Free Homeplace by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

set her to moaning, and then thrashing, and then crying out in sweating release, she concluded that she was in love with Richard Singer. And although he would have died rather than admit to her or anyone else that it was his first time too, Richard Singer, out of relief and gratitude and infatuation and a certain goatish bravado, as well as a practical desire to make his first class of the fall quarter in Cambridge, asked her to marry him.
    And she did, two days later in Winona, Mississippi, during the last week in August, with the redhead from New Jersey and a fat divinity student from Yale who kept saying, “Right on, man,” as attendants. The stained, indifferent justice of the peace never introduced himself. A year later, neither Mike nor Richard could remember any of the names of the wedding party. Just before she said “I do,” and became Mrs. RichardIsaac Singer III, Mike remembered the flicker of wetness in her father’s eyes at DeeDee’s wedding, and thought, I wish you could see me now, Daddy. You’d really have something to cry about. But never during the entire mumbled ceremony did she think of Bayard Sewell. When they went east and north the day after the wedding to meet Richard’s parents in Connecticut and find lodgings in Cambridge, it was for good. Mike Winship did not go home again.

10
    A FTER THAT, HER LIFE SWEPT LIKE A LOCOMOTIVE DOWN THE track she had imagined for it, except that the man at her side was not Bayard Sewell. Mike was not unhappy. She was not recklessly, suffocatingly happy as she had been in the spring days in Lytton before the sit-in, but she was endlessly absorbed, engaged, interested. What pain she might have felt was driven deep under by the weight of sheer novelty. Every pore seemed opened to new stimuli, new information, new potential. Her horizons, laid down long ago in the microscopic universe of Lytton, sped away from her with the speed of light. Sometimes she felt herself to be a simple machine engaged solely in the receiving and processing of information. Her mind hummed with newness in the crispening fall days; in the nights, in the tiny apartment in Cambridge, after she and Richard had made love, her body thrummed with it. She did not stop to analyze all she was taking in, she only assimilated. Sometimes she did not even do that, only registered, filed away for future reference, raised her head for more. Somewhere at the barricaded rear of her mind, a small, stabbing voice that was not her voice said, “Do not stop. Do not lookback. Do not think, not yet, not for a long time. Do not open doors.”
    Richard Singer’s well-to-do parents were dismayed when their new daughter-in-law proved to be both a Gentile and a Southerner, and they mourned the lost wedding and country-club reception, but at least Mike was not pregnant and was presentable and reputedly of good enough family, and they were quick to realize that if they did not accept her, they would lose their lone princeling for good. There was a certain glamour and gallantry about Mike’s circumstances, too, that appealed to their untested liberal sensibilities almost as strongly as they had to Richard’s, who giddily believed that he had rescued with marriage a new kind of folk heroine. In his uncluttered mind, Mike was an aristocratic flower of a corrupt and dying old South who had rebelled against that decadent Arcadia’s monstrous prejudices and been martyred for it. Had not her cruel and arrogant landed father cast her out without a penny to her name? Had he not deprived her of the family plantation that was her birthright? Had he not forbidden her her ancestral home for all time? Richard had been given
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
at his Bar Mitzvah by a sentimental uncle who had spent several miserable years in Richmond, and it had had a profound influence on his life. Nothing he had seen in his short sojourn into Mississippi with the Freedom Riders had disabused him of the gothic impression he had garnered from the