Cass, William

Honeymoon

William Cass

(Featured, July 2013)

It was Sunday night, late November, and Carl sat in the chair next the front window of their upstairs bedroom watching the rain come down. The room was dark except for the glow of the numbers from the clock radio on his nightstand. The quiet, muffled music from it was scratchy from the storm. The song that was playing was fifty years old. The first time that Carl had heard it, he remembered, was when he and Mabel were just beginning their honeymoon in Long Island. They’d come over on the ferry from Bridgeport in the afternoon. Some friends from the wedding had followed them down from Hartford after the ceremony and had thrown rice at the boat from the dock. Mabel had tossed her bridal bouquet from the deck of the boat as it disembarked, and it had landed in the water.

They’d been sitting in the lobby of their hotel listening to Truman make an election speech on the radio, and when he’d finished, the song came on.

Mabel said, “I’m going to vote for him.”

“You ought to, Mabel,” Carl said. “You’d better.”

“Let’s go get dinner,” Mabel said.

They went down the street to a diner called Luther’s and ate roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy at a table in the back. The food was good, but Carl had wanted to go to a place with candlelight. Luther’s had lights in the ceiling and a linoleum tile floor. Mabel had been there years before and remembered the food as tasty and cheap. They had lime sherbet for dessert. Carl looked across the table at Mabel as she scraped the bottom of the metal dish. She was wearing a red dress with an imitation pearl necklace, and she had a pink ribbon in her hair from the wedding.

“You’re beautiful,” Carl said.

Mabel looked up. “Stop that, Carl.” She smiled.

“You are,” he said. “You’re very beautiful.”

“I am not.”

“I can’t believe we’re married.”

“We are,” Mabel said, eating.

“But I can’t believe it. That ribbon looks nice.”

“Stop it, Carl.”

“What should we do tonight?”

Mabel finished her sherbet. “Let’s do something fun.”

“How about going back out on the ferry?”

“We just came on it this afternoon.”

“Yes, but we could see the lights. I haven’t been on the water at night since the war.”

“Oh, it’s too cold,” Mabel said.

“Let’s go see if the paddle boats are still running at the park.”

“I don’t want to ride in the paddle boats.”

“What do you want to do, Mabel?”

“Let’s look in the shops.”

“It’s October. The shops are closed at night.”

“We can look in the windows.”

Mabel was sitting back with her hands in her lap. She was a big woman, and the skin on her upper arms bulged slightly from her bunched sleeves. Carl was small and very thin. His nose and ears were large, and his hair was parted directly in the middle of his head. He looked at Mabel with his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go look in the shops.”

Carl went around and pulled out Mabel’s chair. He paid the check and they left. They walked through the streets slowly, her arm through his. Fall leaves littered the sidewalks and the backs of some of the shops were still lit. The streets, though, were mostly dark and empty. They could smell the ocean and hear the small waves lap at the beach. They walked back along the boardwalk towards the hotel. The restaurants around it were closing, and they could see their breath hanging in the air. They stopped at an antique store next to the hotel and looked in the window.

“Oh, look, Carl,” Mabel said. She pointed in the window.

“What?”

“Look at those little figurines,” Mabel said. “They’re made from porcelain. Aren’t they lovely?”

Carl put his hands on his knees and looked in the window. “The little skaters?”

“Aren’t they wonderful?”

Carl studied the skaters. “I’ll buy those for you.”

“Oh, no, Carl. They’re much too expensive.”

“No, I will.”

“No, Carl,” Mabel said. “They’re antiques, and they’re much too expensive.”

“I’d like to.”

“Stop it,” Mabel told him. “Let’s go to bed.”

They went upstairs in the old hotel that smelled faintly like candied yams. Carl looked out the window of their room while Mabel was in the bathroom. He looked over the wide, still sound and the lights on the surface of it. The room was dark and quiet, but he could hear water running in the bathroom sink. Carl took off his clothes slowly and climbed into bed. The sheets were cold and smooth.

When Mabel came out of the bathroom, she had a nightgown on and her hair was piled up on the top of her head in a knot. She crawled under the covers and they embraced in the

darkness. Carl could smell powder on her, and her skin was soft. After a moment, Mabel rolled over on her side away from him. Carl looked at the back of her. He could hear a foghorn blowing at the end of the breakwater.

“Mabel?” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder. She took his hand and brought his arm around her.

“Mabel, are you going to sleep?”

It

“It’s been a long day,” she said quietly.

“Are you going to sleep, Mabel?”

“I’m very tired,” she said.

The next day, they took the train into New York. The city at noon was bright and full of sun. They bought hot dogs and sodas from a vendor on a street corner for lunch. Then they took in a variety show matinee at Radio City Music Hall. When they left the theater, the streets were crowded. Carl and Mabel sat on a bench on the train station platform waiting for their commuter and watching people. They tossed soda crackers to the pigeons.

When they got back to the hotel, it was already after four. Mabel decided to take a bath. Carl went down and bought the porcelain skaters from the antique store. He had them wrapped in red paper and wrote on the card: “To Mabel. All my love. Carl”. He brought them upstairs while Mabel was still in the tub; he could hear her moving the water around and humming to herself. He put the skaters on the bed with the card showing and went out for a walk on the beach.

The wide, quiet colors of the sun were fading. The water was still. Carl walked down the long, empty beach. The sun settled down in widening hues, but Carl was walking with his back to it. He went out onto the pier and watched some men fish with drop lines off the end of it. He talked with a few old-timers about their bait and the tide. He stayed long enough to see a few bottom fish pulled up: cod and flounder, and then headed back to the hotel.

The early evening sky was soft and ink-like. The streetlamps threw soft, yellow globes of light. The shops were beginning to close, and it was growing cold again. Carl went through the lobby of their hotel and walked upstairs. When he opened the door to their room, Mabel was standing in front of the mirror over the dresser straightening a new hat on her head. The hat was green and made from something like velvet, and it had a big feather sticking out of the back of it.

Carl stood in the doorway. “Where did you get that?” he asked.

Mabel finished straightening the hat. “Those skaters were too expensive.”

“Where did you get the hat?”

“I brought those skaters back, Carl,” she said. “I bought the hat instead, and we have change.” She walked over to him and put the money in his hand. Then she stepped back and looked at him smiling, touching the brim of the hat with one hand. “Isn’t it nice? I’ll wear it to dinner. Where should we go for dinner?”

Carl looked at the money in his hand. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Should we go to Luther’s again?”

He shrugged and said, “All right.”

They went down the street to the well-lit diner for dinner. The next morning was warm enough to read the newspaper in chairs on the beach. They finished their honeymoon the following afternoon and returned to Manchester, Connecticut, where all of Mabel’s sisters and their husbands lived. Carl went to work for the post office there, and carried mail for forty-seven years. He’d been retired for the past nine.

Now, Carl let his thoughts return to the rain outside his bedroom window. He watched it fall and listened to the faint, scratchy music from the radio until ten-thirty when he heard Mabel turn off the light in the kitchen and the groan of the stairs under her as she climbed them.

She came into the room and said, “It’s still raining.”

Carl reached over and turned off the radio. Mabel undressed in the closet and put on her nightgown. She sat on the side of the bed and rubbed cold cream from a jar on her nightstand into her face and neck, and then slid under the covers.

In the darkness, she said, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Come to bed, Carl.”

He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t get up from the chair.

Mabel sighed. “Come to bed, Carl,” she said again.

“Not yet.”

“You’re such a big baby,” she said and pulled the covers up around her.

Carl looked back out at the rain, which had begun to fall harder. He looked over the roofs of the two and three-family houses going off towards East Manchester and watched it pour through the streetlights. It seemed to bounce off the streets. He could smell the moist cold cream; in the mornings, he always awoke to the odor of it on the pillowcase next to him. He listened to his wife’s breathing go steady and slow and heard the furnace kick on in the basement.

***

Mabel passed away two years later, and Carl followed her not too long after that. Both their children, Frank and Betty, made it home to visit him just before Carl died in the assisted living facility where he’d moved for his last few months. The eldest, Frank, flew up from Hilton Head, South Carolina, where he and his wife had just retired. The younger daughter, Betty, flew in from California where she lived with her husband and children. With Carl’s early stages of dementia and the meds he was on, they weren’t sure how much he recognized them during the visit, but they sat by his side after each untouched meal for two days and evenings until the call finally came from the facility in the middle of the night. They were staying at the house in their old bedrooms. Frank took the call, and then switched on the hallway light and came into the doorway of Betty’s room where she was already sitting up in bed. She raised her eyebrows to him, and he nodded.

They arranged the funeral and burial quickly. None of their own family members came out and only the few local relatives and friends of Carl’s who were still alive attended. Betty’s old high school boyfriend came; she hadn’t seen him in over thirty years. When he’d asked her if she wanted to go for a drive together while she was in town, she’d felt her color rise and said she’d let him know.

It took a couple more days for Frank and Betty to take care of the will and other related affairs, put the house up for sale with a realtor, and then set about deciding upon the few things from the home that they each wanted to keep before the estate sale. That’s where they came upon the loose floorboard under the cedar chest in their parents’ bedroom.

Frank had scooted the chest away from the foot of the bed so he could open the cover of it back onto the bedspread, and jarred the lip of the floorboard as he did. Betty was standing next to him. They looked at each other, and then she bent down and lifted the floorboard away, exposing a thin cherry wood box in the opening under the floor. She took it out, set it on the cedar chest, and lifted the lid, releasing the smell of old parchment and dust that wafted up to them. The box held military medals of their father’s from World War II, letters that he and their mother had exchanged while he was overseas, some curled black-and-white photographs, and a folded paper on the bottom that Betty opened so they could both see it. It was their parents’ wedding certificate, and in the strong morning light from the window next to them, it was easy to read and re-read.

They looked at each other after studying it, Frank knitting his eyebrows and blinking.

After a long moment, Betty said, “October 13, 1946. But they celebrated their anniversary on July 13th.”

Frank said slowly, “And I was born in March. Full term. Nine pounds.”

His sister put her hand over her mouth and shook her head.

Frank nodded. “Well, that explains some things.”

He looked over his sister’s shoulder out the window at the crab apple tree in the corner of the backyard. One of their regular chores when they’d been children had been to pick the apples from that tree from which their mother would somehow turn into pies and apple sauce.

“I never saw them kiss,” Betty said quietly. “I never even saw them hold hands.”

“No,” Frank said. “Neither did I.”

Betty studied her brother and was startled at how much he resembled their father. They’d never been close. She’d always attributed that to their seven years age difference and the fact that they’d lived most of their adult lives across the country from one another. But, now, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure either why she hadn’t called her old boyfriend and told him she couldn’t get together with him, or why, in fact, she’d been looking forward to the possibility all day. Frank looked past her out the window again and thought about the separate bedrooms he and his wife had moved into once their retirement home had been finished.

Betty put the certificate in the top of the box, replaced the lid, and sat down on the edge of the bed. She asked, “What should we do with this?”

“I don’t know. Do you want it?”

“I’m not sure I do. Do you?”

Frank frowned and shrugged. “I’ll put it on the table in the foyer for now. I guess we can think about it and decide later.”

He picked it up and started across the room.

“They were good providers,” Betty said. “They always cared for us well.”

Frank turned and looked at her. The bed sagged where she sat. It had been their mother’s side. Betty was built just the same as her and had the same coloring. If he didn’t think about it too carefully, it seemed as if she could have been their mother sitting there in that same spot.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re right about that. You’re absolutely right.”

The Top

Ten . . .

Favorite

Words

by William Cass

(July, 2013)

10. Plum - the way it looks, sounds, comes off the tongue, and its visual image

9. Wren - reminds me of those wonderful, small birds that my grandmother and I left bread crusts for each morning after breaksfast on her kitchen window sill when I was little...she's the finest person I've ever known and the most influential person in my life.

8. Empathy - the title of a story I wrote that was recently selected as the winner of another literary journal's writing contest...at the end of the story, the narrator says, "Among the emotions that I knew of, I'd always thought that love came first, that it was the most important. I'd believed that others, like hope and faith, contributed to it and helped define it. But in that moment I knew that this other preceded love, and that without it, love was not possible. Nor was pity or understanding. That without it, nothing good was really conceivable."

7. Hearth - conjurs: home

6. Warmth - an extension of "hearth;" also seems to me a close cousin to "empathy"

5. Meadow - when surrounded by mountains, and with a stream running through it, well, my heart slows

4. Charlie - my severely disabled/medically fragile son...and hero

3. Rosebud - my daughter's nickname...and an apt description of her spirit and inner beauty

2. Juneau - a place I once lived that is filled with special and wonderful memories...wild, pristine, wonderous (with lots of great meadows)

1. Hope - the word my daughter stitched into a Christmas ornament she gave me when she was little; with her gone away to college, it hangs now year-round in my dining room