Marrying Up - Part II

“Marrying Up” is a fictional story set in 1950s Manhattan revolving around Frances Riley, a difficult and ruthlessly ambitious young woman who moved from one social class to another—Irish immigrant off the boat to high WASP— when she married into the aristocratic Woolsey family.

THIS IS PART 2 of a FOURTEEN-PART STORY

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14

Six months later they were engaged. It was the second time for Jack, who'd been engaged to a girl named Nancy all during the war. "How do I know you'll stay in love with me?" Frances asked. She hadn't yet met his parents, although preparations for the wedding, which was to take place in a Catholic church on Seventy-Third Street with a reception at the St. Regis afterward, were under full sway. “You don't,” Jack said tersely. "You'll just have to go on faith. It's not as if there's a war on."

He'd fought in Normandy and he often blamed the failure of his relationship with Nancy on coming home with an injury that had left him lame and created in his soul an impatience and bitterness that she hadn’t been able to cope with. Frances was too in love with him to care about these faults in his character; she did, however, worry about his parents, mysterious creatures who seemed to have no interest in meeting their son's new fiancée. "They're busy people," Jack told her. "I promise you. I hardly ever see them myself."

Her father, Kip, exploded when he heard this. He was a burly little Irish man, sixty-five years old, with snow-white hair and a lilting accent that grew impenetrably thick when he was angry or drunk. "It's that we're Catholics and not hoity toity like them, that's what it is!" Frances was closer to Kip than to anyone else in the world. He had brought up her and her sister, Peg, virtually single-handedly since their mother, Noreen, was too depressed after six or seven miscarriages to do much more than stare out the window. In recent years he'd made enough money to move the family into a grand house in Prospect Park and enroll the girls in expensive schools, but Frances could still remember, still practically taste in her mouth the poverty of her childhood, wearing the same clothes every day, shoes that were too small, a tiny drafty apartment in a mean section of Brooklyn, being left alone all the time with her mother who was crazy and never talked to her or touched her.

"It's important to marry well," Kip had intoned as he put her to bed or threw together a dinner on the miserable stove, and Frances had accepted the words almost as a religious tenet. She knew in her blood that 'well' meant rich and powerful, and so when she brought Jack home to meet Kip she felt the sort of triumph and elation an athlete might feel having run the distance against all odds.

And of course Kip approved the match. Why would he not? Jack came from an old, big-money family, had been educated at Princeton, brought up with nursemaids, horses, summers in Maine, was fine-mannered, handsome, smart. His air of reserve, Kip told Frances, probably masked great shyness, which might be natural for an only child who'd grown up with wealthy, distracted parents. On the other hand (and Kip didn't say this to Frances), that Jack had chosen Frances, a Brooklyn girl, when he could have had anyone else, seemed miraculous. Frances was full of life; her glossy black hair and blue, wide-set eyes made people turn and look at her, but she wasn't fine or beautiful, and she had a tendency to become snappish and difficult when things didn't go her way. Of course the bluntness of her manner might be appealing to someone like Jack, but she came from an immigrant family and that was what stopped Kip when he thought about the two of them. Why would a WASP like Jack be willing to forget about breeding and background and marry an unpolished Catholic girl like Frances?

"It's the person that's important, not their religion," Frances snapped. But she had a deep fear that Jack would discover she was not as sophisticated or smart as she seemed and change his mind before she had a chance to marry him. Her father had taught her to stand up straight, shoulders back at all times, so she appeared taller and prouder and more confident about her body than she actually was. Worried that Jack had been attracted by her large breasts and the eager way she kissed him, she refused to sleep with him — that might seem cheap — and she avoided the topic of her mother (who had been put in a sanatorium), and tried to persuade her father to speak a more American English and keep his ebullient nature in check. Her sister was away at boarding school at the time, so she didn't have to worry about her. All she had to do was dress nicely and appear calm and interesting and get through the days without incident, and she accomplished this by staring at the diamond Jack had bought her from Tiffany's and thinking that in those glinting lights she saw the richness of her future.

Cover Image: Mr. Autthaporn Pradidpong

Next: Read Marrying Up Part 3 >>