Rosemary turned to her cousins, her shallow chin raised and her arms reflecting the blue of her dress. “Aren't you glad,” she said regally, “that you only have to see your relatives at weddings and wakes?” The children laughed and said, Oh
yeah, recognizing her as their champion, the first of their generation at long last to brush the same old lamentations aside but uncertain, since this was their first wedding and they had not yet attended a wake, of just what she meant. She slowly shook her head. “Who cares?” she said disdainfully. “Who really cares?” And the rest of them nodded, laughing, joining a conspiracy they did not quite fully understand, except in its appeal. “Yeah.”
On the other side of the room the adults were singing “I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” and at the head table Veronica had her arm around Momma, who was wiping her eyes with a man's large white handkerchief. Across the dance floor the McGowan sisters were doing the same, their handkerchiefs somewhat grayer but their tears no less theoretical since not one of them would have gone home againâacross the ocean wild and wideâfor anything. When the song was over, a man at the next table shouted, “A corrupt bastard,” and another said, “He was a better man than J.F.K.,” which drew a shouted objection from the rest of them. “Oh, there's no parallel,” a woman said angrily and yet another cried, “Sweet Jesus, don't mention Parnell.”
The band began to play “I'll Be Seeing You” (“Women were the trouble with all of them,” the argument at the next table went on) and Fred and May took to the dance floor for a final time, dancing slowly and wearily now but looking happy, restful, in each other's arms.
In the restaurant's two dining rooms dinner was being served, and when they got outside, laden with the centerpieces and candied almonds, matchbooks and tiny packages of wet wipes that would be their souvenirs, the children were surprised to see that the sun was still shining and the day still warm and oppressive. There was tea and tiny sandwiches and pastel-colored petit fours back at Momma's place, where the
three window fans moved the curtains but did little to relieve the heat. Their father, in his shirtsleeves now, played bartender. Aunt May reappeared in a black-and-white shirtwaist and a small white hat, Fred in a sports coat and gray trousers. The children kept vigil at the bedroom window and then ran quickly into the living room to tell them that the cab was here, the one that would take them to the train that would take them Upstate, to a resort in the country Fred had heard about, famed for its rose gardens. There was more kissing and quick goodbyes, all the sisters with handkerchiefs now. The children lined up in the hallway, among the bags and boxes, leaning over the railing to say goodbye, goodbye, to Fred and May's upturned faces and the tops of their heads. When they saw them reach the landing, the world turned weird in that deep angular well of the stairs, they rushed back inside and over to Momma's windows, but May by then was just getting into the cab and Fred, of course, didn't know to look up for them.
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THE ISLAND was greener that Sunday, or perhaps only seemed so because they had spent the day before in the city. They rolled down the car windows to breathe in the sweet scent of grass and hay, freshly turned soil and salt air. They had been singing, each year it was the same, “I've Been Working on the Railroad,” and “Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech,” and “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.” Their mother sat between the two girls in the back seat, a bag of caramels and a bag of licorice on her lap, each half empty. In the front seat both their father and their brother wore peaked baseball caps. They had put them on first thing this morning when the family returned from what was to be the second of the three Masses they would attend this week. Their father had worn his, even as he folded his Sunday suit, his work clothes, into the open suitcase. One day delayed, their vacation had at that moment begun.
Happy as the day when a soldier gets his pay, as we go rolling, rolling home.
Their father sang alone now. Although the trip took only two hours, it contained all the variations of tone and mood and energy that an ocean crossing might encompass. There was the initial excitement, the chatting about where they
would go and what they would catch and whether, this year, they would each eat a whole lobster, followed by the struggle to get comfortable, the rearrangement of feet and elbows and rolled sweaters which always led to a skirmish or two and their mother reaching for the bags of candy at her feet, their father offering, “Let's sing,” and then leading them in boisterous song until a certain, exhausted silence overcame the children and they found themselves staring dully at the passing guardrails or fields or telephone poles while their father sang to himself and watched the road and their mother let her head dropâdreaming on the Sunday after May's wedding that she, not the best man, was to make the wedding toast and that she, unlike him, had not done a lick of preparation.
And then the callâit might have been “Land-ho”âfor them to roll their windows all the way down and smell that air, the children suddenly sitting up to see the first windmill, their mother, on that Sunday after May's wedding, looking around dully, a taste of champagne at the back of her throat.
In the village the trees formed a green canopy over the road. At the real-estate office Mrs. Smiley was just descending the white outside stair, a key in her hand.
“The woman has radar,” their father said.
She was wearing her church clothes, a wide floral dress that might have contained an acre of violets, and a pale blue hat with felt roses. She smiled and waved her plump hands and pulled open their brother's door as if she would take the car itself into her embrace. “Hello, hello,” she said, piling herself in. “Welcome, welcome.” Their brother slid quickly across the seat to make way for her but still she caught the top of his fingers under her cool thigh.
“Hello, all,” she said, settling herself and her flowers. “So
good to see you all. How was the trip? How are you all?” She threw her arm across the back of the seat and tried to turn to see the girls and their mother but could not manage it, what with her size and her short legs and her bright slippery dress. “Oh, my,” she said, laughing and getting them to laugh, too. She smelled like violets and as usual her presence had somehow cooled the air.
“Well, I'll see you better when we get out,” she said, giving up. “I'm sure you look wonderful,” and then smiled down at their brother, who was being so jostled by her laughter that he thought he, too, would burst. “How was the wedding?”
“Just fine,” their mother said. “Lovely.”
Since she couldn't turn around, Mrs. Smiley spoke toward the ceiling. “I just love a summer wedding,” she said.
The cottage that year was green clapboard, sitting at the end of a gravel drive and surrounded by trees. The screened porch was at the front and there were two bedrooms and a bath and a kitchen whose window caught the breeze from the bay. They carried in their suitcases and the boxes of sheets and towels and a cooler that contained salt and pepper, cinnamon and garlic powder, a bottle of gin and a bottle of vermouth and two cocktail glasses wrapped in paper towels.
Mrs. Smiley lingered at the door. Her clothes made the children think that she had somehow intended to join in yesterday's celebration, and among the things the younger girl brought for her to admire was the bag of candied almonds. Mrs. Smiley folded her large hands over the child's own as she held them. “I gave out something like this at my own wedding a billion years ago,” she said. She smiled at the child. “You keep them now, honey,” she said. “They'll bring you good luck.” And then straightened up to tell their mother, “It won't be long before you're planning this one's wedding, Mrs.
Dailey. They grow so fast. Don't forget to enjoy them now while you've still got them.” Their mother smiled and blushed. Perhaps because Mrs. Smiley was so full of flattery, it struck her as a compliment; as if there were some achievement involved in having children who were still young. “Oh, I do,” their mother said. “I do.”
Mrs. Smiley would not stay, no, thanks so much anyway. They had enough to do to get settled and she was expecting a call any minute now from her youngest daughter, who lived out West. Her fifth grandchild, due any day now, although, she said, she was certain the call would come in the middle of the night, didn't babies always wait until the middle of the night to make their appearanceâ“like stars,” she said. But they should stop by if there was anything they needed. And they should enjoy, enjoy all this (she indicated the steel-legged kitchen table and the red-and-blue rag rug, the corduroy daybed, the rattan chairs, the children themselves) and pray for good weather.
While their father drove Mrs. Smiley home the children unpacked their shorts and their shirts and then wandered into their mother's room, where she had already set out her brush and her comb and piled her library books on the bedstand beside the freshly made bed.
She turned to them. “Bored already?” she said and they denied it, without vehemence because it was not true; they merely wanted her presence, the sight and the scent of her for a little while. She saw this, and saw for a brief moment, too, what her husband might have intended when he chose, year after year, a different cottage to bring them to. The family had no history here, no memory of another timeâno walls marked off with the children's heights, no windowsills or countertops to remind her of how much they had grown.
She smiled and shook her head at the three of them. It was as if he stopped time for them two weeks out of every year, cut them off from both the past and the future so that they had only this present in a brand-new place, this present in which her children sought the sight and the scent of her: a wonderful thing, when you noticed it. When the past and the future grew still enough to let you notice it. He did that for her. This man she'd married.
She handed them each a pile of towels and sheets. “Well, make yourselves useful, then,” she told them and then added, as she passed by the girls' small room, that, really, Mrs. Smiley had done much better by them two years ago.
Despite their prayers it rained that evening and all of the next two days. They played cards and endless games of pick-up sticks and watched the wet green trees from behind the screen of the sun porch. They drove to the ocean and sat looking at it from their car. There were other cars there, too; they came and went at various intervals, each one nosing up to the guardrail at the head of the sand and then sitting silently for a while, its occupants staring straight ahead as if with some faint expectation. One or two hardier souls walked the beach in raincoats and bare feet. With the low gray sky and the silence, it all seemed a kind of vigil.
“I hope May is having better weather,” their mother said at one point, and their father told her, “Weather isn't supposed to matter on your honeymoon,” which made her laugh and slap him on the knee with her magazine. Twice in that same hour the children heard them say to each other, “The Hotel Saint George,” and began to suspect, by the glances and their smiles, that they were planning a surprise of some sort. They heard their mother whisper, laughing, “I remember everything.”
In the evening their father read aloud. “Humor in Uniform,” “Life in These United States,” a story about three girls way out West who had gotten trapped in their overturned sleigh just as a tremendous blizzard descended on the prairie. As the wind began to howl the oldest of the three told the other two that she was going to crawl out from under the sleigh to have a look around and that they must wait there for her, they mustn't follow. Hours passed and the storm raged and the sister did not return. The other two girls shared a pancake one of them had placed in her pocket that morning and when that was gone they chewed the rawhide of the sled's reins. Finally the storm passed and a rescue party came upon them. As the two girls were lifted out, toes and fingers frozen, they saw a wide horse blanket had been draped over the top of the sleigh. Their sister, they later learned, had seen that the overturned sleigh would not resist the blizzard's strong winds and had crawled up between the runners and held on fast. It was her frozen weight that had kept their only shelter from being blown away.
“Where do they get some of these things?” their mother asked from behind her own novel, laughing a little, although her eyes were filled with tears.
Sitting on the red-and-blue rag rug, in the small circle of light cast by the brown-shaded lamps, the children eyed one another carefully. The tiny room had suddenly become a lifeboat in which all of themâtheir own little familyâwas balanced. Which of them, when the time came, would be brave? Which would live to the end of the story?
“What I'd like to know,” their father said, flipping pages, “is how anyone knows what she was thinking when she climbed up on top of that sleigh. Maybe she hadn't intended to save the other two at all. Maybe she was just dumb as all-get-out
and wanted to get a better view of the storm. How can anyone know? She didn't live to tell it.”
Their mother said, “Oh, you,” and the girls cried, “Daddy!” but their brother, who was more affected by the story than he wanted to admit, said, “It's true. You can't know. You can't know what she was thinking, nobody can. Not after she's dead.” He saw the kitchen curtain move with the breeze from the bay and pulled himself closer to the center of light. “You can't.”
It was early on the evening of their second day when a single ray of sunlight fell through the leaves of the trees. There was steam rising from the road by the time they made their way down to the water. The rocks of the jetty were slick and glistened with small puddles and silver bits of mica, but the children were determined to walk out to the small lighthouse, despite their mother's objections. She watched from the sand with a hand to her throat and then sent their father after them when she saw the youngest briefly lose her footing. From where she stood she could hear the mournful ringing of the buoys. It was the saddest sound, she thought, although she supposed that for anyone who had been at sea it would be a sound that meant safe harbor, the gathering up of bundles, the end of a journey, if the place you'd been heading toward was home. When the children returned their hands were full of wet sand and treasure, rocks and scallop shells and a piece of gold band from what might have been a woman's watch, and they piled all of it into her cupped hands. Her husband stood beside her as the children slapped their bare feet into the wet sand, laughing and howling and scraping out their initials with their toes. “Red sky at night,” he said, “sailor's delight. Fishing tomorrow for sure”âhis profile made gallant and boyish by the cocked baseball cap.
“And I'd better call Momma,” she told him, the children's rocks and shells and gold alone keeping her from putting her hand to his cheek.
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She was out with the three of them right after breakfast, a fistful of coins weighing down her purse. While they were gone, their father sorted through his tackle box and checked each rod and reel. He placed the four of them against the green shingles of the house.
In the kitchen he washed the breakfast dishes and rinsed out the cooler. The phone conversation, he knew, would be a long one, what with the wedding to discuss and May being gone. There would be a great many tears, no doubt, and some anger, and a great effort on his wife's part to assuage both from a hundred miles away. They'd had a fine time on Saturday but now old Momma Towne would feel obliged to remind them all that they'd been dancing on graves.
He turned the radio on to get the tide report. He considered for the thousandth time in what might have been as many years the family he had married himself into. They were nothing like his own, which for most of his childhood had consisted of his father and his mother and her six laughing brothers, who had lived with them on and off and for various lengths of time until he himself was fully grown. They'd had their grief: there was an infant lost before he was born, and he was eleven when he lost his father. One uncle was maimed in a fire and two died in construction accidents while he was in his teens, and drink was a problem for more than one of them. But the places they'd lived in were never haunted and what anger his mother showed was usually directed at the landlord, not the fates.