5
Episode Five. Friday.
The Day of the Wedding.
Walter’s the first one up. Leaving his wife and son in bed (by the time he reaches the door and glances back he sees they have already performed their magic trick of expanding in their sleep to fill the space that so recently accommodated him), he crosses the hall to the bathroom where he pees, flushes, yawns, regards himself blearily in the mirror, stretches his back in the way that has recently become a necessary part of his morning routine, and is uncapping the toothpaste before it hits him what is special about the day. Clemmy. The sun has finally risen on the day he knew would come, the day whose beginnings originated with her birth: one of his children is leaving the fold. Little old Clemmy. Who forbade him as she was boarding the bus her first day of kindergarten ever to call her that again. He sees with sudden exactitude how she had turned, halfway up the bus steps, to reprove him. She’d had the physique of a dumpling, been dressed in a yellow corduroy jumper, and as she’d wagged her finger at him for good measure she had given him such a jolt of pleasure and pain as he would not have thought possible.
Not until he takes the toothbrush from his mouth and spits into the old enamel sink does he remember what else is unusual about the day. Aunt Glad. He, Bennie, Carrie, and Lloyd had agreed to take turns sitting with her throughout the night. Lloyd, who’d volunteered for the last shift, brought The Tibetan Book of the Dead, along with his pillow and sheet, down from the attic and stretched out below her on the braided rug. It was lost on no one that when Lloyd had been orphaned during his last year of high school Aunt Glad had been the one to move in and keep him company. What must that duet have looked like? Walter imagined them as celestial bodies: teenage Lloyd, moody and rangy and newly bereaved, and a younger, more kinetic, more strikingly oddball Glad, the two of them slinking and flitting respectively around this old house, aware of each other’s presence while sticking, for the most part, to nonintersecting orbital paths.
Squirting shaving cream into his palm, he unnerves himself with the thought that Glad might have slipped away in the night. In a kind of countermove, he then forces himself to think of her alive—more than that, to think of her whole life. To hold in his mind the enormity of one human existence. He contemplates Gladys Erlend. Who just yesterday morning, as he was helping her get settled in the cane chair with a cup of hot tea and the moth-eaten mohair blanket over her lap, had given him grooming advice. “Stalwart,” she’d said—he can’t remember her ever having used the nickname previously, yet she said it quite naturally, as if it were what she’d always called him—and then continued with her deliberate, beautiful syntax, “I hope you will allow me the liberty of pointing out something I couldn’t help but notice, and suspect you may not have.” He’d set the teacup and saucer on the wicker table and turned to her, bending at the waist. But she’d beckoned him in even closer, then lowered her voice as if, he’d felt, she wished to avoid causing him undue embarrassment. “You are in need of a haircut.” He’d managed to cover his laughter with a bow of thanks.
That had been a high pleasure: Aunt Glad finally deeming him worthy of being the recipient of such intimate, not to say presumptuous, counsel. After so many years of marriage, to be considered family at last.
Lathering his face, he turns his attention to the Digginses. The next new family to commingle with the Erlend line. And rebukes himself: he should have been more hospitable, should have pressed harder for them to stay for supper. Sure, things had been a bit chaotic, but wasn’t that one of the signal characteristics of family: being together in messiness as well as in presentability?
Immediately he rebukes himself again: Why focus on their imminent kinship if true hospitality is ungoverned by tribal affinity? He should have pressed for them to stay regardless of clan attachment.
An image floats up before him then: the man from yesterday with the business card and the beard, the big black hat and the long black coat, and the way he’d left on foot when the transaction was finished, the way he’d receded without haste down the drive. Walter lifts his gaze from his foam-covered jaw in the mirror to look himself in the eye. I should have offered him a glass of water, he realizes. I should have given him bread.
He recalls something Glad—of all people!—said. How strange. Just yesterday morning, after disapproving of his hair. At the time it had made no sense to him and he’d chalked it up to her doddering mind.
“We must have those new people over.”
Assuming she was doing her thing of weaving in and out of time, memories of the past leaking into the present, he’d just smiled.
But she’d clutched his arm. “I really feel we should. It is happening, you know.”
“What is, Aunt Glad?”
Her deep-set eyes fixed upon him so intently he felt himself blush.
“The—new people?”
Perhaps this satisfied her, for she released him. Then added, inscrutably, “We must always try to embrace reality.”
What had she meant by it? he wonders now, drawing the razor across his face. Reality. It makes him think of Mantha and her taxonomy of the various forms of life: Past, Future, Dream, Make-Believe, Private, Public, Real, and so on.
Something stirs in the darkness of the hall. Walter snaps his head to look and cuts his cheek. A filament of blood draws itself up through the white foam. It’s Richard the dog. His snout nudges the bathroom door wider; his body flows in after. With limpid, licorice eyes he gives Walter a look. Such a look. As if to say, I do not want for faith that you will treat me well.
THE LIVING ROOM, when Walter comes down the stairs, holds a slumbering sprawl of roustabouts and bridesmaids cocooned in sleeping bags, having been driven from their tents by last night’s rain.
The office, when Walter sticks his head in the door, reveals two more sleepers (really? he lingers to make sure he hears—yes: two distinct beings sketched in breath, a tuneless two-part song).
The world, when Walter opens the back door, is washed with brightness, every still-wet jeweled place touched by the just-up sun kissing back a different color of the visible spectrum. Richard the dog half closes his eyes and does reverence with his nose. Then out he bounds.
AN HOUR LATER BENNIE finds Mantha, already in her flower-girl dress (a daffodilly thing with a satin bodice and tulle skirt she had been allowed to pick out herself), sitting on the edge of Glad’s cot eating an ice cream sandwich.
She widens her eyes furiously, shakes her head, and points her finger to the door.
“But Lloyd said—” begins Mantha.
Bennie’s pointer moves sharply to her lips.
Mantha hushes, slides off the cot, and steps just outside the office. “But Lloyd said I should stay with her while he went to get ready.”
“And did he say you should have that ice cream sandwich?”
“I didn’t know how long I was going to be in there!”
“Keep your voice down.” They both look, not unhopefully, to see if Aunt Glad has been disturbed by their voices. She has not. Her valise, on the little bench under the windowsill, is still open. The sight of her nightgown, impeccably folded, palest pink batiste with buttons to the chin, stops Bennie. Something ascends inside her chest and collects at the base of her throat. She swallows, and forces her attention back to the kid with the contraband breakfast.
“You already got some on your dress.”
Mantha looks down at her shiny yellow front, marked now in places with vanilla ice cream and pasty-soft bits of chocolate cookie. She wets her finger and works at the splotches. Succeeds only at grinding the mess deeper in.
“Why are you even wearing that now? The wedding’s not till five. I have a million things for you to do between now and then.”
Mantha’s eyes fill. “Oh, Mama!”
Bennie narrows her eyes with professional skepticism. “What?”
“Aunt Gla-aaa-ad!” Mantha’s lower lip trembles, the tears that had been wobbling in her eyes now flood their banks, and the new drip that has been collecting at the base of her ice cream sandwich plops onto the buttery yellow tulle of her skirt.
“Hm.” Either these are the greatest crocodile tears ever or some there-there-ing might be in order. Still, Bennie is as Bennie does. First she takes the ice cream sandwich from Mantha’s hand, leads Mantha into the kitchen, deposits the melty thing in the trash, and dabs with a wet cloth at the splotches on her dress. Then and only then does she embrace the weeping child, allowing the sob-racked shoulders to convulse against her own burgeoning middle, where new life is developing in its private amniotic sea. Meet your big sister. Meet your new little something or other. Bennie makes the silent introduction between Mantha and her tadpole sibling, which is even now engaging in a sustained and awe-inspiring flurry of growth, the measure of which it will never again reach, that it might become viable on land.
To think: all the industry going on within her is silently outstripping all the activity going on without. Bennie knows practically by heart the stages of fetal development. Now is when its wispy limbs are beginning to articulate, its formerly webbed fingers and toes beginning to differentiate and sprout translucent nails; now is the time its tiny kidneys, intestines, brains, and liver are all beginning to function. Oh fig-size life, you who will in seven months emerge to have a name, an identity, and a particular series of adventures (you who will someday in point of fact be known as Glory Aviva Blumenthal, have copious dark curly hair and, at age twelve, an operation for scoliosis; you who will, despite this, become a modern dancer and one summer, while in residence at Jacob’s Pillow, fall in love with a puppeteer of Uzbek descent and travel through Central America with him and members of his troupe in a VW bus; you who will, years later, things having soured with the puppeteer, return to the States with your son, attend culinary school, and open a pie shop in Poughkeepsie specializing in late-night delivery to college students; you who will, when your widowed mother at age ninety goes on home hospice care, be the child who moves back in with her for those last nine weeks of her life, managing the schedule of the nurses and aides, administering the medications in the comfort kit yourself; you will by then be forty-five, the very age she was when she had you), oh little soul: for now you remain tenuous, provisional.
Every child she has delivered into this world, Bennie has delivered also into the arms of Aunt Glad, who would move in with them after each birth. The lengths of her stays varied according to her age. With Clem she had stayed the longest, a couple of weeks right at the beginning, when Bennie herself was still so young, and weepy and motherless and untried. How momentous it had been for Bennie to place Clem, still in hospital swaddle, in Glad’s arms, and hear her pronounce Clementine (in a low, private voice, as if it were a matter strictly between her and the child), dear little mouse. How vital, especially in those early days (Walter, still finishing his graduate studies and just beginning to work as a junior research assistant at the Ujima Foundation, had been so rarely at home), to have her great-aunt by her side. Glad had been seventy-two, and helpful in numberless ways. She’d pushed Clem in a pram, let her lie out naked on a blanket in the grass, washed spit-up from sweaters she’d crocheted herself, folded endless onesies, endless darling minute socks. She’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Bennie at the kitchen sink and helped administer Clem’s first bath. She’d massaged olive oil onto Clem’s scalp and combed gently, patiently, night after night, to remove the cradle cap. And after Bennie’s sole attempt to pare Clem’s fingernails, when she’d horrified herself by drawing blood, Aunt Glad had taken over manicure duty, abjuring both scissors and clippers in favor of the method she claimed to have used on Bennie’s own mother as well as Bennie herself: biting them.
With each successive child she’d stayed a shorter amount of time, yet her presence and participation had remained vital. As the years went by, her repertoire dwindled a bit—she could no longer lift the children or take them places in the car—and the frequency with which they saw her dropped off sharply after she’d moved into the assisted living center over in Fishkill. But for Bennie there continued to be something indispensable in the ritual of setting each of her children for the first time in that same pair of arms, of seeing the bright whisky-colored gaze travel thoroughly, attentively over each new arrival, as if studying, chronicling, and finally blessing each one’s inchoate singularity.
Only this fifth child, this last, will never receive her welcome.
Bennie reaches behind her until she connects with the box of tissues on the counter and, one-handed, blows her nose.
“Gross.” Mantha pulls away.
“Hey! You’re the one rubbing your snot all over my stomach.”
“Hardy har har.” Mantha wipes her face with her hand.
“Use a tissue,” says Bennie. “Better yet, go upstairs and wash your face. And take off that dress and put on something schlumpy. I wasn’t kidding about chores.”
WALTER IS DEEP in the woods by now. He hadn’t intended to take such a long walk—on this of all mornings—but by the time Richard the dog found a place that suited him well enough to deposit his morning excrement they had already passed the gully, at which point he reasoned it made more sense to keep walking until they came to the county road rather than reverse direction. When they do emerge from the trees, he sees they’ve come farther than he’d thought, all the way to the edge of Garvey’s property. It occurs to him that some part of his mind might have led him here on purpose, curious to see up close what the place looks like now with the Haredi family installed. He hustles a little guiltily to cross the field and reach the road, aware that back at the house people must be awake and starting to attend to all the wedding-day details on his wife’s little blue lists. Still, he can’t help noticing that the yard, which in Garvey’s time had been divided into a luxuriant, well-kept lawn and a bountiful vegetable garden, has gone entirely to seed. The aluminum siding is bearded with mildew and one long section of gutter hangs at a precarious diagonal. If not for the banged-up minivan in the driveway, the place would seem abandoned.
“Excuse me.”
Walter startles.
A man is standing in the yard. Pale, unmuscled, with a sparse beard and corkscrew peyos. Black pants, white button-down. Behind small gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes are gas-jet blue. He’s young—couldn’t be much older than any of the roustabouts—and barefoot. If not for the tzitzit, the long fringes dangling from the tallit under his shirt, and the yarmulke pinned to his blond curls, he might be one of Clem’s friends.
“Why are you on my land?” The accent is not quite foreign.
“I’m sorry. I was just taking a walk in the woods with”—Walter, hesitating over the minuscule lie, waves his hand toward Richard—“my dog.”
The man’s gaze doesn’t stray from Walter. In a tone that is neither aggressive nor friendly he repeats, “But why are you on my land?”
There is something uncanny about the question. The man seems too young to refer to the land as his. Or perhaps it’s the way he said land instead of property.
“We—uh, lost our way,” Walter begins, then doubles back to clarify: “I’m your neighbor.” And corrects himself: “Your neighbor once removed.” Is it his subconscious that comes up with an attempt at humor evocative of familial connection? He hastens to explain: “We live on the other side of McElroy’s.” He gives another little wave, but the gesture—he feels it—comes a beat late, as if he’s an amateur actor in a bad play. “I’m Walter Blumenthal,” he says, recovering ever so slightly. Surely the other man will recognize the name as Semitic. Walter extends his hand.
“Amos Klein,” says the younger man. He pronounces it Ah-mohs. His hand in Walter’s is like powder. Like the theory of a hand. Then it is gone. Back at his side. “I must ask you not to walk here.” He speaks with zero ire, zero apology. “My wife, my children, you understand. They were alarmed.”
“I’m sorry.” A flare of unaccustomed shame and incredulity. The unaccustomed shame because as a white man in the suburbs Walter hasn’t much practice thinking of his appearance as a cause for alarm. The incredulity because this kid already has a wife and children, plural? But he should have expected as much. That’s how it works; they marry young, reproduce often. “How many?”
“Yes?” The way he says it—in place of excuse me?—again suggests he is a foreigner, someone for whom English is a second language. As of course it is, assuming this man grew up speaking Yiddish at home, Hebrew in shul.
“How many children do you have?”
“Four, thank God. And one on the way.”
“Me too!” exclaims Walter. As if this is proof of something. “I also have four and one on the way.” He flushes. Until this moment he has told no one about the new baby, respecting Bennie’s wish to keep the news private until after the wedding. Now he has taken it upon himself to tell a stranger. Out of a desire he can’t account for, a desire to establish fellowship with a man whose interests are almost certainly opposed to his, a man who in all likelihood would vote against a tax override for the schools, who in all likelihood would not support local businesses that stay open on the Sabbath, who in all likelihood would not shake hands or even exchange a Good morning with Bennie or any other woman he might pass on the street. A man who in all likelihood regards him, Walter, as shaygetz.
The word comes back to him from childhood. Abomination. A term for a non-Jewish man, but more pejoratively a term the Haredim applied to Jews like them, like Walter and Myron and even Fiebush, for that matter (never mind that Fiebush was at shul every Friday night, it was the wrong shul). A term for Jews who were insufficiently Jewish. He remembers one time, he’d been sitting behind the counter at Fiebush’s reading a comic book. The bell on the door tinkled and he’d glanced up to see a Haredi woman enter with her horde in tow, seven or eight kids in long sleeves, long pants, long skirts. That was not unusual, but what happened next was. Unwritten custom dictated Walter would slide his eyes back down to the comic without offering any kind of greeting or acknowledgment, as indeed no Haredi children ever acknowledged him. But there was one boy among this group who must have been Walter’s age—not just his age but in some ineffable way his very likeness—and as if he, too, recognized a similarity, a sameness between them, this boy broke with convention and allowed himself to make eye contact with Walter for long unblinking seconds, long enough for a smile to test itself upon Walter’s lips, before the boy turned to one of his younger brothers and whispered that word: shaygetz.
Walter looks the young man in the eyes and says with deliberate warmth, “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
“Tate, Mama zagt bite kumin!” A child’s voice, coming from a window. Walter looks up in time to catch a flurry of movement, little bodies scrambling from view.
“You understand,” Amos Klein says again, neither courteous nor discourteous, making his meaning clear by sweeping his palm toward the street. As though he has no agency in the matter. As though it is all entirely out of their hands. Each must act in accordance with what he has been taught. Walter does understand.
Amos Klein remains planted there while Walter, after whistling to Richard, makes his way down the drive. Walter feels himself watched as he goes. Much as he stood yesterday, watching the departure of the man who wanted to pay cash for their house. The man he later regretted not having offered a glass of water. A piece of fresh baguette. Not until he reaches the road does he hear behind him the sound of footsteps crossing the porch, the front door creaking open and shut. The sound of vigilance relaxed.
Agitated, even short of breath, for some reason he does not understand, Walter finds himself suddenly questioning whether they should put their house on the market after all. Jeff Greenberg has been sending him links to articles detailing all the myriad problems faced by towns where Haredim live in large numbers. Last night in bed he’d finally clicked on a few, only to become immersed in tales of insurance fraud, tax fraud, social security fraud, food stamp fraud, Medicaid fraud, election fraud, voter harassment. He’d read up on investigations of ultra-Orthodox communities by the FBI, the ACLU, the Office for Civil Rights. Story after story describing how lawyers specializing in religious loopholes help the Haredim drain secular coffers while spurning secular society. Reading on the laptop beside his sleeping wife his insides had roiled: he’d felt sick and sad and righteous and angry and resolute.
All he feels now, walking along the county road in the fat of the June morning, bees lumbering about the wildflowers, gold pollen stains patterning the asphalt where the rain ran in rivulets overnight, is a single desire: to be acceptable. To be seen and recognized as good. Menschlich. How he hates being regarded as an intruder, a threat. How intolerable it is—here in his own village! I meant no harm—he finds himself formulating this protest in his head, but to whom is it addressed? To Amos Klein? To the unseen wife and children he is supposed to have alarmed? To the elders of Amos Klein’s community, the synagogue administrators, the guardians of modesty, the yeshiva teachers, the rebbe? I pose no threat, I mean no harm.
But this is not true. His very appearance—his very existence—serves as evidence of the vast world that lies beyond the boundaries of Orthodox life. The Haredim, he knows, brook no Internet use, no television, no exposure to secular thought. If you need a cell phone you have to use a “kosher” one: a phone on which inappropriate content has been blocked. It’s not that these things in and of themselves violate halakhic law; it’s that more and more, modernity encroaches. The community is living under growing threat of losing members to the allure of life off the derech, off the path.
Now he draws even with McElroy’s house and the lawn sign so prominently staked: CITIZENS FOR THE PRESERVATION OF RUNDLE JUNCTION. And he thinks: Isn’t that the ultimate hubristic banality? The wish to keep things as they are, to triumph over impermanence.
So what if the Haredim do move in en masse, get their own elected to the school board and the village trustees, establish yeshivas and eruvs, alter the very character of Rundle Junction? How is that different from the myriad other examples of migration and evolution that make up the history of life on this planet? Before the Haredim, the Erlends. So what? Before the Erlends, the Wappingers. Before the Wappingers, the dinosaurs—and it’s not as if anyone sits around saying, Oh what a shame Homo sapiens came along! If only the Mesozoic Era had lasted.
What was it Glad had told him? Only yesterday morning, gripping his arm. With such queer, startling intensity. We must always try to embrace reality.
And what would Bennie say if he came to her now, after all their arduous deliberations, after finally, finally reaching their difficult decision, only to tell her: I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think we should move after all. What if he were to say, Let’s stay. Not in order to dig in with the resistance and push the Haredim out. But because—well because they live here, and life is change, and you can’t avoid or outrun change no matter where you go. Or who you are. The Haredim are also going to change, he realizes. They can’t not. The point isn’t to fight it but to be curious, attentive to, in dialogue with the reality of change, the ever-changing reality. To sing along with it. Help make up new verses.
Walter’s a little frightened by the strength of this sudden conviction: that they should remain, should be part of whatever shifts and strife and growth may happen in the community. But the feeling is so much clearer than any he experienced around their earlier decision to leave. He’s invigorated, wants to break into a run, wants to go find Bennie and take her by the shoulders, tell her right away: Listen, listen! I think we should stay. And will she be mad at him for changing his mind? Probably. And after being angry will she be happy, too, after all, to stay? He doesn’t know. In any case, he will keep from saying anything until after the wedding.
Rounding the bend now between McElroy’s property and their own, he stops short. And stares. Hardly able to make sense of what he sees. The immense black walnut, ripped out of the earth, split and prostrate on the lawn.
“WHAT?” BENNIE SHUTS the faucet and yells to Lloyd, who has just yelled something to her on his way through the kitchen.
“I SAID WE’RE GOING TO THE STRIP MALL! TRY TO SCORE SOME MORE UMBRELLAS!”
It is threatening to rain again.
Bennie, loading the dishwasher with the last of the lunch dishes (That’s it, she announced not ten minutes ago, realizing the wedding is less than three hours hence, no one eats anything else until after the ceremony), nods and gives him a thumbs-up. Ellerby, his accomplice, makes sure to photo-document this gesture of approval.
“BUT DON’T DAWDLE!” yells Bennie after them.
Lloyd, halfway through the doorway, turns back. “WHAT?”
“COME STRAIGHT BACK! I NEED YOU!”
He salutes. His accomplice salutes. The door bangs shut.
“WHERE’S LLOYD AND ELLERBY GOING?” Mantha scampers into the kitchen.
“WHAT?”
The question is duly repeated.
“UMBRELLAS!” comes the cryptic reply.
Either Mantha’s synecdochical gifts are extraordinary or their destination is beside the point. “CAN I GO WITH THEM?”
“NOT ON YOUR LIFE! I HAVE MORE CHORES FOR YOU!”
Her bottom jaw slides into its trademark sulk. Bennie, stooping to shake soap powder into the little plastic tray, makes a point of not noticing.
“WHATH EVERYONE THOUTING FOR?” Hugh comes in.
“NOTHING!” Mantha gives a casual wave of her cast. “WE’RE JUST YELLING SO WE CAN HEAR!”
“WHAT?”
Bennie turns on the dishwasher, adding a new layer of noise.
Mantha makes an athletic but wholly unsuccessful attempt to communicate through hand gestures, then shouts for good measure, “STUPID CHAIN SAW!!!”
The chain saw is McElroy’s. Their dour neighbor, bless his heart, has come to carve some semblance of order out of the severed and toppled black walnut.
When Walter returned from his walk earlier that morning, he’d broken the sad news and everyone had traipsed out en masse to survey the scene. The centuries-old tree had come down sometime during the night, bowing at last to the combined forces of time, soaked earth, and wind. Its trunk had flattened the majority of the metal folding chairs, and its crown splayed its massive reach across almost the entirety of the lawn. The paper lanterns and LED lights that Clem and the Ch/Hannahs had spent half a day hanging were all crushed or lost amid the great fractal labyrinth of branches.
“It’s so sad.”
“It’s so gigantic.”
“Is your mom crying?”
“Cool. Look at the roots.”
“It ripped up the whole ground.”
“Can we keep it like this?”
“I heard it fall.”
“Did not.”
“Did too—it woke me up. I thought it was an explosion.”
“That tree was like a hundred years old.”
“It’s older than Aunt Glad!”
“Much.”
“It’s been here since the Civil War.”
“Even longer.”
“Since the Revolution?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s basically a miracle it didn’t hit the house.”
“Or a tent.”
“Or a car.”
“Or a person.”
“Do you think Aunt Glad knows?”
“Look, your mom is crying.”
The tree’s wrecked anatomy covered so much ground that it did seem little short of miraculous it had managed to avoid so many precious marks. On the other hand, the mark it had struck—pretty much the exact footprint of the wedding venue—presented predicament aplenty.
“What,” wondered Bennie aloud, “are we going to do now?”
“There must be a tree removal service that would come on short notice?” Carrie suggested, sounding as if she very much doubted it.
“If you explain the reason we need it done today . . .”
“Not just today, but like, ASAP, because even then—”
“What are we going to do about seating? The chairs are toast.”
“The chairs are toast! The chairs are toast!” The children, enchanted, took up the cry.
“We should’ve waited to set them up,” opined Lloyd.
“Thank you, Lloyd, that’s helpful.”
“Maybe Dad knows someone from the village? Like a public works guy?”
“Why does everyone think I have an in with the village officials?”
“Well you do go to all those meetings,” said Bennie.
As it happened, Stalwart lived up to his name—though not by calling public works. He had a better idea. Went and knocked on McElroy’s door, asked if he might borrow a chain saw.
McElroy twisted his mouth sideways. “Ever use one?”
“Not personally.” Only after the words were out did Walter realize how lame this sounded. “I’m familiar with how they work,” he added, again realizing a moment too late the unlikeliness of this helping his cause. “I once used a skill saw?”
Such a substantial expectorating sound came from McElroy’s throat that Walter seriously considered stepping out of the way. Instead of phlegm, however, McElroy produced only his verdict: “Can’t let you borrow it.” He shut the screen door, saying, “Give me ten.” Not seven minutes later he appeared in their yard decked out in safety visor and steel-toed boots, chain saw in hand.
He’s a lifesaver, is McElroy. Or a weddingsaver. And he looked improbably gallant, striding up in all that regalia with his usual saturnine expression.
He’s been at it for hours now, long enough for the family to have come up with the name Operation McElroy for what has turned out to be a stroke of genius: as McElroy saws the limbs into logs, the rude mechanicals collect and arrange them into rows upon which the wedding guests can perch. Cut by cut, the dead tree grows smaller and the demolished folding chairs are replaced by the very source of their demolishing.
THEY HAD, OF COURSE, considered whether to go ahead with the wedding or not. All four of the adults who had taken shifts with her through the night believed Aunt Glad was in the process of dying. Walter had never experienced the particular intimacy of accompanying someone through the end of life, but each of the three siblings had been present during their parents’ final days—their mother’s at home and their father’s at the hospice center across the river—and they recognized the signs. Lloyd, who saw her open her eyes and move her hands before her face in the early-morning hours (Almost like she was folding a piece of cloth, or playing cat’s cradle, he reported), recalled his father also moving his fingers with unhurried absorption through the air before him, as though tracing complex, invisible geometries.
For Bennie it was the breathing—or rather the intervals of apnea during which Aunt Glad drew no breath—that brought back memories of her mother’s last twenty-four hours, the arrhythmic respiration that had made a crazy quilt of time, scraps of rattling calico stitched willy-nilly to lengths of plush velvet loosely basted to edgings of broken lace.
During Carrie’s watch Aunt Glad had not just awoken but actually spoken. Who’s here? she suddenly asked.
It’s me, your great-niece Carrie, Carrie replied. I’m right here beside you. She described to the others how the older woman’s face had knitted into a mask of intense concentration then, as if trying not simply to discern but to divine the answer to a compound riddle.
Who else is here? Glad insisted without lifting her head. Who is that over by the door?
Carrie had looked. No one, she replied. It’s just the two of us.
And Aunt Glad, after seeming to hang on to her question for several speechless moments, had at last given a small nod and lapsed back into her sleep state.
In the end, they let Clem decide whether to proceed with all the intended festivities or to modify things. She was reached by phone over at the Garrison Inn, where she’d spent the night with Diggs (the brides had intended to spend their final night of singledom apart, but wound up scrapping even this minor and frankly tongue-in-cheek concession to tradition in a wedding otherwise very nearly devoid of any), and apprised of the situation.
“Oh, I’m sure Aunt Glad would want us to go on with everything!” Clem declared without hesitation. Bennie, though wounded by the blithe selfishness she inferred from the speed of Clem’s response, nevertheless did not disagree with the verdict. None of them did.
And so it was determined the day would continue as planned.
AT TWO THIRTY, after three and a half hours of work, McElroy switches off his chain saw for the last time, wipes his brow, chugs the glass of lemonade Bennie brings across the lawn, holds out the drained glass for someone to take (Mantha, to her own surprise, steps in), nods, and without further ado hoists his heavy blade and tromps back across the property line. Glistening with sweat and sawdust, wearing his flipped-up safety visor as gloriously as any Greek warrior ever wore his helmet, he inspires not only a chorus of gratitude in his wake but a musical tribute: Dave-Dave runs and grabs his French horn off the front porch and manages to get out the first several bars of “Fanfare for the Common Man” before McElroy, declining to look back but raising his hand in a parsimoniously heroic acknowledgment, reaches his own front door and disappears inside.
Now the sweet ruffians are gathering and tying the last bits of black walnut refuse together with twine. The lawn is starting to look almost orderly. The bent chairs and crushed paper lanterns have been toted out of sight behind the barn. The remains of the black walnut—the massive clump of vegetal viscera resembling nothing so much as a giant earthen heart, a vital organ sculpted of wood and soil, complete with ventricles, atria, branching arterial and venal roots—have become a kind of altar around which the log benches are arranged in concentric rows. The remnants, all the leafy branches too small to be used for seating, are bundled and tucked around the circumference of the new-fashioned amphitheater, and then as a final touch are studded with sparklers: a surprise for when darkness falls.
This is how the setting for the wedding comes to include a spectating area with seats made of wood, ringed by materials known for their flammability.
AND WHERE ARE THE BRIDES? They’ve taken Diggs’s parents’ car over to the train station in New Ashkelon, to meet the two forty-five from Grand Central. Unhappily, the two forty-five has come and gone, discharging onto the platform a scant handful of passengers, among whom the person they were expecting did not number. They watch its silver segments grow smaller and smaller and finally disappear around a bend.
“O-kayyyy,” says Diggs.
“Where is he?” moans Clem.
“Text him.”
“You think he fell asleep?”
“Or just didn’t haul ass. How old is he?”
“Mid-eighties? But super-spry.”
The parking area has emptied out. Diggs shades her eyes and peers up and down the barren tracks. “Shit.”
“Sorry.”
“Clem? You’ve got to stop doing that.”
“What?”
“Saying sorry.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it. You say sorry way too often, and half the time I don’t even know what you’re saying it for. Hell, half the time you don’t know what you’re saying it for. “
Clem draws breath to protest but it is a knee-jerk reaction, impulse outpacing content, and no words come.
Diggs says, softly, “It’s like you’re scared all the time.”
“Maybe I am. I am.”
“Of what?”
“—”
“Me?”
“Displeasing you. Offending you.”
“Why? Am I so easily offended?”
“No—I just.” But then she cannot think of what else to say.
“Look, Chat. Do you trust me?”
Clem nods.
“Do you trust yourself?”
A more tentative nod.
Diggs laughs.
“What?”
“You should see your face.”
Now Clem mugs, pouting exaggeratedly.
But Diggs no more allows her to flee the moment with a comic turn than she allows her to commandeer all the vulnerability in the relationship. “Are we getting married today?” she asks. Very softly. As if really checking.
“Oh Diggs.” Clem is flooded with remorse, tenderness, protectiveness, conviction, rededication. Love. “Yes. Yes.”
After they finish kissing, Diggs returns to the practical. “He text back yet?”
Clem checks her phone. “No.”
And they stand there, Clem trying to look up routes and schedules on her phone, Diggs squinting without much hope into the distance, until she says in a voice riven with disbelief, “Is that him?”
On the other side of the tracks, way down near where the tail end of the train had been stopped, an unlikely figure appears. Bantam-size, moving with sprightly dexterity, it appears to be ambling in their direction. At first, so far away, it’s distinguishable mainly by the almost vertical shock of yellowish-white hair. As it draws closer, they begin to make out a fuchsia bow tie, a pair of lilac bell-bottoms. Pastel-blue seersucker jacket. Eyeglasses pinging bits of sunlight at them.
“Leopardi!” yells Clem, waving. “Leopardi!”
“Cucciolina!” The figure halts and begins semaphoring madly with both arms.
Diggs directs the scene sotto voce: “Okay, great: you see us, we see you, everybody sees each other. Now keep walking, baby.”
As if heeding her instructions, Ignazio Leopardi resumes his progress in their direction with an infusion of vigor and speed (Diggs, alarmed: “You don’t actually have to run . . .”), all the while beaming, pausing every now and then to wave, as if to remind them he really is on his way, and talking a blue streak (not that they have any idea what he’s saying; he’s too far away for the words to carry, besides the fact that his speech is interrupted by fits of boisterous coughing, neither of which—the distance or the cough—seems to trouble him in the least). Drawing opposite them at last, he stops, looks both ways like a child crossing the street, and lifting his knees high, tromps across the metal rails.
“Cucciolina!” he exclaims in a voice even more laryngitic than usual. “And her inamorata!!” He has to go on tiptoe to reach each of their cheeks with his moist lips, fairly fumigating them with the sooty odor of his Fisherman’s Friend cough drops. Then he seizes their hands, unable to contain himself, and, standing between them, swings their arms back and forth. “Welcome, welcome!” he cries.
Clem and even Diggs are laughing helplessly, breathlessly, not without a tinge of hysteria. “But you’re the one,” Clem manages to point out at last, “who traveled here.”
“Yes!” he agrees, his enthusiasm, not to mention his grip on their hands, undiminished. He looks skyward and gives a shake of his cottony mane, as if at the wonder of it all. Or perhaps just at the wonder of himself. “Welcome, me!”
What can one possibly say in such circumstances?
“Welcome,” they respond.
The officiant has arrived.
“WHEN ARE WE GOING TO EAT?” A question Otis has put to his mother at least five times already this afternoon.
“Later,” she has told him repeatedly. Now she has gone to shower and he addresses his query more generally to anyone who will listen.
“Nobody’s eating anything until after the ceremony.” Mantha parrots what she has heard her own mother say.
Otis makes a sound of utter wretchedness.
“Don’t whine,” says Tom.
“I’m not whining.”
Tom snickers and Mantha, with triumphal glee, declares, “You just did!”
Otis screams. “I hate it here! I hate all you Blumenthals!”
Tom blows a raspberry.
“My father does, too, you know—that’s why he didn’t come! He says your sister’s a lesbun!”
Tom’s mouth forms a giant O.
More or less informatively, Mantha says, “That’s not how you pronounce it.”
But Otis is past the point of distinguishing information from insult. “I hate you! I hate your whole family!”
“Well,” says Mantha. “We hate yours.”
Otis’s rage rises beyond the recourse of speech. He stomps over to the fridge.
“Don’t,” warns Tom.
Otis yanks it open. When he turns to give Tom a nyah-nyah look, Mantha throws herself between him and the food.
What is he to do then but shove the heavy door against her, knocking her into the racks. She clubs him with her cast. Tom rushes to intervene and moments later all three are sprawled on the ground, along with a bottle of ketchup, a dozen eggs, a basket of blackberries, and a carton of milk, seeping tranquilly across the kitchen floor.
THE COMMOTION REACHES Bennie at Aunt Glad’s bedside, and Walter coming down the stairs. Hearing his tread, she calls softly, “Stalwart?” and he comes to the door of the office.
Even now she can get brought up short by his handsomeness. He’s always sharp in his navy suit, which he’s paired today with his special-occasion tie, splashed with pink and yellow flowers. “You look like you’re about to host the Oscars.”
He appraises her, still in T-shirt and jeans. “You look like you’re about to—”
“Don’t say it.”
A soundless laugh blooms at the corners of his eyes.
“Do you know what that’s all about in the kitchen?”
They listen, but the ruckus has subsided.
“Shall I investigate?”
She shrugs. “Nah. Hey, have you seen any sign of Clem?”
“Yeah, they finally just got back from the train a little while ago—she and Diggs and her old theater professor, Leonardi, Leopardavinci, something? Listen, have you seen her ring?”
“What ring?”
“She says she’s missing the ring she bought Diggs.”
“For the wedding?”
“An opal.”
“I haven’t seen it. Not that I knew about it. Not that she bothered mentioning it to me. But with all the tents and the sleeping bags and the rain and the moving around, I’m sure—”
“Yeah, I said basically the same thing. We’ll keep an eye out.”
“Fine. Meanwhile, I’m going to go change, so will you keep an ear out? For Aunt Glad, I mean. In case . . . ?”
They both look over. At this hour a kind of lemonade light streams in the office window, pouring libations over the lower half of the cot and illuminating the gold-speck constellations revolving above. Glad looks smaller than ever under the wispy pink mohair, aglow like spun sugar in the sun. She looks not simply reduced but somehow concentrated, as if all that has evanesced was superfluity, while all that remains is essence.
“Has she been awake at all with you?”
Bennie shakes her head no. “I don’t think someone has to be in the room with her every second, but—”
“Yeah, no, Ben. You go.” Walter sits. “I’ll be here.”
NO SOONER HAS Bennie gone than the guests start to arrive, first in a trickle, then in a stream; now in cars snaking up the driveway, now in cars clogging the driveway, until they can be Tetrised into spaces along the periphery of the lawn one by one by Tom. Only too glad to extricate himself from the kitchen (everyone in the clash of cousin against cousin had ended up feeling a similar shamed remorse), he’d flung himself into the role of parking attendant unbidden and unrehearsed. He’s proving quite a natural. Lanky, bare-chested (having shed his button-down in the late-afternoon heat) and chewing a long stalk of wild onion grass, he guides drivers into space-saving, geometrically intricate and (as will become evident only at the end of the party) well-nigh-impossible-to-back-out-of slots.
They arrive, the guests, in dribs and drabs and then all at once, accruing in the yard and on the porch and in the house, kitted out in a miscellany of long dresses and Converse high-tops, of miniskirts and tuxedo jackets, of lace mantillas and porkpie hats, of kilts and harem pants and army boots and feathered mules. They come almost to a one bearing covered dishes (so Clem had been neither disingenuous nor delusional when she’d claimed to have the food under control), which, at a glance, run the gamut from the crudest of crudités and supermarket hummus to more eclectic contributions (tubs of yogurt, bags of homemade horehound lollipops, a pot of plain brown rice, a whole watermelon) to the truly culinarily grandiloquent: someone made a mocha marjolaine and someone else a towering croquembouche.
They bring not only vittles but bottles of wine and brightly wrapped gifts, also knapsacks and musical instruments and camping chairs and bedrolls. More than a few come toting what look suspiciously like tents. More than a few come with four-legged plus-ones—no one ever gets an accurate count, but at least five or six dogs seem to be loose around the place, not including Richard, who welcomes the newcomers with the magnanimity of one whose preeminence is beyond dispute; he spends the rest of the evening monitoring the pack with benign but unassailable authority.
Walter, replaced at Aunt Glad’s side by Carrie, steps out onto the lawn, ever the emcee. Pinned to the lapel of his jacket now is a sprig of fresh myrtle. “From Clem,” he tells everyone who compliments him. He’d been surprised and touched when she’d approached him, in a halter dress of palest green, matching the tiny peridot in her nostril, to pin it on his lapel herself—and only slightly deflated when he saw the foppish old fellow with her (You remember my adviser, Leopardi?) already sporting its twin. Or its sextuplet, as it happened, for she has similarly provided for her father-in-law-to-be, and Lloyd, Tom, and Pim. (“What do you want me to do, stick it behind my ear?” the still-shirtless Tom offers when she tracks him down. “In your teeth,” she counters, “like Carmen.” “Oh go clothe your naked villainy,” advises Hannah, coming up and draping an arm over Clem’s shoulder, silently commending herself for managing to flirt with two Blumenthals—the puckish adolescent and his Shakespeare-loving sister—at one go. “Give it to Otis,” decides Tom. “Tell him it’s from me. Peace offering.”) Now Walter strides about, big and handsome with his silver mane and sonorous voice, hailing friends and strangers alike, shaking hands with one and all.
Diggs, for her part, has gotten matching corsages for Johnetta, Bennie, Carrie, Mantha, and Aunt Glad. (“Aunt Glad,” Clem breathes, removing the final corsage from its plastic clamshell, then turns to Diggs, her eyes wetly shining. “You never even got to meet her.”) They consider bringing it into the office and laying it where Aunt Glad might spot it if she opens her eyes, but just then they notice Ellerby lurking shyly at the end of the porch, and Diggs kneels before the slender brown girl in green cowboy boots. “This is yours,” she says, sliding the elastic band onto her wrist.
Ellerby, finding it itchy, transfers it as soon as Diggs is out of sight to the ankle of one of her boots. Mantha, declaring hers itchy, too, transfers it from her naked wrist to the one with the cast. Feeling resplendent in her daffodil tulle (never mind that it’s speckled now not only with remnants of ice cream sandwich but with a medley of blackberry and ketchup stains as well), she has commandeered one of the card tables set up on the lawn and turned it into a satellite post office branch. Arrayed before her are the familiar props: pens, pencils, paper, scissors, tape, glue, glitter, feathers, stickers. Through a paper bullhorn she tries to drum up business. “Step right up to the Nuptial Post! Come write a letter to the happy couple! Free of charge! Delivery included!” Beside her, the wicker wastepaper basket from her bedroom masquerades as a mailbox.
“How does this work, exactly?” inquires a prospective customer, and when Mantha sees who it is she is overcome.
“Mom! You’re so pretty!”
“Lipstick. Try sounding less shocked.” But she is pleased all the same, even more so when Mantha, unable to contain herself, flings both arms around her.
LLOYD LOOSENS HIS TIE, kicks off his shoes, and relaxes on the office floor. He couldn’t be happier to have won the position of designated companion to Aunt Glad during the ceremony. For one thing, it excuses him from having to witness the exchange of vows, which would have been uncomfortable not, as his sisters might suspect, because he’s opposed to the codification of human relationship, but because he himself failed in his one attempt at marriage and it still hurts. For another, remaining here with Aunt Glad offers something close to solitude, a thing he’s accustomed to quaffing in large doses and of which he’s been deprived these past several days. He reclines against the wall and finds an almost sensuous pleasure in the cool, hard plaster on his back and head. All about him the house crackles with vacancy, is fairly animated by it, that particular heightened sense of vacancy that derives from knowing everybody else is gathered out of doors.
The wedding has begun.
Even tucked away at the back of the house, Lloyd can hear its official commencement: Dave-Dave playing “Here Comes the Sun” on his French horn. Now he watches as the other roustabouts convey from the barn three long banners of brown butcher paper. He can just make out the hand-painted script through the office window as the young people process toward the amphitheater:
WEDDINGS:
A WITHERING CRITIQUE OR,
AN ODE TO UNFETTERED LOVE
• • •
A PAGEANT IN FIVE EPISODES
He can tell they have reached their destination by the sound, moments later, of what strikes him as tentative laughter from those assembled. Himself, he grins. When the next generation does not fear offending the previous one, he thinks, this bodes well for the species. Not only that: it’s the ultimate tribute. The children’s way of telling their elders, Behold your success. You raised us to be free.
OUT ON THE LAWN the wedding is unfurling with much the same effect as the banners themselves—that is, eliciting from those gathered a mixture of insult and indulgence, curiosity and amusement, and an expectation of pleasure increasingly surmounted by niggling dread.
The first “episode,” proclaimed as such by yet another banner, bears the title “Chattel Bride” and involves a perplexing but evidently intended-to-be-funny skit in which Hannah, costumed in a derby hat, kipper tie, and Oliver Hardy mustache, holds up an old metal birdcage (pilfered from the barn) on whose dangling perch has been glued a plastic figurine of a bride, and Chana, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe and a long white beard made out of cotton balls, scrambles up the aluminum ladder, now decorated with cardboard cumulus clouds. (“Ith that thuppothed to be God?” asks Hugh. “Shh,” whispers his mother, who is wondering the same thing.) There is some dialogue between the two, which does indeed having a biblical ring (“She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house, my household stuff, my field, my barn, my ox, my ass, my any thing!” cries Hannah, spluttering a little to get the mustache hairs out of her mouth; meanwhile the false beard renders Chana’s lines largely unintelligible), and then the roustabouts shout, from upstage, “Release the chattel bride!” whereupon Hannah opens the birdcage, removes the cake-decoration bride, and flings it, à la bouquet, into the audience. Tom catches it and promptly tucks it in his breast pocket, in lieu of the boutonniere he bequeathed to Otis. With many blown kisses then and an abundance of ornate bows, the Ch/Hannahs exit the stage.
The second episode, “The Ghost Bride,” alters the tone radically. Guests, seated on log benches that only yesterday were part of a single towering organism, crane around as a new sound, woody and aching, floats through the air from behind them. Dave-Dave has vanished and in his place stands Maya, playing a Chinese folk melody on a bamboo flute. Heads swivel back the other way as a stilt-walker approaches, all in white, its identity concealed by a featureless mask that closer inspection reveals to be a paper plate. Upon reaching the front of the amphitheater, it executes a deep curtsy and everyone can see it is wearing wings made of wire and netting, decorated with real flowers and paper butterflies. (“Is that supposed to be a ghost?” asks Otis. “Shh,” whispers his mother. “It’s an angel.” But on her other side Hugh says, “It’th Aunt Glad,” and those seated nearby see in their minds the powder room photo: the girl in the wagon on her way to the pageant as a Fairy Attendant Upon the Hours.)
In stylized slow motion, with the strains of the bamboo flute wheeling and threading like birds on currents of air, the figure does a dance that—although the movements could not be simpler, the round white face no more expressionless—makes gooseflesh rise on the arms of those who watch. As the last prolonged note dies, the figure bends in another curtsy and this time draws up the hem of her long white dress. The outer layer is gauze, and when she raises it up, all the way up to cover her face, it becomes both shroud and bridal veil. When she gathers up the underskirts, too, tucking them in at her waist and thereby exposing the long wooden sticks to which her legs are bound, they appear entwined, swallowed, consumed by flames of red and copper foil.
Now the bamboo flute emits a series of birdlike pips, and the figure becomes alert, searching hither and thither, until she appears to spot what she seeks. She extends both arms toward—the audience turns to see—a second stilt-walker, approaching from across the meadow. This one is all in black, even its mask, and it runs, actually runs through the tall grass on its spindly limbs, shockingly precarious and shockingly light. The guests suck in their breath. Upon reaching the outer row of ringed benches, the black figure stops—it is somehow unmistakably a suitor—reaches into the pocket of its under-any-other-circumstances-comically-long pants and produces from it an outsize jewel box, which he holds out toward the white, winged figure, opening it to reveal not a ring but a fiery sunflower. The ghost bride, for surely that is who she is, presses together her palms—delicate and mortal, almost piteous relative to her overall stature—and in that prayerful posture, proceeds down the middle aisle to receive the burning helianthus, which she presses to her breast.
Now the bamboo flute resumes, and the stilt-walkers stride away hand in hand, lifting their impossible legs over the high grass with stick-insect grace.
“IS IT OVER?” asks Lloyd, for Bennie has come into the room, but she says, “No . . . no,” and then just stands there, looking at Glad with a stricken expression.
“Are you okay?” asks Lloyd, but she says, “No . . . yes,” and then just continues to regard, with more naked emotion than he is accustomed to seeing on his sister’s face, their great-aunt.
“Why aren’t you out there?” asks Lloyd, and only now does she really seem to notice him, sprawled on the floor in sock feet, his necktie resting across his lap.
“This”—a sip of air, a shake of her head—“is a very weird wedding.” She joins him on the floor. “I think they just acted out kind of like a memorial, or—a wedding, actually—for Aunt Glad.”
He must wait while she regains control of her voice, then he listens as she recounts the details of “The Ghost Bride.”
“That’s a real thing, you know, in China,” he says. “Marrying off the souls of the dead.”
“I know, I remember. That course Clem took. Critique of the Marriage-Industrial Complex or something. She said it’s how women who don’t want a husband can avoid it. Get married to a dead guy.”
“Maybe,” says Lloyd. “I thought it was so unmarried souls don’t have to be lonely. To give them peace.”
“Do you think Aunt Glad was lonely?”
They both mark her use of the past tense.
Softly he answers, “I don’t know anyone who’s not.”
Together they look up at the cot. So slight is the mass occupying it that from their angle it could be uninhabited, if not for the faint sound of a breath expelled. Together they listen. With all their being they listen. Until, after a longish interval, it is followed by the sound of a new inhalation.
Bennie, surprising herself, says, “I’m pregnant.”
Lloyd, surprising them both, turns and kisses her on the temple.
OUTSIDE THE GUESTS are being entertained—or if not entertained, then edified—or if not edified, then bemused—by Episode Three: “Jumping the Broom,” another shift in tone.
The whole gang is involved in this one. First the Ch/Hannahs plunk a couple of apple crates center stage, upon which Banjo and Val rest a large wooden frame displaying a paper scroll with a painting of a broom. As they crank handles on either side, the image of the broom travels off to the right and a painting of a globe inches in from the left. Meanwhile Dave-Dave narrates through a bullhorn in the dramatic baritone of an old newsreel. The origins of the custom called Jumping the Broom have been the subject of much cultural dispute. As the low-tech slide show illustrates his points, he gives a brief history of various similar rites found among the Romany, the Welsh, the Asante people of West Africa, and enslaved people on antebellum plantations in the southern part of the United States. Then Maya comes forth and with a twirl, deposits an antique broomcorn besom (this, too, pilfered from the barn) on the ground in front of the wooden frame. The roustabouts all insert kazoos in their mouths and razzily hum, Here comes the bride.
There is a ripping sound—the brown paper scroll is slashed from behind—and Clem and Diggs leap through the opening, jumping over the broom and landing with a smack. Much clapping, cheering, stomping, whistling, hooting, and catcalling ensues.
Episode Four: “The Act Itself,” announces the next banner. Now the roustabouts depart the playing area, clearing away all props and scenery as they go so that the happy couple remains alone against the backdrop of the epic, calamitous uprooted stump of the ancient black walnut. Still holding hands, visibly breathless and visibly happy, they appear in the brilliance of the solstice’s long golden light to be nearly fluorescing. Ellerby, knowing a photo op when she sees one, stands on her log and lifts her invisible camera to her eyes.
Mantha also rises. Catching her sister’s eye, she points at her own chest and mouths, Now? Clem nods and Mantha gathers the froth of her flower-girl dress in the manner of ladies in olden-time movies (a move she has been practicing lo these many weeks) and sweeps toward the back of the amphitheater where her basket of wildflowers, gathered that afternoon in McElroy’s field, awaits. At the same time, a little musical combo arranges itself on the lawn beside the stage. It consists of Dave-Dave, Banjo, Maya, Val, and Chana, armed respectively with French horn, ukulele, bamboo flute, claves, and concertina. Anyone wondering how this idiosyncratic mishmash of instruments will sound will have to wait, however, for the ensemble, once prepped, remains silent, evidently awaiting some cue yet to come. People begin looking around, shifting their bottoms on the log benches that are beginning to register as less than ergonomically ideal.
And still the wedding fails to progress. Not only the audience but also the betrothed are now craning in all directions and engaging in murmured consultation. The musicians raise their eyebrows inquisitively; the flower girl can be heard wondering to no one in particular what the heck is going on; the brides look frankly concerned; the guests smile with forbearance all around. If their thoughts could be aggregated and distilled, here is what they might sound like: We are with you, don’t you worry . . . oh how we are with you . . . more than you realize, more than you can know . . . do not worry about us; we don’t mind the mishap, and after all there will be so many mishaps, so many moments such as this and many far worse . . . even if you believe it, even if you believe in the idea of it, the idea of mishaps and of soldiering through, even if you believe all it takes is remaining—remaining in place, in conversation, in communion, unswerving, still—you don’t yet know what it means (how could you? when only time can teach us, when nothing but experience—those tiny bits and pieces that by themselves are nothing and that in sum compose a life—when only this can grant such knowledge, this and nothing else—no amount of intellect, no amount of imagination, preparation, study, faith), you cannot yet know these things because you are babies both of you, never mind your senior thesis, never mind your LSAT; you are not really so different from Harriett either of you, Harriett whose milk-blue veins show through the lantern of her skin, Harriett whose diamond-shaped fontanelle pulsates between the bones of her still-forming skull, Harriett whose open toothless mouth sucks avidly now on Carrie’s pinkie knuckle; you, like her, are so new still and wide open to everything, to drinking in your unknown future even as you fall farther and farther away from the memory of wherever it was you left, the memory of the time or place that came before (or the no-place that came before, the nameless, placeless, timeless soup of something-that-is-not-nothingness), even as you fall farther and farther away from the ancestral memories you came into this world somehow bearing—like a yellowed letter written in a forgotten alphabet—these memories you came bearing in strands of nucleotides and in dream symbology: stowaway memories of love, of death, of fire, of celebration, of forced migration and emancipation, of ghettos and shtetls, of calendars that follow the moon and calendars that follow the sun, of singed feathers and wooden boats, of train stations and oceanic undulations, of cherry blossoms and fear . . . you are—we can see it in your eyes, in your glowing faces, in the shininess that is part flop sweat, part elation; we can sense it in the air of mischief and impatience, of luminous expectation rolling off you like fragrance—you are still newly hungry, both of you; like Harriett you are ready to put everything in your mouth, to learn its character by gumming it, licking it, and biting down, and we forgive you your beautiful foolishness as we forgive ourselves our disenchantments and our longing; we bless you both and bless every scrap of sadness and happiness you have yet to encounter.
And if there is such a thing as a wedding, if the act of “wedding” exists in any way beyond pure abstraction, if it could be thought of as an active verb, a concrete force or occurrence, then does this spontaneous, unspoken benediction, conceived collectively and received unknowingly by the lovers under the invisible fermata created by human error, by a glitch in timing, by (not to put too fine a point on it) Leopardi’s letting himself doze on the porch while awaiting his entrance—does this constitute the moment their union is sacralized?
It is true that by the time Leopardi makes his way to the amphitheater, seersucker jacket accidentally left draped over the back of the cane chair so that not only his rainbow suspenders but also his half-moons of armpit perspiration show, wiping a bit of spittle from his chin, there is a sense that the climactic moment—“the act itself,” as the banner put it—has already occurred, so that whatever Leopardi’s role in the ceremony may be (look what a to-do he is making now, positioning himself smack between the couple, where he grins a bit wildly up at each bride in turn, then grants himself license to bodily rearrange them so that he is not upstaged) is of little consequence.
At last the Ch/Hannahs hoist their homemade chuppah, and while the guests shift on their makeshift benches (how patient they have been, how tolerant of all the shenanigans, but now they are bent on standing and stretching, moving into the shade, quenching their thirst, and heaping their plates), Leopardi goes on at immodest length, making some kind of nuptial remarks that no one can follow thanks to the dual impediments of laryngitis and the fact that he is, frankly, bonkers, and his speech would make little sense even if they had access to a transcript. Apparently it’s very witty, if the fact that he keeps cracking himself up is any indication. The sun, even as it continues its flaming descent, swells and intensifies, its own color growing more deeply yolky as it ignites a riotous palette of pigment across the residual tatters of cloud. It drops another notch and each stalk of grass in McElroy’s field is illuminated like a glass rod, while the insects arcing above the grass become lit en masse like so many flecks of spume above a cresting wave.
At last Leopardi finishes his treatise. He directs the brides to kiss and a smattering of applause breaks out. Then, on the reasonable assumption that the official joining is complete, the guests rise, clapping, cheering, whistling, hooting.
“Wait, wait!” Leopardi roars, though it comes out as a rusty mew. He waves his arms overhead in a canceling motion, calling off the ovation. “It’s not over! Be quiet!” he entreats. “There is still more!”
The final banner is raised.
EPISODE FIVE: “UNFETTERED LOVE”
“BEN, YOU BETTER COME.” Walter stands in the doorway, absorbing the tableau of his wife and his brother-in-law sitting on the floor, shoeless, lolling against the wall, bottles in hand. Bennie’s, he sees, is root beer; nevertheless. “What are you doing in here, anyway? Why did you leave?”
Bennie flushes. Right. As she’d left, she did whisper to him, “Going to check on Glad,” but clearly she has overstayed. “I got—I was a little overcome. I wanted—I just needed to see Aunt Glad. Did I—? Shoot.” Scrambling up, smoothing her dress. “Did I miss the—is it over?” Talking fast, compensating for the guilt that is taking hold. “It just seemed like it was going on and on. And on.” She laughs and instantly stifles it: how snide she sounds. Using Walter’s arm to brace herself while she slips her feet back into sandals, she steals a glance at his face. He’s granite-jawed. Contrition knits her into its corrective corset. “Oh Stalwart, did I miss it? That’s terrible. I didn’t mean to stay away so long.”
“You must have meant it,” he says. “On some level.”
Her neck grows warm. “I didn’t.” But she sounds like Pim, denying getting into the candy jar with chocolate all over his chin. “I really didn’t do it on purpose. I lost track of time.” How unconvincing that sounds. “I may not be thrilled with the way Clem’s orchestrated everything, but truly—I didn’t mean to miss her wedding.”
“Well.” He still bears a residual glower, but his tone is less severe. “You didn’t, exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
Walter fills them in.
Leopardi, despite having enthusiastically agreed over the phone to Clem’s outline for the final episode, “Unfettered Love” (it was to have involved a pair of intricately hand-carved marionettes they’d come across in the barn; he would be the puppeteer, but a bumbling one; the strings would become entangled and need to be cut, at which point the brides would step in and, in a sort of variation on cat’s cradle, weave the strings into a fine, airy bridge suspended between them), had taken the prerogative of changing his mind. As he proclaimed, with laryngitic, self-adoring exuberance, he’d dispensed with the script entirely in order to reveal the regalo stupendo he’d decided to give the couple. Ahem! (He’d actually pronounced the word ahem, Walter says, as if under the impression it was English for May I please have your utmost attention.) While completing the online application to become a Universal Life minister so that he could legally perform the ceremony, he’d experienced an epiphany.
“And what epiphany was that?” Bennie inquires.
An epiphany that caused him to realize that the greatest gift he could give was not to help them tie the knot, but to leave them meravigliosamente unknotted! Therefore he had mercifully, providentially, and very cleverly never completed the application but exited the program without entering his credit card information, and was therefore now thrilled and honored to be able to assure one and all that his role as officiant this day was entirely symbolic! Thus leaving the care ragazze free to enjoy sinceramente vero unfettered love! Upon which, after a protracted moment of stunned silence all around, Clem had let out a choked sound and fled the amphitheater, stumbling, her hands hiding her face, up the aisle and across the meadow toward the little encampment, where she’d zippered herself into the orange tent.
“That fucker,” says Bennie.
“You should go to her, Ben.”
“Yes.” She starts out of the room, doubles back, takes him by the lapels, and kisses him on the mouth. “Stalwart.”
IN THE AFTERMATH of the non-wedding wedding (obvious echoes of This Is Not A Theater Collective, a parallel her friends tactfully refrain from pointing out to its chief architect, also its chief disappointee), the startled guests behave with spontaneous, uniform gallantry. They pitch in to expedite the serving of food—peeling foil off trays, lighting Sterno, whisking cold items from coolers—while chatting one another up with concerted good humor, avoiding all critiques and analyses of the unconventional ceremony and its even more unconventional finale. Walter invites Keith and Johnetta Diggins into the relative privacy of the living room, where he pours them each a scotch and they all digest what just happened—or more to the point, what didn’t. The roustabouts ferry the props and scenery back to the barn, and even Leopardi is rescued from the glare of ignominy (not that he’s in need of rescue, appearing wholly unabashed) by a squadron of his most devoted alumni, for whom no outrageousness in the name of art could be too much.
For her part, Bennie stands sentry, positioning herself outside the orange tent in which both brides have taken respite, itself encircled by other tents, which together comprise a little enclave not unlike the one in which she first encountered Stalwart on a frosty morning a quarter century ago, brewing coffee in the dark. Her cause today is less global, perhaps, than his had been, but she feels no less ferocious about pursuing it: defending the fragile bond between the lovers (for what bond constructed of love isn’t fragile?) by guarding their privacy as they suture this Leopardi-inflicted laceration. She assigns herself the task of keeping well-meaning intruders at bay. It isn’t lost on her that she herself is now a member of that camp. She, who had once been closer to Clem than any other human being, she whose very body had been Clem’s dwelling place, the incubator of Clem’s becoming; she who had been not only mother but motherland, is now relegated to defending the periphery. A role she takes up gladly in the wake of the bungled wedding. And with what noble humility, what wise restraint does she stand outside the closed flaps of the tent. (From whence it is hardly her fault she can overhear the voices within.)
Ah, Chat . . . How can you kiss me? . . . Yes it is . . . it is my fault, it was my idea—ridiculous—to ask him . . . I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry . . . I know, but it won’t be the same . . . God, your parents must really love me now . . . It’s mostly Clem’s words she can discern, whether because she knows Clem’s voice better or because Clem in her emotional state is simply louder. Diggs’s voice comes through as a plush murmur, intervals of rumbles trading off with Clem’s chimes of distress. What do you mean I asked for it? . . . You think this is what I wanted? . . . Anyway how come you’re so calm? Anyone would think you didn’t actually want to get married . . . Chat! Is that supposed to be funny? . . . No, now I’m upset for real! Why would you say that? . . . don’t tease . . . don’t call me cracker, pudding . . . you heard me, Kozy Shack . . . oh . . . Silence, then laughter, then silence again, then a deeper silence ribboned with hints of movement, rustling fabric, the metallic harrumph of a zipper, the hiss of whispers, the click of lips . . . until embarrassment wins out over maternal longing and maternal prurience, and Bennie moves several yards away.
“Avast,” she says.
Pim, in a soldierly mood, is marching toward the tent.
Blocking his way: “We’re not going in there, bud.”
“But I have to deliver something.”
Thinking he must mean letters from Mantha’s Nuptial Post, she begins, “Not right now you don’t—” but cuts herself off, for on the flat of his hand he is holding forth a small black velvet box. “What do you have there?”
“The crown jewel.”
She narrows her eyes at him, swipes it, and peers inside: an opal ring. “William Myron Erlend Blumenthal!”
Miraculously, he manages to forestall whatever censure she may be about to deliver with nothing but his impeccably martial bearing. Not only that, his manner is sufficiently impressive that when he holds out his palm once more she actually returns the box to him and steps aside, allowing him to continue on his way to the tent, at whose ramparts he calls, “Madam!”
From within, rustlings and shushings.
“Madam!” He issues his summons again. “Important news!”
The zipper is lowered, the little box deposited through the flap, and after several moments the beneficiary’s head emerges, hair mussed. “You little brat!” says Clem.
A dignified blink. “I porridged it.”
“What does that mean? You’re a thief!”
Pim bows. “My lady.” And judging this an opportune moment to take his leave, he turns and high-steps in the direction of the party.
Clem, spotting Bennie, slips fully out of the tent. “Did you see that?” she demands. “I can’t believe—he must have snuck in and taken it right out of my—” And then with no transition at all she cries, “Mommy!” a name she has not used in who knows how many years, and buries her face in Bennie’s neck. “I’m so sorry,” she cries. “I’m sorry,” over and over on an anguished loop while Bennie holds her, while Bennie luxuriates in the opportunity to hold her, this girl, this inimical, impossible, beloved eldest child, this turncoat who is betraying her, betraying her whole family, as all healthy children one day do, by leaving home. “Shh,” says Bennie. “You have to stop saying you’re sorry.”
Clem gives a teary laugh. “That’s what Diggs says.”
Bennie, looking over Clem’s shoulder, catches the eye of her all-but-in-law daughter-in-law, also now emerged from the tent, her own hair mussed, her own lips softly swollen, wearing on her left ring finger the opal ring. The two of them exchange a smile. “In that case,” says Bennie, and gives Clem a look that completes the thought: Need I say more?
“Oh, but Mom! I am sorry—sorry I haven’t been very nice, and sorry about all the tents and not telling you how many people were coming and acting like you were uptight for wanting to know, and I’m sorry I didn’t manage this whole wedding very well, you were right, in the end it was, it was—just a stupid show. A stupid, botched, make-believe, amateur . . .” Weeping takes over again.
“Clem,” says Bennie, stern now. She puts her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “Open your eyes. Listen. You know something? All weddings are just a show. All weddings are amateur.” She gives her a little shake. “Marriage is what’s real. Weddings are just pageantry.” She laughs. “Did you hear what I just said? Pageantry, Clem! You got it exactly right.”
“LOOK,” says Otis. “Amish.”
It’s a half hour later. Guests are milling round, sitting on the lawn, balancing paper plates on palms and laps. Otis has been playing Revolutionary War Spies down along the driveway with Pim and Hugh, but now he comes running up to joggle his mother’s arm—“Look!”—and point out the cluster of men in long black coats and round fur hats passing along the edge of the lawn.
“Shh,” says Carrie, transferring her cup to the other hand and checking to see whether any red wine spilled on her dress.
“Why do I have to be quiet? The ceremony’s over.”
“Because it’s impolite. Anyway they’re not Amish.”
“What are they then?” asks Hugh. He and Pim have come up to log their official reports alongside Otis’s.
“Black hats,” says Pim.
“What are they really, Mom?”
Carrie lowers her voice. “Jews.”
“I’m a Jew.” Mantha of the uncanny hearing wanders over, eating a piece of watermelon. “What are you guys talking about?”
The boys point.
Now they can see, along the far side of the road, a second cluster, this one comprising women and girls in long sleeves and dark stockings below their skirts. A few push strollers.
“Oh,” says Mantha. “Not that kind.”
“Hold this.” Ellerby hands Mantha her watermelon. “I want to get a picture.”
Mantha rolls her eyes but accepts the watermelon. “Hey Dad,” she calls. Walter stands nearby, carrying on a conversation with Keith Diggins. “Hey Dad, look—it’s those ones you’ve been talking about.”
Both men turn with their plates of ribs and follow the sight of the Haredim processing slowly along the road. The sun is sinking rapidly now toward the horizon and the air is cooling, turning lavender.
“Where are they going?” asks Mantha.
“To sound the alert,” says Pim. “One if by land, two if by sea.”
“Where are they really going, Dad?”
To the old Garvey house, he supposes. Then corrects himself: to the house of Amos Klein.
Aloud he says, “It’s the Sabbath. They must be gathering to pray.” To Diggs’s father he says, “This is new here, the uh, establishment of an ultra-Orthodox community in Rundle Junction.”
Keith, sucking barbecue sauce from his fingers, nods. “We have the same thing. With Muslims. On our street alone we have a few. There’s an Iraqi family down the block. They’ve lived there, must be three years now.”
Johnetta comes over and hands him a napkin. “The Khouris are from Iran.”
Keith accepts both the napkin and the correction. “And now a young couple from Yemen just bought the place across the street.”
“They have the cutest little boy,” says Johnetta. “Eyelashes out to here.”
Walter watches the men round the bend. In a moment, he knows, they’ll draw even with McElroy’s lawn sign. He entertains a fantasy of running ahead and ripping it out of the earth before they see it. Not that they are likely to be shocked. Not that they are unversed in the experience of being unwelcome. They vanish from sight, the bottoms of their long black coats belling slightly in the evening breeze. How many such signs have they encountered? And their ancestors, how many did they encounter? Over the generations, over the centuries. Winding back through the branches of history to where their roots and his are one.
“They look so old-fashioned,” says Mantha.
But they’re the future, thinks Walter. The immediate future of this place. And also its temporary future. All futures being no more than temporary.
Twenty feet away, Lloyd brings his plate of food over to join Bennie on the sagging front steps, those ancient treads leading to the front door no one uses, the door whose broken bell has not trilled in decades. This is not to say the steps have no function. At this very moment they are providing a roof, a shelter for the new nest under construction by the newly impregnated mouse, the very same whose first litter was drowned in last weekend’s rain; who then built a second nest behind the baseboard in the office, but abandoned that one, too, last night—for there had come an odor that made her whiskers twitch and her small heart clatter. Not the odor of cherry blossoms—something else, something beyond comprehension. Beyond what a mouse knows, though not what a mouse smells. Perhaps the scent of a train coming into a station.
The mouse does not mourn. Each time a nest is destroyed, each time danger looms and it becomes necessary to move on, she wastes no time on sorrow. She is a creature attuned purely to exigencies. Even now she freezes: the roof over her head creaks. Is it a threat? She listens. Her whiskers quiver. Her tiny heart pumps blood through her veins. The five fetuses in her womb continue their own undiluted pursuit: to grow.
Gradually, the mouse unfreezes. Resumes the activity of life: gathering material for a new nest.
Oblivious to all this unfolding beneath them, Bennie greets Lloyd with a question. “Is anyone with Aunt Glad?”
“Clem and Diggs.”
That feels right. Feels beautiful, somehow. She sticks her own fork into the watermelon and feta salad on Lloyd’s plate.
“New neighbors,” he says.
“Huh?”
He points toward the road with his corn on the cob; she looks and sees the long-skirted women and children passing by.
“Neighbors.” She tastes that ordinary word. “I guess they are.” She entertains a fantasy of running after them, calling, Come back! Look—we have cake! And suddenly remembers how Clem, one summer night when she was little, had stood on a bench at the ice cream stand out on Route 7. How she’d called after the customers returning to their cars, called to them with the soft serve running down her elbow: “Come back, people! Look, the moon!” She’d been—what? No more than two.
We should stay.
The thought settles upon her like a fine mist. All the talk of putting their house on the market and moving to another town seems suddenly foolish, pointless. This is their home. Whether they move or whether they stay, all homes are no more than temporary.
We’ll stay, she thinks. Come what may.
(Though God only knows what Stalwart will say.)
She won’t mention it tonight, that’s for sure. But her heart is beating fast with it, the conviction. The clear and sudden relief of seeing the real.
Meanwhile the cousins have drifted together toward the road, drawn as if toward a parade. None of the Haredim so much as glance in their direction, or register any awareness of the secular festivities taking place. The men are already out of sight. The women and children process with unimpeachable focus like characters in a play, indifferent to the existence of an audience.
As the tail end of the group is passing by, Pim does a very Pim-like thing: raises a hand to his temple. Across the street, the child bringing up the rear stops in her tracks. Slowly she turns. And among all the people on the Erlend lawn, she locates him, as surely as if he had called her name. She doesn’t do anything so grand as salute back; instead for several seconds she simply stands, regarding him. Her expression and his each alike in fortitude. Until, with a solemn nod, he lowers his hand. Only then does she dart ahead, scurrying to catch up with her people.
WHEN THE FIRST STARS come out it’s time to light the sparklers. All around the yard: a syncopated dazzle as silver-gold spikes of light geyser here, then there, then there, then there. Heads swivel. Conversation trails. For a minute or more everyone’s mesmerized by the wheeling, whirling sparks.
Everything seems darker once the sparklers go out. The band packs up, what’s left of the food is put away. Coolness shimmies over the yard like a nightgown. One by one the guests depart, saying their goodbyes and extricating their cars with considerable patience and toil from the convoluted geometry wrought by the overly zealous parking lot attendant, until at last the knot comes loose and headlights snake down the driveway. Those who remain disperse across the lawn, drift through the empty amphitheater, wander toward the fringes of the property, collect in the encampment, from the direction of which the oily, herby perfume of weed begins to waft.
When will it happen?
If Aunt Glad were sentient, would she be wondering this? Alert to the danger? Would she feel the old alarm clang in her marrow, would a kind of cherry blossom premonition scamper through her blood?
Two pageants, eighty-seven years apart. The first scripted to fortify the myths upon which the institution of this nation was built. The second scripted to dispel the myths upon which the institution of marriage was built. The first sabotaged by anarchists or by accident. The second sabotaged by a solipsistic fop. The first featuring bales of hay. The second featuring bundles of sticks. And doesn’t history repeat itself? Aunt Glad might ask. Haven’t we been taught that tragedy recurs?
What recurs more often than not is possibility. Opportunity. Odds. The groundwork laid, the conditions met, the stars aligned, the critical mass reached. What happens then may go either way. One generation’s unforgivable error becomes the next generation’s act of grace. One generation’s narrow escape becomes the next generation’s foot put wrong. One generation’s epic lament becomes the next generation’s comic relief. One generation’s reconciliation becomes the next generation’s rift. The same threads surface again and again, but the weave is riddled with deviation, tessellation, transformation. No design replicated verbatim.
This is the ecstasy of life. Ecstasy from the ancient Greek ek, “out,” and histanai, “to stand in place.” Ecstasy: the condition of being not fixed, not fettered, not set in stone.
To know we are ever in motion.
This is happiness.
THE FIRE STARTS a little before midnight. The cause is a match. One of the sparkler-lighters (a guest long since departed), upon completing his mission, had blown out the match and tossed it in the nearest garbage. So he thought. He was half-right, twice over. Though he’d put out the flame, he’d failed to extinguish the livid glow at its base. And though his receptacle of choice was indeed a wastepaper basket, it was the one Mantha had brought down from her bedroom as part of the Nuptial Post, and it was full of undelivered missives: dry, crumpled paper. Tinder.
After a few hours of flameless combustion, during which time it produces tendrils of smoke too visually and olfactorily insignificant to draw notice, the smoldering at last crosses the frontier into actual fire—although even then the tongues of orange that lap and lick at the folded sheets of construction paper remain initially modest. When the wicker basket itself erupts, the effect is more dramatic: all those good wishes intended for the newlyweds are released from the prison of material form. Paper and ink are transmuted into heat and light, the written word atomized into the lingua franca of spark and smoke. By now, however, no one remaining on the property stands in the immediate vicinity, and the blaze goes unnoticed.
Who does remain? Ignazio Leopardi bid farewell ages ago, distributing a flurry of impenitent air kisses before catching a ride back to the city. Keith and Johnetta Diggins, having rolled with all the punches with seemingly indefatigable good humor, finally declared themselves fatigued and retired to the Garrison soon after. The not-quite newlyweds themselves followed suit an hour later, in a car that took almost that much time to extricate from Tom’s vehicular maze. The car (Chana’s Buick wagon) turned out to have been appointed by the roustabouts in surprisingly conventional fashion (It was the one traditional thing about the wedding, Carrie will later remark), and it made a great disturbance, tin cans on strings rattling noisily over the gravel drive, as they pulled away. Their departure signaled bedtime for the kids, who were herded upstairs by Bennie and Carrie, both of them pining for their own pajamas. Tom is taking a turn sitting with Glad. Lloyd and Walter are tidying up the kitchen. And Richard the dog has led his pack back from their crepuscular investigations in the woods; having sated for the moment their vestigial wildness, they allow their domesticated selves to steer them over to the ring of tents, where a dozen or so humans are passing around a flask of arak and a couple of joints and debating the pros and cons of state funding for the arts.
Chana, lying with her head in Hannah’s lap, is the first to notice the blaze. Sweet, she thinks, someone’s made a bonfire, an observation she attempts to share with those around her, but they assume her use of the word bonfire is metaphorical, or perhaps a reference to a particular form of protest art, which gets them talking about Guy Fawkes and effigies and Burning Man. “No, no, you guys—literally,” she says (for once using the word accurately), but she is too sleepy and the others too araked-out for the message to transmit.
Shortly after this, the first bundle of black walnut branches catches. The smoke blows toward Bennie and Walter’s bedroom window. Bennie, lying awake (barely) beside Pim, who is lying asleep (soundly) in the crook of her body, smells something burning. Clem’s friends must have built a fire, she thinks. They really have turned out to be awfully responsible, she tells herself, sorry now that her first reaction to them had not been more felicitous. And Stalwart’s up and about; he’ll make sure they’ve got it under control. She snuggles her boy closer, tucking her face against his hair (ah, the perfume of dried sweat and hot dogs), and elects to have faith that all is well.
In the next room, Carrie is so preoccupied with the challenges of tucking her overstimulated twins into bed that she notices nothing. In fact, so intent is she on getting them both to stop bouncing around the room and to submit once and for all to their sleeping bags that when Hugh says, “Thomethingth burning,” she shoots back (not sure whether to be aghast or quite pleased that she sounds a lot like her sister), “Yeah, that’s the smoke you’ll see coming out of my ears if you don’t settle down this instant.”
Farther down the hall the girl cousins are fast asleep. On the dresser top sits the dollhouse that is a replica of this house, backlit by the night-light’s artificial moon. Gradually it acquires a secondary light source: an animating amber glow flickering through the window, growing brighter by the minute and reaching farther up the wall.
Not until the fire has pounced on three more of the roped bundles, found a pathway along the discarded lengths of butcher paper, and begun caressing the side of the barn does anyone take serious note. Lloyd, carrying out the trash, is the first to register not simple fire but the scale of the problem: Fire!
Walter, to celebrate having washed the last dish of the evening, has just hacked himself another slab of wedding cake, which he eats standing up at the sink. He’s positive it’s not what he ordered—he distinctly remembers having relayed to the baker what Clem herself had specified: chocolate cake with apricot jam between the layers and lemon buttercream frosting—but when he picked it up this afternoon it had been far too late to waste time arguing, and this combination anyhow has proved strangely delicious: the angel cake lighter, more ethereal, than anything he’s ever eaten, and the penuche icing somehow at once exotic and familiar. It has a sort of burned taste, he thinks now, savoring this midnight slice.
“Walter!” Lloyd bangs opens the porch door and with improbable assertiveness pushes Walter away from the sink, where he shoves the big spaghetti pot and turns on the tap full force. At nearly the same moment Tom barrels through the other door, crying, “Dad! The barn is on fire!”
It’s more pots and multiplying bodies, then, a whole stream of roustabouts tramping in and out of the kitchen as if they’d trained all their lives for a good old-fashioned bucket brigade. Voices outside. Calm yelling, if that’s a thing. People trying to drag the garden hose around from the spigot on the driveway side of the house but it doesn’t reach. More voices, less calm. Voices upstairs and on the porch and outside, all overlapping, and footsteps, disciplined hurrying, the air crosshatched with smoke, people coughing, dogs barking, windows lighting up throughout the house, windows lighting up at McElroy’s, too. A siren, plaintive and distant at first, swells to near bursting only to cut out abruptly. Sound ruptured by silence. A great dinosaur of a truck lumbering up the drive, veering diagonally across the lawn, scarlet-lit, its tires plowing deep ruts in the earth.
Firelight casts phantasmagoria upon the office walls. They flicker across the desk, the floor, the cot, they lick at the curtains, tongue the ceiling. A puppet show of shadow-flame, a writhing saraband of orange and gold.
For the first time since she embarked on this final leg of her earthly journey, no one attends her. No one is here to notice how, while her body lies still, she is drifting, traveling, her rootedness fully behind her now. She is beyond stasis, in motion.
There once more—the sound of a horn. Something within her inclines toward that voice. The smell of smoke. Something within her reaches for a hand. The spreading flame, the flaming warmth, and something within her is not afraid. Fire makes steam, steam powers engine, train approaches. How beautiful a train.
All that remains her advances toward the fire and its promise: to set matter free, release spirit from form, reunite atom with atom.
AND WITH THIS LIBERATION, the final trace of Lester Vilno is lost.
Although the man himself died decades ago (on a park bench in Chicago on June 21, 1941: another solstice, also the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis’ massive invasion of the Soviet Union, in which they marched into territory formerly known as the Pale of Settlement), something of him had continued in what scraps of memory persisted among the living. There had never been many of these, for even before his exile from Rundle Junction in 1927—even before he caught a train out of town, wearing his long black coat and holding what scant possessions he took with him in a single bundle tied with twine—he had been a man of few acquaintances. Afterward, living in one SRO after another, he’d been known only skimmingly and never by any one person for very long: a gaunt, limping, bearded figure, eyes like stones at the bottom of a well, more caricature than human being. As if he had become one of his own painstakingly crafted marionettes.
Glad Erlend had been the last to furnish what meager nourishment a ghost requires: a place at memory’s hearth, a setting at the spectral table. Now with the expiry of his lone remaining host, the shade of Lester Vilno vanishes wholly from this world.
AND IS THIS HOW IT HAPPENS, how the old Erlend homestead, formerly the village post office and general store, passes on? Not by changing hands, but by conflagration? As if the house itself were programmed to resist change, to refuse the advent of newcomers, strangers of any ilk? Is this how the family finally departs, not by choice but by chance, uprooted rather than pulling up roots?
No. It takes the firefighters all of eighteen minutes to get the fire under control. Good thing, they say, the fuel was damp. Be thankful for last night’s rain. Be thankful the tree was alive until yesterday, the branches still green, slow to burn. Be thankful the wind wasn’t stronger. Be thankful it wasn’t blowing in the direction of the house.
For the house, miraculously, is untouched. The barn’s ruined, but good riddance—the moldering structure has been an albatross, its store of artifacts an encumbrance. All of it gone now. The firefighters, still holding their hoses, won’t let anyone near the contorted, collapsed, dripping timbers, among which some lesser flames still leap intermittently here and there, but even from a distance it’s clear everything’s lost, nothing salvageable or even recognizable except perhaps—is that the old Glendale? In the darkness, with steam rising from its cast-iron chimney, it looks like a small locomotive.
They should have donated the barn’s contents to the Rundle Junction Natural Historical Museum long ago, but perhaps this is even better. To be done with the responsibility of owning all that. No longer in charge of its preservation, no longer beholden in that way.
Still, thinks Walter, his heart rate not yet returned to normal, it’s humbling all around. The judgmental benevolence of the fire chief. The mixture of efficiency and jocularity among the firefighters as they put their equipment away. The spate of dogs slinking around, sniffing at the edges of soaked, smoking debris. The roustabouts beaming as if something marvelous has taken place, gratified that they were called upon to help and they did help, all of them holding their empty pots and jars and jugs like medals of valor. Banjo in long johns singing “There’s a Hole in the Bucket” as he walks Harriett in circles to calm her. The squad car pulling slowly, belatedly up the driveway, its very torpor seeming to say Not these idiots again, discharging none other than Vin Diesel (what’s his name again? maybe it’s time to start calling him Officer Vincente), whose nod of greeting is so professionally devoid of affect that Walter feels he might as well resign here and now: as father, as householder, as man. McElroy, too, clomping over in his steel-toed boots and flannel bathrobe and precious little else, if his pale shins are any indication, ready to bail out his neighbors for the second time in one day. Bennie and Carrie and the little ones in their pajamas huddling by the azaleas, the kids all holding hands as if someone told them to and not let go. Carrie still in her sleeveless dress, shivering. Lloyd stepping up from behind to wrap his arms around her. Bennie slipping away from the others now and coming over to where Walter stands talking to the cops. She places her hand on his lower back. That’s all. Just her warm, steady hand.
And Walter thinks, There are worse things than being humbled.
And Pim comes over, too, now and stretches his arms for Walter to lift him up, and this time he doesn’t say, Don’t hold me.
So Walter lifts and holds him both.
But wait.
What are these new shapes drifting across the lawn? Two, three, four figures, four dark entities emerging from the darkness of the county road. Look, Daddy! whispers Pim. Placing a hand on either cheek, turning Walter’s head so that it points in that direction. Look, they’re coming! They advance, the four men, spectacles glinting as they near the light, heavy beards obscuring their mouths. Long black coats hanging at their sides like wings at rest. The fringes of their tallitot silvered by the moon.
Look, breathes Pim. People.