Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [109]
It was in Academy Hall on the Bradford College campus. She had a suite and a roommate, a small living room between the two bedrooms. On Saturday nights, Sam and Theresa and Liz and I would meet there, then go down to Ronnie D’s or one of the bars on the river in Haverhill. We’d drink till last call, then end up at Howard Johnson’s.
One Friday in the loud smoky noise, we four sat in a booth when Pop walked over from the bar. He only came down to Ronnie’s after all his disciplined rituals and duties were over, when he’d felt he’d earned the drinking he did there, and he usually looked relaxed and glad to be among some of his students, a few lawyers and off-duty cops he’d gotten to know, men from the mills he never would’ve met otherwise, and now his oldest son.
But tonight he walked over looking pained about something, angry, his cheeks red above his trimmed beard. I immediately thought of Peggy. Marriage trouble.
Sam stood up in the booth and offered Pop his hand. Pop shook it, said hello to Liz and Theresa, then asked me if we could talk over at the bar for a minute. I said yeah and followed him. We stood at the corner of the bar, the entire length of it thick with men and women two or three deep, their talk and laughter a constant sound, the jukebox playing a Stones song. Most of the women were smoking, blowing it out their nostrils or the sides of their mouths as they told stories or listened to stories or laughed at stories or looked pissed off about something. The air smelled like cigarette ash and smoke, sour beer, perfume and leather and the oak bar Pop and I leaned our elbows against, our shoulders touching. Pat Cahill’s big hands rested two glasses of beer in front of us. “These are on Jimmy.” Then Pat was back at the register, and Pop raised his glass to a man at the opposite end of the bar fifty people away, a small face in the neon light of the Budweiser sign in the window. In a few years he’d be dead from cirrhosis of the liver. Pop raised his glass to him in thanks, set it back on the bar, and said, “He hit her.”
“Jimmy? Who’d he hit?”
“No, Suzanne. Her fucking husband hit her.”
There was no sound, no voices or thumping music, no laughter or rattling ice in so many glasses, no empty beer bottles tossed into a box—there was the open back porch Suzanne got married on, a small wedding to this man she’d met at Hampton Beach. He was a roofer with a red beard and shoulder-length hair, and he liked her right away and she liked him and then the two families and a few friends were on an uncut lawn on a warm September afternoon witnessing their marriage. I watched from a picnic table I sat on with a few others, and I tried to push aside my concerns but there was something wrong with what I was seeing; Suzanne, twenty-three years old, was in a denim skirt and a white blouse. She’d lost some weight and looked pretty and hopeful standing there on the porch looking up into her groom’s face, smiling as the justice of the peace spoke. She held a small bouquet of flowers.
Keith was in jeans too and a light windbreaker, and maybe he wasn’t conscious they were even on his face, a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses so that as Suzanne looked into his eyes and recited her vow, she was seeing only herself looking back.
And then at the reception, a fish fry at Pop and Peggy’s house on campus, the place overflowing with people, at the end of the night Sam and Theresa and I had decorated my Subaru for them, covered it with shaving cream and flowers, tied a dozen empty cans to the bumper, wrote with soap on the rear window Just Married. I met Keith in the downstairs bathroom to give him the keys. He stood at the sink trimming his beard. Maybe for the fancy hotel they were going to for the night, I didn’t know. But as he looked into the mirror at his own face, he appeared to me unburdened of something, a man just given a second chance.
“Your sister and me are gonna have such a good life together. Our kids’ll have everything they ever wanted. My