The Story of a Marriage Read Free Page B

can’t tell a young couple that their happiest and saddest news will come through that polished phone. It’s hard to think, even now, that the sweet ebony milkmaid that Holland’s aunts gave us in the first year of our marriage and that sat on the bookshelf would watch with its painted eyes every vital decision I ever made. So too the bamboo coffee table. And the “broken pot” that Sonny had made from a drinking glass, masking tape, and shellac. The yarn cat, the broken mantel clock. They watched the whole six months of that affair, and in the hour of my judgment they will surely be called together to account for things.
    As for what Holland’s aunt told me on that afternoon of tea and popovers, I had decided long before to forget it. Marriage was all that cluttered my mind, and the new house, and the care of my child. I could not pay attention to the memory of an old woman shouting, in her muffled voice:
    “Don’t do it! Don’t marry him!”

     
    It was 1953. It was a Saturday.
    Four years of happy marriage had passed, and the aunts were still in our lives. They’d grown stouter over time, and somehow their sharp-chinned heads seemed huger than ever, Duchesses from Alice in Wonderland , fussing with their enormous hats as they sat telling me a story at our kitchen table. Beneath it, hidden by the apple-red oilcloth, lay my little boy.
    “Oh Pearlie, we forgot to tell you about the murder!” said Alice.
    Beatrice was in the act of putting on her hat, pin in hand like a harpooner. “That terrible murder!”
    “Yes,” said her sister. “You ain’t heard?” asked Beatrice with a worried expression. “Up north?”
    I shook my head and picked up the newspaper, holding my scissors aloft. Sunlight came in through the kitchen window, blurred by my son’s fingerprints. It was two o’clock and a bicycle bell was still ringing in my ears.
    “It was a murder, Pearlie—” Alice tried to interrupt.
    “A woman trying to get a divorce—”
    “This was up in Santa Rosa—”
    Beatrice threw her hands up in air, hatpin whirling like a dragonfly, settling for a second, then darting away with her words. “Oh it happens all the time. She wanted a divorce from her two-timing husband. It isn’t easy, as you know. She was up with one of those lawyers, up at their cabin where they knew the husband was hiding … with his… well you know…”
    Her sister filled in the blank: “With his little bit on the side.”
    “His mistress, Pearlie, his mistress,” announced Beatrice, not to be outdone.
    Beatrice smiled at where my son hid under the table. He had been there for an hour, without a toy, without the dog (who lay at my feet); it was a wonderful mystery to me. My child who could be happy under a tablecloth. I remember thinking: When the dishwasher’s done, he’ll come out . The machine was an extravagance, a gift from the aunts. As they chatted, I stood and listened to it turning and murmuring beside me like a dream from which we would awaken.
    I asked if it was a colored woman.

    “A what? No, the wife was white and so was the mistress. I don’t know why you’d think—”
    “Anyhow,” continued the elder twin, leaning in with the deliciousness of the story. She waved her hands and pointed down the hall to the front window, as if the scene had happened right here in this very house. “Anyhow, she and the detective and the photographer, they snuck up there to that cabin to take a photo. For divorce grounds, you see, she needed evidence of… of adultery … for divorce grounds. She needed a photo of the man and his—”
    “And they broke in!” shouted Alice. “Camera flashing! And what do you know—”
    “The man had a gun. He thought they were robbers.” Now they were telling it together.
    “Oh yes. Of course he did!”
    “Who else would be breaking into his house?”
    “Who else?”
    “And then,” Beatrice said as she set the straw hat on her head, “and then he shot his wife dead.” She