by John Updike
Though the wedding is small and the bride an Ohio workingman’s daughter, yet in the eyes of passersby the gathering would make a bright brave flurry before the church’s rust-red doors, on the verge of four o’clock this September the twenty-second. A person or persons driving past this Saturday afternoon on the way to the MinitMart or the hardware store would have a pang of wanting to be among the guests. The organist with his red robe over his arm is ducking into the side door. He has a goatee. A little grubby guy in green coveralls like a troll is waiting for Harry to show up so he can get paid for the flowers, Ma said it was only decent to decorate the altar at least, Fred would have died to see Nellie married in St. John’s with a bare altar. Two bouquets of white mums and baby’s breath come to $38.50, Rabbit pays him with two twenties, it was a bad sign when the banks started paying out in twenties instead of tens, and yet the two-dollar bill still isn’t catching on. People are superstitious. This wasn’t supposed to be a big wedding but in fact it’s costing plenty. They’ve had to take three rooms over at the Four Seasons Motel on Route 422: one for the mother of the bride, Mrs. Lubell, a small scared soul who looks like she thinks they’ll all stick forks into her if she drops her little smile for a second; and another for Melanie, who came across the Commonwealth with Mrs. Lubell from Akron in a bus, and for Pru, who has been displaced from her room - Melanie’s old room and before that the sewing dummy’s - by the arrival from Nevada of Mim, whom Bessie and Janice didn’t want in the house at all but Harry insisted, she’s his only sister and the only aunt Nelson has got; and the third room for this couple from Binghamton, Pru’s aunt and uncle, who were driving down today but hadn’t checked in by three-thirty, when the shuttle service Harry has been running in the Corona picked up the two girls and the mother to bring them to the church. His head is pounding. This mother bothers him, her smile has been on her face so long it’s as dry as a pressed flower, she doesn’t seem to belong to his generation at all, she’s like an old newspaper somebody has used as a drawer liner and then in cleaning house you lift out and try to read; Pru’s looks must have all come from the father’s side. At the motel the woman kept worrying that the messages they were leaving at the front desk for her tardy brother and sister-in-law weren’t clear enough, and began to cry, so her smile got damp and ruined. A case of Mumm’s second-best champagne waits back in the Joseph Street kitchen for the little get-together afterwards that nobody would call a reception; Janice and her mother decided they should have the sandwiches catered by a grandson of Grace Stuhl’s who would bring along this girlfriend in a serving uniform. And then they ordered a cake from some wop over on Eleventh Street who was charging one hundred and eighty-five American dollars for a cake, a cake - Harry couldn’t believe it. Every time Nelson turns around, it costs his father a bundle.
Harry stands for a minute in the tall ribbed space of the empty church, reading the plaques, hearing Soupy’s giggle greet the three dolled-up women off in a side room, one of those out-of-sight chambers churches have where the choir puts itself into robes and the deacons count the collection plates and the communion wine is stored where the acolytes won’t drink it and the whole strange show is made ready. Billy Fosnacht was supposed to be best man but he’s up at Tufts so a friend of theirs from the Laid-Back called Slim is standing around with a carnation in his lapel waiting to usher. Uncomfortable from the way this young man’s slanted eyes brush across him, Rabbit goes outside to stand by the church doors, whose rust-red paint in the September sun gives back heat so as to remind him of standing in his fresh tan uniform on a winter day in Texas at the side of the barracks away from the wind, that incessant wind that used to pour from that great thin sky across the treeless land like the whine of homesickness through this soldier who had never before been away from Pennsylvania.
Standing there thus for a breath of air, in this pocket of peace, he is trapped in the position of a greeter, as the guests suddenly begin to arrive. Ma Springer’s stately dark-blue Chrysler pulls up, grinding its tires on the curb, and the three old ladies within claw at the door handles for release. Grace Stuhl has a translucent wart off center on her chin but she hasn’t forgotten how to dimple. “I bet but for Bessie I’m the only one here went to your wedding too,” she tells Harry on the church porch.
“Not sure I was there myself,” he says. “How did I act?”
“Very dignified. Such a tall husband for Janice, we all said.”
“And he’s kept his looks,” adds Amy Gehringer, the squattest of these three biddies. Her face is enlivened with rouge and a flaking substance the color of Russian salad dressing. She pokes him in the stomach, hard. “Even added to them some,” the old lady wisecracks.
“I’m trying to take it off,” he says, as if he owes her something. “I go jogging most every night. Don’t I, Bessie?”
“Oh it frightens me,” Bessie says. “After what happened to Fred. And you know there wasn’t an ounce extra on him.”
“Take it easy, Harry,” Webb Murkett says, coming up behind with Cindy. “They say you can injure the walls of your intestines, jogging. The blood all rushes to the lungs.”
“Hey Webb,” Harry says, flustered. “You know my motherin-law.”
“My pleasure,” he says, introducing himself and Cindy all around. She is wearing a black silk dress that makes her look like a young widow. Would that she were, Jesus. Her hair has been fluffed up by a blow-dryer so it doesn’t have that little-headed wet-otter look that he loves. The top of her dress is held together with a pin shaped like a bumblebee at the lowest point of a plunging V-shaped scoop.
And Bessie’s friends are staring at gallant Webb with such enchantment Harry reminds them, “Go right in, there’s a guy there leading people to their seats.”
“I want to go right up front,” Amy Gehringer says, “so I can get a good look at this young minister Bessie raves so about.”
“‘Fraid this screwed up golf for today,” Harry apologizes to Webb.
“Oh,” Cindy says, “Webb got his eighteen in already, he was over there by eight-thirty.”
“Who’d you get to take my place?” Harry asks, jealous and unable to trust his eyes not to rest on Cindy’s tan décolletage. The tops of tits are almost the best part, nipples can be repulsive. Just above the bumblebee a white spot that even her bikini bra hides from the sun shows. The little cross is up higher, just under the sexy hollow between her collarbones. What a package.
“The young assistant pro went around with us,” Webb confides. “A seventy-three, Harry. A seventy-three, with a ball into the pond on the fifteenth, he hits it so far.”
Harry is hurt but he has to greet the Fosnachts, who are pushing behind. Janice didn’t want to invite them, especially after they decided not to invite the Harrisons, to keep it all small. But since Nelson wanted Billy as best man Harry thought they had no choice, and also even though Peggy has let herself slide there is that aura about a woman who’s once upon a time taken off all her clothes for you however poorly it turned out. What the hell, it’s a wedding, so he bends down and kisses Peggy to one side of the big wet hungry mouth he remembers. She is startled, her face broader than he remembers. Her eyes swim up at him in the wake of the kiss, but since one of them is a walleye he never knows which to search for expression.
Ollie’s handshake is limp, sinewy, and mean: a mean-spirited little loser, with ears that stick out and hair like dirty straw. Harry crunches his knuckles together a little, squeezing. “How’s the music racket, Ollie? Still tootling?” Ollie is one of these reedy types, common around Brewer, who can pick out a tune on anything but never manage to make it pay. He works in a music store, Chords ‘n’ Records, renamed Fidelity Audio, on Weiser Street near the old Baghdad, where the adult movies show now.
Peggy, her voice defensive from the kiss, says, “He sits in on synthesizer sometimes with a group of Billy’s friends.”
“Keep at it, Ollie, you’ll be the Elton John of the Eighties. Seriously, how’ve you both been? Jan and I
keep saying, we got to have you two over.” Over Janice’s dead body. Funny, just that one innocent forlorn screw, and Janice holds a grudge, where he’s forgiving as hell of Charlie, just about his best friend in the world in fact.
And here is Charlie. “Welcome to the merger,” Harry kids.
Charlie chuckles, his shrug small and brief. He knows the tide is running against him, with this marriage. Still, he has some reserve within him, some squared-off piece of philosophy that keeps him from panicking.
“You seen the bridesmaid?” Harry asks him. Melanie.
“Not yet.”
“The three of ‘em went over into Brewer last night and got drunk as skunks, to judge from Nelson. How’s that for a way to act on the night before your wedding?”
Charlie’s head ticks slowly sideways in obliging disbelief. This elderly gesture is jarred, however, when Mim, dressed in some crinkly pants outfit in chartreuse, with ruffles, grabs him from behind around the chest and won’t let go. Charlie’s face tenses in fright, and to keep him from guessing who it is Mim presses her face against his back so that Harry fears all her makeup will rub off on Charlie’s checks. Mim comes on now any hour of the day or night made up like a showgirl, every tint and curl exactly the way she wants it; but really all the creams and paints in a world of jars won’t counterfeit a flexible skin, and rimming your eyes in charcoal may be O.K. for these apple-green babies that go to the disco but at forty it makes a woman look merely haunted, staring, the eyes lassoed. Her teeth are bared as she hangs on, wrestling Charlie from behind like an eleven-year-old with Band-Aids on her knees. “Jesus,” Charlie grunts, seeing the hands at his chest with their purple nails long as grasshoppers, but slow to think back through all the women he has known who this might be.
Embarrassed for her, worried for him, Harry begs, “C’mon, Mim.”
She won’t let go, her long-nosed tamed-up face mussed and distorted as she maintains the pressure of her grip. “Gotcha,” she says. “The Greek heartbreaker. Wanted for transporting a minor across state lines and for misrepresenting used cars. Put the handcuffs on him, Harry.”
Instead Harry puts his hands on her wrists, encountering bracelets he doesn’t want to bend, thousands of dollars’ worth of gold on her bones, and pulls them apart, having set his own body into the jostle for leverage, while Charlie, looking grimmer every second, holds himself upright, cupping his fragile heart within. Mim is wiry, always was. Pried loose at last, she touches herself rapidly here and there, putting each hair and ruffle back into place.
“Thought the boogyboo had gotten you, didn’t you Charlie?” she jeers.
“Pre-owned,” Charlie tells her, pulling his coat sleeves taut to restore his dignity. “Nobody calls them used cars anymore.”
“Out west we call them shitboxes.”
“Shh,” Harry urges. “They can hear you inside. They’re about to get started.” Still exhilarated by her tussle with Charlie, and amused by the disapproving conscientious man her brother has become, Mim wraps her arms around Harry’s neck and hugs him hard. The frills and pleats of her fancy outfit crackle, crushing against his chest. “Once a bratty little sister,” she says in his ear, “always a bratty little sister.”
Charlie has slipped into the church. Mim’s eyelids, shut, shine in the sunlight like smears left by some collision of greased vehicles - often on the highways Harry notices the dark swerves of rubber, the gouges of crippled metal left to mark where something unthinkable had suddenly happened to someone. Though it happened the day’s traffic continues. Hold me, Harry, she used to cry out, little Mim in her hood between his knees as their sled hit the cinders spread at the bottom of Jackson Road, and orange sparks flew. Years before, a child had died under a milk truck sledding here and all the children were aware of this: that child’s blank face leaned toward them out of each snowstorm. Now Harry sees a glisten in Mim’s eyelids as in the backs of the Japanese beetles that used to cluster on the large dull leaves of the Bolgers’ grape arbor out back. Also he sees how her ear lobes have been elongated under the pull of jewelry and how her ruffles shudder as she pants, out of breath after her foolery. She is sinking through all her sins and late nights toward being a pathetic hag, he sees, one of those women you didn’t believe could ever have been loved, with only Mom’s strong bones in her face to save her. He hesitates, before going in. The town falls away from this church like a wide flight of stairs shuffled together of roofs and walls, a kind of wreck wherein many Americans have died.
He hears the side door where the organist hurried in open, and peeks around the corner, thinking it might be Janice needing him. But it is Nelson who steps out, Nelson in his cream-colored threepiece marrying suit with pinched waist and wide lapels, that looks too big for him, perhaps because the flared pants almost cover the heels of his shoes. Three hundred dollars, and when will he ever wear it again?
As always when he sees his son unexpectedly Harry feels shame. His upper lip lifts to call out in recognition, but the boy doesn’t look his way, just appears to sniff the air, looking around at the grass and down toward the houses of Mt. Judge and then up the other way at the sky at the edge of the mountain. Run, Harry wants to call out, but nothing comes, just a stronger scent of Mim’s perfume at the intake of breath. Softly the child closes the door again behind him, ignorant that he has been seen.
Behind the ajar rust-red portal the church is gathering in silence toward its eternal deed. The world then will be cloven between those few gathered in a Sunday atmosphere and all the sprawling fortunate Saturday remainder, the weekday world going on about its play. From childhood on Rabbit has resented ceremonies. He touches Mim on the arm to take her in, and over the spun glass of her hairdo sees a low-slung dirty old Ford station wagon with the chrome roof rack heightened by rough green boards crawl by on the street. He isn’t quick enough to see the passengers, only gets a glimpse of a fat angry face staring from a back window. A fat mannish face yet a woman’s.
“What’s the matter?” Mim asks.
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I’m worrying about the kid. How do you feel about all this?”
“Me. Aunt Mim? It seems all right. The chick will take charge.”
“That’s good?”
“For a while. You must let go, Harry. The boy’s life is his, you live your own.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling myself. But it feels like a copout.”
They go in. A pathetic little collection of heads juts up far down front. This mysterious slant-eyed Slim, smoothly as if he were a professional usher, escorts Mim down the aisle to the second pew and indicates with a graceful sly gesture where Harry should settle in the first, next to Janice. The space has been waiting. On Janice’s other side sits the other mother. Mrs. Lubell’s profile is pale; like her daughter she is a redhead but her hair has been rinsed to colorless little curls, and she never could have had Pru’s height and nice rangy bearing. She looks, Harry can’t help thinking it, like a cleaning lady. She gives over to him her desiccated but oddly perfect smile, a smile such as flickered from the old black-and-white movie screens, coy and certain, a smile like a thread of pure melody, that when she was young must have seemed likely to lift her life far above where it eventually settled. Janice has pulled back her head to whisper with her mother in the booth behind. Mim has wound up in the same pew as Ma Springer and her biddies. Stavros sits with the Murketts in the third pew, he has Cindy’s neckline to look down when he gets bored, let him see what country-club tits look like after all those stuffed grape leaves. In willful awkwardness the Fosnachts were seated or seated themselves across the aisle, on what would have been the bride’s side if there had been enough to make a side, and are quarrelling in whispers between themselves: much hissed emphasis from Peggy and stoic forward-gazing mutter from Ollie. The organist is doodling through the ups and downs of some fugue to give everybody a chance to cough and recross their legs. The tip of
his little ruddy goatee dips about an inch above the keyboard during the quiet parts. The way he slaps and tugs at the stops reminds Harry of the old Linotype he used to operate, the space adjuster and how the lead jumped out hot, all done with computer tapes now. To the left of the altar one of the big wall panels with rounded tops opens, it is a secret door like in a horror movie, and out of it steps Archie Campbell in a black cassock and white surplice and stole. He flashes his What? Me worry? grin, those sudden seedy teeth.
Nelson follows him out, head down, looking at nobody.
Slim slides up the aisle, light as a cat, to stand beside him. He must be a burglar in his spare time. He stands a good five inches taller than Nelson. Both have these short punk haircuts. Nelson’s hair makes a whorl in back that Harry knows so well his throat goes dry, something caught in it.
