(continued from Part 1)
The Reception
Austin and Della had offered the house before being asked, which
was characteristic and made the conversation easy.
"Of course here," Della said, when Lyle raised it on a
Thursday in early March, trying to frame the request diplomatically.
"We didn't want to assume—"
"Where else?" Della said. "We have the dining room
and the parlor and the garden and I have been cooking for thirty
years. What did you think I would say?"
"I told you she'd say that," Emily murmured to Lyle.
The reception would be simple: cold meats and bread and Della's
rolls, vegetables from the garden as the season allowed, Georgia's
lemon cake as the wedding cake, which Georgia confirmed with a single
nod when asked. Lemonade and tea. A proper table, Della's best cloth,
the good china that came out for occasions.
"It will be lovely," Emily said.
"It will be correct," Della said, which was a higher
standard.
Matie, who appeared at the house on the Saturday after the plan
was confirmed, announced that she would handle the flowers from the
30th Street garden — whatever was blooming in June, arranged in the
way that someone who has grown things all her life knows to arrange
them. Emily thanked her, and Matie said it was nothing, which meant
it was something she had already decided to do and was glad to be
asked about.
The Honeymoon
This was the question Lyle had been working on since February, in
the leather notebook, in the margins of his supply projections, in
the back of his mind during slow shifts at the PX counter.
The mathematics of it were this: a PFC's monthly salary, minus
what he was saving for the ring, minus ordinary expenses, left a
small but real reserve. The US Grant Hotel on Broadway — the finest
hotel in San Diego, where they had eaten on Emily's birthday — had
rooms at roughly three dollars a night for a standard room in 1918.
Two nights would cost six dollars, plus meals.
He would get a 72-hour pass. He could manage two nights. He had
been managing toward two nights since February.
"The US Grant," he said, on a Thursday evening when the
planning was well advanced and this was the last major item on the
list. "Two nights."
Emily looked up from the notepad. They were sitting in the
Hawthorn Street kitchen, Georgia conspicuously present at the other
end of the table, reading a letter from her sister in Chicago and
paying no attention to anything else.
"The US Grant," Emily said. She thought about the dining
room where they'd celebrated her birthday — the white linen, the
silver, the cool September light. "Two nights in the hotel."
"You could see the bay from the upper floors," Lyle
said. "I asked."
"You asked."
"I spoke to the front desk," he said. "In January.
To see what was possible."
Emily looked at him with the expression she wore when he had done
something that was ordinary and also exactly right. "You were
planning in January."
"I've been planning since August," he said. "I just
refined it in January."
Georgia lowered her letter slightly. "The US Grant has good
breakfast service," she said. "I stayed there once, in
1912. The toast was exceptional."
They both looked at her.
"I'm not coming on the honeymoon," she clarified. "I'm
merely noting the quality of the toast." She returned to her
letter.
Emily wrote on the notepad: US Grant — 2 nights — June
19-21.
The Thursday in Mid-March — Everyone Together
On the third Thursday of March, Lyle arrived at Hawthorn Street at
nine in the morning with a Liberty Pass and a plan. He had asked
Della in advance. He had confirmed with Georgia the previous Sunday,
by letter. The plan was: all of them together, at 30th Street, for
dinner.
Georgia put on her good coat and her best hat, which she wore with
the straightforward confidence of someone who does not require
compliments on their appearance but is aware of it. They took the
trolley — the three of them, an unusual configuration, the slight
PFC in his uniform, the young woman in her green wool coat, the older
woman with her cloth bag and her upright posture that the trolley's
swaying did not compromise at all.
Austin and Della were both home. Edgar was there. Davey had come
over with Amy, and Maybelle — who had grown half an inch since
November and developed a new interest in aviation, traceable directly
to Austin's dinner table stories — was full of questions before
she'd even got her coat off.
The kitchen became, immediately, a joint operation. Georgia and
Della had been evolving toward this — a mutual kitchen vocabulary
built through accumulated visits — and they moved in it now with
the quiet efficiency of two capable people who have decided to
respect each other's methods while maintaining their own.
"Your stock is done?" Georgia asked.
"Since this morning," Della said.
"Good." Georgia set down her bag, produced two lemons
from it without explanation, and began.
In the dining room, Austin was explaining to Maybelle the
difference between a biplane and a monoplane in terms she kept
insisting weren't simple enough, driving him to progressively more
elementary comparisons until he had described a monoplane as "a
bird that only has one pair of wings instead of two," at which
point Maybelle said "oh, like a real bird" and Austin sat
back satisfied.
Davey had news. His taxi business had taken on a second driver —
a friend's boy just back from a training camp in Texas who needed
work and knew the city from before his service. "He's reliable,"
Davey said, with the authority of a man who has driven professionally
long enough to know what the word means in this context. "Knows
every street south of Broadway and most of the ones north. Doesn't
argue about routes."
"High praise," Edgar said drily.
"For a driver, it's the highest," Davey said.
After dinner, when the table had been cleared and Georgia's lemon
cake from the previous Sunday had reappeared — she had brought half
a one, preserved, because she was a practical woman — the planning
talk came out naturally, the way it does in families when a decision
has been made and the making of it has been accepted.
Della had found a dress pattern that she thought might suit
Emily's ideas about the wedding, clipped from a magazine in February
and kept in her apron pocket for the right moment. She produced it
with the careful casualness of someone who has been waiting to
produce it. Emily looked at it with genuine attention — it was
simple, modern, the right length for 1918 — and said she would show
it to Mrs. Hennessey as a reference.
"Franklin wrote back," Emily said, when the pattern had
been passed around and assessed. She had the letter in her bag,
brought because she had known this conversation was coming. "He
can come. He and his wife both."
"Good," Lyle said.
"It will be a little strange," Emily said. "We
haven't seen each other in two years."
"Weddings make things less strange," Davey said, with
the authority of a man who has driven people to and from many of
them, and experienced two of them. "Something about the occasion. People decide to be better
than they've been."
"Not always," Abbie said from the parlor.
"More often than not," Davey said.
Abbie considered this. "Granted," she said.
Georgia was quiet through most of this, drinking her tea, watching
the room with the attention she brought to things she had already
assessed and found acceptable. When the planning talk had run its
course and the conversation had moved on to other things —
Maybelle's school, Edgar's report from a neighbor whose son had
written from France, the general wartime business of a family
managing uncertainty together — Georgia set down her cup.
"This will all be fine," she said, without preamble, to
no one in particular. "June will be a good month."
The room accepted this, because Georgia said things she meant and
everyone in the room had learned that by now.
Lyle walked them to the trolley stop at eight-thirty — Emily on
one side, Georgia on the other, the March night cool and clear and
full of stars over San Diego. On the trolley home, Georgia looked out
the window at the city passing in the dark and did not say anything,
which was Georgia's way of being content.
At Hawthorn Street, Lyle said good night to them both and turned
toward his own trolley stop. He had a shift at seven in the morning.
He had ninety-five days until June nineteenth.
He walked to the stop with his hands in his pockets and the
planning notebook against his chest, and thought about a flat on Fern
Street, or maybe in Sherman Heights, with three rooms and a garden
and Georgia in it, and a wedding at Central Christian that would be
small and entirely right, and two nights at the US Grant with
exceptional toast.
He thought about Emily in the blue silk dress that Mrs. Hennessey
was building from chalk marks and certainty.
He thought: ninety-five days.
It would not feel long enough and would not go fast enough and
would be exactly the right amount of time.
Written the same night, in Waterman ink:
My Darling Emily,
Everything is on the list. I checked it against my notebook.
We have not forgotten anything important.
Georgia's line about the toast is going in the notebook under
"things that cannot be improved upon."
Ninety-five days.
Yours always,
Lyle
