Dance of the Happy Shades

happened. I thought it must have to do with her husband, because they are separated and he writes her terrible letters. She said, “Helen, hi, how are you feeling? Did you just wake up?”
    “I heard your car,” I said. “I thought for a minute maybe it was Clare but I’m not expecting him for another couple of days.”
    “Helen. Can you sit down? Come in your room where you can sit down. Are you prepared to get a shock? I wish I wasn’t the one had to tell you. Hold yourself steady.”
    I saw Momma right behind her and I said, “Momma, is this some joke?”
    Alma said, “Clare MacQuarrie has gotten married.”
    “What are you two up to?” I said. “Clare MacQuarrie is in Florida and I just today got a postcard from him as Momma well knows.”
    “He got married in Florida. Helen, be calm.”
    “How could he get married in Florida, he’s on his holidays?”
    “They’re on their way to Jubilee right now and they’re going to live here.”
    “Alma, wherever you heard that its a lot of garbage. I just had a postcard from him. Momma—”
    Then I saw that Momma was looking at me like I was eight years old and had the measles and a temperature of a hundred and five degrees. She was holding the paper and she spread it out for me to read. “It’s in there,” she said, probably not realizing she was whispering. “It’s written up in the
Bugle-Herald.
”
    “I don’t believe it any more than fly,” I said, and I started to read and read all the way through as if the names were ones I’d never heard of before, and some of them were. A quiet ceremony in Coral Gables, Florida, uniting in marriage Clare Alexander MacQuarrie, of Jubilee, son of Mrs. James MacQuarrie of this town and the late Mr. James MacQuarrie, prominent local businessman and long-time Member of Parliament, and Mrs. Margaret Thora Leeson, daughter of the late Mrs. and Mrs. Clive Tibbutt of Lincoln, Nebraska. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Johnson, sister and brother-in-law of the bridegroom, were the only attendants. The bride wore a sage green dressmaker suit with dark brown accessories and a corsage of bronze orchids. Mrs. Johnson wore a beige suit with black accessories and green orchids. The couple were at present travelling by automobile to their future home in Jubilee.
    “Do you still think its garbage?” Alma said severely.
    I said I didn’t know.
    “Are you feeling all right?”
    All right.
    Momma said we would all feel better if we went downstairs and had a cup of tea and something to eat, instead of staying cooped up in this little bedroom. It was about supper time, anyway. So we all trooped down, me still in my dressing gown, and Momma and Alma together prepared the sort ofmeal you might eat to keep your strength up when there is sickness in the house and you can’t really bother too much about food. Cold meat sandwiches and little dishes of different pickles and sliced cheese and date squares. “Smoke a cigarette if you want to,” Momma said to me—the first time she ever said
that
in her life. So I did, and Alma did, and Alma said, “I brought some tranquillizers along in my purse, they’re not very strong and you’re welcome to one or two.” I said no thanks, not yet, anyway. I said I couldn’t seem to take it in yet.
    “He goes to Florida every year, right?”
    I said yes.
    “Well what I think is this, that he’s met this woman before—widow or divorcee or whatever she is—and they have been corresponding and planning this all along.”
    Momma said it was awfully hard to think that of Clare.
    “I’m only saying how it looks to me. And she’s his sister’s friend, I’ll bet. The sister engineered it. They were the attendants, the sister and her husband. She wasn’t any friend of yours, Helen, I remember you telling me.”
    “I didn’t hardly know her.”
    “Helen Louise you told me you and him were just waiting for the old lady to pass on,” Momma said. “Isn’t that what he said to you? Clare?”
    “Using her for an excuse,” Alma said briskly.
    “Oh, he wouldn’t,” Momma said. “Oh, it’s so hard to understand it—
Clare!
”
    “Men are always out for what they can get,” Alma said. There was a pause, both of them looking at me. I couldn’t tell them anything. I couldn’t tell them what I was thinking, which was about the last Saturday night up at his place, before he went away, him naked as a baby pulling my hair across his face and through his teeth and pretending he was going to bite