MAGGIE DREAMED THE night before her wedding day that Kevin Costner, or someone like him, who was with her at a run-down rainy cottage on some river, had a very short, perky penis that he proudly called a smart penis and that someone else, some dark Robert Mitchum film-noir type, standing half dressed and hunched in a shadowy alley doorway smoking a cigarette, had one that was a foot long and thin as a pencil and apparently exhausted, worn right down to almost nothing. As she came to consciousness, these disparate images, these quite separate men crowded together in one lusty dream frame, tried hard to cling to the rafters of her brain. But they were fading fast, they were being booted out the back door, asked to leave with the sleep that made them. Well, she thought, not quite ready to open her eyes, that wasn’t very bridelike.
When she did open her eyes to the light from the window, the men were gone, completely and immediately gone. It was almost as if they had not been real at all. Throwing off the duvet, getting up to walk to the bathroom, she thought, I am only anticipating fidelity, I am only putting foolish things behind me. And then, levelling a steady gaze at her face in the dappled mirror above the cracked pedestal sink, she thought, Hollywood. Nothing happens without Hollywood. Not even the dreams of a bride. She turned on the tap and laid some Colgate along the bristles of her toothbrush.
When Maggie and Jill were teenagers Daphne had often asked about their dreams, perhaps as a kind of quick, maternal, psychic check-up. As with nearly everything else in those days, sometimes they played it straight and sometimes they did not. Only once in a while, when they were at some loss or in some muddle, when they really needed her to be tuned in to them, did they actually tell Daphne a version of the truth. Otherwise they thought and said that she was being invasive, that she was just trying to shove herself into their lives.
The water was pouring out steaming hot so she knew no one else had showered yet. She wanted it to be as hot as her skin could stand, tested it on her open palm, told herself that even the water pressure this morning might be taken as a good omen. She stepped into the tub and pulled the curtain closed.
One summer she and Jill claimed to be having the same dreams, the details varying only slightly, the promise or the menace easily reflected from one dream to its sister. Daphne stopped asking after that summer. She told them that, try as she might, she could no longer make any sense whatever of the insides of their heads, that they were now and possibly forevermore beyond her comprehension.
Jill had proposed a theory then that dreams were really alien life forms, floating around at large in the night air, wafting through clouds and shingles and ceilings and blankets in search of an empty, welcoming brain where they could relax and thrive. She said she figured by the time the dreams discovered that they could not make it in a human brain, could not thrive, it was too late to get out. They were already dying. “Pffftt,” she’d said, snapping her fingers. “Dead and gone.”
Daphne’s ordinary conversation with Maggie and Jill had always been loaded up with words like wafting and welcoming and thrive and gone. The only children’s stories they’d had from her were those filled with what she named the best words, the weird, strange, yummy words. She said what actually happened wasn’t nearly as important, and besides, if they were paying close attention, it was always pretty much the same old story anyway: “Be careful, children. You are all alone. Be very good or else.”
By the time Jill was old enough to hear this, Maggie was in grade four and quite used to asking the hard questions. Of course she had challenged her mother, of course she had wanted to know, “Or else what?” and Jill had chimed in after her, imitating almost everything Maggie did then, everything she could manage.
Cuddled together with the two of them, her own body solid and calm in the middle of the bed, their two small clean bodies wiggling and wrapping themselves tight around her, their lovely little fingers pulling on the ribbons that were threaded through the bodice of her nightgown, Daphne told them, “Well, something will come and get you. Eat you up. There won’t be a trace of you left. You know that.” She gave them this nonsense to make them snort and giggle, to make them flail their arms and legs in theatrical fear, to allow them their beloved dramatics. She could offer such nonsense because she believed and they believed that they were both already smart enough to seriously doubt many of the things the world offered.
Their storybooks had been packed and brought with them when they moved from London into the old McFarlane house. They had their own shelf on one side of the small fireplace in the den, where they sat unread but dusted, waiting patiently for grandchildren, Daphne said. All the other shelves were filled with the small boxes Daphne had started to collect when she graduated from nursing. Many of the boxes were finely crafted wood, some of them were glass, some were clay. One of them, Maggie’s favourite, brought back from Italy by Aunt Andy, was pressed tin.
So Maggie knew what any kids she might have with Josh would get to hear at their grandmother’s knee. And she had wondered how Josh might counter Daphne if and when they did have kids. He would counter her. Josh liked to believe that he himself relied exclusively on logic and consideration, and because of this, or in spite of this, he had no patience with Daphne, with what he called her never-ending attempt to influence. The first time Maggie had brought him home from graduate school to meet everyone, to show him how her life had been, he hadn’t been able to restrain himself. Sneaking across the hall, into her bed, holding her in his beefy arms, he’d started to mumble something he obviously considered benign about the implications of feminism, about women making very odd choices and how those choices could have a severe impact on other, innocent people.
She’d thrown him out of her bed, before she knew she was going to do it she’d pushed him to the floor, the thud when he landed a loud giveaway in the nighttime quiet of the house. He had been very surprised. The following night, back in Toronto, she’d noticed a bruise on his hip in the shape of a pear.
Standing under the hard stream of hot water, thinking about Josh’s resistance to her mother, which by September would be moot because they’d be three thousand miles away and up to their ears in books and papers and seminars, and then thinking about the tone of his voice when he’d said that word choice, the cool, academic detachment, Maggie thought, not for the first time, Isn’t it peculiar that the people who love me best know so little about the way life, my life, works.
Above the noise of the water bursting out to cleanse her long bride body she could hear Jill at the bathroom door, pounding. Jill was more excited about this wedding than she was, had been for weeks. “Miss,” Jill yelled. “I’ve got some breakfast for you.”
Maggie opened the door wrapped in one of the nearly threadbare beach towels Margaret had picked up for them in Port Huron ten years before, when they’d first started swimming every chance they got. This one was hers because it had the clipper ship. Jill’s had a giraffe.
Jill was clowning, standing erect like a French maid holding a tray of coffee and orange juice and two banana muffins. She had just turned nineteen. Recently and often, Bill had told Margaret it was like having Sylvia back and it was almost true, Jill was very much like Sylvia in the face, maybe especially in the gestures. Maggie had always looked more like Daphne, although just lately shades of Murray’s tall and quietly elegant mother were seeping through, the way she sometimes lifted her chin when she was listening, her long feet, her confident, muscular hands.
Jill set the breakfast tray down on the sink. “One last day a virgin,” she said, picking up a banana muffin, looking it over. “You lucky girl.”
“Really?” Maggie said. “Well, I’m certainly relieved to hear that.”
Jill took a bite of the muffin. “What are we going to do with ourselves all morning?” she asked. “Josh is coming when?”
“I’m pretty sure it was left that Patrick would meet the plane in London,” Maggie said. “Patrick has their tuxes, so I expect Josh and Mark will arrive when Patrick and Stephanie arrive.”
“Then we have at least some time,” Jill said.
“I think,” Maggie said. “I think we should put on our bikinis and lie around the backyard until someone comes out and tells us we have to go get dressed. We could take a dip or two in the pool.”
Just after they’d moved into the McFarlane house, when the girls were nine and sixteen, the Stewarts beside them had installed a backyard swimming pool. Making his approach, the backhoe driver had been forced to cut across Daphne’s property and when all was said and done he’d chewed up the grass pretty completely and nipped several chunks out of the hedge. Daphne had watched him from the dining-room window but made no complaint and since that day the girls had been offered generous access to the Stewarts’ pool. Some afternoons Jeannie Stewart, who was still trim enough to look good in a bathing suit, brought out a pitcher of lemonade and joined them for a quick dip before she stretched out on her chaise with her novel. They were fish in that pool.
They swam and sunbathed until twelve-thirty, when the guys Daphne had hired came around the corner of the house to start setting up the chairs and the sound system and then they went up to shower again, to wash the chlorine out of their hair before they put on their gowns.
Daphne was already dressed, waiting in the kitchen for Maggie to call her. She had written down what she wanted to say, the small, folded sheet of notepaper was tucked in her pocket, but when Maggie did call her she walked up the stairs and into the bedroom totally unprepared for what was waiting for her there. Seeing these young women put together so beautifully, in their light-as-air make-up, their thick, naturally wavy, summer-streaked hair falling, just falling, on their shoulders, she thought, I’ve done this. I’ve done this with Murray.
Jill, in pale yellow silk with very high clunky heels to match, was bent down fussing with Maggie’s satin hem. Hearing her mother behind her, she carefully lifted the heavy skirt of the bridal gown to reveal Sylvia’s white lace garter high on Maggie’s thigh. “It is kind of pretty,” she said. “Tacky but pretty. Did you already tell us what she’s supposed to do with it?”
“She’s supposed to take it off at the dance and toss it over her shoulder at the men,” Daphne said. “To see who will be the next groom.”
“The next groom,” Jill said, laughing. “That’s mint.”
Daphne almost asked Jill to leave them for a few minutes and then she thought, No, if I say it to both of them at once, they will have exactly the same words in their heads later, when they might want to talk about this. She sat down on the bed. “Love,” she said, taking one of Margaret’s deep breaths. “I am happier for you today than I can say. I’m happy that you are so very accomplished and still able to give yourself over to someone.”
She waited for one of them to speak but they were occupied, they were very busy bracing themselves. They both knew there would be more than this, knew just looking at her face.
“We got along all right,” Daphne said. “I’m very sorry if the way I decided to do things has hurt either of you in any way, but as far as I can tell we got along all right.”
Maggie was lifting her heavy hair in her hand, fluffing it the way she’d once fluffed Margaret’s breast. “Everything’s fine, Mom,” she said. “It is.”
“Yeah,” Jill said. “Let’s not do this today, shall we?”
Jill was smoothing Maggie’s skirt again, adjusting the modest satin train. She was thinking about the several thousand times the word father had come up in her life when she was a kid, taking her by surprise every time, like a string of firecrackers thrown at her feet. She was thinking about all the other times she could have used, would have been grateful for, an explanation, or a justification, or the truth. When she would have kicked down a door to hear some version of the truth. But of course, of course, the thing would get told not when a daughter needed to hear it but at some other, decided time, when a mother needed to tell it. As if a daughter’s place inside a secret was nothing. As if the waiting was nothing.
A little later in their lives, when they did talk about their father and to their father, when they and everyone who mattered to them knew and knowing was all right, Maggie and Jill both confessed that listening to their mother the day of the wedding they had been terrified that she was going to stand up from the bed and pronounce a name, that she was going to just hand it over on a tray, like the head of John the Baptist. Jill confessed that what had frightened her most was the possibility of two different fathers, the possibility that they were not full sisters which, looking back, she could see was just enormously, wondrously stupid, because how could that have made any difference?
Daphne had not written down anything more and she had made a promise to herself that whatever happened in that room, she would not start rambling. She picked up Maggie’s headpiece from the bed and handed it to Jill.
“Have you cut my rose yet?” Maggie asked.
When they were in the planning stages for this day, Maggie had refused an elaborate bridal bouquet, asking why couldn’t she just carry a rose from the garden instead. Soon after they’d moved in Daphne had started to bring Mrs. McFarlane’s garden back to life, had taught herself how to keep the roses going, replacing worn-out bushes one at a time as necessary. And she’d got the house itself almost back to the casual elegance of its Mrs. McFarlane days. It hadn’t taken much, a softer green for the kitchen cupboards, a new kitchen floor laid over the old grey linoleum, fresh paint for every wall, the woodwork properly cleaned and buffed to a shine, the floors stripped of their yellowed varnish. And all the French doors brought down from the third-floor attic and hung again between the living room and dining room and at the vestibule and at the entrances to the sunroom and the den. It was Mary who found the stack of French doors under a tarp in the attic and she’d found an ancient, stunningly ugly but carefully boxed chandelier up there too, which Mrs. McFarlane must have decided against years before. Even after she’d announced she was going to leave Patrick, Mary had still come to help Daphne and the girls get settled in, her own affection for the house evident in the way she touched the heavy front doors, the banister, the thick plaster walls.
Standing up from the bed now to leave her magnificent daughters, Daphne asked, “What colour rose do you think?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Maggie said. “Pink? Red? White?”
“Red,” Jill said. “Dark red would be extremely, utterly sophisticated.”
Maggie had asked no one but Jill to stand up with her. She had never had only one best friend because she had seven or eight really good friends, a couple from summer jobs, two from university, three still from high school. And having only Jill simplified things because Josh had just one good friend, Mark. Anyway, she had never dreamed of a big production.
Daphne was going to give her away, although Daphne said, when she was told by the United Church minister that this was still the custom, “Just so we understand each other, I’m not actually giving her away. Not on your life.”
And Patrick. After the minister’s visit, Daphne had told Maggie if she wanted a man there too, she had a couple to choose from, although perhaps Grandpa shouldn’t be asked. “Then it has to be Uncle Patrick or Murray,” Maggie said. “And I suppose it should be Uncle Patrick, because he’s blood.”
“Blood,” Daphne said. “Is that what he is?”
* * *
WHEN SHE CAME in from the garden with Maggie’s dark red rose, Josh and Mark were sitting in the living room, looking a bit stiff but nonetheless exquisite in their tuxedos. They were having an early and likely necessary drink with Patrick and Stephanie. Murray and Kate’s Toyota had just pulled into the driveway, and Sarah, in a wide-brimmed straw hat and a wonderfully short peach dress, with Jake and Natalie, the cousins nobody knew, following close behind her like goslings, was walking over to the Toyota with her arms flung open. She was laughing, calling out something Daphne couldn’t hear. Although he’d had his plane ticket, Rob had not come back with them for the wedding. His job had disappeared out from under him, the result of some multinational cost-saving merger, so he was in Seattle, at an interview set up by an old friend from home, from England. He was scrambling, this was how Sarah had put it to Margaret. When Margaret told Daphne, clearly worried and angry and rattled because there was nothing she could do to help them, she’d been as close to tears as Daphne had ever seen her. “God, there’s a lot of costs being saved,” she’d said. “Every new day, wherever you turn, costs being saved.”
Margaret and Bill were sitting out on the wraparound porch in the wobbly, many-times-repainted Muskoka chairs. Through the big living-room window, Daphne watched her father reach over to take Margaret’s hand, looking for comfort against the onslaught of his family. They had just yesterday had word that his brother Gerry, Uncle Gerry, had died after a long stay in hospital in Windsor, and that Aunt Eileen was not in good shape at all, so there was that, too, to think about today, and the funeral to attend on Monday. And another funeral on Tuesday, at least for Margaret and Bill.
Charles Taylor, who had become an old man, had also died, some time in the last week. He’d been missing for a few days and finally some kids had found him under the railroad bridge two miles past the golf course, beyond Livingston’s gully, drowned in Stonebrook Creek. It had never been a particularly hard crossing under that bridge but it was thought that Charles had lost his footing on some mossy rocks and gone down hard. On hearing this sad bit of news, Bill had told Margaret he only hoped Charles had knocked himself out cold before he had to suffer the insult of drowning. Margaret did not tell Bill or anyone else that she believed the tarnished silver whistle she’d found in the turned garden soil that May afternoon must surely have belonged to Charles at some time, or that its presence in their garden was a mystery she sometimes pondered.
Until very recently, Margaret had been determined to resist what she considered to be the too-easy solution of drugs to control Bill’s moods, but she’d told Daphne she would give him a little something extra with his lunch today, to keep him steady. She’d said it was going to be a long day for Bill and he wouldn’t want to do anything to spoil it for Maggie.
At five after three, after all the wedding guests had been seated on fold-up chairs in the backyard and just before it was time for Patrick to join Daphne and Maggie, to offer Maggie his arm and escort her down the aisle to the recently built arbour, to the minister, to Jill and Mark, to Josh, he walked over to Murray, who was sitting near the front with Kate and Stephanie, and pulled him up out of his chair. Murray hesitated, understandably, and looked a bit worried but this did not prompt Patrick to explain himself. “Just come,” he said.
Then he looked down through the rows for Andy, who had been late arriving because she’d had to drive in to London for Meg and when she’d got to the home Meg wasn’t dressed because she thought maybe she didn’t want to come. Andy had been watching Patrick, had watched Murray stand up from his chair and head for the back. She was waiting, ready to understand what Patrick wanted to happen, ready to catch his eye if it came her way. When he found her, she nodded and got up quickly, grabbing Sarah on her way to the back.
Maggie had been watching Patrick too, anxious for him to come to stand beside her. Someone had given the signal. The processional music had already started. Jill had gone down the aisle, she was already up there, and Stephen, with his Lab, Sailor, sitting at strict attention beside him, had started his video camera. People would be wondering what the hell was going on.
And then she got it. When Patrick moved in beside her offering his arm, and Murray and Andy and Sarah gathered in close behind them, she looked straight ahead down the aisle and muttered, “It would have to be a cast of thousands. Silly me.” She patted Patrick’s back. “Anyone else would likely be surprised,” she said. She took his arm because what else was there to do?
Daphne did not turn around. She was thinking. This is good enough, this is more than good enough. But Patrick wasn’t finished. In the instant before they would have started to move forward down the aisle, he frowned and pulled his arm away and stepped back behind Murray, whispering loudly that he had to fix his damned cummerbund again, Jesus, he hated cummerbunds. Murray quickly moved to help him, to lift his jacket and check the hooks, but Patrick shoved him off, pushed him forward. “Go,” he said.
When Murray moved in close to offer Maggie his own bent, available arm, Daphne did turn around. If she could make Patrick meet her eyes, she would not even have to speak, she would not have to ask him if he couldn’t please just cease and desist, please, for once in his manipulating life, couldn’t he just stop the manoeuvres. But he would not meet her eyes. Of course he wouldn’t.
She started them off. Patrick and Andy and Sarah followed, Andy comprehending, finally, and nearly blind with tears.
When they got to the arbour, no one but the minister and Josh could see Maggie because she was so surrounded and those were the words she whispered to Josh before their vows began. “God, look at me. I’m surrounded.”
But they left her to him soon enough. They split off, took their separate places in Daphne’s backyard to listen attentively as Maggie and Josh made their many promises.
The Presbyterian women had been signed on to do the buffet, which they’d decided to serve on long tables in the side yard, and as soon as the ceremony was over they started to pour out the kitchen door with covered platters of food. The wedding party was going to use this time for photographs and while they waited the guests were expected to more or less take care of each other, to find someone to engage in conversation and to help themselves to canapés and punch, both kinds. The little kids, some of whom were Patrick’s grandchildren, some of whom were Andy’s, moved together through the crowd in spinning, dressed-up clusters, the girls holding hands and swinging their hands together in quick friendship, the boys following along, kicking at the grass, sometimes jumping in front of the girls to entertain them with clumsy taunts.
Bill shouldered his way up to the head of the line for punch and as soon as someone poured him two cups of it, he got away from Margaret and moved determinedly past the people he should have talked to until he found Patrick. He handed Patrick his punch and told him that he wanted everyone to go up to the Town Hall steps for a picture. Because it would be gone soon.
“You know the bastards are tearing the Town Hall down,” he told Patrick, pulling on his sleeve, fidgeting. “When the boys in Toronto are finished there aren’t going to be any more towns, just one big stretched-out mess. Those assholes think we’ll all be happy as clams to live in one big stretched-out mess.” He paused to give Patrick a chance to join him in his rage. “A city,” he said. “That’s what they think they’re going to call us.”
Patrick knew that the province in its wisdom had recently decided that amalgamation was the way to go. To save money, five separate towns much like this one would soon be joined at the hip so that all the administration, which the government proudly and loudly described as suspiciously expensive, could be handled in one central place, which was not here.
Of course it cost something to keep a building like the Town Hall running, heat in the winter, maintenance, insurance. And not surprisingly it needed substantial structural repair. Margaret had told Patrick that some of the guts, the dance floor upstairs and a few of the ceiling beams, had rotted almost right through. But now that it was going to be more or less useless there seemed no point in sinking good money into it. She told him those in favour said either nothing lasts forever or progress sometimes hurts and those opposed were mute, made impotent, because it was their money the government was wanting to save and how could any sane person argue with that? In one of their last motions, the town council had apparently decided that after the building was levelled and gone the lot could be used for a skateboard park, with maybe a ramp or two, to keep the high-flying baggy pants kids off the streets.
“Get everyone organized,” Bill said, spilling some of his punch on Patrick’s just recently purchased one-size-larger tux, then pulling a crumpled handkerchief from his back pocket to blot it up. “We can be up there and get this thing done in no time.”
Patrick left Bill with Stephanie and Kate to go and look for Daphne. He found her on the front porch steps, heading for one of the cars. She wouldn’t look at him and she didn’t stop walking. “When this is over,” she said, “you and I are going to have ourselves a little talk.”
“Fine,” he said.
“It wasn’t your decision to make,” she said. “It was mine.”
“Fine,” he said.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?” she asked. “Did you think it would go unnoticed?”
“Most of the people watching thought it was a simple screw-up,” he said. “And that’s what I was counting on.” He stopped following her. “I do know people.”
He knew too that he should have gone straight to Maggie with Bill’s request but he asked anyway. Hearing the request, Daphne was able to remember where she was, she was able to let the other go, temporarily. She turned to tell Patrick that she found herself in a difficult spot, that she wasn’t sure the photographer would have time. She said he was a friend of Josh’s parents, they had arranged for the pictures, and unbeknownst to her the plan appeared to be to use the time between the ceremony and the reception to go over to Stonebrook Park. The photographer had come early enough to spend a half hour driving around town trying to find some place suitable and he had decided they should go over to the park to take advantage of the footbridge and the water and, of course, the rocks. “They want picturesque,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “It’s their call.”
When Patrick reported back, Bill poured the last of his punch on the grass at his feet. “I would have paid for the pictures.” He was beside himself. “Why didn’t someone ask me to pay for the God damned pictures?”
* * *
THE DANCE WAS at the arena, because it was close and because Daphne had said there was no good reason to ask people to drive back into the city. Maggie’s friends, who were staying out at the golf course motel, had spent the earliest part of the hot afternoon decorating the hall, drinking Long Island Iced Tea and filling each other in on their lives as they draped steamers from one side of the room to the other and covered the walls with clusters of white balloons and oversized satin bows. Krissy and Carol had helped the florist, who was the granddaughter of the late Archie Stutt, bring in all the centrepieces, the sweetheart roses and the mums and daisies, and Margaret had set up her old bridge table just inside the door and covered it with one of Sylvia’s mother’s embroidered cloths to hold a display of pictures: Maggie at about six months settled securely in Bill’s arms, looking up confidently into his face, Maggie and Jill swinging hard on park swings somewhere, Maggie off to her first day of school when they still lived in the city, and another picture of her as an older student, looking embarrassed and annoyed to be holding a plaque for second prize in public speaking. Maggie almost as she was now, posed on the diving board of the Stewarts’ pool like a pin-up girl, rudely shaving her legs.
A deejay friend of Jill’s boyfriend Ryan, Crank, they called him, took care of the music and it wasn’t half bad. He was young but he was very good at gauging exactly this kind of crowd and he had something in his repertoire of CDs for nearly everyone who wanted to dance. Jill had told Daphne that given enough to drink, Crank would do a really funny Elvis impersonation, an ironic impersonation, and Daphne had told Jill that she would leave it in her hands then, making damned sure Crank did not get enough to drink.
Maggie and Josh had started things off. They were obviously uncomfortable with everyone staring at them, watching to see them do the thing newlyweds were supposed to do, whatever that might be. As soon as she decently could, Maggie whispered something in Josh’s ear and stepped away from him. She found Patrick and Josh got his mother and soon the newly formed couples broke off again, and again, collecting more dancers, filling the floor.
When Bill heard the first bars of what he considered to be a legitimate waltz, he bowed low to Margaret and guided her in among the others. He was astonishingly smooth for a man in his eighties, smooth as butter.
Daphne moved from table to table alone to talk to the guests and to thank them. Maggie and Josh had opened many of the gifts and people had been thoughtful in the choices, and generous. After she’d finished her rounds, as she was making her way back to her table, she noticed Patrick walking across the floor toward her. He was going to ask her to dance, and what could be more normal, more civilized? Of course he would be counting on her not to make a scene in front of all these people, “a public spectacle of yourself,” as Grandma Ferguson used to call it, which, when Daphne was a girl, had never failed to make her extremely curious about private spectacles. She had imagined these going on behind closed doors all over town, muted and bound by walls and unwitnessed, but still, as the word itself suggested, spectacular, still something to be part of.
Those nearly forgotten Saturday nights out at the Casino dances had not been for naught. Unlike Josh, unlike John, neither of whom was old enough or experienced enough to understand that it was necessary to take control of a woman on the dance floor, Patrick guided her with confidence and grace, and listening to the old Motown song, she was almost charmed. But she was waiting for him to acknowledge his responsibility, his mistake. It did not have to be complicated, he did not have to dredge up a fake humility. He could say, for instance, All right, I’m sorry, I likely overstepped. I am sorry. When he tried instead for the pretence of oblivion, nodding at people and smiling, lifting his arm from her back to wave to someone sitting at a table, she let go his hand and pinched the flesh above his thumb, hard. “I want you to leave us alone,” she said.
Anyone watching them dance and talk might have thought Patrick was having one of the best nights of his life. His reportedly brilliant niece was successfully launched into the world with her equally brilliant young husband, and Daphne looked so obviously, deservedly content. Many people assumed it had been Patrick’s money that had made things a little easier for Daphne.
“Don’t you ever ask yourself,” he asked, nodding again at someone behind her, “if this might be too much for the girls to carry? If you might be too much for them to carry?”
“No,” she said. “That is not something I ask myself. You think you know them but you haven’t got even a partial understanding of how strong they are.” She pinched him again.
“Jesus,” he said, dropping his hand to his side. “Are they in the habit of inflicting pain on innocent bystanders like their brat mother?”
“We can only hope,” she said.
The song ended and Patrick took her back to her table, and before she could sit down Murray was beside her, leading her onto the floor again.
After he got her surrounded, buried in the crowd of dancers, he asked, “Did you get a chance to share a few thoughts with Patrick?”
“One or two,” she said.
He pulled her a bit closer but only to steady her. “There is a small possibility that he’s right,” he said. “He sometimes does have a wonky kind of instinct. You have to give him that.”
“Are you ready to give him that?” she asked. “Is Kate ready?” Saying Kate’s name, she realized that it was not very fair to Kate, using her for this.
“I’m just wondering if it could be time,” he said. “We didn’t ever decide that it would never happen. Did we? Was that our intention?”
“What if it doesn’t make them happy?” she asked, shaking a bit now, her hands and her arms and her bare shoulders. “What then?”
“Why wouldn’t it?” he asked, pulling back to look down at her face, which meant he expected an answer. He didn’t get his answer but in the expectation, in the blunt calm of his expectation, the conceit that had long since settled in a dark, guarded corner of her heart, the conviction that it was enough to mean no harm, that this could keep her safe, and innocent, shifted. Shifted and broke apart and came scraping out into the open chambers of her heart like jagged shards of shrapnel. For better or worse, Murray had decided that this was the day to let her know what the lie had cost him, and that he might want recompense. That he might be prepared, finally, to desert her.
When he turned her to move off the floor, he put his hand, absently, on the firm rise of her rear end. She could feel in the dead weight of the gesture how little it meant to him now and she remembered that hand, or an entirely different hand attached to an entirely different man, resting comfortably on her body, at home on her body, anywhere.
Just before they joined the others at the table, he bent down to her. “This is something we could do,” he said, already leaving her, reaching out for Sarah, who apparently had made him promise her a jive, if jives there were.
She watched Murray and Sarah go at it. They were not the only ones on the floor, as Murray had no doubt feared, because Jill and Ryan and Rebecca and her boyfriend soon joined them. Watching Murray spin Sarah, watching him pull her in close and fling her out again, she wondered where on earth he’d learned to do that. And then she thought, Things are going to change.
She excused herself to go to the clammy cement-block washroom, telling herself as she skirted the dancers, as she nodded and laughed at her dancing guests, this whole damned wedding was a mistake. My mistake. The kids didn’t care if they had a big day, it was me, greedy for a good time. For all of us to be together, to mark their happiness with a bit of our own. She was almost at the washroom door when Patrick’s John grabbed her hand and suggested with some quick footwork and a quirky grin and a hopeful tilt of his head that they could join the jivers. “Can’t,” she said, pointing to the washroom. “Sorry.” John just shrugged and gave her a quick bear hug before he let her go, holding her a few seconds longer than he might have because Stephen was coming at them with his video camera, ducking through the dancers in his beautiful waistcoat, a fine blue silk shot with gold thread.
She was making her way to the washroom to cry and John’s bear hug had nearly brought it on before she got herself free. And what might John have done if this middle-aged woman, this aunt whom he probably assumed to be entirely grown up and without any serious doubts in her heart, and certainly without shrapnel, had started to bawl in his strong, innocent arms? Laugh and hug her harder, that was her best guess. People like John, young people, seemed to put a lot of faith in a big, spontaneous display of physical affection and, from what she’d seen, most of them were absolutely sincere with their hugs, as if the raunchy pleasure of sex, so highly prized and so hard won by their parents, was finally not quite enough.
The washroom was stuffed full of high-spirited young women touching up their lipstick and blush and mascara and trading earrings and hiking their carefully understated but elegant dresses high to adjust their pantyhose. Friends, all of them. Brash, beautiful, and dangerous to know, that’s what they’d called themselves when they were teenagers stretched out on Daphne’s sofa and across her chairs and sprawled on the rug with pillows, their legs intertwined as they talked far into their teenaged nights, deciding together exactly what kind of women they were getting ready to become.
She could not retreat back out to the dance floor because in this riotous company she herself quickly became what these young women believed her to be, which was nothing more or less than their friend’s middle-aged mother, the lovely, proud, and evidently beloved mother of the bride. Pleased for her and with themselves, because in fact almost all of them had grown up to be what both she and most of their own mothers had promised they might, they passed her around the small crowded washroom, from embrace to embrace, and after she finally got herself safely locked in a cubicle she couldn’t even pee, let alone cry.
Sitting there waiting for a reasoned calm to overtake her, willing it, because it was something very much like calm she was going to need, she listened to the excited voices on the other side of the partition as they interrupted and contradicted and verified each other, each one of them fighting to hold her own in the chaos. It is chaos, she thought. That’s what they provide for each other. There was a softening of the voices and then the more distinct sound of only two or three of them still standing at the mirrors and then the certain silence of an emptied room. Calm in an empty washroom, she thought. Well, fine.
She opened the cubicle door to a wavy, squared-off reflection of her small, proud, evidently beloved self in a deep raspberry linen two-piece dress, the colour Jill’s decision and just exactly right for this day, for this night of dancing. Turning on the tap at the sink, at the mirror, which was not wavy at all if you stood close enough, she saw in the damp, god-awful light that her bare shoulders looked cold but that her hair, a thick, robust, and envied silver grey, was holding fine, and that the skin on her neck beneath her jaw was smooth and taut, and that her face was broken, illuminated by a clean, white, unanticipated smile. A smile from nowhere.
At the house, before they’d come over to the dance, she had gathered her hair and tied it at the nape of her neck with a soft, wide silver ribbon and she understood now, in this clammy quiet, that she had gathered and secured her hair deliberately, to expose the widow’s peak, to remind at least a few of the dancers, to remind herself, that there had once been among them a very pretty woman named Sylvia. Who would have danced her heart out on a night like this. So, she thought, placing a hand over each bare shoulder, watching the smile die off like one of Jill’s alien dreams, this is the kind of thing I might do with my life. I could amuse myself with the arrangement of hair, and memories. I could make myself smile.
The music had stopped. When she came out of the washroom, she saw that Maggie and Jill had gone to the middle of the cleared dance floor. Everyone made a large circle around them as Maggie lifted the satin hem of her gown and Jill pulled Sylvia’s white lace garter down and slipped it over Maggie’s arched foot. A small herd of young men stood ready, not one of them even pretending to look anxious to be anyone’s groom, and when Maggie turned to throw the garter over her shoulder toward them, it was caught by Andy’s six-year-old grandson Tom, a soccer player in his first suit, who dove hard to the floor to make his catch. It looked as if Jill had decided that she might want to wear the garter too, some day, because she kicked off her buttercup yellow heels and chased the squealing Tom through the crowd to make him give it up.
Patrick and Murray, after they’d had their turns with Maggie and Margaret and Daphne and Jill and Andy and Sarah and Meg, danced with their wives, sometimes switching off, although Stephanie and Kate tried to assure them they didn’t have to be babysat. These two women did have much in common and when they were not up dancing they were content to huddle together at one of the front tables, a white woman in a black dress and a black woman in a white dress, watching the dancers and drinking wine and chatting easily, guessing correctly that the people who moved past the table who couldn’t recall their names would call them simply the second wives. But they didn’t care. This was what they were, almost happy sixty-year-old second wives.
After several glasses of wine, certainly more than she might have had under normal circumstances, Kate leaned close to Stephanie’s ear. “So tell me,” she said. “Has everyone just always known?”
Stephanie shook her head. “No,” she said. “No. Not at all. I’ve always assumed it was some married doctor. Or two married doctors.”
Kate lifted her wineglass at Patrick’s son John, who was dancing past with a child lifted up into his arms, his own sweet daughter done up in a layered froth of pale organza. As they danced, the child rested her fat cheek on his shoulder and watched the strangers’ faces floating around her own, fighting with all her small might to resist the pull of sleep.
“I wonder if I did realize,” Kate said, “at some subterranean level. And it would be interesting to know now how much I actually care.”
“I’m sorry for you in this,” Stephanie said, thinking, God help me, what a paltry combination of words.
“Maybe it’s all right,” Kate said. She was grinning at Margaret, who looked almost jubilant in the sturdy young arms of the best man, what was his name? Mark. “There is a possibility that I can live with this,” she said. “It would take a very large effort to foul things for Maggie and Jill. And what kind of person would do that?” She turned to look at Stephanie’s face. “Am I such a person?”
Stephanie, too, was smiling at Margaret and Mark, who were approaching the table now. “This Mark,” she said, just under her breath, “is an astonishingly handsome young man. Oh, if I were young again,” she said, “I’d have me some of that.” Studying the small movements of Margaret’s face as she came near, a face that was at that moment a miraculous combination of absolute control and a beautifully aged contentment, Stephanie decided that this thing they had ahead of them, the death of Daphne’s private, puzzling lie and the subsequent exposure of the bald and simple truth, could easily, with just a bit of carelessness, turn into something beyond even Margaret’s orchestration. “I can’t say if you are such a person,” she said to Kate, quietly. “I shouldn’t say. But I think not.”
Kate had pulled her chair up closer to the table to allow Margaret to pass behind her. “I suppose I think not too,” she said, and just as she was saying these words, Margaret leaned down to kiss the top of her head. A coincidence, she thought, surely. Margaret was the last person who would believe she could be bought with a kiss on the top of the head.
After the short visit from Margaret and Mark, Sarah drifted by the table and throughout the evening Andy sat down with them several times and started to talk, but she never stayed long. Someone always turned up to coax her to her feet and she went every time, eager and laughing and by the end of the night sweating, which she said had embarrassed her once upon a time but didn’t now. All night people made a point of telling Andy how wonderful she looked. For some reason, maybe Krissy had given her a nudge in that direction, she had started to colour her hair blond again and she could still dress because she hadn’t gained an ounce in forty years, not since she was a teenager. She’d tell you this.
It was an open bar. Murray had asked Patrick to cut a cheque for the liquor. There was still some money left in the girls’ account, the bulk of it held there to cover Jill’s tuition. Most of the guests had danced this floor many times before, most of them had no memory at all of a time when they couldn’t dance and they thoroughly enjoyed a night of nothing else but. When things were well under way, some of the outsiders who had been claiming that no, they couldn’t really dance, were being pulled reluctantly to the floor to confess that well, maybe they could, and when some of them started to sing as they danced, Crank tried to play songs they might know.
Late in the evening, Patrick and Murray excused themselves from Stephanie and Kate, freshened their drinks at the bar, and left the dance to walk out through the lobby and then through the big double doors that led to the rink. They found it all in empty darkness, hot with summer heat and full of the threat of echo, and after their eyes adjusted to the absence of light they stood together at the boards and saw that where there used to be a summertime grid of water pipes laid on a bed of sand, there was now only an expanse of dull cement.
They turned and found the balcony stairs and climbed up in the dark, sat down together front and centre. “Best seats in the house,” Murray said.
Patrick leaned forward. “I have to say that it is small,” he said. “Even if that’s what people usually say coming back to something, it’s nevertheless true.”
“It was, my friend,” Murray said, “always small.”
Patrick was looking out over the ice and up to the scoreboard, which even in the darkness he could see was new and much larger, much more elaborate than it had been in his day. “You would have seen that,” he said, “sitting up here watching. We didn’t. We thought we were the cat’s ass and then some.”
“That I remember,” Murray said.
“It felt so damned big. Although that sheet of ice was a good deal smaller for guys like Paul.” He stopped for a minute, looked down at his drink. “Every coach likes a long stride. Guys like Paul could get the puck from anywhere.”
“It’s been eleven years this summer,” Murray said. “And I have not yet found a way to think about him being gone.”
Patrick drained his Scotch. “Andy our travelling lady seems to be doing all right,” he said. “It’s much better for her with Meg in London. There was never any other way to go with that.”
“She should remarry,” Murray said. “She shouldn’t be on her own now. There’s no reason that I can see.”
“Well,” Patrick said. “People marry and people don’t marry. You’ve likely noticed.” He stood up quickly to start down the dark stairs. “Although looking at Andy tonight makes me suspect she’s not entirely on her own. Daphne mentioned something to Stephanie about a guy from Toronto, some stud in his forties, no less.”
“I hope he hasn’t got his eye on her money,” Murray said.
“I hope not too,” Patrick said. “Because he won’t be seeing much of it. Andy is extremely close with her money. Instinctive and careful and firm. In that respect, she’s quite a bit like your mother.”
Murray laughed quietly at the memory of his mother’s financial acumen, and as he got up to follow Patrick back to the dance he finished his own drink and crushed the plastic cup in his hand, tossing it behind him into the darkness. He was perhaps a little drunk, something he had not intended. Just before he took the first step he put a question to Patrick’s descending shoulders. “How’s the cummerbund now?”
Patrick didn’t stop or hesitate. “It seems to have got itself straightened around,” he said. “Although I’ll be glad to take the damned thing off. I always am.” He continued down the steps. “In case you’re wondering, this afternoon was understood to be just a simple screw-up,” he said. “That’s what people think. And more to the point, it’s what Maggie and Jill believe.”
“Is it?” Murray said, beginning his own descent. “Then maybe you would be kind enough to tell me what Daphne believes.” He had to raise his voice because Patrick was almost at the bottom of the balcony steps. He could hardly see him down there and what he saw wasn’t so much a man as the probable shape of a man. “And what Kate believes.”
* * *
AT DAPHNE’S THE next day, after the rest of the gifts had been unwrapped and lunch was being served by the Presbyterian women, this time on card tables set up on the wraparound porch, Bill arrived. He was unexpected because he had told everyone he wasn’t going to be there. He’d walked over, had got himself dressed in his suit pants and a fresh white shirt, which he’d buttoned wrong down near his belt. He had even remembered his tie, although he hadn’t knotted it. He wore the tie draped over his small hunched shoulders the way you would wear a harmless carnival snake. The old camera he’d dug out of Margaret’s kitchen junk drawer swung down heavy from his neck and as he approached the porch it bounced against his sunken chest.
It was not his intention to go inside Daphne’s house, so he stopped to talk to the Presbyterian women for a minute and one of them soon fixed him a plate of food he said he didn’t want, bits of strange cheese, slices of lukewarm spiced-up chicken, cold chopped broccoli that was supposed to be some kind of salad. He stood waiting, holding his paper plate and eating what he could manage to get down. The women were right there hovering over him, he could hardly refuse to eat. And Patrick’s Stephen had that godforsaken video thing pointed in his direction again.
He was waiting until word got to Maggie that he was on the porch. He knew she’d come out to him. He was here to insist on his picture. Maggie and her new husband and himself and whoever else wanted to be in it. He was not going to listen to any talk today about who arranged for things, who paid for what. He’d paid for enough things in his life to get a picture out of it. If no one would drive them uptown, they could walk. It wasn’t that bad a day.
When Maggie came out through the wide open doors, he was annoyed to see that she wasn’t in her beautiful white gown and when she got close enough he said so. “Where’s your dress?” he asked, squirming in her strong arms.
“Oh, Grandpa,” she said, giving him her biggest bride smile. “Silly Grandpa.” Maggie had not seen much of Margaret and Bill since she had started her doctoral work and soon, after she and Josh got packed up for the big move to California, she wouldn’t be seeing them at all, although she would be closer to Aunt Sarah in Vancouver. She did realize that there was every chance that one or both of them would die while she was gone. Unlike her mother, and unlike Jill who argued loudly with her grandfather, and because she was not required to exercise it very often, Maggie had been able to adjust herself to Bill’s condition with a firm, one-time-only decision. If he said something offensive, she simply didn’t hear it. It did not compute. Today she was just happy to have a flesh-and-blood grandfather to tease. Some of her friends didn’t. “That was for yesterday,” she told him. “The bride dress was only for yesterday.”
By this time Daphne and Margaret had come out to the porch to see what was going on. They were standing outside the open doors at the head of a bunched-up pile of the rest of them, Josh, Jill, Patrick, Murray, Andy, Sarah, Meg, all of them together in a cosy little group holding their plates of food, their forks hanging in mid-air as they listened. Margaret noticed the unknotted tie immediately. “Oh, sweet man,” she said quietly, meaning it to be only to herself. “So this is what you’ve forgotten today.”
“Go get your dress back on,” Bill told Maggie. He set his plate of food down, balanced it gingerly on the porch rail. “We’re going up to the Town Hall for my picture.” He lifted the camera in his hand to show everyone that he meant business.
No one stepped forward to try to tell Maggie what she should do. They stood just where they were, waiting to see what might happen, quiet and wary and ready, one way or the other, for things to proceed.
Standing at the edge of the steps, Stephen lifted the video camera and began to record again. He focused first on the weird old camera trembling in Bill’s hand and then he panned to Maggie and Josh, who was beside her now with his arm around her bare back, and then he swept across the tables of food and some of the Presbyterian women and back again to a medium shot of Daphne, who seemed to be close to laughter, and then over to Margaret and Sarah, who was still in her peach dress, and to Stephanie and Kate, who were leaning side by side against the railing, their arms touching as they talked quietly between themselves.
And then he zoomed in on crazy Jill who, after she’d grinned and pulled him up to dance last night, had responded to his first, hesitant, hopeful telling of his news, which was not news of course to the people in his real life, the young men who would never be grooms, whose lives would never provide an excuse for family celebration, with an immediate and brutally confident equanimity, as if she’d been waiting and ready to be told, as if he had flattered her with his trust. As if she believed it would be helpful, would be best just to throw him over her shoulder and carry him through whatever was to come. He could imagine this, his own body gone slack, Jill pushing forward undaunted by the extra weight and singing at the top of her lungs, yelling fierce obscenities to intimidate the enemy. And wasn’t that the risk with rescue? If you allowed it, you could find yourself in someone else’s hands? Although Jill’s hands, of all these beautiful hands, were perhaps the most beautiful.
Hearing the girl behind him, hearing them come, he turned the camera toward the street to get two guys flying past on Rollerblades, pulling between them a long-legged girl who was squealing in either terror or joy, and when they were gone he got all the cars parked at the curb, the Jag and Patrick’s new Lexus in particular, and from the cars he lifted the camera up to the dappled light in the just-quivering leaves of the front-yard maples and to the bright blue Ontario sky exposed between the leaves. Finished with the sky, he came back to the wraparound porch, to the far corner of the porch where the kids were climbing over and under and around the overturned Muskoka chairs, to Patrick and Murray, grey-haired men in cut-offs and stupid hats who had moved to stand one on either side of Bill, and then to Andy and awkward, hesitant Meg, who was the only one looking directly at the camera, the only one on the porch who seemed to realize she was being captured. And then he began to move down the steps, thinking if he stood far enough away, maybe as far away as the sidewalk, he might be able to get a full, wide-angled shot of everyone, the whole mess of them, together.
“Come on, people,” he said, moving carefully backwards. “Strut your stuff.”
* * *
A FEW DAYS later, after three carloads had driven down to Sarnia for Uncle Gerry’s funeral and then most of them had gone their way, those left behind would sit around Margaret and Bill’s living room to watch Stephen’s wedding videos, to see themselves in action. They would watch Jill as she came down the aisle ahead of her sister, grinning at Josh and Mark, and wasn’t she an incorrigible flirt, and they would once again admire Maggie’s beautiful gown as she walked slowly forward, followed by her unanticipated crowd of escorts. They would see themselves standing up from their chairs after it was done, after all the promises had been made. They would laugh watching the bridal party fool around down at Stonebrook Creek while the still photographer worked so hard to pose them, first on the wide footbridge for several shots and then down at the water. They would see Josh reach back to help Maggie, their hands lifted and extended to each other like dancers from another century as she tried to get a foothold beside him on a large, flat rock that had been placed deliberately and probably with some difficulty at the edge of the current.
Then, as Stephen’s camera work was softly praised, they would move with him away from the bridal party, away from the bridge. They would follow for a few minutes along the bank of the creek, the water moving fast and churned to mud in the middle of the current but much cleaner, almost crystal clear, in the pools along the edge, the surface of the water there held calm by clusters of rocks and stones and bright with reflected sun, with the slow, reflected swaying of trees. They would watch Sailor run ahead along the water and then turn back at Stephen’s call. And from a perfectly focused, extreme close-up of a Scotch thistle, so sharply, delicately barbed, its small, spiny flowers so perfectly mauve in the sunlight, they would be quickly lifted back to a long view of Stonebrook Creek turning through town on its way to the lake, its movement like a muscle twisting and their perspectives briefly jolted, just as Stephen intended.
Near the end of the second video, which was partly the dance and partly all of them at the house the next day, they would watch the scene on the wraparound porch and Stephen’s brief, unintended narration, his overheard command that they strut their stuff, would prompt a round of easy laughter. Pleasure would pass among them not because they knew Stephen well, they didn’t get to see him very much any more, but because what little they knew of him they quite liked, because even when it hardly mattered he had taken the trouble to choose his words.
Bill’s pictures, snapped by Cheryl and Tara, young curly-haired twin sisters who just happened to be walking past the Town Hall with their arms full of groceries, would be ready a week later. Although it was tight, there had been enough steps to hold all thirty-seven of them, Maggie and Josh and Margaret and Bill front and centre, Maggie in her beautiful gown with Sailor stretched out at her feet, panting, and all of them, except for Bill, looking perhaps a little too serious, Daphne and Jill perched on the step above, and the others standing not in their natural groupings but scattered, a husband separated from his wife, a sister nowhere near her brother, little kids content in the wrong arms.
Studying the pictures with a cup of tea at the kitchen table, Margaret would almost regret her insistence on knotting Bill’s tie for him. He likely would have been all right as he was. And she would decide that before too much time passed, someone with a fine hand should write all their names on the back of the pictures, in full, the placement of the names replicating the placement of the bodies, like a key, or maybe it was more properly called a legend.
Yes.