Adios, Scheherazade

So it was Johnny, Betsy’s brother, that gave her away. A funny phrase, that, gave her away. They didn’t exactly give her away, her family, they sort of let her get away. She became an alien, as separate from her family as a flower from a tree. I’d look at Betsy and I’d look at her family and I could just never draw the lines between them. In fact, I wondered sometimes if she was adopted, but knowing how cheap her folks are that seems unlikely. Of course, she might have been kidnaped from her real family, that might make a degree of sense. Born to this cultured and well-to-do couple, kidnaped by desperate men in thin black suits and hats that need blocking, men who smoke roll-your-owns, who turned the baby over to the Blake family for safekeeping. But then something went wrong, the ransom wasn’t paid or the kidnapers ran away, and the Blakes were stuck with this little kid. They couldn’t give it back without admitting their own complicity, and they’re too feebleminded to work out any indirect way — like leaving the kid in a church — so they’re stuck. And Betsy grows up, a flower on a dungheap, the colors showing through the shit, and she strains toward better things, and goes to college despite the Blakes’ disapproval...

And marries me?

Do you suppose — this is a brand new thought, now — do you suppose she

felt as trapped as I did when we got married? Do you suppose she called me not because she wanted to but because there wasn’t anything else she could do, she married me not because she wanted to but because there wasn’t anything else she could do?

Maybe it was over for her, too, back there in the summer of 1964, maybe she was just as glad as I was that the school year was over and I was going home to Albany.

Maybe she was just as much of a poor fish wriggling on the line as I was.

That’s a sort of a lonely thought. I know I have never in my entire marriage given myself completely to Betsy, I’ve always held myself back, I’ve always been alone on the inside, but I never thought the same might be true of her. And if it is, how lonely I feel. How cold and thin-skinned, shivering in this wind. Is this how it always was for her? Has she been living on this thin gruel for over three years? Or did she never know it till she read those chapters?

Oh, I’m sorry, Betsy, I am honest to God sorry, if I could have reversed the roles before this, understood things before this, a lot would have been different.

Or would it?

We should never have married, that’s all. We were going through ritual tribal motions, like the characters in a Greek tragedy, slowly and methodically and portentously doing senseless things because they were required by the script. On learning she was pregnant, Betsy should not have phoned me. There were other things she could have and should have done. On getting the phone call, I should not have offered marriage. There were other things I should have and could have done. (Hester understood that, she has always been the one to understand the multiplicities of possibility.) And on our seeing each other again in Monequois, Betsy and I should both have known the whole thing was doomed.

For five days, from the time of my arrival in town till we walked into that church together, Betsy and I were as silent and distant and indrawn from each other as strangers sitting together on a bus. If the minister hadn’t been such a silly ass, we might have gone into the honeymoon that way, but he saved our bacon, though inadvertently and perhaps not permanently. Perhaps not for good, I might say, punning a bit.

Anyway, this minister, the Reverend Doctor R. Eugene Plunkett, was the white-haired, round-faced, steel-spectacled, mild, gentle, inoffensive moron sort of country minister, and I met him for the first time on the day and the hour of the ceremony. We trooped into the church, Betsy and her mother and Birge and Johnny and me, and Rev Plunkett shook everybody’s hand, smiling and nodding and just as pleased as punch to see people happy, and then he asked Betsy and me to come into his office with him a minute while the others waited outside.

(My family wasn’t represented, as perhaps you already noticed. Mom couldn’t get away from her job at the restaurant, Hannah had started already at the hospital, and Hester didn’t give a reason. She didn’t have to. I was just as glad none of them were there, anyway.)

Rev Plunkett’s office was neat and fussy, with a rolltop desk and a squeaky swivel chair. There was a bench with a slat back, and on this we sat, while Rev Plunkett sat in his swivel chair and squeaked around to face us.