Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by Ed Tarkington

  “So,” he said. “Where’s Mrs. Culver, son?”

  “In there,” I said, pointing in the direction of the living room. He started toward the door.

  “They’re praying,” I said.

  “I’m sure the Good Lord will pardon the interruption,” Culver replied.

  When we entered the room, we found the women in a circle of clasped hands around the glass-top coffee table. Miss Anita, it seemed, was receiving the “gift of tongues.” The sounds were soft and labial—almost musical. Miss Anita swayed back and forth in her position on the couch, her lips parted in a thin smile, her head tilted back. The other women held on to each other, heads bowed, brows furrowed in deep concentration.

  I had seen Miss Anita receive the gift before and so was not alarmed; in fact, I had never been particularly stirred by these scenes, having been instructed years before by Paul that Miss Anita was a “kook” who put on a “carny fortune-teller’s act” to satisfy what he called her “guru complex.” Brad Culver, on the other hand, was clearly unprepared for what he was walking in on, and was a little too loosened by the scotch to contain himself.

  “What in blazes are you people doing?” he barked.

  Miss Anita’s eyes opened with a start. The murmuring ceased; all at once the women came back to awareness, squinting and blinking as if they were waking from a deep sleep.

  “Brad!” Jane Culver exclaimed, wiping the stains of her tears from her dampened cheeks.

  “Hello,” Miss Anita said. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “I’m so sorry,” my mother said, rising to her feet. “Brad, this is Miss Anita Holt.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Miss Anita said, extending her hand.

  “Likewise,” Culver said, recovering himself. “Please excuse me. I’ve just never seen anything like that before.”

  When Brad Culver took her hand, a flicker of panic came across Miss Anita’s eyes. The color drained out of her face. Her warm society matron’s smile went slack. Her whole body seemed to tremble slightly, as if she were being charged with electricity. She was seeing something.

  Brad Culver stared at her, flummoxed. I wondered whether Miss Anita had fallen into a trance. Abruptly her eyes lifted to meet Brad Culver’s. She pulled her hand back as if she had been bitten by a snake.

  “I beg your pardon,” Miss Anita whispered.

  “Are you OK, Miss Anita?” my mother asked.

  “I’m feeling a bit faint, honey,” she said. “Do you mind if I sit?”

  “Please,” Culver said. “Let me help you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, retreating from Culver to my mother, who helped her back to the couch.

  “That must have been a bit of an aftershock,” Miss Anita said.

  Mrs. Culver scowled at her husband. The other women looked on, fidgeting with discomfort. Whether they felt more embarrassed for Brad Culver or for themselves I could not say.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you,” Brad Culver said.

  “No, no, dear,” Miss Anita said. “Forgive me. I’m just an old woman, prone to spells.”

  Culver stared around the room, shamefaced. The vehemence in his wife’s eyes had drained the vinegar right out of him.

  “I thought you’d be home by now, honey,” he said. “We’ve got a lot to take care of.”

  “I needed some advice,” Mrs. Culver curtly replied.

  “I thought we agreed we wouldn’t discuss this with anyone,” Culver said.

  “You decided,” she said. “We didn’t agree.”

  The other women looked around at each other, smiling the way polite women smile when confronted with two people making a scene of themselves.

  “I think we’ve troubled these nice ladies enough with our problems,” Culver said.

  “It’s no trouble,” Miss Anita said. “No trouble at all.”

  Culver shot an angry look at Miss Anita. His face darkened. For a moment I thought he was going to tell her to shut the hell up, or something of the sort.

  “Brad’s right,” Mrs. Culver said. “There are a million things left to do before tonight. Alice, Miss Anita, I’m very, very sorry.”

  “You’ve nothing to apologize for, darling,” Miss Anita murmured.

  “Richard, will you please see Mr. and Mrs. Culver out?” my mother said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  I led them out into the hallway and held the door for them as they passed. I heard the living room door close behind me.

  “Good afternoon, Richard,” Mrs. Culver said.

  “See you around the barn, sport,” said Brad Culver.

  “Bye,” I replied.

  The Culvers walked out to their cars. They stopped for a moment and exchanged some tense words before parting and hurrying to their matching Mercedes sedans. Just as hastily they sped off down the driveway. When they were gone, I crept back and resumed my position by the door to the living room.

  “Was it clear?” Kiki Baumberger asked. “Can you describe it?”

  “Did it happen when you touched his hand, or before?” Rosa Lee Baldwin asked.

  “Will it happen soon?” asked Laura Hearne.

  “Hush,” I heard my mother say. “Can’t you see she’s feeling faint?”

  There was a pause, followed by the sound of Miss Anita’s voice.

  “I will never speak of what I saw,” she said, “unless it comes to pass.”

  11

  BY THE TIME WE all sat down at the dinner table, the Old Man had heard all about Jane Culver’s visit to the Bible study, Brad Culver’s intrusion, and Miss Anita’s bizarre reaction to him. The Old Man’s immediate thought, naturally, was of Paul.

  “New Mexico, you say? What part? We tried there, years ago. Maybe I should try again.”

  “Paul is not the main concern at the moment, Dick,” my mother said.

  “He is for me,” the Old Man said.

  “Stop thinking of yourself,” my mother said, “and think about that poor girl.”

  “Where is this story coming from anyway?” the Old Man asked.

  “Jane wouldn’t say,” my mother said. “A ‘reliable source’ was all she would admit to. It must be that Patricia. She’s been buttering poor Leigh up for months, but I always felt there was something cold in her.”

  I concentrated on my dinner plate, wondering whether I looked as guilty as I felt.

  “Paul and Leigh,” my mother said. “Married! Can you believe it?”

  “It doesn’t sound like anything legally binding,” the Old Man said.

  “I know. It’s just the thought of it. And what happened after! Poor child. That Prentiss Bowman really is a monster, isn’t he?”

  “You don’t know any of that is true,” the Old Man said sharply. “Don’t you dare pass it around any further than you already have.”

  “I’m just telling you what I was told, right here in your own house by your new business partner’s wife.”

  “Obviously that’s why he came here,” the Old Man said. “To tell her the same thing I’m telling you—to keep her goddamned mouth shut about it!”

  His voice had risen in pitch. My mother sat silent for a moment, furious but also chastened.

  “What if it is true?” she asked. “Could you have done something like that to your child? To your daughter?”

  My eyes rose from the plate to find the Old Man staring at me.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Love can make people do terrible things.”

  I COULDN’T REACH PATRICIA. She was off at the rehearsal dinner, and then at the after-party, held under an illuminated tent on the front lawn at Twin Oaks. I snuck out into the field, hoping Patricia might anticipate that I was waiting for her and slip away to meet me there. The party went on into the late hours of the evening; eventually I gave up and went back inside to bed.

  It was almost noon before I woke. I spent the day in Paul’s room, pretending to be sick, hoping my parents would spare me the ordeal of having to watch Leigh walk dow
n the aisle, knowing that, thanks to me, many if not all of the people there would know her dark secret. Bless her heart, they might say, which was just the southern way of excusing oneself for making a trivial diversion out of another person’s misery.

  I was beginning to think I might escape when, around four thirty, I rolled over to find my father standing in the frame of the door.

  “Time to get up,” he said.

  “I’m not feeling any better,” I said.

  “I paid sixty bucks to rent that tuxedo,” he said, gesturing to the black plastic suit bag hanging from the knob on the closet door.

  “I honestly don’t think I can.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest.

  “I think there’s a rule,” he slowly said, “that if you invite yourself to a wedding, you have to show up.”

  Truth be told, even before I potentially wrecked the whole thing with my incontinent mouth, I had never really wanted to go; I was just trying to get a rise out of Leigh. I never considered actually having to attend.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I just feel too sick.”

  “We all feel a little sick today,” he said. “Now get up.”

  “But Dad,” I pleaded, “I’ve got a headache!”

  He stepped into the room and leaned down toward me, so that I could smell his breath, which was soured with whiskey.

  “You’re going,” he said. “You’re going if I have to drag you by your ear.”

  BLACK WAS THE COLOR of the season: the men in tuxedos, the women an army of black dresses—A-line, scoop-neck, spaghetti-strap, full-length, cut at the knee, tastefully slit or sequined, with touches of white and red and orange and blue and a few striped or earth-toned deviants. They lined up in their blackness, a coven with pearls and brooches, diamond earrings and charm bracelets, frosted hair and face-lifts, pink lips and designer bags.

  The setting sun backlit the lingering swaths of fall color in the oaks and dogwoods bordering the long, quiet avenue of stucco, brick, and Tudor paneling. The air was still unseasonably warm. Tiki torches lined the sidewalk path from the sign that read EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE HOLY COMFORTER, EST. 1803, past the boxwood hedges and over a hopscotch game scrawled onto the sidewalk in pink chalk, down to the enormous white tent in front of the Bowman residence, just a block away from the church.

  When we reached the doors to the sanctuary, one of the groomsmen extended his arm to my mother.

  “Bride’s side or groom’s?” he asked.

  My mother looked back at us. The Old Man shrugged.

  “Groom’s,” my mother said.

  The sanctuary was full by the time the bridesmaids appeared at the back of the hall in moss-green sleeveless satin gowns with black sashes tied in the back into rather funereal-looking bows. Jane Culver was escorted to her seat, wearing a peach Chanel suit and a mask of polite restraint. The groomsmen marched out of step down to the foot of the altar, arms swinging. The organ murmured “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Father Cannon emerged from his chambers.

  I became acutely aware of the heat enveloping and emanating from hundreds of bodies in layers of black wool, cotton, and starch. Handkerchiefs dabbed brows; dry throats swallowed. The peals of the organ lingered in the stifling air.

  Charles and Brad Culver emerged from the choir room door. The groomsmen lined up beside them, shoulders back, arms hanging at the side. Maybe the whole business had blown over harmlessly, I thought. Everything seemed to be proceeding as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

  The bridesmaids rustled down the aisle in their stiff dresses, each of them wearing an awkward smile. The last of them was Patricia—the maid of honor. How had this escaped me? The irony was too cruel to be believed.

  I had never even seen Patricia in a dress before. She never wore heels—only boots or tennis shoes. In the green dress, her athletic body looked ungainly; her shoulders seemed milky and thick, thanks to the visible tan lines at her neck and above her elbows. Her face was heavily made up and her hair styled into a French braid that might have seemed beautiful were it not so disarming to see her wearing any sort of makeup other than pale lip gloss. As she drew closer to us, I looked down at the floor.

  When Patricia reached the foot of the steps below the altar, the music ceased. A hush fell over the congregation. A moment later, the organ exploded in a cacophony of notes at once sonorous and dissonant. From the balcony, a trumpeter blew the melody of “Ode to Joy.”

  Leigh appeared at the sanctuary door in her mother’s wedding gown. Next to her stood Prentiss Bowman, tall and lean in his white tie and tailcoat, smiling in such a way that he seemed to be scowling instead. Leigh’s eyes took in the stares. I noticed a faint twitching in her jaw at the edge of her lovely mouth. The music bounced around the hall in rolling torrents. A little girl in a pink dress standing on a pew next to us clapped her hands over her ears.

  Leigh and Judge Bowman reached the altar precisely as the organist played the last note of the song. Its echo mingled with the sound of shifting bodies reaching for the Book of Common Prayer.

  “Who gives this woman . . . ?” asked Father Cannon.

  “I do,” Judge Bowman replied.

  He gave Leigh a brusque kiss on the cheek and retreated to his place on the first pew. Father Cannon looked out to the congregation.

  “Into this holy union Leigh and Charles now come to be joined. If any of you can show just cause why they may not lawfully be married, speak now; or else for ever hold your peace.”

  An excruciating silence followed. Glancing around, I realized that a number of people in the congregation were staring at me and my mother and the Old Man. I wondered whether they were hoping, as I still was, that this would be the moment when Paul returned.

  A voice from near the rear of the sanctuary broke the silence. Heads swiveled; a few people even gasped.

  “Mommy,” the voice said, “is that God?”

  Leigh and Charles looked back. Again, the voice came, louder this time—a deep little boy’s voice, almost raspy, like a smoker’s.

  “You told me God was going to be here,” said the child. “That’s not God. God has a BEARD.”

  Laughter rippled across the sanctuary. The mother snatched up the young theologian and whisked him out the door into the narthex. As the white door slowly closed and came to a rest behind her, the laughter rose in pitch and intensity. People grinned with naked relief, as if everyone in the room had awoken simultaneously from a terrible dream.

  “Let us pray,” said the priest.

  The room quieted. Heads bowed, we listened as Father Cannon recited the words, so familiar as to be almost meaningless. No one was thinking about the prayer—we were all basking in the euphoria of disaster averted. In retrospect, it was the kind of relief that begs for swift and vicious comeuppance.

  Moments later, a loud thud near the altar interrupted the priest’s recitation. We all opened our eyes and looked around to see who had fainted.

  Then the screaming began.

  It was an ungodly sound: hell-bent, bellowing shrieks, higher and higher, bouncing off the walls, off the Tiffany windows, off Moses and Isaiah and Jesus with his hand over his heart, louder and louder, “My God why are you doing this why is this happening God help me stop it stop it stop it . . .”

  Dumbstruck, Father Cannon could do nothing but gape at what was happening in front of him, his hands limply clutching his prayer book. Another thud echoed through the hall. One of the groomsmen, we later learned, had locked his knees and fainted, falling forward onto his face and breaking his nose, crimson torrents billowing onto his starched white tuxedo shirt and about half of the first row of Cabell cousins and aunts and uncles.

  A pediatrician near the front raced forward. He motioned to Prentiss Bowman and another man I didn’t recognize, sitting behind him. The three of them lifted a seizing, shaking Leigh Bowman, eyes rolled up into her head, flecks of foam pasting strands of blond hair to the corners of her mouth, her two front teeth pinching into her lip
, a trace of red on her chin. The mass of them tumbled out a side door at the front of the sanctuary, into the darkness. The door closed silently behind them.

  Eyes flashed around the room. The stuffiness of too many bodies pressed into such a small space seemed to give way. We were all suddenly alert and awake, glancing around at each other.

  Father Cannon stared feebly out at the openmouthed faces before him, all of them waiting to be told what to do. The look on his face suggested that he was hoping for some direction himself. So, naturally, he did what everyone does when thoroughly bewildered and terrified.

  “Let us pray,” he said.

  The organist began playing a soft, melodic arrangement, punctuated by the click and thud of kneelers dropping to the floor on the backs of the pews. Shoulders dropped as congregants slid forward off their seats. Without thinking, I lurched forward, elbows on the pew in front of me, head bowed, eyes clenched shut.

  I opened my eyes and looked back at the Old Man. His hands gripped the seat beneath him. His eyes were open, his wet teeth clenched between his parted lips. The liver spots forming on the high crown of his head beneath his thinning hair stood out in dark relief. Vertigo, I thought. The old inner ear playing tricks on him. I reached back and placed a hand on his knee. His head jerked slightly, startled. He stared at me, his eyes red-rimmed and hollow.

  I looked back to the altar and the stained glass windows at the front of the church. The Culvers were all still there: Patricia, her parents, even Charles. None of them had left with Leigh. She was alone out there with her asshole father and the doctor and the fool with the broken nose.

  While the rest of us prayed, the Culvers conferred with the priest. The groomsmen and the bridesmaids exchanged furtive, anxious words. I stared at the back of Patricia’s head, hoping she would turn so I could see the look on her face. When at last the music ended, Father Cannon resumed his position before the altar.

  “Obviously this is all very out of the ordinary,” he said. “But the best thing we can do is to lend support to the families and share our best wishes through fellowship. I hope you will all be able to join them at the reception.”