Meanwhile, Pookie was getting down to the fine points of her wedding. It was less than a year away now, and an event of such scale took some planning. A date had been set, and a venue for the reception. The color scheme for the bridesmaids’ dresses was under deliberation. Merrick had been asked to serve as maid of honor. She told her parents it was bound to be a bore, but her mother said, “Oh, now, I think it’s nice of Pookie to choose you,” and her father said, “I don’t guess you realize that Walter Barrister the First founded Barrister Financial.”
Red had started noticing that any time it was a girls-only gathering, Pookie had a tendency to speak of Trey belittlingly. She mocked the loving care he gave to the sheet of blond hair that fell over his forehead, and she referred to him habitually as “the Prince of Roland Park.” “I can’t come shopping tomorrow,” she’d say, “because the Prince of Roland Park wants me to go to lunch with his mother.” Partly, this could be explained by the fact that her crowd liked to affect a tone of ironic amusement no matter what they were discussing. But also, Trey sort of deserved the title. Even during high school he had driven a sports car, and the Barristers’ house in Baltimore was only one of three that they owned, the others in distant resorts that advertised in the New York Times. Pookie said he was spoiled rotten, and she blamed it on his mother, “Queen Eula.”
Eula Barrister was stick-thin and fashionable and discontented-looking. Any time Red saw her in church, he was reminded of Mrs. Brill. Mrs. Barrister ran that church, and she ran the Women’s Club, and she ran her family, which consisted of just three people. Trey was her only child—her darlin’ boy, she was fond of saying; her poppet. And Pookie Vanderlin was nowhere near good enough for him.
Over the course of the summer, Red heard long recitals of Pookie’s tribulations with Queen Eula. Pookie was summoned to excruciating family dinners, to stiff old-lady teas, to Queen Eula’s own beautician to do something about her eyebrows. She was chided for her failure to write bread-and-butter notes, or for writing bread-and-butter notes that weren’t enthusiastic enough. Her choice of silver pattern was reversed without her say-so. She was urged to consider a wedding gown that would hide her chubby shoulders.
Over and over, Merrick gasped, like somebody on stage. “No! I can’t believe it!” she would say. “Why doesn’t Trey stick up for you?”
“Oh, Trey,” Pookie said in disgust. “Trey thinks she hung the moon.”
Not only that: Trey was inconsiderate, and selfish, and given to hypochondria. He forgot Pookie existed any time he ran into his buddies. And for once, just once in her life, she would like to see him make it through an evening without drinking his weight in gin.
“He’d better watch out, or he’ll lose you,” Merrick said. “You could have anyone! You don’t have to settle for Trey. Look at Tucky Bennett: he just about shot himself when he heard you’d gotten engaged.”
Often, Pookie delivered her recitals even though Red was present. (Red didn’t count, in that group.) Then Red would ask, “How come you put up with it?” Or “You said yes to this guy?”
“I know. I’m a fool,” she would say. But not as if she meant it.
That fall, when they were all back in college, Merrick fell into a pattern of coming home every weekend. This was unlike her. Red came home a lot himself, since College Park was so close, but gradually he realized that she was there even more often. She went with the family to church on Sunday, and afterwards she would stop out front to say hello to Eula Barrister. Even when Trey was not standing at his mother’s elbow (which generally he was), Merrick would be eagerly nodding her head in her demure new pillbox hat, giving a liquid laugh that any brother would know to be false, hanging on to every one of Eula Barrister’s prune-faced remarks. And in the evening, if Trey stopped by for a visit—as was only natural! Merrick said. He was marrying her best friend, after all!—the two of them sat out on the porch, although it was too cold for that now. The smell of their cigarette smoke floated through Red’s open window. (But if it was so cold, his children would wonder years later, why was his window open?) “I’ve had it with her. I tell you,” Trey said. “Nothing I do makes her happy. Everything’s pick, pick, pick.”
“She doesn’t properly value you, it sounds like to me,” Merrick said.
“And you should see how she acts with Mother. She claimed she couldn’t help Mother sample the rehearsal-dinner menus because she had a term paper due. A term paper! When it’s her wedding!”
“Oh, your poor mother,” Merrick said. “She was only trying to make her feel included.”
“How come you understand that, Bean, and Pookie doesn’t?”
Red slammed his window shut.
Junior told Red he was imagining things. After the situation blew up, after the truth came bursting out and nearly all of Baltimore stopped speaking to Trey and Merrick, Red said, “I knew this would happen! I saw it coming. Merrick planned it from the start; she stole him.”
But Junior said, “Boy, what are you talking about? Human beings can’t be stolen. Not unless they want to be.”