A Wedding on the Banks Read online

  It was in response to hearing this speech for the first time, the one about the employees being innkeepers of sorts, that Jimmy Driscoll was prompted to speak up and ask Marvin Ivy why he didn’t put out a welcome mat and stick a candle in the window. Marvin said nothing in front of the others, but the very next day Jimmy Driscoll was sucking on a milk shake in the Portland Mall and talking about getting a job selling life insurance. So no one spoke up again whenever the home-versus-a-massage-parlor lecture came down. Marvin Ivy may have thought he loomed large and authoritative as Winston Churchill before his employees, but in truth he was barely in his car, on his way home from a busy day at the office, before the barbs began to fly. “Has anyone seen the boss?” they would ask one another. “He must still be here,” someone would say. “He left his calfskin briefcase.” And then a soft moo could be heard throughout the funeral home, until all the employees took up the chorus and a loud litany of moos filled the establishment. Once, a secretary, who was biding her time until an autumn marriage, told a prospective client who had phoned for information, “Sorry. There’s no more room at the inn.” Everyone in the casket showroom had cracked up when they heard about it.

  One more time before he died, Old Man Ivy tried to get some light to leak in through Marvin’s tightly sealed lids.

  “Don’t let none of this fool you, boy,” the old man said. “This has been going on ever since the first caveman threw a few daisies onto a grave. Think in terms of dollars only, son, and you’ll be all right.”

  The advice had fallen on ears as receptive as those belonging to an Ivy Funeral Home houseguest. The old man’s words had beat against the hard walls of the embalming room, had circled like doves around the chapel and then escaped into the wide sky over Portland, Maine’s, finest funeral home. They must have been interred with the old man. They must have gone back to dust next to the rattling bones in his coffin, because they simply disappeared. Now, twenty-three months before his retirement, Marvin Ivy still felt a literary jostle to his gut while driving in to the office each morning. As he cut the sharp corner onto Maple Street, the first thing he saw was the building, vine-covered, kingly, aristocratic as hell. A building that had seen some things, this building, like the Tower of London. It occurred to Marvin Ivy that if his own son, Marvin Ivy Jr., didn’t get his cow patties collected soon, rather than pass the funeral home on to the foolish boy, he would turn it into one of those historic monuments and charge tourists a buck apiece to tramp through it. That’s just what those broke aristocrats did to their castles in England. That’s how most of those English big wheels paid their light bills. Fifty cents here and there from Ohio and Missouri and Delaware. Yes, sir. Junior had better get his horse manure into a meaningful pile soon or Marvin would change the very history of the building. Maybe he’d do it anyway. Even if Junior got his dog turds rounded up it would be only a matter of years before Junior’s son, Randy, Marvin’s only grandson, would inherit the family business. When Marvin Ivy thought about his vine-clad business being passed on to Randy Ivy, when he thought of his beleaguered houseguests being invited in for their brief stay by his grandson, it caused a sweat to form all over his body, a dangerous thing for tweed.

  As Marvin Ivy left the office for the day, remnants of spring were lounging, still, around the squat hedges and along the prim drive. He hoisted his briefcase under his arm and sighed a heavy sigh as he surveyed his empire. It had been a busy week last week: eight from the local nursing homes, a heart attack at the new mall construction site, three automobile fatalities on Interstate 95, and a stillbirth. Thirteen houseguests made a nice tidy number that would add silver to the pockets. But that had been last week. So far this week, every living soul in Portland seemed healthy enough to force Marvin Ivy into bankruptcy. Last week thirteen. This week nothing. That number thirteen could grab hold of a man’s superstitions, if a man let it.

  In the midst of his monetary reverie Marvin was bombarded by a hideous whine that had just cut the sharp corner onto Maple Street. The amplified sound of an outboard motor, he thought at first, or worse, a high-powered chain saw on wheels. It loomed out of the setting sun that had temporarily blinded him and burst up the drive in a deafening squall, loud enough, perish the thought, to waken each of the slumbering houseguests at the Ivy Funeral Home, had any checked in.

  “Shhh!” Marvin said, a finger to his lips. He pointed to a sign near the door: QUIET, PLEASE. THIS IS NOT AN AMUSEMENT PARK. Marvin was proud of the sign. It was a minor example of the imaginative sparks that illuminated his lucrative career in funeral undertaking.

  “We can’t have one group bawling their heads off and disturbing another group of mourners,” he had said to his wife, Pearl McKinnon Ivy, when she inquired as to the tastefulness of the wording.

  “Shhh!” Marvin warned again, as the wall of sound pushed itself off the paved drive and burst across the newly sprouted grass of the funeral home lawn. It halted before him, with a rude abruptness, an inch or two from his shoes.

  “SHUT IT OFF!” Marvin Ivy bellowed. “SHUT—IT—OFF!”

  “What?” asked Randy Ivy, his hair dirty and dangling down his back in a limp ponytail.

  “I SAID SHUT THAT GODDAMN THING OFF!” Randy turned the ignition key and the sound melted away.

  “How do you like my new wheels, man?” Randy Ivy asked. The flare in the legs of his jeans had been wrapped around his skinny ankles and bound there with elastics to avoid any transportation hazards. Randy Ivy had learned this during the years he was confined to the noiseless, smokeless bicycle.

  “And don’t call me man!” Marvin shouted.

  “Gramps,” Randy said.

  “That’s worse,” thought Marvin. “What if the mourners hear him?”

  “What do you think of my new Kawasaki, Gramps?” Randy asked. His eyes glowed red.

  “Get it to hell off my lawn,” Marvin warned, wondering what chemical Randy was experimenting with now. He knew a little bit about chemicals himself. They all did the same thing to the dead and the living. They were meant to embalm the body. In Randy’s case, the brain.

  “You seen my old man?” Randy asked.

  “Your father,” Marvin said. “He’s your father.”

  “Yeah,” said Randy. “You seen him?”

  “No,” said Marvin. “I haven’t seen him. I don’t especially want to see him. And I don’t especially care to see you. You’re obviously higher than a Chinese kite. And you’re tearing up my goddamn front lawn!”

  “Cool it, man,” Randy said. “Calm down. You’ll end up a houseguest.” Marvin stared at his grandson. Blaspheme his institution, would he, this product of the ungodly sixties?

  “Listen, you greasy-haired little squirt,” he said, trying to sound menacing without disobeying his own sign behind his tweeded shoulder, the one outlawing amusement park activities. “You get your wheels to hell out of here. And your ass, too.”

  “How’s business?” Randy asked. “Anybody’s grandmother croak today?”

  Marvin Ivy stood, slack-jawed, his tweed turning almost a full-colored navy in the sun setting over the Portland treetops. Marvin stood in front of his establishment, which looked, as the sun turned gold as wheat, more like Cambridge University than ever. He looked away from his grandson to the lot across the street that had been purchased for the sole purpose of housing the Ivy Funeral Home memorial stones. He counted to ten, his eyes moving from one sparkling, highly polished baby’s monument to another. He kept his eyes on those newly arrived kiddie memorials adorned with angel wings. The monument addition to the family business was another one of Marvin’s lucrative ventures, and it had proved a wise one. It was just last month that he had decided to try out an entire line of children’s markers, and now they lolled in the sun, the embossed lambs weary with waiting, the angel wings that embellished the tops too heavy to fly. One. Two. Three. His eyes counted until they marked off ten memorials. As he fought to keep
his blood pressure from rising, he imagined what the tenth marker, with its granite wings fluttering, might say. MARVIN RANDALL IVY III. KNOWN AS RANDY. SADLY MISSED BY GRANDMOTHER ONLY.

  “Do you see that sign?” Marvin was finally able to ask. “Right there?” He pointed to a mound that would soon be flowering with pansies, those somber yet summery flowers. The sign in question said in heavy black letters: STAY OFF THE GRASS! Randy read it slowly, thought about it.

  “I’m trying to, man,” Randy Ivy said, reaching into his jacket pocket and taking out a Baggie full of what his grandfather estimated to be large chunks of parsley flakes. “But this shit,” Randy said, wetting a Zig-Zag paper to his lips and beginning to expertly roll a joint, “this shit is pure Colombian.”

  ***

  Marvin Ivy Jr. turned away from Monique Tessier, in bed at the Portland Ocean Edge Motel, and checked his watch. He hoped to make it back to the Ivy Funeral Home in time to satisfy his father that he was just away on a short business call and would be back on the job until six thirty, his usual departure time. Marvin Sr. left the office by five o’clock every day, with a timed precision Junior had never been able to acquire.

  “He’ll probably die right on time, too,” Junior had said to his wife, Thelma. “He’ll probably kick off at five o’clock sharp someday to go to that casket showroom in the sky.”

  Junior squinted his eyes, gathering up enough afternoon light flitting past the thick motel curtains to read the digits. Five thirty.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “Mmmm?” Monique stirred beside him. It was most likely Marvin had already noticed that Monique was not at her desk in the reception area. The other female employee at the Ivy Funeral Home, the secretary-accountant, was supposed to cover for Monique if Marvin Ivy came around, smelling of sweaty tweed and calfskin and asking questions.

  “Tell him I have a dental appointment,” Monique had begged Milly Bishop. So when Marvin Ivy turned up at four thirty to inquire as to Junior’s whereabouts, Milly was ready for him.

  “He had a business appointment,” Milly lied, “and will be back any minute.”

  “Where’s Miss Tessier?” Marvin had asked, noticing the empty chair and paperless desk.

  “Dental appointment,” said Milly, too flustered with lying to look her boss in the face.

  “Dental appointment?” Marvin asked. “That’s the fourth one this month. How many teeth has the woman got?”

  “Thirty-two,” said Milly sheepishly, as if Monique had urged her to say this as well if asked. “I think humans have thirty-two,” she repeated, and then went back to mailing coffin bills to the still-stricken relatives of houseguests.

  “Damn!” Junior said again, and threw back the covers. Monique pushed brunette hair away from her eyes and then opened them.

  “What?” she asked.

  “The time,” said Junior. “The old man is gonna raise the roof over this.”

  “Well, why don’t we meet after work, sweetheart? Wouldn’t that make it so much easier?” Monique walked her fingers among the forest of hairs on Junior’s chest.

  “You know why.” Junior grunted and lurched forward to a sitting position. The acquisition of belly that he had worked for all his life, a nest egg of fat tissues and fat cells and skin dimples, jiggled as he hoisted his pants up over his hips.

  “You know damn well Thelma would have the fire department out looking for me if I came home ten minutes late.” Junior studied his face in the motel mirror. He hated the lighting in motel rooms. It had all the ambience of a police lineup. His image filled the tiny mirror, towered dark and heavy, like Citizen Kane.

  “Well, let her then,” Monique said. “The trouble with Thelma is that she has nothing better to do with her time.”

  “Don’t start,” said Junior, and slipped his feet into his shoes.

  “When she comes into the funeral home, she talks like she’s drugged. I know those Valiums her doctor gives her keep her on another planet.”

  “Don’t start,” said Junior.

  “And Randy would be such a nice boy if he only had a little discipline.” Monique said this as she pulled her cotton sweater over her head and then fluffed her hair. She took her skirt off the chair by the side of the bed and stepped carefully into it.

  “I don’t know why you don’t just put your foot down,” Monique said. She applied a fresh layer of lipstick to each lip, then rolled them together to smooth the effect. “The girls will be space cadets too, with Thelma as a role model.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “And where does that leave us? Sneaking off like high school kids. Hiding from your wife and your father. Why can’t we go to dinner? Spend a weekend in Boston? See a movie now and then? We never do anything but go to bed in the middle of the afternoon at the same damn motel. Day after day after day.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Junior, as he opened the door for the Ivy Funeral Home secretary. “You’re gonna start.”

  ***

  Pearl brought Marvin’s after-dinner coffee in to where he lounged in the living room. He was reading the obituary page like a broker scouring the Wall Street Journal.

  “Sicily called today in a panic,” Pearl said. “It seems some boy is stupid enough to marry Amy Joy. Can you imagine?” But Marvin wasn’t listening to matrimonial news.

  “I don’t understand it,” he said to Pearl, who was milking his coffee the way he liked it. “They seem to be dying just fine in Bangor, and Brunswick, and Lewiston. What the hell is Portland holding out for?”

  “People are living longer nowadays,” said Pearl. “People are healthier.”

  “Healthy is one thing,” said Marvin. “Immortal is another.”

  “Oh, it can’t be that bad, can it now?” asked Pearl. She settled back with a large thump onto the sofa. Her body had deteriorated more this very year than any other. She could feel it happening, the joints stiffening with rust, the skin loosening, the yellow growing in her eyes as though they were gardens of weeds. Every morning since the twenty-fifth of January, when it had first occurred, she had awakened before daylight and lain beside Marvin Ivy and whispered to herself over and over again, “I am sixty years old now. I am sixty years old.”

  And so she was. The Reverend Ralph C. McKinnon, her father, had seen her last when she was thirteen. Now she was sixty. Would he recognize her when her turn came and she died and went to heaven? Would he know that the graying woman, large and solid like the McKinnons, with the arthritic hip and crow’s-feet smile, was the same little girl who wore the brunette braids in 1923? That was the day of good-bye, as the Reverend set out for China, never to be seen again. He had died there of a disease transmitted by an insect of some kind. Pearl could no longer remember what. But the Reverend wasn’t her problem in the gray morning hours as the first light of dawn settled over Portland, over her house, over her very bedroom. It was her mother’s face that got her up long before daylight and kept her awake long after Marvin’s heavy snores were cascading from his side of the bed. She was little more than four years old when Grace McKinnon died giving birth to Pearl’s younger sister, Sicily. Yet Pearl could see her mother’s face, pure, calm, with the dream of life still unbroken. When she was not quite awake or not quite asleep, that’s when it filtered in to her. A mother’s face, awash in plainness, the skin pale and milky. The thin hair that fell along the sides like silver willows was soft with forgiveness. She was not a pioneer, Grace McKinnon, but delicate and sickly. And she proved that by dying as Sicily was born.

  Sometimes her mother’s face turned into her sister Marge’s, dead a decade, who had raised Sicily and Pearl after the Reverend embarked for a career and death in China. Poor Marge. What a sad, lonely life for such a young girl. Pearl felt a twinge of guilt. She and Marge had not always been on the same team. Sometimes they hadn’t even been in the same ballpark. But she missed her dearly. Marge had died of beri
beri—had refused to eat anything but polished rice and Chinese tea as a tribute to the great missionaries of the world. Marge had died unmarried, unhappy, unfulfilled, and now Pearl wanted to tell her that—although she herself had a husband, a son, three grandchildren—she was feeling that life had dealt them the same round of cards, but in different games.

  “This dry spell keeps up and I’ll have to fire Barney,” said Marvin, and drank some more coffee. “It’s getting to the point nowadays where nursing homes are teaching exercise and fitness. What do people want, for Chrissakes? To live to be a hundred?”

  “Fire Barney?” asked Pearl. Barney Killam had been with the Ivy Funeral Home for thirty-eight years. Old Man Ivy himself had hired him. “Isn’t he about to retire?”

  “We’ve been saying that for ten years,” said Marvin, and turned to the sports page. Perhaps it was business as usual in that category at least. “He’ll never retire. We’ll just embalm him one day and stand him in the corner.”