“Thank you.” Lance checked his wrist for the time, but he must have forgotten to put on his watch. “You don’t really have much reason to ever want to do me any favors. I know that. It’s just, well, people change, you know? Like butterflies. Or moths, in my case. I’m not the same as I used to be. I’m not angry like back then. I don’t let anger or spite or whatever control me.”
Lance, unable to look at his brother, stared at his shoes. A pair of white bucks with red rubber soles, a style he’d worried he was too old for when he’d bought them, they seemed even more garish here in the South than they had in L.A. To make matters worse, the left one had a long, black scuff mark on the inside of the heel. Lance resisted the urge to lick his thumb and scrub and scratch and scour the goddamn thing.
“It’s eleven,” said Harold.
“What?”
“You were looking for your watch. It’s eleven o’clock.” Harold held up his wrist, on which, one link too tight, hung Lance’s sixteen-year-old Rolex.
“Where’d you get that?” Lance said.
“You left it on the mantel downstairs last night.”
On her way up the stairs, Miss Urquhart, with a drink tray in her arms, asked, “What’s so funny?” as she approached the two chuckling brothers.
“Oh, Haddy’s just giving me the time of day,” Lance said, his laughter winding down. He squeezed his brother’s shoulder for emphasis.
“That’s nice,” Miss Urquhart said. “Excuse me, gentlemen.” She wove her way between the two of them, walked down the hall, and, announcing herself at the door to prove she was not the groom and therefore stood no risk of breaking an old wedding superstition, entered the room where the dress was being tried on. Karen stood before a long mirror, and Ramsey sat in a chair behind her. In Miss Urquhart’s opinion, which she formulated while setting the tray on an end table, the bride looked magnificent—standing there in her A-line dress of ivory tulle, with its natural waist, court train length, delicate beading, floral embroidery, and illusion lace sleeves. The maid of honor, on the other hand, looked annoyed.
“The waist is perfect like it is,” Ramsey said. “It does not need to be taken in.”
Seasoned bartender and amateur therapist, the latter an indirect result of the former, Miss Urquhart announced, “I’ve brought the makings for juleps. Thought you two could use one.”
Karen turned around. “But it’s not even noon.”
“It’s the eve of your wedding day, my dear.” Into silver beakers Miss Urquhart dropped mint leaves. She spooned in two teaspoons of sugar from a Weck jar, crushed the contents with a muddler, packed each beaker with cracked ice, filled them with Kentucky bourbon, and added a mint sprig for garnish. “There now,” she said, handing the drinks to Ramsey and Karen.
“Thank you.” Karen sipped. “Think everyone will like my dress, Miss Urquhart?”
“Of course.”
“Think they’ll like me?”
“Beg pardon?”
“I want everyone to like me. Houghton and Annabelle and Fiona and Harold and Branchwater and Sarah and Imogene and Susannah and Nicholas. And you, Ramsey. And you, Miss Urquhart. Do you like me?”
“Well, I—”
“Of course she does,” Ramsey interrupted, trying to save poor Miss Urquhart. Over the entire morning, Karen had been teetering on the border between unhinged and awkward, continually asking Ramsey if she really did like her. It was weird if nothing else. Apparently, from what Karen rambled on to Ramsey about, her family in Canada had been extremely religious, the kind to pound the Bible instead of thumping it, and after she moved to what they called Hollow Wood, they refused to take her calls, telling the operator, “We don’t know anyone named Karen DeWitt.” That last bit was true. She had changed her name from Clop to DeWitt in the hope it would help her career. Karen’s family told the operator they didn’t know her even when she used her old name.
Ramsey wasn’t sure which part made her feel worse for the girl: that she had come from such a horrible family or that she had spent her entire childhood named Karen Clop.
After reordering her mixology tools on the tray, Miss Urquhart told the two women to send for her if they needed anything and then, satisfied that they appeared to be enjoying their cocktails, left the room. Downstairs she set the tray on the bar counter. While emptying the ice bucket, she glanced out the window and noticed Mrs. Forster in the side garden, tangled up in crepe myrtles, passionflowers, and trumpet vines the colors of rainbow sherbet. That woman and her gardening, thought Miss Urquhart, sneaking a quick nip of bourbon.
Annabelle took enormous pride in her garden. It soothed her. Not once since moving in to this house so many years ago had she allowed a gardener to tend it without her presence. Mulch season? She was there. Time to weed? She was there. Rarely did her plants even get watered without her supervision from a house window. Today, hoping to distract herself from the impending nuptials, Annabelle was pinching back her roses, deadheading her petunias, and gathering a few bouquets’ worth of the season’s best to use as centerpieces.
“Tend your own garden,” her father had always told her, a saying he meant figuratively but one she took the other way as well. She’d had that saying in mind when she planned out the lie about his death. Twenty years ago, her father’s drinking reached the point where he could no longer even feed himself, so she had to put him in a rest home, one she paid for with a private bank account. Rather than let her family name get besmirched, she told everyone, including her husband, that her father had died. She insisted on overseeing the burial alone, telling people he had not wanted a funeral. That her father had by then alienated every one of his friends and his only family left were distant relations helped her subterfuge. Until his actual death ten years ago, Annabelle often came close to getting caught in her lie about Royal, who would somehow gain access to a phone, call the house, and plead with her to let him see his grandchildren. He always ended the phone calls by saying how much he loved her.
Along her neck sweat trickled in the blazing sun, just as it had the first time she kissed Houghton. She could use something cool to drink. On deciding that was enough work for today, Annabelle picked up her flower basket and, trying to ignore her throbbing joints, went back inside to get ready for the rehearsal dinner that evening at the country club.
* * *
“Every small town in America has a Country Club Road,” writes Theodor von Hedt in his classic book Die Freizeit-Klasse in Amerika, part travelogue, part social history, part manifesto. Although its name would change to “Old Country Club” when Pine Grove’s new facilities opened a decade later, the road where the club was located on May 20, 1955, still proved the German philosopher’s comment regarding the American leisure class.
Not since the Moonglade Serenade her junior year of high school had Imogene been to Pine Grove. In the ballroom, a large octagon with limestone pillars at each corner, spoked beams overhead like the stripes of a circus top, and floor-to-ceiling glass for every other of the eight walls, she sat at one of the nearly two dozen dining tables, trying not to seem bored while listening to some third cousin once-removed talk about how “for toy shops, it’s Christmas, but for us, it’s Easter through and through.” Over the chattering crowd in the room the band began to play.
“Mind if I distract Imogene from you?” her grandfather, taking a seat at the table, said to the third cousin once-removed, who answered, “Not at all. I’ve love to chat with you later about—”
“Sure. We’ll figure out a time.”
Once they were alone, Houghton said to Imogene, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
“Why?”
“Because this party was boring him half to death.”
“Think about going professional,” said Imogene. “You’re a really funny guy.”
Houghton smiled rather than laughed aloud. His granddaughter had always reminded him of both Annabelle and his mother, incapable of settling for anything, saucy when needed, sympathetic when
necessary, the type of person who could become someone great with the tiniest, tiniest push. Wasn’t competition the basis of capitalism?
“I need to have a serious talk with you, Imo.”
“Okay?”
“It’s about the company. One day it will be yours. Yours and yours alone.” Houghton leaned forward, tilting his head at Imogene. “I want to be sure you deserve it. Understand. It’s a lot of responsibility. Think you can live up to that kind of standard?”
Ding! Ding! rapped a piece of silverware against a glass. Ding! Ding!
Across the ballroom, as the band came to a halt, Ramsey stood at a table next to Harold, setting down the fork she had just used to strike her champagne flute. “Ladies and gentlemen!” she yelled. “My brother and I would like to make a toast!” On the other side of her at the table sat Susannah, who wasn’t listening to a word her mother said. Susannah was busy planning how to make her Big Escape.
Earlier that evening, she and Nicholas had promised that, if the party wasn’t fun, they would sneak away to the golf course, and Susannah had now decided this party was not the kind of fun she had been expecting. She’d wanted to see women in lilac evening gowns of ribbons and netting and accented by long white gloves, men with fluffy cravats at their necks and pleated frills poking from their cuffs, all of them dancing an ever-so-splendid Scottish reel around the ballroom. Instead, the men wore baggy slacks and sports coats with fat ties, the women, though gloved, wore dresses of only one fabric, and none of them were so much as tapping their feet. Someone could have at least sat in the corner playing a pianoforte.
Susannah’s mother was still making a speech about her uncle Lance. Trying to make it appear an accident, Susannah knocked her napkin, balled next to her dinner plate, off the table and onto the floor. She feigned a look of concern. In order to pick it up, she slid from her chair, knelt to the floor, and, leaving the napkin behind, started to crawl away.
Banquet tables along the walls of the ballroom kept her hidden from sight as she worked her way toward the exit. The knees of her white stockings looked bruised from all the dirt on them by the time she ran into Nicholas. “Did anyone see you?” she asked.
“No. You?”
“Uh-uh.”
“The doors are right there. We could make a run for it, but I think it’d be better if we just walk right to them, act natural.”
Acting natural, Nicholas and Susannah rose from their hiding spot at the same time, their reappearance camouflaged by the sudden bout of applause from the crowd as Susannah’s mother finished her speech. Waiters bobbed around the tables, refilling water glasses, carrying away empty plates. A few guests stood and headed for the bathroom.
The two fugitives reached the doors, on the other side of which, viewable through glass panels, lay acres on acres of green-grassed, rolling-hilled freedom. Unfortunately the doors were locked for the evening. Nicholas twisted them hard, but the knobs would not budge.
“What are you two criminals doing?”
Drink in hand, Houghton stood smiling at his two grandchildren, wondering why they were so comically wide-eyed, their mouths shaped into perfect Os.
“Nothing,” they said in unison.
“That’s for sure.” He sipped his cocktail without taking his gaze off them. “Nicholas, I think your mother’s looking for you. Susannah, maybe go tell yours you enjoyed her lovely toast. ‘I enjoyed your lovely toast, Momma!’ Practice it on your way over.”
What cookie jar had they been trying to stick their hands in? Houghton was thinking as he watched Susannah and Nicholas weave a set of paths to their respective mothers. He edited the turn of phrase: “respective single mothers.” Years ago, nobody would have imagined a child could be raised properly without two parents, but now, here were two children who had been raised exceptionally well in just that scenario. Houghton had to hand it to Ramsey, and he especially had to hand it to Sarah. After Monty’s accident, Houghton had worried that Sarah, a dry wit without the wit, more pageant queen than world-beater, would have problems raising Nicholas on her own. But she had done it. He supposed it shouldn’t have surprised him all that much. The two strongest people he knew were women; one had given birth to him and the other had said, “Obviously,” when he proposed.
Into Houghton’s view of his grandchildren appeared Truitt the pastor. Resident of Belzoni, Mississippi, where he presided over a Black Jack church, Truitt Baumgartner had been brought in to officiate tomorrow’s ceremony because of his expertise in the traditions and customs of a “genuine southern wedding.” For his son’s big day Houghton wanted the circumstantial pomp by which the Delta had come to be known. Not having met the pastor till now, he was surprised at the man’s age. He doubted if Truitt was even thirty.
“Mr. Forster, I presume,” said the pastor, taking Houghton’s hand.
Houghton said it was a pleasure to meet him and asked if he had settled into his room all right. “Thank you again for agreeing to officiate. I realize it was short notice.”
“My pleasure.” The fair-complexioned Truitt nodded mechanically. His hair, the mottled color of a fox squirrel’s tail, fluttered. “It’s the least I could do, given my history with your family.”
“History?” asked Houghton.
“Did Mrs. Forster not mention it? I gave the service for her father’s burial. Of course, she was the only one in attendance, but she still felt someone from the church should be there.”
Houghton laughed. “Think you’ve got the wrong Teague. If you gave the service, you’d have been—how old are you?”
“Thirty-one.”
“You’d have been eleven years old.”
With a tilt of his head, Truitt said, “I was twenty-one at the time. I remember because it was my very first burial. Yes, though, I can see your point. I was indeed young. Felt the calling at an early age, Mr. Forster. My father had a saying about that, in fact.”
For the next few minutes Truitt continued, but Houghton could no longer hear him. He was looking through the crowd that filled the ballroom at Pine Grove, past the waiters bringing out dishes of syllabub for dessert, on a few occasions and by request leaving and returning with banana ice cream; past the club manager standing like a drugstore loafer in the back; past bowls of pickled peaches congealing in syrup and plates smeared with watermelon-rind preserve; past the local guests who were attired on the cocktail-hour side of formal, voile dresses on the women, planter’s boots on the men, and middy blouses on the children; past the bride; past the groom; until he spotted Annabelle sitting by herself at their table.
* * *
That night, Ramsey went quietly to her room after putting Susannah to bed. She closed the door behind her. In front of the mirror, she was about to undress, taking down her hair, sliding off her rings, when in a corner on the opposite side of the room a shadow moved.
“Jesus Christ!” Ramsey said, half scream and half whisper, on noticing Karen. She turned around to face her. “What are you doing in here? You scared me about half to death!”
Karen, sitting in a chair, shrank into herself. Her only verbal response was a distinct rhythm, low sobbing as the flat notes, infrequent sniffles as the sharp. She was dressed in a nightgown. Her hands cradled her face.
“Hey. Hey there.” Ramsey knelt in front of Karen. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re not coming.”
“What? Who? What?”
“Never mind,” said Karen, standing up. “I shouldn’t be in here.” With hesitant determination she marched toward the door, not making any noise because she had taken off her shoes. Ramsey, still on her knees, didn’t have time to grab her before she reached the door, so she gave her a command, accidentally putting more force into it than she had intended.
“STOP RIGHT THERE.”
Like a reprimanded child Karen did as she’d been ordered. Her fingers hung frozen midair, reaching for the doorknob. After getting on her feet, Ramsey guided the stunned girl to a seat on the edge of the bed, squeezing her hand t
o get it to relax. Next, on the second floor of a house quiet as a bookstore, in a bedroom colored by the noncolor of moonlight, blue but not blue, white but not white, Ramsey sat beside Karen, looked directly into her eyes, and, trying for the gentlest tone she could muster, asked, “Who’s not coming?”
“My family.”
“Aw, honey, I’m so sorry. Were they supposed to? Didn’t Lance say—”
“They told me they weren’t coming. But I thought.” Karen’s voice crumpled in on itself. “I was hoping they might try and surprise me.”
“Ssssh, ssssh,” Ramsey said when the sobbing started up again. She put her arm around Karen’s shoulder and pressed her face against her chest, letting her make a damp outline of her eyes, nose, and mouth on the front of her dress. “They could always show up tomorrow, a last-minute surprise.”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because their wedding present came today.” From a pocket of her nightgown, Karen removed an envelope, The Sweetest Thing’s address written on its front, below the name “Karen Clop.” She handed it to Ramsey. Inside the envelope was a single, one-way train ticket to Toronto, nontransferable, third class, “Fair Weather Route.”
For years after that night, anytime Ramsey and Karen saw each other, they’d exchange a look, the flattened expression of trying to suppress a smile, in remembrance of the moment Ramsey considered the entire situation, how it explained why she had been so anxious that day for everyone to like her, and, while ripping the ticket to pieces, said, “Third class? You’re about to be a Forster. We don’t travel third class.”
Karen looked almost angry for a moment, watching wide-eyed as the pieces fluttered to the floor. Then, quietly at first but gaining in volume, she began to giggle, like a spit-take in slow motion, culminating with a burst of breath exhaled through closed lips: “Pffffffffffft!” Ramsey joined in herself.
“I bet Lance would have done the same thing,” Karen said once their laughter had quieted. Her eyes were still sodden with tears.
American Pop Page 30
