Anne Tyler - The Amateur Marriage

I am sitting in my living room with Lindy, George was thinking. The actual Lindy, in person, after all these years. She’s wearing ordinary tan suede clogs with a brown leaf stuck to one sole. She drives a sixty-something Ford Falcon, and one of her sweater buttons is hanging by a thread.

Lindy unfolded the newspaper clipping and examined it. A peculiar, airy, buzzing sensation surrounded George’s ears.

“Here,” Lindy said. She handed him the clipping.

George found a grainy black-and-white photo of two men — one elderly and mustached, one young. It took him a second to realize that the younger man was Pagan. He could have been almost anyone, with his shock of black hair and generic gray cable-knit sweater. Underneath, a caption read: Dr. William Gamble, developmental psychologist, and Pagan Anton, longtime child and family advocate, discuss the merits and drawbacks of the proposed legislation.

“Did you notice the wording?” Lindy asked.

“The wording,” George said.

Lindy nodded, smiling encouragingly, inviting him to share her amusement at something.

“Well,” he said, “yes, I suppose… considering that Pagan is only twenty-five…”

“I mean the way they broke the lines up. Or maybe there should have been a hyphen, because it looks as if they’re saying Pagan is a longtime child, doesn’t it?”

She gave a rough-edged giggle and reached for the clipping. George hadn’t quite finished studying it, but he could tell she felt some urgency about getting it back and so he released it.

“I found it lying on a desk,” she said. “Isn’t the world amazing? All these years I’ve been thinking about him, trying not to think about him, trying to keep him out of my head… Well, not at first, of course. Not when I was so wrecked and bad off. Back then I couldn’t think about anything. But, you know, after I married and all… I married a guy with two children. We met when I was still in the commune. You wouldn’t have heard about the commune, but that’s where I cleaned up my act. And Henry came to lead this poetry workshop; he was a high-school English teacher in Berkeley at the time, except now we live in Loudoun County—”

“Loudoun County, Virginia ?” George asked.

Lindy nodded. “We moved there last year,” she said. “Oh, I realize how it looks! It looks as if I planned it; plotted to inch closer. But honest, it was coincidence. Just a coincidental job offer, and now that Henry’s children are grown… But I was going to say, so I married him and he had these two kids, aged six and nine. And first they were just, you know, baggage, but bit by bit I got fond of them. I started, let’s say, loving them. And here’s what’s funny: as soon as that happened, as soon as I felt attached to these kids who were no relation to me, why, all at once I found myself thinking more and more about Pagan. I missed him to death! I thought I would die of it! It’s like those kids were a constant reminder. Well, I knew I had no right. By then he was settled; he’d moved on in life. I vowed I would keep away from him. But then…”

She turned her head sharply and gazed toward a porcelain lamp on her left. For a moment George assumed that something had caught her eye, till he realized she was blinking back tears. After a long, painful silence she turned back to him and said, “Then I found that clipping.”

George said, “I see.”

“I was clearing off Henry’s desk so I could play a game of solitaire, and there was this stack of articles about educational issues. And I swept them together and started to put them in the drawer, and that’s when I saw his name. Pagan Anton.”

She spoke the name lingeringly, giving each syllable its full share of attention. George cleared his throat.

“For one split second I thought I’d made it up. I thought I was hallucinating. But when I looked at the photo, I knew it had to be my Pagan — that Mexican hair like his father’s. I asked Henry, ‘Where’d you get this? What newspaper is it from?’ He didn’t know. The principal had just handed him a file folder, he said. And there weren’t any clues in the clipping itself. On the back was an ad for mail-order steaks. I said, ‘But he’s a child and family advocate! Couldn’t there be, I don’t know, a heading for that in the Yellow Pages?’ Because already, some time back, I’d tried to look him up in the Baltimore phone book. I was like a stalker or something. I was like someone demented. But all I found was you. Not Karen, not Mom or Dad…”

Her eyes filled with tears again, but this time she went on facing George. “I see now that I always imagined the whole lot of you right where I left you,” she said. “Mom in her miniskirt. Dad wrestling with that old lawnmower. You and Karen kids still.”

“Pagan’s here in Baltimore,” George blurted out. He felt ashamed of his earlier impatience.

Lindy watched him steadily.

“But he lives at the school where he works. That’s why he’s not in the phone book. He teaches an experimental music program for autistic children. He married his college sweetheart and they have a baby boy.”

“I’m a grandmother,” Lindy said. And then, “Does he hate me?” For a moment, it seemed she was asking whether her grandson hated her.

“He never mentions you,” George said.

That sounded so harsh, though, that he hurried to add, “But I don’t know. Who can say? He was so little at the time, I’m not sure he remembers you. Or, rather…” Because that, too, sounded harsh. He started over. “When Mom and Dad first got him,” he said, “he didn’t mention anything. He was… kind of silent. Kind of deaf and dumb.”

Kind of autistic, in fact — a thought that hadn’t occurred to George till this very moment. Did that explain Pagan’s choice of careers, which George had always viewed as discouraging if not futile?

“But gradually he warmed up,” he said. “With Mom, for instance — I remember at first he acted as if he didn’t know she existed, but every time she left the room you could see him sort of stiffen, and then he would relax again when she came back.”

“So he adjusted, by and by.”

“Oh, yes! By and by he settled in and had a perfectly normal childhood.”

It seemed, though, that George couldn’t leave well enough alone. He felt compelled to go on. He said, “The only thing I’m not sure of is, has he really forgotten you? Or does he remember and just not let on? Because sometimes I get the feeling… well, sorry to say this, but…”

Why was he saying it? But now he was forced to finish what he had begun. “I get the feeling he’s sending the message that we’re not allowed to bring your name up,” he said. “It’s like he’s silently forbidding us. Though of course I could be imagining things.”

He stole a glance at her face. At least she had stopped crying; she was listening to him calmly. “I could very well be mistaken,” he told her.

She said, “I don’t know which to wish for: that he remembers, or that he’s forgotten. We were so close, once. We did everything together! We were all each other had. But once—”

She looked at the lamp again. This time the pause was longer.

“Once I threw him down a flight of stairs,” she said.

“Oh, well. Well, now!” George said. He shifted in his seat. “Gosh, I’m sure you — oh, why, these things happen! Gosh. Anyhow. So—”

“And how about you, George?” Lindy asked.

“Me.”

“Are you married? Do you have children?”

“Why, yes, Sally should be home any minute, in fact.” He wished she would hurry. He and Lindy had had ample time alone, he felt. “We have a son at Princeton, and a daughter still in high school. I’m a vice-president with a firm that facilitates mergers for small businesses.”