“Let us pray.”
He opened his eyes, closed them again, tried to pray. Stand close, son, his father had said, hit the hole.
From the tiny portable organ there came a volcanic burst of Mendelssohn, incredibly loud. Before he knew it, Peyton and Harry had vanished smiling up the aisle, the guests had dispersed in a noisy herd behind them, and Edward laid a paw on his shoulder, saying, “Felicitations, old man. Let’s have a drink.” Loftis shook him off, suggesting hurriedly, with a weak attempt at irony, that he go ambush some champagne. The effect of the ceremony had worn off somewhat, though he still felt dizzy and vaguely disoriented, and he took Helen’s arm. Carey joined them. There was sweat on his brow, but he looked proud and somehow purged.
Helen looked up at him. “It was beautiful, Carey. Simply beautiful. You made magic out of it.”
“Nothing, Helen,” he said in a tone Loftis could not help feel was pompous. “I felt that I was joining those fine children in a union that was somehow … more significant and … meaningful.” He paused with a smile. “I’m sure you know what I mean.” He removed his vestments and stole with a chipper remark, which for some reason made Loftis squirm, about taking off his work clothes in order to show off his drinking clothes. Why, Loftis wondered, were these boys such hypocrites? He excused himself to go to the bathroom.
“Well, it was lovely, Carey. As I say—” and she touched him lightly on the hand—“you do have the magic touch.” As a matter of fact, it was true: she had been held in thrall, as much as any of the dimmest and most susceptible of the women present, by the service and by Carey’s artful mannerisms. Throughout the ceremony, she had forced herself to conceal her joy, revealing it, she knew, only in the light of triumph which flashed briefly across her eyes. It was a strange sort of triumph. Life until her reconciliation with Milton had been miserable and disappointing. In the past few months she had gone over her life in her mind, minutely, always trying to avoid thinking of Maudie. She remembered a time when she was young. She had wanted the future to be like a nice, long, congenial tea party, where everyone talked a little, danced a little and had polite manners. She had come to the party and it had been ghastly: everyone misbehaved and no one had a good time. Religion had been a toy, a trifle, and she had cast it aside in despair when Maudie died. But she had always been motivated by a stern, if misty and primitive, belief, and when she took the last nembutal, sinking not into death but into what she hoped would be an endless sleep, filled with only the friendliest of dreams, it had been with a prayer on her lips and a mysterious, whispered apology to her father. Milton had rescued her. She knew the limit of his patience and, in a sort of marathon, had teased his patience to the very brink. But she had got what she wanted. She had got Milton back, along with the chance to watch him plead and grovel and humiliate himself. What more, for one who had suffered a lifetime of indignities, of so much emotional privation, could be asked? Because she did love him; she loved him desperately, and although he had hurt her—and she was wise enough to admit (but only to herself) that she had hurt him, too—he had, by coming back to her, saved her from certain death. Saved her not only from those endless, drugged dreams but from death. Too many thoughts of Maudie would have driven her, she knew, quite insane, but Milton had saved her from all that. And there had been a period, in the first few weeks of their reconciliation, when her brain throbbed, intoxicated, and in her thoughts Dolly drifted like a vanquished corpse face-downward upon some swollen stream. It had been the first time she could remember that she had ever laughed aloud, privately—alone in her room swooning backward upon the bed, clutching her throat with nerveless fingers, in a spasm of soundless, hysterical laughter.
And this day had really been a triumph for her. No one would ever know. No one would ever know what electric fulfillment she felt, beneath the soft, tender dignity of her manner, behind the wrinkled, rather sad, but gracefully aging serenity of her brow. No one would ever know the struggle, either. The struggle to accomplish just this casual, collected air of the proud mother: the woman who has sacrificed, whose suffering is known to the community, but who, on the day of her daughter’s marriage, presents only the face of humility and courage and gentle good will. It had been cruelly difficult to put on this act, and how she had connived, how she had falsified her true feelings! But she knew that any means justified this end, this day, and after she had murmured into Milton’s ear, “Oh, darling, I do want Peyton to come home,” she had rejoiced at the sincere and grateful look in his eyes; she could tell he didn’t doubt her honesty.
Her honesty. Oh, what was honesty, anyway? After so much suffering, did a woman really have to be honest to fulfill herself? She felt that her marriage had been such a nightmare, she had endured so many insults—the weight of so many outrages had pressed so heavily upon her spirit—that she could discard honest intentions in order to make this one day come true. Anything, anything, she had said to herself these past months, anything at all. Anything that Peyton should come home. Anything that people should know Helen Loftis was a good mother, a successful mother. Anything that people should know: it was Helen Loftis, that suffering woman, who had brought together the broken family.
Now, in sheer, rash courtliness, Carey bent down and kissed her hand. She knew how Carey saw her: poised, gentle, smiling brightly. Who could tell, she asked herself—and certainly it wasn’t Carey who could tell, in his dense, well-meaning charity—that this genteel spright-liness masked the most villainous intentions? Well they were villainous. Here a shadow passed over her mind, just briefly, but long enough for Carey to murmur, “What’s wrong, Helen?”
“Why, nothing, Carey!”
They were cruel intentions, cruel feelings, and perhaps unnatural, but what could she do? She had suffered too much and too long not to feel them. Or it. This profound and unalterable loathing of Peyton. Poor Peyton. Dishonorable, sinful. Her own flesh and blood.
“Maybe I’ll be seeing you in church again, Helen. Now that you’ve become reconvinced of my powers and all that.” Carey was smiling down at her and she was about to answer him, but Milton came back just then, looking pale and harried. What was the matter with Milton?
“We’d better go into the dining room, honey. We’re supposed to be in the receiving line.”
“Oh, yes, sure, dear, I hadn’t forgotten.” Carey had walked to the hallway to hang up his vestments and she called back over her shoulder. “I might, Carey. I might at that. In fact I think I shall.”
Loftis took her arm. “What’s that, honey?”
She put her arm about his waist. “Oh, nothing.” She looked up at him as they walked up the aisle: “What’s the matter, dear? You looked worried.” Then she squeezed him, the soft, vulnerable flesh beneath his ribs. “Oh, Milton, I’m so happy.”
Somehow most of the guests had managed to get into the dining room, although as before many of them overflowed onto the porches. Ella presided at the punchbowl, along with two colored boys in white jackets who were ready to pour the champagne. La Ruth had been put in charge of the hors d’oeuvres and sandwiches, the plates and forks and napkins, but before the guests had come in she had done so many things improperly—folded the napkins wrong, put the forks way out of reach on the table—that Ella had sent her to the kitchen to get her out of the way. When the guests entered to go through the receiving line, Ella and the two boys stood up in a sort of shy, awkward position of attention, punch ladle and bottles in hand. From time to time La Ruth peeked in from the kitchen, along with Stonewall, dressed in a blue coat and corduroy knickers, who got his fingers pinched in the swinging door and had to be silenced and soothed.
Helen and Milton had joined Peyton and Harry, and the guests streamed past, shaking hands, exchanging greetings. The older women—among them Mrs. Mayo and Mrs. Cuthbert and Dr. Bulwinkle’s wife, who looked like a frightened little thrush and talked in gasps—had all been nearly wrecked by the ceremony, and were visibly affected. When they came to Peyton and looked at her each of them
remembered her own vanished loveliness and fell on the bride in a silent, shaky embrace, each afraid to entrust words to her trembling lips. But the general air was that of exuberance and gaiety and joy. Peyton, everyone thought, was so beautiful and so graceful. She smiled at everyone and introduced them to Harry, remembering the right names. The older men, who thought she was beautiful, all right, and kissed her dutifully, had, nevertheless, seen so many children get married: their minds were on the champagne. Carter Houston, the head of the shipyard, was all gentility and breeding. He wore a pendulous, bleached-white mustache upon which there was not the slightest trace of a stain, although he chewed a pipe almost constantly. When he kissed Peyton he murmured, “My lovely,” and his starched cuffs crackled and his fine old blue eyes sparkled romantically.
“So this is your boy,” he said, turning to Harry, and halted, the only person in the room who might with impunity dally so long. He looked him up and down, courteously, gently, and turned to his wife. “This is her boy, Lissa,” he said, as if she didn’t know. “You must take good care of such a lovely child, Harry. And if you all don’t stay in New York, why then you all must live in Port Warwick and come to visit us often. Peyton, you’ve stayed away too long. Isn’t that right, Lissa?” He turned to the small gray woman clinging to his arm and smelling of Yardley’s; she had the face of an aristocrat and an odd, perpetual smile. It had something to do with her eyes and the way her mouth went up at the corners, and all her life she had existed in an atmosphere of baffling good will, since because of this smile people could not help grinning back at her, even when she was, perhaps, sad. “Indeed it is, Cyatah,” she said, “indeed it is.”
“We will, sir,” said Harry. The Houstons drifted off. The receiving line went slack for a moment, for Loftis, standing next to Peyton, had become involved emotionally with the crippled dentist named Monroe Hobbie. He once had had a dim-witted, handsome wife—a marriage abbreviated by the lures of a slick Italian seaman from Wilmington, Delaware, who owned a cleverer tongue than he, as well as two good legs—and at every wedding, in an effort to retrieve the splendor of earlier days, he became prematurely drunk and long-winded and pathetic. He looked up at Loftis and gripped his shoulder, muttering something about eternal youth, and then blundered speechlessly past Peyton and Harry, in a haze of forgetfulness. Loftis turned to Peyton.
“How’s it going now, honey?”
“Insulted.” She laughed.
“What’s the matter?”
“Dr. Hobbie. He didn’t kiss me. Poor fellow.”
“Poor fellow is right.” He looked at Harry. “Don’t mind some of these people, Harry,” he said in a low voice, and with a wink, “they’re Virginians. Most of them are in a daze and—oh …” and he turned, because Helen had touched him on the shoulder, to say, “Here are the Appletons, dear.”
So it went. The guests filed by, shook hands, kissed and were kissed, and made a decorous beeline for the champagne. There was whisky and gin, too, bottle upon bottle of it, for cruder palates. Helen had spared no expense for this, the blowout of her life, and Loftis, through his extensive social connections, had performed the necessary miracle with the ration board. The October sun shed a light like gold dust against the windows, but inside the air was all silver: silver of champagne and gin, silver of spoons, of the bars the young girls wore, tucked in their hair, and the silvery tinkling of half a hundred glasses, a gay and flimsy tintinnabulation. There was recorded music, something tender and Viennese, and it washed out onto the terrace, bearing with it a crowd of boys and girls, who began to dance, splashing champagne in silver tracks across the piled-up leaves. The weather was mild and blue, thick with sunshine—one perfect day, everyone said, for a wedding; soon the windows were thrown open, mingling the odor of distant, smoky fires with that of perfume and flowers. In one corner a fat couple, the Cuthberts, both of them teetotalers, stood gobbling Smithfield ham; no one paid them any notice. Very soon Moncure (“Monk”) Yourtee, always the joker, had lost himself in the spirit of things and began to kiss all the girls, young and old, until his wife, a tall stern woman, hauled him aside and calmed him down. Romance sprouted among the young people; there were promises, hand pattings, flattery. Someone brought Peyton and Harry champagne, and they kissed each other, while a man with a camera filled the room with a burst of light, and the German song, caught in its groove, went Bist ein bist ein bist ein, over and over.
“Somebody fix the record!” Peyton cried, breaking away from Harry and laughing. There were more toasts, more champagne, and the end of the receiving line at last: a girl named Winnie Byrd Taylor, who had grown up with Peyton. She was gaunt and homely, with no breasts to speak of, and she probably would never get married, and she embraced Peyton with a sort of whimper, letting her blotched face fall on Peyton’s shoulder and crying a little, as if she could remember nothing but their childhood and the summer days beneath the trees.
“Thank you, Winnie Byrd,” said Peyton, kissing her back, “this is Harry.” Winnie Byrd touched him briefly, made an agonized smile and was gone. The four of them were alone together then—Peyton and Harry, Loftis and Helen; and Loftis, turning with his champagne glass in hand, looked at Peyton, and had a surge of relief. Everything seemed to have improved some. Utterly sober, he nonetheless felt a faint, tingling, pleasant intoxication: from the happy faces of the guests, the music, from watching Peyton. Mainly, from watching Peyton. There had hardly been a second since the end of the ceremony when he had taken his eyes off her: how happy she looked now, how excited, lovely, how much the glowing bride! And how wrong he must have been to have thought otherwise. Look: she had kissed him twice—saying, “Bunny, you dear”—in five minutes. His panic at the ceremony had been needless suffering.
Helen stepped aside for a moment to put her arms around some woman, an old friend, and over her shoulder Loftis saw Harry bend down and kiss Peyton again, right on the mouth. It was a private view he had, almost: one of those unaccountable lulls at a gathering during which the guests of honor, hastily ignored by the other people in favor of food and drink, seem to be completely and senselessly isolated. It is the mystery of a split moment in time, the instant when we could most logically ask, in our strange solitary state, even as guests of honor, “Life. What am I doing here?” For that brief instant one could remove all of one’s clothes or faint dead away, and nobody would notice. Here Loftis was the only observer, and he sensed it, and as he watched them kiss he felt the same visceral, drowsy hunger he had felt this morning and at the ceremony; only this time it was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but a little of both, partaking more of memory, really, than anything else, and causing him once again to recall a note of music only half-heard, sunlight somewhere, something irretrievable. Helen moved aside, a glass was lifted, there was the tinkle of laughter and the clatter of dishes; a lush fraulein voice sang “tränen ins Auge” above the remote whine of strings, and through the sphere of his glass, iridescent as a rainbow, which he raised to his mouth, he saw their lips touch and their eyelids drift close, and flutter excitedly, their arms about each other in an anxious embrace. No one saw, no one noticed, except himself, and he was split up the middle with a violent, jealous tenderness such as he had rarely felt before. Only a moment had passed. Bubbles of champagne rose sour and sweet beneath his tongue, and he watched in a sort of enchantment: Harry, dark and Jewish, handsome, blood gently pulsing at his brow, and Peyton, hair about her shoulders, eyelids so clear they might be transparent, drawn down, fluttering—her lips on his.
The spell was broken. Suddenly they drew away from each other, for Helen’s back had loomed up in front of him. With one arm around the woman, she was saying, “Felicia, this is Peyton and this is Harry—don’t they look good together?” Loftis moved in closer, about to say something, but someone touched him on the arm. It was Edward, blushing to the ears with champagne.
“Hello, old man, you aren’t celebrating much. Here, take this glass.” He had two.
“Thanks. I’ve got
one,” he said, raising his own.
“You’re out.” He put down a glass, removed the empty one from Loftis’ hand, and replaced it with his own.
Loftis protested, then gave up. “I’m on the wagon, you know.”
“Not today you aren’t,” Edward said. Loftis felt himself succumbing to his sudden, real urge to drink—partly to the authority in the voice—and he took a big swallow, hating Edward, for some reason, more than ever. He heard that voice behind a desk at some camp, saw himself for an instant a trembling lieutenant—“Not today you aren’t”—how easily, under certain conditions, could that voice become a paralyzing command. Edward was at the stage of drunkenness in which the ego glows like a coal, and brilliant people become more inspired, but in which dull people, fired by the same inspiration, become only more dull. Loftis looked at the eagle roosting on Edward’s shoulder. It would be nice, he thought with some envy, to have been a colonel and to have survived wounds on Guadalcanal (the champagne was working: he had a sudden vision of steaming jungles, heard the hollow rat-tat-tat car-Wong, as in the newsreels) but to have all that to be a man like this: no.