At Weddings and Wakes

by Alice McDermott

  And then a dozen pages more, unfilled. Agnes closed the book, its pages already begun to grow brittle with the thick ink. All night she’d heard Momma and their father brawl. They called her Momma now and now her cool, broad arms, for all the times she’d held them in these past months, were more familiar than the fading memory of their mother’s own. “You won’t forget her?” their father once asked, in the beginning, but, really, what a thing to ask a child. In truth she wanted them all to forget since she knew now, all these months gone past, there was no other remedy. She wanted, young as she was, a return to the decorum the family had once known. No more sudden weeping and sloppy women breezing in to press her against their breasts. No more sympathy meals, as Momma called them, brought by curious neighbors who she said came only to see how they were getting along. “And where is it you’re sleeping?” they asked Momma when she was still downstairs. “And what is this?” they said now. “A wall?” She wanted the door shut on them again. She wanted her family to once more be its own.

  She searched the room for another place to hide the book. She had only a few more minutes before Momma returned from the store. Her eyes fell on the rug and the green chair. The fireplace. The skeleton of the new wall.

  MAY’S WEDDING took place on the last Saturday morning of July at 10 a.m., when the streets had not yet dried and the summer sunlight still seemed fresh and weightless in the thick green leaves of the trees. The wedding party arrived in two cars. May and Lucy and their brother John were in the first (May’s arm in its pale white sleeve held to the window throughout the ride as she gripped the plush strap), Momma and Veronica and Agnes in the second, with the three children perched carefully on the jump seats. The girls wore their Easter dresses, the boy his navy-blue Confirmation suit that was already too short in the sleeves. On the floor of their bedrooms at home there were opened suitcases packed with summer clothes and in the front hallway two cardboard boxes filled with newly ironed sheets and towels that had hung in the sun all of yesterday afternoon, and the fresh sense of adventure and change, of meticulous preparedness, that the sight and the smell of these things had given them when they woke and dressed and followed their mother out the front door was with them still: glorious, miraculous, timeless day on the edge of the year’s best journey—their first wedding.

  The sunlight through the limousine windows fell at intervals upon the three women’s clothes and hands and gave some new, clearer quality to each face as it was turned to the passing streets. Had May been here she would have been watching the children, gauging their delight in this elegant backwards ride, but Momma and Veronica and Agnes only smiled at them occasionally and then looked on ahead. There was a sense that they were anticipating, looking out for, not only the approach of the church but of the very hour that had for long been expected. With their bottoms on the narrow seats, their fingers wrapped under the lip of each as if they feared it might at any minute spring closed on them, the children, too, were aware only of the hour they were headed toward; the streets they passed were indistinct shades of sunlight and shadow and sound, too distant from their own joy to be real.

  When the car glided to a stop, Aunt Agnes held out a gloved hand and said, “Wait. The bride first.” They waited and, looking over their shoulders, saw the chauffeur from the first car open the door and reach in to help Aunt May out. She wore a slim, off-white suit and a hat with a small veil and she stumbled a little as she stepped away from the car to look up at the church, the chauffeur turning just in time to catch her shoulder and her wrist and then, with astounding, bent-kneed alacrity, the small bridal bouquet that suddenly flew up out of her hand. He caught the bouquet against his heart and stood laughing with it, Aunt May laughing, too, and touching his arm, until their mother began to step out and he moved to help her. Once on the sidewalk their mother touched Aunt May’s shoulder and both women looked down at the turned ankle and the uneven concrete and Aunt May’s low white heels. Then Uncle John stepped out and their own chauffeur opened the limousine’s door.

  The church was the same one their mother had been married in and so they knew they had been to it any number of times before, but their having arrived at it in such a manner and on such a day made it seem utterly transformed. The girls placed their hands into the wide dry palm of the chauffeur and then stood on the sidewalk with Momma and Aunt Veronica as Agnes went forward to give some last-minute instructions to their mother and the bride. Uncle John held out his elbow and Aunt May slipped her hand beneath it, looked at the sky or at the church steeple and then began to go toward the steps. At the last minute she turned and smiled at the children and then waved with her bouquet that they should come along, as if the day was a gift from her to them, after all.

  Their mother followed and then Aunt Agnes turned to move them all forward.

  Inside the dark vestibule they noticed first that May and their mother had disappeared and then, with such a shock of recognition that the younger girl shouted a happy “Hey!” that echoed into the sacristy (and drew a cautious look from both Uncle John and Agnes), their father grinning at them from the doorway. He held out both his arms and the two girls walked with him down the long aisle and through a garden of smiling, nodding faces. Their brother trailed behind them and at the last minute their father paused and indicated that he should step into the pew first so the girls could be on the end, “to see better,” he whispered. And then he put his fingers to his lips and turned back down the aisle. Dutifully, and with the sound of his footsteps still echoing through the church, the children knelt and blessed themselves and said a quick and formless prayer before sliding back into their seats. Now, as if on a draught, the smell of the place came to them, the smell of snuffed candles and old incense, fresh roses and cold stone. The altar cloth was pure white trimmed with gold and on it was the same arrangement of baby’s breath and white roses that had been placed on the coffee table at Momma’s place this morning, although this morning the flowers were the last thing they noticed, given how the living room when they climbed the stairs (the key thrown out on this day by Momma herself) was filled with Agnes and Veronica in lovely clothes and Uncle John in his suit and a woman and a teenaged girl and boy whom, no one ever acknowledged, they had never met before.

  Their father brought Aunt Veronica to the pew behind them and as she knelt to say her prayer at their back they were aware of the sweet, peppermint smell of her breath. “You all look so lovely,” she whispered into their hair and then placed her gloved hand on the back of their bench and raised herself into her seat. Aunt Agnes came next. She wore a linen suit of deep rose and her dark, boldly graying hair was pulled back under a small rose hat. Coming down the aisle on their father’s arm she nodded from side to side, acknowledging, it seemed to them, not only friends and acquaintances and relatives (Uncle John’s wife, Aunt Arlene, and her two children among them) but all the time and effort and care she herself had given the day. She stepped into the pew with Veronica, briefly whispered something to their father, who nodded eagerly and said, “All right,” told the staring children, “Eyes front,” and then, with what seemed an imperceptible tilt of her head, brought the white-robed priest and his two altar boys and even, they suspected, the unseen organist to some kind of attention.

  Momma came now on their father’s arm in a dress of gray-blue lace, a large, pink, trembling orchid pinned to her shoulder. Her white hair had been curled and brushed out softly from her face and the lace cap she wore was set at what seemed a jaunty angle. She was smiling her thin smile and her eyes shone as deep and as black as ever. Her shoes were black, too, brand-new and shiny but still the same heavy lace-ups she wore at home. The children felt somewhat relieved by this, relieved that she had not, like May, appeared this morning in delicate heels. Theirs might have become another family altogether if amid this summer-morning sight of Uncle John and his smiling wife and near-grown children, of Aunt May wearing makeup and Veronica stepping into the sun, bending into a luxurious car, Momma had appeared in a young w
oman’s shoes.

  She did not kneel, only sat, broad and erect, on the seat in front of them. When he saw she was settled, their father went to the altar rail and, with an expertise that the two girls took as one more wonderful indication of the depth of his experience, began suddenly to unroll the white carpet down the length of the stone aisle. The priest and the altar boys stepped to the front of the altar. Fred and another man, who, in the same dark suit and with the same cautious, collar-tugging, elbow-lifting manner, seemed to the children to be his twin, stepped from a room just behind the pale white, life-sized Christ on the cross.

  The organ struck a somber note and then, rising, a tempered but optimistic series of chords and all of them began to stand. And then the familiar march, the sound from cartoons and back-yard games now played straight and seriously and at a volume that sent goosebumps down from each of the sisters’ puffed sleeves. Their mother came first. She was smiling and yet it was easy enough to see that it was not her real smile and that the small bouquet she was carrying trembled.

  The children had never seen their mother in such a role—all eyes on her with shoes dyed the same pale lavender color as her dress—and this momentary celebrity made them hope, as she approached on the thin white sheet of carpet, that when she passed them she would wave or wink or even reach out her hand to indicate to all the strangers gathered here that they were hers. The smaller girl stepped up on the soft cushion of the kneeling bench and leaned forward, but her mother with her trembling bouquet and her fixed smile only stared straight ahead, leaving them to recognize the familiar freckles on her bare forearms, the familiar curl of her dark hair as details of a treasure that had once been exclusively their own.

  And then came the bride. Aunt May walked carefully beside her brother, her hand in his arm. She had brought the veil of her hat down over her eyes, so that the gold rims of her glasses sparkled behind it. She was smiling slightly, cautiously, it seemed, and the two older children were reminded especially of the way she had looked as a nun, of the delicate and uncertain way she would smile at them before, in some single moment when they were off by themselves, producing a gift from her robes. They saw in her careful smile, her veiled eyes, that same guarded delight: joy held in cupped hands against her heart.

  But then as she approached them she looked fully into their faces, just as their mother had failed to do, and her smile became broad, open. She nearly laughed (her shoulders and her breath giving in to it, collapsing for a second as if she would laugh, although she made no sound), and then carried the vision of their young and astonished and much-loved faces across the last few feet she had to go, to the foot of the altar, where she turned to kiss her brother at the altar rail (his taut cheek smelling of alcohol, but bay rum or Bacardi she couldn’t tell) and then passed through its gate, where Fred, looking wonderfully neat and dapper, stepped forward and took her arm, putting his bare hand over her gloved one just as she’d hoped he would do, while they climbed the last few steps toward the priest.

  The two girls could not deny that they’d been disappointed this morning when Aunt May stepped out of Aunt Agnes’s bedroom and was not wearing a long, lace dress with a train and a thick veil, and were now disappointed again to learn that the priest would not merely get to the heart of the matter, the Do you’s and the I do’s, but put them all through an entire, interminable High Mass as well. They listened to their brother recite without hesitation the complex Latin of the Confiteor and knelt and stood with the bells. Creeping up the side of the church, their father had joined them from the other side of the pew and he sang each hymn in his familiar tenor. In front of them, Uncle John leaned a little to the right and knelt with a great deal of caution, but also turned to take his mother’s arm each time they had to stand.

  The Epistle was Saint Paul’s, all the empty things he was without love. The Gospel was the Marriage Feast at Cana. When he had finished reading it, the priest kissed the Bible and intoned a solemn “In the name of the Father …” He was a stubby, white-haired man with only a trace of a brogue and he had met the groom at Mary Immaculate Hospital, where he had been chaplain in the last years of Fred’s mother’s life. On the day she died, the priest had just come into the room when Fred, his chair drawn up beside her bed and his hand on her arm, looked up and said, with more peace and resignation than the priest himself knew he could have managed, “Father, I think she’s slipped away.”

  All week the priest had wondered if he should refer to this in his sermon today. He recalled it had been Good Friday. He recalled he had said, after the nurses had come in to confirm it, “Not slipped away, Fred, but risen,” and been impressed once again how even for those with the barest shred of faith (and at the time he counted himself as one of them) Christ’s story offered parallel and metaphor and a way for us to speak to one another.

  All week long he wondered if he should speak of this now. Both Fred and May had asked that their parents be named at the Memento and this he would do, but, he wondered, would it be appropriate to say in his sermon, too, that so much of what these two had lost in their parents’ deaths had been returned to them in each other? The bride’s aunt, the old lady in the front pew who, it occurred to him, was fingering her rosaries as if she were conversing with the Blessed Mother right over his head, not expecting to hear anything of value from him anyway, might take some offense if he were to hint that May had been bereft until now. And the children behind her—look at that moon-faced one in the flowered hat, off in dreamland by the look of it—might be confused by too much talk of death and dying on such a day.

  “Our Lord,” he said, settling for some shortened version of the standard, what with the day’s approaching heat and the Funeral Mass scheduled at noon, “began his public ministry at a marriage feast, changing, at his beloved mother’s request, plain water into the finest wine. Ahead of him were the three arduous years of his ministry and many more miracles, more spectacular, more breath-taking miracles: the healing of lepers, the casting out of devils, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Ahead of him in three years’ time was the last meal he would share with his disciples, when he would once again raise a cup of wine in love and commemoration, changing it this time into his own precious blood.” He turned to the couple now seated in two high-backed chairs behind him—“Fred and May”—turned to the congregation again, “Dear friends in Christ. Each of us has in our future our own last time when we will dine with friends, taste the fruits of the earth for a final time. Each of us has as we leave here today our own arduous way to follow toward death. But it is from such moments as these that we, following our Saviour’s example, find the courage to go forward. Love sustains us. Our Lord understood this at Cana. He understood it at the Last Supper. He understands it now as he blesses our difficult way with the gift of love. Love that sustains us as we, each of us, make our inexorable journey toward those final moments. Love that will, through his most precious Blood, bring us life again. Everlasting life in the love of Christ. In the name of the Father …”

  Uncle John took Momma’s elbow as the congregation stood once more but she paid no attention to him, holding the hand with the rosaries tightly against her waist. His wife had proved to be plump and somewhat pretty, a blonde in a shiny pink dress that made a soft satiny pillow of her round belly. She had pale white skin dotted with rouge, bright red lipstick, and a happy, startled look about her big blue eyes. She’d said little this morning, smiling and nodding over her lipstick-stained teacup, adding a cheery “Yeah, oh yeah” to what seemed to the children to be any conversation that would accept it. Whenever she’d looked at them she’d winked and smiled and wrinkled her eyes. Their father had driven her and her children to the church from Momma’s place and tonight when they left Brooklyn the smell of her perfume would still be in his car.

  Up on the altar, Aunt May and Uncle John raised their chins and closed their eyes, opening their mouths for Communion. Then the priest walked to their mother and the best man. Uncle John suddenly stood—for
a moment the children thought he mistakenly believed it was time to go—stepped out of the pew and then stepped back to help Momma out. He followed her to the altar rail, where mother and son knelt side by side, their broad straight backs so similar that everyone in the congregation who knew it considered the fact that he alone of all of them was her full flesh and blood—as if the spinal cord itself were the vehicle of the entire genetic code.

  Momma stood again, pushing off from the rail, and as she briefly faced the children as she walked back to her pew, her face seemed as beautiful and severe as they had ever seen it. “From such moments as these,” the boy thought, turning the phrase over in his memory, imagining how it would serve him in the future. Uncle John followed his mother, his eyes on his clasped hands.

  And then their father was standing in the pew and whispering, Go on, go on, raising the kneeling bench with his instep, and Aunt Agnes behind them was touching the younger girl’s shoulder, Go on.

  Other people, strangers, were filing out of the pew across from theirs and going to the altar, and as they joined them the children saw how Fred had risen from his kneeling bench and returned to his high-backed chair while Aunt May still knelt, her face in her hands, the clean soles of her new shoes pointing toward them.

  They knelt themselves, just as the broad fragrant robes of the priest descended on them, pushing with what seemed a sudden haste the brittle Host onto their tongues. They rose again and, in the confusion of the other wedding guests now standing shoulder to shoulder behind them (Aunt Arlene with her satin-pillow tummy and her two tall children among them), turned this way and that, the two girls nearly walking into each other, before their father held out his arm and showed them the way to go.