Savage Bride

Chapter Four

Midnight over a tropic sea. Two cigarettes winking close together across a ship’s rail. Two faces ignited into incandescence by the hammered-silver sheen of the moonlit water below. Inside somewhere, the ship’s band was playing “Perfidia.” The song of treachery, the song whose very name spells faithlessness. Out here, two strangers standing side by side, two strangers joined in marriage, groping desperately toward the beginning of acquaintanceship, the beginnings of understanding.

“Why do you look at me like that? What do you see?”

“I’m trying to figure it out. There’s a sadness in your eyes. I wonder what it is. You’re a thousand years old, inside your eyes. You must have been born old, Mitty.”

She glanced at him with an odd little quirk of surprise. “It’s strange you should say that,” she answered slowly. “I was, in a way.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know, I can’t remember my childhood at all.”

“Darned few of us can. I can hardly remember my own. Just faded snapshots of a licking or two, of my first day at school.”

“No, but you’re speaking of infancy, early childhood; I mean even late childhood, the early teens—” She stopped to ask him, “You won’t be disturbed, Larry?”

“No, why should I be? What was it?”

“Illness, I think. Fever of some kind. Maybe even sleeping sickness. He never told me exactly what caused it. It wiped out all recollection of everything that had gone before. It was like starting all over again. I had to learn to talk, to read — why, I can even remember their teaching me how to walk.”

He whistled. “How old were you when this happened?”

He saw her stop and try to think. “I don’t know. They’ve never told me my exact age. This was about three or four years ago.”

He tried to compute it for her. “Well, if you’re eighteen now, and this was about three or four years ago—”

“I’m not sure that I am eighteen now. I’ve never been sure of my own age.”

“Well, didn’t he have to produce a birth certificate when he took out the adoption papers?”

“I don’t think there was one available. I’ve never known who my parents were. His face, Fredericks’, was the first thing I can remember, peering blurredly down at me, feeding me something with a dropper or giving me shots in the arm. I must have lain in a stupor for weeks and months.”

“That’s bad stuff, that sleeping sickness,” he agreed soberly.

“When it finally ended, I had to learn everything all over again. I’d even lost the use of language. I had to pick up words from him, one by one. He’d hand me something to drink and he’d say, ‘Water.’ Then when I wanted it again, I’d say, ‘Water,’ and he’d bring it to me. That was how I learned.”

“But you mean, in your own mind, you didn’t call it ‘water’ before you heard him call it that?”

“No. I knew what it was. But I must have had some symbol, some word of my own for it. Because the sound of the word was strange to me. I couldn’t even pronounce it correctly in the beginning. I had trouble with it on my tongue. Wa-wa, and then wa-ta. It was like a foreign word, a word in another language.”

She fell silent for a time, and he did too. His mind grappled with the enigma she had revealed to him, or rather presented; for the key that would have revealed it was still missing.

Suddenly she blurted out, “Larry, why were they that way to me?”

His eyes narrowed. “That’s something I’d like to know myself.”

“They always made me feel so queer, so different. As if there were some shadowy secret hanging over me.”

He thought about it. “What you just told me about being ill — I suppose that’s it. They were worried about your health.”

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t because I’d once been ill. They didn’t try to keep that from me; I knew it anyway. It was something beyond that. Some knowledge that they had, but that I was forever excluded from. Some knowledge that it would be terrible for me to come into possession of. So many times a look would pass between them, a remark would be exchanged, that they knew the meaning of, but I didn’t. Like in that game that children play, where a ball is tossed over your head, for somebody else to catch behind you. It was as though — as though I were a thing apart. Different from all other girls. They taught me all the things a girl is supposed to know, and then they kept me from using them. They crammed eighteen years of education into just about four years, and then they kept me just shut up in that house. They even taught me to dance. And then they wouldn’t let any boy come close enough to dance with me. They had an instructress come down to the house from Baltimore two or three times a week and give me lessons. I learned the steps, but for the longest time I thought that just women were supposed to dance with one another, like she and I were doing. It never occurred to me that one partner was supposed to be a man.”

He made a grimace of distaste.

She sighed whimsically. “So I waltz beautifully, but until I came on this ship with you, I’d never been in a man’s arms on a dance floor.”

A little flare of resentment kindled in him for a moment. “Who were they, anyway? What were they? An elderly man, and a younger one. What were you doing with them, a girl like you? Those are associations that don’t just happen. How’d it come about? Those are the things I’d like to know!”

“And those,” she said softly, “are the things I would, too. And I never did know. And I still don’t. He was writing, all the time writing, Fredericks. I think it was a book. And I think it had to do with me. They’d subject me to all kinds of tests. And then he’d jot things down. And then he’d lock himself up in that room in the back, and write for hours.”

“They didn’t — mistreat you in any way?”

“No, no,” she assured him. “Nothing like that. But you need a lot more than just — kindness.”

“Yes,” he said, as if to himself. “You need love.”

“I used to hear that word all the time,” she said. “That was one subject, though, they tried to keep in the background. When this dancing teacher I just told you about came to give me lessons, she brought a portable phonograph with her, and various records. Most of them were straight instrumental, but a few had vocal choruses. And right in the middle, they’d pop out with this talk about love. They’d swoon about it, they’d go into a fever about it. Sometimes they were happy about it, sometimes they were sad about it, sometimes they were mad about it. Sometimes it was a girl sobbing for a man. Sometimes it was a man groaning for a girl. Once it was four men at once, and they were all in love with the same girl. I think she was called Diane. I said to the teacher, ‘What is that? Why does it do that to them?’ She just sighed and dropped her eyes. But Fredericks overheard me. And before she left, he sorted out the records, and told her not to bring any more that had vocal choruses.”

She shrugged. “But it was in the books I read, anyway. They were full of it. In one play, the lovers killed themselves. He took poison and she stabbed herself.”

“Romeo and Juliet,” he assented.

“It was strange,” she reflected, “to hear of it all around you, and yet not know what it was.”

“Wasn’t there anyone before me? I suppose every husband asks his brand-new wife that at least once. And this is my once to ask it. But wasn’t there anyone at all?”

“No one. You were the first. You were the first who ever kissed me. You were even the first I ever rode with in a car, and that was the night we ran away to Baltimore.”

He blew out his breath in a sort of soundless whistle.

“Only once,” she continued, “did a boy ever get as far as the door of that house. And that was as far as he did get, the door. That was about a year before that night that you lost your way and knocked on the door to ask directions.”

“He lost his way too?”

“No, it was different that time. I wasn’t on the lookout that time, as I was when you came along. I didn’t have any little balled-up note prepared, to throw down to him out of the window, as I did to you. I missed the chance. He was opportunity, and, as they say, opportunity knocks only once, and then goes away again.”

“Tell me about it. Let’s hear.”

“They’d taken me in to a dinner party in the city, in Baltimore. I suppose it was to complete my education, as a sort of extension course in social behavior. It was at the house of... oh, I don’t know who he was, some college professor or famous man of some sort. There were no boys and girls there my own age. All elderly people, very learned men, most of them with beards, scientists and doctors and what not. This boy was the nephew of somebody who was present. He didn’t even live there in the house, just popped in with a message for a minute. Before he’d popped out again, he’d seen me from the far end of the room. And I’d seen him. That was really all there was to it. Not even a single word was exchanged between us. But the eyes can do wonderfully quick work. I remember he smiled at me from the doorway. So I smiled back. Before he could go any further, get himself introduced to me, suddenly my wraps had been brought, very suddenly, and I was being hustled home, with Fredericks marching on one side of me and Cotter on the other, like bodyguards.

“I made one more sign. I turned my head a little and looked back over my shoulder. He was just standing back there forlornly. He hadn’t even been able to be introduced to them, so what chance did he have to get to me? But—”

“He followed through.”

“He tried to. He found out where I lived, and a couple of evenings later he showed up at the door, complete with a box of chocolates. You know, the usual first call. They wouldn’t let me come down, of course, but I crept out to the head of the stairs and overheard the whole thing from there. Fredericks got rid of him in the oddest way.”

“What was it?”

“Well, he wasn’t brusque, he didn’t slam the door on him. He was kind about it, fatherly, almost. That’s the point I’m trying to bring out. As if he were trying to warn him off for his own good. As if he were trying to keep him from dire misfortune.”

“What was it he said to him?”

“It was the implication, more than the words themselves. He slung his hand to the boy’s shoulder, and gently turned him around the other way. ‘You seem like a nice boy,’ he said. ‘For your own sake, I want you to listen carefully to me. You find some other girl. There are plenty around. Some other girl, who’ll be just right for you. This one — isn’t the one you want. That’s all I can say to you. You’ll live to regret it if you don’t take my advice. Don’t come near here any more. Forget this house. Forget your way to it. Forget my foster daughter. Forget you ever saw her.’

“And there was something about the way he said it that made my blood run cold. As though there were some horrid thing, some terror, waiting to be unleashed if this boy — or any other — forced his acquaintance on me any further.

“It wasn’t a bluff he was putting on, either. You could tell by the ring of sincerity in his voice that he meant it.

“And the boy must have felt it too. I noticed he didn’t argue, didn’t insist any further, seemed glad to leave. I watched him from the window. He threw the candy away on the lawn, climbed into his car, and drove away fast, without looking back.

“I rushed to the mirror. I stood there and stared. Oh, how long and hard I stared at my own face, to try to see what there was that was wrong with me. I held my hair pressed down flat and stared deep into my own eyes. I couldn’t see anything different there, anything wrong.”

She turned to him suddenly, her face suffused with emotion. She took him by the shoulders, and pulled at them pleadingly, as if hoping to draw from him the answer she needed so.

“What was it? What is it? What’s the matter with me?”

He placed his hand gently across her trembling mouth, sealing it, keeping it there until the frightened inquiry had left her brilliant dark eyes. “Say this to yourself. There wasn’t anything before tonight. Anything before tonight wasn’t you, wasn’t true, never happened. We begin tonight, you and I.”

“We begin tonight, you and I,” she murmured softly.

After a while she said, “Now tell me about you. What were you like — before? Before me?”

“What’s there to tell? No different from any other young fellow, I guess.”

“I never knew any other young fellow, remember? So to me it’s new.”

“I’ll try. I was born in a town you never heard of.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Pueblo, Colorado. I had no brothers and no sisters. My father was a bus driver there. The bus turned over and burned one day. I was eight. My mother worked then. She passed on when I was sixteen. I got out of school. Then I worked. In a garage, in a grocery store, lots of things like that. Then the war came along and I was drafted. I guess the war was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. The war was my parents, the war was my support, the war was my education. I went to college on the GI bill, took engineering. When I finished, I got a couple of small jobs, nothing much. Then this big one came along, the opportunity of a lifetime, the one I’m heading for now.

“And that’s about all.” He shrugged. “I have no folks. I never had a sweetheart, never had a girl. Each time I’d single one out, somebody else was there ahead of me.”

“How did you know how to make love?” she asked wonderingly.

He laughed a little. “I didn’t say there weren’t any girls. I said I never had one of my own, to keep. In France and Italy, for a bar of chocolate or a pack of cigarettes, there were girls for an hour. It’s not the same.”

She thought about that as though she couldn’t understand what the difference was.

“Well, anyway,” he went on, “here I was, making this trip by car with one of my buddies from the war, both of us working our way by easy stages toward jobs that were waiting for us, and one night near a crossroads we lost our way. I got out and went over to this house, to ask directions. The house you were in.

“I came back and told him about a beautiful face I’d glimpsed in a window, about a tap on the pane, about a note that had landed at my feet.

“He said, ‘Don’t be a sap. This is what comes from waiting too long to get yourself a steady girl. You fall suddenly, in the dark, sight unseen.’

“I said, ‘This is my steady girl — now. From now on.’

“He went on the rest of the way by train. I stuck around. The car was mine, you see. And the rest is — our story. The rest is — tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she repeated softly. They both turned to look seaward again. One of the velvety gardenia petals in her hair brushed his cheek. “Tomorrow is—?”

“Puerto Santo,” he said.

“Are we going ashore there?”

“Not worth it; nothing to do or see. Just one of these stick-in-the-mud tropical holes, I understand.”

“Then we’ll stay on the ship. I’m satisfied.”

He crooked his finger under her chin, guided her face around toward his. Their faces blended, in the shadow under the deck roof.

Midnight over a tropic sea. Two strangers, getting acquainted with one another. Two strangers: man and wife.