by Andrea Lee
And as the day approaches, the obstacles turn out to be about as solid as dragons made out of clouds.
Everything organized by the bride and groom, because the old folks have nothing to contribute anymore, except checks.
The wedding on this neutral university ground, far from the incense-filled arches of St. Michael’s in Little Compton or the high, yellow Baptist gloom of New African in Philadelphia. In the soaring ecumenical space of Memorial Church, a place that suggests a utopian lecture hall.
The joint bachelor party, a tequila blast where the happy couple get knee-walking drunk and perform a double striptease to “Brick House.”
The bride, glorious as the queen of Sheba with a rose in her hair, teetery high heels, and a yellowing muslin dress that once belonged to her grandmother.
Nick, reassuring everyone by how handsome, how steady, he looks in a suit.
The rumbling basso of Mira’s uncle, a famous Congregational minister who flies in from Nairobi to perform the ceremony. His dour brown face and his strange pale eyes flickering with resignation over the young couple, as if he had seen it all before.
The swell of laughter in the church during the kiss, where Nick grabs Mira and lifts her up and bends her back as if he’ll never let go. An old uncle of Nick’s who teaches classics at Amherst calls out, Hymen îo Hymen, Hymen!
In the end, a wedding not very different from others held on campus. A strain for the bride and groom, who can hardly wait to grab their backpacks and take off for Maine and then Greece, where they’ll spend a month lost to the world among dazzling islands, the blinding sea.
Yet for the others, most especially the relatives with qualms, something extraordinary happens after that theatrical kiss. The pleasant dormitory garden where tables are spread in the shade of the old maples becomes the setting for a pastorale. Mira and Nick, who have steeled themselves for anything from barbed politeness to a full-scale race riot, find themselves enclosed in a bubble of arcadian harmony. Where, like figures in a dynastic union, they shine like symbols of the general good.
A sense of liberation is in the air. The two families suddenly realize that they need nothing from each other. That the terrifying intimacy is the province of the young couple. So they can relax.
The Reivers notice that none of the Wards is dark-skinned, or fat, or dressed in loud colors, or possesses frightening ghetto accents. Several of them are distinguished people. That the Wards, puzzlingly, seem resigned and not at all jubilant about a marriage that twenty years before would have been unthinkable.
The Wards notice that the Reivers are not the lords of the earth. That neither are they limp-wristed white liberals who are so easy to despise. Nor the trash who lined the school steps, howling and spitting, in South Boston and Little Rock. One or two Reivers are plump, and several are badly dressed in a way that cannot be put down to New England parsimony.
Mira’s famous uncle and Nick’s father drink scotch and trade portentous gossip about Liberia and Somalia, and the foibles of K Street, and obscure think tanks.
Old Reiver aunts, overeducated at Bryn Mawr, swap reminiscences of their civil-rights days with old Ward aunts, overeducated at Spelman.
Mira’s mother, in pleated chiffon, has drunk several glasses of Vouvray, shed a tear for her dead husband, and now sits in the shade with a lively old elementary school teacher, a distant Reiver cousin from Concord, happily exchanging tales of peril in inner-city classrooms.
Babies cry and are put to sleep, and children climb walls and trees.
Mira’s normally sedate older sister, Faith, kicks off her shoes, pulls her dress down on her lovely shoulders, and flirts outrageously with Nick’s younger brother, Teddy.
Nick’s cousin, in a large Chinese hat, nurses her infant son. Who will later stand on a Cambridge street corner blushing at the sight of Mira.
A Chesapeake Bay retriever chases an Italian greyhound and knocks over a table full of glasses.
Nick’s former crewmates from St. George’s take Nick and Mira into the dormitory bathroom and present them with half an ounce of the finest Colombian.
The toasts include references to the poetry seminar that brought the happy pair together. Finally the old professor reads:
To the Nuptial bower
I led her blushing like the morn: all heav’n,
And happy constellations on that hour
Shed their selectest influence; the Earth
Gave sign of gratulation, and each Hill; Joyous the birds; fresh Gales and gentle Airs
Whisper’d it to the woods, and from thir wings
Flung Rose, flung odors from the spicy shrub
Disporting, til the amorous Bird of Night
Sung spousal, and bid haste the Ev’ning Star
On his Hill top, to light the bridal lamp.
He blinks in the sunlight, his bald head covered with age spots and his hooded eyes behind his reading glasses making him look like an ancient tortoise.
The bride and groom stand through this with a charming awkwardness, he in his blue suit and she in her yellowed wedding dress. Their weary young faces flushed from the drugs they have taken. They look tall, handsome, in a matching way that suggests that they are their own race. Twin stars in the sky. Too good for this wedding. Too good for anything, too rich for use. For a moment the eyes of the guests hurt from looking at them.
And then they are gone in jeans and T-shirts, rattling off to Maine in an old loaned MG. The bouquet thrown to Faith, who marries her high school sweetheart with much more traditional pomp six months later. Parents and friends embrace, a whirlwind of tears and confetti and rice.
THE GUESTS
Back in the garden, we suddenly acknowledge our own importance. And our relief. As if a strategic task has been accomplished with the sending off of those two in the old sports car. We savor our position in the shaded enclosure of the powerful university. Black and white chess pieces mingled in the waning hours of a June Saturday, when campus is shut down and the streets are quiet. Where the setting sun gives a festal golden tinge to every complexion, and there are still bottles of wine to finish. In circles we sit down on the grass and on the cheap university folding chairs. Heedless of our fancy clothes, which we’ll soon take off, finding ourselves the same as ever. But now, brandy and cigars come out. We are infatuated with one another, young and old. Nobody wants to leave. And in fact, we sit and drink and talk about unimportant things until the impatient student waiters clear the tables and summer darkness falls. There is an odd feeling, a communal tipsiness, in the air, and suddenly everybody knows what it is: peace and—it must be—love.
5
NICK
2004 • WHITE SNAKE
The earliest dream he remembers is the Ferris wheel. Turning faster than the real Ferris wheel at Rocky Point, a buoyant speed that means happiness. And it holds cartoon animals: dogs, cats, mice, who are smiling and waving. Like the Japanese anime that enthralls his two younger daughters, or the crap plastic toys made by that deadshit Zenin. Nick must have started dreaming it when he was three or four, when his family was still in the old house on Moffatt Lane. He’d wake up feeling good, that things were in their place. But a few times, the dream changed. The image would blink out like a TV going off. And there’d be a black field with a white line across it that would suddenly convulse in pulsing rhythmic curves like a mechanical snake. Each time, he’d jolt into consciousness, not screaming but dumb, frozen with the terror of a world sliced into glaring extremes.
This memory comes to mind, strangely, as he sits with Maddie in a sleek overpriced Cambridge coffee shop, a few weeks into her freshman year.
Weird recollection to have when you’re contemplating a gorgeous grown-up daughter who has just started Harvard. A moment rich with a thousand facets of feeling that offset the ordinary sinking sensation caused by tottering around one’s old campus in that dreariest of supporting roles, a paterfamilias.
There is, for example, the smug paternal sense of completi
on, of having his child arrive at a conventional peak of success in the eyes of all the world. Then there is the wrench at seeing the face he’s carried in his heart for eighteen years, of its changing forms suddenly distant, finished as a portrait in its womanly perfection.
And of course the disconcerting fact that this face is attached to a healthy pair of breasts, to a long-legged body almost embarrassingly ripe and exuberant that, along with a cascade of chestnut curls, turns every male head on the street.
Nick, who in London enjoys the usual expatriate addiction to scurrilous English tabloids, is aware—though he hopes Maddie is not—that everyone who looks at the two of them must wonder about their relationship. The lovely dark-eyed young woman and the tall blue-eyed man with graying fair hair whose clothes and bearing identify him as one of those who command in the world outside of academe. The captain of finance, still virile, who can claim any young beauty he wants. So—are they father and daughter, or lovers?
The thought tickles his vanity and at the same time makes him uneasy, so that he finds himself lecturing Maddie with extra firmness about the hazards of debit cards and the importance of learning to budget. She sits listening, poking holes in the froth of her cappuccino with the tip of one rather grubby fingernail, her face wearing a daughterly expression of loving indulgence, restrained exasperation. Rapt in thoughts far from debit cards. She teases him that when he lectures her in the ceremonial role of Dull Dad, all she has to do is wait for him to get bored and turn into Cool Dad, the Nick who takes her on tours through his old Clash and Dead Kennedys albums, who reminisces—editing out drink and drugs—about nights at the Rat, at Tunnel, at Danceteria and Trax. For years she has worshipped him uncritically, as daughters who see their divorced fathers on weekends and on vacation do.
Now, in his best Cool Dad manner, he asks, So how’s the race thing on campus these days? Is everybody still obsessively culture-fair?
You wouldn’t believe the political correctness, Dad. Some of the kids and some faculty are so snotty and aware and exclusive about our unique minority cultures that it’s like the Civil Rights Act never happened. Some days I feel like getting dreads, and some days I just identify Italian.
You what? Nick feels oddly disturbed. But you’re not Italian.
But I was born there, and it’s my other language, and people think I’m Italian anyway. It’s my business, isn’t it, Daddy?
I guess it is, says Nick in a conciliatory tone, but inwardly disturbed, reflecting that this is one more thing that bitch Mira has to answer for.
He reaches out to take Maddie’s hand, but she grabs her cup and stares dreamily out the window. I sometimes wonder, she says, if I made a big mistake coming to Harvard.
Nick sloshes his coffee. What do you mean?
Yeah it’s the best. But sometimes this campus feels like there’s no room for me. Like it’s overcrowded. With you. With you and Mom.
That’s where the white snake flashes into view, for an instant twisting mechanically in his peripheral vision as he looks around for help. Probably the fault of this pretentious café, so different from the battered beer-stinking booths of Cronin’s, where he used to hang with his jock roommates. Back in the day, he recalls, this place was a Frenchified clothes store where a lot of cute girls worked in ankle-tie espadrilles. But now the air smells portentously of Ghanaian chocolate and gourmet bean blends, and the walls are laminated black and decorated with blowups of film noir scenes: shadows of venetian blinds, movie stars with tragic cheekbones, sleuths in creased fedoras.
A black-and-white cave of melodrama looking out on the clear September sky, and on the students shuffling up and down the brick street like angels in beggars’ clothes.
Maddie is right: the past abides in university towns, no matter how transient the decor. He sees the truth of this as he looks into her unmarred face, where his own and Mira’s features are inextricably blended. And says the most honest thing that Cool or Dull Dad has ever told her.
It might be true, Mad. I can’t help you there. It’s your world, you chose it, and now you have to make it fit.
1980 • ICE
How could a kid have a dream that was so bland? demands Mira. They’re strolling back from the Brattle Theatre or lying in her Adams House bed, Nick never afterward remembers. How can you have had a life that was so tranquil? It seems crazy to me. She pauses. I could hate you for a dream like that.
I’m white, it’s my burden to be boring, he says, kissing her, grabbing her butt. Crude on purpose. He clowns for her as a white boy, it occurs to him, for the same occult reason black minstrels existed: to defuse suspicion. For love of her, he’s always embarrassing himself, making dumb jokes, dancing ludicrously, burlesquing one of those sad white hipsters who high-five and quote Richard Pryor.
He doesn’t tell her that he started having the snake dream after his brother Meade died from meningitis at seven years old. For the simple reason that he doesn’t remember. Just as he was too young to remember Meade, the golden oldest son, except as a brief flux of joyful noise and light, and then a dark cave of absence around which his mother and father, in their agony, set up a valiant defensive structure of family life.
And Nick and his younger brother grew up in their rather threadbare clan of New England patricians with thrift and books and heirlooms and sufficient love, but always with the feeling that something essential was lost. That you had to compensate.
Now he says, I can’t help it that I was happy. We climbed trees, we caught crabs, we pissed off the side of sailboats. Delivered papers for Dad in the summers. Waited for Mom to pull up at school in one of those big station wagons like barges. I thought Dick and Jane was a portrait of life.
And I was always freaked out by Dick and Jane, says Mira. They were exotic, so white and perfect. I wanted to be them. But my family was on a different planet. My sister, and I used to joke that we were the shadows of Leave It to Beaver. The grown-ups went on about love and brotherhood, but we lived in the suburbs like in a ghetto.
She tells him complicated childhood dreams. Strange animals jumping out of the woods, sea monsters washed up on tiny beaches. The comfortable fieldstone houses of her Mount Airy neighborhood suddenly opening eyes and glaring. Above all, a dream about being unmasked in a crowd. Having a Sleeping Beauty mask torn off to show an alien face, a shameful black face. While classmates from the Quaker school in Germantown, where she and Faith were two of three black students, look on, sniggering.
Nick listens to this and feels sick inside. His own loss, barely comprehended, seems insignificant. He thinks he could spend his life shielding her from dreams like that.
As vivid to him as dreams is the memory of how they first got together, one afternoon before poetry class.
A February sleet storm coats every tree with crystal and turns streets into skating rinks. Slipping and sliding, Nick and Mira meet on the threshold of a rambling Victorian frame house whose shabby opulence and smell of stale wood smoke and cat pee always reminds Nick of home in Little Compton. The house and classroom of a famous poetess, a plump feminist with the piping voice of a little girl.
Nick, lapsed jock, now English major with a medieval bent, writes muscular poems exploring Old English meter. About canoeing at night on the Swampscott River. About a dead dog he found in the rocks on Prudence Island, mummified by salt and sun into rawhide, legs fixed in a desperate swimming position. About being lost in fog in Ledbetter’s Narrows. He knows something about his poems already: that they are good enough to get him into writing seminars, but not good enough to make him a poet.
But Mira, he thinks, might continue. Something about her breezy passionate bullshitting on Eliot and Pound, about her short verses that sometimes sound like specious translations from Lorca but other times transfix one’s imagination like nails hammered in a board. She rejects with aplomb the famous poetess’s insulting urgings that she write “something close to home.”
About what?
About anger, for example. You
r anger as a black woman.
The only time I feel real anger, says Mira calmly, is when I have to hear shit like that.
On the afternoon of the sleet storm, Nick is wearing a ski hat that has frozen into a helmet, but Mira is bareheaded, each curl of her mass of hair encased, like the twigs on the trees, in a rattling sheath of ice.
Amazing! says Nick, courage coming to him out of nowhere. May I? First bowing like Jeeves, and then reaching out gently to pull off the crystal beads that dissolve in his cold hands and run down into his sleeves. Her drenched hair a freezing cloud. She laughs up at him as her chapped wet cheeks glow. Around them the student winter smell of damp uncleaned down jackets. I’ve been meaning to tell you I like your name, he goes on.
Everybody thinks it’s something unusual, but it’s ordinary. Short for Miranda, to avoid horrible Randy. My dad used to teach high school English, and The Tempest was his favorite part of the AP curriculum. But I always thought Miranda was kind of a sap. Fell for the first guy she saw after Caliban.
If you think of it, Shakespeare’s Miranda was just an overprotected only child. But speaking of names, mine’s worse, from some points of view. When I was really little I thought I was named after Jolly Old St. Nicholas and I used to worry about living up to the title. You know, being nice instead of naughty.
Mira grins impudently. Nick’s also another name for the Devil.
They look at each other. Mira sees blue eyes as direct as a fall sky. Nick sees dark eyes like the entrance to somewhere he has always wanted to go.
Nick notices he still has a tiny piece of ice in his hand. He puts it in his mouth, where it dissolves without any taste at all.
A thunder of feet on the porch and all the other aspiring poets in the class pour inside in a noisy frosted body like a polar expedition. And down the staircase in an oversize squaw dress creaks the poetess.
