by Kate Walbert
The day before her wedding, we sat, the three of us, in her attic room. Roger had told her she could take only half her wardrobe, a genuine heartache for Rita, since she had sewed every dress by hand. Still, an officer’s wife should never, Roger said, appear ostentatious—I can still remember her coming into my room asking to use my dictionary to look it up—and they were only permitted to take so much weight in luggage across the country. It turned out they hadn’t gotten their Hawaii post, though they did manage California, which Rita claimed was even better, since the food in Hawaii, she had heard, was god-awful.
“For the love of Pete,” Rita was saying. “You’re gorgeous.”
Betty stood with the dress pinching her at the shoulders and beneath the arms. “We’ll just let it out some.”
Betty looked down at herself and then back at Rita and me, who stared at her in the mirror. “I look like a horse,” she said.
I shook my head and Rita rolled her eyes. “Okay,” she said. “Try this one.”
She held up an emerald green dress with a line of sequins around the bodice. “It’s a bit ostentatious for me now,” she said, without irony, unzipping Betty’s dress and helping her pull out of the grip of the shoulders. Betty, clearly awkward in her panties and brassiere, stepped quickly into the emerald green. “Inhale,” Rita said, zipping. In truth, Betty was at least two sizes larger than Rita, though nobody seemed to want to admit this. Betty was what we called a big girl, and though she, like Rita, had blond hair and blue eyes, she might have been more a best friend than a sister. Rita’s blond hair truly shone like the spun sunlight you read about in fairy tales; Betty’s blond hair lay flat, dull.
Rita pushed at the zipper as if trying to close a too-tightly packed suitcase. Betty winced. “I can’t breathe,” she said.
“It will be fine,” Rita said. “Give me a minute.” At last the zipper slipped more easily on its groove and Rita zipped it closed. “It’s a question of the in-seams,” she said. “I could let those out in a jiffy.”
We looked at Betty in the mirror. Though she did not look like Rita would have in the emerald green, she looked pretty enough, stuffed and molded into a shape by the dress’s stiff lines. “Gorgeous,” Rita said, and Betty smiled.
I can’t remember what I received from that afternoon. Maybe a few hats and a pair of slacks Rita had copied from a magazine. I rarely wore dresses. I do remember that we were exhausted by the end of it, and even though Rita had a hotel full of Roger’s relatives to return to she stayed, lying with the two of us on the attic floor, staring up at the unpainted beams of the roof. It was rare for the three of us to be together in such a way. Generally Rita had social engagements, sometimes including Betty, sometimes not. I, as the youngest and the least like the two of them, was never asked to join. It didn’t bother me. I had my own amusements. Reading, primarily, and helping Mother in the garden. Anyway, there we were, and though the moment may have been lost on my sisters, I remember how acutely aware I was of the moment as a moment, as a point in time I would always remember. I tried to levitate, to view the three of us from the attic beams, but the most I could do was close my eyes and picture us as we were, or as we just had been, three expectant faces in the mirror.
Rita continued talking about the wedding, about the god-awful dress that Mrs. Goodall, Roger’s mother, would be wearing. “She claims it’s ivory,” Rita said. “But it’s horse-piss yellow. And she’s got this matching hat. This hat, I told you? I mean, there are certain women who can wear hats, and certain women who have no business even trying one on. Mrs. Goodall should know she’s one of those no-business-trying-one-on women but you would think she was Myrna Loy. She goes on and on. And she’s got Missy dolled up in teal, which is no teal I’ve ever seen though she insists, and I can’t say a word because she’s still angry I didn’t ask Missy to be a bridesmaid and I would have, I told her, but I have two sisters and a best friend and I wasn’t going to have one of those weddings with the whole darn class.”
It was wonderful to hear her speak. She had a voice that infused every story with drama, and whether she was talking about the wedding or about nothing at all, I loved to listen to her, as, I know, did Betty. Betty might have interrupted from time to time. Betty was more Rita’s friend and could offer comments or respond. But I was simply Rita’s little sister, taking it all in, taking her all in, thinking how I would remember.
• • •
There was some mix-up with the photographer and so no photographs exist of Rita’s wedding. I find this prescient now, though at the time it was considered tragic. Rita wore a dress with organdy pleats and a high lace neck and lace sleeves cut from one of Mother’s Irish tablecloths, sleeves that hung past her wrists and covered her fingers. Every time she reached up to brush back her hair, the lace fluttered, softening the gesture. She had used the same lace for her veil, which trailed out so far that Betty, the maid of honor, had to hold it up as she walked. Roger stood near the minister, still in uniform. Behind him were his younger brother and some cadets from the academy who got drunk at the reception and tried to dance with me on their shoulders.
These would have been the photographs: the boys dancing with me on their shoulders and the lace on Rita’s fingers; the way Daddy stood, once they reached the end of the aisle, as if he, too, wanted to marry Rita; Mrs. Goodall, who didn’t look half bad in her little hat and ivory dress; Rita at the top of our stairs yelling for all the available girls to gather and turning around to toss her bouquet directly at Betty; Betty catching it with both hands; Rita, dressed now in a pink traveling suit she had ordered through a catalog, running down the stairs as if being chased, Roger at her heels; Rita, without looking at Mother or me or Betty or anyone else, racing outside and jumping, laughing, into the touring car that would take her to Philadelphia, to the suite at the Grand Hotel the Goodalls had reserved and then, we knew, to Atlantic City, where she would spend a week before returning to Philadelphia to board the train for Chicago, and then California; Rita waving from the touring car to no one in particular; the crowd of guests waving back, throwing what leftover rice they had in their pockets; the touring car moving slowly through the guests and down our drive, turning left at the Springfield’s orchard and following the same route we had walked, Betty, Rita, and me, on our way to school most mornings; Rita, once the touring car reached the end of the drive, sitting straight and face-forward, as if she were the one navigating the road.
I remember how I wrote about it to Randall. I’m ashamed now to say I wrote mostly of Roger in his uniform and the Army friends in theirs, I imagine to make him jealous. No doubt I gave all the superfluous details, though I may have had the wherewithal not to go on about Rita’s lacy veil. He died before I could tell him the end of the story. I suppose I’m grateful for that.
Randall sent back a postcard, the kind that were popular around the time of the First World War. On it was painted a little soldier boy slouched like a tired shepherd against a haystack, a rifle clenched to his chest. “What is just? What is unjust?” Randall had written on the other side. “What is it to be a ruler of men?”
7
Mother decided to take Sterling up on his invitation, or request, I should say, to help with the estate sale. She said he had no immediate family and that with Randall gone it would be a terribly lonesome task; he needed us, she said. She was right, although the idea of returning to that house, to Randall’s room, knowing that I would look up at the dusty windows and see nothing but the reflections of oak shadows, made me miserable. I said I would rather catch polio than go back there. Mother looked at me hard. “It isn’t easy for any of us, young lady,” she said. And I knew, in the tone of young lady, that I would have to keep my protests to myself.
This was late spring, as I may have mentioned, a month or so after we got the news of Randall’s death. Coming into Maryland the farms were thick with alfalfa, clover; the wheat knee-high. You still see a few of those old farms today, but then it was pure business. A drive through t
he country in that season meant the buckle of tractors plowing fields, and horses pulling cultivators through rows of corn so green as to be yellow, and stark Guernseys corralled in bright pastures, chewing, and a general feel of commerce, of production. Business. I suppose it’s the same feeling now on city streets, but then country didn’t mean a place where nobody was home. Everybody was home and working: old men and boys too young for the war. We’d stop from time to time to buy a soda or to wash our faces; the drive long and dusty, as I remember. It hadn’t rained.
We got to Randall’s house near sunset. As soon as we turned up the long drive I clamped my eyes shut, not wanting to look. I put my head down between my legs and counted to one hundred. Next to me Betty snored; she had slept all the way from Clarksburg. Daddy stopped the car and turned off the engine. “We’re here,” he said, as if we wouldn’t have noticed. Mother let out a long sigh. I kept my eyes shut and looked up, feeling a sudden slant of light. Something struck the car, a walnut? an acorn? and I opened my eyes, thinking I might see Randall there knocking. But all I saw was what I knew: the oak trees, the brick house. No, that’s not entirely right. There was something I hadn’t expected, something you wouldn’t be familiar with but at the time had become quite common: the red-bordered rectangle placed in the parlor window, the gold star stark in its white center.
We stood at the front door and Mother knocked. I remember thinking that we never, before, had to knock, that Randall was always right there at the front door to greet us. Now the door swung open to Sterling, older than I remembered him, hunched, leaning on a cane I later learned Randall had carved: a snake twisted up its shaft like a magician’s wand.
“Sterling,” Mother said, and hugged him tight. He shook Daddy’s hand and Betty’s, and mine he took in both hands and squeezed. His own hands were wizened, this is the only way to describe them, and when I looked up I saw that his head shook slightly, something I had never before noticed. Parkinson’s, of course, though at the time this was simply attributed to old age. He wore a cardigan sweater though it was warm, and a tie with a conservative pattern. He had been a well-known judge in Baltimore for many years and had moved to the country before Jeannette, Randall’s mother, died, when Randall was still quite small. He was an expert on Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist preacher, and had been working on a biography. He was a good cook, a master bridge player. He would later be instrumental in influencing the Supreme Court on the state’s first desegregation laws, filing a friend-of-the-court brief that was cited in the decision that followed.
These things I learned much later, at the time of his death, when Mother sent me the obituary that appeared in the Baltimore Sun. I remember my surprise at the photograph that accompanied the obituary, one taken in the early days of Sterling’s judgeship. His head was slightly turned, as if it had been suggested that he look away from the harsh studio light right over the photographer’s shoulder. He wore a gown, the regal black of it like a stand from which rose his long neck. He might have been chiseled out of marble and set down in museum storage somewhere: the sharp nose, the high forehead; not the man I remembered at all, and yet, something familiar sat at the edge of my surprise. Randall. A hardened, fleshy Randall. A Randall who might have been an athlete, or a man you watch in a barroom. A Randall chopping wood. A Randall crossing a path quickly, his coattails flying, hurrying to make an appointment. A Randall all grown up: a father Randall or a husband Randall. They were in fact the spitting image; I had never seen this before, or certainly never seen it when the two were alive in the same room, at the Easter suppers when finally Randall and I would join the rest of the family, our clothes dusty, our cheeks flushed. Then Sterling would carve, his old hands gripping the silver knife and fork, as Randall sat by his side, his own delicate hands in his lap, waiting for his father to finish so he could lead the rest of us in grace. This was Randall’s job: grace. The point is, there was no resemblance then; absolutely none. Randall might have been his father’s employee. Sterling might have been somebody’s grandfather, invited to dinner out of the goodness of the family’s heart.
I suppose they were too far at either end of the spectrum— Sterling into old age, Randall barely shedding childhood—to view them in the same light, to see them as father and son. But Sterling’s photograph was clear proof of flesh and blood.
• • •
Sterling led us into the dark house, through the Gallery of Maps and out to the parlor where a dimly lit desk lamp seemed the only light in the room. The furniture was threadbare and rose-patterned, though most of the roses had disappeared, so faded into their own background they could easily have been mistaken for stains. Looking closely, you could still see ghosts of their buds, ghosts of their full blooms, ghosts of the thorny vines that twisted around the arms and the backs of the chairs and sofa. I traced the pattern around my knees, pretending to prick my finger, to suck the blood. Mother and Daddy and Sterling talked about the details of the sale. On the arm of my chair a small white ticket fluttered on a loop of white thread: $5 or best offer. All the furniture, including the desk and the desk lamp, had these white tickets. I suppose this was what had been keeping Sterling occupied during the weeks after he learned of Randall’s death. He had made the decision quickly, he explained to Mother and Daddy. He wanted to get rid of the clutter, to return to Baltimore, to his research, his life there. Most of this was Jeannette’s, anyway.
Sterling swept his hand around the room, indicating “most of this,” I suppose. I pictured Jeannette there, with their young son, Randall. The windows were washed clean, open, the cold air breaking down the smell of ammonia still sharp in the freshly painted room. She stood in the center surveying the furniture, just unloaded, as the deliverymen waited for her to make up her mind. She did so abruptly, decisively, pulling Randall into her skirt to move him out of their way. The men lifted the sofa, heavy with new down and the thick metal frame the salesman had assured her would guarantee its longevity. The roses, red, brightened with the sunlight through the clear glass, the room washed with the cold newness, a morning’s expectation.
“Perfect,” she said as the men set the sofa down near the bay window, arranging the two wing chairs on either side. She clapped her hands. “It looks wonderful.” The boy clapped his hands too and the deliverymen laughed. One stopped and crouched down to jiggle his chin. “Where’d you get that hair, kiddo?” he said, standing and winking at Jeannette.
I suppose I had this fantasy in the way I’ve had them since I can remember; in the way I still do: so sharp, so distinct, it’s like a waking dream. They’re often peopled with persons I have never met, only heard of, as if I, with concentration, can bring them back into some visible form, even though they’re long dead, their bones rearranged in the graveyards. I remember when you were born how your great-grandmother appeared to me: Vicey, a woman I had only met on a few occasions though one I had heard many stories of; Vicey whose own mother was reputed to be the town whore. You know the story: She was born blind from that woman’s syphilis and died so young we barely knew her. But there she was, sitting in the corner through my labor, unseeing, beside her a lamp with a large pink tasseled lampshade, the light from its solitary lightbulb dull.
Anyway, I must have looked as transported as I was, since I suddenly became aware that everyone was staring at me.
I fidgeted and pulled at my dress. Though it wasn’t Easter, Mother had still insisted that we wear our holiday clothes, as if this weren’t a sad event but a party we were attending.
“Sweetheart,” Mother finally said. “Did you hear your uncle Sterling’s question?”
I looked at Uncle Sterling. I’m not sure I had ever looked at him so directly. He stared back at me like an old, shaky bird. I have mentioned that he had a high forehead in his judge’s photograph. Well, it seemed even higher now that he had lost all his hair, or most of it, though there may have been a few strands he combed across his skull, spotted as his hands and dry. His eyes were hooded with loose skin so that you co
uld not fully tell whether they were blue or brown. His nose, enormous; the kind more often hidden behind a handkerchief as it is loudly blown. I don’t need to say he terrified me and so I simply looked at him and waited, hoping he would repeat it.
“Sweetheart?” Mother said.
“I’m sorry, no,” I said. “I didn’t hear.”
“Uncle Sterling wanted to know if you might show him to Randall’s room.”
My heart went loud in my chest. Did this mean he had never been there? That all these years he had no idea where his son slept? It’s an absurd thought, of course, though at the time I thought it might be true, at the time it seemed perfectly plausible. Every visit I had ever made had seemed as if I were visiting Randall in a place all his own, one he did not share with anyone, much less an old man.
“Yes sir,” I said.
Mother smiled as she always would when we remembered our manners, and the room seemed to gather up with the expectation of our going. Uncle Sterling made no motion, though, and so I sat back down. Now the conversation ground to a halt and the only thing to do was to watch the dust motes drift in the late setting sunlight. I knew if I stood and pulled the heavy drapes aside, I would see the brilliance of the sunset. I had often watched it from Randall’s room. The house must have faced west, because each time I was there it seemed as if the house were the sole audience for the setting sun, sitting square and solid in view of its sinking. Randall and I would each take turns declaiming to the sun—this Randall’s word—as we read aloud the end of whatever we had chosen, our voices rising, our dramatic presentation at its most dramatic, lit in the way that is the most romantic, or youthful. If I could have pulled aside the heavy drapes now I might have been inspired to recite “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” or something equally predictable. I don’t know. Perhaps I would have just looked.
