“My mother married late. But it’s none of their business.” She wrote back and slapped them down.
Vernon’s parents and his sister Patty drove up from Durham to D.C. late in the summer, so that the two families could meet. They said they’d stay in a reasonably priced motel somewhere, have dinner with Imogen and her parents, and spend the following day seeing the capital sights, which they’d always promised themselves they’d do. Vernon’s mother wrote him that she didn’t know how they would ever make it, it was so far, what if a hurricane flooded the roads, or the old car gave up the ghost in the middle of nowhere, she was a silly woman, and wouldn’t burden Vernon’s father with her fears, and she knew J. V. was out of patience with her, so she’d say no more about it.
On the day, both the prevailing weather system and the Fuller family’s 1942 Ford were kind, and they arrived unscathed at the house on Harrison Street NW. The car doors opened and out popped the homely, heavy faces. They were all overweight, as Vernon had been before the Navy (only Julian seemed naturally slender), and his mother and Patty in particular looked, he suddenly realized, an awful lot like W. C. Fields. When Imogen’s father invited them in, Vernon could see that his mother and sister were discomfited by the comparative fineness of the furnishings, and he worried that his mother would declare she was afraid to sit on so good a chair, provoking his sister into opining that a chair was a chair and for her part she didn’t understand why some people spent more than they had to. But his father must have given them a talking-to ahead of time.
Vernon was particularly anxious about Patty, who wasn’t so easily quelled as his mother. She disapproved of people who were smarter or better than she was, and as that description fit just about everybody, she was perpetually aggrieved. He was afraid someone might offhandedly refer to something universally accepted as true—say, that objects expand when heated, or that ice floats—and Patty would retaliate against the chairs, the slimmer figures, the better education, and declare, with a tone of brooking no nonsense, “Well, I don’t believe that.” He was equally worried she would make some reference to Negroes—as shiftless, lazy, stupid, thieving, lying, violent, self-gratifying, childlike, improvident, impulsive, or some combination thereof—because Imogen was fierce about Negro rights.
But disaster failed to strike. It turned out that Gen herself was nervous because she had prepared the meal with her mother, who was acknowledged a fine cook. Over the tomato soup (Imogen wondered if she’d oversalted it; “Not at all,” Vernon and his father said simultaneously) it was Imogen’s own mother who introduced a story turning on recent activity by local blacks—in this case, thieving plus self-gratifying plus lying—and Imogen went after her hammer and tongs, while both fathers respectfully addressed their bowls and Patty visibly relaxed. The dessert was a peach pie made by Imogen—table-lore had it that her mother was famous for her pies—and Gen was so flustered she delivered a dollop of whipped cream straight into Vernon’s mother’s lap. Gen yelped, but Vernon’s mother laughed with genuine good humor. After eight hours on the road wondering whether the catastrophe lying in wait for her was a hurricane or a spontaneously combusting automobile, discovering that it was only a spoonful of whipped cream on her ten-year-old Woolworth’s dress was giddy relief.
The only other time the two sets of parents met was four months later, at the wedding. By then Vernon had figured out that Imogen’s mother came from nearly as backwoods a background as his parents, having grown up on three Alabama acres of chickens, yams, corn, swamp, and clutter. She had a passel of loud, ignorant brothers, one of whom had climbed a grid pylon in drunken mischief when he was twenty and managed to electrocute himself, and a handful of slightly smarter sisters who tended toward cheerful circular chatter that, accelerating, gradually rose free of the ground of facts. One of the sisters insisted on being the photographer at the wedding, unaware that her camera was cracked. The photos all showed Imogen on the arm of an attention-seeking blob of light, or Vernon cutting the cake with help from the blob, or the blob flanked by proud parents. Vernon thought it unfortunate but hardly calamitous, whereas Imogen was—as she would have termed it—apeshit. She threw the photos away and didn’t speak to her aunt for five years.
The newlyweds had neither time nor money for a honeymoon. Vernon had classes and Imogen had found a paid research position at a chemical company. They moved into an apartment in the attic of a Presbyterian parsonage three blocks from the University of Chicago campus. Vernon remembers those times as the happiest of his life. He’d survived his war, he’d won his freedom, he loved his work, and he’d found his girl. Occasionally now—decades later, in his study, listening to Beethoven with his headphones on—he glances through the notebook of household accounts he kept daily for the first three years of his marriage: 69¢ for lunch, 23¢ for cigarettes, 6¢ for a cup of coffee. He remembers the dim light of the physics department canteen, the cherry-tobacco smell of the corner store, the shade and sun of the walk to the laundromat. At the end of every day he totaled the expenses, subtracted them from cash on hand, added each week his stipend as a teaching assistant and Imogen’s paycheck. Everything—savings, income, expenditures—such small amounts. He sees that on January 16, 1953, he calculated that at some point during the day he had lost a penny. Weep for what little things could make them glad.
The plan was to
