Cold Spring Harbor (7 page)

There was, he said, a nondenominational chapel in Cold Spring Harbor that might provide a pleasant ceremony; then afterwards they could have a sort of small reception at the Shepards’ house. Did that sound suitable?

“Oh, wonderful,” she said. “Oh, that’s perfect, Charles.”

On the morning of her wedding, Rachel Drake was so tired and nervous she could barely pack her suitcase. She would have given anything to crawl back into bed and sleep for a few more hours, but that was out of the question.

“Mother?” she called through the open door to the living room. “Do you have the timetable out there?”

“The what?”

“You know; the train schedule. Because I can’t remember whether it leaves at nine twenty-five or nine fifty-five, and I—”

“Well, dear, there’s all the time in the world,” Gloria called back. “We don’t even have to be at Penn Station until almost eleven; then we can have a leisurely cup of—”

“No, no,” Rachel said impatiently, “I’m taking the earlier train—didn’t I tell you this?—I’ll be going out with Daddy.”

“Oh,” Gloria said after a significant pause. “No, you didn’t tell me that.”

And Rachel chewed her lip in fear. Her mother’s un-governed displays of emotion were frightful, and this could easily develop into a bad one. “Well, I certainly thought I’d told you,” she said. “I could’ve sworn I’d told you days and days ago. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, does it? We’ll all be together for the whaddyacallit, the wedding, and for the reception and everything.”

Then her mother appeared in the doorway with the sad, ironic little smile of a tragic actress, wearing a splendid new
dress that had cost almost a third of this month’s check from Curtis Drake.

Gloria wasn’t accustomed to keeping her temper when all other elements of an unfair situation cried out for her to lose it. Only a few times before in her life had she held everything back this way, managing to control herself, and she had soon forgotten, each time, how lofty and noble it could make her feel.

“Well, of course, Rachel,” she said quietly. “I’ll do whatever you wish.”

There wasn’t much sense of loftiness or nobility left by the time she rode alone on the later train that morning. She was preoccupied now with how awful her cheap old winter coat looked; she could only hope there would be some inconspicuous place to hang it, or dump it, before walking into the hush of the nondenominational chapel. (“Oh, there’s her mother,” people would whisper in their pews. “That’s Rachel’s mother. Doesn’t she look nice?”)

She knew Rachel would probably take care of introducing Curtis Drake to the Shepards, and to the Shepards’ guests—surely that was how these things were done when the bride’s parents were divorced—but she knew she wouldn’t draw an easy breath until that part of the day was over and Curtis had gone home. And the very thought of him shaking hands with Charles Shepard made her wince—even made her squirm a little in her train seat—because Charles was a tall man and Curtis was five foot four.

“Well, of
course
we’re the same height, Curtis,” she’d told him crossly once, standing barefoot at the mirror of some forgotten bedroom, long ago. “Come and see. Come and look at us.”

But when he complied, stepping up beside her in his socks with a bashful, self-conscious smile, she saw at once
that she’d been mistaken: he was shorter. They must look utterly ridiculous together every time she wore high-heeled shoes, and other people must always have known it.

“Well, it’s not really all that bad, dear,” Curtis told her. “We’re close enough. You can still say we’re the same height, if that’s how you’d like it to be.”

Sitting straight and alert in the taxicab that took her away from the train, Gloria tried to see all she could of the subtle community sweeping past on either side. She knew she couldn’t expect to see very much, because one important characteristic of the people here was their disdain for ostentation of any kind; still, there were a few quick, small rewards for her curiosity. Once she saw a blue-white pebble driveway, uncommonly clean and wide between two elegant stone pillars, but it vanished in a blur of hedges before she could even hope for a glimpse of the house it led up to; another time there was a sign reading Cold Spring Harbor Historical Society, and that was satisfying in itself.

The chapel was smaller than she’d imagined, but that didn’t matter because there weren’t very many wedding guests; everything, apparently, had been planned on a small and dignified scale. Charles Shepard sat only a few feet away, in a front-row pew across the aisle from her own, but she guessed he hadn’t seen her come in. She guessed too that the thin, high-shouldered woman beside him was his wife.

Then an electric organ began to emit various slow, unsteady sounds. She supposed she should have known that Curtis Drake would want to “give the bride away,” but it came as a little shock, even so, to see the two of them make their solemn way toward the altar. They were both too small even for small-scale pageantry, and their two embarrassed faces looked exactly alike.

Gloria had a cigarette in her lips and was ready to strike the match before she remembered you weren’t supposed to smoke in church, which seemed a cruel deprivation. How long did these things generally last?

But soon enough she found herself smiling fixedly in the back seat of a car packed with strangers, heading for the Shepards’ reception, and that meant the day might still be saved.

All her life, from the time she was eight or nine years old, Gloria had relied on a neat, nearly automatic little trick of her mind for adjusting to minor disappointments. When you opened the bright wrappings of some meager or poorly chosen gift, you simply let your mind tell you it was just what you wanted; that way you could always make the right response, and you could even believe it.

“Oh, isn’t this nice,” she said in the instant of her first, sharply disappointing look at the Shepards’ house—small, ordinary, all made of brown-painted wood and too-closely flanked on both sides by bigger, better houses—and then she said it again, while getting out of the car, to make it true. “Isn’t this a nice house.”

Now there would be a party, and Charles Shepard might open his arms to greet her with a decorous kiss on the cheek.

But there weren’t enough people in this place to make a reception. Except for a laughing cluster of guests around the bride and groom, near the liquor table, there was hardly anybody here at all—and Charles couldn’t have opened his arms for her even if he’d meant to, because he was carrying a drink in each hand as he approached her across the empty floor.

“I’m afraid my wife won’t be able to join us,” he said. “She hasn’t been feeling well; she’s resting now, upstairs.”

“Oh, well, I’m sorry,” Gloria said. “Was she the lady sitting with you in the church? In the chapel?”

“No, that was my sister. She lives over in Riverhead. Curious: it’s not really very far away, but this was the first time we’d seen each other in years.”

“Has your family all come from around here, then? For generations?”

“Well, ‘generations’ makes it sound a little grand,” he said, looking as embarrassed as if she’d inquired into their financial affairs, “but yes; on my father’s side I suppose we do go back a ways. My mother was from Indiana, though; that sort of breaks the pattern; and my wife is from Boston.”

“I’d really been looking forward to meeting her today; your wife, I mean.”

“Yes, well, she’d have liked that too,” he told her, “very much. But I’m sure there’ll be other times soon. After all, we’re all sort of related now, aren’t we. We’re a family.”

That struck Gloria as a remarkably nice thing to say, and it warmed her as she watched him move away to another part of the room. But then she felt chilled again, all at once, because Curtis Drake was shyly bearing down on her.

“Well, Gloria,” he said.

“Yes; well, hello.”

This was awful. She knew she should probably have called him “Curtis” but there wasn’t any way to make her tongue pronounce the name.

“Doesn’t Rachel look lovely?” he said.

“She certainly does, yes.”

“Oh, she’s always been lovely, of course, but there’s something about the way a girl looks on her wedding day that really brings it all home for you. Makes you very glad and very humble; very proud.”

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

Oh, this was horrible; and it might have gotten worse if Curtis hadn’t raised his whiskey glass in a sad, casual salute and turned from her in search of someone else to talk to.

It wasn’t until she was aboard a dirty, swaying, heavily rattling train for New York that Gloria realized she’d be going home to an empty place. Her daughter gone for good, her son away for many more months, she would now awaken to the hours of each new day alone, in silence, and never with anything to do.

For days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Charles Shepard was almost sick with chagrin. He wasn’t yet fifty; he knew the army would take him back if it weren’t for his eyes. He made a careful trip to lower Manhattan for another, stronger pair of those well-publicized glasses; then he reported for an army physical, but he had no luck with the eye doctor. No luck at all.

It was several more days before he gave full attention to another line of thought that had been in the back of his mind all along: the army might never take him now unless things got bad enough for medical standards to be relaxed, but they would almost certainly take his son. Evan was healthy and smart and strong: he’d make an excellent soldier and would probably qualify for officers’ training.
There’d be no chance of his getting overseas too late for
this
war; and so, as a lieutenant or even a young captain, he might serve to justify his father’s life.

That was why Charles had begun to feel well again when he rode down the Island to Amityville for his first visit with Evan and Rachel in their new home, which turned out to be an oddly sumptuous apartment with peach-colored walls.

“So what are your plans, Evan?” he asked as soon as Rachel was out of earshot in the kitchen. “You going to enlist?”

“Well, I think so, yes. I’d certainly like to. The thing is, though, I think I’d better hold off on it a while now, until Rachel’s a little more—settled. She’s pregnant now, you see. We just found out this week.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose that does sort of complicate things. Still, the army’d always provide for her and the baby, and very generously too.”

“Oh, I know that, Dad.”

“Well, I know you know it, of course. And I know you’ll do whatever’s best.” But he had to acknowledge, in silence, that he was deeply disappointed. All the way down here, obliged to hire a taxicab because he could never again drive a car of his own, any more than he could ever command a company of men, he had believed there was every reason to expect better news.

“Coffee, gentlemen?” Rachel called, emerging from the kitchen with a tray of bright cups and saucers, and now it was time to prepare and deliver a nice little speech about how fine it was to learn she was having a baby.

“… And then, of course, the other factor,” Evan was telling him, “is that I might not have any say in the matter—if I get drafted, that is.”

“Yes. Well, that’d be another story, wouldn’t it.” And Charles could feel his spirits beginning to lift again. It
would be another story, but it might be almost as good: draftees could qualify for officers’ training too.

It wasn’t until he was on his way out that afternoon, shrugging into his overcoat as they walked him through room after peach-colored room to the front door, that Charles thought to ask what proved to be an awkward question.

“How much are you kids paying for this place?”

Evan hung his head in a dumb, cowardly way that Charles hadn’t seen in years, but Rachel came through with the precise amount of the rent as brightly as though she didn’t know it was going to make trouble.

“Oh,” Charles said, taking in the dull shock of the information. “Well, that’s a little—that’s a little on the preposterous side, don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s about three or four times as much as it ought to be, if you still have any plans for engineering school at all? This is foolishness, Evan.”

Exasperation wasn’t a very good note to strike at the end of a visit like this—Charles knew that—but he was determined to stand here waiting until his son looked him in the eyes like a man.

“Well, I think I can handle it, Dad,” Evan said, and at least his head was up and facing in the right direction now. “And the thing is we like it here, you see. We both like it here a lot.”

In March Evan’s draft board summoned him for a physical examination.

Rachel tried to be brave about it because that was how young wives were shown to be in the movies, but she was perilously close to tears as she went about the poignant business of fixing his breakfast. She felt almost as if this
were the day of his going into the army itself, or even the day he’d be sent overseas.

All he had to do today, though, was stand and walk buck naked in an echoing civilian gymnasium among hundreds of other bare-assed men, each with a set of numerals drawn in lipstick across his chest, each with his “personal effects” slung in a little cotton bag around his neck. It didn’t take very long because the doctors all worked quickly, but there was time enough for Evan to find a surprising pleasure in the visions of soldiering that began to crowd his mind.