A Wedding on the Banks Read online

  “Good heavens, Marvin. It seems to me that firing Barney after thirty-eight years of service would be unfair.”

  “Well, I can’t let any of my new blood go just to keep Barney working,” Marvin said. Pearl thought about the situation.

  “Well, don’t tell Barney why you’re firing him,” she said. “He may be tempted to bump somebody off.”

  “You can’t blame a man for loving his job.” Marvin put his shoeless feet up onto the ottoman. Pearl had come to accept almost every tenet and ism of funeralology over the forty years they’d been married. Had even grown used to her Mattagash sisters being unable to deal with death and its earthly ministers, the undertakers. “Funeral directors,” Pearl was still correcting Sicily after forty years. “Please, Sicily, not undertakers.” But some notions were harder to swallow. This was one. That white-headed Barney might slink in dark alleys in hopes of slaying potential houseguests in order to keep his job was too much. Pearl tried not to imagine him in court, bent as a willow tree, weeping about missing the embalming room. And he had been the best embalmer. A real artist. But now the trembling in his hands limited him to shaking hands with mourners and offering his condolences. Pearl realized that Barney’s hands were probably incapable of murder these days. She imagined the raised silver knife glancing off the victim and skittering like a fish along the pavement. She saw the bullet refusing to go into the gun as brittle fingers pushed at it. The match unable to ignite with such a slight scratch of itself down an alley wall. Old Barney couldn’t hurt a fly even if he were a spider and wanted to. He was too fragile with age, Pearl decided, and let the issue drop.

  “Speaking of firing,” Marvin said, his voice tight with tension. Pearl’s jaw grew taut. She waited. Nothing.

  “Yes?” she asked, finally. “What about it?” The tension floated like a balloon between them, ready to burst at the first sharp word.

  “If I ever run into Junior at work, I may just fire him.” Marvin said this quickly, hoping to make it sound as matter-of-fact as the possible firing of Barney Killam. But this was different. This was treading upon ground higher and taller than any sacred mound an Indian even conceived of building, for this Junior, this large, pinkish philandering heap, was, at thirty-eight years old, Pearl’s one and only baby. Juniorkins, she had called him in his baby years, and on occasion she still slipped and called him this. Juniorkins. And it seemed, she was sure, to please him. She had done all a mother could to protect Junior for years. His classmates had been cruel, she knew, singling him out on the basis of his father’s profession. So she had cradled him from those awful creatures all she could, had plied him with cakes and candies and high-caloric meals, insisting his bouts with unhappiness were a sure sign of low sugar. When Junior jilted her to marry batty little Thelma Parsons, Pearl had felt, family business metaphors aside, that a great grave had opened up wide and swallowed any chances for future happiness for her only child. Now Thelma Parsons Ivy had proved true to Pearl’s expectations of her. She was battier than ever. She was driving poor Junior to his wits’ end. Pearl knew this. A mother senses inner turmoil, regardless of how many layers of fatty tissue she must go through to reach it.

  “And Monique, the secretary with the big tits, was gone again. Another dental appointment.” Marvin offered more evidence, but to Pearl it was even further proof of poor Junior’s marital unhappiness. Thelma could have had breast implants. Pearl had seen her bras in the laundry room. Thirty-two A’s. “Walnuts,” Pearl had thought, “could fit in these cups.” How then could Junior not be tempted when veritable melons were flaunted before him, day after day? Pearl did pale at the thought of Monique, a fortune hunter, a gold digger if she ever saw one, trying to finagle her way in through the showroom doors of the Ivy Funeral Home as Junior’s second wife. And that was what Monique was after, to be sure. What woman wouldn’t want to be first lady of Portland’s largest, most academic funeral parlor? Parlor. Pearl grimaced. The last thing she needed that evening was the “we do not give massages” lecture. Pearl glanced over at Marvin, but he was staring straight ahead, still consumed with the anger he had brought home over Junior’s habitual disappearances.

  “All he thinks of is sex and food,” Marvin said. “In that order.”

  Pearl wished that Junior would come to her for the food, and for some motherly consolation. She might not be able to compete with Monique Tessier in some departments, but she could hold her own with quick, drive-through restaurants and the seedy sort of menus one might find in sleazy motels. She would make her son a three-tiered sandwich of homemade bread, cut him a monstrous slice of cake, fill a glass of Shulman’s Dairy milk up to a frosty brim. She would rub his shoulders and call him Juniorkins.

  “Maybe it was just a coincidence,” Pearl said, of Junior and Monique’s magical codisappearance.

  “Any more coincidences like that and the woman won’t have a tooth left in her head,” said Marvin. He finished off the coffee.

  “This is Thelma’s fault,” Pearl said, her eyes on Junior’s bronzed baby shoes, which glittered on the top shelf of the bookcase. Pearl could, if she listened hard enough, long enough, still hear the lovely patter of those plump little footfalls. “My God, where does the time go?” she wondered.

  “No. He’s a grown man,” said Marvin. “It’s no one’s fault but his own. He has a business thrown into his lap, for Chrissakes, and he’s still too lazy to do a day’s work.”

  So here it was, the continuing argument between Marvin and Pearl for years, between husband and wife, between father and mother.

  “The funeral business makes him nervous,” Pearl said.

  “Yeah, well let him shovel shit somewhere and see if that makes him feel any better. Any other boss would fire him anyway. He’s lazy, Pearl. You might as well admit that.”

  Pearl sat softly and watched the bluish light from the turned-down television set as it bounced off the bronze laces of Junior’s first pair of shoes. She had bought them at The Blessed Stork, a children’s store now long swallowed up by a swath of shiny new office buildings.

  “If he hadn’t married Thelma,” she said resolutely.

  “Thelma Shmelma,” Marvin said, as he always did. “You’d put the blame on anyone he would have married. If he had married Elizabeth Taylor you’d have blamed her.” Marvin had Liz Taylor on the brain, since all the funeral home employees had commented many times on Monique Tessier’s resemblance to the star.

  Pearl tried to imagine Junior driving up to the front door of the Ivy Funeral Home with Elizabeth Taylor happily ensconced in the front seat, the three Ivy grandkids bobbing noisily in the back. “Large breasts,” Pearl thought, visualizing Elizabeth—no, she would call her Beth—opening the car door and waving a warm, diamondy hello to her in-laws. Pearl could even see the angle of Portland sunlight as it bounced along Beth’s ample cleavage. She was reminded of the tiny path that wound between Thelma’s walnuts, with not even the slightest trace of curve or hint of a hill. “Yes,” thought Pearl. “Beth Taylor Ivy. It might have worked.”

  “Ever since he was a kid,” Marvin went on, “you blamed other kids for his wrongdoings. You’re not helping him any, Pearl. Believe me. I know. I work with him—when he’s there.” And with that, Marvin had gone up the stairs to take a long leisurely soak and ponder the new no-corpse situation befalling Portland, Maine.

  “Something in the water, maybe?” he wondered as he turned the tap and warm water gushed out to fill the tub.

  Pearl sat alone on the sofa, staring at her wedding band, wondering how all that young skin around it had grown so miserably wrinkled and dry. When she married Marvin, he had been studying to become a lawyer, and thus she felt she was marrying a lawyer. But she had married an undertaker instead. Sicily was right. Funeral director. Undertaker. It made no difference. The end result was the same. Somebody died. Somebody undertook to bury them. It had been going on since time immemorial, this dying-burying busin
ess. Someday, and someday soon, no matter how she looked at it, someone at the Ivy Funeral Home would take Pearl McKinnon Ivy in as a houseguest and drain and stitch and powder her to a lasting perfection. This would happen to Marvin. It would happen to Junior. It would happen to his wife, Thelma. To the Ivy grandchildren. Someday.

  “I am sixty years old,” Pearl said softly, and the television flickered a blue response. Junior’s baby shoes sat gathering the dust of the years. Petrified. Embalmed. “I am sixty years old now,” Pearl said again. And she tried to call her mother’s face to her mind, to picture a visage that was soft and loving and peaceful. But instead of her mother, she saw Thelma Parsons Ivy. Pale and breastless. Thief of sons. Purloiner of only children.

  “Damn her,” Pearl thought. One day soon, she would take a hammer and chisel and pound away at those bronzed baby shoes, just to see how the soft leather inside, like the aging meat of an old nut, had been holding up.

  She struggled up from the sofa and turned off the TV set. It was an older set, a model with tubes, but Pearl still hadn’t the heart to chuck it out for a newer one. Junior had watched his favorite cartoons on this set. And Ed Sullivan playing straight man to Topo Gigio. Arthur Godfrey, the redhead, dug up the best talent in America. And Milton Berle dressed up as a woman on Tuesday nights with Texaco sponsoring. Pearl had read that the streets of America emptied on this night, so folks could gather around televisions and radios to see and hear Uncle Miltie. “Where does the time go?” Pearl asked again. On the television screen, the white line of the picture tube drew slowly inward, until it became a white, flickering dot. It hung there like a tiny soul, like the ghost of every one of the old television performers who had come and gone in the lives of curious, forgetful Americans. I Married Joan. You Bet Your Life. Edward R. Murrow chain-smoking on Person to Person. The picture screen fell to a grayish haze and grew darker. Then the white dot was gone and the screen turned black as death. “I am sixty years old now,” Pearl said again, as though it were the latest answer to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

  ***

  One of the adult shoes belonging to Junior pressed down on the accelerator as he flew down Beacon Street and swung into his wide driveway. He saw the curtain flutter gently in the window. Birdlike. Thelma. Junior walked around the back end of the car after he parked it. It was the longest route to the house, but even a few extra feet would give him added time to think. His eye spied a sticker on the rear bumper that one of the kids had pasted there during the family’s spring vacation. I WISH I WERE IN FLORIDA, it stated.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Junior thought, as he saw the curtain go limp in the window.

  Inside, Thelma popped a Valium into her small mouth, and it disappeared down her throat in a wash of ginger ale. She hurried across the room and flopped onto the sofa in front of the evening news. She straightened her dress and waited. Junior stopped to pet the family’s miniature collie on the front steps. More time to think. Thelma glanced out nervously and saw her husband’s head bobbing up and down outside the window.

  “There, boy,” she heard him say. “Good dog.”

  “That’s me,” Thelma thought. “A good dog.”

  Junior came in and closed the door softly.

  “Whew. What a day!” he said. He threw his suit jacket on the sofa and leaned over to lightly kiss the top of Thelma’s head. “And how was your day?”

  “The same,” said Thelma. “Nothing new.” He heard the thin layer of ice forming among the words, molding them into a cold sentence. What now? He moved nervously to the bar and poured himself a gin and tonic.

  “Where’s the kids?” he asked. This would be okay. There was no trap in this sentence waiting to snap shut. Something had riled her, to be sure, so he must step the way soldiers do to avoid live mines. He was good at this. Very good. He’d had plenty of qualified training. He dabbed a napkin at the bottom of his glass. If it hadn’t been for the funeral home, he might have tried his hand at drama. His confidence pushed the words out again. “I said, where’s the kids?”

  “Where’s Monique Tessier?” Thelma asked suddenly and Junior’s glass slid a full inch down, out of his hand. He caught the bottom of it with his other hand, but Thelma had already seen the damage caused by her remark.

  “Who?” Junior asked. The Muse had abandoned him, the bitch. Now his feet hurt, as if he were wearing shoes that were too small. Mama, his subconscious mind all but shouted. His clothes began to shrink, to hurt him, an embalmed suit of skin.

  “Monique Tessier,” Thelma said again, and turned to look at him. He had grown even more portly, this man she had married. He had grown chins, and unusual habits, and away from her. She took a Polaroid picture from beneath the sofa cushion and handed it to him.

  “Look familiar?” she asked. Calm. Beneficent. This surprised her. Wasn’t she usually flighty, illogical, overly emotional? This must be, then, the new her. She must have grown already from the news of this nasty business. In truth, she had forgotten the day’s handful of Valiums.

  Junior took the picture and gazed at it. Polaroids. How he hated them. What ever happened to the old-fashioned way of processing film? How nice it would have been if Thelma had had to drop her film off at the mall for three days. Or send it to Boston. Or Hong Kong. It would have given him days to think. Yes, there they were, him leaning on the door of Monique’s old Buick, just about to give her a little good-bye peck. His lips were moving with words. What had they been? Oh, yes. You’ll see. Things will get better, honey. That’s what he had been foolishly saying just as the blasted Polaroid had snapped and frozen his guilt forever. Bronzed it. Things will get better. Sure, but for whom, that’s what he hadn’t asked himself.

  “Is that,” Thelma asked, “or is that not Monique Tessier?”

  Junior struggled for an answer. He pondered heavily, as if to be of help to Thelma in her identification of the culprit, to ingratiate himself, to fling himself into her side of the ring. His eyebrows knitted with disgust. He wanted to say, “What’s she doing away from her desk? She’s supposed to be working! Me and the old man will need to look into this tomorrow.”

  “Ah,” was all he said. He was struck with the fullness of Monique’s breasts in her cotton sweater, with their pendulous appeal. And right there, even upon the burning coals of this fiery inquisition, he wanted to bury his head between them. “She does look like Elizabeth Taylor,” he thought.

  “What are you looking at?” It was Cynthia, his oldest daughter, engaged to a young dental student.

  “Nothing,” said Junior, and stuffed the photo into his hip pocket.

  “A picture,” said Thelma. She had no idea she was capable of such composure.

  “Where’s Regina Beth?” Junior asked quickly, hoping to lead Cynthia to the sidelines and away from the heat of the action. If Thelma kept it up, the goddamn picture would be in the Portland Telegram in the morning.

  “In her room reading. Where else but with her nose in an book?” asked Cynthia, and turned up her own nose, which looked as if it had never even smelled a book, much less been in one. She tugged at the legs of her jeans, pulled them down, away from her. She had been born, Cynthia Jane Ivy had, long-waisted. At least that’s how Thelma described the malady. Shorts and pants tended to ride up into the crotch area. Cynthia was chafed constantly as a young child, and Thelma had kept a steady supply of talcum as a powdery buffer. But as she got older, Cynthia found the best remedy was a constant relocation of clothing and she perpetually tugged her garments down into more comfortable locations. As a result she fidgeted constantly, and was even sent to the principal’s office in the fifth grade by an insensitive teacher who incorrectly diagnosed a kind of civil disobedience as the cause. Thelma had gone, red-faced, to the principal’s office to explain. “A birth defect,” she had told the man, her eyes lowered to the floor by the weight of what she thought was a family secret. “She lives with pain,” she had a
dded. The nervous affliction had even kept the poor child off the cheerleading team. At tryouts, while the other five girls flew like balloons into the air with shouts of “Give me a P, give me an O, give me an R, give me a T,” Cynthia had remained with her feet flat on the gymnasium floor, trying desperately to come to amicable terms with the stiff red cheerleading panties.

  “A lovely, lovely picture,” said Thelma, and smiled. Junior flinched.

  “Listen,” he said to Cynthia. “Why don’t you go get your sister and we’ll all go out to a nice little dinner? That way your mother won’t have to cook. What do you say?” Junior was grasping—surrounded by the children, he would be temporarily safe. How far had Thelma gone in uncovering his deceit? Had she hired a detective? A lawyer? God, he hated lawyers. Smug sons of bitches. They almost never smelled of formaldehyde. But no, there was her Polaroid camera sitting on the table in the entryway where she’d obviously left it, hastily, on her way in with the spoils. Her purse sprawled in a nearby chair. She’d done the act herself, no doubt. Yes, her car had been in the garage when he’d come home for lunch, and now it was parked haphazardly near the curb in front of the house, threatening to tip over. She must have nearly broken her neck driving there and back. It saddened him that she seemed in such a great rush to catch him red-handed. What had happened to honor, and trust, and emotions like that? Couldn’t she at least have given him the benefit of the doubt? He was suddenly angry at her lack of faith in him. He glared out at the little yellow Corvair, Thelma’s accomplice. Her right-hand man. Her sidekick deputy.

  “I never should have bought her that car,” Junior thought. “She keeps this shit up and she’s losing it.” But how the hell had she pursued him in that canary-yellow thing without his seeing her? He imagined her following him, her mind somewhere in the ozone as she sneaked from stoplight to lilac bush to stoplight, all the way from the funeral home to the Ocean Edge Motel. How downright disgusting of her! No! Of course. Now he had it. She had followed Monique. Men were too damn smart to be followed in bright yellow cars by their wives. Especially if they were on their way to a rendezvous. But one woman following another, well, that was a different story. Thelma could have followed Monique in the Queen Mary, in the Goodyear blimp, and gotten away with it. Monique rarely thought to look up or even ahead sometimes. She was too busy with inspecting herself in the car mirror, fluffing her hair, smoothing her lipstick, checking for food particles in her teeth. He’d seen her do this a thousand times, had followed her to the Ocean Edge Motel so often he knew every detail. Thelma could have maneuvered the Hindenburg up behind Monique’s old Buick and no one would have been the wiser for it. There now. The intrigue was over. The next part would be planning the defense. He hadn’t lost the battle yet. Not by a long shot. Thelma would have to start getting up a whole lot earlier in the morning if she was gonna play detective with Junior Ivy, vice president of the Ivy Funeral Home.