It emerged that Lee had felt emancipation would come about on its own, in the natural course of events. He wrote this in a letter to his wife. “Well, I never,” Rebecca told Poppy. “I had no idea Lee was such a rationalizer.”
“Lee who?” Poppy asked.
“General Lee. Robert E. When I was a girl, I thought I was going to rewrite his chapter in history. I could not believe he would have chosen which side to fight on purely out of personal loyalty.”
“Well?” Poppy said. “What better reason?”
“How about principle? Even a wrongheaded, evil principle?”
“Robert E. Lee was one of your Virginia types,” Poppy said. “All the principle he cared for was his own little bit of acreage.”
“Not according to this memoir I came across in college,” she told him.
“Oh, well, college,” Poppy said. Then, as if he’d proved his point, he returned to his own reading — a multicolored magazine, surely not the New York Review. He was making notes on a memo pad with a promotional ballpoint pen from Ridgepole Roofers. The article he was consulting, she saw, was called “Ten Ways to Shake Up a Party.” She sighed and looked down at her book again. Lee’s wife gazed mournfully from the left page, Lee himself from the right. Rebecca caught herself wondering what kind of sex life they’d had.
* * *
Rebecca’s mother telephoned. She had been much more attentive lately — all sly questions and perky alertness, like a girlfriend hoping for confidences. “You’re home!” she said. “I thought you’d be out.”
She didn’t say why, in that case, she had bothered to call.
Rebecca said, “How are you, Mother?”
“I’m fine. How about you? No date tonight?”
“No date.”
“What did you do last night?”
“Sat home with Poppy,” Rebecca said perversely. In fact, she’d seen Will in the afternoon, but her mother hadn’t asked about the afternoon.
“Well, I just wanted to tell you that Sherry Hardy knows all about Will’s ex-wife.”
“Have you been talking to Sherry Hardy about my private business?” Rebecca demanded.
“Just who you’re going out with, is all. I really don’t remember how the subject chanced to come up.”
Rebecca groaned.
Her mother said, “Sherry’s second cousin went to Will’s wedding. She told Sherry that his wife seemed way too young for him.”
“Well, she was a former student of his. You knew that.”
“She was pretty but unlikable, according to the cousin. A discontented type. You could see it in the corners of her mouth. All during the reception, she poked fun at how stodgy Will was. At one point he made some comment that was the least little bit professor-sounding, and the bride told everybody, ‘Will is my first husband, needless to say.’ Only joking, of course, but when you consider how things turned out…”
Rebecca, who had been listening more closely than she would admit, felt a stab of pity. Will could never have held his own against that kind of woman! But she just said, “Well, that’s all water over the bridge now.”
“Dam,” her mother said.
“Pardon?”
“Water over the dam.”
“Whatever.”
“The ceremony was Catholic, or maybe just High Episcopal. This cousin wasn’t quite sure. She said there was a lot of kneeling going on. When Will was defining what a homophone was, he used feted and fetid as his examples.”
Rebecca said, “He used what?”
“F-E-T-E-D and F-E-T-I-D. That was the comment that struck his ex-wife-to-be as professor-sounding.”
“Why was he defining a homophone at his wedding?” Rebecca asked.
“Oh, you know how these subjects come up… I really couldn’t say.”
“Well, anyhow—”
“Also liken and lichen.”
“Excuse me?”
“L–I-K-E-N and L–I-C-H-E-N.”
“What on earth?”
But then her mother asked when Rebecca planned to bring Will for a visit — a prospect that seemed filled with possibilities for disaster — and Rebecca shifted her focus to inventing reasons not to.
After she had hung up, though, she started picturing Will at his wedding. She saw his fine-boned, serious face surrounded by laughing young guests, and she felt such a deep sense of injury on his behalf that it was almost physical.
Yesterday afternoon, he had come over to watch a movie with her — something subtitled, black-and-white, very difficult to follow, that she had driven all the way to Video Americain to rent. And Zeb had stopped by, as often happened on Sundays, and he and Poppy got to reminiscing about old times at the Open Arms. Zeb, in particular, could pull out any number of horror tales. The wedding ceremony where Mother Davitch started sobbing and couldn’t stop, the Easter morning when Joe hid six dozen raw eggs that he thought were cooked, the after-prom breakfast they forgot to put on the calendar…
“Can you imagine where we’d be if Rebecca hadn’t shown up?” Zeb asked Will. “We all thanked our lucky stars. She turned out to be awfully good for the business.”
Will had pulled his gaze from the screen. “Rebecca, good at business?” he’d said.
“Good for business, actually. If not for her, we’d have long ago gone under.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Rebecca had said. “Why are you talking this way? The first time I helped with a party, I let fly a champagne cork straight into some woman’s bosom.”
“Right! I’d forgotten. Most comical picture,” Zeb had told Will. “Rebecca pops off the cork and crumples to the floor in mortification, so it looked as if she were the one who’d been hit. Meanwhile the woman with the bosom goes on talking, completely unaware. Falsies, was my considered opinion. I was very observant about such things in those days.”
“We never let on to my mother-in-law,” Rebecca said. “When she saw me on the floor she said, ‘Dearie? Are you all right?’ and I just said, ‘Yes, fine,’ and got up and poured the champagne.”
She and Zeb had started laughing, while Will looked from one to the other with a tentative smile that seemed prepared to broaden as soon as he got the joke. “So,” he’d said finally, “I gather you were still living at home then, Zeb.”
“Lord, yes,” Zeb had said, taking off his glasses to wipe his eyes. “Yes, I was still a kid when Joe and Rebecca married. The whole experience scarred me for life: seeing Rebecca walk out of their bedroom every morning all rosy and contented.”
Rebecca had instantly sobered. She’d said, “Stop talking rubbish, Zeb.”
It wasn’t like him to be cruel. She had glanced toward Will to see how he was taking it, but his gaze was fixed on the movie again. His head was craned forward earnestly and his long, articulated fingers were cupping his bony knees.
Stodgy, she thought now. Wasn’t that the word the wedding guest had used? Well, Rebecca knew he was stodgy! She knew his literal cast of mind, his reliance on routine, his almost laughable pompousness. (That “Dr. Allenby speaking” when he answered the phone.) The thing was, to her those traits were endearing. More than that: she felt partly responsible for them. Any time she saw him looking lost and ill at ease, she was reminded all over again that she had once abandoned him.
Which was why, yesterday afternoon, she had openly, pointedly, brazenly reached for his nearest hand and clasped it in her own.
* * *