Tom stood as I came in, held out my chair. He was laughing again. “Gehenna, no less,” he said, relishing the old family story of how I had squelched Gabe’s boyish piety with Mrs. Chehab’s leftover Irish. “You’re in for it, Marie,” he said, relishing, perhaps, my name.
My mother put her hands to the table and slowly rose. Tom stood, moved to help her with her chair. She touched him gently on the arm, although she was never one to go about touching strangers. “I’ll leave it to you, Tom,” she said, “to stand between these two. I’m going back to bed.”
So I had my wedding in the pretty church, after all.
Squinting at myself in the narrow bathroom mirror, lovely in my makeup and my veil, I confess to recalling another time: How’s that, Mr. Hartnett, I thought, making eyes at my own reflection. Mr. Walter Hartnett.
Gabe walked me down the aisle and surprised me at the last minute by not merely kissing my cheek when we reached Tom but pulling me into a firm embrace. We all joked about it later, at the reception. “Like he was sending you off to the Foreign Legion,” Tom said. Gabe laughed quietly. Admitted, blushing, that he might have been a little overcome, there was so much to think about on such a day. “I am the fool of loss,” he said.
“You haven’t lost a sister,” Tom told him. “You’ve gained me. God help you.”
That night, Tom lifted the blanket and I closed my eyes completely, even though the light in the hotel room was already dim, only a thin shaft from along the bathroom door and the low glow of streetlight behind the thick curtains. “There’s not much to you, is there?” he said.
I was on my back, my hands folded together over my chest so that I was aware of both the new wedding ring on one and the feel of my own heartbeat beneath the other. I wore the white nightgown, satin and lace, that my mother had sewn. It was the centerpiece of my trousseau, and the provocative way my mother had worked the lovely lace into its bodice had come as some surprise to me. My mother, it seemed, knew things she had never spoken of.
“Take it or leave it,” I told Tom with a laugh. I was dizzy with the champagne we had drunk.
And Tom said, “Oh, I’ll take it. If I may.”
There was the stirring touch of alcohol on his breath. The taste of champagne and sweet cake at the back of my throat. The faint, lingering scent of bleach on the hotel’s sheets and pillowcases. And it was either an indication of some expertise I didn’t know he had, or of my mother’s skill with fabric and needle and thread, that I was out of the lovely gown without the slightest effort on my part, without even opening my eyes.
I was naïve enough, drunk enough, to be surprised to find that a body could become a new thing altogether, shed of its clothes. Just as I was surprised to discover, not then, of course, but over time, that in the dark it would all remain unchanged—skin, hair, and limb, bone and blubber, scent and heartbeat and rhythm of breath. Unchanged as far as mouth was concerned, lips were concerned. A mystery revealed only to the long married.
In the morning, in the pale hotel room, what a lot of strangeness. I reached for my glasses to see the time. Just after 7:00 a.m. There was a brown-edged cigarette burn in the wood of the nightstand that I associated somehow with the narrow headache that was searing the center of my brain. My mouth was as dry as ash. Experience told me I would not go back to sleep. Whatever charm the room had had last night, with its low light and drawn shades and elegant silver bucket of champagne, hadn’t exactly fled—I had never before, after all, spent a night in a place anything like the St. George Hotel—but there was a weirdness about it all at this hour of the morning—the light behind the pale green curtains and the rattling of the dark radiator, a door slamming somewhere, the revving of motors in the street, a disappointing sense of an ordinary day, even here in the lovely hotel, an ordinary day simply going on. Tom, this stranger, with his thin hair curled like a Coney Island Kewpie doll’s above his pink face, was serenely asleep beside me.
I found my nightgown on the floor, slipped into it—hardly a wrinkle, I was happy to discover, good fabric, as my mother had said. The robe was on a chair in the corner. In the bathroom, I threw cold water on my face to relieve the headache. I brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth, combed my hair, and put on a little lipstick. In the movies, there would be room service, a bellhop pushing a cloth-draped table into the room, ostrich feathers on my sleeves, but it was Sunday morning and we had to fast, since we were meeting my mother and Gabe for ten o’clock Mass. My mother would give us breakfast back home, with all the wedding party invited. There would be some quiet kidding, no doubt, Tom’s friends from the brewery especially. At the reception one of them had crooned, “Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed, we danced and we danced cause the room had no bed.” One had left a jar of Vaseline on the seat of the hired car when we left the reception—which Tom knocked to the floor and I pretended I didn’t see.
We were taking a train to a resort outside of Albany, a place Gerty had recommended that would prove to be less elegant than we had hoped.
With my head aching, I recalled something my father had once said, about someone not being the first groom to feel under the weather the morning after the big day. I figured I wasn’t the first bride to feel this way, either. And then I remembered it was Dora Ryan’s husband he had referred to. The woman pretending to be a man. I was grateful that I hadn’t thought of her before this, especially last night, as we slipped out of our clothes.
When I went back to the room, Tom was awake and looking at me with some concern. His hair still stood up above his bald scalp like a pale flame. “Are you all right?” he whispered as if I were some delicate thing, and although I was a little sore—I’ll admit I had wondered at one point if the Vaseline would have helped—I said, blasé, “Oh, I’m fine, thank you. And yourself?”
He said he suspected a glass of tomato juice with a shot of Worcestershire would help, after Mass. And I quoted my father to him, Not the first groom, after the big night.
He moved aside a bit, as if he needed to make room for me to get back into bed, and I climbed in beside him.
Strangely—here I was in my satin and lace nightgown and him in his undershirt, in bed together for the first time in our lives and talking as if we were fully clothed and sitting at my mother’s table drinking tea—we went over our plans for the day, Mass, breakfast, the subway to Grand Central, or should we splurge and take a cab? Why not? Our packed suitcases were at my mother’s—I said “my mother’s” purposefully, self-consciously, not “my house,” or even “home,” as if to remind myself of where I now belonged—even if it was only a small apartment in Rego Park that I had barely seen, that Tom had secured only two weeks earlier. I said “the old neighborhood,” although it had been my neighborhood just the day before.
Because she was on my mind, or perhaps because we were a married couple now and such subjects were no longer impolite, I told him the story of Dora Ryan’s travail, back in the old neighborhood: a woman pretending to be a man.
“More to be pitied,” Tom said. He in turn told me about a fellow he worked with, Darcy Furlong, from the South. “A nice guy,” he said, “but a window dresser, if you know what I mean.” Some of the other fellows had given him a hard time until the boss put a stop to it—the guy’s tormented enough, was the way the boss, Mr. Heep, had put it to Tom.
(At our reception, Mr. Fagin and Mr. Heep had stood before me, arm in arm, laughing and pointing at each other, shouting about what they called the “irony of it,” that they both had names out of Charles Dickens. I thought it only a meaningless happenstance, but Tom, who had learned his catechism from former chorus girls, saw every such coincidence as God’s winking reminder that He was a regular Ziegfeld, orchestrating everything. Tom raised his glass to the two men and said, “Beers and biers,” which got everybody roaring.)