“And what about Uncle Charlie?” asked Barbara.
“Yes, you should tell your Uncle Charlie, too,” said Mrs. MacLane, “but your Aunt Josie and Gramma should be the first to know.”
“Mother, promise you won’t let Uncle Charlie try to sell Greg an insurance policy the very first thing,” begged Rosemary.
Mrs. MacLane smiled. “I can’t be responsible for your relatives. Now run along and phone Aunt Josie and Gramma.”
“But, Mother, I have to study and you know how Aunt Josie is,” protested Rosemary. “Besides, I have to go back to school right after lunch.”
“Yes, I do know Aunt Josie,” said Mrs. MacLane. “That’s why I want you to tell her yourself.”
I am not going to have a chance to get in one word about Bill Cunningham, not even edgeways, thought Barbara suddenly. This whole morning was going to belong to Rosemary. She was nothing but the sister of the bride.
“Have you thought about the wedding?” Mrs. MacLane asked her older daughter.
“Sort of.” Rosemary looked vague, happy, and unusually pretty. “Not much. Last week I was too busy thinking about what Dad was going to say, and this week I had to write a paper for English on Love’s Labour’s Lost.”
“Next month is June,” Mrs. MacLane reminded her, bringing the conversation back to the wedding. “Hand me that seam tape, will you, dear?”
“I know.” Rosemary was trying to look thoughtful. “I thought I’d be married in a suit. And a hat with a little veil.”
A suit! Barbara did not have to hide her disappointment, because no one was paying the slightest attention to her. A suit would spoil everything. Being married in a suit might be legal and binding and all that, but it certainly would not be a wedding. And as for Mrs. Aldredge—she would probably be ashamed to invite her friends to such an affair. No, a suit would not do. Rosemary’s mind would have to be changed. That was all there was to it.
Mrs. MacLane tore the cellophane from the seam tape. “How many guests are you planning to have?” she asked. “We have to start someplace.”
“Just our families and maybe our roommates. I don’t know.” Rosemary’s manner was offhand.
This was not the way to plan a wedding, thought Barbara. A wedding should have lots of guests, a whole churchful, in their best clothes. Gloves, flowered hats, everything. She could see her mother was about to say something but was choosing her words with care. There were so many things Barbara wanted to know that she could hold back no longer, and she seized the moment of her mother’s hesitation. “When do you get your engagement ring?” she asked.
Rosemary smiled at her sister, but it was a new kind of smile, a smile one might bestow on a lovable and amusing child. “I’m not going to have an engagement ring. Just a plain gold band for the ceremony. We have so many more worthwhile uses for our money—tuition, for instance—and, anyway, engagement rings are so sort of, I don’t know, middle-class.” They were not even married yet, and already it was their money.
Barbara and her mother exchanged a glance at this astonishing statement. Mrs. MacLane, who wore a modest engagement ring, raised one eyebrow and said, “It is certainly news to me that engagement rings are middle-class.”
“Oh, Mother, you know what I mean,” said Rosemary vaguely.
“I’m afraid I don’t.” Mrs. MacLane’s tone was tart, but she continued on a gentler note. “We want you to have the kind of wedding you want. But don’t you think it would be a happier occasion if you were married in a pretty dress instead of a suit? If it’s the money you’re worried about, don’t worry. We can manage a nice little wedding. Something simple but pretty.”
Barbara was eager to encourage her sister for the sake of the family honor. “And Greg’s mother thinks you should have a real wedding. She says, in her heart, every girl wants a big wedding.”
“I don’t,” said the bride. “And Greg wants us to have whatever I want, and I am not going to have a big wedding just to impress his mother’s friends. My family is giving the wedding, not his.”
As much as she longed for a big wedding, Barbara could not help admiring her sister for the stand she was taking. Rosemary had grown up in the past year. She was no longer the kind of girl who would choose a dress simply because it bore a good label.
“But a suit seems a little severe,” said Mrs. MacLane mildly.
“Oh, Mother, a wedding with bridesmaids and everything would be an awful bother. I’m just trying to be practical,” said Rosemary. “You know how Dad is always saying how impractical I am. Well, this time I’m being practical. That’s all.”
Well, wouldn’t you know! thought Barbara, as her dream of a lovely wedding faded like a bruised gardenia. Now Rosemary had to start being practical, after a whole life of being impractical. Next she would probably say she wanted pots and pans for wedding presents. Or a vacuum cleaner. Or a pail and scrubbing brush. If Rosemary decided to be practical, she would be all-out, one-hundred-percent practical. Rosemary, according to her father, always overdid things. In this mood she would probably decide to be married in a tweed suit, which would wear forever and grow baggy with age. “The bride, attired in sturdy Harris tweed of a sensible shade of brown, was given in marriage by her father,” the papers would say, “and was attended by her sister, in gray tweed, with a bouquet of geraniums picked in the backyard.” Or Rosemary would probably dismiss the thought of any attendants at all as being impractical.
“But a wedding should be an event to remember,” protested Mrs. MacLane. “It is not a time for being practical.”
“Of course it isn’t,” Barbara agreed, pleased with her mother who, she now felt, was showing an unexpected streak of poetry in her soul.
Rosemary flashed her mother and sister an amused smile. “Honestly, Mother, I can’t see why everybody always has to get so sentimental, just because two people decide to get married.”
Now it was Mrs. MacLane’s turn to look amused. “A wedding is an occasion for sentiment, and that’s the way it should be. You can’t escape sentiment, so why not have a pretty wedding?”
“Besides, think of the presents,” said Barbara, as long as Rosemary was bent on being practical.
“Oh, presents.” Rosemary dismissed wedding gifts with that irritating air of sophistication she had sometimes assumed since she had gone away to college. “They are mostly just things. Greg and I want a life free of things.”
“Now what on earth do you mean by a remark like that?” Mrs. MacLane’s exasperation was rising to the surface once more.
“I mean that if we have our lives cluttered up with a lot of things, I’ll have to waste my time dusting them and taking care of them when I could be doing something more constructive. Except for books and records we want a life free of possessions,” explained Rosemary.
Barbara considered this with interest. She thought of her own half of their room cluttered with things, stuffed animals, a poster advertising a school play, faded pom-poms, and party invitations. Rosemary was right. Tomorrow she would clear out a lot of things, so her mother wouldn’t spend so much time telling her to straighten up her room. At the same time she was upset at the idea of a wedding with no presents. Opening packages would be half the fun.
“That is all very well, dear,” Mrs. MacLane said to Rosemary, as she pinned the tape to the edge of the coat, “but there is such a thing as being too practical. Your father and I couldn’t have a wedding during the war, and although I didn’t really mind, I’m sure your father wished things might have been different. It was all so bleak. The army camp had just been built, and it was nothing but a chapel and a PX and a lot of barracks in a sea of mud. Not a tree or a shrub anywhere. And your father about to go overseas.”
Both girls looked with surprise and curiosity at their mother, who until now had always made a gay and funny story out of her wedding. An old snapshot came to Barbara’s mind. Her parents had posed in front of the chapel in the army camp, which they had always described as being in the middle of nowh
ere. Their father, then Corporal MacLane, looked young, and his ears loomed large beneath his raw GI haircut—he had not yet begun to lose his hair. And their mother—how often the girls had poked fun at that snapshot. Her suit, which barely covered her knees, had the padded shoulders that were fashionable at that time, and her hair, brushed high in a pompadour in front, hung in a fluff to her shoulders. Just like somebody in an old movie on TV, her daughters had often said. And those enormous shoulders, Mother, they had exclaimed whenever they saw the picture. You could have played football in the suit with all that padding.
Rosemary was not to be swayed. “Just because you couldn’t have a wedding, Mother, is no reason why I should have one. I just want to get married in a suit without a lot of fuss and expense.” She rose from the bed as if, as far as she was concerned, the matter was settled. “I’ll go phone Aunt Josie and break the news, and then I simply have to study.”
When Rosemary had gone into the kitchen to telephone, Barbara picked up the discarded wrapper from the seam tape and rolled it between her fingers. “What does Rosemary mean, an engagement ring is middle-class?”
“It’s just one of those notions she has picked up at the university,” said Mrs. MacLane. “Of course I wouldn’t want her to go away to college and not get new ideas, but it is a little trying at times. She’ll outgrow it. After all, my generation scoffed at a lot of things as being bourgeois.”
Barbara did not like the suggestion that her sister was still young enough to outgrow an idea, as if it were a dress or a pair of shoes and she was a child. “Well, I just hope she hurries up and changes her mind about the kind of wedding she wants.” Barbara wanted her sister to change her ideas, not outgrow them.
“I imagine she will,” said Mrs. MacLane. “Rosemary really likes pretty clothes, even though she has taken to wearing drab colors since she has been going to the university. I only hope Gramma doesn’t bring up her wedding veil.”
“What wedding veil?” Barbara had never heard of such an heirloom in the family. “You mean she has a real wedding veil?”
“Oh my, yes,” answered Mrs. MacLane. “Her own. A long one that calls for an elaborate wedding. I wasn’t able to wear it for my wedding and Aunt Josie never married, so it has been packed away for over fifty years. I do hope Gramma has forgotten about it. You know how her memory is lately. Sometimes it’s clear, and other times it’s a little vague.”
The veil, Barbara was certain, would be lace, yellow with age, and in her imagination it resembled an old lace curtain she and Rosemary had used for a veil when they were little girls playing bride. Barbara, who had pictured her sister floating down the aisle in a cloud of tulle, conceded that an old lace veil might be better than no veil at all, simply because it might persuade Rosemary to give up the idea of being married in a suit. Barbara fervently hoped that this was one of those days when her grandmother’s memory would be clear. “You don’t suppose she’s going to be so practical she’ll want to get married in the city hall, do you?” asked Barbara, wishing Rosemary had assured her she would have a part in the wedding. “She might think it would save the gasoline it would take to drive to the church or something.”
“She’d better not,” said Mrs. MacLane. “Her father would put both feet down on any daughter of his who wanted to get married in the city hall.”
Rosemary returned to the room. “Well, wouldn’t you know,” she announced. “Aunt Josie is all in a dither, and she and Gramma are going to rush right over. I tried to tell her I had to study sometime today, but you know Aunt Josie. She just doesn’t listen.”
“That means lunch.” Mrs. MacLane folded the coat and laid it aside. “You go study until they get here, and I’ll have your father drive you back to school as soon as lunch is over.”
“If I can escape Aunt Josie,” said Rosemary.
“Now, Rosemary, you mustn’t mind your Aunt Josie. I know she’s difficult, but she loves you,” said Mrs. MacLane.
“I know,” said Rosemary with a sigh. “Sometimes I feel she loves me to pieces.”
“And you will find,” added Mrs. MacLane dryly, “that being loved bears certain obligations whether you like it or not.” Then she left to investigate her kitchen cupboards to see what she could produce for lunch on such short notice.
“Maybe I can do a little work before Aunt Josie and Gramma get here. I’m doing a paper on ‘Plato: Teacher and Theorist,’” said Rosemary, picking up her books. “Millions of footnotes, when all I want to do is think about Greg.”
It was not long before Aunt Josie’s little car was heard turning into the driveway, and through the window Barbara saw Aunt Josie climb out and hurry around to the other side to assist Gramma out of the car before she could get out by herself. The whole family worried for fear Gramma might fall and break her hip someday. She would wear those high heels, much too high for an old lady. Someone had once told her she had a trim ankle, and Gramma still had her pride.
Aunt Josie, thin and nervous as a windshield wiper, was both fashionable and efficient. Today Barbara noticed, as she opened the front door, that Aunt Josie was wearing a pair of chopsticks, poked crisscross through her chignon. Aunt Josie, who was the buyer for the corset department in the largest store in the county, always tried to be a little bit different.
“Hello, Barbara dear,” greeted Aunt Josie, and kissed her niece. “How nice to see you.” Then her eye, accurate as a tape measure, appraised Barbara’s appearance, and she gave her a little pat. “You must come to the store sometime. We have a nice little garment that would do wonders for you.” Fortunately Aunt Josie did not expect an immediate answer. “Where’s Rosemary?” she asked.
“Studying,” answered Barbara, struggling to control her mingled feeling of amusement and irritation. A nice little garment! Well, she had eaten a lot of snicker-doodles lately. Maybe they were beginning to show, but she did not intend to wear what her aunt called “a nice little garment.”
“Rosemary, darling!” cried Aunt Josie, when Rosemary came in, and she flew across the room to embrace her niece. “I am so happy for you. A June bride! I just can’t believe it. It seems only yesterday that you were sitting in your high chair spitting out strained carrots as fast as I could spoon them into your mouth.”
Barbara observed that Rosemary was not particularly pleased at this picture of herself as an infant. About to become a married woman, she wanted to think of her childhood as something far away and half forgotten.
“And how you used to love to have me bring empty boxes from the store for you to play with!” Aunt Josie went on.
Rosemary smiled gamely at the thought of herself playing happily among discarded corset boxes.
“Now tell us all about your young man,” said Gramma, settling herself in a chair.
Buster strolled into the living room and sat down, twitching his elegant tail with displeasure. Buster did not care for visitors. They disturbed his rest. Barbara scooped up the cat and held him in her lap, where he regally consented to being petted. It was embarrassing to have a cat that so obviously disliked guests.
“And all about your wedding plans,” added Aunt Josie. “I’m dying to hear about your wedding plans. An afternoon wedding is nicest. About a hundred guests, with a reception afterward at the Women’s Club. And something different in the way of music. A little Bach perhaps while the guests are arriving and no Mendelssohn or Lohengrin for the marches. I am so tired of weddings that begin with dum dum de dum. It’s no wonder so many brides drag their feet on the way to the altar. I do like a happy bride, one who looks as if she’s glad to see the groom. And Betty”—here Aunt Josie turned to her sister—“I do hope you won’t look like the cat that swallowed the canary. So often the mother of the bride does, while the mother of the groom struggles to hold back the tears.” Aunt Josie was in good form.
“Now, Josie,” said Gramma, “don’t plan Rosemary’s wedding for her.”
“I’m not planning her wedding,” protested Aunt Josie. “I was just making a
few simple suggestions.”
“I’m sure Rosemary hasn’t had time to make up her mind about a lot of things,” Mrs. MacLane said soothingly. “She’s very busy with her studies, you know.”
“Well, she’ll soon be through with all that,” said Gramma.
“No, Gramma,” said Rosemary. “I’m going to finish college. Greg wants me to.”
“We’ll see.” Gramma’s mischievous smile implied that Rosemary would soon get over this ridiculous idea.
Rosemary became dignified. “Greg says I will be better equipped to be a wife and mother if I finish college.”
“And I think he’s right.” Mrs. MacLane spoke quickly to head off any argument on the subject. “A girl who finishes college does make a better wife and mother. And I wouldn’t want Rosemary ever to look back and regret missing it.”
“And what does your young man do for a living?” asked Gramma.
“He’s going to school, too,” said Rosemary, “and he works in the Rad Lab part-time—”
“What on earth is the Rad Lab?” interrupted Gramma.
“The Radiation Laboratory. That’s where they smash the atoms,” explained Rosemary. “Greg files things and goes to the library for the physicists. Things like that.”
Both Aunt Josie and Gramma looked so disapproving that Rosemary quickly explained. “I don’t mean he’s going to make a career of filing things. He’s working for his general secondary credential, and when he gets it he’s going to teach history and English until we can save up enough money for him to go back to school and get his master’s degree and his PhD. His job doesn’t pay an awful lot, but we can manage until he finishes school.”
Neither Aunt Josie nor Gramma looked convinced. “It sounds like an ambitious program,” said Aunt Josie skeptically.
Sister of the Bride Page 8
