A Wedding in December

by Anita Shreve

  "Was he that good?" she asked.

  "Oh yes," Harrison said, running his fingers along the edge of a mahogany console table.

  "Were you that good?"

  "No. I only looked good because of Stephen. The two of us could turn a double play better than anyone in the league. But it was all Stephen — the way he'd snag the ball and whip around midair and rocket it to me. The only other player I've ever seen do it as well as Stephen was Nomar, actually."

  Nora sat in the desk chair. "It's all so . . ."

  "Sad?" Harrison asked.

  "That, yes, but more than that. Pointless."

  Yes, Harrison thought. Absolutely pointless. "When I think about Stephen," he said, "I worry about my own two boys."

  "They say it's worse now even than back then," Nora said.

  "The drinking, you mean."

  "We ... we had a group of boys here in town last year who went joyriding, skidded on the ice, and hit a telephone pole. One of them was decapitated. All six died."

  The image squeezed at Harrison. "It's a wonder any of us make it," he said quietly.

  "Enough," Nora said, standing. "It's almost three. I have to go." She moved toward the doorway and stood at its entrance. "Will you be all right until six-thirty?"

  "Of course," Harrison said, getting up from the chair and mov­ing to the door as well. "I brought some work with me. I might look for Agnes."

  He stood so close to Nora that he could smell her shampoo.

  "That night," she said.

  Harrison shook his head.

  "No. You're right." Nora touched Harrison with the flat of her palm in the slight hollow between his shoulder and his collar bone, a touch that Harrison experienced as if on naked skin. As soon as he registered the touch, however, it was gone, and Nora was again leading the way along the corridor. "I can't wait to see Rob," she was saying from somewhere miles ahead of him.

  Agnes unpacked the orange duffel bag, laying out her clothes on the bed. Jeans and a hand-knit sweater. A rose-colored suit for the cocktail party that evening. A blue wool dress she would wear to the wedding tomorrow. She sat at the edge of the bed and ate a PowerBar. She knew the inn served lunch — hadn't Nora said so? — but Agnes, on a tight budget, the budget made necessary by a modest salary from Kidd, had brought her own lunch, not know­ing if meals were included in Nora's generous offer to put up every­one in the wedding party. Agnes had not liked to ask.

  As she ate, she thought about the tour she had had earlier of the inn, of the sitting room, austere and yet inviting, of the splendid kitchen with its new appliances, of the corridors with their fresh white paint. Had Nora had a designer, or did the decor represent her own aesthetic? It was a kind of cleansing, Agnes thought, as if the inn had been put through a washer and the wringer had spit out something new. Yes, it was the newness — an entity with weight and texture — that so unnerved.

  But something else nagged at Agnes, a half thought she had had in the kitchen before she'd been interrupted. What was it? Though the kitchen was magnificent, something struck her as wrong. Agnes closed her eyes. Yes, that was it: the smell of meat. Delicious in it­self, but foreign to the kitchen of old. Carl had been a vegetarian, a purist. Agnes recalled with a shudder the bars of homemade soap, slimy and sandy at once, in the tiny bathroom at the end of the hall.

  The smell of meat in the kitchen. Carl Laski would turn over in his grave. Where was his grave, come to think of it?

  Agnes, who had arrived in her best school clothes, not knowing if shed immediately run into Jerry or Bill or Bridget, changed into the sweater and jeans and a pair of L.L.Bean boots, finished off the PowerBar, took a swig of water from a bottle provided by the inn, and slipped die gold key into her pocket. She hooked her backpack over her shoulder.

  At the desk in the lobby, she found a trail map for hikers. She paused for a moment on the front steps, studying the map and try­ing to orient herself. She was hot in her sweater but reluctant to re­turn to her room to change. Surely it would grow cooler as the afternoon progressed, and she might find herself in the shade of the hill. It was an extraordinary day, and she wanted to make the most of it. It was a novelty to be able to walk without the wind bit­ing at her face, as it nearly always did at Kidd in December.

  Agnes took off impatiently, anxious to exercise muscles that had tightened and complained during the long ride from Maine. She had an image of herself running up the side of the hill but found, as she went, that the path was steeper than it had first appeared. A gentle light sifted through the trees, the limbs creating a gauzy view of the inn and of the mountains in the distance. If Jim had come with her this weekend, he would not be with her on this hike. A contemplative man, he did not like to exercise. He could be cajoled into a walk, but he seldom seemed to enjoy it. Never, in Agnes's memory, had Jim initiated a walk or a hike — something a wife, but not a lover, might begin to nag about, might learn to despise.

  Agnes skirted a stone wall and followed the path, which grew steeper still. She was panting now, sweating inside her sweater (her own handiwork), and was cross with herself for not having worn layers, which she might have been able to peel off. Her un­suitable wardrobe was hardly her fault, though, was it? Who'd have predicted seventy-degree temperatures in December in New En­gland? She leaned against a tree trunk, needing to catch her breath. Sweat trickled down her neck and under her arms, and it occurred to her that she might have forgotten to put on deodorant this morning. If so, she'd ruin the sweater. One could never get the smell out, not entirely. She glanced about her for signs of other human beings, but knew from the utter stillness of the woods that she was alone. She lifted the sweater over her head.

  Immediately the sweat began to dry on her skin. She sat in her jeans and her bra on a rock, mildly tickled by the thought of herself half naked in the woods, slightly disconcerted by a narrow roll of fat hovering above the waistband of her jeans. She would have to increase her sit-ups from fifty to a hundred a day. She had a horror of Jim calling to arrange a rendezvous and Agnes finding herself overweight. If a woman had a man every day in her bed, Agnes wondered, was she then able to stop worrying about an extra pound or two?

  Tonight, someone would ask Agnes why she had never married, why she hadn't wanted children. Someone would assume, but not say, that she was a lesbian. It was bound to cross the mind. Never married. No observable boyfriend. Field hockey coach. Agnes had been asked these questions before, had even been the recipient of passes from other women (one on the Nova Scotia trip). The ques­tions, which Agnes used to try to dodge or dismiss, had lately begun to annoy her for their repeated assumptions. Agnes did not hunger for a child. Sometimes she wondered if this wasn't a failure of her imagination. She could no more picture herself with a child than she could with a horse.

  A slight breeze rose and passed across her skin and cotton bra. She put a hand to her chest and was reminded of how smooth and taut her skin was there, of how long it had been since it had been touched. More than a year. How many years, Agnes wondered, before her skin was no longer smooth but crepey in the cleavage, as she had noted on underdressed older women? It would be all lost then, this skin, this loveliness, a dismal thought that gave rise to an­other one. Did a woman who had been fully loved mind the loss of her youth less than a woman who had not?

  They'd all been together in Jim's class their senior year. Harrison and Nora and Rob and Jerry and Bill and Stephen. Not Bridget, who was a year behind them, the only junior in their circle of friends. Contemporary American literature was a class with a wait­ing list, and those who got in considered themselves privileged. They sat on sofas in Bloomfield Lounge, discussing Bellow and Kerouac and Ginsberg. Stephen, who seldom did the reading, had a gift for arguing a point. Nora, a true scholar, wrote papers she was sometimes asked to read aloud to the group. Agnes remembered Harrison as the thoughtful one; ideas and deft debate were Stephens forte. Rob kept up a barely audible running commentary on the commentary, amusing anyone lucky enough to sit next
to him, sometimes even Mr. Mitchell. Jerry, Agnes remembered, was always well prepared and brusque, occasionally resorting to ad hominem attacks when all else failed; yet just when you thought he'd gone too far, he would graciously concede the point and ask the one brilliant question that none of them had quite been able to formulate. And Mr. Mitchell (not yet Jim) would attempt to answer it, gently moving the conversation toward a kind of con­clusion, allowing them their intellectual theatrics. Beneath the pos­turing, real learning was going on. It was only later, when Agnes herself became a teacher, that she understood the quiet skill of his methods.

  It was November of their senior year, November 13 to be precise, a date Agnes had observed every year since as a kind of private an­niversary. Shed walked into Mr. Mitchell's office after school to argue a grade on a paper. She had not, during her years at Kidd, made a habit of harassing teachers (as some of the students had), and so she had thought herself perfectly justified in her assault. She went in ready for a battle and did not allow Mr. Mitchell a word until she was done. By the end, she was sputtering, red and blotchy in the face. Jim, sitting across an oak desk while she stood and de­livered, pushed his chair back and crossed his arms over his chest.

  "Miss O'Connor," he said, everyone "Miss" or "Mr." then, "that was the most cogent argument I've ever heard in favor of changing a grade. More cogent, I might add, than anything you have so far written for this class. I am impressed. So impressed that I will change the grade. On one condition."

  "Really?" Agnes asked, exhausted and slightly bewildered by her easy success.

  "I want you to promise me that you'll work yourself into a simi­lar state when marshaling your thoughts in writing."

  Agnes wondered if this was a trick. "Okay," she said.

  "Good," Mr. Mitchell said. "You'll write the paper over, and you'll get an A." He stood and gave his belt a little hitch. He put his hands on his hips. Agnes looked at his hips, saw the way his shirt billowed a bit over the belt, noticed as well the four or five inches of bare skin on his wrists where the man had rolled his sleeves, and she experienced desire. Pure. Unfamiliar. Uncorrupted. Her eyes rose to his face, to the blue irises she had not noted before. Agnes had been in this man's class twenty or thirty times, and she had never really looked at his face. Impossible.

  Mr. Mitchell, clearly puzzled by Agnes's demeanor, tilted his head. "Well," he said.

  Agnes could not move.

  "So then," he said, made uncomfortable now by Agnes's odd be­havior, "if I give you until next Wednesday, will that be enough time?

  Agnes nodded but made no move to pick up the paper she had set upon the desk with a snap in the middle of her argument.

  "Anything else?" he asked.

  Agnes tried to calculate his age. He was not old. Possibly thirty. She would find out. She could one day ask him where he'd gone to college — so much to learn about the man! — and what year hed graduated.

  "No," she said. "I'm just. . ."

  Mr. Mitchell waited for his student to finish her sentence.

  "Just what?" he asked in a gentle voice, dipping his head.

  (Later, Jim would tell Agnes that he thought the generosity of his gesture had unleashed in her a desire to unburden herself of teenage angst — that she might reveal a tortured home life, an al­tercation with a roommate, a love affair gone bad, none of which he felt equipped to deal with, none of which he wanted to hear.)

  "I've got to run," he said when Agnes didn't answer him.

  Agnes collected her paper from the desk. "Thank you," she said. "Wednesday is fine."

  "Good," he said, as though already congratulating himself for having successfully negotiated a tricky moment with a student.

  But Agnes knew differently.

  Leaning against a tree in the woods, remembering that day, Agnes realized she had to short-circuit the longing. If she didn't, she would cry, and she was not a lovely crier. Her eyes would vein up, and her lids would turn the color of uncooked bacon. No amount of makeup would disguise the mess. She put her sweater back on and took several deep breaths. She thought about the pa­pers she had not yet graded, about her bank balance, about the roll of fat over her jeans. She thought about the Halifax disaster, that comfortable place to which her mind lately traveled. She reached into her backpack for her notebook and pen.

  At dinner, Innes was seated across from Louise, a smaller woman than her sister. Louise had remarkable hazel eyes (yes, there was no other word for their color; Innes was a connoisseur of eye color), a fact that caused a slight dissonance, the actual Hazel having brown eyes. Did the Frasers regret their firstborn's name when Louise had come along? Or had they appreciated the little genetic joke?

  "We are so happy to have you," Louise said in a rush, her nervousness betrayed in a tightness about her mouth. "Though heaven knows there's no shortage of men about with the war on. Droves of them, in fact. Coming and going. Simply droves."

  An odd remark, Innes thought, begging the question of why Louise had remained unattached. Or perhaps Innes had got it wrong and Louise, too, had a ring. He could not just now see her hands.

  "Few with Mr. Finch's qualifications to be sure." This from Dr. Fraser, who was missing at drinks but prompt for dinner. He was a man with military bearing of his own, the high collar, dot­ted tie, and neatly brushed mustache a sort of uniform. Innes wished that he and Dr. Fraser had had a moment to speak before the meal, not only so that the apprentice could properly intro­duce himself but also because Innes had large gaps in his under­standing of his precise duties.

  "How was your journey?" Louise asked.

  "Cold, but remarkably easy," Innes replied, thinking that Louise would be prettier if her face relaxed, the nervousness in­herited from the mother, certainly not the father, who had shown himself throughout the meal to be taciturn, immune to the chattering of his younger daughter and his wife, a private moving picture show of wounds perhaps or of surgical instru­ments or of soldiers' faces preoccupying him instead. For the wounded and dead soldiers were coming in "in boatloads,"

  Innes was informed in one of Dr. Fraser's few pronouncements, a grim counterpart to Louise's "droves."

  As the liver and bacon were served, Mrs. Fraser spoke of a new house, away from Richmond, in a better neighborhood, Young Street, did Innes know it? No, he did not. Mrs. Fraser reg­istered her disappointment and added, in case Innes had missed the point, "where the better people are." Innes, of course, was not one of the better people, though he had prospects to recom­mend him, which Mrs. Fraser, the wife of a physician, knew only too well. Did Hazel, hearing this exchange, smile? Innes thought she did. He wondered if the circlet of diamonds was a gift from a grandmother. But almost immediately, the name Ed­ward was mentioned in close proximity to Hazel's, the coupling causing a frown on Louise's brow. So it was true, Innes thought. Hazel gone before a dozen sentences exchanged. Gone even be­fore his arrival. He was aware of the absurdity of his claim, en­tirely out of proportion to the length of time he had spent in her presence. She had given him nothing except, perhaps, for that half smile. She was a stranger.

  Innes's attraction, however, was visceral.

  "I inherited this house from my uncle," Mrs. Fraser said in another attempt to remove herself from Richmond. "He owned a sugar refinery."

  "Will you be here long, Mr. Finch?" Louise asked, passing him the bowl of root vegetables.

  "I'm to stay six months," he said with a question lobbed in Dr. Fraser's direction. Dr. Fraser did not respond.

  "Through Christmas then," Louise said. "Will you be here over Christmas, or will you have to return to your family? They are where?"

  "Cape Breton."

  "Too long a journey," Louise said.

  "My work might prevent a journey home at that time," Innes said carefully, embarrassed by Louise's question. Very likely, the Frasers, wishing to be alone over the holiday, would want him away for a few days. In truth, Innes could not afford the journey to Cape Breton.

  The elder Fraser
s ate with relish. Louise, eager to please, filled in all the gaps, her rapid speech more than just nervousness. Innes diagnosed mild hysteria. Louise's hair, light brown, had been cut short and waved at either side of her face.

  ""We would welcome Mr. Finch at Christmastime," Mrs. Fraser said politely, albeit a bit late.

  Innes imagined Hazel's fiancé. A man in uniform. A surgeon? An officer in France? Louise was speaking of a dance aboard a ship in the harbor and wondered aloud if Innes would like to go. Innes was reminded of his civilian suit, his one civilian suit that would not take itself aboard a ship full of naval officers in uniform.

  "Mr. Finch," Dr. Fraser said, rousing himself in the moments after the liver and bacon and before the pudding, "I have some papers I should like you to look over this evening. Meet me in the front hallway at nine-thirty in the morning. We will have a rigorous day. New wounds from France."

  The phrase, a low gas floating across the table, smothered conversation. The silence drew itself out, approaching unen­durable. Even the voluble Louise was quiet, though she glanced sideways at Hazel. A guess was confirmed. Hazel was engaged to an officer in France.

  "Fifteen ships lost last week," Dr. Fraser added, seemingly oblivious to the effects of his remarks. Perhaps the women of the table were used to them. "They say a man at the front has a three-month life expectancy. A horse, one month."

  Oddly, it was Hazel who broke the ghastly silence. "Do you play cards, Mr. Finch?"

  Innes Finch, as it happened, was rather good at cards. "Yes, I do," he said.

  "We'll play gin rummy," Louise said as they all stood. She moved to take Innes's arm. "We'll be a team, you and I, because Hazel is simply too good. Aren't you, Hazel? We'll have some cocoa and make an evening of it."

  The three returned to the sitting room where earlier drinks had been served. An electric lamp had been lit near a hexagonal table. The low light and the blackout curtains gave the impres­sion of a fortune-teller's parlor, and Innes had the bizarre sense that a seance was about to take place. He was reassured by the sight of a ball of yarn perched on the wide arm of a chair. Louise would be knitting socks for the war effort. Hazel, he was certain, would not.