At Weddings and Wakes (17 page)
Read At Weddings and Wakes Online
Authors: Alice McDermott
The light from the chandelier grew brighter and then softer (directed, they saw, by Aunt Agnes's gloved hand) and thenâhow restful it seemedâjust right, confounding somehow both the season and the time of day and giving the impression that neither season nor time of day had ever touched the place. The piano began to play, light, happy notes,
and then, as if they had only been waiting for the sound, bright voices began to come from the room behind them. Aunt Agnes turned toward the door, smiling, pulling off her gloves, and the tall maître d' slipped away.
and then, as if they had only been waiting for the sound, bright voices began to come from the room behind them. Aunt Agnes turned toward the door, smiling, pulling off her gloves, and the tall maître d' slipped away.
Now the wedding guests were filing into the room, laughing and lighting cigarettes and stirring their drinks with black swizzle sticks, settling into the celebration as if it had not just begun but was continuing, as if for each of them such parties were always going on somewhereâunderground, at the edge of the waterâand they only had to find the right opportunity to rejoin them. Women in face powder and perfume patted the girls' hair and touched the two boys' cheeks, men smiled at them, passing by with their elbows raised and three or four glasses woven among their fingers. Their father appeared as one of these, a cigarette in his mouth and a trinity of Cokes held high before him. He handed them to the three girls and, with the cigarette held in the V of his fingers, told the two boys to saunter up to the bar and order something for themselves. “None of the hard stuff, though,” he said, laughing, and the two sisters saw with some envy how their brother glanced up at his taller cousin and with an easy, silent gesture that said, “Wanna go?” walked off casually with him, a couple of swells.
Their father plunged again into the crowd, pumping hands and touching forearms, leaning to kiss women the girls didn't know. Rosemary, their cousin, tucked a thin hand under her elbow and looked out over their heads as she sipped her drink. She was tall and skinny with dark hair and a small face, no chin to speak of, but with large, heavy-lidded eyes that seemed so familiar to the two sisters that they wondered if they had met before, perhaps during that same shadowy time of their early childhoods when Aunt May had appeared wrapped in a heavy habit, stocked with gifts.
“I like your dress,” the older girl told her, sincerely,
although she suspected that Aunt Agnes would have found it inappropriate, too dressy for daytime or too sophisticated for a fifteen-year-old girl. It was teal blue, sleeveless, with a scooped neck and a skirt like an inverted tulip. The material had a dull shine and was studded here and there with what looked like white nailheads.
although she suspected that Aunt Agnes would have found it inappropriate, too dressy for daytime or too sophisticated for a fifteen-year-old girl. It was teal blue, sleeveless, with a scooped neck and a skirt like an inverted tulip. The material had a dull shine and was studded here and there with what looked like white nailheads.
“Thank you,” the girl said and then added over the rim of her glass, “I didn't have anything else.”
Waiters were circulating now, silver plates balanced on their white-gloved fingers. One dipped a platter into the center of the three girls and asked, “Caviar?” but their cousin turned up her lip and said, “Fish eggs,” so that the girls, despite their curiosity, pulled back their hands. “No?” said the waiter. “God, no,” Rosemary said, suddenly speaking for them all.
Out of the music and the murmur of the crowd they could hear Aunt Arlene's sweet “Yeah? Oh yeah.
Yeah
!” and their father's laughter and someone else saying they had known Fred in his “dancing days.” Smoke rose with the talk and the laughter and Rosemary leaned to the two sisters to say, “Get a load of that dress, is that tacky?” although neither sister knew for sure just which dress she meant.
Yeah
!” and their father's laughter and someone else saying they had known Fred in his “dancing days.” Smoke rose with the talk and the laughter and Rosemary leaned to the two sisters to say, “Get a load of that dress, is that tacky?” although neither sister knew for sure just which dress she meant.
Aunt Agnes approached and said, “Come, girls,” and led them to one of the nearer tables, where Momma was seated primly beside two old women who by contrast seemed merely plopped. They were heavy, somewhat slovenly-looking old women with gray hair and gray dresses and a squat, battered look about their square heads. Each held an identical tumbler of some identical liquid in her wide lap.
“Johnny's girl, Rosemary,” Aunt Agnes was saying, lightly touching the girl's shoulder. “And Lucy's two, Margaret and Maryanne.” The younger girl felt her aunt's hand like a pistol at the small of her back, urging her to step forward as the other two had, put out a hand and say “How do you do?”
“These are the Miss McGowans,” Aunt Agnes added. “Our cousins.”
“These are the Miss McGowans,” Aunt Agnes added. “Our cousins.”
The two women grinnedâone had a blackened toothâand said how much the children resembled each other. One of them pointed at the older girl. “And there's Annie's face at that age, as clear as if I'm remembering her,” she said. The other nodded. “Lord, yes, God love her. There she is.”
They were the nieces of Momma's stepfather, who had been so good to her when she first arrived here and a shanty Irish thorn in her side ever since. (“No blood of mine,” she would declare later that week when they had all gathered again. “Thank God for that.”) “Quite a dynasty,” one of them told Momma when Agnes called the two boys over to be introduced as well. “And all handsome, God bless them.” The Miss McGowans had never married. They had come over together in their teens and had not spent a single night of their lives since with any other creature but the other. They'd lived in Harlem, done factory work and office cleaning and so missed the refinement that life as a domestic might have lent them. They were generous, bighearted, bitter. They had been angels of mercy for Momma in the months that followed her sister's death, cooking and cleaning, caring for the girls and holding her in their big arms when that was what she had needed. Propriety and convenience aside, they had not seen the need for her marriage to Annie's husband. They had drawn in their breath and pulled their white lips over their mouths when she turned up pregnant and did not speak to her again until Jack's wake, where they whispered to the other mourners, “It's a judgment, no doubt.”
“Five,” said one of them now. “Imagine that, five lovely grandchildren.” She was stroking the younger girl's bare arm. “And I bet you're all smart, too, aren't you? Top of the class in school.”
“Oh, sure,” the other answered for them. “Your grandfather was a brilliant man.” She shook her head. “God rest his soul, a genius.”
The children stood grinning but Momma turned to Agnes, straighter than they'd ever seen her, and said in a voice that seemed suddenly to have shed its brogue, “Would you get me some soda water, dear?” (“Dear?” the children thought) and then to the children themselves, “Yes, that's fine now but run off and enjoy yourselves,” freeing them, they saw, not only from the lumpish, grinning pair but from all the stories they might tell, tales that seemed to swell the various parts of them in their gray shapeless clothes, tales that had, until this moment, been Momma's alone.
Annie's face, at that age.
Annie's face, at that age.
Back among the crowd the boy shoved his glass under his older sister's nose. “Taste this,” he said. Patrick was grinning behind him.
She pulled back her head. “What is it?” she asked.
“Just taste it.” She took it from him and put it to her lips just as Patrick said, “It's bourbon.” She pulled it away, taking only a sip of the Coke, which had, perhaps, another aftertaste.
“The bartender made a mistake,” their brother said, his voice straining to keep both low and free of squeakiness. “We saw him. He gave us bourbon and Coke.”
“Both of us,” Patrick said. He had his mother's pale skin but with freckles across his nose, and his father's dark wavy hair. “Double shots even.”
The girls saw their brother hesitate before he said, “Yeah,” and so were certain that this part, anyway, was a lie.
Rosemary took the glass from her brother's hand and sniffed it. It was nearly empty. “You're dreaming,” she said. She took a sip. “It's just soda.”
“It's bourbon, I'm telling you,” he said. “I'm already getting a buzz.”
Their brother looked cautiously at the two girlsâhe was never very good at mischiefâand then grinned and took another sip of his own. Rosemary rolled her eyes. “That's just what this family needs,” she said, her eyelids dropping with disdain. “Another alcoholic.”
She turned on her heels and without a thought the two girls quickly followed her over to a small table in the corner where rows of pale place cards were lined up like dominoes. Rosemary plucked her name from among them, Miss Rosemary Towne, in Aunt Agnes's fine hand, and then the two girls, delighted, found their own.
“We're all at the same table,” their cousin told them. “The kids' table I guess.”
But there were adults settling there as well. A Mrs. Hynes and her husband, who said she'd grown up with their mother and her sistersâ“I'm sure they've mentioned me, Margy Delahey”âtransforming the impish child from their mother's stories into a permed and perfumed grown woman. A youngish couple with dark skin and heavy accents, neighbors of Fred's. A single man with a round bald head, Fred's second cousin, he told them, joining, the children thought, the endless number of cousins who had filled the room. The table before them was set with a wealth of silverware and crystal and at the head of each gold-rimmed plate there was a pretty net bag filled with pastel almonds and tied with a white ribbon. Other guests had begun to find their seats. “They're here,” Fred's cousin whispered to the table as all across the room the noise and the laughter began to quiet down. All three musicians began to play now as their mother and Mr. Sheehy appeared at the double doors. There was a round of applause as they crossed the dance floor together and took their seats at the head table, where Momma and Uncle John, their father and the priest who had said the Mass already sat. And then Aunt
May and Fred appeared and everyone in the room stood to cheer, as if, it seemed to the children, they had all gotten word that something fabulous had occurred to the pair of them in the hour of their absence.
May and Fred appeared and everyone in the room stood to cheer, as if, it seemed to the children, they had all gotten word that something fabulous had occurred to the pair of them in the hour of their absence.
Aunt May's face was bright red as she crossed the dance floor but Fred grinned and waved and, just as they reached the head table, turned his bride around and took her into his arms. Surprisingly for the children, the man with the trumpet began to sing in a soft and foggy voice.
You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long â¦
Fred was a dancer, a natural, even the children saw it. He was light-footed, elegant in all his movements, and although Aunt May was notâthey could see that, tooâby the song's second verse she was gliding rather smoothly, carefully following his lead but shed, too, of her initial self-consciousness. It seemed a revelation: that two such subdued and cautious people could transform themselves in this way, could hold each other so closely and yet move with such grace, hand to waist, hand to shoulder, the other two hands held high. Fred did not clasp Aunt May's hand in his as the children had seen other dancers do. No, he kept his fingers out, his palm open, and she draped her own thin hand between his thumb and forefinger, as if they needed only the gentlest touch to hold them fast.
The dearest things I know, are what you are.
The dearest things I know, are what you are.
Mrs. Hynes at their table, their mother's childhood friend, sighed heavily and wiped a tear from her eye, but no one else in the room made a sound. On the dance floor, May and Fred gracefully parted, their hands still joined, took a few steps side by side and then moved into each other's arms again.
Someday, my happy arms will hold you, and someday â¦
His pants leg touched her pale skirt. His cheek touched her forehead. May closed her eyes and it was clear to the
children, at least, that something indeed had happened in that hour since they'd left the church together. A consummation of sorts that had made them clearly husband and wife, made them so firmly husband and wife that it seemed for the moment that they could no longer be aunt, sister, stepdaughter, stranger, mailman, as well. They had shed, in the past hour, or perhaps only in the time since they entered this perfectly lit, hourless, seasonless place, everything about themselves but one another.
children, at least, that something indeed had happened in that hour since they'd left the church together. A consummation of sorts that had made them clearly husband and wife, made them so firmly husband and wife that it seemed for the moment that they could no longer be aunt, sister, stepdaughter, stranger, mailman, as well. They had shed, in the past hour, or perhaps only in the time since they entered this perfectly lit, hourless, seasonless place, everything about themselves but one another.
There was another round of applause as the song ended (Fred turning her once, twice, and then finishing the dance with a delicate, debonair dip) and the two of them kissed and went to their places at the table. Now the waiters who had paused to watch the dance scurried through to pour champagne, putting just a mouthful into each child's glass, which was enough anyway to make Patrick roll his eyes as if to say this was just what he needed.
At the head table the best man stood and waved a rectangular magazine clipping in his hand to quiet the guests once more. He raised his champagne glass, turned to the bride and groom, and was just about to speak when the glass disappeared. There was a tiny, tinkling crash. Fred pulled back his chair, Aunt May put her hand to her breast, and the best man looked with astonishment at his empty hand. Patrick said, “Oops” and across the dance floor the two Miss McGowans made the sign of the cross over their gray dresses.
“Sorry, folks,” the best man said as the waiters rushed forward. “Must be nerves.” And everyone laughed consolingly, someone among them shouting, “It's good luckâlike the Jews do.” “Yes,” Mrs. Hynes said to everyone at their table, “They always break a glass, don't they?” And the Cuban couple, Mr. and Mrs. Castro themselves, nodded vigorously, yes, yes.
Another glass was brought and filled and the man said,
“Let's try that again.” Once more the guests quieted. “Fred and May,” he said and then looked at the clipping in his trembling hand. “May the road rise up to meet you,” he read, squinting a little, moving the paper closer and then farther away, “May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind always be at your back, and the sunshine warm on your face. And may you be in heaven ten minutes before the devil knows you're dead.”
“Let's try that again.” Once more the guests quieted. “Fred and May,” he said and then looked at the clipping in his trembling hand. “May the road rise up to meet you,” he read, squinting a little, moving the paper closer and then farther away, “May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind always be at your back, and the sunshine warm on your face. And may you be in heaven ten minutes before the devil knows you're dead.”
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