By Any Name

by Cynthia Voigt

  By way of contrast, talk at the table backed into a corner of the living room was faltering. Mumma didn’t want to know about where the Greats had come from, which she already knew, or where they lived, which she could guess. Everybody took slow spoonfuls of the creamy soup, and swallowed slowly, and an awkwardness as heavy as the linen it was swathed in settled over their table. The Greats began to talk about the weather, this spring, last winter, last fall, last summer, and Mumma couldn’t turn them to any other subject, not the chicken salad, not books, not radio shows, and she knew better than to try politics. They didn’t seem to want to talk to her about themselves, either, and the meal limped on. Finally, as they waited for their plates to be cleared, one of the Worthies asked Mumma, “Can you give us any idea how young Brundage is taking the marriage?”

  “He’s living in Paris.”

  “No, no, my dear, we know that, we know all about the son,” another said. “We mean the father. Young Brundage was never what a person would call generous of spirit.” She waited; they all waited.

  “He wants Giancarlo to change his name,” Mumma reported.

  What Grandfather said, which Mumma didn’t quote precisely although perhaps to this quartet she didn’t have to, was that he didn’t want any daughter of his named like some wop Italian greaser, or any grandchild either. If Anne wanted to throw her own life away, she wasn’t throwing his good name away too, he could promise her that. If Anne expected him to do anything for the two of them—just for starters, to pay for this goddamn wedding her mother had her heart set on—then what did Giancarlo have to say about changing his name he’d like to know.

  The Worthies had not yet heard about this, and were surprised into real interest. “Oh my.”

  “Oh my.”

  “I have to say that is just what I’d expect from young Brundage. It’s drink, of course.”

  “But will the boy do it?” they asked Mumma, leaning back to give the servant access. “The fiancé.”

  “I think so.”

  “You could be wrong.”

  “Probably not,” Mumma said. “I’m usually right about things,” she explained.

  They hmphed, then asked, “What are you giving Anne today?”

  “I didn’t bring it,” Mumma told them.

  They were concerned. “But you know, Rida, it’s customary, for a shower, to bring the gift with you. The unwrapping of the gifts is a high point of the party, when you see her with all the fine things for her new home.”

  “Mine isn’t for home décor. It’s practical, for both of them. Giancarlo is practical.”

  “Oh,” they told her, “the groom isn’t to be thought of in the bridal shower.”

  “In my book he is,” Mumma said.

  “Well, yes, of course, dear,” they soothed her. “But this is our book.”

  “I’m sorry to say, it isn’t,” Mumma said. “I’m sure it used to be,” she soothed them.

  “I’m sure it still is,” they warned her, not without curiosity about just who this young woman was and how she was going to enliven their lives. “Tell us, how did you and young Spencer meet?” they asked, and since this was one of Mumma’s favorite stories, especially with such an interested audience, she smiled and leaned forward, to begin it.

  Then dessert plates were set down in front of them and before they could eat, or drink the tea and coffee put down for them, the group from the dining room, hastier eaters, moved past them into the living room to begin the next stage of the party. The five women agreed, without a word spoken, to forgo dessert and end their lunch together. They rose from their table.

  “A lovely luncheon,” one of the Worthies praised Jonquil.

  “How clever of you to start with a cold soup. It quite reminded us that summer will soon be upon us,” another added, the kind of compliment that could be worried over for weeks.

  “And you are entirely correct, dessert really is too much for people as old as we are,” said a third.

  “Oh, really,” the fourth said, shaking her head at her old friends. She turned to Jonquil. “It was very kind of you to seat young Rida with us.”

  The others echoed her. “A lovely shower, a lovely luncheon, Anne is looking so well.”

  Mumma held her tongue.

  The occasion dragged on well into the afternoon, gifts being exclaimed over and their ribbons twined into a remembrance bouquet for Anne to take home and treasure, four identical sets of guest towels from the Greats (all purchased at the same well-known purveyor of quality linens), causing both Anne and Grandmother to laugh merrily and Jonquil Cartenbury to speak with disappointment about Makanna’s clerks, who she felt should have caught the duplications, while the Worthies twittered, “So silly of us, we should have consulted one another, so sorry, such silly-billies,” and, “Do exchange them, please, for something you find that you need, Anne.” (“They were no fools, those old ladies,” was Mumma’s opinion.)

  It was Jonquil Cartenbury who voiced the question, “But Rida, where is your gift?” This was just before the audience had disbanded to talk among themselves for a last few minutes as they waited for the groom-to-be to arrive to pick up his fiancée, which would be their signal of release.

  “I didn’t bring it,” Mumma told her, and didn’t add that a perambulator was too large to be put on top of the grand piano. Eyebrows were raised, and eyes were rolled, but that was, luckily, when the doorbell rang, causing a silence, the whole long double living room silent with its damask drapes and chintz-covered furniture, its landscapes and still lives, its grand piano and the display of unwrapped gifts, and all the women too, all in readiness for the grand finale, the arrival of the groom.

  Giancarlo entered, confident of his good looks if not of his lines, but aware of which was more important to the occasion. “I am not too prompt?” he asked. “I don’t interrupt?”

  Anne rose to take his hand and kiss his cheek, then, placed at Giancarlo’s side, she turned to face the group. “You’re right on time. Everyone? Here he is. Those of you who don’t yet know him, this is my fiancé, John Brooks. Johnny, let me introduce you around. I want everyone to meet you.”

  Mumma, of course, refused to call him Johnny, or even John, and all of her life continued to call him Giancarlo; and so we did, too, unless we were talking about him to one of the other Spencer-Howlands. To us he was Uncle Giancarlo, and a great favorite of ours, and not just for his good looks. Uncle Giancarlo let us dig in his gardens and later, when we reached our teens, was willing to give us summer employment that wasn’t babysitting. He assumed we were in the know about various Howland-Spencer carryings-on, thus becoming a major source of information about many things Mumma considered none of our business. He wasn’t tall and slim, like the stereotypically handsome Italian, but he had an exotic quality despite a square, muscular body; perhaps it was his nose. Uncle Giancarlo’s nose didn’t slope gently out from below his eyes like the rest of the noses we knew. It fell down from high in his forehead, like the beak on some raptor bird. He looked stronger, perhaps more dangerous, than the usual kind of men we saw. He worked in the outdoors as much as possible, even when the business acquired a corporate identity with its own multistory office building just off Route 128, so he was always as tan as a fisherman. He was a romantic vision, in fact, our uncle Giancarlo Ruscelli. I understood why Mumma declined to let him be toned down to John C. Brooks.

  All of the ladies at the shower fluttered with pleasure in his presence. “Now I’ve seen you up close,” Jonquil Cartenbury said, “I can understand why Anne is so ready to forgo a long engagement. If you were mine, I’d want to have you signed, sealed, and delivered as soon as possible, too.”

  Mumma stood back, as did Grandmother, while the others fussed. Giancarlo came to greet them without Anne, who had remained behind at the center of an excited group.

  “Johnny,” Grandmother said, holding out her hand to him. “You do Anne proud.”

  “I hope, yes,” he said. “They like such things, girls do. Th
is I remember from my sisters.”

  Giancarlo didn’t greet Mumma as he had Grandmother and the others, with a formal bow over their outstretched hands. Instead, he put a hand on her shoulder and kissed her first on the left cheek, then on the right, in the Italian way. Mumma loved that, as he knew. Mumma always believed that had she not been so obviously devoted to Spencer, Giancarlo might have given over his attachment to Anne and tried to win Mumma. (“But you know she thought every man she met was in love with her.”

  “Except Grandfather,” Jo reminds us.)

  At the end of the afternoon, Grandmother and Mumma were the last to make their farewells to the Cartenburys and leave that spacious house. Grandmother had a car waiting and she would drop Mumma off before crossing back into the city. As soon as they had settled themselves into the back seat, Grandmother made her move. “I expect we can ask you to give the rehearsal dinner, Rida. That is, I hope,” she corrected, because she was getting to know Mumma’s nature, “that if asked you will say yes. The young man has no family,” she added cannily.

  “I thought he had a big family.”

  “Yes, of course, but they’re in Italy. They’re Italian. They can’t be here for the wedding—which entre nous I admit is something of a relief. However, of more immediate importance is the fact that they can’t be here to undertake the traditional responsibilities of the groom’s family. We’ll have the rehearsal dinner out on the Cape,” she added. “You can’t get Trinity Church with less than twelve months’ notice, so the Cape it is, Saint Stephen’s it is. I am resigned to that. It won’t be a large dinner, no more than forty, I’d think, there are only fourteen in the wedding party, and then immediate family, and then Frances and Jonquil Cartenbury.”

  “Is Jonquil one of the bridesmaids?” asked Mumma, who was not.

  “No, of course not. But if a person is a close enough friend to co-host the bridal shower, it would look odd if she weren’t included in the rehearsal dinner. And I have my hands full with next weekend’s party to introduce John to our friends, as well as to the entire family, so since you two did such a lovely job with this shower…”

  Mumma didn’t respond. She was thinking about the exams Pops had to take, and those he had to grade, and their upcoming move out to their new house on Cape Cod.

  “Besides, I’ve asked Jonquil if she could lend you a hand with the rehearsal dinner and she has quite sweetly agreed. I don’t know what I would have done without her at this time. Do you? What, I mean, we would have done without her support, and help, and generosity.”

  “I’ll do it,” Mumma decided. “But I’ll do it alone.”

  Grandmother turned her face to study Mumma’s expression. “You aren’t jealous of her, are you? What good does that do, Rida?”

  “I’m not,” Mumma assured her, but Grandmother was unconvinced.

  “She could be a useful friend to you. She has such a graceful way about her, and lovely taste, and she seems to instinctively understand how to make things go smoothly. You could do a lot worse than watch how Jonquil does things.”

  Mumma could agree to watch. “But if you want me to give the rehearsal dinner, Dorothy, you have to let me do it by myself.”

  Grandmother considered this, then stated her compromise position. “You’ll let me advise you?”

  “If you want. Also, I can read about rehearsal dinners in Emily Post. What were you thinking of advising?”

  Grandmother commenced. “In the first place, that we give it in the big house. They’re opening it for me this weekend. Aired, cleaned, and polished, it will be an appropriate setting. A formal dinner, seated, with place cards, we have all of the linen and silver, place settings, that’s all taken care of.” Then Grandmother returned to her primary interest. “The wedding reception is at the Club, a more modest affair than Phyllis’s, but Anne will just have to make do, and I have to say that in the circumstances, a little modesty seems appropriate. I need all of the help you can give me, Rida.”

  The car stopped outside of Mumma’s building in North Cambridge.

  “I’ll give you all the help I can,” Mumma assured her.

  Grandmother was puzzled by this qualified promise. “You aren’t pregnant, are you?”

  “Not that I know of,” Mumma assured her. “I could be,” she added, because in those days, unless she was actually menstruating, a woman couldn’t be sure.

  “Perhaps this is a good time to think about getting rid of this distraction,” Grandmother suggested with a slight wave of her hand, barely able to look at the three-story clapboard building. “Since we’ll be needing so much of your time, and energy, for Anne’s wedding, and your children make many demands.”

  “There’s Spencer, too, at the end of his school year,” Mumma said. “Also, the building next door is still for sale and it would be smart to buy it.”

  “My goodness. Can Spencer afford that? With his school costs and all.”

  “You don’t have to worry about Spencer. I’m already paying him back. I can take care of everything.”

  “Yes. I’m sure you can. That I am sure of.”

  Mumma had been away from her daughters for hours, and was eager to return, but she took the time to ask, “When will you have the guest list?”

  “I have it right here”—Grandmother took a sheet of folded paper out of her purse—“with all the phone numbers. Because I was so hoping you would agree to do it. And I do want to help you in whatever way I can. I’m grateful to you, Rida, as is Anne, as well. That goes without saying.”

  “Actually,” Mumma told her, “I’m doing this for Giancarlo. He’s the one without any friends around here.”

  INTERLUDE: GRADUATION EVENTS

  Mumma wanted to be a good wife to Pops, and this was the end of the academic year, when a rush of social events presented opportunities to win the assistant teaching assignments and research positions awarded by professors to their most deserving, or demanding, or maybe even just most beloved, students. His wife made a big difference to a student and Mumma knew that. What she didn’t know, what she never knew, was how to flatter some man whom she privately considered not half as bright as Pops, or a windbag, or even—this was the worst in her private lexicon of academic vices—a phony. Mumma didn’t know how to make useful friends and then make use of them. She didn’t know how not to say what she thought and she never figured out that many people, maybe even most people, disguise, conceal, and even deny their true thoughts and opinions and emotions. She never paid any attention to, or had any curiosity about, what others might be privately thinking; it was the words they actually uttered that she attended to. If people didn’t mean what they said, they shouldn’t have said it: that was her opinion; they were phonies and cheats so she didn’t want anything to do with them anyway. This was not an attitude likely to win her friends at the graduate school, not among students and not among professors. Also, Mumma was not good at being an underling, or the wife of an underling, and students, even graduate students at prestigious universities, are paradigmatic underlings.

  As a wife, Mumma was often a liability. Not that Pops ever thought that.

  That May marked the end of Pops’ first year. The final graduate school gathering, held on the Commons outside the Widener Library, took place between Anne’s bridal shower and her wedding. Rhododendron and azalea and dogwoods were in flower and even the myrtle offered up bright little blue blossoms. All the young men came dressed in lightweight gray suits, their ties striped blue and red and silver, their shoes polished. None of the young men wore uniforms, not even those who were more prepossessing and dashing in them, or who had earned the right to wear medals, thus declaring their deservedness of special notice. Likewise, none of the gray-haired or white-haired men wore academic robes or, in those few cases where they could have, their own military uniforms. Their suits also were gray, but often inexpertly pressed, and their shoes were often scuffed, which reminded everyone that their minds were on higher things. The women present, all of them student
wives, most of them young mothers, wore light, flowery cotton dresses in pastel colors; except Mumma, of course, who had chosen something electric blue splotched with white flowers, with high-heeled white sandals.

  Undercurrents of ambition and envy eddied around the ankles of the chattering guests. Pops sequestered himself off to one side of the party, on higher ground. He waited out the time next to a rhododendron in the company of a couple of equally awkward and earnest fish-out-of-water friends; they stood with their gin and tonics in one hand and, should one of the Alumni House waitresses seconded to the occasion happen to have recently passed, some small edible in the other, while they discussed perhaps some fine point about the nature of monads or the question of property left to female beneficiaries under the Code Napoleon. Mumma mingled, seeking out interesting conversations in which she might take an interesting part and thereby bring notice to Pops, the man who had such a wife. She had no idea what Pops’ particular ambitions were, since he hadn’t confided any to her, but she identified the important men present: Jonas Jackman, who held the Carnegie Chair of Economics, the mathematician Tex Pauley, and Hampton Court, who had the distinction of having had for his Harvard roommate a man who now sat on the state supreme court, so that every year one of Professor Court’s law students was assured a clerkship in that judge’s office.

  Mumma avoided the mathematician (“I knew my limits. It’s always good to know your limits and I knew I had nothing to say about numbers. Or pi”) and joined the group gathered around Professor Court. They were still discussing the March suicide of Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, which everyone knew had been murder, an example of Soviet methods of securing power, representing the threat of Soviet communism to a world that had so recently sacrificed so much to stay free. Professor Court supported the establishment of the House Un-American Activities Committee in response to this threat, with dire warnings to the encircling young people about Communist ambitions for world domination. “It’s a stated objective of Stalin’s foreign policy,” Professor Court said, to murmurs of agreement and self-important noddings of heads. “Anyone who watched the partitioning of Europe not so long ago has to be aware of how they work. Not to mention Berlin. It’s lucky we’re the only ones with the bomb,” he said.