Читать книгу Chin Up, Honey - Curtiss Matlock Ann - Страница 13

Mother of the Bride

Sylvia Kinney was a beautiful woman of forty-five who could, and often did, easily pass for ten years younger, even though this would have had her giving birth to her one and only daughter at fourteen. She would rather have people think she had gotten caught up in youthful foolishness than know the truth of her having made a big mistake at twenty-two, when she should have known better. She was desperately trying to save Gracie from making the same mistake.

Gripping the telephone receiver, Sylvia Kinney paced the white carpet of her bedroom in a fashionable apartment in Baltimore and tried talking sense to her daughter. She tried cajoling, threatening and, uncharacteristically, pleading—everything she could think of to convince her daughter two thousand miles away not to marry that bubba with whom she thought she was in love.

Finally, thoroughly frustrated, Sylvia came out with, “My God, Gracie, he’s nothing but a redneck boy with no future beyond the possible ability to acquire a lot of junk cars up on blocks in the yard.”

She knew instantly that she had made a serious error.

“Yes, Mother, I know,” came Gracie’s cool reply. “I’ll always know where he is at night, right out in the backyard playing with our children.”

“Oh, Gracie…I didn’t really mean it like that. I didn’t. I just don’t want you to do something that…”

“I’m going to marry Johnny, Mother. I wish you could be happy for me. Goodbye.”

There came a loud click and the line hummed.

Sylvia slowly set the phone aside. Her gaze went to a gilded frame holding the smiling face of her daughter. She picked it up and gazed for a long moment at the image. She swallowed back tears and breathed deeply. As far as she had ever seen, crying did nothing but cause wrinkles. She could not afford wrinkles. Not in the modern business world. Looking into the mirror, she finger-combed her dark hair that still did not need dyeing.

On closer inspection, there was a white hair. She plucked it out.

Then, hopping up, she tossed off her slippers, quietly opened the door and tiptoed down the hall to peer into the living room at her lover, Wadley Johnson, who was asleep on the couch where he had retreated last night, because she would not let him sleep in the bed with her. She had not let another man sleep in her bed since her idiotic blunder with Gracie’s father, which she still blamed on the fantasy of Paris. These days, when she went to Paris, she always wore dark glasses and never drank wine.

The sun was coming in the wide windows, and Wadley had pulled a pillow over his face. He was still in his dress slacks and shirt, his coat and tie thrown on the floor.

She and Wadley had been to a club to listen to Wadley’s jazz-playing friends and had not gotten in until nearly three in the morning. Wadley very often slept until noon, anyway. As he would say, his career as a rich playboy required certain habits.

Wadley R. Johnson was forty-eight, handsome, charming and rich. He had three ex-wives to attest to this. He wanted to make Sylvia number four and last, so he said. Sylvia, however, believed that his record was against him and that her own was not promising, either.

For a brief moment she considered waking Wadley and asking him to make breakfast—he could cook, and she did not—or to go down to the breakfast shop and get them something.

But he was always so chipper and loving in the morning. He would probably get all amorous and ask her again to marry him, and she was feeling especially vulnerable.

She went back to her room and threw herself into bed.

The conversation with Gracie played back over her mind…right out in the backyard playing with our children.

Oh, good Lord. She would be a grandmother.

She pulled the covers over her head and tried to figure out how she was going to face the mess she was in.

Just over twenty-two summers ago, right after graduating college, Sylvia had flown to Paris and gone a little crazy. Intellectually, she understood it well. She had spent the better part of her life being super-responsible. Her parents, Albert and Margie Kinney, had been of an irresponsible and distant nature. Their entire world had been each other. They had hardly noticed they had given birth to a child. At an early age, Sylvia had learned to take care of herself, as well as the difficulties of her parents.

When Sylvia was thirteen, her mother died. Her father went on to run even more quickly through his large family inheritance. What money was left now was thanks to Sylvia’s shrewdness. Her father and his new wife, Giselle, were living comfortably, even enjoying yearly trips to Europe and Florida. Whenever anything came up, such as a glitch in air-f lights or a gallbladder operation, Sylvia was called to handle the matter.

But that summer after her college graduation, where she had graduated with the highest grade-point average of any student for the five previous years, Sylvia escaped this pattern for a short period and went off with fast friends all over Europe. She finally had time to fall in love, for the first time in her life, with Paul Mercier, an American who was in Paris studying art. She became pregnant and married him.

Sylvia had explained all about her rashness in marrying Gracie’s father and how impossibly different they had been from the beginning. She had not painted Paul as an ogre, just very irresponsible, and far more in love with art and the free-and-easy life than he had been with Sylvia or with Gracie. Artists were like that, Sylvia had explained. Paul had eventually faded from their lives, and they did not need him. End of story.

In fleeting honest moments, Sylvia admitted to herself that she wanted to bury that part of her life so deeply as to make it seem that it never happened. The problem was that in doing so, she also buried Gracie’s history. This fact had not seemed too important at the time, nor for years afterward. As Gracie grew older, Sylvia convinced herself that nothing about Paul mattered and those memories were better left alone. So, for a million reasons that she was at a loss to explain, Sylvia had never mentioned to Gracie the small fact that Paul Mercier was a black Creole.