Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  I poured myself some coffee. Posey said, "Mr. Cicero has given up all caffeinated beverages. Soon ice cream will be his only indulgence. I don't think I will be able to stand that. We Fair-weathers have always been leery of anyone too abstemious."

  "He still drinks, doesn't he?" I said.

  "Yes, of course," Posey said. "But that is not an indulgence. It's a social lubricant. Speaking of which. Does Waldo have a drinking problem these days?"

  "Waldo? He hardly drinks at all. I tell him that red wine is good for the arteries, that it's why the French live long and healthy lives, but he is indifferent to my pleas."

  "I do not ask this lightly," Posey said.

  "Do I take it he drank too much last night?"

  "He started off the evening so well, made a lovely speech about Dick and agriculture and Sydney as a flower, but then he just disintegrated. Lurched into his limericks. Now, I like limericks just as much as the next person, but it all depends on time and place. Last night was most assuredly not the time and place for Waldo's dirty limericks."

  "They were dirty?"

  "They were indeed," Posey said.

  "I didn't know anything about them," I said. I was miffed. Why hadn't he shared them with me beforehand? "Do you remember them?"

  "I should hope not," Posey said.

  "That's too bad," I said. "I really like his limericks. It's a mysterious talent, but a good one."

  Posey had a point to make, and she made it: "He was overserved."

  "So let's let him sleep this morning. To be on the safe side. But what about Sydney? I know nothing at all about Sydney."

  "Sydney is just as she should be. She will do wonders for Dick. She's already gotten him in a foursome at the club. And he's going to race in the midsummer regatta this year. He hasn't done that since he was thirteen."

  "Dick's a member?" Now I was speechless. Dick had never shown the slightest interest in joining the yacht club. To the extent that he expressed an opinion about anything, he considered the Bug Harbor Yacht Club to be archaic, badly managed, bigoted, unimaginative, and engaged in nefarious horticultural practices.

  "Since last week. Sydney's father was the commodore a while back, and her grandfather as well, I think. Now one of her brothers is the second or third flag officer."

  "I would have thought Dick was more likely to bite the head off a live python than to join the club."

  Just then, and not a moment too soon, Mr. Cicero, Ezra, and Henry walked in, breathless, letting the screen door slam behind them.

  "Mom! We got the best rocks," Henry said.

  "They have these long flat rocks, like tiny skateboards with no wheels," Ezra said. "They'll be perfect."

  "How's the cut, Ezra?" The butterfly bandages were stained and curling up at their edges. My fingers twitched to touch them, but I forbore.

  "Excellent. Couldn't be better."

  "He's a prince, is that young Ezra," Mr. Cicero said.

  "Just be careful, okay?"

  Posey said, "What did you do with all the rocks?"

  "Don't worry. The rocks are under control. We have the situation under control. Don't we, boys?"

  "We do indeed," Henry said.

  I went to find Waldo. His brother was getting married very soon, and there was much to be done.

  The Sweets had hired several Catamunk lobstermen and their boats to ferry guests over to Slow Island. People gathered at the yacht club and boarded the sturdy fishing boats (the Leda-G, Jolly Mon, and Mary-Q), incongruously fitted out with folding chairs on their decks. Slow Island was fifteen minutes, and a century, from the mainland.

  Inside the stone chapel built ninety years ago to honor a Sweet who'd gone down with the Titanic, I cried. Sydney was beautiful in her grandmother's gown. How an athletic young woman (the club tennis champion and a former all-American lacrosse player) could fit in that gown harking back to a corseted generation was mystifying, or miraculous. Where was Susie to wonder with me? Not here. She was in VerGroot, researching chicken breeds on the Internet. I wept as Dick, resplendent in his monkey suit, and Sydney, in silk and lace, made their simple vows. I was still crying when they dashed outside. Waldo handed me a handkerchief and did something with his eye that resembled a wink. But Waldo wasn't a winker.

  "Weddings always make me cry," I said.

  "They make everyone cry," Waldo said. "Except me."

  "It's not like that. I'm feeling sorry for myself. Here they are, full of love and hope, and here I am ... You just don't get it, do you?"

  "I get it, Al. I get it. Forgive me. I love you. With this ring I thee ... Oh, Al. I can be such a shit."

  "I know," I said.

  "But I'm your shit, honestly," he said. I almost swooned with believing him.

  Fairweathers, Sweets, and friends walked up from the chapel by the sea to the cottage. The sandy road swarmed with bridesmaids and flower girls. It wasn't a cottage at all but a rambling gray-shingled house with porches and verandas on every side, and a hexagonal tower with views of the cold Atlantic in every direction; it was all limbs and no torso. I anticipated flaking wicker chairs and abandoned paperback potboilers on the porches, then, inside, the comforting smell of rotting timber and mildewed books. Surely there would be warped jigsaw puzzles with views of the Alps, chipped duck decoys, and seashells giving up sand. Upstairs in the children's rooms, spongy old National Geographics and the missing puzzle pieces trapped in the gaps between the wide wooden planks.

  "Don't you think it's a little strange that you barely know this woman?" I said. Waldo was fiddling was his cuff link.

  "We have years to get to know her."

  "Who's that?" I pointed to a handsome man who had what must surely have been the best haircut in the state of Maine as well as a five o'clock shadow. He wore a dark suit and dark sunglasses.

  "A Secret Service agent," Waldo said. "Don't point."

  "You always say that. Seriously."

  "Seriously," Waldo said.

  "And pray tell, who is being protected here?" I said.

  "That's the whole point. We don't know."

  "Did you tell Dick about the mechanical harvester you made him?" I asked.

  "Did I tell him it was in pieces back in New York? No."

  All of a sudden it seemed I had missed more than a dinner. "Are you going to tell me what you said at the dinner last night?"

  Posey of the never-failing radar materialized and asked if I knew where the boys were. I didn't. I took the hint and went in search while she parsed the Sweet genealogy with Waldo and Pompey. Pompey Fairweather was Posey's late husband's brother. He lived even farther up the Maine coast than Posey.

  I wandered, air kissed and pecked club members to whom I'd been introduced countless times and still couldn't name. I found the boys behind the house with Mr. Cicero, next to a rusty wheelbarrow full of beach rocks. With admirable concentration they were placing the rocks on the ground. They appeared to have a plan.

  Mr. Cicero said, "It's going to be a cairn. In honor of the newlyweds."

  "I thought cairns were like gravestones. Somebody's going to be pretty upset."

  "Dear Alice, give us the benefit of the doubt. The boys and I are creating a thing of beauty to commemorate this day. Cairns are often used as trail markers."

  "Don't worry, Mom," Henry said. "It will be a thing of beauty."

  Of course it would. How could I have ever doubted them? Ezra looked pale and tired. I touched the now-fraying butterfly bandage with my fingertip. He said, "Mr. Cicero told those fruity flower girls that I got punched in a fight. He told them that the other boy is still in the hospital."

  "You didn't?" I said.

  Mr. Cicero nodded. "If anyone asks you what happened, tell them you're sworn to secrecy. Say you could tell them, but then you'd have to kill them."

  Ezra grinned weakly.

  Rounding the house, I almost slammed into a waiter balancing a tray of champagne glasses, shimmering vertical flutes of bubbles. He pressed one into my hand and floate
d off. It was delicious. And there was more of it. Perhaps there was an as-yet-undiscovered saint in the kitchen, turning salt water into champagne.

  I longed to find Waldo. Was he still with Posey? I thought: Sheila—no, Shirley—probably has a mother too. They all have mothers. No, not all.

  I drank more champagne. I stood at the edge of the lawn beside a vast hedge of rhododendrons and watched the black rocks that jutted up from the dark blue ocean.

  "On a day like today it's hard to give credence to the terrible northeasters that roil up the waves and batter this shore." It was the Secret Service man.

  "Really?" I said. I thought then that I should stop drinking champagne. But it went down so easily, more like the idea of itself than the reality.

  He showed a vast number of teeth. They sparkled in the sunshine. "Or maybe you think that's just a line?"

  "I was thinking about the champagne."

  "Red wine is much better for you. The polyphenols are an antioxidant."

  "I was just saying the same thing. About red wine, not the polyphenols."

  "Some reports say that the resveratrol in the grape skin acts like estrogen."

  "Amazing." I extended my hand. "I'm Alice Fairweather. Dick is my husband's brother." Mr. Secret Service regarded my hand quizzically. I looked down; were my fingernails dirty? Then he took it.

  "How nice to meet you," he said. "I'm Harold Sweet. Sydney is my cousin."

  "You're Harold? The—?"

  "That would be me," he said.

  "But I thought—?"

  "That I would be conveniently absent for this event? Not to worry. Nothing could make me miss a celebration of this stature in my personal hierarchy of emotional upsets," he said. He had not yet released my hand. "I live for trauma, and trauma lives for me. And now I can be doubly glad to have traveled across the continent to witness the nuptials."

  "What about Jeopardy!? I'm a Jeopardy! fan myself."

  "I wouldn't describe myself as a fan," he said. "Oh, no. Rather, it was my intention to clean their clocks and reverse the damage that has been done to me and my financial well-being by the manipulative harpies who took advantage of a senile old man and caused my grandfather to change his will."

  "So what happened? Why aren't you in Los Angeles?"

  "If the truth ever emerges, it will be a nationwide scandal," he said.

  "The truth about what?"

  "The last game. Yesterday's game. I threw the game and then took the redeye to get here for the wedding."

  "You threw a game of Jeopardy!? How?"

  "The same way people have thrown games since the first Olympics. I lost. I gave the wrong answer. The wrong question." His grin curled across his face like a garter snake.

  The sun was still shining, and the ocean was still blue. But something in the air had changed, and it wasn't the temperature. Suited men and hatted ladies continued to form knots of conversation and then disperse. Where had all the flower girls gone? "I am getting hungry," I said. "I've had quite a bit of champagne. When do you think we will see any real food?" When I looked straight ahead, things were crystal clear, but the perimeter was fuzzy. The perimeter of my vision was where things were slipping off the edge, into deep water.

  "I take it you have not been warned about the Sweet indifference to taste buds. Or lack of taste buds. It used to be recessive, but now it's a dominant gene."

  "Are you saying you're not hungry?" I said, unable just then to imagine a condition that did not include an insistent appetite.

  "You remind me so much of Sydney," Harold said.

  "Take my word for it," I said. "I am nothing like Sydney."

  Harold said, "You don't even know her. I have it on good authority that you never met her before today. Have some more champagne." Harold's arm shot out to retrieve a flute from a passing tray.

  "I think I should eat something first," I said. "This champagne is lovely."

  "Are you a champagne expert?" he said. "And you really do remind me of Sydney."

  My stomach was growling and my head was spinning. I was lucky to be upright. And where, oh, where was my Waldo? Was food imminent? Ezra and Henry were coming round from behind the house. Ezra was pale as a bleached seashell, and one of the butterflies had come off. Henry was pink cheeked and giddy. I saw a champagne glass in his hand. "Uh-oh," I said. "That's my Henry."

  "How old is this Henry?"

  "He's eight. I have to go see him."

  "Shall I find out about the food?"

  "Oh my God," I said. "That would be fantastic. Yes, thank you." If he found food, I would find him less objectionable. I would encourage him to return to Jeopardy! and seek his fortune.

  Waldo reached Henry before I did. "Where have you been?" I whispered. "I met the cousin Harold. He's the Secret Service man. He's not that bad."

  "I've been here. Where have you been?" Waldo said. "Lay off the champignons, Henry."

  "That would be a mushroom, Dad."

  I felt Ezra's forehead. It wasn't feverish. Far from it. It was cold and clammy. Shit, I thought. Ezra was always intense and completely wrapped up in the project at hand. He never perceived the treacherous exhaustion looming just ahead, and so he always hit it head-on, and crumpled. Ezra was like a morning glory petal or a spider web, a thing of nature that was beautiful and vulnerable to every darkening sky or passing wind. What kind of mother drinks champagne on the lawn with a black sheep while her ashen son builds a cairn out back? This was a Grade B Bad Mother Moment—bad but not irredeemable.

  "We're going to go inside for a bit," I told Ezra. "So you can rest."

  "But the cairn! Mr. Cicero wants to show Uncle Dick and Aunt Sydney the cairn," Ezra said.

  Waldo said, "You're already calling her aunt?"

  "Henry and I decided we would."

  "Henry will come get you if anything important happens," I said. "Won't you, Henry? Ezra needs to rest. I don't want his cut to get inflamed or infected."

  Ezra insisted, "I feel completely fine, Mom."

  "Humor me, Ez," I said. "It's just for a few minutes."

  That was another thing about Ezra: he acquiesced so easily.

  There was no one inside to ask if it would be all right for us to recline on one of the three capacious, threadbare sofas. Behind the screen door was a roaring silence. Absent the duck decoys, the dim interior was eerily as I had imagined. Instead of ducks, there were stuffed fish mounted on wooden plaques. Dead stuffed fish girded the whole of the living room, which was almost the entire first floor. Through an open doorway I could see the kitchen at the back of the house, and beside it was the stairway leading up. There must have been thirty or forty of those fish. The swordfish and sailfish I recognized. And the wide-mouthed bass and striped bass. But what were all the others? Those long-dead fins undulated against the wall. It was time for some strong coffee. These fish had been there a long time. Tired bits of scales were flaking off, and several were missing their eyeballs. Which, frankly, was better than the eyes that stared at me. A long time ago some Sweet had been a passionate fisherman. And fully employed his taxidermist.

  Ezra lay down on the couch and I stroked his forehead. In about two minutes, he was asleep.

  I would have slept also, but each time I closed my eyes the room started spinning. So I sat very still and decided that soon I would get myself a large glass of water. I should have been drinking water all along. One of Mami's great life lessons was that the only way to stay upright at a wedding was to drink one full glass of water for every glass of champagne. Her lessons were ignored at my peril. Today was a case in point.

  But my eyelids kept drooping, and Ezra slumbered on. His forehead was a little less cold and a little drier.

  "I can't believe you lied to me. About that. After everything." The voice came from the back of the house, from the kitchen. I needed water—big-time—but I didn't move from my chair.

  "You're hysterical. No one lied about anything." Another female voice.

  "You said he wouldn't be
here. You promised he wouldn't be here. And he is here. I call that lying."

  "I couldn't stop him from coming. What was I supposed to do? Hijack the plane?"

  "After fucking up? You could have warned me he was coming."

  "Oh, please. Don't talk to me about fucking up. You're the one who screwed him in the first place."

  Ezra still slept. Or so I thought. His legs and arms quivered and stretched as if toward something. Nothing caught the attention of a small boy quite like an adult cursing. But he slumbered on and rolled over onto his other side. I held my breath and watched. His right cheek bore the imprint of the needlepoint pillow.

  There was no question now of barging into the kitchen for a glass of water.

  Then came the scratchy tinkle of breaking glass, not much glass, but definitely broken. "Oh, fuck. Don't remind me. The fucker."

  "Just calm down."

  "I wouldn't have come if I'd known."

  "Calm down. You're overreacting. No one here even knows about you two, and he's not about to bring it up."

  "Sydney knows."

  "Sydney's busy getting married. She didn't want to see him any more than you did."

  "He never abandoned her in a bedbug-infested Mexican hotel. He never gave all her clothes to the local tart. He never gave her—"

  "You have got to calm down. Nobody's disputing he's a shit. And you have no idea what kind of diseases he gave her."

  "The worst thing she ever caught was cold."

  They must have been standing just outside of my line of vision, in some part of the kitchen I could only imagine. Where was Posey when I needed her? My mouth was as dry as yesterday's toast and my stomach was growling louder than ever. But my head had stopped spinning and that was a good thing.

  "Shit. Shit. Shit. How much longer will this thing go on?"

  "God knows. Sooner or later they'll have to feed us. Although knowing Hammy, I'm surprised we didn't have to bring bag lunches."

  I should have spoken up the instant I'd heard a voice, back when I could have made some concerned reference to my sleeping child. I should have done anything but sit there inert as a stuffed fish.