Two Much!

17

Art was there in spirit. Like the tremulous virgins in Victorian novels, I went through my wedding in a daze. Betty ran the whole thing; all I had to do was sit back and let it happen.

And wonder, from time to time, just what the hell was going on. What did Betty want with me anyway? I knew why I was marrying her, but why was she so hell-bent on marrying me?

And I mean determined. From the moment of our arrival in Manhattan Sunday afternoon, when she browbeat the Kerner family doctor into backdating our blood tests to Friday, until the moment of our legalization in a judge’s chambers in Weehawken, New Jersey, on Tuesday evening, Betty drove forward like a piranha fish through a cow, undeflected by cartilage or bone. Was Bart really that lovable?

Well, what other explanation was there? I’d been too busy with my double life to pay much attention, but apparently I’d bowled the girl over right from the beginning with my plodding semidistracted amiability. I’d never realized such depths of passive charm resided within me. Nor was it likely to be generally as provocative as Betty found it. Hers had to be a very special taste: if I was in truth the most exciting bachelor she’d ever met, the moneyed class in this country is in serious trouble.

In any event, Betty set to with a will and got us married. “You just relax, sweetheart,” she said, giving me a quick kiss and a brisk shove into a handy easy chair, “and I’ll take care of all the details. And if there’s anything you want, just ask Nikki or Blondell or Carlos.”

“Yes, dear,” I said.

Nikki or Blondell or Carlos. The Kerner family home in Manhattan, an eight-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in the sixties, with windows and terrace overlooking the park from a safe seven stories up, was exactly my idea of the life of the rich, starting with the three servants just mentioned. We’d been roughing it at Point O’ Woods, doing our own cooking, dressing ourselves, all of that lower class raggle-taggle. A local girl from Bay Shore, a stout blonde teen-ager who seemed to be molded out of wet white bread and who occasionally answered to the name Francine, ferried over twice a week to do the laundry and sweep the floors, but my God even dental technicians have cleaning ladies.

Well, the apartment in New York was more like it. The rooms were spacious and expensively furnished, and the things hanging on the walls were, I discovered with my fingernail, paintings and not prints. There were three phone lines, reflecting the former occupancy of Kerner pére and his far-flung business interests, and there were four bathrooms, reflecting his tendency to produce daughters. And while the three servants lived in, they were hardly underfoot; they had quarters of their own, beyond the kitchen. Nikki, and Blondell, and Carlos.

The last-named, Carlos, was the chauffeur who’d had the piano key inserted in his shoulder during the New Year’s tragedy. A short and stocky forty-year-old with a flat sullen Indian face and an accent like a briar patch, he went out of his way to assure all and sundry that he was Mess-kin and not Poor Ree-kin. When not driving, which was most of the time — his trip out to Bay Shore to pick up Betty and me from the ferry Sunday afternoon had apparently been his first excursion in the family’s new Lincoln in several weeks — Carlos was vaguely a handyman, terrace gardener, sometime butler, frequent bartender, and general layabout. We viewed one another from the outset with mutual distrust.

Blondell, a great round black mammy of the sort I’d thought had been made illegal by the Supreme Court decision of 1954, was the cook, of course. She was also not an American citizen, which perhaps explained her continuing existence in a form that had to be rated a debit to her race. Hailing from an obscure Caribbean island named Anguilla, she carried a British passport, but the language she spoke could hardly have been less English. Her accent, even more impenetrable than that of Carlos, was like wayward breezes: soft and unpredictable. Since as Bart I wore glasses, and Blondell loved intellectuals above all things, she and I got along from the beginning.

Nikki’s accent was French. She was the maid, her manner was saucy, and her presence made me revise slightly my opinion of the late Albert J. Kerner. She had Candy’s boniness, and some of Candy’s foxlike facial features, but softened in her case by a more honest lewdness. Her uniform skirts were short, and she seemed to find an incredible number of work tasks that required her to bend over in front of me, showing me what she would have called her derrière. I called it an ass, and I wanted to bite it, but of course with the wedding so close that was impossible. Perhaps Art, in a few days?...

Well. That was for the speculative future; in the speculator’s present I was about to become a gushing groom. The waiting period in New York State was too long, so on Tuesday Carlos drove us to Jersey City where we took out our license, and where Charlie Hillerman’s birth certificate passed with flying colors. Then some sexual extravagances in the backseat of the Lincoln during a run out to Far Hills for dinner with an old college chum of Betty’s plus the chum’s new husband; these were the only people in on our little secret.

I must say I liked their house. This was the foxhunting section of New Jersey, where Jackie Kennedy used to hang out, and the house did the neighborhood proud. A great sprawling stone creature four stories high, it stood amid a park of imported trees, dotted with tennis court and arbor and swimming pool. The stables were out back. Inside, there were warm wood tones and expensive antiques and the comfortable aura of money gouged from generations of peasantry.

The owners, Betty’s chums, were named Dede and David. Dede was a cool ash blonde such as American men are supposed to go crazy for but which I have always suspected would be an inept lay, and David looked like one of those junior Washington lawyers who get sent out for coffee. He was in fact an attorney with the family firm in Philadelphia, and this house — Windy Knob they called it, which made my teeth jar — was also a family fixture, having been most recently occupied by an aunt who was now declining on the Côte d’Azur.

Having seen Betty mostly in sexual encounters recently, I’d forgotten just what a crashing bore she could be in company. The modulated voice, the standardized conversation, the social smile. How proud her etiquette teacher would have been.

Not that Dede and David helped. They’d gone to the same etiquette school, and with no trouble at all the three of them recreated that Point O’ Woods party at which Betty had first entered my life. David talked with me about the stock market, Young Republicans, sailing, and men’s shoes, and by God if Bart didn’t join right in. Art would have behaved badly here, of course, either with smartass remarks or by falling asleep, but Bart was of a more placid nature. Men’s shoes: I’d never known they could be that interesting.

Dinner was early, since our wedding was scheduled for nine. In a two-car caravan, Dede and David following in their V-12 Jaguar, we roared northeast to Weehawken, Where we cooled our heels for twenty minutes in Judge Reagensniffer’s quarters while Hizzoner finished dealing with his evening’s quota of traffic offenders and wife beaters. David spoke to me about imported automobiles.

At last the judge entered. A sharp-faced skinny geezer with thinning white hair on his bony pate, he probably wasn’t a day over eighty-five, and had the brisk spryness that comes from years and years of uninterrupted bad temper. He looked at us, sitting around on his sagging brown leather furniture, and snapped, “What do you people want?”

“I’m Elisabeth Kerner,” Betty told him, her smooth surface unmarred by his cantankerousness. “We have an appointment here to be married.”

“Ah!” His sour face creased in a bony if fatherly smirk; he’d known for a long time how to behave with the gentry. “Of course, Miss Kerner,” he said. His little eyes surveyed us all “And this would be?”

“My fiancé, Robert Dodge. And these are our witnesses.”

Introductions were made. The judge offered to shake my hand, and I found myself gripping something that seemed to be made of coat hanger wire and sausage casings. Then the forms were gone through, Betty pulling envelopes from her purse, the judge sitting at his massive old wooden desk, people signing things right and left.

There was one form for me to put Bart’s name to, which I did while leaning over the desk. Finishing, I looked up and saw the judge glowering at me in sudden distaste. “Well, young man,” he said, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

“I beg pardon?”

He frowned, looked puzzled, glanced around at the others, and suddenly flashed a wide insincere smile, saying to me, “No last-minute doubts, eh?”

“No, sir,” I said. Not of the marriage, anyway.

“Fine, fine.” He went through the forms one more time, gave us all a swift keen look of disapproval, and rapped out, “Bailiff!”

The door popped open and a worried-looking gent popped in. “Yes, sir, your honor?” He was about thirty, covered with a layer of baby fat, and with dandruff sprinkled like monosodium glutamate on his black-clad shoulders.

Having called in this flunky, the judge seemed unsure what to do with him. “Mm,” he said, hefted the marriage papers in his hand, dropped them on the desk, and pointed vaguely toward a far corner, saying, “You just be, um, present.”

“Yes, sir, your honor.”

So the bailiff went off to stand in the corner, like something from a New England ghost story, while Judge Reagensniffer married us. First he got up and drew a slim volume from the shelves of lawbooks behind his desk, and then he spent an endless period of time arranging the four of us in some precise pattern in the middle of the room. “A bit to the right. You come forward a step; no, not that much.” Was this a judge or a photographer?

Well, the arranging finally came to an end, the judge stood in front of us flipping pages in his book till at last he found the right place, and then, one finger in the book to mark his intention, he said, “I usually preface these ceremonies with a few introductory remarks.”

A spectral throat-clearing took place in the corner. We all jumped.

“Marriage,” the judge told us, “is a frail bark on the stormy sea of life. It is not to be undertaken lightly. And those who do, and who don’t watch their steps, can’t expect to be treated lightly either. I’m the same man in these chambers that I am on the bench. I’m willing to listen to explanations, but I firmly believe in the letter of the law.” He fixed us with his bird-eyes. “Well? Anything to say to that?”

We all made uneasy movements. This wasn’t quite the ceremony any of us had had in mind. Finally, to break the awkward silence, I said, “Your honor, we still want to get married.”

“Married,” he said, as though it were a new and possibly interesting word. Then he blinked, looked at the book impaled on his finger, and said, “Ah, yes, married. Those who enter upon the married state take unto themselves a strong partner, a companion through the shoals and rapids of life. Two are stronger than one, a companionship, a giving and receiving of strength. And for there to be a conspiracy, no overt act needs to take place. Only the intention of the individuals to conspire together. Is that clear?”

Not to me, Jack. This time it was Betty who worked at getting us back on the right track, saying, “Your honor, we intend to conspire together and love together and remain together forever.”

“Yes, indeed,” the judge said. “A permanent bond.” He hesitated; was he going to say a life term? No, he fell the other way. “So we might as well get on with it,” he said, opened his book, and with no more preamble went directly into the wedding ritual. He read it briskly, almost angrily, as though explaining our rights to us before passing sentence, and we made the appropriate responses in the appropriate locations. Betty looked misty-eyed throughout, and I did my best to look solemn and trustworthy.

“... I now declare you man and wife. Bailiff, take them away.”

And so I was married. Bride and groom were kissed by the witnesses. Hands were shaken. I passed a sealed envelope to the judge, making sure Betty saw me do it. Everyone was pleased by that, but then again they probably all thought the envelope contained money. Its sole content, however, was a card from Those Wonderful Folks that had turned out to be even more apropos than I’d thought when I’d selected it yesterday afternoon. On the front an old man in a wheelchair is saying, “I’m not too old to cut the mustard.” Inside he finishes, “I just can’t seem to find the hot dog.”