It was a uniformly happy group that gathered for the ceremony. No one could have been more enthusiastic about the union of Holly and Peter than Arthur Beeche. He insisted that the service be conducted in his private chapel and that he hold the reception at his house. Charlotte and her new husband were there. He looked like a dressed-up doll in his oversized black suit and white shirt. But he was clean-shaven and displayed rare bonhomie, a fruit of his delight over his own marriage. Peter’s parents had been joyful at Peters marriage to Charlotte because they rarely found cause to be discontent, especially on an occasion that was officially a happy one, but on this day there was an added sparkle to their grins. The prospect of having Holly as a sister-in-law rather than Charlotte had produced a mild euphoria on the part of Peter’s sisters. His friends had not been able to follow the story line exactly, but they knew that Peter had split up with someone whom they considered actually to be kind of a bummer and was now married to someone who was really great (and who was a babe). Inasmuch as one always wishes the best for one’s friends, they were pleased, and inasmuch as it is inevitable that one will spend time with the wives of one’s friends and so prefers that those wives not be bummers (and to be babes), they were perhaps even more pleased. Alex, Holly’s sister, thought the entire arc of Holly and Peter’s relationship was both romantic and spiritually deep. “So you were in love all this time! The devas must have had some reason for having it go this way.” Graham felt great joy and also relief. For thirty years he had suffered from anxiety over the question of whether Holly would ever find the right man; nothing was certain in life, he knew, but it seemed as if she had (he still worried about Alex in this respect). Holly’s mother, meanwhile, floated easily from Jonathan to Peter but did manage to focus enough to say to Graham, “You know, Jonathan was so good-looking, but I think I like Peter more. And I wonder if he might not be a nicer person.” Charlotte’s mother, who had always been fond of Peter, also came. Her escort was her fiancé, Dr. Smythe, the man who had been so helpful on the night of Jonathan’s death. Charlotte’s brother, David, was there, with a glossy coat and meat on his bones. (Charlotte’s father, an unlikely guest in any event, had a particular reason to be absent. Several clients had complained about Dick’s work, but it was the threat of Beeche and Company to take all its business elsewhere that finally led to his ouster from his firm. His partnership interest was liquidated to repay the large loans he had taken.) Miss Harrison came, too, accompanied by Isabella.
Julia attended. Her baby, a boy named Peter, was now two months old. When she and Arthur were introduced, Arthur was intrigued. “There was a woman named Julia Dyer who died about thirty years ago,” he said. “You must be a relation?”
“Oh, yes,” said Julia, “she was my grandmother.”
“How funny,” said Arthur. “When I was just starting out as a collector, I bought several things from her estate. I still remember the sale. I vowed I was going to buy only one lot, but I couldn’t help myself. I was very nervous bidding on a side table. It was getting so expensive!” He shook his head and laughed. “Now it’s probably worth a hundred times what I paid for it.”
Julia smiled, although she could not prevent a shadow from crossing her face. “Yes,” she said. “She had some beautiful things. Of course, I had no idea of their value, but I remember each one of them so well. We would go to Gram-Gram’s apartment every Sunday, and I can still see her living room. I think I could draw an exact picture of it: the bergères, the sculpture of the faun, the clock, that side table you mentioned with all the ormolu, the pictures. All those portraits of people who were not good-looking at all. She did have a couple of Impressionists—not very good ones—that I liked. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that just about everything was dispersed. I think my uncle still has a pair of candlesticks.” She thought for a moment. “You know,” she said finally, “it’s too bad. My father and my uncle have both spent years and years in a mania—an intermittent mania, anyway—of trying to get rich. If they had just socked away everything they inherited from their mother and done nothing, they’d have fortunes.”
“The key to life,” Arthur said solemnly, “is having the liquidity to ride out bad markets.”
He and Julia pondered this truth, and then Arthur realized he had made a faux pas, treating lightheartedly a subject that obviously caused Julia some sorrow.
“Forgive me,” he said. “You must miss all those things.” He thought a moment. “Maybe it would make it even more painful—but would you like to see some of them? They aren’t here, they’re mostly in a house on Long Island, and some are in storage. Maybe the memories would hurt more than be pleasant.” His face lit up. “I’ll tell you what! You could choose a couple and I’d be happy to let you have them.”
“Oh no,” said Julia. “I couldn’t agree to that.”
“Please,” said Arthur. “We can call it a permanent loan, the way museums do. It would be a great pleasure.”
“No, really, I couldn’t,” said Julia. “But, yes, I might like to take a look, although I might burst into tears.”
“Excellent!” said Arthur. “All we need to do is fix on a weekend when you and … er … you and—”
“There’s no ‘and,’” Julia said. “I was married to the father of the woman Peter was married to before, Charlotte’s father, but we have just gotten a divorce.”
“Charlotte’s father,” Arthur said. “Oh, yes. Yes, I know of him, Dick Montague.”
“Yes. But I would be accompanied by someone. I don’t know how you’d feel about a two-month-old baby boy coming along?”
“A baby?” Arthur said. “That would be no problem at all! I love babies. That old house hasn’t had any babies in it for a long time.” A distant look came across his face. “Maria and I, we had no children.”
“Neither did Dick and I, actually,” Julia said.
It took a moment for Arthur to understand Julia’s circumstances. “I see,” he said. “Then the boy’s father—?”
“I’m sorry to say that the father died rather suddenly several months ago.”
“That’s terrible!” Arthur said. “How awful. I’m so sorry.”
They stood in silence for a moment.
“And what is the name of this little boy?” Arthur asked.
Julia told him it was Peter.
“Excellent name!” Arthur said, laughing. He asked what stage Peter was at. Was he holding up his head? What was his favorite toy?
Julia began describing her Peter’s little ways, the cute noise he made when he sneezed, their little game when she shook a stuffed tiger on his tummy and made him laugh, how his head smelled like toast. She reddened. “I’m sorry!” she said. “This must be very boring for you! I swore I wouldn’t be like every other first-time mother and go on and on about her baby as if no one had ever had one before.”
Arthur looked at her warmly. “Don’t apologize! It’s all very interesting! I look forward to seeing Master Peter. I have to warn you, though, that there are some old women on the staff who will probably spoil him beyond all redemption.”
“That sounds lovely,” Julia said. “As far as I’m concerned, no one can make too much of a fuss over Peter.”
“Well, then, it’s settled. I’ll call you and we’ll arrange the date.”
“It’s so thoughtful of you, Arthur. I can hardly believe it. Thank you!”
Remembering her grandmother and her own old nanny, Julia began to tear up, and she sought to change the subject. “Oh,” she said, “there’s Holly’s father, Graham Edwards. Do you know any of his movies?”
The minister was a youngish man with a closely trimmed beard and an annoyingly familiar manner. In his homily, he went for the laughs a few too many times. But his spirit, at least, conformed to that of the congregation. Its members had an air of particular delight that one does not find at all weddings. Holly and Peter were so obviously in love, and their match seemed so right, that no one could remain unaffected by the joy of the occasion; moreover, all
the difficult, ill-willed people who of necessity are invited to first marriages were absent here, so everyone extravagantly wished the couple well.
At the appropriate moment both Holly and Peter said “I will.” There were hymns and readings. Holly and Peter repeated their vows. The minister, grinning dopily, nodded to the pair. They closed their eyes and kissed. This lasted a long time and the congregation cheered and laughed. Their eyes open, the new husband and wife laughed, too.
Epilogue
Maggie O’Sullivan had just taken a shower, and with a towel around her she crept as quietly as she could through her roommate’s bedroom, which lay between Maggie’s room and the bath. It was a Sunday morning, and the roommate was in bed with a man whom Maggie had never seen before. A tricolor tattoo covered his upper back. Once in her own room, Maggie began to get dressed. She was a big girl, tall with broad shoulders and hips and a large bosom, and she had long, wavy, rust-colored hair, which she could feel sticking to her back. Freckles, a lighter shade of rust, covered her chest. She put on a V-neck T-shirt, flipping her hair out, and a pair of jeans.
Maggie was hungry, and she made some coffee and toasted a bagel, on which she spread “light” cream cheese. She drank her coffee and ate her bagel at the small, scarred wooden table in her bedroom, which also served as the dining room and the living room. She had started out in Manhattan with several girls paying an astronomical rent for a loft in a very depressing part of town, and she couldn’t quite believe that after that arrangement came to an end the best she could do was to share a one-bedroom apartment deep into Brooklyn. The neighborhood was quiet and friendly, and relatively safe, and her apartment had a lot of light. But it was so far from Manhattan, and the whole point, after college, had been to live in Manhattan. Now she sometimes felt as if she were no better off than if she had gone back to New Jersey. (No! That was definitely not true!) People in her neighborhood talked about taking the “train” into “the city” and she had heard of old ladies who had never been there in their lives! She suspected that if she got a job out where she lived, the filament connecting her to Manhattan would be cut, and she might lose any contact with it whatsoever.
After college she really hadn’t known what she wanted to do. She had gotten a degree in drama and, nominally, she was becoming an actress. Largely supported by her parents, she came to the city and lived in the loft with a friend and three girls she didn’t know, took some acting classes, and mostly worked as an office temp, although she did have a job for a while behind the counter at a take-out gourmet soup place. Because it was in a hip, artsy neighborhood and because it was gourmet soup, it didn’t feel the same as working behind the counter at a regular take-out place.
Naturally, what Maggie wanted to do, in the short term at least, more than taking acting classes and working as a temp, was to go out at night. She didn’t have enough money to go out every night, but she didn’t have so little money that it was unthinkable to go out at all. So despite her resolutions to limit her socializing to the weekends, she succumbed to temptation most nights of the week, spent more than she could afford, often arrived at work with a hangover, and lacked energy in her classes. She had fallen in love a couple of times, and, except for the phone calls to her parents asking for money and the visits home during which, like a stench, the question of how she justified her life hung in the air, it was all a lot of fun. She managed to placate her parents, and herself, with one story after another of a job at a magazine she was hoping to get, or another class she was going to take, or a non-Equity showcase that, through a connection, she might be cast in.
But she had graduated three years ago, and unbearable pressure was building on her to make some kind of plausible plan and then show evidence of carrying it out. She was certainly no further down any path now than she had been when she arrived, and, to add insult to injury, her nightlife was logistically more difficult to sustain, even though lots of her friends lived in Brooklyn, too. Nothing had come together for her, and she lived each day with a creeping sense of panic about her future.
The best idea she had was to go to graduate school in photography and get an MFA. She had taken photography courses in college and had liked them and had done well (although it was difficult to say how much it meant to get an A from the professor, a gregarious, big-bellied man in his fifties who liked his wine and his pot, since he gave one to everybody). Sometimes on a weekend she would take pictures or go to photography shows at galleries, although if she honestly reckoned up the times she had really done each of these things the number barely reached half a dozen. Without too much effort, though, she could convince herself that photography was a passion or, anyway, could really become a passion if she got deeply into it, and that getting an MFA was a serious pursuit. Lurking on the edge of her awareness was the belief that a graduate program would be an oasis that would, for a couple of years, provide her with a reason to exist—“I’m getting my master’s”—and was something that her parents could be convinced to pay for while also supporting her, or mostly supporting her. It was painful, actually, to imagine the way her parents would try to be encouraging and proud when they were so obviously dubious about the value of an MFA in photography and also shocked at the cost, and within her breast Maggie felt guilty for taking advantage of them. And her grandparents, what would they think? Two of them had never gone to college, and her mother’s father had paid his way by hauling goods around a warehouse and winning money at cards. What would they think of someone paying thousands of dollars to be taught how to take pictures? But she tried to keep these thoughts at bay, and when she failed, she could still successfully argue to herself that this really was something she wanted to do and that the degree was completely legitimate. After all, why would the universities offer it if it were not? The only problem was that it seemed quite daunting to fill out the applications, put together a portfolio, and collect the letters of recommendation.
At some level of consciousness Maggie was turning over these thoughts all day and all night long. Still, there was another subject that preoccupied her even more. A year and a half after she had come to New York something had happened that no one knew about, except her two best friends. Maggie had become involved with a man, a writer, who had been several years older than she. He had also been married.
His name was Jonathan Speedwell. One day, after she had been working at the gourmet soup place for a few weeks, he came in at lunchtime. From then on, Maggie would see him almost every day that she worked there. She had noticed him the first time because he was very, very good-looking. He was tall and thin, with curly brown hair and blue eyes and fair skin. She remembered his sensitive-looking fingers when he took the soup container from her. When he came in, he usually wore something kind of stylish, a purple scarf or a striped shirt of a type she was not familiar with (she learned later that they came from England).
Jonathan was always polite and friendly, but at first he would only smile at her and say hello. Then she caught him looking at her a few times, and when their eyes met he would quickly turn his away. Eventually, they began to chat, small talk: the weather or “What, out of chicken gumbo, again?” or “I noticed you weren’t working last week.” Jonathan was shy and often looked down or away when they spoke, but when he did look directly at her, his eyes seemed full of meaning. Finally, he had asked her if she would like to get some coffee later, and in time, having coffee led to having a drink, and having a drink led to having dinner.
The very first time they had had coffee, Jonathan mentioned his wife, Holly. It was not a big deal. They had been talking about Los Angeles, which Maggie had recently visited. “My wife,” he said, “Holly—you’d really like her—her father has lived out there for years, and she loves it and she hates it.” Jonathan had continued to mention Holly from time to time, whenever doing so seemed to flow naturally from the conversation.
It had not taken very much time before the high point of Maggie’s life became her visits with Jonathan. As lunchtime approa
ched at the shop, she would find herself swallowing hard as she wondered if she would see him that day. If they had a plan to meet, her heart would race as the appointed hour approached. He was funny, and he would listen to her so intently as she talked about her life or her ideas about things. Sometimes she felt embarrassed when she talked so much more than he did. She mentioned that once and he smiled, touched her arm, and said, “Don’t worry, your thoughts are a lot more interesting than mine, especially to me. I’ve heard mine a million times.” So she talked more. She didn’t quite know what it was, but she was so relaxed that she kept telling him everything. And beyond that, he was so good-looking, and you could tell that he was slim but strong. And he was a writer! She hadn’t heard of him, but she looked him up right after he told her what he did and discovered that even if they hadn’t sold a lot, his two books were very well regarded. She read them and loved them and reread them; they left her in tears.
Early one evening, they were sitting at the bar of a place that had become sort of their regular hangout. They had been talking about one thing or another, but Jonathan had seemed to have his mind on something, and he was looking at her in a particularly yearning way. They fell silent for a while, and he sipped his beer, and then stared at the glass, holding it with both hands.
Finally, he spoke, without looking at Maggie. “You … you know what’s happening, don’t you?” he said.
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