry without a waiting period or a blood test was Las Vegas. Thousands of men and their girls streamed there that night. James had an older cousin in California who made the drive and married someone he had known for six weeks. The marriage had since been annulled, but she probably saved his life.

  “My parents lied about their age so they could get married before my father shipped off to World War II,” Sheila said. “Now I understand why. This whole thing has made me realize it.”

  He shook his head. “You want to get married?”

  “Why not? We would have eventually anyway, right? What’s the difference if we do it now, instead of two or three years from now?”

  He’d be lying if he said he had thought much about it before then. But his heart was pounding from happiness. She wanted to marry him.

  “You’re drunk,” he said, reminding himself as much as her.

  “I know I am, James. But that doesn’t mean I don’t mean it.” She pulled him down on top of her. “What do you say?”

  He kissed her in response, wondering if he could take her seriously, hoping that he could. In the morning, she said it again: “I want to get married. If anything ever happened to you, I’d want to know I was your wife. Just think about it, okay?”

  James was sweating when he went to talk to her father three weeks later. He sat at Tom and Linda’s kitchen table. The stained-glass light fixture overhead might as well have been an interrogation lamp. He drank three beers before he got there, but still his hands shook in his lap.

  “Are you sure you two are ready?” Tom asked. “I mean, maturity-wise, not to mention financially.”

  “Yes sir,” James said, though he knew he sounded like a kid. He was only twenty years old.

  “My mother used to say, ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ ” Linda added fr
om her spot at the sink, where she was pretending to wash the dishes. “Why don’t you wait a while, Jimmy?”

  He just nodded. Their blessing would have been nice, but he didn’t actually give a shit what they thought. He already had the ring.

  James spent the absolute max that he could afford, but still, what he gave Sheila was puny; the diamond was only a quarter carat. Even so, the act of buying it made him feel like an adult for the first time in his life. He asked the jeweler to lay the stone flat inside the band, since she was a nurse and he figured anything that stuck out would just rip through her rubber gloves and get in the way.

  James could still remember how he had felt, holding that ring in his pocket. He was afraid he’d bungle the proposal somehow—Sheila would only get this once in her life, and they said that it was the most important moment a woman ever had. But no matter how piss poor his delivery, he knew the diamond would communicate something that words couldn’t. A woman wanted a diamond. It meant you were serious, committed for life. He proposed on the seawall at Wollaston Beach, and Sheila cried out in surprise as he got down on one knee, as if the whole thing hadn’t been her idea.

  They had been engaged for just one month on the Saturday in January when the war finally ended. They sat in silence in the den, watching the signing of the cease-fire agreement on TV. The phone rang. Outside the apartment, church bells tolled. The fire station two blocks away sounded its alarms.

  “Wow,” Sheila said. “It’s really over.”

  James dug his fingers into the arm of the couch. He knew he should be happy, but he felt tense. He tapped his sneaker rapid-fire against the floor.

  He looked at Sheila, trying to decipher whether there was something more in her expression than relief that the war had ended. She had wanted to get married in case the worst happened, but there was no longer any danger of that. He knew he should ask her if she still wanted to go through with it, at least give her the chance to back out. But he couldn’t.