And Then There Was Silence

My  mother's friend Claire - a tall, elegant looking and statuesque redhead in her very late forties with upswept hair wound tightly and held in place by an ivory colored comb - comes home from her six week Mediterranean cruise with startling news - she has met a man, she tells us almost shyly, and she's to be married.  My mother and grandmother look at her slack jawed and speechless, as if she has suddenly taken leave of her senses and announced her plans to leave for the moon on the next shuttle.  My daddy smiles hugely and kisses her cheek.

Claire was the only friend of both my mother and grandmother who was self supporting and still stubbornly single. She worked as a legal secretary at a downtown law firm and lived in an upscale terraced apartment on Beacon Street with a glorious view of Boston Harbor.  She drove a perky little two seater sports car and always dressed to the nines - she believed in seamed stockings, high heels and hairdressers - and got her make up at department not drug stores.  She was what my mother sneeringly referred to as one of those career women, making it sound like a communicable disease and clearly undesirable. 

It goes against nature for a woman not to marry, she liked to say with a smug smile, When her looks go, she'll be just another lonely old maid.

Maybe her looks won't go, my grandmother suggested wickedly, She looks better now than you did at eighteen.

Don't be a bitch, Mother, my mother would snarl.

Your mother is so jealous her eyes cross at the thought of a woman making it on her own, Nana told me coldly,
Claire is everything she wanted to be and couldn't.

Claire heard none of this, of course.  Back stabbing was an art in my family, gossip a means to an end, but to get caught at it was unthinkable.  My maternal relations were careful to keep these conversations mostly private.

So, my daddy said with a sideways warning glance at his wife and mother-in-law and a wink in my general direction, Tell us all about it, Claire.

Well, Claire began, a little nervously, I thought, It started as a shipboard romance.......

It was a magic tale of sunsets and pink champagne and candlelit dinners for two with dancing afterwards, a variation of Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in "An Affair To Remember" except without the tragedy.  And on their last night at sea, the handsome first officer had proposed and the pretty redhead had said yes.  

Just like that? my mother wanted to know.

Just like that, Claire nodded.

Sounds too good to be true, Nana said with more than a trace of doubt, Sounds like there ought to be a catch.

That was when the doorbell rang and while we didn't know it, "An Affair to Remember" was about to change to "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner".

A tall and distinguished looking black man in an immaculate white dress uniform was at the door.  He nodded to me, smiled and with a definite island lilt, announced that he had come to collect Miss Claire for the evening.  His coffee with cream skin shone under the porch light and the brass buttons on his uniform gleamed.
He was holding a single red rose and carrying a heartful of expectations.

Now that you mention it, I heard Claire saying serenely, there is one small thing......

And then there was silence.