The Progress of Love

twinkly outfits. He seems guileless, but Sam detects satisfaction.
    On the false mantel over the electric fireplace is a photograph of Callie and Edgar in wedding clothes. Callie’s veil, in the style of a long-ago time, is attached to a cap trimmed with pearls and pulled down over her forehead. She sits in an armchair with her arms full of roses, and Edgar stands behind, staunch and slender.
    Sam knows this picture was not taken on their wedding day. Many people in those days put on their wedding clothes and went to the photographer’s studio on a later occasion. But these are not even their wedding clothes. Sam remembers that some woman connected with the Y.M.C.A. got Callie a dress, and it was a shapeless dull-pink affair. Edgar had no new clothes at all, and they were hastily married in Toronto by a minister neither of them knew. This photograph is meant to give quite a different impression. Perhaps it was taken years later. Callie looks a good deal older than on her real wedding day, her face broader, heavier, more authoritative. In fact, she slightly resembles Miss Kernaghan.
    That is the thing that can never be understood—why Edgar spoke up the first night in Toronto and said that he and Callie were going to be married. There was no necessity—none that Sam could see. Callie was not pregnant and, in fact, as far as Sam knows she never became pregnant. Perhaps she really was too small, or not developed in the usual way. Edgar went ahead and did what nobody was making him do, took what he had run away from. Did he feel compunction; did he feel there are things from which there is no escape? He said that he and Callie were going to be married. But that was not what they were going to do—that was not what they were planning, surely? When Sam looked across at them on the train, and all three of them laughed with relief, it couldn’t have been because they foresaw an outcome like this. They were just laughing. They were happy. They were free.
    Fifty years too late to ask, Sam thinks. And even at the time he was too amazed. Edgar became a person he didn’t know. Callie drew back, into her sorry female state. The moment of happiness he shared with them remained in his mind, but he never knew what to make of it. Do such moments really mean, as they seem to, that we have a life of happiness with which we only occasionally, knowingly, intersect? Do they shed such light before and after that all that has happened to us in our lives—or that we’ve made happen—can be dismissed?
    When Callie comes upstairs, he doesn’t mention the wedding picture. “I’ve got the electrician downstairs,” Callie says. “So I’ve got to go down again and keep an eye on him. I don’t want him sitting smoking a cigarette and charging me.”
    He is learning the things not to mention. Miss Kernaghan, the boarding house, the skating rink. Old times. This harping on old times by one who has been away to one who has stayed put is irritating—it is a subtle form of insult. And Callie is learning not to ask him how much his house cost, how much his condominium in Hawaii cost, how much he spent on various vacations and on his daughter’s wedding—in short, she’s learning that she will never find out how much money he has.
    He can see another thing she’s wondering about. He sees thequestion wrinkling further the deep, blue-painted nests around her eyes, eyes that show now a lifetime of fairly successful efforts and calculations.
    What does Sam want? That’s what Callie wonders.
    He thinks of telling her he might stay until he finds out. He might become a boarder.
    “Edgar didn’t seem to want to go out,” Sam says. “He didn’t seem to want to go out after all.”
    “No,” says Callie. “No. He’s happy.”

J ESSE AND M ERIBETH
    In high school, I had a tender, loyal, boring friendship with a girl named MaryBeth Crocker. I gave myself up to it, as I did to the warm, shallow, rather murky waters of the Maitland River in summer, when I lay on my back, and just fluttered my hands and feet, and was carried downstream.
    This began one day in Music period, when there were not enough songbooks to go around and we were told to double up—boys with boys, of course, and girls with girls. I was looking around for some other girl who didn’t have a special friend to sit with, and MaryBeth slipped into the seat beside me. She was new to the school then; she had come to live with her sister Beatrice, who was a nurse and worked