Disavowals: A Study in Perspective

By Donald Anderson

"And you're going to say 'it was good to know you' to the guy in the sexy hat . . . the guy you were going to marry today?"

Promises, promises. Vows to do and vows to undo. A summer weekend in the Hudson Valley is supposed to be devoted primarily to the third marriage of psychologist Marguerite

• Language: English
• Publisher: CKBooks Publishing
• Release date: Jun 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781949085839

Donald Anderson

Donald Anderson is the director of the creative writing program at the US Air Force Academy. He is the author of Gathering Noise from My Life: A Camouflaged Memoir. He is also the editor, since 1989, of War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities.

Book preview

Friday

I

For Marguerite Ariston, the anticipated arrival of her parents was an element of her nuptial weekend that rang no bells. Alarm bells, perhaps, but not those of imaginary steeples or those of a gladdened heart. This, her third wedding, would come with its own overhang of self-doubt without the added pressure of a mother and father who’d not seen each other for more than a decade but had decided this would be the ideal time for a family reunion. Whether Bartholomew had contacted Forsythia or Forsythia Bartholomew—or whether neither had contacted the other but were coming by way of a shared mystical impulse—she would not know until they arrived. And that would be soon enough.

She had phoned her half-brother, Anson, after receiving calls from each parent on the same day. He had agreed to be officiant of the wedding, having received an encouragingly uncomplicated certificate from the State of New York, so he was the only one who needed to be there. No clergy, like the first time; no judge, like the second. Anson would be fulfilling one of his more potent fantasies while she put another dent into hers.

As far as her parents went, Anson had assured her that there had been no coordination, that, as far as he knew, Forsythia and Bart had maintained their long silence until then and were continuing to do so until the wedding itself would apparently put an end to it.

I invited them both, she told Anson, thinking they would neutralize each other. I let each know the other would be there and that would take care of any odd inclinations, the same as it did the first time.

The earth has shifted, Anson suggested. With your third attempt, Megs, and your willingness to do it so publicly again, I think you’ve created an irresistible opportunity.

I hope it isn’t that. Honestly, that could be a reason to call it off.

Are you still looking for one?

I am not, dear brother. I don’t want you to think that. And I don’t want to deprive you of your own big moment. Have you thought of beautiful words to cast over us?

No. Well, not definitely. Meanwhile, you’ve made it sound like courting along with Baxter—whom you picked up at a wedding—has been like sharing a coma.

Wrong. I was speaking of the wedding itself. For your information, Anson, I tend to go numb at weddings, even those of others’. He said it made me alluring ... like a misted field.

Baxter did?

He was my silent knight. He was wonderfully alone. So was I, since I was with—who I was with.

Number two.

I at least waited until well into the reception before I made a move.

Staunch girl.

Chide if you will, Anson, but I would have thought about our Baxter the rest of my life if I had never seen him again. I’m convinced of that. Probably any intelligent person would have left it at that. I disqualified myself—and put my intelligence out to pasture, as it were. He is a farmer, after all.

So you keep reminding me.

She was pacing the balcony of her condominium where the ultra-simple ceremony itself was to take place: his parents and, possibly, hers. She looked at the pond in the near distance, a bean-shaped centerpiece to the complex, refreshed on summer days by a device that lifted a circular spray into the air. A pair of swans swam just off the nearest embankment, as swanlike as it was possible to imagine swans being. The glide of self-knowledge. Since childhood she had known this was a species that mated for life, and there were times since moving here that she had wished humans had been given a similar inner programming. Once and Done. With a mate living or dead, there would be no bumbling about to discover what else lay beyond the swimming-hole of singular commitment.

Anson, did Forsythia say anything to you about why she was suddenly willing to be on the same stage with my father?

Our peculiar mother, he said, has been tottering about the house with a notable smile on her face for several weeks now. As you know, she’s not one of mankind’s great smilers, but when I’ve asked her what’s up, she tends to shrug and tell me to pay more attention to my studies—though, of course, I no longer have any.

Yes, that sounds like a clear danger signal. A smile may be an umbrella for some, but for her it’s a storm-warning. When are you planning on coming?

She insists it be early tomorrow, before the day turns into one of those July beasty-bits. She’s having hair, nails, and various pluckings done as we speak. How would you like to be the one to put the tweezers to that skittery old bird?

I wouldn’t—not for anything; but that is your mother—our mother—we’re talking about.

"You don’t live with her—haven’t for 15 years."

I keep her in my memory, Anson. Ruggedly. Call me if there’s more news today.

Roger. Will do.

As she turned off her phone, she noticed the man on an adjoining balcony—a picture of undulating black hair, brushy moustache, and impressive hands and wrists, like those of a retired blacksmith. He nodded, and she returned it. She found it curious that a person’s grasping abilities should project so clearly across the empty space of ten or twenty yards, but she considered it a welcome phenomenon nonetheless. She had been living in Deer Meadows for more than five years, and her new neighbor had only been there a brief fraction of it—since Easter, she calculated—and she considered him a diversion ready to teach her graspable lessons. She had never lived next to the hands of a smithy before, and they presented to an analytical person such as herself new material for her consideration—consideration not so much of these attributes as her fascination with them. She was growing to believe that fingers like his in the act of gripping her shoulders would be more than a comfort. They would provide a peculiar stability.

Her conversation with Anson had given Marguerite a twinge above both eyes: the beginning of a headache, or a midsummer sinus event. She would have to see before deciding what to take. She would like to laugh, to see what ease that might provide, but she hadn’t been able to make herself laugh since she was quite small and could only do it back then by rubbing her stomach in just the right way—and that way was now forgotten.

She could picture them, the Zeyns, Forsythia and Anson, in their Westchester home with its Tudor lines and angles. It had been her mother’s remarriage home, Marguerite’s for a few years before graduate school, and where her stepfather had died of his massive heart attack. She hadn’t liked him very much, but she hated having such an obvious word tagged to his virtual toe. Of course it was massive. It was unnecessary to say so and, therefore, a waste of effort.

She took a few minutes to think of Baxter, her bridegroom-to-be who had been ground up in her thoughts since her parents’ eerily timed responses. She moved a vinyl chair into the shade that the top of her building was beginning to cast across the balcony, a benefit belonging to her northeastward-facing unit. Baxter House: it was odd that a man with such a well-structured name—a man who had proposed marriage to her at the fateful reception while her current husband spun ice cubes in his single malt not more than twenty-five feet away—should slip so easily and so often from her thoughts when they were not together. As much as she tried, she couldn’t mold that into a positive sign for their future. She had attempted at first to see it as the natural re-balancing of their impulsive beginning, an adjustment to her pledge of marriage after an hour of exchanged glances and a half-hour of conversation. It was a difficult act of mental positioning. But that beginning had been so lovely in its lunacy. Beyond lunacy, even to her own psychologist’s field of vision. Unclassifiable. It had been like a wedding present at the expense of another bride. Or not at her expense, since it took nothing away from Amelia, who looked radiant, was marrying a sweetheart from childhood who looked at his bride the same way Baxter looked at her. Somewhat, at least. Baxter had a fading black eye that day, but as he looked at her across the center aisle, it gave him a rough sweetness that had definition and a touch of intrigue. It had all been too perfect to think of as rushing out or rushing in. There were, she hoped, certain phenomena—that kind of loveliness being one of them—that should not have a clock applied to them.

She would keep hoping.

And there was, also she had learned on that fateful wedding day, an art to catching the eye of another, particularly one with a darkened ring around it. That shadow had, in fact, been part of what had drawn her into the webbery of eye-catching. It had looked perfectly un-sinister in a man so comfortably dressed and with the probing smile of a schoolboy. She learned from him later that the shiner had come from a mother cow in the process of calving, helping the birth along with her well-aimed if unintentional kick. It was a perfectly wonderful mark to surround a wink, and she wondered at times in the months after their meeting whether she had wanted to give birth to Baxter rather than enter into a marriage with him.

The chirping of her cell put an end to her musings. The screen announced it as Anson again, and his voice sounded wire-thin. The matron of the house has just come in from shopping and public preening and wishes to speak with you, Megs. She imagined she could hear the phone being ripped from his hand—the sound of bandaging being removed with a flourish.

Marguerite?

You have your own phone, don’t you, Mother?

Of course I do, but my hands were full and Anson was available to punch you up. I was afraid my thoughts would go away as soon as I dispensed with my packages. It has been known to happen. Thoughts come easier when you are holding recent purchases. It is a lesson I have learned at great expense.

I see. She noticed the man on the adjacent balcony was wire-brushing the grilling insert of his barbecue. It was a ritual of those infrequent afternoons when she was there to observe him.

"And now I have forgotten. The volume of her voice had dropped several levels before recovering itself. And now I haven’t. It had to do with the wedding."

What a surprise.

Don’t be facetious, Meggy. It’s one of your primary weaknesses. It’s unbecoming. Anson, make a pitcher of daiquiris. She could hear his voice trailing into the background, happy, no doubt, to be commissioned out of earshot.

All right then, Mother. Let’s make adjustments. I will forego my weakness while you work on recalling what it was you wished to say. Take a deep breath, look with a spiritual affection at the packages you brought home, and let the good thoughts come.

"Coming—of course! she trumpeted. Your father is coming."

I know that, Mother.

"Do you? How interesting—but you don’t know that this afternoon, right in the middle of Fortunoff’s, he sent me a text message. One word: Casablanca. Her voice pinched into a whisper. And I don’t have to tell you what that means."

Marguerite stifled a sigh. Not if you don’t wish to.

"But you do know, my darling. You were inseminated on a Casablanca night.

I don’t believe I’ve ever been inseminated.

"Conceived! Don’t be so impatient. It was the night you were conceived."

I wasn’t quite there.

I must have told you, at least—when you were old enough to know of such details.

I’m afraid not, Mother.

It took place under a Baldwin piano, said the voice on the other end, with some exasperation. "You must know that, at least. Your father would later refer to it as ‘a grand coupling.’ And you were his ‘grand baby.’"

Why would I know that—and, for that matter, why should I want to?

It is, whether you like it or not, part of who you are.

Not in the least, Mother. And I dislike piano players. They’re too all-knowing.

There! You see?!

Tell me about the text message.

But that’s it. Just that one word. Not even one of those cute abbreviations or little faces at the end.

Which means ... ?

Which means, my slow-to-warm daughter, he has a plan in mind.

To do what?

That is what I don’t know, Meggy. Why thank you, Anson. The sound of eddying ice cubes brightened the background.

Marguerite took a breath and noticed the man on the balcony was jabbing at the barbecue with an extended lighter, poking at the grill as if he was jousting, until there was a poof of flame—the size of a beachball. He looked her way tentatively, then waved a dishtowel in front of his face like a flag of surrender. Are you all right? she called to him, leaning against the porch railing.

He inventoried his face with his fingers before approaching the railing that paralleled her own. Perhaps a crisp alteration to my eyebrows. That would seem to be the extent of it. But thank you for asking.

She could hear Forsythia’s voice spilling her name from the phone but chose to ignore it. I have an aloe plant, she told him, noticing the curve of his moustache and wondering if it, too, had been attacked by the flaming gas. It does wonders for burns. It has the weight of the ages behind it.

I see. I have that feeling myself at times.

The voice coming from the phone had grown louder, with an edge of alarm: Meggie—Where are you, and who are you talking to? She put the phone to her ear, holding up a finger to the man across the way. That’s not your father, is it? He has a voice like a Flugelhorn. One with a stoppage.

Wait, Forsythia. Drink your daiquiri. I have a needy neighbor who just tried to incinerate himself.

How interesting. Ask him to tell you his name.

Well, certainly, she said, then turned to the man on the deck. My mother thinks if she knew your name, it would help her to understand why you’ve just attempted to blow yourself up. She could hear sputters of indignation coming from the phone in the way of electronic backfire.

The man mopped his forehead. That all sounds perfectly logical to me.

She spoke into the phone. He said it sounds logical, Forsythia.

You can be exasperating, Meggie—especially when you have help.

The name is Peter, said the voice from the other deck.

Peter, she repeated.

Peter, her mother re-repeated. Very solid, for a man who plays with fire. Does he know you’re getting married—again?

The descent onto Forsythia by what Anson would often call the Shroud of Zany invited her daughter to play along, and she did. She held the phone in the air, facing the man. My mother wants to know, Peter, whether you were aware that I was getting married—again. I know it’s a distance, but you can speak to her directly. She’s already commented on your vocal strengths.

And what is her name? he asked.

Forsythia—like the shrub.

The Shroud had apparently touched him, and he spoke with resonant and playful assurance. I must confess, Forsythia, I have just met—what is your name?

Marguerite.

I have just met Marguerite, while I was attempting to light my barbecue—though I’ve often noticed her with some puzzlement. ‘Married,’ did you say? You don’t seem to have bridal vibrancy, from what I’ve noticed.

Marguerite spoke Mother?