A Big Storm Knocked It Over (15 page)

The house was of formal flagstone with a low porch. On either side of the front door were topiary trees in pots. To get inside, it was necessary to duck under a rose trellis, whose tiny yellow fall roses had climbed into the ivy. From a low hedge in the front yard wafted the pungent scent of cat pee.

Teddy's shoulders were bunched beneath his jacket. Jane Louise, who was intimate with the physical manifestations of his distress, longed to touch him, but this was never a good idea. Teddy's feelings, which he so longed to bury, were not buried, and the lightest touch when he was upset made it worse.

As they passed under the rose trellis, they turned their heads to see Martine bustling toward them. She was dressed in fawn-colored chiffon, with a large hat dyed to match. Her square feet were encased in fawn-colored shoes with cross-straps, and she was carrying what Jane Louise believed was called a reticule, a tiny ornamental bag that looked big enough to contain a mint and a child's handkerchief. She wore a bright pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. No matter how often her daughters got on her case,
Martine applied the makeup of her youth. She kissed Jane Louise and Teddy, enveloping them in her heavy perfume.

“Ted, your dad is on the lawn with the photographers,” she said. “Go help him out, will you?” She turned to Jane Louise. “The girls are upstairs getting dressed, and they're longing to see you.”

Jane Louise knew that there was nothing for Teddy to help his father with and that the girls were not longing to see her in the least, but she was used to Martine. Martine was like her mother. She had an idea of the way things should pleasantly be, and she edited reality heavily to conform with it. Besides, Martine probably felt that in weddings of the royal family there was a proper and appropriate place for the pregnant half-sister-in-law.

Jane Louise followed Martine into the immense foyer and up a curving flight of stairs carpeted in a Persian runner. At the top of the stairs was a large pink dressing room, and in it were Martine's daughters, getting dressed.

For a moment it was a pink-and-gold blur. The sun poured through the pink curtains, causing the pale room to glow. In the center stood Lisbeth and Moira in lacy pink full slips. They were pulling on lacy pink stockings. Their hair was every shade of blond, and their makeup was as pale and perfect as their mother's was not. The dressing table was arrayed with pins, dusting powder, makeup boxes, brushes, and cotton puffs.

“Oh, hello! It's you!” said Lisbeth. It was clear to Jane Louise that for an instant Lisbeth and Moira had no idea who she was. “Oh, gosh! Mum told us you were having a baby. It's due this winter, right?”

Although Lisbeth was younger, Jane Louise always thought of her as older since she already had a five-year-old and a three-year-old. She belonged to a world of normal suburban matrons who married young, had babies young, had family holidays and huge
parties in which thousands of children ran wild in the house. They had barbecues and birthday parties and bake sales. Their husbands went to business and the wives discussed child development.

“You all look so pretty,” Jane Louise said. “Where's Daphne?”

Lisbeth propelled her into another room—the formal bedroom in the center of which stood Daphne in her wedding slip, still as a waxed statue. Her elaborate bride's dress hung from the chandelier on a padded hanger. She did not move, even to smile. A little Cuban woman—the fitter—fluttered around her, smoothing and patting. On her wrist she wore a corsagelike pincushion attached to an elastic band. “Don't move, don't move!” she cried, but this was totally unnecessary, as Jane Louise had never seen anyone hold a pose for so long.

“Can I help?” Jane Louise asked.

“No, thanks,” Moira said. “We have to put these net bags over our heads so we don't mess our hair, and Graciela will put our dresses on.” She motioned with her shoulder to the closet door from which hung two long pink dresses, stuffed with tissue paper and looking like disembodied girls.

“Master of the female half lengths,” Jane Louise said.

“Pardon?” said Moira.

“There's a Flemish painter known only as the master of the female half lengths or something like that,” Jane Louise said. “Your dresses sort of remind me.”

Moira gave her the sort of look you might give to a silly child. She gazed out the window. “There's lots of people out there. Daph, you ought to put your dress on. We ought to, too.”

Daphne was still unmoved. The fitter draped a net scarf over Daphne's head while Moira helped slip her dress over it. She looked like an Elizabethan child being hung with cloth of gold. The fitter smoothed out Daphne's voluminous skirt.

“Look, girls,” she said. “Here I put the train up like this, and
this tie keeps it up. When she will walk down the aisle you let the tie go, like this. See?” She let go of the tie, and the train slipped out. “When you walk, please walk so carefully and do not step from the red carpet because the grass will stain and these never come out.”

She rearranged the train and then turned to Moira, whose sleeve needed adjusting.

There was no reason for Jane Louise to be in that room, and in her gray dress and her dark hair, she felt like Cinderella.

She remembered her sister Nora's wedding to Jaime Benitez-Cohen so long ago: the white dress, the bridal attendants, one of whom had been the younger Jane Louise, dark, uncomfortable, taller than anyone else, and unhappily in love with somebody or other while her sister, radiant in the proper bridal clothes, which had set their father back quite a number of dollars, walked down the aisle to marry somebody absolutely perfect: Jewish, rich, and from a well-connected family. In her heart Jane Louise had known she would never wear a white dress, or be entitled to wear one, walk down an aisle, get married by a rabbi, or please her mother to this elaborate extent. Watching Martine she realized what sense of safety a daughter can bring to a mother. Although Lilly liked Teddy very well, he was not quite what she had had in mind, and furthermore, he was not second nature. Lilly liked money she understood
viscerally.
Flinty old WASP New England money was not something she knew by heart, only by literature.

Daphne turned her radiant face to them. She could move now, and she was very beautiful. Lisbeth and Moira had put their dresses on. Their pinkness, their blondness, their carefully streaked hair, nail polish, eyelash curlers, mascara, the heap of things that lay on the dressing table and that Jane Louise never used made her feel that they were women in a way that she was not.

“Oh, Daph!” sighed Lisbeth. “You're
so
beautiful.”

Martine called from the top of the stairs. “Girls! Girls!” she said. “You must come at
once!
”

Daphne went first. She walked carefully and serenely, as if her parts were made of glass. Jane Louise gave her a smile and was greeted in return by an uplift of her lips. Her look said to Jane Louise:
This is my perfect day. What are you doing here?

What these girls thought of their half-brother was unknown. He was some other element. He was older, a chemist, married to someone older, from a place they had never seen. What was the point of this sort of blood relation?

Daphne's wedding books, of which she had read dozens, did not say what to do with halfs or steps. They were a minor burden, something that reminded you that life is never smooth or perfect.

Downstairs they were met by a young man from the florist's who presented Daphne with her enormous bouquet, a mass of white roses, lily of the valley, and freesia, with long garlands of white-rimmed ivy. Moira and Lisbeth carried sweetheart roses, and Martine was given a long swaglike corsage to pin to her shoulder. Martine stood patiently while it was pinned and then turned and began to rummage through the florist's box. There was a pink rose for Cornelius's buttonhole, and an extra pink rose that she gave to Jane Louise.

“I'm afraid we haven't a pin,” she said.

Jane Louise said it was perfectly all right and twisted it into her hair, although it was clear that this was not the orthodox thing to do. As the girls floated down the lawn, Jane Louise went off to find Teddy.

He was standing on the lawn with his father. Cornelius looked splendid in his morning clothes, which, he explained to Jane Louise, had belonged to
his
father. His top hat was collapsible and could be made to go flat. His hair was brilliant white, and his mustache gleamed in the sun.

“Let's go for a walk,” Jane Louise said to Teddy.

“
Family
portrait, old boy,” Cornelius said. “We'll be wanting you for one or two snaps.”

They followed him and stood obediently in the back row for two family portraits. Then they were released.

They walked into the rose garden, where they sat on a concrete bench and watched the goldfish swimming lazily in their pool.

“Did you secretly want all this?” Jane Louise said.

“You mean a big house with a goldfish pond?” Teddy said.

“I mean a big wedding with ushers and bridesmaids,” Jane Louise said.

“I didn't,” Teddy said. “Did you?”

“I always feel bad that you had to marry a Jewess by a Puerto Rican judge.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, Jane,” Teddy said. “I
wanted
to marry a Jewess by a Puerto Rican judge. I can never figure out your free-floating anxiety about this. Nobody has to get married. At least, I didn't. I married you because I wanted to marry you. Is there something wrong with me that you never seem to believe it?”

“No,” said Jane Louise in a small voice.

“Then maybe what I'm hearing is that
you
wanted all this, just like your sister Nora. Maybe you wanted me to be Jaime Benitez-Cohen with a big family and lots of money and a board membership in the synagogue.”

“Is that really what you think?” Jane Louise said.

“I'm beginning to wonder,” Teddy said. “Usually I just assume that you married me because you wanted to, but I might be wrong.”

He gave her a grieved look, a look that said, Don't hassle me when I'm suffering. But it was this remote suffering Jane Louise wanted to cut through. She would rather have had him angry than distanced. The fact that he had snapped at her in some way
made her feel better. How could you tell your husband, who thought you were a normal person, that you had never felt normal for a single minute in your life?

Teddy looked at her. He picked her chin up and saw that there were tears in her eyes. For an instant he scowled, and then his face softened.

“I married the best person in the world,” he said. “Is this real upset or just being pregnant?”

“I don't know,” said Jane Louise.

Jane Louise and Edie sat on the bus on a rainy day. They were on their way to buy baby supplies and they were talking about weddings. It seemed to them that although everyone cried at them, no one had anything very nice to say about them.

Jane Louise said: “When Daphne walked down the lawn, my throat closed up. I said to myself, ‘This thing is costing a fortune that would have been money better off in Daphne's bank account,' and then I realized I was just plain jealous because I could never even have contemplated any such thing being done for me. Or even wanting it.”

“Tut,” Edie said. “After all I did for you. My most beautiful cake.”

“You know what I mean,” Jane Louise said. “I mean, look at you and Mokie! City Hall, no rice, no flowers.”

“There were flowers,” Edie said. “You brought me that bouquet.”

“I did,” Jane Louise said. “I guess I kind of blur over where these things are concerned.”

“And you pointed out how elegant I looked compared to all the other pregnant brides,” Edie said.

“I don't know why weddings make people feel this way,” Jane Louise said. “To Sven it's just legal fucking, eventual obligations, and court fees.”

“He's an old war-horse at these things,” Edie said.

“Well, it comes from a very deep place,” Jane Louise said. “Even though Dan looks kind of a twerp and Daphne has about a molecule of brain, they looked so pretty and they pressed all those buttons: hope, promise, new starts, and young love, and all that stuff.”

“We're too old for that stuff,” Edie said.

“It's true,” Jane Louise said. “We're about struggle, dislocation, and marrying aliens, right?”

“Well, we're having babies,” Edie said. “We're still young enough for that stuff.”

“Barely,” said Jane Louise. “This whole thing was hardest on Teddy. He really suffered. I think it was really terrible for him when his father married Martine.”

Teddy's father had sent him a suit for that occasion. It had needed to be tailored, so he had been driven into town by his mother, who had dropped him off at the local tailoring shop while she went to browse in a bookshop. It was perfectly clear to Teddy, at age eight, that his mother could not bear to witness her son's being fitted for this wedding suit. Teddy had stood, sweating with heat and embarrassment, as the tailor fussed and pinned.

His mother's awful feeling about this event—even though she had no use for Cornelius whatsoever—had burned into Teddy like acid on an etching plate. She had not wanted to burden him with these feelings, and as a result, he was almost sick with anger and dread.

Teddy had not liked Martine. The sight of his father kissing this
person upset him very much. He did not like her accent or the pitch of her voice, and he had not known what to say to her when she spoke to him. His boyish feelings had been in total chaos, and yet he had found himself at his father's wedding standing beside him in a church he had never seen before. He had sat next to his father and Martine at the wedding lunch, and then had been driven home by his Uncle Charlie, his father's brother. He was sick by the side of the road halfway home.

He had been handed, pale and shaky, over to his mother, who put him straight to bed. The smell of his own house, the sight of his own room, his mother's neutral, rather astringent scent, made his eyes swim.

This was put down to too much excitement, cake, and champagne. He remembered dozing off in his bed. From his room he could hear his mother and uncle chatting pleasantly. This had soothed him and made him feel that something was almost right.

Edie had heard this story before. It was a variant form of a story Mokie told of being invited to a wedding and being taken for a parking attendant.

Daphne and Dan would have a big, leather-bound book of wedding photos. Jane Louise kept her small batch in a pine box, and Mokie and Edie had a few very nice pictures Teddy had taken the day of their wedding—the two of them holding hands, Edie in a blue smock, visibly pregnant, her fuzzy hair in a halo around her head, carrying the bouquet Jane Louise had given her. Jane Louise remembered the details of Daphne's wedding: the pink and white jordan almonds in little pink baskets, the five-tiered cake on top of which stood a tiny plastic bride and groom. Weddings were definitely about destiny, for better or worse.

Jane Louise fished a list out of her handbag.

“We should get serious,” she said to Edie. “This layette business.”

“It would be nice to know why it's called that,” Edie said. “I think all babies should be dressed in black to show them off.”

“Or white, if you have a darky,” Jane Louise said.

“It is weird wondering how dark your offspring will be,” Edie said. “Of course, you don't have this problem. But I may end up with a little chocolate baby.”

“Or spotted,” Jane Louise said. “Wouldn't that be a hoot?”

“It would make it easier on Mommy and Daddy. They could tell everyone it has a disease,” Edie said.

Jane Louise always wondered that Edie still called her parents Mommy and Daddy. These frightful people, who did not, in Jane Louise's opinion, deserve to have such a nice daughter, had not taken the news of Edie's pregnancy very well. It caught them off guard. They had spent so long denying that Mokie was anything more than Edie's business partner that they had never given much thought to their strategy should he have proved to be anything more. Since they had not wanted to imagine such a circumstance, they had no presentation ready for it. On the bus Jane Louise and Edie tried to make one up.

“They could say that Mokie raped you and then decided to be a man about it,” Jane Louise said.

“They could say that this is the consequence of anthropological research,” Edie said.

“Or that you are part of a widespread do-good movement that believes passionately in miscegenation as the answer to world peace,” Jane Louise said.

“Oh, that's very good,” Edie said. “They'd love that.”

“Sven refers to your impending as ‘the project in black and white,'” Jane Louise said.

“How stylish!” Edie said. “Mokie feels we should have a black-and-white party when it's born—you know, date-and-nut bread
with cream cheese, marble cake, black-and-white sundaes, Irish coffee.”

“Yik,” said Jane Louise.

“Or little plates of mashed potatoes with black caviar. Or truffles and egg whites.”

“What
do
they say, do you think?”

“They lower their voices and say what a wonderful person Mokie is and that they pray life won't be awful for us as an interracial couple, and how they back us one hundred percent. And we
will
look nice at all those racial harmony events they go to. I mean, it'll show how brave they are that their daughter went the distance.”

Jane Louise eyed her friend. She had never heard Edie, who was so careful and muted about her family, speak this way. Edie's wide hazel eyes were awash.

“Come along, Miss Edith,” Jane Louise said. “It'll be okay.”

Tears slid down Edie's cheeks. “Oh, Janey. They're so horrid. Mokie suffers this stuff so silently. He's so cheerful and stoical, but he's sort of like Teddy. Being down is pretty far down for him. It doesn't happen often, but it's pretty awful when it does. It's very depressing to see your parents not love your loved one.”

“Charlie and my mother weren't so thrilled with Teddy, as you recall,” Jane Louise said. “At Daphne's wedding I had a long think about Nora's wedding years ago. I was her bridesmaid only because I was her sister and she had to have me, but she didn't really want to, and for about ten years afterward my father complained that he was still paying off the debt. It was the year before you and I met at college. You should have seen it—all this stuff dragged out to impress the Benitez-Cohens, and they probably never thought much about us anyway because we didn't have any money. But Jaime! He has tons of money, he makes tons of
money, they have that enormous house in San Francisco, and tons of famous people to be friends with and genius children, and Jaime gets his name in the paper all the time, and Nora gives parties that get reviewed! What are we compared with that?”

“Dust,” Edie said. “Sand. Cobwebs.”

“Yes,” Jane Louise said sadly. “Why are people's families so horrible? And here we are, just about to start our own. Do you suppose these fetuses will someday not be able to stand us?”

“Oh, doubtless,” Edie said. “But they'll have each other.”

“Sven's children adore him,” Jane Louise said. “Maybe our children will adore us because we'll be good, and if even a totally inadequate parent like Sven, who'd probably put the arm on his daughter if it were legal, can get love, maybe we will, too.”

“Yes, Sven is a beacon of hope,” Edie said. “Such a swine and such devoted children, although perhaps little Piers will turn out to be a serial killer with thighbones hidden under the floorboards. Here's our stop.”

They entered a place called Bubby's Baby World. It was like entering a museum full of the cultural artifacts of another culture: rockers, strollers, things to hang a baby in, buntings, stretchies, tiny garments of every description, plus dozens of varieties of bottles, hotplates, warmers for baby food, tiny forks and spoons, some with oddly shaped handles, nightlights in the shape of ducks, lambs, cats, and moons. Rattles filled with plastic stars or beans. Objects that could be grasped by a tiny fist and made to whirl in different colors. Baby strollers, some with hoods, some with little umbrellas suspended from springs. Side carriers, Snuglis, crib blankets and sheets. One side of the store was devoted to cribs, in colonial, art deco, and rustic style. Cribs that looked as if handmade by Shaker craftspeople. Cribs with flowers handpainted on them. White, pink, and blue cribs, and cribs in
natural and stained wood. The sight of this made Jane Louise's and Edie's heads spin.

In back of the clothing counter was a small old man.

“Hello, girls!” he called out cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

“Layettes,” said Jane Louise.

“Congratulations,” the little man said. “Now, what would you like?”

“Well, cotton baby clothes,” Edie said.

The man peered up at her. “This we don't sell,” he said.

“Really?” said Jane Louise.

“Listen,” the little man said. “Here we have only flame-retardant materials. You know, if you would take a piece of cotton and hold it up to a seventy-five-watt bulb, in one hour that piece of cloth would be on fire.”

“I promise you,” Jane Louise said, “I have no intention of holding my baby up to a seventy-five-watt light bulb for even half an hour. It never entered my mind.”

“You'd be surprised,” the man said.

“I would be stunned,” Jane Louise said. “But you have cotton undershirts or whatever you call them, don't you?”

“These we have.” He gave the girls a long look to assess their ages. “Boys or girls?” he asked.

“We don't know,” Edie said.

“Most of my ladies know,” the man said. “It saves so much time and worry. It takes the guesswork out.”

“We didn't ask,” Jane Louise said. “So we thought we'd just try to get black or brown or gray infant clothes.”

The man looked at her if she were insane.

“Those they don't make,” he said kindly. “And you mustn't ever dye anything for a baby, because the baby could chew on something, and dyed fabric is poison.”

“We hadn't thought of that,” said Jane Louise.

“You'd be surprised,” the man said. “What about white or yellow?”

“That sounds right for any gentler,” Edie said.

“Somehow,” the man said, “I don't feel you girls are taking this very seriously.”

“We are,” Jane Louise said. “After all, we're pregnant.”

“Besides yellow, white, pink, and blue, don't you have any colors?” Edie asked.

“Babies just need to be warm, they don't need colors,” the man said. “Have a baby shower, and your friends will give you fancy. Here we have basic. Do you have a list?”

Jane Louise and Edie looked at each other. Neither had a list nor any idea what they were supposed to have besides undershirts, which, they had been told, were the most important item of baby wear.

“We don't know,” Jane Louise said. “What do they need? High socks? Kilts? Earmuffs?”

“Ach! You girls are teasing me,” the man said. “All young ladies are born with this knowledge.”

“We're not young,” Jane Louise said. “We might have been born with it, but we outgrew it.”

“We'll just put ourselves in your hands,” Edie said.

On the way home it began to sleet. Jane Louise and Edie hunched together on the bus surrounded by large shopping bags.

“Didn't it sort of creep you out when he said, ‘Now all you need is the baby'?” Jane Louise said.

“The whole thing is so totally weird,” Edie said. “Won't it just be a hoot and a half when we take the boys this weekend to pick out cribs? I liked that Shaker-looking one.”

“I did, too, but it costs a fortune,” Jane Louise said.

“Did it?” Edie said. “I didn't even look.”

“We both better start looking at prices, Miss Edith. We're going to be moms, and neither of us has a bean. Did I tell you about that lady and her shoes?”

“Tell,” Edie said.

“I was browsing around in the bookstore the other day at lunchtime. This woman came in wearing a heather maternity smock and a violet cape,” Jane Louise said. “She looked as if she was about to deliver on the counter. She was wearing the most gorgeous shoes I have ever seen. Kind of that lawbook dark tan calf, very plain, low heel. I asked her where she got them, and she said they came from Andrew Paulsen. That place is extremely pricey. I've never been in it, but I said to myself, ‘I'm pregnant, and I want those shoes.' So I nosed over and there they were. I looked at the price tag and realized that my days of buying shoes like that were over, what with school tuition and like that.”