Saint Maybe (2 page)

His mother, skipping several stages of acquaintanceship,
swept Lucy into a hug. (Clearly more was called for than a handshake.) His father said, “Well, now! What do you know!” The dog gave Lucy’s crotch a friendly sniff, while Mrs. Jordan—an older lady, the soul of tact—hastily murmured something or other and backed out the door. And Ian clamped his palms in his armpits and grinned at no one in particular.

They moved to the living room, Ian bringing up the rear. Lucy perched in an easy chair and Danny settled on its arm, with one hand resting protectively behind her loose knot of black hair. To Ian, Lucy resembled some brightly feathered bird held captive by his brown plaid family. Her face was very small, a cameo face. Her dress was scoop-necked and slim-waisted and full-skirted. She wore extremely red lipstick that seemed not gaudy, for some reason, but brave. Ian was entranced.

“Tell us everything,” Bee Bedloe ordered. “Where you met, how you got to know each other—everything.”

She and Ian’s father had seated themselves on the sofa. (Ian’s father, who had a baseball player’s mild, sloping build, was pulling in his stomach.) Ian himself remained slouched against the door frame.

“We met at the post office,” Danny said. He beamed down at Lucy, who smiled back at him trustfully.

Bee said, “Oh? You two work together?”

“No, no,” Lucy said, in a surprisingly croaky little drawl. “I went in to mail a package and Danny was the one who waited on me.”

Danny told them, “She was mailing a package to Cheyenne, Wyoming, by air. I told her it would cost twenty dollars and twenty-seven cents. You could see it was more than she’d planned on—”

“I said, ‘Twenty twenty-seven! Great God Almighty!’ ” Lucy squawked, startling everyone.

“So I told her, ‘It’s cheaper by parcel post, you know.
That would be four sixty-three.’ ‘Let me think,’ she says, and moves on out of the way. Gives up her place at the counter. Stands a few feet down from me, frowning at the wall.”

“I had to take a minute to decide,” Lucy explained.

“Frowns at the wall for the
longest
time. Three customers go ahead of her. Finally I say, ‘Miss? You ready?’ But she just goes on frowning.”

“I was mailing some odds and ends to my ex-husband and I wanted to be shed of them as fast as possible,” Lucy said.

A little jolt passed through the room.

Bee said, “Ex-husband?”

“Half of me wanted him to get that box tomorrow, even yesterday if it could be arranged, but the other half was counting pennies. ‘That’s fifteen-and-some dollars’ difference,’ this other half was saying. ‘Think of all the groceries fifteen dollars could buy. Or shoes and stuff for the children.’ ”

“Children?”

“What got to me,” Danny said, “was how she wouldn’t be hurried. How it didn’t bother her what other people made of her. I mean she just stood there pondering, little bit of a person. Then finally she said, ‘Well,’ and straightened her shoulders and chose to spring for airmail.”

“It mattered just enough, I decided,” Lucy said. “It was worth it just for the satisfaction.”

“If she had said parcel post I might have let her go,” Danny said. “But airmail! I admired that. I asked if she’d like to have dinner.”

“He was the best-looking thing I’d seen in ages,” Lucy told the Bedloes. “I said I’d be thrilled to have dinner.”

Bee and Doug Bedloe sat side by side, smiling extra
hard as if someone had just informed them that they were being photographed.

There was this about the Bedloes: They believed that every part of their lives was absolutely wonderful. It wasn’t just an act, either. They really did believe it. Or at least Ian’s mother did, and she was the one who set the tone. Her marriage was a great joy to her, her house made her happy every time she walked into it, and her children were attractive and kind and universally liked. When bad things happened—the usual accidents, illnesses, jogs in the established pattern—Bee treated them with eye-rolling good humor, as if they were the stuff of situation comedy. They would form new chapters in the lighthearted ongoing saga she entertained the neighbors with: How Claudia Totaled the Car. How Ian Got Suspended from First Grade.

As for Ian, he believed it too but only after a kind of hitch, a moment of hesitation. For instance, from time to time he had the feeling that his father was something of a joke at Poe High—ineffectual at discipline, and muddled in his explanation of the more complicated algebraic functions. But Bee said he was the most popular teacher Poe had ever employed, and in fact that was true. Yes, certainly it was true. Ian knew she was right.

Or look at Claudia. The family’s one scholar, she had dropped out of college her senior year to get married, and then the babies started coming so thick and so fast that they had to be named alphabetically: Abbie, Barney, Cindy, Davey … Where would it all end? some cynical voice inquired from the depths of Ian’s mind. Xavier? Zelda? But his mother said she hoped they would progress to
double
letters—Aaron Abel and Bonnie Belinda—like items on a crowded catalog page.
Then Ian saw Claudia’s children as a tumbling hodgepodge heaped in a basket, and he was forced to smile.

Or Danny. Wasn’t it sort of a comedown that Danny had gone to work at the post office straight out of high school, when both sides of the family as far back as anyone could remember had been teachers? (“Educators,” Bee called them.) But Bee pointed out how lucky he was, knowing so early in life what he wanted and settling in so contentedly. Then Ian readjusted; he shifted gears or something and
whir!
he was rolling along with the others, impressed by Danny’s good fortune.

He had always assumed he was the only one who experienced that hitch in his thoughts. He assumed it until the day Lucy arrived, when he felt his parents’ hidden start at the word “ex-husband.” Wait. The girl of Danny’s dreams had chosen someone else before him? And was saddling him with someone else’s children besides? His father looked confused. His mother’s broad face developed a brittle, tight surface, like something easily broken.

Ian himself absorbed the notion with no trouble. Of course, he wanted only the best for Danny. He had worshiped Danny since infancy—the family’s all-round athlete, talented in every known sport but not the least stuck up about it, unfailingly sunny-natured and patient with his little brother. But as Ian saw it, Lucy
was
the best. The ex-husband was only a minor drawback; same for the children. What mattered was that pile of black hair and those long black lashes. None of Danny’s previous girls could begin to compare with this one.

But he saw how steadily his parents smiled—stony, glazed smiles as they murmured chitchat. His mother said it certainly was an unusual way for a couple to meet. His father said he’d have opted for parcel post, himself; so
he
would never have been asked to dinner,
would he, heh-heh. His mother said that speaking of dinner, Lucy must stay for spaghetti. Danny said she couldn’t; he was taking her to Haussner’s Restaurant to celebrate their engagement. The word “engagement” sent another shock through the room; for now it was plain that, yes, Danny really was set on this. Bee said maybe later in the week, then. Lucy thanked her in her foggy, fascinating voice. They all stood up. Ian stepped away from the door frame and received his first direct glance from Lucy. She had pure gray eyes, almost silver, and up close her little nose revealed a sprinkling of freckles.

After Danny and Lucy had left, his parents returned to the living room and sat back down on the couch. Supper was more than ready, but no one mentioned eating. Ian wandered over to the upright piano in the corner. Dozens of family photos, framed in dull brass or varnished wood, stood on an ivory lace runner. Other, larger photos hung behind, nearly obscuring the flowered wallpaper that had darkened over the years to the color of a manila envelope. He studied those: his grandmother standing grimly erect beside his seated grandfather, his Great-Aunt Bess trying to master a Hula Hoop, Danny in a satin track uniform with a first-place ribbon hung around his neck. Whenever Danny did something he enjoyed, his face would shine with a fine sweat. Even eating made him sweat, or listening to music. And in this photograph—where he’d recently been sprinting under hot sunshine, after all, and then had the pleasure of winning besides—he gleamed; he seemed metallic. You could imagine he was a statue. Ian lightly touched the frame. (Dust felted his finger. For all her great clattery housecleaning, Bee tended to let the little things slide.) Behind him, his mother said, “Well, we’ve been wishing for years he’d get married.”

“That’s true, we have,” his father said.

“And now that the draft’s stepping up …”

“Oh, yes, the draft,” his father said faintly.

“Did she mention how many children she had?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“If she has lots,” Bee told him, “we can mix them in with Claudia’s and form our own baseball team.”

She laughed. Ian turned to look at her, but he was too late. Already she had passed smoothly over to unquestioning delight, and he had missed his chance to see how she did it.

Lucy did not have lots of children after all; just two. A girl aged six and a boy aged three. She lived a couple of miles away, Danny said, in a rented apartment above a Hampden pharmacy; and she left the children with the pharmacist’s wife when she went to work every day. He told Ian this later that night, when he stopped by Ian’s room on his way to bed. He said she worked as a waitress at the Fill ’Er Up Café—the only job she could find that allowed her to arrange her hours around her children’s. But he would soon put an end to
that
, Danny said. No working wife for Danny.

He said she had mailed that package at the request of her ex-husband. Her ex-husband was getting remarried and he wanted her to send him his things. Lucy had packed up every trace of him: the geisha girl figurine he’d won tossing darts at the fair, for instance, and the bowling ball in the red-and-white canvas bag that matched her own. Danny listed these objects in a detailed and lingering way, as if even they had fallen within the circle of his love. The bowling ball, he said, had accounted for much of the package’s weight (a total of twenty-eight pounds). Lucy had also mentioned a trophy cup, which couldn’t have been so very light either.

Ian tried to imagine Lucy bowling. Illogically, he
pictured her in the shoes she had worn to the house—little red pumps with red cloth roses at the toes. The high heels would make tiny dimples in the glossy wood of the runway.

“She’s a wonderful cook,” Danny said. “Whenever I come to dinner she fixes a special meal for me and she lights new candles. Lucy feels people should always eat by candlelight. And sometimes she makes her own holders; last night it was two red apples. Wasn’t that smart? She has the smartest ideas. She’s good with napkins, too; she folds them into these different shapes, accordions or butterflies or wigwams, because Lucy says …”

Lucy says, Lucy feels, Lucy believes. She seemed almost present in the room with them. Danny lounged in the doorway with his hands in his trouser pockets, his eyes slanting slightly the way they did when something fired him up. The knot of his tie hung loose on his chest, which made him look tipsy even though he wasn’t.

How did their evenings
end?
Ian wanted to ask. Did the two of them make out on her couch? Or maybe even go all the way?

Danny spoke of Lucy’s knack for interior decorating, her concern for her children, her difficult past life. “Both her parents died in a car crash when she was still in her teens,” he said, “and that husband of hers must not have been much, considering how far he’s fallen behind on the child support. Not that she complains. She never says a word against anyone; that’s not her style. I tell you, Ian, I’ve been looking for a woman like Lucy all my life, but I’d started to think I’d never find her. I almost thought there was something wrong with me. I’d meet these girls who seemed so pretty and so nice and then it would turn out I’d been hoodwinked; they were flirts or users or constitutional liars and everyone
knew it but me. Shouldn’t there be some sort of training course in how to judge a woman? How are guys supposed to figure these things out? Well, some just do; it’s some kind of gift, I guess. But I was starting to worry I was jinxed. Then along comes Lucy. Two weeks ago she was a total stranger, can you believe it? And yet I’m certain she’s the one. She makes her own curtains and she cuts her children’s hair herself. She can plant a snipped-off twig in a pot and it will turn green and start growing. When I circle her waist with my hands, my fingertips almost meet.”

Ian somehow knew exactly how that would feel: her body narrowing between his palms like a slender, graceful vase.

Danny and Lucy were married a week later, in the Presbyterian church on Dober Street that the Bedloes sporadically attended. Lucy wore a rose-colored suit and a white pillbox hat with a bow. She stood in front of the minister with her arm linked through Danny’s, and her feet were placed primly together so that Ian’s eyes were riveted to the seams on the backs of her stockings. He had never seen seams on stockings before, if you didn’t count old black-and-white movies. He wondered how she got them so straight. They looked like two fountain-pen lines drawn with the aid of a ruler.

Pathetically few guests dotted the bride’s side of the church. The first pew held a couple of waitresses from the Fill ’Er Up Café, both wearing cone-shaped hairdos that made them seem the tallest people present. Behind them sat the pharmacist and his wife, with Lucy’s two children huddled against the wife. Ian had met the children at a family dinner the night before, and he hadn’t thought much of them. Agatha was as cloddish as her name—plain and thick, pasty-faced. Thomas was thin and dark and nimble but no more responsive to grownups.
During the wedding they both gazed elsewhere—up at the vaulted ceiling, around at the pebbly pink windows—till Mrs. Myrdal leaned over and whispered sharply. Agatha was the kind of child who breathed through her mouth.

But the groom’s side! First came the parents, Doug Bedloe belted in and slicked down in an unfamiliar way and Bee wearing a new striped dress from Hutzler’s. Then in the second pew, a row of Daleys—Claudia and her husband, Macy, and all five of their rustling, fidgeting children, even little Ellen, although a sitter had been hired to lurk at the rear of the church just in case. Ian sat in the third pew with Cicely, holding hands. And if he turned around, he could see Danny’s friends from high school and his co-workers from the post office and just about the whole neighborhood as well: the Cahns, the Crains, the Mercers, Cicely’s parents and her brother Stevie, Mrs. Jordan in her bald fur stole even on this warm May day, and every last one of the foreigners—a row of tan young men wearing identical shiny black suits. The foreigners never missed a chance to attend a celebration.