Excerpt

1.
Common Knowledge

Anyone in the neighborhood could tell you how Michael and Pauline
first met.

It happened on a Monday afternoon early in December of 1941. St.
Cassian was its usual poky self that day—a street of narrow
East Baltimore row houses, carefully kept little homes intermingled
with shops no bigger than small parlors. The Golka twins,
identically kerchiefed, compared cake rouges through the window of
Sweda's Drugs. Mrs. Pozniak stepped out of the hardware store with
a tiny brown paper bag that jingled. Mr. Kostka's Model-B Ford
puttered past, followed by a stranger's sleekly swishing Chrysler
Airstream and then by Ernie Moskowicz on the butcher's battered
delivery bike.

In Anton's Grocery—a dim, cram-packed cubbyhole with an
L-shaped wooden counter and shelves that reached the low
ceiling—Michael's mother wrapped two tins of peas for Mrs.
Brunek. She tied them up tightly and handed them over without a
smile, without a "Come back soon" or a "Nice to see you." (Mrs.
Anton had had a hard life.) One of Mrs. Brunek's boys—Carl?
Paul? Peter? they all looked so much alike—pressed his nose
to the glass of the penny-candy display. A floorboard creaked near
the cereals, but that was just the bones of the elderly building
settling deeper into the ground.

Michael was shelving Woodbury's soap bars behind the longer,
left-hand section of the counter. He was twenty at the time, a tall
young man in ill-fitting clothes, his hair very black and cut too
short, his face a shade too thin, with that dark kind of whiskers
that always showed no matter how often he shaved. He was stacking
the soap in a pyramid, a base of five topped by four, topped by
three . . . although his mother had announced, more than once, that
she preferred a more compact, less creative arrangement.

Then, tinkle, tinkle! and wham! and what seemed at first glance a
torrent of young women exploded through the door. They brought a
gust of cold air with them and the smell of auto exhaust. "Help
us!" Wanda Bryk shrilled. Her best friend, Katie Vilna, had her arm
around an unfamiliar girl in a red coat, and another girl pressed a
handkerchief to the red-coated girl's right temple. "She's been
hurt! She needs first aid!" Wanda cried.

Michael stopped his shelving. Mrs. Brunek clapped a hand to her
cheek, and Carl or Paul or Peter drew in a whistle of a breath. But
Mrs. Anton did not so much as blink. "Why bring her here?" she
asked. "Take her to the drugstore."

"The drugstore's closed," Katie told her.

"Closed?"

"It says so on the door. Mr. Sweda's joined the Coast Guard."

"He's done what?"

The girl in the red coat was very pretty, despite the trickle of
blood running past one ear. She was taller than the two
neighborhood girls but slender, more slightly built, with a leafy
cap of dark-blond hair and an upper lip that rose in two little
points so sharp they might have been drawn with a pen. Michael came
out from behind the counter to take a closer look at her. "What
happened?" he asked her—only her, gazing at her
intently.

"Get her a Band-Aid! Get iodine!" Wanda Bryk commanded. She had
gone through grade school with Michael. She seemed to feel she
could boss him around.

The girl said, "I jumped off a streetcar."

Her voice was low and husky, a shock after Wanda's thin vio- lin
notes. Her eyes were the purple-blue color of pansies. Michael
swallowed.

"A parade's begun on Dubrowski Street," Katie was telling the
others. "All six of the Szapp boys are enlisting, haven't you
heard? And a couple of their friends besides. They've got this
banner—'Watch out, Japs! Here come the Szapps!'—and
everyone's seeing them off. They've gathered such a crowd that the
traffic can't hardly get through. So Pauline here—she was
heading home from work; places are closing early—what does
she do? Jumps off a speeding streetcar to join in."

The streetcar couldn't have been speeding all that fast, if traffic
was clogged, but nobody pointed that out. Mrs. Brunek gave a
sympathetic murmur. Carl or Paul or Peter said, "Can I go, Mama?
Can I? Can I go watch the parade?"

"I just thought we should try and support our boys," Pauline told
Michael.

He swallowed again. He said, "Well, of course."

"You're not going to help our boys any knocking yourself silly,"
the girl with the handkerchief said. From her tolerant tone, you
could see that she and Pauline were friends, although she was less
attractive—a brown-haired girl with a calm expression and
eyebrows so long and level that she seemed lacking in
emotion.

"We think she hit her head against a lamppost," Wanda said, "but
nobody could be sure in all the fuss. She landed in our laps, just
about, with Anna here a ways behind her. I said, 'Jeepers! Are you
okay?' Well, somebody had to do something; we couldn't just let her
bleed to death. Don't you people have Band-Aids?"

"This place is not a pharmacy," Mrs. Anton said. And then, pursuing
an obvious connection,

"Whatever got into Nick Sweda? He must be thirty-five if he's a
day!" Michael, meanwhile, had turned away from Pauline to join his
mother behind the counter—the shorter, end section of the
counter where the cash register stood. He bent down, briefly
disappeared, and emerged with a cigar box. "Bandages," he
explained.

Not Band-Aids, but old-fashioned cotton batting rolled in dark-blue
tissue the exact shade of Pauline's eyes, and a spool of white
adhesive tape, and an oxblood-colored bottle of iodine. Wanda
stepped forward to take them; but no, Michael unrolled the cotton
himself and tore a wad from one corner. He soaked the wad with
iodine and came back to stand in front of Pauline. "Let me see," he
said.

There was a reverent, alert silence, as if everyone understood that
this moment was significant—even the girl with the
handkerchief, the one Wanda had called Anna, although Anna could
not have known that Michael Anton was ordinarily the most reserved
boy in the parish. She removed the handkerchief from Pauline's
temple. Michael pried away a petal of Pauline's hair and started
dabbing with the cotton wad. Pauline held very still.

The wound, it seemed, was a two-inch red line, long but not deep,
already closing. "Ah," Mrs. Brunek said. "No need for
stitches."

"We can't be sure of that!" Wanda cried, unwilling to let go of the
drama.

But Michael said, "She'll be fine," and he tore off a new wad of
cotton. He plastered it to Pauline's temple with a crisscross of
adhesive tape.

Now she looked like a fight victim in a comic strip. As if she knew
that, she laughed. It turned out she had a dimple in each cheek.
"Thanks very much," she told him. "Come and watch the parade with
us."

He said, "All right."

Just that easily.

"Can I come too?" the Brunek boy asked. "Can I, Mama?
Please?"

Mrs. Brunek said, "Ssh."

"But who will help with the store?" Mrs. Anton asked Michael.

As if he hadn't heard her, he turned to take his jacket from the
coat tree in the corner. It was a schoolboy kind of jacket—a
big, rough plaid in shades of gray and charcoal. He shrugged
himself into it, leaving it unbuttoned. "Ready?" he asked the
girls.

The others watched after him—his mother and Mrs. Brunek, and
Carl or Paul or Peter, and little old Miss Pelowski, who chanced to
be approaching just as Michael and the four girls came barreling
out the door. "What . . . ?" Miss Pelowski asked. "What on earth .
. . ? Where . . . ?"

Michael didn't even slow down. He was halfway up the block now,
with three girls trailing him and a fourth one at his side. She
clung to the crook of his left arm and skimmed along next to him in
her brilliant red coat.

Even then, Miss Pelowski said later, she had known that he was a
goner.

"Parade" was too formal a word, really, for the commotion on
Dubrowski Street. It was true that several dozen young men were
walking down the center of the pavement, but they were still in
civilian clothes and they made no attempt to keep in step. The
older of John Piazy's sons wore John's sailor cap from the Great
War. Another boy, name unknown, had flung a regulation Army blanket
around his shoulders like a cape. It was a shabby, straggly,
unkempt little regiment, their faces chapped, their noses running
in the cold.

Even so, people were enthusiastic. They waved homemade signs and
American flags and the front page of the Baltimore Sun. They
cheered at speeches—any speeches, any rousing phrases shouted
over their heads. "You'll be home by New Year's, boys!" a man in
earmuffs called, and "New Year's Day! Hurray!" zigzagged through
the crowd.

When Michael Anton showed up with four girls, everybody assumed he
was enlisting too. "Go get 'em, Michael!" someone shouted. Though
John Piazy's wife said, "Ah, no. It would be the death of his
mother, poor soul, with all she's had to suffer."

One of the four girls, the one in red, asked, "Will you be going,
Michael?" An outsider, she was, but very easy on the eyes. The red
of her coat brought out the natural glow of her skin, and a bandage
on her temple made her look madcap and rakish. No wonder Michael
gave her a long, considering stare before he spoke.

"Well," he said finally, and then he kind of hitched up his
shoulders. "Well, naturally I will be!" he said.

A ragged cheer rang out from everyone standing nearby, and another
of the girls—Wanda Bryk, in fact—pushed him forward
until he had merged with the young men in the street. Leo Kazmerow
walked on his left; the four girls scurried along the sidewalk on
his right. "We love you, Michael!" Wanda cried, and Katie Vilna
called, "Come back soon!" as if he were embarking for the trenches
that very instant.

Then Michael was forgotten. He was swept away, and other young men
replaced him: Davey Witt, Joe Dobek, Joey Serge. "You go show those
Japs what we're made of!" Davey's father was shouting. For after
all, a man was saying, who could tell when they'd have another
chance to get even over Poland? An old woman was crying. John Piazy
was telling everybody that neither one of his sons knew the meaning
of the word "fear." And several people were starting in on the
where-were-you-when-you-heard discussion. One had not heard till
that morning; he'd been burying his mother. One had heard first
thing, the first announcement on the radio, but had dismissed it as
another Orson Welles hoax. And one, a woman, had been soaking in
the bathtub when her husband knocked on the door. "You're never
going to believe this," he'd called. "I just sat there," she said.
"I just sat and sat. I sat until the water got cold."

Wanda Bryk returned with Katie Vilna and the brown-haired girl, but
not the girl in red. The girl in red had vanished. It seemed she'd
marched off to war with Michael Anton, somebody said.

They did all notice—those in the crowd who knew Michael. It
was enough of a surprise so they noticed, and remarked to each
other, and remembered for some time afterward.

Word got out, the next day, that Leo Kazmerow had been rejected
because he was color-blind. Color-blind! people said. What did
color have to do with fighting for your country? Unless maybe he
couldn't recognize the color of someone's uniform. If he was aiming
his gun in battle, say. But everyone agreed that there were ways to
get around that. Put him on a ship! Sit him behind a cannon and
show him where to shoot!

This conversation took place in Anton's Grocery. Mrs. Anton was
answering the phone, but as soon as she hung up, someone asked,
"And what's the news of Michael, Mrs. Anton?"

"News?" she said.

The Amateur Marriage
by by Anne Tyler [5]

Genres: Fiction [10]
paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN-10: 0345470613
ISBN-13: 9780345470614