I’ve known Eliza Moore, now Eliza McIntyre, all my life. In school she was two grades ahead of me from the very beginning, but the way she tells it now she was three grades behind me; but those school records are somewhere, however yellowed and crumbled they may be, and there’s no need for Eliza to try to pretend she’s younger than I am when she’s two years older. Not that it matters. I just don’t want her in my kitchen.
That young woman was mistaking my silence. She leaned close as if I were either deaf or a very young child who hadn’t paid attention. How many times have you been married? she asked in a very loud voice.
When she put it like that, how could I answer her? Husbands aren’t like teacups. I can’t count them off and gloat over them the way Cousin Lutie used to stand in front of her china cabinets, saying she had so many of this pattern and so many of that.
For goodness’ sake, I had them one at a time, a husband at a time, and perfectly legally. They all just died on me. I couldn’t stay the hand of fate. I was always a sod widow — there weren’t any grass widows in our family. As Mama said, it runs in our family to be with our husbands till death us do part. The way that girl put her question, it sounded as if I had a whole bunch of husbands at one time like a line of chorus men in a musical show.
I didn’t know how to answer her. I lay back on my pillows with not a word to say, as if the cat had run off with my tongue.
It’s sheer accident that I ever married to begin with. I didn’t want to. Not that I had anything against marriage or had anything else special to do. But Mama talked me into it. Baby, she said, other women look down on women who don’t marry. Besides, you don’t have any particular talent and Aunt Sallie Mae, for all her talk, may not leave you a penny. I don’t think she ever forgave me for not naming you after her, and all her hinting about leaving you her money may just be her spiteful way of getting back at me.
Besides, Mama said, the way she’s held on to her money, even if she did leave it to you, there would be so many strings attached you’d have to have a corps of Philadelphia lawyers to read the fine print before you could withdraw as much as a twenty-five-cent piece. If I were you, Baby, Mama said, I’d go and get married. If you don’t marry you won’t get invited any place except as a last resort, when they need somebody at the last minute to keep from having thirteen at table. And it’s nice to have somebody to open the door for you and carry your packages. A husband can be handy.
So I married Ray.
Well, Ray and I hadn’t been married six months when along came Mama with a handkerchief in her hand and dabbing at her eyes. Baby, she said, the wife is always the last one to know. I’ve just got to tell you what everyone is talking about. I know how good you are and how lacking in suspicion, but the whole town is buzzing. It’s Ray and Marjorie Brown.
Ray was nice and I was fond of him. He called me Lucyhoney, exactly as if it were one word. Sometimes for short he called me Lucyhon. He didn’t have much stamina or back-bone — how could he when he was the only child and spoiled rotten by his mother and grandma and three maiden aunts?
Baby, Mama said, and her tears had dried and she was now using her handkerchief to fan herself with, don’t you be gullible. I can’t stand for you to be mistreated or betrayed. Should I go to the rector and tell him to talk to Ray and point out where his duty lies? Or should I ask your Uncle Jonathan to talk to Ray man-to-man?
I said, Mama, it’s nobody’s fault but my own. For heaven’s sake let Ray do what he wants to do. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him when he can come and go and what persons he can see. It’s his house and he’s paying the bills. Besides, his taking up with Marjorie Brown is no discredit to me — she’s a lot prettier than I am. I think it’s romantic and spunky of Ray. Why, Marjorie Brown is a married woman. Her husband might shoot Ray.
I don’t know exactly what it was that cooled Ray down. He was back penitent and sheepeyed, begging forgiveness. I’m proud of you, Ray, I said. Why, until you married me you were so timid you wouldn’t have said boo to a goose and here you’ve been having an illicit affair. I think it’s grand. Marjorie Brown’s husband might have horsewhipped you.
Ray grinned and said, I really have picked me a wife.
And he never looked at another woman again as long as he lived. Which unfortunately wasn’t very long.
I got to thinking about him feeling guilty and apologizing to me, when I was the one to blame — I hadn’t done enough for him, and I wanted to do something real nice for him, so I thought of that cake recipe. Except we called it a receipt. It had been in the family for years — centuries you might say, solemnly handed down from mother to daughter, time out of mind.
And so when that girl asked me whether I had a recipe for a happy marriage I didn’t give the receipt a thought. Besides, I’m sure she didn’t mean an actual recipe, but some kind of formula like let the husband know he’s boss, or some such foolishness.
Anyway, there I was feeling penitent about not giving Ray the attention he should have had so that he was bored enough by me to go out and risk his life at the hands of Marjorie Brown’s jealous husband.
So I thought, well, it’s the hardest receipt I’ve ever studied and has more ingredients than I’ve ever heard of, but it’s the least I can do for Ray. So I went here and there to the grocery stores, to drug stores, to apothecaries, to people who said, good Lord, no, we don’t carry that but if you’ve got to have it try so-and-so, who turned out to be somebody way out in the country that looked at me as if I asked for the element that would turn base metal into gold and finally came back with a little packet and a foolish question as to what on earth I needed that for.
Then I came on back home and began grinding and pounding and mixing and baking and sitting in the kitchen waiting for the mixture to rise. When it was done it was the prettiest thing I had ever baked.
I served it for dessert that night.
Ray began to eat the cake and to savor it and to say extravagant things to me, and when he finished the first slice he said, Lucyhon, may I have another piece, a big one, please.
Why, Ray, it’s all yours to eat as you like, I said.
After a while he pushed the plate away and looked at me with a wonderful expression of gratitude on his face and he said, oh, Lucy honey, I could die happy. And as far as I know he did.
When I tapped on his door the next morning to give him his first cup of coffee and open the shutters and turn on his bath water he was dead, and there was the sweetest smile on his face.
But that young woman was still looking at me while I had been reminiscing, and she was fluttering her notes and wetting her lips with her tongue like a speaker with lots of things to say. And she sort of bawled out at me as if I were an entire audience whose attention had strayed: Do you think that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?
Excuse me, young lady, I wanted to say, but I never heard of Cleopatra saying to Mark Antony or any of the others she favored, here, won’t you taste some of my potato salad, and I may be wrong because my reading of history is skimpy, but it sounds a little unlikely that Madame de Pompadour ever whispered into the ear of Louis the Fifteenth, I’ve baked the nicest casserole for you.
My not answering put the girl off, and I felt that I ought to apologize, yet I couldn’t bring myself around to it.
She glanced at her notes to the next question, and was almost beet-red from embarrassment when she asked: Did the financial situation of your husbands ever have anything to do with your marrying them?
I didn’t even open my mouth. I was as silent as the tomb. Her questions kept getting more and more irrelevant. And I was getting more stupefied as her eyes kept running up and down her list of questions.