At Weddings and Wakes

by Alice McDermott

  It was this confusion and the new energy it inspired, as well as the pale, perfumed breeze set up by the wedding guests as they moved back and forth past their pew, that got the children giggling, poking each other with their elbows as they knelt to place their faces into their palms. Into the blackness of her cupped hands, the older girl let out a single, breathy laugh and received for it as she turned to slide back into her seat a look from Aunt Agnes, shot over her own folded hands as she knelt behind them, that would have melted lead.

  Now the remaining wedding guests left the Communion rail and made their way back down the aisle, moving their sealed lips in the mute and unconscious way of Communicants, as if the Host in their mouths had left them struggling with something they could not say. (The boy nudged his sister and then moved his closed lips up and down in imitation of one of them but she felt her aunt’s blue eyes on the back of her neck and so only turned away.)

  With his hand on his breast and the golden chalice held delicately before him, an altar boy close to his heels, the priest moved swiftly up the bone-pale steps of the altar, where still, still, Aunt May knelt in her post-Communion prayer. Ascending the stair, the priest briefly touched her on the shoulder and she turned her face up to him as she had done to receive Communion. He paused, seemed to pull himself short, and then bent to whisper something to her, Fred all the while sitting alone behind her, his hands on his thighs and his face so sympathetic and confused that, watching him, the best man, unaccountably, felt his heart sink.

  She nodded at what the priest said and then briefly bowed her head, blessed herself, and rose into her high-backed chair. In another chair just behind hers their mother quickly leaned forward, flourishing a white tissue. Aunt May took it from her, held it to her eyes and her nose, and then balled it in her hand.

  On the altar, the priest was tidying up, finishing off the wine and wiping out the chalice with his sacred cloth. As he began his final prayers the congregation stood, Aunt May and her mailman once more side by side, her arm in its white sleeve brushing his as they all made the sign of the cross beneath the priest’s blessing. She turned once more to accept her small bouquet from their mother and then the priest said, in English, “Well, go ahead, man, give her a kiss,” and the two leaned toward each other. It was not the soft embrace a bride in a white gown would have received from her young husband but a brief, even hasty meeting of lips, his hands on her elbows, hers on his arms, that a long married couple might exchange on the verge of some unexpected parting.

  The notes of the organ seemed to build a staircase in the bleached air above their heads and then to topple it over as Aunt May and Fred walked down the steps, through the altar rail, and out over the white carpet to the door. Their mother followed, looking a little more like herself now, except for the fact that she was on the arm of a stranger.

  In the dark vestibule where racks of white pamphlets offered help in crisis and comfort in sorrow, rules of church order and brief, inspiring narratives of the lives of the saints, Aunt May stood beside her mailman, a married woman now, and greeted her guests. The doors of the church were open but no light reached her where she stood, smiling and nodding and lifting her cheek to be kissed. She touched the children’s faces as they filed by but had no words for them, it seemed, although they heard Fred tell someone in the line behind them, “Her sister’s kids, she’s wild about them,” and felt themselves some trepidation that their aunt’s careful affection for them had been so boisterously revealed.

  Outside, the July sun seemed to cancel even the recollection of the church’s cool interior. The heat had descended in the last hour and was rising now in bars of quivering light from asphalt and stone and the roofs of parked cars. Now the brightly dressed wedding guests were milling about, the men squinting into the sun and the women pulling at the fronts of their dresses as if to settle themselves more comfortably into them. Their father passed around a bag of rice. A man beside them shook a handful of it in his fist as if he were about to throw a pair of dice.

  Aunt May and her husband stood before the heavy door of the church for a moment as the photographer crouched before them in the sun. Then their mother and the best man were brought in, then the priest, now shed of his white vestments, then Momma and Veronica and Aunt Agnes, who would appear in the photographs to be solemnly preoccupied, looking, it would seem, toward some distant horizon.

  Arm in arm, heads bent against the sudden white rain, the wedding party hurried down the steps and through the stone gates and out into the waiting limousine, all the guests trailing behind them, throwing rice, waving and laughing and calling goodbye with such enthusiasm that the younger girl thought for a moment that she had somehow misunderstood the protocol and this was, after all, the last of the bride and the groom that would be seen. As their car drove away she brushed the grains of rice that had stuck to her damp palm and then saw how all the others were doing the same, brushing at palms or suit skirts, shaking caught rice from their hair, quieted now and somehow desolate. There was a crumpled paper tissue in the gutter.

  But then Aunt Agnes began giving orders—Johnny, help Momma into the car. Arlene, you’ll come with us. Bob, Mr. Doran here will follow you. Who else needs directions?—and the children found themselves rushing after their father over the gray, erupting sidewalk, their two new cousins in tow.

  It was their father who started the horn-blowing, leaning playfully on his steering wheel as he maneuvered the car into the street and getting the man behind him to do the same. They pulled up in back of the limo that carried Uncle John and his wife as well as Momma and Veronica and Agnes, and even the limo driver, glancing into his rearview mirror, tapped his horn a few times. And then the other guests, pulling out of parking spaces on other streets, began to do the same and the children, excited by the wild cacophony, by the mad hunch of their father’s shoulders as he pounded the horn, put their hands to their ears and shouted loud, nonsensical objections, amazed at the volume they and the cars had attained, at the sheer bravura, in this hot sun and after the wedding ceremony’s cool solemnity, of the noise they were making, a noise that seemed to defy not only the heat and the lingering holiness but that encroaching sense of desolation as well. Laughing, their hands to their ears, they hoped that Aunt May could hear them from whatever street she was now on.

  Their cousins—Rosemary and Patrick were their names—sat beside their father in the front seat, and when the horns finally died down he began to shout questions at them, as if he had been directed by Aunt Agnes herself to keep this morning’s silence at bay. The cousins answered that she was a freshman at Notre Dame Academy, he an eighth-grader at Saint Stanislaus. She played basketball and he liked bowling. They had an uncle who lived in Brooklyn but they weren’t sure where, they’d only visited him once or twice. It wasn’t around here, though. She had once been to Girl Scout camp on Long Island. She’d loved everything about it but the jellyfish—a remark that seemed to delight their father, although the two girls in the back seat noted that he’d never found it so delightful when each summer they said much the same.

  Looking out the car windows, the children saw that the heat had succeeded in changing the day into something ordinary. The shops they passed were busy with people, people who seemed to move in clumps, brushing their thick, bared arms together and scuffing their feet against one another’s heels. Bins of towels and fruit and racks of clothing had oozed out of the stores toward the street and the sun was blasting the sidewalks and sending steam through the manholes. Even a fire hydrant had burst under its weight. A thin park sat perfectly still in the heat, the sunlight through its weak trees scattered across the ground like debris. They drove on. “Where’s Mom?” the younger girl asked and their father answered that she was off with Fred and Aunt May and Mr. Sheehy the best man, getting her picture taken. “For posterity,” he said. “So years from now we can look at them all and see how we’ve aged.”

  They drove across a series of shaded streets and then once more pulled up b
ehind the limousine, this time in front of a small brick restaurant with a long maroon awning that stretched to the curb. Momma and Veronica, Arlene and John were already under it, and their father turned to say the children should follow them while he parked.

  Inside, it was cool and dark, a hushed, wood-paneled place flanked by two dim dining rooms set for lunch and lit, like a library or a pulpit, with thin, shaded tubes of light. Only Aunt Agnes was there, speaking quietly to a tall man in a dark suit who had his head lowered, his ear to her mouth like a priest in a confessional. “Very good,” the children heard him whisper, nodding, his hands clasped before him. “Very good.” And then he quickly stood erect—they would not have been surprised to see him genuflect—elegantly raised one hand toward a white-jacketed waiter in one corner of the dark room and stepped back to let Aunt Agnes proceed. She turned briefly—until that moment the children had not known for certain that she knew they were there—and said, “Come along.” The tall maître d’ smiling kindly at them, nodding still, as they filed past.

  The restaurant seemed to grow both cooler and darker as they proceeded, as if they were descending into a catacomb. They passed the two dining rooms, went down a narrow corridor and across a carpeted anteroom and then through a set of double doors where they suddenly found daylight again, pouring from four plain rectangular windows across one wall of a wide but cozy room, reflecting just as brightly from the semicircle of polished parquet floor at its center and making a black silhouette of the five-tiered wedding cake in the middle of the room.

  Aunt Agnes paused, all of them halted behind her. There was one long table at the head of the dance floor and then, on the carpet that surrounded it, a number of others covered in long white cloths and topped with baby’s breath and roses. There was a bar to the far right, a portable thing about the size of an upright piano and manned already by another man in a short white jacket. There was a real piano to the far left, a small baby grand, a set of drums, and a folding chair that held a trumpet case. The three men who were to play moved toward their instruments when they saw her, themselves made shadowy by the bright sun.

  Agnes raised a gloved hand to her brow, squinted, and then began to speak without turning toward anyone. The maître d’ quickly stepped forward, bending, nodding, and then once more raised his hand. Suddenly two pale opaque curtains moved across the windowed wall and in just the moment before they met the children realized that the blue they’d been seeing was not merely sky but water: that the place was on the river or the sea.

  The light from the chandelier grew brighter and then softer (directed, they saw, by Aunt Agnes’s gloved hand) and then—how restful it seemed—just right, confounding somehow both the season and the time of day and giving the impression that neither season nor time of day had ever touched the place. The piano began to play, light, happy notes, and then, as if they had only been waiting for the sound, bright voices began to come from the room behind them. Aunt Agnes turned toward the door, smiling, pulling off her gloves, and the tall maître d’ slipped away.

  Now the wedding guests were filing into the room, laughing and lighting cigarettes and stirring their drinks with black swizzle sticks, settling into the celebration as if it had not just begun but was continuing, as if for each of them such parties were always going on somewhere—underground, at the edge of the water—and they only had to find the right opportunity to rejoin them. Women in face powder and perfume patted the girls’ hair and touched the two boys’ cheeks, men smiled at them, passing by with their elbows raised and three or four glasses woven among their fingers. Their father appeared as one of these, a cigarette in his mouth and a trinity of Cokes held high before him. He handed them to the three girls and, with the cigarette held in the V of his fingers, told the two boys to saunter up to the bar and order something for themselves. “None of the hard stuff, though,” he said, laughing, and the two sisters saw with some envy how their brother glanced up at his taller cousin and with an easy, silent gesture that said, “Wanna go?” walked off casually with him, a couple of swells.

  Their father plunged again into the crowd, pumping hands and touching forearms, leaning to kiss women the girls didn’t know. Rosemary, their cousin, tucked a thin hand under her elbow and looked out over their heads as she sipped her drink. She was tall and skinny with dark hair and a small face, no chin to speak of, but with large, heavy-lidded eyes that seemed so familiar to the two sisters that they wondered if they had met before, perhaps during that same shadowy time of their early childhoods when Aunt May had appeared wrapped in a heavy habit, stocked with gifts.

  “I like your dress,” the older girl told her, sincerely, although she suspected that Aunt Agnes would have found it inappropriate, too dressy for daytime or too sophisticated for a fifteen-year-old girl. It was teal blue, sleeveless, with a scooped neck and a skirt like an inverted tulip. The material had a dull shine and was studded here and there with what looked like white nailheads.

  “Thank you,” the girl said and then added over the rim of her glass, “I didn’t have anything else.”

  Waiters were circulating now, silver plates balanced on their white-gloved fingers. One dipped a platter into the center of the three girls and asked, “Caviar?” but their cousin turned up her lip and said, “Fish eggs,” so that the girls, despite their curiosity, pulled back their hands. “No?” said the waiter. “God, no,” Rosemary said, suddenly speaking for them all.

  Out of the music and the murmur of the crowd they could hear Aunt Arlene’s sweet “Yeah? Oh yeah. Yeah!” and their father’s laughter and someone else saying they had known Fred in his “dancing days.” Smoke rose with the talk and the laughter and Rosemary leaned to the two sisters to say, “Get a load of that dress, is that tacky?” although neither sister knew for sure just which dress she meant.

  Aunt Agnes approached and said, “Come, girls,” and led them to one of the nearer tables, where Momma was seated primly beside two old women who by contrast seemed merely plopped. They were heavy, somewhat slovenly-looking old women with gray hair and gray dresses and a squat, battered look about their square heads. Each held an identical tumbler of some identical liquid in her wide lap.

  “Johnny’s girl, Rosemary,” Aunt Agnes was saying, lightly touching the girl’s shoulder. “And Lucy’s two, Margaret and Maryanne.” The younger girl felt her aunt’s hand like a pistol at the small of her back, urging her to step forward as the other two had, put out a hand and say “How do you do?” “These are the Miss McGowans,” Aunt Agnes added. “Our cousins.”

  The two women grinned—one had a blackened tooth—and said how much the children resembled each other. One of them pointed at the older girl. “And there’s Annie’s face at that age, as clear as if I’m remembering her,” she said. The other nodded. “Lord, yes, God love her. There she is.”

  They were the nieces of Momma’s stepfather, who had been so good to her when she first arrived here and a shanty Irish thorn in her side ever since. (“No blood of mine,” she would declare later that week when they had all gathered again. “Thank God for that.”) “Quite a dynasty,” one of them told Momma when Agnes called the two boys over to be introduced as well. “And all handsome, God bless them.” The Miss McGowans had never married. They had come over together in their teens and had not spent a single night of their lives since with any other creature but the other. They’d lived in Harlem, done factory work and office cleaning and so missed the refinement that life as a domestic might have lent them. They were generous, bighearted, bitter. They had been angels of mercy for Momma in the months that followed her sister’s death, cooking and cleaning, caring for the girls and holding her in their big arms when that was what she had needed. Propriety and convenience aside, they had not seen the need for her marriage to Annie’s husband. They had drawn in their breath and pulled their white lips over their mouths when she turned up pregnant and did not speak to her again until Jack’s wake, where they whispered to the other mourners, “It’s a judgment, no d
oubt.”

  “Five,” said one of them now. “Imagine that, five lovely grandchildren.” She was stroking the younger girl’s bare arm. “And I bet you’re all smart, too, aren’t you? Top of the class in school.”

  “Oh, sure,” the other answered for them. “Your grandfather was a brilliant man.” She shook her head. “God rest his soul, a genius.”

  The children stood grinning but Momma turned to Agnes, straighter than they’d ever seen her, and said in a voice that seemed suddenly to have shed its brogue, “Would you get me some soda water, dear?” (“Dear?” the children thought) and then to the children themselves, “Yes, that’s fine now but run off and enjoy yourselves,” freeing them, they saw, not only from the lumpish, grinning pair but from all the stories they might tell, tales that seemed to swell the various parts of them in their gray shapeless clothes, tales that had, until this moment, been Momma’s alone. Annie’s face, at that age.

  Back among the crowd the boy shoved his glass under his older sister’s nose. “Taste this,” he said. Patrick was grinning behind him.

  She pulled back her head. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Just taste it.” She took it from him and put it to her lips just as Patrick said, “It’s bourbon.” She pulled it away, taking only a sip of the Coke, which had, perhaps, another aftertaste.

  “The bartender made a mistake,” their brother said, his voice straining to keep both low and free of squeakiness. “We saw him. He gave us bourbon and Coke.”

  “Both of us,” Patrick said. He had his mother’s pale skin but with freckles across his nose, and his father’s dark wavy hair. “Double shots even.”