FLO DID NO carrying-on as the time for the marriage came near. However she became more quiet and thoughtful and the bitter look on her face subtly changed to a tragic look. Once she urged Margy to wait another year. (You’re young, yet. You have your whole life before you.) But Margy didn’t want to wait. She was anxious to get started on her new life.
Flo tried to make up for all her sins of omission in those last two months. Painstakingly, she laundered the girl’s clothes and foraged far out of her neighborhood for food that was “different” and yet within her means. In a way, Margy longed for the routine meals of ground steak or eggs. They’d make supper seem less sad.
Henny took to staying home nights because Flo almost convinced him that it had been his going out in the evenings that made Margy decide to marry so young. Both parents avoided quarreling in the presence of their daughter. Only hissing whispers in the night behind their closed bedroom door indicated that they pursued the familiar tenor of their lives in private.
They had always meant to be good parents; to make their girl happy. But they had kept putting off the time to start. This is only for now, Flo thought. Someday next week, I’ll take time and make something good to eat. Next month I’ll buy a new spread for her bed. She’s been asking for a pink one for so long. Sometime I must ask her if she has any friends—she must have some—and I’ll fix up the house and ask her wouldn’t she like to have them here. Next year maybe I can let her get that new winter coat. Maybe Henny might get a raise, then I could let her keep more of her pay.
Tomorrow—next month—next year. Everything was always going to be better in the future. And suddenly the future had come. It was a brief present. Too soon it would merge into a past to be remembered. And now there were two months of the present left. She tried to do everything in that time. She couldn’t manage the new coat but she dyed Margy’s white seersucker bedspread a pale pink.
DECEMBER, THE MONTH set for the wedding, began to draw in. According to the books Margy read this should have been a happy time; full of anticipation of the ultimate consummation of love, heady with hopes for the future, plans for children, tender with thoughts of how two people who could not live without each other would have each other until life’s end.
But it wasn’t that way. It was a time of sadness and foreboding. The parents on both sides were unhappy. Both families would miss the financial help of their children. But they were used to economic deprivation and would adjust themselves to it. What saddened most was that the families had counted on marriage lifting their children up out of the environment in which they had been born and reared. Marriage was one of the few chances in the world that the poor had to better themselves.
Flo had no dreams of a knight in shining armor riding by on a white horse to scoop up Margy and set her upon his saddle’s pommel with her white chiffon robes floating back in the breeze. She had no such dreams because she had never heard of knights and didn’t know what shining armor was. But she had had dreams of the knight’s equivalent; a decent man of a better family; a professional man or one in business for himself; one who would set up her daughter in a little house which he owned on Long Island or somewhere not too far from Brooklyn; a house with all the modern conveniences. He would be someone who would give Margy not the luxuries of life but lifelong freedom from grinding want for herself and her children.
Henny felt as Flo did—that Margy should have married someone who’d improve her life. But marriage to Frankie being inevitable, Henny began to have hopeful thoughts about the boy. The Great American Dream had betrayed Henny. But why couldn’t it work for Frankie? Henny began to dream of Frankie becoming indispensable to his firm; getting steady increases in salary; working himself up to be one of the bosses. Why not? It had happened before. It could happen again.
Yes, the Great American Dream had betrayed Henny. Sometimes he wondered whether it had ever existed in the first place. But it must have existed sometime in America. There were records—there was history to prove it.
The Dream was this: The important ingredients of wealth, fame and success were backgrounds of poverty, hard work, ambition, rigid honesty and systematic saving. Henny had had the correct ingredients. His folks had been desperately poor; he, himself, had worked at hard labor since he was a child of twelve. He had been ambitious—had thought of going to night school after the laboring day was over. He had even saved a little money before he married. He had lived as honestly as possible, cheating no fellow-man and giving sixty full minutes of work for every hour’s pay he received.
And he had become neither successful, famous or wealthy. In fact, he had become poorer and more obscure with each passing year. So he concluded that The American Dream had faded away into the mists of legends. The Dream had had its heyday, reasoned Henny, about the time of Horatio Alger, the favorite author of his boyhood. The Alger book titles were subtitles of the Dream. From Rags to Riches.
And there was the true and golden chronicle of Abraham Lincoln, who had been the poorest of poor boys.
Once in the first days of his marriage he had discussed the Dream with Flo. “What does a man have to do in America,” he had asked, half jokingly, “so that he has a chance to turn out like—say Lincoln?”
“He has to sit in a box at the theater and be shot dead by an actor on the stage.” They had laughed over the remark. Then Henny had said:
“I’m sunk. I can’t afford to buy a box seat at the theater.”
It had seemed funny then. But often recalling the little dialogue in later years, he realized how bitter it had been.
But he still believed that Frankie would make good and his daughter would have a comfortable life. He had to believe in something, otherwise he would have found the going hard.