A Wedding in December

by Anita Shreve

  A man jostled Innes's elbow. "We are here on a trip," he said.

  "You live in Toronto still," she said.

  "At the same address. Yes."

  "I stopped writing."

  "She wouldn't allow me to read the letters to her," Innes said.

  Innes moved Hazel out of the path of a cyclist. He let his hand linger on her arm. "Is it always this crowded?" he asked.

  "This time of year, it is."

  She looked up at him from underneath the brim of her hat. He saw that she was self-sufficient. Time or experience had done that.

  "I have a room," Hazel said.

  Innes was astonished at the bold invitation. And then he was not. They couldn't stand on the street corner.

  "You live here?" he asked. "In the city?"

  "It's rather far uptown."

  "Should we take a taxi?"

  "If you like."

  "I have very little time."

  In the taxi, Innes took Hazel's gloved hand in his own. It was not enough. He removed his glove and then Hazel's. She didn't protest. He clasped her hand and held it tightly.

  They drove up the avenue, past the mansions and the park. Innes could see the city only in the periphery of Hazel's face.

  They parked in front of a modest brownstone building. Emerging from the taxi, Hazel climbed a set of steps and waited for him in front of a door set with panes of rippled blue glass.

  "This is yours?" he asked, looking up at the four-story building.

  She smiled. "I have an apartment," she said.

  They took a small elevator to the fourth floor. In the elevator, Innes reached out to hold her arm, unwilling to let her go, even for a moment. They stepped out into a dark corridor. Hazel led him to her door and unlocked it.

  He held her coat while she slid her arms from its sleeves. Innes shed his own. He didn't know where to put them.

  "There," she said, pointing to a cracked leather chair and be­traying an impatience that sent Innes's heart soaring.

  Hazel, standing before him, had on a belted dress of thin brown fabric. Her hair was cut short and had been waved. The brown dress fell just below her knees. She was slender. Many women were slender these days, Innes thought. He hadn't re­membered the sturdy legs, muscled.

  "I've thought of you often," he said.

  She nodded. "Has it been very difficult?"

  "Louise? My life?"

  "Louise."

  "No," he said. "Not very. Sometimes."

  "You did it for me," Hazel said. "To let me go."

  "My reasons seemed complicated at the time," Innes said.

  "Are you bitter?" she asked.

  "No, I'm not bitter."

  He followed her into the penumbra of a small dark room. On the bed was a fabric he now knew was chenille. Innes, even in his exalted state, took note of a skirted dressing table, a pearl neck­lace hooked around a post attached to the mirror. Later he would notice the small economies: the lovingly washed silk stockings hanging from a towel bar in the bathroom, a single or­ange in the icebox, the paper sacks saved in a drawer.

  That she had been here all these years scarcely seemed possible.

  "I teach at a girls' school in the city," Hazel said.

  "Did you marry?" he asked.

  "No."

  "I thought you might have," Innes said. "I was sure you had."

  "No."

  "There must have been . . ." Innes stopped himself. He could not ask about other men. Not in this room, not under these cir­cumstances. "I have a son," he said instead. "A lovely boy. He will study engineering, I think. Architecture perhaps. We've been to the Empire State Building twice together. I also have a daughter. Her name is Margaret. She's quite tall for her age. She's very good at the piano."

  "What's the boy's name?" Hazel asked.

  "Angus," Innes said and paused. "My father's name. You are their aunt."

  "Do they know about me?" Hazel asked.

  "A little. That you exist. We have said that you were injured at Halifax," he explained with some shame. "That you live abroad."

  Hazel nodded.

  "I have perhaps twenty minutes at best," Innes said.

  Through the thin cloth of her dress, he could feel the bones of her spine. He drew his shirt up over his head. She carefully unfastened her garters. He felt the ridges of the chenille along his back. Her breath was sweet. He gave no thought to Louise, for whom he had sacrificed a joy he might have had for years. For Innes had always believed that, given time, he could have persuaded Hazel to go away with him. Had he not seen Louise sitting in the chair that afternoon.

  They lay naked on the bed facing each other. Hazel's thighs were wet. He could see the fine lines of thirty-nine now that the sun had come around the corner of her building. He had been gone nearly an hour. Hazel was not a virgin. How could he even have imagined that she might be? He smoothed her face, her hair.

  "What do you teach?"

  "History."

  "Have you been here all this time?"

  "I was in Boston for a while. I returned to Halifax. And then I came here."

  "You went back to Halifax?" he asked, surprised.

  "Briefly."

  "I haven't gone back," he said.

  "I found it depressing."

  "You have had . . ." Innes hesitated. "Lovers," he said finally.

  "Yes."

  Innes discovered that he was glad, that he would not have de­nied her this pleasure. He was equally glad he could not put faces to the men.

  "One who mattered?" he asked.

  "Yes," she said.

  How strange that Innes had known Hazel for only a night, a morning, and an afternoon, and yet he had missed her all this time. The resemblance between the sisters might have kept Hazel alive for him.

  "I haven't the strength to leave you," he said.

  She pulled him to her breast. Innes had a sense of needing to remember every second so that later he would be able to re-create this hour in all its wonder. The ease with which she had un­dressed. The lack of shame. The sense of inevitability.

  "Did you ever think about me?" he asked.

  "Of course," she said.

  "That night, in Halifax, before the blast," he asked, "did you know?"

  "I didn't know enough to know," she said, "but in retro­spect . . . yes, I did." She paused. "You have been happy in your marriage?"

  "'Happy' is the wrong word. 'Content' maybe. 'Accepting.'"

  "Would we have been happy?"

  "Yes," Innes said. "I'm sure of it."

  "She has borne children," Hazel said.

  "Yes. Well, in one case. With difficulty in the other."

  Innes reflected how strange it was that it had been Louise who had cried out that day in Halifax that she would never have a husband and children, and that Hazel would have everything — when actually the opposite was true. Louise had the husband and the children.

  "You have been all right without children?" Innes asked Hazel.

  "Yes. Most of the time. I'm sometimes afraid of the future."

  "Louise would not have been all right," Innes said. "She is barely all right even with all of us around her."

  "That day," Hazel said. "It doesn't seem possible."

  "The blast, you mean."

  "Yes."

  "You were engaged."

  "He came home," Hazel said. "He had to stay in Halifax, but I didn't."

  "It was that simple?"

  "No."

  312

  A Wedding in December

  "All those years ..." Innes said, and in that moment, he came as close to despair as he ever had.

  "We can't think about it," Hazel said.

  "I have to go back to Toronto," he said. "The day after to­morrow."

  "It will be all right," she said, soothing him, drawing her fin­gers along his back. He wanted to sleep. God, how he wanted to sleep in this bed. With this woman.

  He would have to tell Louise that he ran into a friend, lost track of tim
e. If he waited any longer, she would miss her con­cert. Louise knew that Innes, short of a catastrophe, would not cause her to miss her concert.

  This was a catastrophe, he thought.

  With a wrenching movement, Innes stood. He found his clothes, the various pieces, putting them on as he discovered them. When he looked again at Hazel, she was sitting at the edge of the bed in a cotton robe. He pulled on his jacket, slipped his feet into his shoes. He sat beside her while he tied them. His coat and hat were on the chair in the front room. He took her hand.

  The feeling was visceral, a physical pain. Hadn't he sacrificed enough? But then, it hadn't been all sacrifice, had it? If he were to be truthful? He had had his very satisfying practice, his family. He had had a life.

  He couldn't leave Louise. It would be wrong.

  He kissed Hazel and stood. He walked to the door and put his hand on the knob.

  Agnes rested her head in her hands. She couldn't decide. Did Innes turn the knob and leave the room? Never to return? Would that be right? Would Innes then be a good man?

  Agnes could see Innes hesitating, his hand on the cut glass. Per­haps he noticed the panels in the door, could hear a siren from out­side. He didn't know exactly where he was. He would have to find a taxi and make the torturous ride back to the hotel, which just an hour ago had held for him a luminous candescence.

  Hazel waited patiently behind him. This couldn't be her deci­sion. She couldn't influence the man at the door or try to persuade him. Agnes could only imagine what she was thinking.

  Agnes knew what she was hoping.

  So, no, Agnes decided, setting down the pen with a snap. Innes wouldn't leave Hazel. He might have to leave her for now, Agnes determined with a kind of wild joy in her heart, but he would re­turn. Perhaps even tomorrow he would return for an hour. Yes, that was it. Innes would see to Louise, and he would raise his children, but he would never be without Hazel again. He and she would meet in New York City and in Toronto. At Niagara Falls and in Chicago. They would be lovers until one of them (surely it would have to be Innes; Agnes couldn't allow the man any more heart­break) died.

  Her heart full, her imagination satisfied, Agnes picked up her notebook and put it in her backpack. She dropped the pen onto the floor and bent to retrieve it. She stood up quickly and saw again the oily cylindrical blips at the periphery of her vision. Maybe they had more to do with blood pressure, she thought now, than with vision.

  She would finish the story when she got home. Perhaps she might even send it out to be published. Why not? For what was the point of fiction, Agnes wanted to know as she hoisted her duffel bag to her shoulder, if not to edit reality? If not to rewrite history? If not to soothe one's fevered dreams?

  Bridget was ravenous, having had little to eat the day before — the wedding, her nerves, the ironclad underwear — but she hadn't wanted to wake Bill. She opened the dining room, taking a seat by the window, the sun beginning to scorch its way up the hill. After a time, Bridget caught the eye of a woman she'd seen around the inn performing various chores: waitressing, registering guests, and, once, carrying a suitcase.

  "Can I get you something?" the woman asked.

  "I know you're not ready," Bridget said, "but if you could just bring me whatever is easiest. Coffee, juice? Cereal if you've got it?"

  "You're the bride," the woman said.

  "Yes, I am," Bridget said.

  There ought to be a word, Bridget reflected, for "bride-who-is-forty-three." It was the sort of word the Inuit might have.

  Bridget watched with fascination as the woman placed the order on a dumbwaiter and sent it down to the first floor to the kitchen. Had Matt and Brian seen the contraption? It wasn't so long ago that one of them would have dared the other to get in and take a ride.

  Bridget would wake the boys at 10:00 so that they could dress and pack. She hoped they still possessed all the various parts of their tuxedos. She imagined cummerbunds and studs and bow ties sprinkled over the floor of the basement room in which the pool table apparently was located. Bridget would pack up her own things and let Matt and Brian take all the bags out to the car. And then she would go in search of Nora to thank her. For her kind­ness, for the extraordinary meals, for all the arrangements. Nora had been more than generous. Bill was paying something (he had not told Bridget the precise sum), but she knew that Nora had heavily subsidized the cost of the weekend. Not just for Bridget and Bill, but for all of them.

  Bridget thought of Jerry and Julie. Would their marriage survive the ride home? She thought, too, of Agnes's surprising confession (truly surprising, there had been nothing to suggest it) and won­dered what the woman's future would hold. Having revealed the af­fair, would it now be over, or might it spur Jim Mitchell to action? It was hard not to dislike the man for having kept Agnes on a string all these years. Or was one meant to admire Jim for his loyalty to the family he had made? Bridget worried that her wedding might inadvertently have caused the dissolution of two other couples. How potent these reunions were. Was that why so many refused to go?

  And then there was the mystery of Nora and Harrison. Clearly a charge there — anyone could see it. Nora had sat next to Harrison at the ceremony. Did that mean anything? Bridget couldn't ask. She didn't know Nora well enough. She thought about the way Nora had left the room after Agnes's extraordinary challenge to the table.

  Bridget could remember some things about that night so long ago. She recalled making out in a corner with Bill (it had been too cold, they had agreed, to go down to the beach), keeping it dis­creet, occasionally getting up to get another Coke. She remem­bered that the party was loud, that the boys seemed to be getting drunk faster than usual. There was a sense of everything coming to an end. In a week they would have exams, and in two weeks they would all be gone. Bill to his family in Albany, Bridget to her family in Foxboro. Weeks might go by without her seeing Bill, and if he did manage to come visit Bridget, her parents would keep a close eye on them. In September, Bill would be off to college.

  Bridget remembered hearing the news that Nora and Harrison had been seen kissing in the kitchen. Bridget had thought at the time, as it should be, not having previously recognized the fact, but knowing that Harrison and Nora were a good fit, a more compre­hensible fit than Nora had ever been with Stephen. That relation­ship had baffled Bridget right from the outset. And she had realized something else that night: that Harrison had all along been waiting for Nora.

  Bridget's wants were simple now. She wanted to stay alive until Matt entered his senior year in college. After that, she would have to trust that Matt could make it on his own. It was a lot to ask for, Bridget knew. The odds were slim that she'd even make it to her son's high school graduation.

  It wasn't enough time. Her death would send Matt into a tail-spin. She hoped Bill would have the sense to hang on to him for a year after high school and delay his admission to college. Get the boy working, have him come home at night, talk to him inces­santly. She would speak to Bill about this when she thought Bill was ready to hear it. In a year, perhaps, if all went well.

  Bridget heard the pulley of the dumbwaiter. The blond woman brought Bridget her breakfast. There was cereal on the tray if she wanted it, but there was so much more: eggs with crisp bacon, a delicate brioche with sweet butter, a dish of berries with a pitcher of cream. A silver pot of coffee.

  A feast for a bride.

  Bridget laughed and asked the woman her name. She did not say to Judy, as she might have, "I'll never finish this," because she knew that she would. Bridget would eat every morsel.

  A movement at the entrance to the dining room caught Bridget's eye. The young woman there mirrored her glance and instinctively crossed her arms over her chest. Bridget thought it a testament to Melissa's character that she did not turn and walk away. She'd come, Bridget guessed, for a meal and a quick getaway, thinking that the bride and groom would be sleeping in.

  How lovely she was, even in her embarrassment. She had on a white boat nec
k T-shirt that hugged her narrow rib cage and waist, her slim jeans breaking just so over the toes of her black boots. There was a thin silver chain at her neck.

  Bridget half stood and called the girl's name.

  Reluctantly, Melissa turned in Bridget's direction.

  "Join me?" Bridget asked.

  Well mannered, the girl crossed the dining room, but she re­fused eye contact. Slowly, with some poise, she unfolded her arms and took the chair across from Bridget. "Where's my dad?" she asked at once.

  "He's sleeping," Bridget said.

  "Oh," Melissa said. "I'm not really hungry."

  "You have a long drive back," Bridget pointed out.

  Melissa shrugged.

  (Old people, of course, always thought drives were too long.)

  "There will be a buffet later," Bridget explained, "but you can order a la carte from the menu. As you can see, they've brought me quite a spread." Bridget glanced at the food in front of her. Melissa would think her gluttonous. "I ordered cereal, and they brought this."

  Melissa nodded.

  "Did you sleep okay?" Bridget asked.

  The girl fingered the silverware. "I slept okay," she said.

  "How was the pool?"

  Melissa seemed not to understand.

  "Billiards?" Bridget asked.

  "Oh, pool," Melissa said. "Good. Brian beat us all."

  No more questions, Bridget told herself, until Melissa volun­teered a statement or a question of her own.

  Judy came to the table to take Melissa's order. She handed Melissa a menu and positioned herself for a wait, but Bridget doubted the girl read beyond the first item. "Oatmeal," she said nervously. "And some tea, please."

  "We have Earl Grey and ..."

  "Earl Grey," Melissa said quickly.

  When Judy left them, Melissa sat with her hands in her lap, star­ing out the window, doubtless grateful for the view.

  "I'm glad you came to the wedding," Bridget said. "It meant a lot to your father."

  Melissa nodded.

  "I know it can't have been easy."

  "Matt was nice," Melissa said, and Bridget's heart lifted. The re­mark was more than just a polite lob back to Bridget. A chink, maybe. Something to work with.