AUDREY

It wasn’t as if Audrey had a lot of illusions about weddings. Her own was nothing special—she had a nice dress, and she still remembered the pale-pink pumps she had dyed to match it, even though you couldn’t see them in the one photo of the occasion. She remembered the feel of Harry’s arm through his uniform jacket as she gripped it tight going out of the chaplain’s office down on the base. There were only the six of them there—the bride and groom, Ellen and Wes, Marilyn as Audrey’s bridesmaid and one of Harry’s army buddies as his best man. Even so it had felt more like a wedding than today’s business in Judge Davis’s office.

Stella cried in the car all the way downtown, and Henry was irritated. When she had first moved in with them he used to be so gentle with her crying fits, and Audrey would look at him and think that it might work out after all, that her boy was turning into a kind young man. Then Henry started getting short-tempered, and Audrey thought it was shocking, how he could be so unkind to the poor girl.

Then, sometime around the third week of Stella’s stay, Audrey had started to get annoyed herself. Yes, the poor girl had it hard—barely sixteen, and pregnant, forced to choose between a shotgun wedding or being banished off around the bay to give up her baby. And yes, it was hard on her that her father had ordered the whole family to cut her off, so none of them could take her in or even come visit. But even so, you couldn’t spend every day sitting down crying, could you? You cried a bit—in private, if you could manage some privacy—and then you wiped away your tears and got on with the business at hand. That was how life worked. If you still had tears to shed you did your crying alone, and never let anyone know you were upset. That was the sensible way: Audrey’s way.

But it wasn’t Stella’s way. Stella’s way was to sleep till ten or eleven every morning, fry herself two eggs and some bacon, then sit down and watch the television. Not even a bit of knitting or crochet in her hands to make use of the time, and her with a baby to prepare for. And whenever anyone came through the room, she’d start in about how she called her sister Mary-Louise but Mary-Louise hung up the phone, and oh my, what are they going to do when the baby comes, she don’t know nothing about babies?

Stella had cheered up a little the last few days with the thought of getting ready for a wedding. She was almost happy when Audrey hauled her down to the Royal Stores to buy that nice little dress in the black-and-white hound’s-tooth check. But now, dressed up and ready to go, she looked at herself and Henry in the mirror and it seemed to strike her, just as it struck Audrey, what a mean, sad little excuse for a wedding this was. Stella’s response was to start another flood of tears that lasted all the way to the judge’s chambers. Audrey’s response was to say, “Let’s hurry up now, we haven’t got all day.”

All the way in the car Stella kept glancing over her shoulder. “What are you looking at?” Henry asked, halfway down Long’s Hill.

“Nothing. I only thought….”

“You think your old man is coming after us? Going to try to stop the wedding?”

“Nobody even knows it’s today,” Stella sniffled.

“So there’s no reason to be looking out for him. In half an hour it’ll all be legal and you got nothing to worry about. There’s nothing he can do to us.” Henry didn’t sound like he was convincing even himself.

As they waited outside the judge’s chambers, Audrey wondered if she should be more worried about her boy making a mistake that was going to change his life, maybe ruin it. Tony Nolan had threatened to have them up on charges for keeping Stella in the house. Bridget came over secretly to talk to Audrey, whispering as if she thought her husband had spies about the place, begging Audrey to change Stella’s mind. They had all gone cracked, as if being married young and having a baby was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.

“It’s not just because he got her in trouble, it’s because we’re not Catholic,” Ellen told Audrey. “If that was some young Ryan or Malone that got her in the family way, they’d have the two of them bundled off to the priest before you could say Bob’s your uncle. It’s happened before, in both their families—in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Bridget herself was expecting when she married Tony. You think me and your father are old-fashioned about mixed marriages, but it’s the RC’s who are the worst about it—they think all Protestants are going to hell. Sure don’t you remember what Treese’s crowd were like? They came around in time, and I ’low the Nolans will too, once Henry and Stella are settled in together and that youngster is born.”

Regardless of the difference in religion, a young girl getting pregnant like that was a terrible shame to any family, but Audrey thought that in Henry’s case a shotgun wedding might not be the worst fate in the world. Better if it were three or four years later, perhaps, but having a wife and child to provide for would steady him a little. Already he’d settled down to a regular construction job with Alf. The boy had never had any real get-up-and-go about anything except playing his guitar. And while Henry had a bit of talent, from what Audrey could tell, he was no Hank Williams. He would have to work whether he liked it or not, and this might be just the thing to make him grow up.

So she told herself, anyway, papering those thoughts over the scraped-off shreds of doubt underneath. The secretary called their names and the three of them walked in. Stella said her vows in such a tiny, choked voice they could hardly hear her. She started to cry again as they left the office. “I’m sorry,” she told Henry. “It’s only—I thought Mom might come. Right up to the last minute I thought she’d be here.”

“How could she be? We never told anyone!”

Audrey understood the forlorn hope. Bridget probably would have come, if she’d known and if she could have gotten away. Tony Nolan announced to the rest of the family that Stella was as good as dead to them. Anyone who visited her or tried to talk to her would be the same. “I never knew he was such a hard man,” Bridget Nolan had whispered to Audrey the last time she visited. “I don’t dare come no more, he might put me out on the street too.”

Then you’d be out with your daughter, and you could help look after her and the baby, Audrey thought. It wasn’t as if life with Tony Nolan could be such a picnic, that this woman would risk losing contact with her own daughter and grandchild just so she could stay with him. But of course she was a woman who’d gone straight from her parents’ home to marriage, had no trade or business, no way to keep herself much less help anyone else. A woman like Bridget Nolan was tied to her husband. Not for the first time Audrey felt a rush of gratitude: she wasn’t one of those women.

There was no money to spare for giving the youngsters a honeymoon night in a hotel or anything like that—and anyway it seemed indecent, for a young girl who was already five months pregnant, to be thinking of honeymoons. Stella’s belly had bloomed overnight, just these past couple of weeks: she looked distinctly pregnant now in the hound’s-tooth maternity mini-dress, and not a soul in that judge’s office would have the slightest doubt why these two teenagers were in here getting married. They’re judging me more than they’re judging Stella and Henry, Audrey realized as she steered the newlyweds out past the pairs of eyes in the waiting room.

On the way back up from downtown, Sonny James came on the radio singing “Take Good Care of Her.” Audrey turned it up: as good a theme song for today as any, she thought. She pulled the car over to the curb on Freshwater Road. “Anyone hungry?”

“No,” Stella sniffled, at the same time as Henry said, “I’m starved.”

“Let’s go get a plate of chips at Marty’s. My treat.”

“I could eat a few chips I guess,” said Stella.

“Go on, then,” said Henry. “Thanks, Mom.”

So that was their wedding lunch—chips and vinegar in a booth at Marty’s. Henry ordered chicken with his, and told Stella about how the apartment they were going to rent upstairs in Donny Vokey’s house would be ready by the end of next month, and he was going to get the baby crib that Donny’s sister was finished using. “And we’ll be out from under yours and Nan’s and Pop’s feet before the baby comes,” he told Audrey.

“It’ll be nice to have a place of your own,” Audrey said. “Make your own start together, like. Everything will be just grand, you’ll see.” The trick was to make it sound as if she believed it.