A Wedding on the Banks Page 3

  “What do you suppose got her out of the house so early?” Vera had thought. Then, when the pan was shining again and ready to be rinsed, Vera heard a car door slam. She looked up quickly.

  “Just out of instinct,” she later told Vinal. “Just pure holiday instinct.” But there Goldie was, half dragging another box, and it looked full of little boxes, too!

  “She was all nerves,” Vera told Vinal, “like she was trying to drag a dead body into the house. And she kept dropping her purse and trying to sling it back on her shoulder.”

  The drama had deepened when Goldie’s little white crocheted hat with the three big diamond shapes on it flew off her head and went tumbleweeding in the wind. That’s when Vera’s dog, Popeye, had gotten involved in the action, had gone after the hat and caught it up in his teeth. This aroused Vera’s suspicions more than anything.

  “No matter how hard he pawed it, or shook it in his mouth like he does one of the kids’ socks when he wants to play, Goldie never give him a second of her time,” Vera told her uninterested husband. “She let him chew that crocheted hat to smithereens and yet, if you heard her talk, it took her weeks to make it, and it was past perfection. No, sir! She just went on inside her house, dragging that box.”

  Vera had watched out her window until there was just one big maroon diamond and a few strings left between Popeye’s paws, but still no Goldie to rescue her hat.

  “What jackpot do you suppose she hit?” Vera had thought. But that was before the newspaper had come, all snowy and damp because Vinal still hadn’t welded the mailbox door back on. Little Vinal had turned the mailbox into a play horse just a day before Christmas. He straddled the box, cowboy style, then tied a rope around the open door for reins. The billowing gust from the Mattagash snowplow had knocked him off, reins in hand, and with the reins came the mailbox door. But the newspaper wasn’t so snowy that Vera couldn’t read about the Christmas lights sale, and she put away her puzzlement at Goldie’s behavior in order to drive to Watertown for several boxes of lights.

  “It ain’t just the Catholics who light up their yards,” Vera told Vinal as she was leaving. “I need to get there before the goddamn Protestants hear about the sale. They’re just greedy is all. What do they need extra lights for? There ain’t a single Nativity scene among them.”

  When Mattagash surmised through its complicated intelligence network of telephone calls, both the legal kind and the rubbering in kind, through the countless cups of strong Canadian-bought coffee downed while in pursuit of some new clue, through the close scrutiny of car tracks so as to tell who’d been out of their yard on December 26 and who hadn’t—when Mattagash set its mind to solve the mystery, it was just a matter of time until the icy finger of guilt pointed right up Goldie’s long driveway to her house on the hill. And it was Vera, the sister-in-law whom Goldie loved to hate, who had come back from Watertown lightless and downhearted, who did the most effective sleuthing. She called the manager at J. C. Penney’s to give him a verbal trouncing for exaggerating his sale. Madam, he assured her, there were forty boxes of the most colorful Christmas lights ever trucked to northern Maine. He had placed no purchase limitations on his customers. One lone woman had been there when the store opened and had bought them all. She was from Mattagash, he was certain. He had recognized the distinguishable old-country brogue that still survived in the accents of modern-day Mattagashers.

  Once Vera remembered Irma’s highly esteemed position at J. C. Penney’s as a kind of clerk with tenure, it didn’t take long to surmise what had happened. She put the phone down from bawling out the bewildered manager and marched out the door and up the hill to Goldie’s. On the icy trip up, she pondered their relationship. She had tried time and time again to be friends with her sister-in-law, but it had been futile. It had been like spitting into the wind and getting it back in your face. The real clincher had come when Goldie announced she was born again. She had spent a week in Bangor looking for her real father and had come back a Protestant. No one in Mattagash was happy about the conversion. The Giffords and a few other families in town were Catholic, and so hated to lose a sheep to the Protestants. The rest of Mattagash wanted no part of a Gifford in their fold, and they were certain God would feel the same way. Goldie’s own husband, Pike, was most confused over the transformation.

  “I don’t know why anybody would want to stop being a Catholic,” he had stood in Vera’s kitchen to announce. “Why would anybody wanna do anything wrong if they can’t go and confess it?”

  December 26, like all other wintry days in northern Maine, was freezing cold. Vera knocked loudly three or four times before Goldie came to the door, smoking a Virginia Slim and holding it precariously in her fingertips. The way Vera never held her Lucky Strike no-filters. The way no woman in Mattagash smoked a cigarette. Even though she was a Gifford by marriage, Goldie had always thought she was a peg above the other Giffords. It was Goldie who first brought the Jackie Kennedy hairstyle to town. She had to dye her goldish-blond hair dark brown in order to create the full effect. She had even lowered her regular speaking voice to a Jackie Kennedy whisper, but when Jackie married that little Greek man, Goldie forgot about her and went back to the gold-blond curls. She still, however, held her cigarettes as if they were needles. Vera hated Goldie.

  “What are you doing out without a coat?” Goldie had asked, opening the door just a crack, then barring it with her foot.

  “Never mind my coat,” said Vera. “I’m too hot to wear one. I’m fuming right now, Goldie. If I had on a coat, I’d set it on fire.”

  “You ain’t been here in years, Vera. You ain’t even sent a Christmas card up this hill by one of my kids. So what are you doing up here?”

  “I come to buy some Christmas tree lights,” Vera had said. “And I figure the only other person who owns more Christmas tree lights than you do is Nelson Rockerfuller. I don’t know Nelson personally, but I do know you, Goldie.”

  “You’re off your rocker as usual,” said Goldie, and tried to shut the door. But Vera pushed until the crack came back again. Goldie had a shoulder and hip against the door, holding it, a single eye glaring out at Vera.

  “Irma told you about that Christmas lights sale, didn’t she?” Vera shouted, and pushed harder.

  “You’re a crazy woman!” Goldie screamed. Vera pushed harder still, but Goldie managed to hold her grip.

  “I drove all the way to Watertown, over ice and snowdrifts, to buy three or four measly boxes of lights and I come home empty-handed to find out you bought all forty boxes!”

  “You come home empty-headed, too,” Goldie had answered, almost in tears. She was losing her position in the doorway; she could feel her foot slipping, millifraction by millifraction. And she’d always been a little afraid of Vera, who was a large woman with broad shoulders and a violent temper. Goldie was even more afraid of her since she’d heard that Vera was in the midst of menopause.

  “I want four goddamn boxes of Christmas lights!” Vera had shouted against the wind. “For my goddamn Christmas tree next year that I intend to stick next to my goddamn mailbox!”

  Goldie was sure this was a sign of menopausal frenzy, although it seemed that Vera was always lit up like that. Even as a child she’d been a handful. Vera was a Gifford before her marriage to Vinal, who was a first cousin, and she seemed much more intent on being a true Gifford than did Goldie. Goldie would have been Jackie Kennedy in a flash, if she could have been.

  “You can’t even keep a mailbox standing because of Little Vinal,” said Goldie. “How are you gonna keep an outdoor tree?” Goldie had asked this question sincerely. She was truly wondering how Vera could believe, after all these years of knowing him, that Little Vinal, aged twelve, would allow anything not made of concrete and steel, and welded to the earth, to retain its original form and location. “Besides,” Goldie had continued. “I ain’t got no Christmas lights. You’re crazy. This is a hot flash, is what it
is.”

  “I’ll give you a hot flash. I saw you dragging them in today.” Vera was angrier than Goldie could ever remember. “You was so damned scared someone might see you, you let Popeye chew up your hoity-toity hat.”

  “Someone has to feed him,” said Goldie. “That poor dog looks like a washboard walking around on four legs.”

  “He gets plenty to eat,” shouted Vera, who rarely knew where Popeye was, let alone if he was nutritionally satisfied.

  “Hell he does,” said Goldie. “He lays in the yard all day eating the catalog. Even the kids joke about it. They say he’s too weak to order anything.”

  It was Pike, who had fallen asleep on the sofa during The Edge of Night, who came to Goldie’s rescue. He ordered Vera to go back down the hill and forget about the incident.

  “Lick some Green Stamps and paste ’em in a book,” Pike suggested to his brother’s wife. “Git your mind off this foolishness.” So Vera had loosened her grip on the door and retreated.

  “She’s so mad she’s melting all the snow off the hill,” Goldie had observed to Pike, and then had gone back to packing away the boxes of Christmas lights, some to be used the very next holiday, others during the many holidays to come, when the very mountain top of Giffordtown would radiate for miles around.

  For two weeks following the sale, Vera had made everyone in her own household miserable—all except Popeye, who was forced daily to eat bowls of chopped welfare Spam, mixed with powdered welfare eggs. The dining took place outside, and the sole purpose was to assure Goldie that his daily diet was a well-balanced, family-monitored affair. Popeye was delighted and, not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, added stomach weight so quickly that the entire length of his body turned round and wobbly.

  “Now he looks like a big ball of yarn walking around on four toothpicks,” Goldie said, lifting a curtain panel with one finger ever so slightly and watching the activity at the bottom of the hill.

  Pike Gifford was flattened out on the sofa, waiting for Guiding Light. Like kings, the male Giffords never worked, and they engaged with the public at special functions only, the kings at court, the Giffords in court.

  “She ought to be mixing up a little meat for her kids,” Pike had yawned. “It might stop that little one’s nose from bleeding all the time. It looks like somebody stuck a pig in that house.”

  While the snows fell and the land settled more serenely under the tonnage of winter, the battle between the two women became military. Encastled on the top of the hill with her small army, Goldie had in her coffers a treasure wanted by the angry army camped at the base of the hill. They waited. They spied. Since party lines still plagued Mattagash in 1969, McKinnon and Gifford alike, they listened in on each other’s calls. Each and every time, after hearing the one long, two short rings, Goldie would carefully lift the receiver.

  “The blond witch is on the line, Maggie,” Vera would warn. “Be careful what you say.” And many times Goldie had to bite her tongue in order not to ask, “Who’re you calling a witch, you gray-haired hag?” Instead she would wait her turn, wait until someone phoned her, knowing Vera would hear the two long, two short rings and be unable to resist a listen.

  “The biggest mistake Vinal Gifford ever made just picked up the phone, Lizzie,” Goldie would say. “Don’t breathe deep. You might catch stupidity.”

  Vera and Goldie also waged their ornamental battle through the children. “They’re as bad as the Viet Cong,” Vinal commented to Pike one day, as the brothers sat before the final minutes of Days of Our Lives. “The next thing you know, they’ll be strapping grenades on them kids and sending ’em back and forth across the road.” But, quick to vie for parental attention, even if it came in the form of a slap, the Gifford progeny were happy to oblige. At school, one of Goldie’s tripped one of Vera’s on the playground. One of Vera’s pulled a hank of hair from the head of one of Goldie’s on the school bus. One tore up another’s homework. Mittens were stolen. Swear words filled the air like old medieval curses. But those first weeks of sheer holiday rage cooled a bit when 1969 brought in the coldest February to settle down on northern Maine in a hundred years. It’s difficult to stand outside, the Gifford first cousins soon realized, and cuss someone out when your nose is frostbitten.

  But not even a windchill factor of sixty below could assuage the painful need Vera had to wrap her fingers around her sister-in-law’s neck. By the time spring curled, doglike, about the crooked doorjambs, the peeling paint flecks, the weathered outhouses, the mud-filled driveways, Vera was still seething. Had Goldie found the time to plant a row of daffodils in front of the unsightly tires, Vera would’ve taken Vinal’s old .44 rifle and blown the heads off every one of them.

  Diplomats that they were, the two Gifford patriarchs managed to stay untouched and unruffled by what they considered female hysteria. A pile of new batteries might be a different story, but only women could get so emotional over glass bulbs that did little more than rocket electricity bills. So, when April came around with the ancient sound of water dripping from eaves, of car tires finally touching tarred roads, of rips rattling again in the Mattagash River, Pike Gifford lay on the porch sofa and listened to it all. God was in his heaven at times like this, when neither he nor Vinal was in jail. What more could a man crave than a comely spring, a little bit of freedom, and a daily diet of soap operas? And he could almost smell the disability check already in the mail, already on its sweet journey from Augusta to Mattagash. Pike lifted his head and gazed down to the bottom of the hill for a sign of his older brother Vinal. His eye caught the magnificent flash of hubcaps simmering in the warm sun, like a vein of silver dug up from all those early boomtowns he’d seen in westerns. He shifted himself onto his side and smiled when he heard in his pocket the soft sweet rattle of quarters and dimes and nickels that had, just the day before, been in a container for “Jerry’s Kids” at Craft’s Filling Station. He had also gotten some gossip from Craft’s, gossip that wedding bells would be ringing in the valley soon. Wedding bells, like sirens, meant excitement. From his hilltop view of Giffordtown, Pike knew that all was right with the world.

  SPRING SLAPS PORTLAND IN THE FACE: THE IVYS CLING TO THE FUNERAL HOME

  “I’ve been so depressed lately that if it wasn’t for my little packet of birth control pills, I wouldn’t even know what day it is.”

  —Thelma Ivy, to “Dear Abby,” one of thirty-four letters written from January 1969 to April 1969

  Portland, Maine, like a favored heir and through some natural sort of special dispensation, had received its glorious spring a few weeks earlier. The ocean salt and sea breeze served to hasten winter into a quiet retreat, and already folks were tiring of the canary-yellow daffodils in their last death throes along the neat lawns and walks. Soon the rigors of summer mowings and prunings would replace all romantic notions of April, would push them back into the gray attics of people’s minds until they were needed again, when the first daffodils birthed themselves once more out of a thawing earth.

  At one particular yard, mowed and pruned to perfection, sprawled the brick Ivy Funeral Home, a structure more closely resembling an educational institution than a mortuary. Vines toe-hold their way across the gray bricks. Sagging, intelligent elms lolled on each side of the entrance, and shapely hedges squatted along the paved driveway and adjoining parking lot. A somber lull lay in the architecture of the building. It could easily have been Cambridge University, that place of great thought and deep learning, so much did the structure demand one’s highest respect. Old Man Ivy, who designed the building himself, knew the architectural reasoning behind it all, knew it was no accident that the Ivy Funeral Home could pass as a university in its insistence on being paid an academic homage. He had researched buildings for six long months before he came up with the creative spark that had burst, finally, into full flame. When the smoke cleared less than a year later, the Ivy Funeral Home was welcoming clients at the cul-de-s
ac on the end of Maple Street. “There are two things on the planet that people are most afraid of,” Old Man Ivy once said to his son Marvin. “The first is a scholar. The second is a corpse. Put them together and you can sell a coffin for twice the factory price. Please remember that, son.”

  And the notion worked. The institution threatened revenge on any weeping family member who might stop crying long enough to question the dollars and cents that were accumulating on the funeral bill. Old Man Ivy had seen, before his own demise, the long lines of reverent mourners filing into his chapel as though Leonardo had sculpted the J. C. Penney plaster of Paris statues about the altar and the fernlike designs on the heavenly ceiling. He had seen the faces, pale and divine, like pilgrims at Lourdes, their nostrils fluttering at the smell of flower shop carnations and gladioli. He had seen the eyes sneaking peeks at the floral banners: BELOVED UNCLE, CHERISHED MOTHER, DEAREST FRIEND, SON, DAUGHTER, SISTER, BROTHER.

  “Schmuck,” the old man told Marvin one night, as they studied the newly arrived corpse of one of Portland’s more prominent Jewish citizens. “They should print a banner that says BELOVED SCHMUCK.”

  But his son Marvin was as oblivious to the professional tricks of the trade as were the clients of the Ivy Funeral Home. He was caught up in the promotional thrust of the scheme. Driving to work each morning, to what he called “the office,” Marvin Ivy felt like a professor about to enter the chalky halls of academia, where he might be prompted to deliver a lecture on Anglo-Saxon runes. Several years earlier he had begun wearing tweed suits and carrying a two-hundred-dollar calfskin briefcase to house his colored pamphlets on casket models and monument selections. He grew a small, fuzzy mustache. The secretary began finding vestiges of Grecian Formula on the restroom towels. Then an 8×10 photo of Winston Churchill appeared in his office, among toothy school pictures of the Ivy grandchildren. “You have nothing to fear but fear itself,” he began telling the secretaries and other “upstairs employees,” who were skittish about the embalming room. Another innovative splash in funeral jargon that Marvin Ivy had coined himself was “houseguest.” No corpse entering the Ivy Funeral Home was referred to as “the deceased,” or even “the departed.” Maybe behind Marvin’s back his employees verbally roughhoused the bodies, calling them stiffs, or goners, or “Friday’s paycheck.” But to Marvin Ivy’s face, all incoming dead were to be referred to, politely, as houseguests. “We are not a parlor,” he told his melancholy group of employees, “because we do not give massages. We take in houseguests. We are a funeral home. Think of yourselves as hosts. And don’t slump in your suits,” he warned, as they itched in their colorful tweeds and looked more like overgrown Scottish delinquents than workers at the Ivy Funeral Home.