The Wedding Machine

by Beth Webb Hart

  The next stop for the wedding party is Alberto’s, the new little Italian joint that sits in a strip mall at the lower end of Main Street. It’s quite an unconventional rehearsal dinner location, but this piece of the weekend is in the Giornellis’ hands and, as Ray reminded her at one of their last wedding meetings, “One must go along with one’s daughter’s future family.”

  As soon as they arrive at Alberto’s, Hilda slips into the bathroom to find Miss Cotton, with a little French soap in one hand and a linen hand towel hanging on her arm with Hilda’s new initials, HPG, embroidered across the top. The gals have thought of everything, and for some reason the tears are there before Hilda has time to stop them, and she scurries into the stall as the foreign voices of what may be the wait staff or perhaps Giuseppe’s family echo in the hall outside the bathroom.

  This is so unlike me. Hilda dries her eyes and rubs at the mascara smudges. She can’t help but be struck by what her friends have done, looking after her the last few years, and taking over this whole wedding. Goodness knows I don’t deserve their friendship.

  No, Hilda wouldn’t have chosen a dark and narrow strip mall restaurant for a rehearsal dinner. Nor would she have chosen to have her daughter and her fiancé’s name printed in red on everything from the napkins to the cigarettes to the bottles of Chianti. And the dyed green carnations, well, they’re enough to give her the hives, but she doesn’t say a word against them.

  Thankfully, she is seated by Little Hilda and Giuseppe and his parents while Angus takes his place in the back of the restaurant with Trudi and Dodi. Sis is also at Hilda’s table. She’s single and easy to put in all sorts of places, but Hilda knows she’s been purposefully placed here to support her tonight, and she appreciates Little Hilda’s thinking of that. Suddenly the thought occurs to Hilda, I am a single too.

  The food is quite good. The Giornellis have somehow talked the restaurant into serving Giuseppe’s paternal grandmother’s clam sauce over the pasta, and it is divine. After an ample serving of tiramisu and an offering of champagne, the toasts begin.

  Giuseppe’s father has done quite well in the knickknack business. He makes the plastic brides and grooms that go on tops of cakes. And a lot of the stuff you see in a place like Party City. He’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s obvious that he and Fiorella adore their eldest son.

  They show a little slide show of their life in New Jersey and of Giuseppe at his graduation from Dartmouth and on the campaign trail with Senator Warren and on the steps of Capitol Hill where he took his first job. The last slide is a photo of their son and Little Hilda kissing in front of the Washington Monument on the night they were engaged. It was last year’s Fourth of July celebration on the mall, and there are fireworks blossoming behind them in red and blue.

  Angus’s toast catches Big Hilda off guard. Just as she sips her cappuccino, her ex-husband ambles up to the microphone and reminisces about his daughter’s childhood.

  “There was the time she put on Big Hilda’s lipstick at age four and grabbed her five-year-old cousin by the neck and kissed him until he cried and begged for release,” he says to the gathering. “And another when Priscilla dared her to slide down the laundry chute and she landed head first on the ironing board and I had to rush home and stitch her forehead up. Then,” he says, “in college during a brief Priscilla-induced tree hugger phase, they set out to walk the Appalachian trail one summer with a few other classmates and instead of me talking her out of it, she talked me into coming along, and I followed her and her crew for one month up and over the Blue Ridge Mountains until I got dysentery so bad that Cousin Willy had to come pick me up and bring me home, and still my little girl kept on going.”

  “Little Hilda looks fragile,” he says, turning toward Giuseppe as he sums up his speech, “but she’s no shrinking flower. The girl got shortchanged in the fear department, and she got a double dose of determination like her mama. She was determined to win your affection, Giuseppe, and she’s never been happier. Now you just better hope and pray that she doesn’t get her mind set on what kind of car she wants to drive, what kind of home she wants to own, or what kind of gift she’d like for her first anniversary, ’cause, Son, your goose is going to be cooked then. There’s no getting this girl to back down.”

  He lifts his champagne glass and so does the rest of the crowd, and as Big Hilda takes a sip, a pain shoots through the side of her head, and she can hardly see for a moment. She can’t tell if she’s got a migraine forming or if she’s just angry with Angus for taking a shot at her.

  When she focuses again, Vangie Dreggs is up at the microphone giving a toast. The nerve! Not even Ray or Kitty B. are planning toasts. It’s just not something the women do. But there is the Lone Star pain in their rear end making some crack about the Democratic Party and Senator Warren and New Jersey, and how even though she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Texas Republican she’ll even be nice to the senator because she thinks so much of Angus and his daughter and Hilda. She calls Hilda a dear friend and says that she and the gals have made all the difference in her life here in Jasper.

  Sis rolls her eyes, and Hilda can hear Ray clearing her throat in disdain somewhere behind her. Then her head begins to throb. As the line of Giuseppe’s extended relatives and friends form around the microphone with toasts to give, Hilda wonders if anyone will notice if she just lays her head down on the table. It’s been several months since she’s had a migraine, and this one is blinding—a hammer pounding the base of her head. Her new doctor says they’re hormonal, and she expects them to subside once the menopause does.

  “Sis,” she leans over and whispers. “I need you to take me home.”

  Sis takes one look at Hilda’s eye and nods, and Hilda tries to head toward the door without making a scene. She doesn’t want to disturb Little Hilda, who is engrossed in a poem Giuseppe’s cousins are reciting, but just as she’s about to make it to the door, Little Hilda runs up to her. “You aren’t leaving, are you, Mama?” she says. “The toasts aren’t over, and Giuseppe has something special planned for the end.”

  “Darling, I have a migraine,” she says clutching the back of her head.

  “But you haven’t even heard from half of Giuseppe’s family, and I know you’ll love hearing what they have to say. This is your chance to get to know them.”

  Amidst the crowd of murmurs, Hilda hears Angus let out a contrived cough and in it she hears, Must you always let us down?

  Sis holds her by the elbow as her vision goes blurry. She can feel her knees buckle as the throbbing in her head grows stronger.

  “I’m so sorry, darling, but I can’t,” she says. “I’ve got to get to my bed and wait this out.”

  Outside it is raining sideways because of the warm gusts from the Eleanor bands. It must not have been coming down for long, but now it flows like a river across the parking lot and into the drainage pipes. Hilda’s bronze heels are drenched by the time she reaches Sis’s car, a little Toyota, youthful and no-nonsense just like Sis. Oh, and of all things, soft seats that smell like mold. Hilda doesn’t know why Sis doesn’t spring for leather seats! What else does she have to spend her money on?

  Just as she’s about to thank Sis and close her front door, she sees stars in front of her eyes and then blackness, and before she knows it she is lying down in her foyer, her fingers grabbing at the wet fringes of the Oriental rug.

  When she wakes up again, she is upstairs and Sis tries to open her locked bedroom door. “Go on home,” Hilda says. Then she throws up her clam sauce right then and there all down her overpriced ivory suit.

  The next thing she knows, Sis is wiping her mouth and asks her how to get into her bedroom so she can lay her down. Hilda doesn’t answer, and Sis puts her in a chair by her vanity and picks the bedroom lock with a bobby pin. She turns on Hilda’s bedside light and lets out a faint gasp when she sees what Hilda has done. How she’s shoved three king-size pillows under the covers as if someone is sleeping next to her. As if the feel of her husb
and is still there.

  Hilda, too embarrassed to look her in the eye, clutches her own head in an effort to ward off the pain. It’s as fierce as ever. Sis lifts Hilda up and helps her out of her suit and slips on a nightgown from her closet. Then Sis brings her some Advil and a cool glass of water, and Hilda lies down on her pillow with lights like the fireworks in her child’s engagement photo pounding around her head.

  Hilda doesn’t remember Sis turning out the lights or closing the sliding doors to her room. When she wakes up she is alone, and she rolls over and puts her arm around the mass of pillows. She envisions Angus getting into Trudi’s car and kissing her. She doesn’t think that Angus will marry her. They’ve been dating for two years now, and nothing has come of it.

  If Hilda is honest with herself, she will admit that she holds out the thinnest strand of hope that Angus will come back to her. She tries not to think of it often, but in the middle of the night she often imagines how it might work. Angus suddenly on the front stoop of the piazza. Hilda welcoming him into the home they shared for three decades. “I want to come back,” he would say to her. She would nod and smile and say, “Then come.”

  “Lord,” she prays to the God she has distanced herself from since she was fourteen. She waves away the idea that He would listen to her and simply says to the darkness around her, to the air in her self-made tomb, “Don’t let Angus end up with Trudi.”

  She lets out a sigh from somewhere deep in her chest. Then she embraces the wall of pillows, pulling them closely to her side, and drifts back into sleep.

  EIGHT

  Sis

  Sis’s phone rings early before the doves have made their first coo on the branch outside of her window. Her clock radio reads 5:07 a.m.

  “We’re sunk,” Sis hears as she groggily presses the receiver to her ear.

  “Ray?”

  “Pink Point is under water, Sis! Go look outside.”

  It takes Sis two rolls to get across her bed as she groans, “The weather channel said we were in the clear last night except for a few outer bands.”

  “Well, the storm surge rippled back at high tide, and we’re under a couple of inches of water right now. I just swept two flapping shrimp off of my porch steps, okay?”

  “Can’t you call the pump man?”

  “I’ve tried him, but I can’t get him to answer. Willy is banging on his door as I speak. That’s how desperate we are.”

  Sis peers out of her blinds at the dark morning as the wet branches of her crepe myrtles bob back and forth, casting off their little white flowers like confetti. “All I can say is that I hope to God we’ve got power in the church so Ina can blow her pipes.”

  Ina’s the name of the forty-stop organ that was sent back to London to be restored the year after the church hired Sis. A Mrs. Ina Louise Barrett Gardner, a descendant of the church’s first priest, The Rev. T. Henry Barrett IV, who took his post here at the chapel of ease in 1794, paid for the organ’s trip and restoration. They’d put a little brass plaque over the rows of keyboards with the woman’s name on it.

  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 S
is 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.