“You can always get your old job back if things don’t turn out right,” suggested Marie. “Let me know and I’ll put in a good word for you with Prentiss.”

  “Things will turn out fine,” said Margy.

  “I hope so,” said the beauty without conviction. “I certainly hope so.”

  Margy, made important by her coming status of matron, dared to speak intimately to Marie. “I’m surprised,” she said, “that we didn’t lose you long ago—with your looks and all.”

  “I’m not in any hurry,” said Marie. “I’m waiting for Mr. Right to come along.”

  “I thought Mr. Prentiss was Mr. Right,” said Margy daringly.

  “Don’t be sil’,” drawled Marie.

  Margy felt very happy. Of course she knew she was nothing to Mr. Prentiss but she had his interests at heart and she’d certainly hate to see such a nice man married to such a cold, conceited girl like Marie.

  Mr. Prentiss shook hands warmly. He told Margy that Welcome was written on the mat for her and that the latchstring was always out. Finally he admonished her not to buy any wooden nutmegs. Margy could tell the parting affected him. He had used three sayings in one sentence!

  Since Reenie was to be bridesmaid, there was no farewell scene with her. Margy folded the ribbon with the names typed on it and put it in the box with the silverware. She took home three pieces of cake for Frankie and her parents and the girls let her have the papier-mâché bridal couple.

  21

  WAYNE PRENTISS DID not sleep on the cake. But he dreamed. He woke up in the middle of the night out of the dream. It had been a nice dream. He couldn’t understand why he woke up feeling uneasy.

  In his dream, his mother was a different kind of woman. She was strong, not frail. And she was wise instead of cute. In the dream, she was friend and mother to Margy, Reenie, Marie and Ruthie and the other girls in his office. There was always one or the other, usually Marie or Margy in the house. His mother brooded over them and tried to solve their little problems. And the girls loved her and confided in her. And he felt happy and unbound.

  Yes, it had been a pleasant dream. He couldn’t understand why he was so disturbed about it. He switched on his bedside light, got up, went over to the closet and got his cigarettes out of his coat. He went to the window and stood there smoking. He looked down on the deserted tree-lined street. In the nighttime it had a glamor and a mystery that it never held in the daytime.

  He finished the cigarette and went back to his bed. As his hand went out to the light chain, he heard the click of the light going on in his mother’s room across the hall. His first instinct was to complete the act of turning off his light, getting back into bed and pretending to be asleep. But he didn’t have it in him to deceive anyone.

  He was again at the window when she came in. He had moved as far away from his bed as he could simply because he didn’t want to have a sitting-side-by-side-on-the-bed talk. She wore a lavender flower-sprigged dimity dressing gown with lace at the neck and wrists. All her clothes were made by an old-time neighborhood dressmaker according to Mrs. Prentiss’ designs. All carried out the mood of a lovely and gracious lady of a bygone time.

  “What is it, son?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But you can’t sleep.”

  “I slept.”

  “A dream wakened you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it a bad dream?”

  “No. It was a very nice dream.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve already forgotten it,” he lied. She sat on his bed. “Remember,” she said, “when you were a little boy and cried out in your sleep I’d come to you and tell you a story?”

  “I remember.”

  “It was a story of a boy with a selfish sweetheart. The sweetheart demanded that the boy bring her his mother’s heart as a proof of love. And the foolish boy cut out his mother’s heart and ran with it to his sweetheart. But he stumbled and fell and the mother heart spoke and said: ‘Are you hurt, my son?’”

  “Yes, I remember the story.”

  “But you’re too grown up now to be soothed by a story.”

  “Yes.”

  Yes! Yes, yes, yes. Always yes. Everything she asks me, he thought, I answer, yes.

  “There’s something wrong,” she said. “I won’t be able to sleep all night worrying about you.”

  “It’s nothing, Mother. I had a heavy day at the office, I guess. I thought a cigarette would calm me down. That’s all.”

  “You’re keeping something from me.”

  “Nonsense!” he said firmly. He took her hand. “Come now. I want you to get your beauty sleep.” He took her to the door of her room and kissed her cheek.

  He went back to bed and turned out the light. He lay awake a long time. Then he began drifting into sleep. He lay face down and spoke into his pillow. “I hate you, Mother,” he whispered fiercely. “I hate you!”

  And in the morning, he couldn’t remember whether he had actually said that horrible thing or whether he had dreamed he said it.

  22

  FRANKIE AND MARGY rented a one-room, bath and kitchenette apartment on Bushwick Avenue. It had a Murphy bed which was a break as it saved them the cost of buying a bed. It upset Flo’s plans, however. The bedspread she was working on would not be needed since the Murphy bed folded into the wall. So she took her many years’ collection of Lion Brand Condensed Milk wrappers, tied with thread in rolls of fifty and redeemed them for a set of dishes—with violet sprays and a gold band around the edge of the plates. The china looked beautiful on the kitchenette shelf.

  They missed the furniture sale at Batterman’s but a store on Graham Avenue sold them a three-piece living-room suite on time—dark green wicker with bright cretonne cushions. They bought a gate-legged table painted to look like mahogany and two straight chairs to match. Margy set a black glass bowl on the center of the table and filled it with artificial red roses. She thought it looked beautiful. Flo let Margy have the dresser from her bedroom at home. A secondhand porcelain-topped kitchen table and two white chairs completed the furnishings.

  Aside from the black bowl there were a few other artistic touches. Margy’s pride was a fringed tapestry, the newest thing in home decorations, tacked up on the wall behind the table. It was a medieval hunting scene. It was a nice tapestry only the seam down the center was not quite straight which made the upper half of the huntsman’s hand an inch forward from the lower part. Flo pointed out the defect saying: “You got skinned.” Margy explained that the defect had been brought to her attention before purchase and the price reduced accordingly.

  Two pictures hung on the wall; a framed lithograph of the “Weeping Magdalene” with her Titian hair and blue robe, and Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy.” Margy loved blue.

  A cedar hope chest, the gift of Frankie, stood between the two windows. Reenie’s wedding present, a French doll, with its exaggerated legs tied in knots, sat on the hope chest propped against cushions that almost matched the furniture upholstery. When asked, Flo agreed that the chest could pass for a window seat.

  After a thorough inspection of the apartment and a dire prophecy that cockroaches would come in from the people upstairs and bedbugs from the people downstairs, Flo pronounced the apartment “very mod-dren and up-to-date in the bargain.” Henny said nothing. But he was proud. Already Margy was doing better. An apartment was a step up from the flat.

  Margy spent her evenings there that last week, fixing it up. Reenie and Ruthie met her there one night by appointment. The girls examined the place with squeals of delight.

  “It’s the nuts,” was Reenie’s judgment. “I wish it was Sal’s and mine.”

  “Someday,” soothed Margy. “Someday.”

  “And a private bath!” Ruthie exclaimed. “Your intended must be coining money.”

  “I intend to live in that bathtub,” said Margy.

  “. . . and soak your troubles away,” sang Reenie.

  “It’s smoke your troubles away,” corrected Ruthie.

  “I think it’s sing your troubles away.”

  “It’s soak!”

  “It’s smoke!”

  “It’s hoke!” clinched Margy.

  They started to laugh. They laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop. “What are we laughing at?” they asked each other gaspingly. They didn’t know. They were too young to know that they were laughing for no other reason than that they were young.

  23

  A FEW NIGHTS BEFORE the wedding, Flo spoke to her daughter in the dubious privacy of Margy’s bedroom. She said, “Being as you’re getting married, there is things you ought to know.” Then she blushed painfully.

  “I know them, Mama,” said Margy gently.

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Suspicion flared up in Flo like excelsior to which a match had been applied. “So you’ve been running around,” came the instant accusation. “And all the while I’m sitting home alone thinking you’re a good girl, and all the while behind my back . . .”

  “No. It’s just that the girls at the office . . . well, we talk about those things.”

  “Fine company you keep! Telling dirty stories when you should be tending to your work. When I was a girl . . .”

  “Mama, I’d drop dead if you ever stopped scolding me. I’d be that surprised. So save my life and don’t ever change.”

  “All I was trying to do was what a mother should do—see that her daughter keeps out of trouble . . . tell her things.”

  “I know. And it’s all right, Mom.” She kissed her mother on the cheek.

  Both were intensely relieved; the mother to sidestep a painful duty and the daughter to be spared the embarrassment of her mother’s fumbling sex instructions.

  Margy bought a long-sleeved white dress. “A fine wedding dress it will make,” the saleswoman assured her. “And after, you can shorten the skirt and dye it navy blue and wear it for everyday.”

  Margy shuddered. She had had enough of navy blue to last a lifetime and, God willing, hoped she’d have no more of it.

  She couldn’t afford to buy a veil. Reenie went with her to rent one. There was a store on Moore Street whose brightly lighted window displayed wax dummies dressed in bridal garb. A life-sized, tuxedo-dressed dummy, whose doll’s face sported a smirking mustache, linked arms stiffly with a waxen bride. A bridesmaid who had lost a wooden foot—the loss concealed by her long pink tulle dress—leaned drunkenly against a cardboard facsimile of an altar.

  The girls stared at the display like two little kids staring at Christmas dolls. “That’s for me,” said Reenie, “when—I mean if—I marry Sal.” She referred to the bridal gown. “With a train and all. You could have rented that, Margy.”

  “I want to own the dress I get married in,” said Margy. “I want to keep it for remembrance. It will be nice for when my daughter marries. It will be cute and old fashioned when she marries.”

  “Listen to her!” said Reenie to an imaginary companion. “A daughter already and she’s not even married yet.”

  “A person has to look ahead,” said Margy. “No sin in that. And you can be godmother.”

  “Remember now. You promised!”

  MARGY AND FRANKIE went to their prenuptial confession late Saturday afternoon. After supper, Frankie brought his parents and oldest sister, Cathleen, over to meet the Shannons. (Malone was in his civilian clothes.) Frankie brought Marty along, too. Marty was Cathleen’s fiancé and would be Frankie’s best man at the wedding.

  After the boisterous, falsely gay flush of introductions and acknowledgments, the menfolk went out together to rent their outfits for the morrow’s wedding. Then Reenie came over. After Cathleen and Mrs. Malone had grudgingly made her acquaintance, Reenie went out with Margy to do some last-minute shopping. Flo was left alone with the two Malone women.

  She didn’t like either one of them. Cathleen Malone, irritatingly called “Cat’leen” by her mother, was gaudily dressed, heavily made up, sullen and unsociable. Flo classified her as a skinny, snappy flapper.

  Poor Cat’leen had reason to brood. Not only did she resent the loss of Marty’s company for the evening but she was furious because she had not been asked to stand up for the bride in company with Marty. But Margy had to pick out that Reenie! She hated Reenie. It often happened that the best man and bridesmaid started going around together—their romance getting off to a head start in the hothouse intimacy of a wedding meeting. If Reenie so much as smiled at Marty tomorrow. . . . Cat’leen clenched her hands. And that Margy! She had deliberately arranged the whole thing to get Marty for Reenie. So Cat’leen sulked the evening away.

  The future mothers-in-law had hated each other before they met. They engaged in many little skirmishes throughout the evening but blood was drawn only once.

  “Your girl is certainly getting a good man.”

  “And what do you think your boy is getting?” asked Mrs. Malone. “I’d say he was lucky.”

  “I didn’t mean nothing out of the way,” said Mrs. Malone. “But you don’t know how a mother feels.”

  “Why don’t I? I happen to be a mother myself,” said Flo.

  Mrs. Malone tried to explain. “Here’s the way it is: Your daughter might be a good girl for all I know.”

  “She is a good girl,” said Mrs. Shannon. “And you know it.”

  “I have nothing against your daughter. I would feel the same no matter who my son married. Even if she had a million dollars in her own name.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Flo. “I’d feel a whole lot different if my daughter married a millionaire. Not that I have anything against Frankie. But you’re a mother—like you said. And you can understand how another mother feels.”

  Cat’leen yawned.

  MARTY, TAKING HIS job as best man seriously, took charge of the costume-renting expedition. He steered the three men to a store on Seigel Street which had a sign in the window: COSTUMES SUPPLIED FOR THEATRICALS, MASQUERADES AND WEDDINGS. In no time flat, the overanxious proprietor got the boys into satin lapelled tuxedos and the two fathers into striped pants, swallow-tailed coats and ready-made, on-an-elastic, black, satin, puff ties.

  The boys looked handsome in their tuxedos but Frankie demurred at the white lawn tie supplied, insisting that black ties went with tuxedos. The merchant had an answer to that.

  “You are a smart fellow to know that,” he granted. “But you’re not smart enough to know that weddings is different. White ties is the style. You want people should laugh when you stand up in your church in a black tie? No, my friend. For funerals is black ties the style. But not for weddings.”

  The fit of Henny’s suit was far from perfect. The trouser bottoms hardly came an inch below the tops of his high laced shoes. The sleeves exposed his wristbones and made the hands coming out of the smooth, pressed, black cloth seem alien. The man assured Henny that the stiff detachable cuffs supplied with each “rental” would fix that up. Henny asked what would fix up the shortness of the pants. The man said the pants were of the right length to give him “hi’th.”

  Derby hats went with the rentals. The boys drew hats that fitted well enough but Malone’s was too small for his big head and Henny’s was too round for his narrow oval head. The resourceful proprietor made Henny’s hat fit by inserting strips of toilet tissue under the sweatband— He kept a roll under the counter for such emergencies. He couldn’t stretch Malone’s hat. So he told him that he surmised men didn’t wear hats in their church. “And on the street, who looks? And if they look, you can carry the hat in your hand.”

  The four stared at themselves in the triple mirror. “The Harmony Four,” decided Malone. “We look like a Goddamned quartet.

  “All together now, fellers. Let’s harmonize,” he suggested. “Mee—mee,” he ventured tentatively, then broke into the opening lines of “Shine on, Harvest Moon.” Marty and Frankie joined in. Henny stood silent. He always felt ill at ease in the presence of exuberance or exhibitionism.

  The costume renter beamed. “Good times I like to see in my store,” he said.

  While the three were harmonizing, Henny came to his decision. He announced it at the end of the song. “I ain’t going to do it,” he stated flatly.

  “What? Do what?” asked Frankie, worried.

  “Wear this monkey suit tomorrow.”

  “You look swell in it,” boomed Mr. Malone. “Like J. P. Vanderbilt himself.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “What are you kicking about?” asked Malone surveying his bulk in the mirrors. “We’re all in the same boat. I don’t look so hot myself. But who gives a damn?”

  Henny was adamant to begging, threatening and coaxing. He had made up his mind that he wouldn’t be found dead in that outfit. He formulated a personal declaration of independence. “I was born a workingman,” he said, “and I’ll die a workingman.”

  “I’m a workingman, myself,” admitted Malone. “And I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.”

  “As a workingman I’ve been shoved around a lot in my time but nobody’s going to shove me into that outfit tomorrow. I won’t dress up like no horse’s ass for nobody.”

  The simile was so terrifying in its finality that they gave up trying to persuade him. Malone decided that Shannon was shy a few marbles and he felt sorry for his son, getting into that kind of a family.

  Henny changed his mind as the outfits were being boxed. He had a thought of how upset Margy would be if he wasn’t dressed properly for the wedding. He thought of his wife’s reproaches. He decided it was better to look like a fool than to go through a lot of emotionalism. He told the man to wrap up his outfit, too. The three men took turns pounding him on the back in gratitude.

  The rental fee was exacted in advance and a deposit collected—“So that you should return the garments in good condition and not spill nothing on them.” Henny insisted that they get a receipt for their money. (He was receipt conscious ever since he lost that victrola handle years ago.) As the proprietor complied, Frankie complimented Henny on his business acumen and Marty said that Mr. Shannon sure knew his onions all right. Henny modestly replied that all he knew was what his rights were.