By Any Name

by Cynthia Voigt

  Mumma was not distracted from what she perceived to be the hidden, if not the main, point. “What about a party?” she demanded of Grandmother, but before Grandmother could answer, she turned on Pops. “What party?”

  “The party to announce Spencer’s marriage, of course. Just a few family and friends, people who have known Spencer, and the family, for years. They have to meet you.”

  “You knew about this,” Mumma accused Pops.

  Grandmother intervened. “I instructed him not to tell you. I made him promise. Don’t blame Spencer. It’s my fault.”

  Sensing unease, Meg reached out to her mother, so Mumma took her back and stood with the child against her breast, facing her husband and his mother. She stood on an Oriental carpet worn pale by years of afternoon sunlight and dozens of pairs of bare feet, but Mumma was not quelled by her environment. “I certainly will blame Spencer for making a promise to keep something secret from his wife. He knows better. Although he probably doesn’t realize how difficult it is for me to meet everybody all at once, so I don’t blame him about that. I don’t blame you for that either, although I think you do know perfectly well. What I blame you for is putting secrets between a husband and wife.”

  “We wanted to spare you the worry,” Grandmother suggested.

  Mumma gave her the gimlet eye. She didn’t believe it for one minute. “I wouldn’t have worried.”

  “You’re going to have to meet these people sooner or later,” Grandmother pointed out. “You might as well get it over with.”

  “Are you trying to undermine my marriage?” Mumma asked. “Because I should tell you, Spencer is very happy with me. Although,” she turned to Pops, “I warn you, another trick like this—ever in our life, I mean—and that’s the last you’ll see of me.”

  “It’s not his fault,” Grandmother repeated.

  “Oh, I know whose fault it is. But Spencer and I have a marriage here.”

  Grandmother, tall and straight in a light flowered chiffon garden party dress with one of the large lace collars she favored at the time, made an effort to resume control of the situation. “I’ve put you in the Capstan house,” she told Pops, referring to the small building nestled at the bottom of the hill below the big house. “You can live there for as long as you need—we’ll settle all of that later—but right now you have only an hour to get bathed and changed. You’ll want to get started getting yourself ready. Spencer will show you where everything is,” she said to Mumma, “and baby will be here with me and Mrs. Cook. I’ve had some dresses hung in your closet since I can imagine what condition your wardrobe is in, after having been on the road for so long. Just so you know you don’t have to worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” Mumma said. She wasn’t. She was furious. At both of them.

  Then Grandmother surprised her by saying, in a considering tone of voice, looking down at Mumma from her extra four inches, “You’re not at all what I expected.”

  “Spencer sent you a photograph,” Mumma reminded her.

  “Yes,” Grandmother said.

  “Or do you mean…? I get it, you mean I’m not what you expected of Spencer. For Spencer. I’m looking forward to meeting Abigail.”

  That was the first time Mumma saw Grandmother’s real smile, which occurred no more than once a week, and sometimes not for weeks at a time. This smile was not only rare, it was also brief. It lit up her stern face like a flash of lightning, gone as soon as seen; it didn’t change her appearance or attitude, it merely revealed—and only for that flash—her sense of irony. Isn’t this just the kind of trick life gets up to.

  Pops escorted Mumma down the dirt-and-log stairs to the Capstan house and opened the door to her new home. Without even looking around at the furnishings in the living room or out the window at the view, Mumma told him, “Don’t bother unpacking.”

  She didn’t try to explain anything to him, but she didn’t have to because his family often made him feel the same way, like an unwelcome stranger. Either Mumma would settle in or not, and whether or not he unpacked would make no difference. Besides, the blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit he’d be expected to wear was waiting for him in the closet, so he didn’t need to unpack much of anything. Moreover, he didn’t feel like fighting with anyone, ever again, not even a squabble, in his whole life. So he said to Mumma, “Just what I’d take out in a hotel,” and set about the process of getting dressed for his mother’s party to introduce his bride. He knew who he was, and where, and what to wear.

  So did Mumma, whatever anybody might think to the contrary, although when she looked into the closet and saw the dresses Grandmother had hanging there, she had a moment’s doubt—not about what to wear, and not about who she was, but about where she was.

  (This was the point in the story where Mumma began her refrain of, “Don’t remind me. I don’t want to talk about it,” which prefaced her answers to any of our questions about this first meeting with Pops’ family. “What were the dresses like? Did they have those awful lace collars?” “Don’t remind me about those dresses.” “Where was Grandfather? Why wasn’t he there to meet you?” “I don’t want to talk about your grandfather. I’d already heard all I needed to know about him by the time I saw his face.”)

  Mumma was out of the bath when the same little maid who had opened the door to them arrived at the door of the Capstan house to deliver Meg, with the message that Mrs. Cook thought the baby needed a feeding. Once Meg was attached to a breast, and quieted, Mumma had a visit with the girl, who had been instructed to wait and then return the baby to the big house. Pops was having a postwar bath, a long, leisurely soak, so Mumma had the time and privacy to get to the bottom of whatever it was that was keeping this girl so scrawny and uneasy.

  Her name was Polly Grangery and she was fifteen, just summer help, but she wished she could quit. Not that she minded the work, she never minded work, hard work wouldn’t hurt you, long hours wouldn’t hurt you. It was the people. Not that she minded Mrs. Howland, for all her carry-on, and she didn’t mind Mrs. Brundy either, and she didn’t mind the daughters. Juliet was often quite friendly, not at all stuck up, not like Phyllis, and Anne was in Bourne for her nursing job, so how could she mind someone who wasn’t even there? Although Mrs. Howland said it was probably some man there and not a job at all.

  Polly didn’t mind the housework either; the rest of the staff was very patient, explaining things to her, helping her, so she had nothing to complain about, did she. Mumma rocked in her chair, and nursed Meg, and listened, then asked, “What is it you would complain about? That you’re not mentioning although it’s obvious to me there’s something.”

  “That’s Mr. Howland,” Polly answered, the first but not at all the last occasion on which she and Mumma followed perfectly one another’s mental leapings and torturous grammars.

  “Men,” Mumma said.

  “I know he’s just being friendly,” Polly said. “Everyone says.” She smiled brightly and then burst into tears, a child’s helpless tears born of fear and rage. Then, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Spencer. But you wouldn’t be willing to ask to have me work down here for you, would you?” she asked. “I’ll be all right,” she said, wiping her eyes and nose on the back of her hand, wiping the back of her hand on her starched uniform apron. “After all, a girl has to learn how to take care of herself, doesn’t she?”

  “Who have you talked to about it?” asked Mumma. “Besides me, I mean.”

  “I’d never,” Polly said. “They’d fire me and I need the money. I’m saving.”

  “Saving for what?”

  “To go to school. To be a secretary, maybe for a doctor, maybe for a lawyer. You meet men in offices,” Polly said, and blushed. Polly Grangery was a terrific blusher; her face turned brick red with excitement or anxiety or embarrassment, with anger or impatience, and also—most frequently—with laughter. “I’d like to get married someday, like you, and have a baby, like this one, like you.”

  “We will not be staying on here,” Mumma
told her.

  “You aren’t? But Mrs. Howland said—”

  “I haven’t told her yet.”

  “I was hoping you’d stay,” Polly said, bright red. “I was hoping I could work for you.”

  “You are a planner, aren’t you?” Mumma observed.

  “If a girl doesn’t have her own plans, she could end up with a baby and maybe not even married, and then where would I be? I don’t mean you. You’re married. If I could marry someone like Mr. Spencer, I’d think I’d done well for myself. He’s going to be a professor, or anyway that’s what they’re saying. I could be a secretary in a university college. They have secretaries in those places, don’t they?”

  Mumma shifted Meg to the other breast and told the girl sternly, “There’s more to life than a husband.”

  “For children you need a husband. You can’t tell me you don’t agree with me because you’re pregnant again, aren’t you?”

  It was seldom that anyone surprised Mumma. “I guess you are observant.”

  “How am I going to get ahead if I’m not? With this baby, and being pregnant again, you’re going to want help in the house, and I could work for the whole rest of the summer. And weekends and holidays, after.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t want anyone having an influence on my daughter who puts up with the kind of behavior from men you were talking about.”

  Polly considered that. “I can’t tell Mrs. Howland.”

  “I never thought you would, and she probably knows anyway. It’s him you tell. Tell him to stop. Tell him if he doesn’t, you’ll tell your father.”

  “My dad has worked for the Howlands for years, and my mother too, and everybody says that’s the kind of thing you have to put up with when you work for summer people. They pay much higher wages.”

  “Well then, tell him you’ll tell the authorities.”

  “You mean the police? The minister? They’re all afraid of him, and anyway, he’s a lawyer, from the city, from Boston.” Polly tried to make Grandfather’s status clear to Mumma. “They’d never listen.”

  “Then quit. And say why.”

  “But I need—”

  “Once you get the gumption to quit, and say why, come talk to me about a job.”

  (“I don’t know where Mumma got off being so authoritarian with Polly that day,” I say to Amy but “Mumma taught Polly to stand up for herself,” Amy tells me. I correct her. “Mumma taught Polly how to be her servant.”

  “Polly had three children, and a good husband—even if he wasn’t a lawyer or a doctor, or a WASP either, if that matters, if you’ve turned into as much of a snob as Grandfather,” Amy answers. Having temporarily silenced me, she finishes the job. “Although I admit she never got to be some man’s secretary and work long, tedious hours for low pay, getting home late and too tired to enjoy her family, that’s if she found a man other than her boss to fall in love with. Gee whillikers, Beth, maybe you’re right. Maybe meeting up with Mumma did ruin Polly’s life.”)

  • • •

  On the Cape, Grandmother held parties at the long crescent of private beach below the house, but only the footwear—or, rather, the lack of footwear—nodded at summertime informality. Everything else met higher standards. A marquee was put up, with tables and chairs set out under its cover, as well as the long serving tables for food and drinks, and a special wooden floor for dancing. Grandmother didn’t give cookouts or lobster roasts or clambakes; hers were garden parties, to which the women wore light summer dresses, and some even sported broad-brimmed organza hats, their crowns circled with wreaths of silk wildflowers. The men wore seersucker suits and striped ties, and the gayer blades sometimes a panama hat. This was a Boston crowd, so the jewelry—with the exception of engagement rings—tended toward pearls, strings of which, in those days, women wore to the beach, believing that the warmth of the sun and the oil of their bare skins promoted luster, just as the washing and buffing of their silver by the servants promoted luster—luster being acceptable, glitter not. Because the party was at the beach, however, the women didn’t wear stockings, and nobody wore shoes. Guests set their shoes neatly side by side on an old swimming float the family kept at the foot of the steep road to the beach for just such use, twenty, fifty, eighty, a hundred and twenty pairs of shoes, wingtips and sandals, arranged in neat rows.

  It was hard for Mumma to understand that although she was wearing the swirly red satin skirt edged with black lace, and the off-the-shoulder white blouse edged with ruffles, both of which she had purchased in New Orleans, with big gold hoop earrings for her pierced ears, she couldn’t complete the outfit with high black Cuban heels. Giving up her footwear was bad enough, but when Pops told her that they were expected to stand with his parents to greet guests, she sat down in the living room for the third time, announcing for the third time that she wasn’t going to this party. The first time was when he suggested that it might be politic to wear one of the dresses Grandmother had hung out for her, without earrings, since nobody else would have pierced ears, not in that crowd. Mumma sat right down, declaring, “I’m not going out to meet people looking like a sack of potatoes—and a sack of peeled potatoes at that.” The second time concerned shoelessness. “What kind of people are they? Whoever heard of a formal picnic? Are they trying to have the worst of both worlds?” At mention of a receiving line, Mumma plumped herself down on the sofa and once again announced her refusals, but she knew she had to go along, however much going along went against her grain.

  The receiving line (“Don’t remind me about that receiving line folderol of your grandmother’s—I’ve never felt so unnecessary in my life”) formed up just beyond the shoe float, where the stones and pebbles washed down by rains gathered, which encouraged the now barefoot guests to move swiftly along onto the warm, soft sand toward the well-stocked bar and the abundant platters of food. The line itself was not long, a traditional wedding receiving line, the only real difference being that there were no parents of the bride to add two more hands to be shaken, two more polite congratulations to be offered. “Or,” Grandfather announced to Grandmother as the four of them set themselves up in a line, “to foot the bill.” He knew Mumma heard him, so he smiled and added, “Nothing personal…Rida? I can see”— here he leered—“why Spencer chose you.”

  Mumma refused to stand next to Grandfather in line (“He had the look of a pincher”), so the guests were greeted by—and offered their appropriate pleasantries to—first Grandfather, then Grandmother, then Mumma, and finally Pops. Grandmother would welcome them and mention a name, saying “Mary,” or “Mrs. Gillespie,” or “Cousin James, I want you to meet Spencer’s bride Rida, she’s only just arrived.” All that Mumma needed to do was say Hello and Hello and Hello. Nobody cared what else she might have to say, they just wanted to clap eyes on her. “I’ve heard so much about you,” the guests said, over and over. (“You can bet your boots they had, and they’d probably said a lot, too. I don’t want to talk about it.”) The first people through the line were members of the immediate family, sisters and brothers, sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law, then more distant relations, and Grandmother would mumble some introductory phrase like, “One of the North Shore Campbells,” or, “Her father is a Villier,” and Mumma would say Hello. She met Brundy, and Phyllis, then Phyllis’s husband, Rich, then Ethan and Juliet and Anne, and all except for Brundy said, “I’m so glad to meet you at last,” and “I can’t wait to get to know you.” Brundy, a lean, handsome man like his father, said nothing, but he did really look at her, for one lingering glance. (“Different from your uncle Ethan’s kind of lingering, and if you don’t know what I mean, ask me. A girl needs to know these things.”) Cousins went by, Spencers and Norths, as well as more Howlands. After them came family friends, Gillespies and Maddons, Dawsons, Sawyers, and younger people, Pops’ age, Tommys and Billys and Bettys and Susies, postwar young people who, like Pops, had survived, and at the last a slender, tall, pale woman, introduced only as Abigail. “This is Abigail, of course.
”

  Abigail Smith was quite lovely, wearing a sleeveless linen dress of pale silvery blue, the broad white collar of which set off her slender neck. She wore her long, pale hair up in a chignon. Mumma tried to catch her eye as they were introduced, then while she was shaking the hand of her ex-fiancé, but Abigail Smith would not look up from those clasped hands, until she moved quickly on to join a group of young people standing, talking, with their feet in the shallow water.

  (“I knew it right then and there—he’d never written to her. I don’t know why I didn’t do what Huckleberry Finn says and light out for the territories. It was your father who stopped me, because I couldn’t abandon him in that nest of vipers. Even if they were his own blood vipers.”)

  From where she stood, Mumma could see a long curve of beach, more crowded with each passing minute by arriving guests, and beyond that the water of the cove, protected from the bay by narrow barrier islands of marsh grass. The cove required only this minimal protection because the bay was itself protected on the east by the projection of land out from Woods Hole and on the west by the coast of Rhode Island. (“Just the kind of overprotected place the Howlands liked, and I don’t know how your father turned out as well as he did.” “But Mumma,” I pointed out, “Wampanoag’s where we grew up.” “You had me,” she explained.)

  On the day of Grandmother’s party, the water rippled gently in the sunlight, fluffy white clouds floated across a glowing sky, and a breeze cooled the air with no more troubling effect on shore than a seductive stirring of skirts. It was a perfect day. Guests in summer dress and bare feet held tall champagne flutes, and barefoot waitresses wearing crisp white aprons moved among them, offering delicacies on silver trays. Uncle Ethan, who had learned photography in case the war kept going on—photographers as a rule seeing less combat than other servicemen—took photographs. The high Spencer forehead appears on many of the guests, and the square Howland jaw, as well as a tendency toward youthful balding. In the wedding portrait taken that day, Mumma has her hand on Pops’ arm, and his hand covers it; her hair is wild around her head and bare shoulders; her mouth is set, her face grimly expressionless. She’s rather frightening to look at, not at all the glowing bride, or even—as her outfit promises—the fiery gypsy. Pops looks merely handsome; his bare ankles belie the formality of his dress and expression.