By Any Name

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Oh, I’m sure Elliot and Emily will make a good life together. Emily’s a lucky girl.” Oil on troubled waters. Then I was temporarily possessed by the spirit of my mother and added, “Did you want to talk to Sarah?” A match to the oil on troubled waters.

  “Don’t be—” Christina stopped herself. We were, after all, going to be related, and it is, after all, politic to maintain appearances with the in-laws your child has brought down upon you. “What good would that do? I’ll just fend these people off as best I can.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, back in my passive persona. “Are we seeing you this weekend?”

  Christina avoided the invitation. “Our plans aren’t settled. Have a good day, Beth.”

  “I am,” I assured her.

  When I asked Sarah, “It’s fourteen percent of the invitation list!” she exclaimed, and reminded me, “You said weddings would be different. And I wasn’t the least bit rude.” She explained it patiently to me: “You set the RSVP date two weeks before the caterers want to know, and that’s another ten days before they absolutely have to know. You told me this, I remember, I thought it was interesting the way human weakness—See? I’m not calling it rudeness, Mother—is sort of factored into everybody’s thinking. All I did was write a note to anybody who hadn’t responded by the deadline. Let us know if we can hope to see you, that’s all I said. It was entirely polite, I was charming. Really, don’t laugh, I read Amy Vanderbilt and I cross-referenced Miss Manners and I included a stamped, addressed postcard for responses. You better hope they answer now, because fourteen percent of two hundred and seventeen people is a lot. At a hundred and twenty-five dollars a head. You’re the doctor, you do the math.”

  She was becoming incoherent. I was about to become incoherent. George intervened.

  This conversation took place over a Sunday lunch in Mumma’s house on the Cape, which George had given me as a forty-first birthday present, buying out my siblings’ shares when Mumma went into the nursing home. We ate Sunday lunches on the Cape together, simple meals like grilled cheese sandwiches or lobster rolls or, if Sarah or George felt like making it, there might be a pot of soup. That Sunday, with only the three of us at the kitchen table, I was about to tell Sarah in a blur of incoherent embarrassed fury that I wasn’t that kind of a doctor, as she perfectly well knew, and that the cost of this wedding did not concern her, and that moreover I didn’t believe even Miss Manners, whose righteousness almost equals Sarah’s own, would condone sending reminders to people who haven’t RSVP’d. Wasn’t it time Sarah learned respect for social realities? Before she found herself out on her own in the real world. I was about to say something to that effect, when George stepped in.

  “Elfrieda would have felt the same,” he told me.

  “I’m not saying I don’t feel the same,” I protested.

  George turned to Sarah, and laughed. “Gran would have made house calls.”

  “One’s in California, two are in Arizona, one lives in Idaho,” Sarah explained. “Plus, a couple there’s only a business address for. Wall Street, I’d have had to make an appointment.”

  “You’re right, Mumma would have,” and I had to smile, picturing it. “She’d have done it wearing a hat, and white gloves, high heels. A dress—something bright yellow, or orange, or yellow and orange. Flowered.” I tried not to laugh. “Just like Sarah.”

  “I don’t own any of those kinds of gloves.”

  “Or anything yellow because it’s so unflattering,” George added, and smiled benignly, not victoriously, at both of us, one after the other, and back again. George was wonderfully handsome when I fell wildly in love with him, and he has aged well, in terms of moderate paunch, moderate baldness, immoderate, although bespeaking much character, lining of the face; but I actually fell in love with him for his contentment, not his looks. And it might also be accurate to say I’ve stayed in love with him because of that contentment. Life, for George, is not a contest. It’s a pleasure.

  “Besides, if I’m correct, it’s already too late,” he said. “If I’m correct, the letters have already been mailed.”

  “Last Wednesday,” Sarah said. “And I’ve already gotten four responses. They telephoned. They apologized,” she announced.

  “I can imagine,” I said, letting her make of that what she would.

  “I really was polite. I can show you my final draft.”

  “No.” I stopped her before she actually left the table. According to her lights, she had probably been entirely decorous. It’s just that Sarah’s lights, like Mumma’s, tend to be blinding, unless you keep them peripheral. “I believe you.”

  Sarah knows me as well as I know her. “No you don’t,” she said. “Don’t ever think you can get away with pretending to agree with me when you don’t, Mother. Life is too short to waste time trying to hide what you really think.”

  “Life is too short in general,” George pointed out.

  Sarah nodded her head energetically. “Exactly,” she said, and her glance included me in the question she asked with, for Sarah, an unusual pensiveness, “What should we do about that? Since we can’t change it.”

  • • •

  As the receiving line at Emily’s wedding reception was about to disband, George elegant beside me in a morning coat and I equally elegant in a dusty rose crepe mother-of-the-bride dress that flowed around my calves, Dot came up from behind to speak in my ear. “Mother,” she said, giving the word an irritated elongated pronunciation, Mo-ther. “You better stop her.”

  I did not wait for an explanation. Christina Adams stood next to me, competing for the graciousness award, so I ceded it to her and slipped away. It had been a lovely wedding, traditional, tasteful, the bride and her attendants in simple long gowns of white and deep blue (so flattering to all skin tones), the Club with its wide verandas overlooking the Hyannis harbor an elegantly unostentatious setting for the reception, both Saint Stephen’s and the clubhouse resplendent with flowers. We had done Emily proud and satisfied the Adamses: altogether, a promising start for the young couple. I didn’t know exactly what offense Sarah was committing to upset Dot. Hectoring the kitchen crew was most likely, or arguing about how the cars were being parked by the teenage valet staff. Accepting compliments to my right and left, I followed Dot down a hallway where heavy gilt-framed mirrors alternated with engravings that covered a century’s worth of racing yachts. We arrived at the entrance side together. “See?” Dot asked into my ear, and slipped away.

  I saw. The heavy glass doors had been opened wide and I looked out into a golden summer evening saturated with the mingled scents of sea air and fresh-cut grass, infiltrated by the faint sound of an orchestra. On the topmost step of a broad staircase stood Sarah, like the angel with the flaming sword that guards the entrance to the Garden of Eden. The only weapon she actually had was her glance, but that was enough to keep at bay the eight people transfixed just beyond the lowest step.

  All eight of them were dressed as if for a formal occasion—my daughter’s wedding, perhaps. There were three couples of about my age, the men silver-haired unless bald, the women draped in pearls and gold chains, festooned about the fingers and ears with gemstones. With them stood two young single women, each carrying a wrapped gift. The two younger women and the tallest and broadest of the older men were at the front of the group, all three simmering with anger. It was the man who gave voice to their feelings. “We are invited guests.”

  “You didn’t RSVP,” Sarah responded, for what was probably not the first time.

  “We drove down especially,” he insisted. “We were at the church.”

  “Anybody can go to the church,” Sarah said. “The reception is different.”

  “We were invited to the reception as well,” he said.

  “You didn’t RSVP,” Sarah repeated.

  George came up behind me and put his arm around my shoulders. He was there for solidarity and I stood within his embrace, trying to think of how to step in, how to make things better and sm
ooth them over so that life might go flowing on.

  “That was my secretary’s error,” the man maintained.

  “You didn’t answer the reminder I sent in July,” Sarah said.

  “That was an impertinence.” One of the older women speaking up from the rear.

  “We sent a gift,” another wife said. “From Tiffany’s.”

  “You didn’t RSVP,” Sarah said again, quite patiently. Like Mumma, when Sarah has right on her side she has the patience of Job.

  “I never RSVP,” one of the younger women said, and I recognized her, DeeDee Johnston.

  “I know that,” Sarah said, with so ominous a note of recognition that DeeDee took a step back.

  “This is ridiculous,” the man said.

  “No, it’s rudeness,” Sarah said.

  “And you consider what you’re doing polite?” another wife questioned.

  “Maybe rudeness begets rudeness,” Sarah suggested. “Think about it. An eye for an eye. Fighting fire with fire. Tit for tat,” she continued.

  DeeDee caught sight of George and me, standing back. “Mr. Middleton?”

  “None of you should be here,” Sarah concluded to her assembled group of unwelcome guests. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that.”

  Following DeeDee’s lead, the imposing man looked to George, a straight look between members of the same superior sex that wondered, Are you allowing this? and he asked, “You’re the father of the bride here?” Subtext: The host? Are you going to let this chit of a girl get away with treating me like this?

  Sarah gave us only the most careless of glances. We would agree with her: She was in the right.

  George didn’t hesitate. He pivoted me around and we went back inside, together, past mirrors and yachting prints, back along the carpeted hallway to the music and voices. We could trust Sarah to finish up fairly quickly and then join the party. George, I saw, was smiling.

  I felt tears fill my eyes and then I felt my eyes overflow.

  Not for long, not much, but still—

  “Sometimes I just…miss Mumma,” I told George as I wiped them away.

  “I know,” he said, and put his arm around me again. I put mine around his waist and we comforted one another. “I can just imagine what Elfrieda would have said, about all of this. And about Sarah too. Can’t you?”

  “Do you think Mumma would be back there with Sarah?”

  “Maybe,” George said. “But she’d be unnecessary.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “But she wouldn’t notice that. She had a wonderfully blind view of reality,” I reminded him.

  “She’d have driven Sarah crazy,” he agreed.

  “I haven’t,” I boasted, because that was one of the few things about my life I was certain of, that my unwieldy youngest child had emerged untrammeled from my hands.

  We arrived back at the party to see that the reception line had disappeared and we hesitated just inside the doors to the long ballroom, surveying the scene. A small orchestra was seated up on a balcony. Half of the room held tables and the rest of the floor was free for dancing. When the orchestra began a waltz, we watched Elliot lead Emily out onto the dance floor. George and I moved toward the dancers, he contentedly, I with some dread: It had been years since I had attempted even ballroom dancing; dancing was not one of my proficiencies; I knew that soon, inevitably, Elliot would come to claim me, to lead me out onto the floor, where I was not sure I would do well. At that craven thought, I could almost hear Mumma’s voice: “Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking I would have a daughter who can’t dance.”

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