A Marriage
The piano stood beside an open window that looked down to the dam and the lake. The house was on a ridge, the music falling down the hill and out across the water. My Uncle Robert was an excellent pianist. If he were playing Claire de Lune, it was likely my mother was there. That was her favorite. She sat in a chair beside the piano while he played, her fingers moving to the melody. She had little of contentment in her life and I think Clair de Lune allowed her to set troubles aside, lifting her up through the curtains, out beyond the window, and away. She didn’t often say much, just ‘Robert can you play Clare de Lune?’ Her life by then was laden with disappointments. A little music is not much to ask.
Off the lake, I would pull the boat up on the sand, walked up the hill to the house and dinner. Fresh fish, just caught and cleaned, grits, coleslaw. Miss Nannies’ bright, intelligent, assertive voice, a little of the day’s news from Papa, Robert’s cheerfully oblivious side notes. My father could have been there. I don’t recall. My mother moving the food around on her plate, smiling, tentative, hopeful conversation.
I don’t recall a time when theirs was a happy marriage. It must have been at some time. But what do I know? My mother and my father’s sister Margie were pals in school. Introductions were made. You should meet my brother, she said. What did she leave out? He’s a drinker and he has a temper? They met, dated, and married during the war. He went to flight school and proved a good enough pilot that he was made a flight instructor. They moved around as needed by the Army Air Corp. The war over my father was discharged. I was born the year after he got out of the service. I don’t know what he tried to do for a living back then. They lived in a rented apartment in Jesup after I was born. He sold life insurance and she tended house. In what turned out to be a mistake that blighted his working life, he did not use the GI Bill and go to college. Whatever he was doing to make a living couldn’t have been much and he took advantage of a need for pilots during the Korean War and re-enlisted.
I was too young to remember much about those years, not old enough to be aware their lives. He was stationed at McCord Air Force Base when I was in the first and second grades. We lived in a rented house, always a rented house, with views of Mount Ranier from the back yard. From there to Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. We lived in a small house across the road from corn fields. I had a dog. During my fourth-grade year he was on temporary duty in Japan. My mother and I lived in an apartment that was up the street from my grandmother’s house. This may have been her happiest year. She was the wife of an officer, a pilot, with enough money for nice clothes, a nice car.
It was not until I was eleven and he was transferred to an Air Force base in Newfoundland that I began to notice. What I noticed was that he drank and they fought, a lot. Every night was an argument, cursing one another, always ugly. I don’t know that one was more at fault than the other. But he was the one doing the drinking. She pushed back, baiting him, while I laid in bed listening, wishing she would just leave it be, let him go to sleep.
The drinking hurt his career and after being passed over for promotion a couple of times he was discharged, RIF’ed it was called, Reduction in Force, an honorable discharge but hardly one he would have hoped for. Out with a total of twelve years of service, well short of a pension. He was thirty-nine years old with uncertain prospects and a drinking problem. They moved back to Pembroke where we lived with my grandmother in a house too small for two families. The years became harder for her, harder for him, hard with disappointments, frustrations, and failures that led to more of the same. My mother was embarrassed coming back to Pembroke, no longer the stylish wife of an air force pilot, but back as the wife of an unemployed former pilot with no job, no money, and the years slipping by.
My father tried selling debit life insurance and when he couldn’t sell life insurance, or anything else, he got a job in a building supply, counter help, making little money and too little respect for a prideful man. Coming home in the evening after an hour’s drive from Savannah, resenting having to come there, resenting having to eat at my grandmother’s table. I don’t have a single clear recollection of him being there for four years of high school. Nor do I have memories of her. My mother seldom ventured outside her bedroom where, hour after day after week, she lay in bed and read and slept and read. He continued to drink. She started taking pills for escape.
Eventually he was offered a position opening and running a building supply, a small one, in Dublin. So he went, summer of ’64. I went with him and together, for that summer, we lived in a boarding house and worked all day setting up the building supply. It was a good summer, work for him that offered the possibility of a decent job, self-respect, a new start. He bought a little house and my mother came up from Pembroke, giddy at living in her own home for the first time in their married lives. It wouldn’t last long.
In those days, before the Lowes or Home Depots, building supply stores were for contractors. To sell to the contractors you had to be out calling on them at job sites, developing contacts, making friends, which he didn’t, maybe couldn’t, do. To be successful you needed to know how to run business. He didn’t. The store failed. He got a job working the counter of a local building supply in town. Hourly wages again and not much of that. They lost the house. Their lives bent under the strain of alcohol, over the counter drugs, bitterness, and anger.
They moved to a little rental house in Dudley, Georgia. Not much of a house but it had a big yard, shaded and green, a garden spot for my father, a place for my mother to hide away. He quit the building supply and started doing light carpentry and remodeling. Bought an old step van for his tools. Money was always short. My father somehow started to unwind some of his years of anger. I think he was worn out. The drinking fell off, a few beers in the evening.
My mother withdrew within a quiet space of simple routines. How much time did she spend standing in the kitchen wiping and re-wiping the counters? She had drawn in the perimeter of her life to minimize chance encounters with embarrassment, bad checks, a car that wouldn’t crank, someone who might speak to her in the grocery store, anything. The edge of something unpredictable was always very close. Better, safer, more comfortable to remain in a small circle of control and routine, her bedroom and the circle cast by a reading light, a metal chair in the yard beside a fig tree, a sunlit place to sit with her cats, an afternoon’s share of calm in a life of loss, uncertainty, worry.
Good memories of their years in Dudley? My mother’s coleslaw and liver hash. Martha enjoyed that. My father explaining to Martha why some of his water melons were standing upright on their ends: “Special kind of melon. They pop up like that when they get ripe.” He had been out earlier and stood the ripe ones up before going back out to cut them from the vine. She may have believed him for a second. He got a laugh out of that.
They died in that little rental house. She from a heart attack in the middle of the night. My father had been diagnosed a few months earlier with lung and brain cancer. My sister got him into a nursing home where he died two months after my mother. I gave his step van to my father-in-law and for myself kept a hammer, a couple of handsaws, and a square.
Leave a comment