But she broke it off. And then he met his Betty, our Betty, the one he drew the sketch of, that young and lovely girl, tentative and uncertain. For years I have searched for that drawing he did as I watched, but it has long been missing. I think she may have found it and disposed of it or tucked it away in some secret place.
On their first date, they went to the old Busch’s Grove in St Louis. He knew that night that he would marry her, he said. He made it into a sentimental story where everything turned out just as it should. “There was something,” he said, “a sweetness.” She ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. She was nervous. He was glad he had found the right Betty.
My parents married on a scorching St. Louis day in August 1948. A small gathering with a cake from the Lake Forest Bakery. Bill Baker brought Mammy to St. Louis for the wedding in one of his crazy old cars, which broke down around St. Charles. Mammy said she was so hot waiting for Bill to fix that car she thought she was going to “upchuck,” a term I have never known used outside my family. Betty was twenty-six, too old, she said, for too fancy a dress or too lavish a ceremony.
Afterward, they went to Chicago for the weekend. Sade Sizer took them to a restaurant with phones on the tables: the Pump Room. Betty called up Mammy and told her she was just about to eat a lobster.
. . .
I am standing in front of the church, hoping my mother is doing all right at the piano, that she won’t wind up hurt, that she will come out of that church looking like she did when she was younger. At a wedding of a daughter of one of Betty’s friends ten or fifteen years or so ago, my mother was maybe seventy-five or a bit older, but looked sixty or less. Big George was gone by then, and Betty, who no longer drove at night, refused to go “in a carload of old widows,” so I came home to be her escort. I was having a good streak, making lots of money at a publishing house where my books were hitting big.
So I got on a plane, though I don’t much like weddings, which make me feel out of place, especially single.
I told Betty that she looked better, more beautiful than she ever had, but she could not accept this, could not take it in. At the entrance to the cool, candlelit church, she reached out to touch the fresh flowers, in awe at the perfection of the preparations. “Hazel has outdone herself,” she said, “spared no expense.”
My friend Lauren, who thinks she is Margaret Mead, says that weddings and funerals stir all kinds of things up in us because they are tribal occasions. I am not sure I have a tribe, though I think I have always longed for one.
That night at the wedding, my beautiful mother wore a suit the color of key lime pie, her favorite. She actually seemed to want to have a good time. At the reception, after a few glasses of champagne, she took off her shoes and wandered through the crowd in her stocking feet, greeting old friends. She was swaying, but just barely, when no one was looking, almost dancing to the music. She touched my elbow once to steady herself. “Have you had some champagne?” I asked. “Mind your own business,” she said.
“You are my business,” I said, as she had always said to me, all my life, in similar exchanges. I wanted her to feel as I did when I heard those words: protected, aligned with someone, connected.
I want her to feel this way now.
. . .
Betty always says she misses my aunt June more than almost anyone. I miss her too, and can picture her standing up at her table at that wedding reception, rearranging some flowers in a centerpiece knocked askew, tucking little sacks of rice into her purse. She couldn’t walk well anymore, but pushed herself to come, wanting to be part of the occasion, more lavish than most held around here now. Bill had stayed home and June had on a diamond-encrusted brooch in the shape of a large turtle along with her other major gems, the jewelry that Bill rarely allowed her to wear in public.
I wondered if June was imagining what Mary Ann, the daughter she lost, might have looked like as a bride. She looked left out, a little sad. I sometimes avoided my aunt, as she was the type to make reference on such occasions to my unmarried status. Or say something mortifying. I have always hated direct references to my way of being. Betty takes the easy way. Betty asks nothing. I prefer the easy way too, the approach that allows one to ignore every feeling until you are strapped in the back of an ambulance, screaming all the way to Silver Hill.