Anne Tyler - The Amateur Marriage

Sally said, “Point!”

“Well, I suppose that’s understandable,” George said.

Both women looked at him.

He said, “In view, I mean, of the… you know, circumstances.”

“No, we do not know,” Sally told him, and then she turned back to Lindy. “I hope you convinced him otherwise.”

“No, I just said, ‘Fine,’” Lindy said. “I said, ‘In case you ever might want to get in touch, though, I’ll leave my number with George.’”

“He was just taken unawares,” Sally decided. “He’s very kind-hearted; believe me, he is. It’s just that he wasn’t expecting this. He’ll call back! I promise he will. That phone’s going to ring any minute.”

“No, I don’t think it will,” Lindy said. She gathered her sweaters around her. She said, “I should be getting home now.”

“Right now? But we’ve barely met!” Sally cried.

“I do have a husband waiting.”

“You’re married? Where do you live? I don’t know anything about you!”

“George will tell you,” Lindy said. “I just seem to be really, really tired. I have to go.”

She rose and started toward the front hall, holding her bag in both hands. She moved as if her feet hurt.

George said, “Wait.”

She paused, not bothering to look at him.

“What about Dad and Karen?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to see them?”

“Maybe some other time,” she said.

A tantalizingly familiar mixture of frustration and bafflement swept through him, and he said, “Suit yourself.”

But Sally said, “Lindy. Please. Reconsider. They’ll be desperate to see you! Couldn’t we just phone them and invite them over? Just for a little visit? A few little minutes, maybe?”

“You know,” Lindy told her, “I really feel I might be about to die of tiredness. I’m sorry. You seem like a very nice person. But all I want to do is go home and go to bed. George, I left my number on your desk pad if Pagan wants it. But he won’t.”

The peculiar thing about it — the unjust thing — was that everybody blamed George. Sally said he’d acted so passive, he’d given up so easily, he had seemed almost pleased when Pagan turned Lindy down. “Pleased!” George said. “Excuse me, but who was it who phoned him, may I ask? Who told him she wanted to speak to him?”

“I swear you looked downright satisfied when you heard he wouldn’t meet her in person. You said, ‘Oh, well, I suppose that’s understandable.’” (Here Sally made her voice sound booming and pompous, really nothing like George’s.) “Admit it: you were on his side. You didn’t think he should meet her, either. You’re an unforgiving person, George Anton.”

“All I meant,” he told her, “was that it might have been anticipated that a three-year-old thrown to the wolves by his mother would possibly not have much to say to her all these decades later.”

“He’s not a three-year-old anymore; he’s twenty-five. And of course he has things to say to her, even if they’re angry things! You should have called him right back, George, and told him to get himself over here. You shouldn’t have left the den in the first place. Lindy probably said everything wrong out of nervousness.”

“I was giving her some privacy, Sally.”

“Privacy, is that what you call it,” Sally said. “The fact is, you’re exactly like your father. You think standoffishness is a virtue.”

And his father? His father, who should have been the most unforgiving of all, behaved as if Lindy had merely been out shopping all these years. “When’s she coming back? Did she say?” he asked when George telephoned. “Why didn’t you let me know about this? Didn’t it occur to you that I would want to see her?” This was a man who’d suffered untold worry and grief, not to mention an entire second round of carpool duty and soccer games and parent-teacher conferences for the sake of somebody else’s child, but now all he wanted to know was “Did she at least ask about me? Did she wonder how I was doing?”

“Naturally she asked,” George said. (Well, more or less she had.)

“Was she upset about your mom?”

“Oh, yes.”

His father gave a ragged sigh. “Poor, poor Pauline,” he said. “It kills me that she didn’t live to see this.”

“I know, Dad.”

“She never gave up hope, I could tell. She never stopped believing that one day, sooner or later… Why, that time she had a chance to go on a cruise, remember? She could have gone with a group from her church but she said, oh, she would have to be away so long, she just didn’t think she ought to. And I was arguing with her, do it! We would manage just fine! You were already in college by then and Karen was, what; well, if you were, say, eighteen then I guess Karen would have been…”

Ever since his retirement, George’s father had grown more trying. His conversations were so long-winded now, so shapeless and convoluted and pedantic, full of repetitions, qualifiers, self-corrections, pauses to search for just the word he had in mind, dogged attempts to nail down the exact, specific date or street or name even when it made no difference to his story. All due to loneliness, no doubt. The grocery had been his whole social life. Ordinarily, Anna could be counted on to move things along. “Well, June or July, one or the other. At any rate…” she would gently suggest. But she couldn’t help over the telephone; so it was up to George to break in, finally, and say, “It’s true that Mom always seemed to be kind of… looking out the window for Lindy.”

“She kept every single one of Lindy’s belongings in case she ever came back, did you know that? Her clothes and books and papers and cosmetics and LP records.”

George certainly did know that. It was he and Karen who’d discovered it all, while they were still in that state of disbelief that follows a sudden death. (Marilyn Bryk, his mother’s old friend, had phoned George on a rainy March evening — Marilyn the cancer patient, who should have been the one to die first, by all rights. She’d gotten word before anyone because the police found a birthday card from her in Pauline’s purse.) Imagine how it felt to come upon a faded black turtleneck, a pair of black jeans studded hip to cuff with silver rivets, a voluminous, wrinkled black raincoat bristling with buckles and epaulettes — a sad little time capsule of a wardrobe that George’s daughter Samantha had instantly claimed for her own. Samantha had a kind of crush on Lindy, or so it seemed to George. She hadn’t even been born till years after Lindy left home, but she was always asking questions about her, poring over photographs of her, making her into some mythical, magical being.

When Samantha heard now that she’d missed Lindy’s visit, she was beside herself. “Lindy was here? In this house? The person I’ve most wanted to meet for as long as I’ve been on this earth? I cannot believe that you let her get away before I could see her!”

“Is it my fault you didn’t come home from school till after dark?” George demanded.

“Well, it sure wasn’t my fault! I was waiting for my tennis coach! Mom forgot to tell me he’d canceled! And anyway, how long did Lindy stay here — three and a half minutes? Why did she leave so fast? What did you say to cause her to go? Did you make her feel not welcome?”

Gina was even more accusatory — Pagan’s bossy wife, Gina Meredith, a feminist type who’d kept her last name and refused to shave her legs and breast-fed her baby in public. “Pagan told me his mother’s shown up,” she said when she telephoned. “Is she still there?”

“No, ah, she’s left, Gina.”

“Well, I feel strongly about this, George. I feel he should meet with her. I feel we both should. We all should, as a family.”