The Best of Everything (35 page)

"I guess Mary Agnes tells you all the oflBce gossip," Caroline said, smiling, trying to make conversation.

Mary Agnes and Bill exchanged a glance, like two high-school children caught whispering in the back row of the classroom by their teacher, and grinned at each other.

"Yeah," he said. "She certainly chews my ear off!"

Mike took him into the corner with a bottle of Scotch and two glasses and after a moment of self-consciousness Bill seemed much happier. Mary Agnes turned to Caroline. "Isn't he cute?"

His dark hair was much too long and he was a little too heavy-set for Caroline's taste but he had a pleasant round face. "Yes," Caroline said. "He's very cute."

Mary Agnes looked pleased. "This is a nice party," she said. "It was awfully nice of Mr. Rice to throw it for me. He does some things

sometimes that really surprise me. I mean, he didn't have to give this party. He hardly knows me."

"He likes you," Caroline said.

"Well, I like him too. I'm sorry for him and the way he lives and everything, but I like him. And now that he's been so nice to me I'm even sorrier for him."

"Just don't get depressed at your own party," Caroline said, smiling.

Mary Agnes picked a potato chip out of a paper bagful with one small prehensile claw. "I wouldn't dream of it," she said. She nibbled at the potato chip, "You're coming to the wedding, I hope. I sent your invitation already."

"I'd love to."

"I sent Mr. Rice one too." She looked rakish. "You can come to the wedding with him if he accepts. Unless, of course, you're going with someone and you'd like to take him."

"I'm not 'going with' anyone," Caroline said.

"You'll find somebody," Mary Agnes said. "Don't you worry."

"I'm not worried. Mother," Caroline said.

"That's a good attitude," said Mary Agnes, licking the salt oflF her fingers. "I admire you for it. Most girls our age are scared to death if there's nobody on the horizon, and that's silly. Because if you look at the girls five years older than we are, why, I don't know one who isn't married."

"I do."

"Are they terribly ugly?"

"Quite the contrary. I've met some at parties who are very pretty and smart, too, with good jobs."

Mary Agnes' eyes widened as if she were about to expound some great and mysterious bit of philosophy. "Well," she said, "perhaps there's something psychologically wrong with them."

Caroline clamped her lips together to keep from laughing and jiggled her empty glass so Mary Agnes could see it. "I've got to get a refill," she gasped, and fled to the desk that was serving as a bar. The whole conversation had been so ludicrous, really, with Mary Agnes smug now that she had landed her man and she herself the adventurous but rather pathetic figure of the attractive unattached girl. It made her want to laugh when she thought of Mary Agnes' comments, and yet, imaccountably, they hurt a little too. Because as

always she could see and hear everything on two levels, the one that told her how silly it was and the one that allowed her to become aflPected and upset. She was only twenty-two, she had been out of college only two years, and she knew she was going to get married someday, just as she had known ever since she was a little girl that she was eventually going to go to college and that she was going to work for a while afterward at an interesting job. These were the things that happened to girls like herself, they were the things one did. But underneath, where lay the things she always had to admit to herself eventually, Caroline knew she had lied to Mary Agnes because one always lied to such people if one intended to survive. But she couldn't he to herself. She was worried about getting married. She knew it was ridiculous, but she was worried. She wondered whether every girl felt the same way she did, or whether it was a personal foolishness.

The days preceding the day of Mary Agnes' wedding were feverish ones. Most of the time Mary Agnes arrived late at the oflBce or left early, and the powers that governed the typing pool, ever respectful of love and romance, pretended not to notice. She and Bill were going to go to Bermuda on their honeymoon and her desk was littered with travel folders depicting pink beaches and couples in long shorts riding bicycles. Caroline could hardly imagine Mary Agnes pedaling a bicycle, and the subject came up, of course, eventually, in the bullpen, with the inevitable giggling comment from someone that Mary Agnes and Bill would return with not a trace of a sunburn and leaving behind a weU-used hotel room. One day Mary Agnes returned from lunch with a paper box containing a bridal veil. It was a short white veil attached to a circlet of waxen-lookdng orange blossoms, and when she tried it on in front of the mirror after very little coaxing it made her look quite bridal. It's strange, CaroUne thought, we've been thinking about Mary Agnes' wedding for so long it doesn't seem real any more, and now in that veil I can see it's all true. Mary Agnes had picked out her wedding ring, part of a set to match her engagement ring and the groom's ring. There was a drawing of it in a magazine advertisement that Mary Agnes had brought to the oflBce—a narrow white-gold band set with infinitesimal diamond chips. For the first time during all these insistent preparations April drew close to Mary Agnes' desk.

"Oh ... let me try your engagement ring on, please," April

breathed. "If you don't have any special feehng for not taking it off, I mean."

"I take it off at night when I go to bed," Mary Agnes said, quite pleased at this new attention. She twisted the ring off her finger. "I always keep it in the little velvet box, on my dresser. I'd hate to go to sleep with such an expensive ring on, it makes me feel funny somehow."

She handed the ring to April, a narrow white-gold band with a little round diamond sparkling in the center of it set with four prongs in a sort of square frame that made the diamond look larger. April held it for an instant, looking at it, before she slipped it on her finger. Her eyes were fixed on the blue gleam and her lips moved almost imperceptibly, as if she were speaking to someone. Then she put the ring on her third finger, left hand and held her hand out, looking at it.

"Wow," Mary Agnes said. "I was afraid it'd be too small and then you'd never get it off. You'd have to keep it." She laughed.

"Nah," Brenda said from the next desk. "We'd just cut her finger off!"

April turned and looked at Brenda with a little smile. "I'm going to take it. You cut my finger off." They all laughed. But Caroline didn't like the way April's mouth pulled when she smiled, a false smile, and a laugh that did not sound true. April slipped the ring off her finger and handed it to Mary Agnes on the palm of her hand. "Thank you," she said. "It's beautiful, Mary Agnes."

"I got my going-away suit," Mary Agnes said. "It's navy-blue butcher linen. It's really a sleeveless dress with a little jacket, so I can wear the dress alone in the evenings. Did you get the invitations yet?"

"Yes," Caroline said. "They're very nice." They were just like every other wedding invitation she had ever received in her life.

"They're engraved," Mary Agnes said. "You can feel it with your finger, how it's raised. I hate the other kind."

"They're lovely," Caroline said.

"Well, you have to answer them, you can't just tell me in the office," Mary Agnes said happily. "I want everybody to answer them."

"I did already," Caroline said.

"Me too," said April. She smiled mischievously. "But I won't tell

you whether I'm coming or not, you'll have to wait until my answer comes to find out."

"We ordered tlie champagne," Mary Agnes continued, captivated by her captive audience. "Four whole cases! And we're having a photographer to take movies and stills, and a wedding cake with a bride and groom on top. And everybody's going to get some cake to take home to sleep on."

"The man you dream about is supposed to be the man you marry, isn't it?" April said. "I never had the nerve."

"Neither did I," said Caroline. "With the crumbs dribbling from under the pillow down my neck, I was afraid I would have a nightmare." They all laughed. Why is it, Caroline wondered, that every girl thinks her wedding plans are so fascinating to everyone else when they're exactly like every wedding that everyone else has ever been to?

And then, at last, it was the day of the wedding. Caroline woke up LQ the morning with the sensation that it was a special day and she couldn't quite remember why. Then she remembered. The wedding was at foTU" o'clock, with a reception afterward and then a dinner.

"Did you ever have the feeling," she said to Gregg, "that you've been waiting for something for so long that on the right day you're going to wake up and find you've slept right through it and missed the whole thing?"

"You might be better oflF if you had," Gregg mumbled, rolled over, and Went back to sleep with the sheet over her head. She had not been invited, of course, because she hardly even remembered Mary Agnes, but she remembered her well enough to know that Mary Agnes was one of a vast group of girls she herself viewed with complete incomprehension. "The Happy Ones," Gregg called them, not knowing exactiy why they were happy and not wanting to join them, but sometimes going so far as to say that it was a shame she couldn't end up in such a bovine and contented way. She also called them "The Grapefruits," because she said if you were to slice one of them in half she would be revealed to be all partitioned oflF into nice little predictable segments, every one the same.

Maybe I should have slept through the wedding, Caroline thought as she and April climbed up the steps of the church. Weddings always gave her mixed feelings: if it was the wedding of a very close

friend she felt happy and excited and nostalgic and a little lonely because, without either of them wishing it, things would be different between them, and if it were a wedding of an acquaintance, like Mary Agnes, her feelings swung between boredom because weddings were always exactly the same and a kind of daydreaming because they were beautiful too. She and April paused for a moment in the vestibule, delaying, looking around. April wore a pale gray linen dress and a straw skimmer like a gondolier's hat with gray, yellow and white ribbons around it.

"How nice you look!" Caroline said.

"You too." Let s go m.

They took each other's hands and tiptoed into the church. An organ was playing softly. Two ushers swooped down upon them, extending crooked black-sleeved arms terminating in spotless white gloves. "Bride's or Groom's?"

"Bride's," Caroline whispered.

They were led to an empty pew near the back. The front pews were by now half filled with relatives and close friends of the bride and groom, all dressed up, and in the second row a woman was already weeping into a handkerchief. Caroline looked around. She had never been in this church before—in fact, she had never been in the Bronx. The walls on both sides were lined with tall stained-glass windows in beautiful colors. The altar was bathed in shimmering golden light that drew the eye toward it. It always made her feel religious to be in this kind of atmosphere, it made her believe in a God who watched over her and knew she existed, and yet she never went. She hadn't even gone to Sunday school after the first protesting year. None of her friends went to their families* various places of worship oftener than once a year either, not even April, who had talked a great deal about churchgoing and religion when she had first come to New York but now seemed to have dropped the subject altogether. Whenever she was inside a church for someone's wedding Caroline would have the feeling that there was a kind of peace attainable for her somewhere, at least for a while, and that she should try. I could come here whenever I was lonely, she would think, and I could meditate even if I felt self-conscious trying to pray after so long. But when she was out on the street again in the air the feeling would evaporate and she would

forget about it. It was like sitting at the ballet enraptured with the beauty of it and telling yourself you would take ballet lessons at night so you could be like those soaring dancers, and then having the rest of the things in your life push the thought out of yoiu- mind.

Now, sitting in the pew, listening to the soft organ music and looking at the glow inundating the altar, she wondered whether this sort of addition to her life would be an answer. Being alone in a place like this for an hour wasn't the same as being alone in one's apartment, because you weren't really alone. There were people praying quietly, perhaps only one or two, and there were silent, robed figures moving in and out of your line of vision every now and then. There was a kind of hidden life in a church. And if you weren't really sure you believed in God in your apartment you could be more sure in a place that had been built for and dedicated to belief. Surely if God was anywhere He would be there, if only because so many people were looking for Him.

Beside her April stirred, Caroline could hear her intake of breath. She could imagine she knew what April was thinking. If anybody was thinking about going to church more often at this moment it would be April.

The music had changed, it was now suddenly the music everyone remembered. The pews had filled up with people, sitting up straight, looking to the side and to the back waiting for something to happen. An usher came down the aisle escorting a thin woman in violet lace—evidentiy Mary Agnes' mother. She wore a violet-strewn hat to match and she had black hair and a very white face. She was trying not to smile as she recognized certain people at the ends of each pew and she looked thrilled and happy. Where were the groom's parents? Caroline realized she must have missed them in the excitement. There were several new people sitting down front, and she supposed two of them were they. And now here were the groom and best man, nervous and practically ignored, walking fast. Then, in measured step, teetering a little on very high heels, the bridesmaids began to walk down the aisle. There were six of them of varying heights and sizes: a thin, dark girl who was Mary Agnes' younger unmarried sister, a bosomy blonde with pink cheeks who was her best friend from high school, a roimd-faced brunette who looked different from any of the other girls and was evidently a sister or cousin of the groom's. Mary Agnes' old^