The Wedding Machine (14 page)

Ina is like Sis's child in a way. For one thing it took nine months for her to be made over and until then Sis had to play Pee Wee, a whiny-sounding electric number that Fox Music House loaned her. She'd accompanied their former priest, Old Stained Glass, to greet Ina at the airport, where five strong men rolled her packaged body off a large metal ramp. Once she was hoisted up into the balcony, Sis wedged open the boxes of pipes with a wrench from the rectory and rubbed her hand across them as Stained Glass sprinkled holy water on each piece of Ina and dedicated her to the church's music ministry. Sis has spent more time with Ina than she has with most of the people in her life.

Now Sis sits in her car with one arm on the door handle trying to get up her nerve to make a break for the chapel in her new high heels. Little Hilda's wedding takes place in just two hours, and it's the darkest, most waterlogged wedding day Sis can remember. And that's saying something. She's played in 377 weddings over the last nineteen years as the organist and choirmaster at All Saints Episcopal Church. More than once, she's played three weddings on a Saturday, and it is typical to play two in a day now that The Lone Star of the Lowcountry and the like are parting the salt marsh grass on the quaint little chapel of ease and their whole town, for that matter. Seems like it won't be long before Jasper will be swallowed whole by the resorts and retirement communities that are spreading out like a disease from Charleston to Savannah.

Sis's daddy used to say time stands still in Jasper. From where she sits in the car she can see his gravestone rising to the left of the chapel, a long marble slat with his name and date in block letters and a quote from Psalm 31:15 that reads, “My times are in your hands.”

There's a space right next to him where Sis's mama will go, and she has her choice of the one next to her mama or the one next to Fitz in the Hungerford family plot under the live oak tree toward the back of the crumbling brick wall. An ornate wrought iron gate surrounds the Hungerford plot. It's about the size of a bedroom, and Fitz's parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents lie in rest together there.

When Sis sits at the organ in the center balcony just opposite the stained glass portrait of the angel greeting the Marys in the empty tomb, she has a good view of Fitz's headstone between the black iron rods that enclose the family plot. It's awfully nice of his family to offer her a place there, even though they were never actually married. And you know, she thought for sure she'd find someone else somewhere along the way, but it just never seemed to happen.

Once she read that trees sense a hurricane before it hits. That they drop ten times more seeds than usual before one strikes—one of nature's remarkable attempts at self-preservation—and she wonders if the cabbage palmettos dropped their shiny black fruit around the graveyard yesterday.

Well, she hopes Little Hilda's not too upset about the weather. Ray says the backside of Eleanor must have scraped the ACE Basin at high tide, because half the town appears submerged in a few inches of the Atlantic Ocean. Sis can see Cousin Willy and Justin and Ray, black eye and all, in her rearview mirror. They're across the road at Pink Point Gardens in their rubber waders, pumping water out of the park by the seawall.

Out of the corner of her eye, Sis sees the rector, Capers Campbell, making a run for it from his car to the chapel. He has this funny habit when he runs of swinging his left arm fast and furious and keeping his right stationary and tight by his side.

He's never married, and the gals think it's about time he noticed Sis. Hilda helped Sis pick out this flowy little sky blue dress with a creamy silk sash for today. It reminds Sis of the one that Julie Andrews wore in the
Sound of Music
as she strolled around the moonlit grounds of the manor on the night of the ball, longing for the captain, who eventually met her there. And Hilda insisted she buy these fashionable beige sandals from Copper Penny. They have high heels and a thin strap that circles her ankles, and Sis really likes them.

Of course, she feels ridiculous wearing the heels and the dress on this gray and soaking wet morning, but she went ahead and put them on to avoid the chiding and to let Little Hilda know that despite the flooded town, they are going to pull off this grand event. At least right now she's wearing her choir robe over it so she doesn't feel quite so out of place.

But back to Capers. The gals have hosted him and Sis for dinner and for boat rides and even a trip to Edisto for the weekend, but he never seems to make a solid move in her direction. Maybe he's not interested. Sometimes they tell Sis to make some sort of advance. Life's too short and all of that. Pollinate before the hurricane. Drop your seeds, so to speak, but she feels kind of funny about cornering a man in a stiff white priest's collar and reaching out for his hand.

If you want to know the truth, when she gets right up close to him, he smells like her Uncle Bugby from Bamberg, kind of old mannish and mothballish. Kitty B. says she needs a nose pincher like the kind that swimmers wear, but Sis thinks you have to like the way someone smells.
What do they call that
, she thinks . . .
pheromones
?

Sis isn't sure she puts out any pheromones now, what with her female organs scraped out. After the hysterectomy last year she felt like a gutted watermelon. Nothing more than the knobby green strips of the rind that Kitty B. would take home and pickle.

Her hysterectomy hit her hard. There were no more watermelon seeds and no more anything, and she just sat down before Ina for several days and wept. There was this kind of darkness around the edges of her vision, and she had weeks where she just sat on the couch and stared into the blank space between her television and her kitchen as CNN spat out the news while the days slid by like the ticker at the bottom of the screen.

That's why the doctor at the Medical University prescribed the Zoloft. Of course, Sis jokes and calls them her happy pills, but she is a real believer in them because they stood her up and got her moving again. She takes one every morning with her cereal and coffee, and just before she pops one in the center of her tongue she says, “Thank you, Lord!”

Well, I probably don't have pheromones anymore
.
But maybe I put
out happy vibes, which is worth something, right?

~ MAY 24, 1978 ~

“Put out a good vibe,” Roger Rosenthal, the cellist, said at their first Spoleto Chamber Music rehearsal at the Dock Street Theater. He was a virtuoso and a hippie from New Hampshire, and Sis fell in love with him in a matter of days.

She was living in Charleston at the time and had been invited to serve as a stand-in pianist for the chamber music series featuring Roger's up-and-coming string quartet.

Sis dated him for the summer, and she loved the way he smelled, sort of like sweat and marijuana and candle wax. They listened to the Shostakovich cello concertos. They attended the opera and the modern dance performances and the end-of-festival concert on the rim of the butterfly ponds at Middleton Plantation.

Once, after a few glasses of wine in the carriage house apartment where the festival was housing him, he unbuttoned her blouse and tenderly kissed her chest until she had to pull away.

“What's wrong?” he said.

Sis's heart was pounding in her throat and as much as she wanted to say,
Nothing, nothing is wrong
, and pull him close, she couldn't ignore the war between her mind and her body, and all she'd been taught about love and sex and marriage and God.

“Look, I didn't even have sex with my fiancé until the night before he went to Paris Island, Roger,” she said. “I can't just whoop it up with some guy who breezes into Charleston for the summer.”

Then he took her shoulders in his hands and looked at her head-on. “You're a grown-up, Sis, my sweet southern belle. Isn't it time?”

Just behind him she eyed his cello in its case decorated with stickers from the wide array of countries to which he'd carried it. Roger'd been letting go and enjoying all over the world, and she had to admit she envied him. Next week he was off to Buenos Aires and Montevideo for a concert series, and in September he was headed to Vienna to teach a semester of master classes.

“Sure, I
want
to,” she said as she pulled at a strand of his long wavy hair. “But love needs to be part of it, I think. And maybe even commitment too. That's what I've grown up believing.”

She felt shame as the words came out of her mouth. She felt unsophisticated and unenlightened, and yet she couldn't let the notion go any more than she could have cursed God or her parents or the brutal war that snatched away her fiancé's life and her very future.

Roger smiled and nuzzled her cheek with his unshaven chin before closing her shirt back up and taking her in his arms like a child. “You're a dear,” he said. “And I hope you find what you're looking for.”

At the next lull in the rainfall, she dashes out of her car. As she's bolting toward the church steps, out of the corner of her eye she sees a limb fall on what looks like her daddy's grave. In the split second she takes to pause and see where it landed, her new, expensive and extremely high heels sink down into the thick grass, and the muddy water pours into their arches.

Squealing, she steps from side to side hoping to get a foot free, but she sinks deeper until she's almost up to her ankles in mud and she can feel the suction of the soft ground pulling her in. Just as she's about to fall forward in her choir robe, Giuseppe's cousin Rupert and some other tall, olive skinned man, who she's assuming is Mr. Dentist, grab her by the elbow and pull her out. They hoist her up in their arms and carry her toward the church porch, her choir robe brushing across the wet and muddy ground.

“Thank you, Doctor and Mr. Rupert,” she says, flustered as she takes off her shoes and bangs them against a church column to get the pluff mud out.

Rupert laughs and rubs his hands together, “You're welcome, Elizabeth.” He can't quite get with the southern nicknames.

“This is not the dentist. This is my brother, Salvatore, the trumpeter, mmm?”

“Oh yes, of course.” She'd practically forgotten about the Giornelli family trumpeter. He was supposed to arrive yesterday evening, but his flight was cancelled due to the storm. “It is a pleasure to meet you.” He is kind of this older version of Giuseppe with a curly thatch of salt and pepper hair and deeply set blue eyes.

“How in the world did you get here?” she asks as she turns to knock on the door in hopes that Capers or LeMar will hear them and let them in.

“Hertz rent-a-car.” He grins as she turns back around. “I drove right through Eleanor all night and lived to tell about it, Elizabeth.” “Well, I know Giuseppe and Hilda will be so pleased. Now, let's hope the sheet music hasn't turned to mush.” She picks up the garden hose on the side of the steps and sprays out the last bit of mud from her heels.

Her choir gown is drenched, and she slips it off and drapes it over her bag. When she looks up, she sees the trumpeter marveling at her wet silk dress in a way that Rupert and the Mr. Dentist wouldn't, and she can feel her face redden. Before she knows it Capers is standing at the doorway watching her and in the background she can hear LeMar practicing his scales.

“Y'all okay?” Capers says, and he seems to be admiring Sis too.
Heck, I should have poured some water over my clothes long before this
if I'd known it would get his attention.

“Yes,” she says, patting her rosy cheeks, “these nice Italian boys rescued me from being sucked into an early grave.”

Capers chuckles and shakes his head. “All I can say is thank the good Lord for generators because the power's been out since late last night.”

Sis races up the back stairs to see about Ina and the sheet music for the wedding. She thinks she put them all in the drawer beside the organ, but she might have left them out on the stand, and she can guess the leaky spot in the ceiling to the right of her is brown with water drip, drip, dripping down on the “Ave Maria” and the “Laudate Dominum.”