“Ready?” Marcie said.
Sallyann’s mother stood. She picked up the fedora. Go home, darlings, she might say even now. Widows are notorious witches. “Sit down, girls” was what she did say, though Helen had never left the glider. Sallyann’s mother held the hat in her upturned palms and offered it to June. June’s hand dived in like a baby seal. It surfaced, a folded paper between thumb and two fingers.
Helen next.
Marcie.
Sallyann.
Then the four girls retreated to separate corners of the porch. Sallyann’s mother carried the hat out of the room. She followed her daughter’s earlier path from porch through living room to coat closet, its door now closed. She moved on to the kitchen. She placed the hat in the empty sink and lit a match and dropped it among the unclaimed bridegrooms. They burned quickly. She ran water into the hat before the little bonfire could do more than singe the silk lining.
When she returned to the porch she found Sallyann alone.
“They all thanked you, Mom.”
“Such sweethearts,” she said, her voice light, or perhaps trembling. Both went to bed.
Greedy Marcie had deftly lifted two tickets to happiness. The first bore the name of one of the Larrys, a tall, awkward boy. Sitting at her frilled dressing table, she looked up into the mirror. Larry would be dazzled if she turned her attention his way. But he would respond—there was a confidence within his clumsiness. In fact, she thought, now studying his name as if she were studying him—the thin chest, the mouth frequently marred by cold sores, the dreams, the ambition to become a doctor like his father—he had an excellent future. She considered him for several minutes. Then she looked again at the other paper. Biff Gray.
Biff. He had flirted with her at some graduation parties, and once at the beach. He had overlooked her at other times. Something more than merriment was needed to captivate him—some quality she had not yet achieved. She would make it her business to achieve it.
And so, the next time she ran into Biff, at the tennis courts, she nodded briefly and returned her full attention to the game she was playing with June. She played better than usual, and won. June, accustomed to beating Marcie, threw her racket into her bike basket and pedaled off—she said she had to babysit. Marcie bought a Coke and settled herself on one of the slatted chairs. After his game Biff sat down next to her. She gave him a smile—not her usual broad one, however. She did not show her teeth, perfect though they were; she kept her chin lowered; she concentrated on a storybook sequence of thoughts. The unusual blue-green of my eyes indicates that there is a cache of emeralds hidden somewhere in my father’s house. Some of them may have been distributed about my person. Only the brave deserve the fair. Concentrating, she said nothing, not even hi. He began to talk.
That was the way of their courtship—Biff talking, Marcie listening with her eyes. Her high spirits, her healthy optimism, her clever chatter—all were restrained in order to perfect the new talent. Once she had been a thoughtless tease. Now she was a seductress.
They were married two years later. At the end of the celebration Marcie turned her back to her bridesmaids and threw the bouquet over her buttermilk shoulder. It was a wide flattish nosegay, all yellow flowers, and it looked rather like a garden hat. Helen caught it.
Helen had drawn Steve Folkster’s name. She’d known him since third grade. He was a diligent student, a good athlete, an everyday sort of fellow. But in Sallyann’s mother’s graceful script he became someone fresh, a young man with interests to reveal—a yearning for the mountains, say, or a passion for bees.
Helen did something unusual for those times—she telephoned Steve and, without preliminary remarks, invited him to the movies.
“I didn’t know you liked me,” he said that night, wonder steaming his face.
“I always liked you,” she fibbed.
“I’ve always been crazy about you,” he said. That claim probably wasn’t true either, but no matter. She liked him now. He was crazy about her now. And it turned out that he was a passionate woodworker, and that he was devoted to his three young nephews, and that he was slow to anger, and that he was able to forgive her spurts of unkindness.
And so, when Helen caught Marcie’s bouquet, she left the other bridesmaids and carried the flowers to Steve. He drew her into the harbor of his embrace.
She was protected by his devotion for the next forty years, through all their woes: his job lost, twice; a malformed infant who lived a week; her brother’s intractable depression; the prolonged defiant adolescence of each of their surviving children. Even when she briefly left him, haring after a woman who had no long-term use for her but who liked to be tied up, liked to be taken from behind—he gravely withstood the desertion, gravely welcomed her back.
There was nothing written on Sallyann’s paper.
In the corner of the porch, she folded it again and then unfolded it, looked at both sides several times, took off and put on her glasses. She held the paper up to the moon.
Was it accident? Was it the intervention of fate? Through the years that followed she sometimes remembered to be puzzled. At the time, though, she felt only blessed. A delay had been granted: a secret reprieve.
Many decades later she did mention the queer incident to her mother.
“No!” Her mother raised head and shoulders with such sudden force that the IV pole shook.
“Lie down, dear,” said Sallyann, glancing at the monitor.
Her mother subsided into the pillows. “I assumed that you drew Maurice.”
“I drew a blank.”
“You married Maurice,” her mother reminded her.
“Among others,” Sallyann reminded her in turn. “Franco and Nils—who knew then that they existed? Their names weren’t even in the hat.”
“Franco,” her mother murmured; and even though her voice had been weakened by the troublesome business of dying, it managed to convey the distaste she had felt for Sallyann’s middle husband.
Sallyann smoothed the pillows. “My gorgeous Franco had a bad character but he was passion made flesh. All cats are not gray at night…Did you really think they were?”
Her mother’s heart was unstoppably failing but she was in no pain and her mind was clear. “I thought—I still think—that people are more similar than different. I think that any reasonable couple can…invent its own romance…make its own happiness. See how right I was with Helen and Steve, with Marcie and Biff.”
“Marcie and Biff both play around, I hear.”
“Look who’s talking,” her mother said. Her affectionate hand found her daughter’s.
Sallyann wore contact lenses these days. Her still fiery hair was coiled around her head. She had fulfilled all possible promises: had become stunning, had become worldly, had become an important anthropologist, had lived in various places, had married and divorced and borne interesting children. Though nearly seventy she would probably marry yet again. It had become a gratifying habit, more enjoyable each time she did it; but the man in the fedora still occupied pride of place in her heart. Now she had returned to Godolphin to nurse her ancient, twice-widowed mother.
“So it was you who drew the blank,” her mother was whispering. “All along I thought it was June.”
No one will ever know the name of June’s intended. She pocketed the paper she had lifted from the hat. While the other three girls were reading theirs—or, in Sallyann’s case, trying to read hers—June was merely musing. Once home, she went into the bathroom and, face averted, tore the paper into many pieces and flushed the pieces away.
She too felt relief, deeper than Sallyann’s. She would not merely delay; she would retire. She could pretend that Celibacy was the name she had drawn; she was freed now to become that endearing thing: an old maid.
At college in Maine she had been languidly studying the history of music. Now she switched to biology; and in graduate school she made fungal morphology her specialty; and there, among the mushrooms, she found her life’s su
staining interest. It was a particular organelle called individually the parenthesome, though it always came in pairs. She spent her postdoc investigating its properties, and, with a succession of cherished lab assistants, she spent the years afterward discovering its many uses. She, and they, received awards and honorary degrees. When she was fifty she bought a cottage on a hill. She grew roses and dahlias and poppies. She was the cellist in an amateur string quartet that met faithfully every week and gave occasional recitals. She kept in touch with old friends.
“You knew there was a blank?” Sallyann asked her mother.
The old woman briefly lifted her chin: Yes.
“Did you put it into the hat?”
The barest side-to-side motion: No.
“But you let it stay there.”
This was not posed as a question; and she hadn’t the strength to reply; and anyway there were too many answers. Because she had been acting as agency, not executive: she’d been as passive as the fedora. Because chance allows itself an occasional collaborator. Because Helen needed an opportunity to discharge her malice. Because the one blank paper made the game more interesting. It was only a game, after all. Who could have known that the girls would play it so seriously. Who could have predicted that a woman addled by bereavement could wield such influence over four sprites with their lives ahead of them, with choices thick at their feet.
Sallyann saw that her mother could no longer speak. She bent over the loved face. “You did a marvelous thing,” she said. “We are all happy enough.”
Sonny
Of all the books Mindy’s father received during his illness and convalescence, his declared favorite was Legends of the Jews. Fat warty Rabbi Goldstone lugged the set into the sickroom on one of his unwelcome visits and deposited all six volumes with a godly thump onto the bed, as if the learning inside might overcome ills of the flesh. Mindy’s mother, Roz, gave the rabbi one of her ambiguous smiles—this one, Mindy knew, meant “Strike me dead if I open one of those tomes.” The book Roz grabbed from a stack sent by patients was B.F.’s Daughter—the first J. P. Marquand since the war. She admired Marquand’s well-bred characters.
As for Mindy and her two sisters, they liked best the optical-illusion book, Masters of Deception, brought to the door by the maid of Mrs. Julius Barrengos, who lived in a grand house on the next street. Masters of Deception’s illustrations included paintings and engravings by Dalí and Magritte and Escher. Impossible things made possible—a hat floating between clouds like a bird, a watch dripping like syrup. Transformation was the game: just what the Margolis girls were looking for.
Retransformation, really. Their father had already been transformed from a hearty man into an invalid. So Mindy and her sisters wanted to return to what they’d all lately been—a reasonably contented family of six: two parents; one maiden aunt, Cecile—she chose the latest Perry Mason from the stack; and three princesses, otherwise called daughters. “Fairy tales always have three daughters,” Thelma noted. “The older two are mean, the youngest is nice.” At twelve, Tem was the youngest. “Though Beauty’s sisters are not so bad…”
“Three sisters are endemic in drama,” said Talia, the oldest. “Chekhov wrote a play of that very name, and think of Lear…”
“I never think of Lear,” said Mindy.
“What’s a Lear?” said Tem.
Talia at sixteen was the family intellectual. She was in the eleventh grade’s first group in the three-track high school. Mindy, two years younger, was in the ninth grade’s first group. Tem was still in untracked grammar school.
Talia persisted. “Lear, a king, had three daughters: Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia.”
“In the gender category our family doesn’t balance,” Mindy said, disregarding those made-up names.
“Dad and Mom hoped you’d be a boy,” Talia told her.
“After me they hoped that Tem would be a boy,” Mindy said.
“I am a boy,” Tem said. “Sometimes.”
Whatever Dr. and Mrs. Margolis had hoped for, they expressed only satisfaction with the brainy, underweight Talia, the curly, pretty Mindy, the sturdy Tem. Tem had a talent for drawing—faces in particular—which she exercised with particular vehemence during her father’s recovery. It was Tem who had first lit on Masters of Deception. She soon learned to reproduce the optical illusions at the beginning of the book. Her favorite was the standard schema of profile confronting matching profile with a space between them. Anybody staring at the drawing got freed suddenly from profiles and found herself looking instead at the silhouette of a vase created by slanting foreheads, prominent noses, rounded lips, and jutting jaws. Tem drew pairs of matching profiles with a neat vase between them, and then pairs of nonmatching profiles producing severely asymmetrical vases in danger of falling over.
As for Legends of the Jews, all three girls could see Dr. Margolis, through the half-open bedroom door, propped up in bed with one of the volumes splayed on his lap. Every so often he turned a page. So Talia abandoned Deception and chose a volume of Legends for herself and read it in the living room on her father’s leather recliner. She copied phrases into a spiral notebook. Uninvited, she read pages from the Legends out loud to her mother, who, Mindy noticed, only seemed to listen; to Tem, who glared as if annoyance could transform Talia into a pillar of salt; and to Mindy, who liked the thought of God becoming soft, melting like a watch, saving Isaac, saving Jonah.
But Mindy liked best the paintings of Arcimboldo. He was a famous sixteenth-century Italian, the book told her. His portraits were composed of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. That is, he painted representations of fruits, vegetables, and flowers so arranged that together they formed the likeness of a grotesque person. They had helpful titles, and after a while you saw that, say, the portrait called Autumn, a face in profile, had a pumpkin for a hat, grapes for hair, a potato for a nose, a cherry for a wen. His cheek was an apple, his ear a lemon slice. The Gardener, an assembly of oversize root vegetables, bore an unhappy resemblance to Rabbi Goldstone. Each vegetable or piece of one was rendered so precisely that Mindy wanted to eat it right off the page, or, if hygiene demanded, plunge it into boiling water first.
Fruit played its part in the Legends too, Talia told her: Eve’s apples of course, but also many other juicy foodstuffs, like pomegranates. “‘Moses was commanded to cause a robe to be made for Aaron,’” she read. “‘Upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet…and bells of gold between them…Aaron’s sound shall be heard when he goeth unto the holy place before Jehovah, and when he cometh out, that he die not.’”
Mindy’s class had done mythology last year. “In Ancient Greece the pomegranate was a symbol of death.”
“Shut up,” Tem said to both her sisters.
There were no pomegranates in Arcimboldo’s work, but there was all that familiar produce. It reminded Mindy of Louie the vegetable man.
Louie the vegetable man was not composed of fruit or vegetables. He was composed of a cap, a face with little eyes and a big nose and a mouth missing some teeth, and a pile of assorted clothing from a junk shop. He was called the vegetable man because he owned a fruit-and-vegetable truck.
Before Louie the Margolises had had a different vegetable man—Paci, born in their middle-size New England city but of Italian descent, like almost one-third of the population. Another almost-third was Irish. The third nearly third was Yankee. There were Negroes too, slighted in so many ways—housing, city services, schools, employment—that it was a wonder they didn’t revolt. To Roz, instructed in hierarchies by her beloved Marquand, the city’s ethnic groups formed a ladder—Yankees on top, then Jews, then Italians, then Irish, then a bunch of others like Armenians, then Negroes. She graded Jews within their category too. On the Jewish ladder the rungs were occupations: professors on top (there was one Jewish professor in the local college), then doctors, then lawyers, then businessmen (unless very successful, in which case they moved above lawyers). Beneath middling
businessmen were high school teachers, inevitably unmarried, living with their mother or taking up residence in their younger brother’s house, like plain Cecile; and then people who worked with their hands, like chiropodists, and then tailors who worked on their knees. Beneath tailors were vegetable men. Like the lone professor, there was just one of those, Louie.
These rankings were flexible; personal characteristics like beauty, musical talent, and tragedy could elevate a person’s status. Murky pasts, schnorring relatives, disappointing children, and the failure to marry could lower it. This ordering of people, Talia informed her sisters, was rather like the divisions in heaven, where…
“Don’t tell us!” Mindy said.
Talia’s eyes watered. Mindy had noticed that Talia was less know-it-all these days, even though her new glasses made her look like a genius. That was paradoxical, Mindy thought (she was improving her word power).
“Okay, tell us,” Mindy relented.
“You are not heavenly material,” snapped Talia, recovering. “Here on earth Mom’s rankings show how uneasy she is about us.” Though by being children of a doctor they occupied the next-to-highest rank, Talia explained, there was always the danger of unfortunate friendships leading to inappropriate attachments or—God forbid—inappropriate marriages. “Mom’s seen it happen in life, she’s seen it in—”
“I will marry an appropriate prince,” said Tem, who was apparently a girl today.
“—Marquand. So she wants to teach us where everybody stands.”
Their mother’s instruction was casual: murmurs over the slender shoulder as she stood at the sink, her face not quite in profile—curls obscured a portion of the smooth brow and the cheek, and all you could see was the brief nose. Or perhaps during a trip to the ice cream store: pretty Mrs. Margolis and her girls. Of Mr. Shapiro, who sold insurance, she confided: “Men in the insurance business can’t make a living doing anything else.” Of a nurse at the hospital, an ebony beauty: “I wonder if white boys fall for her.” Sex appeal could lead directly to miscegenation. Of Mrs. Barrengos, who’d attended college out of town and didn’t play canasta and wore prewar clothing: “She’s like a Yankee.” Embezzlement could move somebody’s level from high business to criminal (below vegetable man). The discovery that a seeming aristocrat was in fact Jewish moved him above even the Yankees he had infiltrated. Roz Margolis liked Houdini, or at least the idea of him.
Honeydew: Stories Page 21
