The Wedding Read online

  For a moment she had the impulse to wake Isaac, but his sleep was too deep, too long deferred. Tidily, she put her cerebration away in the memory slot of her disciplined mind, where it would stay at the same intensity of white heat until her next meeting with the board. With a sigh of completion, she fell asleep, and the night folded down on the still spent forms of the forgiven.

  It was the cold that woke her, a glacial cold like no other in her experience. She felt as if she had slept on a slab of ice. It surely must have been the coldest night in memory. The temperature must have fallen below any existing records. The city was probably at a standstill. No school bells would ring on this morning. Frozen birds must be dropping like dead flies from the eaves. The sun was shining brightly through the windows, though; she was even briefly blinded by its glare. But despite its radiance it could not budge the immovable mass of cold air, the arctic front that the weather forecast had not predicted. Still, she was grateful that the day would not have to seem more depressing for unfolding under a dark sky.

  Then something struck her as odd. She shouldn’t have been seeing the sky at all—the windows should have been coated with frost. Even if the sun had managed to melt them, they should have been wet and steaming, not clear and dry. Was the cold indoors? No cold felt more bone-chilling than indoor cold. Had the furnace gone out? It had never happened before, but anything could happen once. Maybe the hired man had gotten himself drunk and had forgotten to bank it for the night.

  With a little moan of dismay she turned to look at her flowering cactus. Her younger son Clark had brought it home on his Christmas holiday from school. The plant was not dead. Not a petal had fallen, not a leaf had curled from the cold. Indeed, its leaves had turned toward the sun as if they could feel a warmth she could not.

  Then she was struck by another curious fact. She could not relate the way she felt to any previous reaction to intensive cold she’d known. She was not shaking with it, her teeth were not chattering with it, she was not rigid with it, she wasn’t knotted up in a fetal position as if seeking the womb’s warmth. She was not numb at all. The feeling was indescribable.

  This unparalleled cold, this cold beyond human experience, was steadily advancing up her body. Already her feet and legs were icier than she would have believed possible in a living body … in a living body … she could feel no colder if she were dead … if she were dead …

  Terror struck her. Was she ill? Was she desperately ill? Had she had a heart attack in her sleep? Had she waked to watch herself die? There was so much to do before she died. Oh, God. There was so much to undo. “Isaac!” she called, but he wouldn’t rouse and there wasn’t time to wait. She got out of bed and began to walk. Up and down, up and down, keeping herself alive.

  The walking helped. Her heart beat evenly. She could feel the cold backing down her lower body until her feet were as warm as toast on the warm rug. As she passed the windows, the noise of the city rising up did not seem full of protesting cries. When she blew her breath against the window, it did not steam.

  Her panic subsided. She wasn’t dying any more than she was standing on her head. Her heart was sound—indeed, she felt wonderful, just the way she should feel the morning after a night of fulfillment. She had only been dreaming that she felt cold, only dreaming that she had called Isaac. She jumped out of bed in her sleep. She was only now really awake.

  But in an inexorable moment of dawning lucidity, she knew. She was awake enough now to know that she had not dreamed any part of it.

  The climax was anticlimactic. She did not scream, faint, or cry. Perhaps another’s death, that incontrovertible state of nonbeing, is easier to face than the marginal moment of dying. Death is only the end of dying. She went to the bed, not to confirm the fact but to face it. When she touched her husband’s stiffening hand, she drew back in a reflex of crawling flesh. She knew, or believed she knew, that the cold that had rocked her out of bed had not been the cold of outward contact but a distillation of cold, a clamor of cold sounding an alarm through her sixth sense. Out of the intensity of her physical oneness had come a mystical communication in which she had taken his dying into the warm bed of her body, not to die with him, not to die for her, but to fight for his life with the supernatural strength the resisting flesh stores for the hour before eternity.

  But Isaac had died while her conscious mind was disarmed. In her waking awareness, she had leaped for her own life, running from a sleep already overslept, from a bed already robbed. In her desperate flight she had flung the covers to the foot of the bed. Isaac lay revealed in his nakedness. She drew up the sheet, smoothing it gently across his shoulders. She did not cover his face. Let the doctor draw the shroud over the dead. She could not raise her hand against him.

  She must call the doctor. She would use the telephone in Isaac’s room, that telephone that had rung out so many times in the middle of the night to wake Isaac with its summons.

  Her hardest task would be to tell her sons. Losing a husband was a sad, hard thing, but losing a father before you’re old enough to understand what that loss meant was cruelly unfair. At least she could say that she had a last night of reconciliation, however ephemeral and bittersweet. She thought of Clark, the youngest. He hardly knew his father. Would he be able to forgive him for leaving? Would he understand the reasons Isaac had for never being around much in the first place, for working himself to the bone? She would make sure that he did. That child would grow up knowing who his father was, what he stood for, what he believed in. God willing, he would follow his father’s path. The schoolteacher looked down on Isaac’s still body for a last time. She brushed a fingertip softly against his cold forehead, and then she turned and walked from the room.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Clark sat in corinne’s station wagon, waiting for the morning boat to bring another brace of coleses to witness the barbaric rite of giving a virgin in marriage. There were other off-islanders waiting in sleek cars, and others who were just as clearly stamped “summer people” who had left their cars to walk restless pedigreed dogs or restless, radiantly healthy children. Their sun-browned holiday faces were turned seaward, waiting to catch a glimpse of the steamship, islander, when she rounded the cliffs, the sun on her gleaming white flanks, her whistle sounding for a landing, the green sea parting to let her pass and quieting the waves in her wake.

  clark alone sat with a tight, tormented face, his tan washed out by his pallor, his eye oblivious, his ears rejecting the joy around him.

  The letter was like a wound in his clutched hand, its words burned into his palm, as traceable as a pattern in braille. He had left the oval well ahead of the ferry’s arrival with the stated purpose of stopping for gas, picking up the morning paper that had come in on the early plane, and making a reservation for the ferrying of his car across the sound as soon after the wedding as space on the steamer was available.

  only the latter errand had any relation to the real intent behind his impatience to get away from the house, but he had methodically attended to them all, if only because they were too minor to find excuses for not doing them. He saved until last his major errand, which involved the post office. He did so not to postpone it or to steel himself, but because he would be incapable of concentrating on anything else once he got rachel’s letter. He would have to ask the clerk for it, having to admit his ineptitude at making three correct turns upon the post-office-box dial. Though corinne had rented the same box year round because of its convenient height and easy-to-remember number, its summer contents were rarely addressed to clark, and never of any interest to him, and he had never bothered to remember the combination. The telephone was a more immediate way of reaching him if a medical problem needed his attention in new york.

  Rachel knew the telephone number, but she had never used it. They had an understanding. At the start of the final week of his vacation with his family, he would find an outdoor telephone booth in some section of the island far removed from the usual orbits of the people he knew
and put in a call to rachel, who knew, by prearrangement, that he would call at such-and-such an hour—or as near to that hour as possible—on such-and-such an evening, or without fail on the next night, if something unavoidable were to come up.

  The call was to confirm the time and place of their departure for their two-week holiday somewhere outside the states, to a clime where the beauty of rachel’s brownness commanded extra courtesies from those who served the white-appearing american doctor and his lovely colored wife, and from those at dinner tables around or in theater seats beside them who were captivated by the harmony of their contrast, a reaction exactly the reverse of that which such a juxtaposition would have excited in their own america, the country to which they gave their love and loyalty.

  It was rachel who always selected the place where they could take their love without shame or slander. Clark had come to make a small ceremony of taking her a sheaf of travel folders on the eve of his departure for the island, to fill her time of waiting, to divert her mind from dwelling too much on the irony of his openly going to join corinne, who had not been his wife in any real sense for years. But they both knew that he was soon to return to rachel’s constancy, slipping off behind a smoke screen of little lies that corinne surely did not believe but accepted as her due to save face before her friends.

  Last night he had talked to rachel by telephone. He had tried to call her earlier in the week, but there had never been a free hour. A wedding in a household of women involved the father of the bride to the limit of his patience. In these final, frantic days, there were errands to run around the clock, the conclusion of the women being that they were too busy running the wedding to attend to the small-scale operations that a fairly intelligent male could execute without too many errors in judgment.

  Once or twice he had been tempted to scribble a note to rachel, just a line to say she was very much on his mind. But the gesture had seemed empty and meaningless. Why tell her what she knew already, that she was second only to his daughters in his thoughts? he had never written her anyway, not wanting to compound the secrecy of their love. Until this morning’s mail, she had never composed a letter to him, not wanting him to have to destroy the tenderness that had dictated it. But now here was rachel’s handwriting, so familiar a sight on memo pads, so unfamiliar on the outside of an envelope.

  When he rang rachel the night before, it had been after midnight, and he had winced with reluctance at the thought of shattering her sleep. He knew he had sounded embarrassed about how obvious it was that he was calling her at this inconsiderate hour because he had been lured into some unavoidable commitment by corinne.

  It was true enough, though. Corinne had held a dinner party for those of her friends who had come a long way for the wedding. Not all of them had driven down, and not all of them were staying within easy walking distance of the oval. Corinne had asked clark to chauffeur these guests to and from her party since taxis were hard to come by, their summer demand far exceeding their limited supply.

  Rachel’s voice on the telephone had sounded flat and far away. The connection wasn’t clear. He mentioned it and she made no comment, as if it didn’t matter. He told her he would make a reservation for his car in the morning. Silence. Then, without any preamble, she told him that a letter would reach him in the morning.

  He concealed his surprise at this breach of her accustomed behavior. He had no feeling of crisis, however; to write a letter to a tardy love was not a departure from love’s ways. Rachel undoubtedly knew there was little chance of discovery. With all the mail pouring in for the bride-to-be, and all hands needed to keep abreast of it, nobody would have the time to be interested in a letter addressed to anyone else.

  But he was profoundly sorry that rachel had felt driven to write and remind him of his inattention to the woman who would be his wife—at least, and quite openly, his intended wife—as soon as the dust of shelby’s marriage had settled. He began to apologize for his busy week. But she interrupted to say, in a voice as dry as autumn leaves, “don’t apologize for the wedding. I believe in weddings. They should come before everything else, or everything else is nothing. But it’s much too late to philosophize. I’ll hang up now, if you don’t mind. Good night, clark, tomorrow, you’ll have my letter.”

  He heard the finality of the click despite that second of hesitation when something affecting their future had been weighed in the balance. But nothing had been settled. He had said nothing he’d rung her up to say. Didn’t she know that she hadn’t asked when he would be in new york, or how they were to plan their brief holiday? was her avoidance explained in her letter? had she given him an ultimatum, set a limit to his patience? marry me now or be my enemy?

  With the end in sight and a new beginning in sight, why would rachel, who had always been so predictable, let a few lost days scratch the immaculate surface of their perfect understanding? there was nothing to prove in punishing him by pointedly ignoring the purpose of his call. To treat their love as if it were one and the same with their lovemaking, to dismiss their tryst as if that was the surest way to bring him swiftly to one knee in penance with a proposal of marriage on his lips and a ring in his pocket for when she said “yes,” was to squander the treasure of their mutual trust in a wholly feminine fit of pique.

  For a moment she had seemed on the verge of recanting, or giving him equal time for rebuttal. Then there had been that negation, that “no” said to herself or to him, signifying some dark withdrawal from reasonable behavior. Always before when he had thought of this impasse he had turned his mind away from it in fear. Now, though, with the phone call, there was a new sense of urgency. He knew that he must act, however cruelly inappropriate the time and place. He would ask corinne for a divorce before he left the island. The morning after the wedding he would ask her for his freedom, agreeing to whatever terms she might impose to punish him. With rachel, and his practice, and the end of secrecy, there would be nothing more he needed for fulfillment.

  Inxs the summertime of the oval, when screen doors replaced solid doors, and everyone saw everyone throughout the day, a closed door would only bring solicitous inquiry. He would have to leave corinne exposed to whatever knowledgeable deductions were drawn from her altered look. The married, like the old, never know when they are next and cannot help but hope the plight of others postpones theirs. Many would sift through the ashes of a burned-out marriage, a few of them looking for a spark to rekindle it, but most of them looking for evidence of the other woman.

  He drove home and got quietly into the twin bed on the other side of the room from corinne. It was corinne’s bedroom, which he was sharing only because his room had been borrowed for two of their house guests.

  Corinne did not stir. The evening had been lively, and she slept soundly, her breathing audible. He had not even looked at her, not because of any distaste, but because he had been filled with an obsession for rachel greater than anything he had felt since the first tempest of possession. All through the night he had ached for her. He saw her in her nakedness. In his fitful sleep, he had dreamed of her in the dress that his daughter would wear at her wedding. In his dream, rachel had been as he had once known her: young as morning, a graduate from a nursing school. She had had no seasoning, but her eyes had implored him to let her try, dissolving whatever resistance he might have mustered, and her soft, unslurred southern speech, so unlike the careful brittleness acquired by corinne, had completed his capitulation. Clark had been doomed from that point on because, while not everyone can see it, those who can know that there is no beauty like that of a brown-skinned woman when she is beautiful: the velvet skin, the dark hair like a cloud, the dark eyes like deep wells to drown in.

  And yet clark would not have hired rachel if he’d known he was going to fall in love with her. It was not a calculated act. As young and expectant of life as she was, she was entitled to more than a married man could give her. He told himself that he was hiring her for a trial period in which she would have to prove her capab
ilities. What he was never able to tell himself was all the ways she reminded him so sharply, so powerfully, of sabina, with whom he had had that sweet and unfulfilled encounter, from whom he had taken the trust and expectancy of a proffered heart and traded them for corinne’s empty vows.

  Now, however, as he sat in the station wagon in the crowded gravel parking lot by the dock, he wondered if he would ever be free of the questions that licked at his brain like flames. He looked down at the letter again, and again he took it in, hoping that it had changed since his first reading.

  dear clark,

  In these long weeks without you, i’ve had time to do a lot of thinking about the past and the present and now the years ahead. I know the wedding has had to take first place in your mind in these last days of preparation, with all hands needed to meet the standard of perfectionof the coleses. The wedding has absorbed my mind, too, though for very different reasons.

  I’m thirty-nine, and in december i’ll be forty. Perhaps if i had already crossed that bridge and looked the same and felt the same as i had twelve hours before, i could thinly of myself as being only one day older instead of one year older, and the bond between us would still be secure.

  I’ve tried to cling to that hope, but every day my doubts diminish it. Clark, a woman still unmarried panics when her fortieth birthday comes due. She knows, as i know that i know too, that time will not turn back, and the next decade i’ll be fifty, and only god knows the number of my remaining years, with no children and no grandchildren to remember me when the counting stops.