Chin Up, Honey

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.

8

Gracie

She was glad to have a few minutes after the phone call with her mother to put herself back together before Johnny arrived to take her to Sunday dinner with his parents.

Her gaze fell on the card Emma Berry had sent her. Gracie had cried when she had received it, and now, looking at it, she had a fantasy of her mother calling back and saying something like, “Oh, Gracie, I’ve just been so silly. You’ve made a good choice, and you are going to be so happy. I’m proud of you, and I support you all the way.” She imagined it so thoroughly as to even listen for the phone to ring. It did not.

Gracie told herself that she should not be surprised at her mother’s attitude. She and her mother had been at odds for all of Gracie’s life. Gracie could still recall being six years old and wanting to wear a certain pair of pants that her mother did not want her to wear.

“You won that fight, Mother, and you have won just about all of them since—but you are not going to win this one,” she said aloud to herself in the mirror as she got herself ready to go to the home of her future in-laws.

They were very different, she and her mother. Her mother was keenly intelligent and exacting. Gracie was of average intelligence and easygoing. Gracie’s teenage years had been spent in hard attempts to please her mother. She had even pressed herself through constant study and tutoring to get into Bryn Mawr, where her mother insisted she go. She had gotten into the prestigious college by the skin of her teeth and had made it through two years, when, thankfully, illness had given her an excuse to drop out before being kicked out. She spent six months in bed, suffering an indefinable form of chronic fatigue. After she recovered, she refused to return to school. She had gotten away with that by allowing her mother to get her a job as a clerk with the local M. Connor store. This was intended to last only until Gracie was stronger physically, but as it turned out, Gracie had loved it and excelled.

She found her talent in clothing sales. She enjoyed helping people be happy. She succeeded so well that she was awarded an impressive number of promotions and cash bonuses. Finally she had pleased her mother.

In fact, her mother had been so pleased and encouraged that she had wanted Gracie to move on up into a buyer position at the corporate offices, or perhaps even into design—both more respectable, as she saw it. That would require Gracie finishing college, of course.

Gracie had refused. Adamantly. She was saved from a further fight when she was promoted to a management position that handled store openings, and by an executive quite high up in the company. Her mother recognized that it would be poor policy to try to change another executive’s directive. She acquiesced, but was clearly disappointed.

That was when Gracie perceived that her mother was a perpetually disappointed woman, and that she, Gracie, was more or less a contented one. She did not desire the same things as her mother, and she also possessed a certain assurance that what she did desire would come without a lot of striving.

She looked for an excuse to move as far away from her mother as she could manage at the time, which turned out to be the opening of one of the company stores in Dallas. There, she gave in to following her own natural inclinations, which resulted in an amazing happiness. When she moved to open the new store in Oklahoma—even farther from her mother in terms of travel—and met Johnny Berry, she recognized in him someone who was also quite happy and whose desire was the same as her own: namely to be happy, and to be so with her. She knew she had found the man of her dreams.

As a gift for Mrs. Berry, Gracie bought a pot of daisy mums in a basket. She held it on her lap on the drive down to the Berry home.

“I don’t want to get into my mother’s objections to our marriage with your mom and dad,” she informed Johnny. “My mother will eventually come around, and there’s no need to mention anything about it now and get feelings hurt.” She was not at all certain that her mother would come around, but she was a lot happier to hope so.

Johnny said, “Okay.”

“We’ll just say that my mother is really busy at this time, and that you and I want to do the wedding ourselves—that’s the truth, anyway.” She saw a wilted daisy bloom and pinched it off.

“Okay.”

“And we’ll ask your mother to help. She’ll like that, don’t you think?”

“Uh-huh,” Johnny said, with a nod.

She rather wished he would speak in more than one-word sentences. Then she took his hand, very grateful for his smile in return and for his pleasing nature.

Spying another small broken bloom, she pinched it off and thoroughly examined the entire plant, pinching off any f lowers that were not perfect. Maybe she was a lot more like her mother than she’d realized.

Gracie volunteered to set the table. The silverware was real silver, handed down through five generations of Emma’s family. The china and crystal were silver-rimmed and handed down through three generations.

There was an arrangement of f lowers as a table centerpiece, the napkins were linen, and a silver coffee and tea set sat ready on the polished sideboard, where Gracie’s gift of daisies also sat. Emma had raved over them. They really did look pretty there, especially with the window blinds that were arranged so that light filtered through.

The entire effect was like something off the cover of a Better Homes and Gardens magazine, and Gracie almost sent Johnny off to locate a camera in order to take a picture to send to her mother.

Although her mother was likely to say, “Good grief, have you ever seen so much old clutter?”

As she carefully placed the table settings and filled the crystal water glasses from an iced pitcher, she could hear the drone of the television in the adjacent family room, where Johnny and his father sat with eyes glued on the television set and the broadcast of a car race. Once or twice a shout went up.

Gracie loved the sound. She felt delighted that her man liked to be at home and to enjoy something with his father. That he had a father, a real family.

She kept an ear tuned toward the kitchen, as well, listening to Emma and her mother, Mrs. Jennings. The two women were physically so different as to not look at all related. Mrs. Jennings’ voice was deep, from at least fifty years of the cigarettes that she stepped outside to enjoy every so often, and her accent was a very long Southern drawl. Emma sounded Southern, too, but her voice was lighter and often laughing. Mrs. Jennings was a good head taller and thicker all around than her daughter, with dark eyes and steel-gray hair, while Emma was blue-eyed, fair and petite. Both women had really nice complexions, although Emma wore a lot of makeup. In Gracie’s opinion, Emma could have done without.

Mrs. Jennings was apparently not as inclined to domesticity as was her daughter. The entire time Emma was preparing the meal, her mother sat on a stool in the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking about an incident at a writers’ conference that she had attended the previous week. Her upset appeared to be with a woman who had told Mrs. Jennings that she could not be from the South because she lived in Oklahoma.

“And it wasn’t so much what she said, it was her attitude, standin’ there with her hand on her hip, sayin’, ‘Oklahoma? That’s not in the South.’ Like she was the last word.”

She was now in about the third full telling of the tale. The first time, Emma had said, “Did you tell her you were from North Carolina?” and that was when Gracie learned that both Emma and her mother were from way over on the East Coast. The information aroused the somewhat unsettling realization that there was so much she did not know about this man with whom she intended to join her life.

This time Emma said, “What did she say when you told her you were from North Carolina?”