The Sisters (33 page)

“No,” Jenny said. “We want a big wedding. Stephen has lots of family. And the sanctuary at his church is so beautiful.”

“But all that rigmarole,” Daisy said. “All that ritual and hocus-pocus. A wedding doesn’t have to be in a church to be beautiful.”

“I don’t think it’s hocus-pocus.”

Mabel, Daisy, and Barry all stared at Jenny, while their friends Nick and Ted excused themselves from the table, saying they hadn’t yet had a good look at the Christmas tree.

“I like it,” Jenny stammered. “I can’t tell you why exactly. And it’s not like I believe everything the priest says. I don’t understand a lot of it, but even if I did—” She picked up her fork and scratched at the tablecloth. “I like the way it makes me feel,” she said. “Like there’s something beyond this world we have to answer to.” She nodded toward the ceramic tree that sat in the center of the table. “Why do you even celebrate if you don’t believe anything?”

Mabel scooped up the bread basket and said she needed to get more rolls from the oven. Jenny followed her into the kitchen. “What’s wrong, Gran? Don’t you like Stephen?”

“I do. We just don’t really know him, that’s all.” Mabel pulled an oven mitt onto her hand, which Jenny pulled off again, saying, “I’ll do it.”

While her granddaughter opened the oven, Mabel said, “You’re too young, Jenny. Finish school first. Get to know some other boys.”

One by one, Jenny plucked the steaming rolls from the tray and dropped them in the basket. “Oh, Gran,” she said. “When it’s right, it’s right. What do you want me to do? Wait until I’m thirty-five, like Mom was? Or be like you and never get married at all? It’s not like we’re planning to have kids right away. Lots of girls my age get married. Lots.” She pulled off the oven mitt and covered the bread basket with a cloth. “You’re not upset about the church thing, too, are you?”

Mabel shook her head. She turned toward the sink to hide her reddening eyes. “Of course not,” she said.

“You are.” Jenny stood beside her. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice quiet, “but I want to come out after my wedding feeling like I’ve been through something—not like Mom and Dad. They treated it like a big joke.”

Mabel’s head snapped up. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She looked at her granddaughter. “Take that back.” Jenny had seen the photographs of her parents’ wedding—onstage at the theater following Daisy’s closing night performance in
A Doll’s House
—and she’d been told the story: how Barry, a theater-loving insurance salesman, talked his way backstage to meet Daisy by claiming to be a florist with a special delivery. From that, Jenny had imagined her parents’ courtship as a blithe romance out of a musical comedy—all bells and stardust. But she didn’t know what had really happened—like how Daisy, who hadn’t been touched by a man offstage in twenty years, fell into hysterical sobs the first time Barry tried to kiss her. He’d lifted his hands to cup her face, and she’d fought him as if he were strangling her. It was hard not to love a man who stayed after that, who sat in a corner until she calmed down, who asked in a gentle way for her to explain what happened, when she could.

Perhaps they had all protected Jenny too much. She was so naïve, understanding the world in the simplistic way of the young—the very young, who had never faced death or feared any monster that wasn’t imaginary. Jenny saw the theater as only make-believe. She couldn’t understand—as Barry had come to—that there was no place on earth more sacred to Daisy.

“I didn’t mean it,” Jenny said. “But why won’t any of you tell me why you hate church?”

“Your parents weren’t raised on it.” Mabel knew Jenny would roll her eyes at that easy answer, so she quickly added, “And me … I just didn’t want to go back after my mother died.” To say any more would have been like throwing her granddaughter into the center of a great maze—and for what? It wasn’t Jenny’s fault that at twenty-one she remained such an innocent—Mabel and Daisy and then Barry had made those choices. Jenny knew Mabel had adopted Daisy during the war, but she knew none of the circumstances—and certainly nothing of the common past her mother and grandmother shared.

“Those aren’t good reasons,” Jenny said. “I’m not asking you to join. I just want to have my wedding there.”

“Well, what about Nick and Ted?” Mabel knew the question wasn’t fair, but she was desperate to divert Jenny to another track. “Do you want to make them feel they’re not welcome at your wedding?”

Jenny sighed and slumped into a chair at the kitchen table. “So I’m supposed to give up even asking questions because some people who go to church think gay men are devils? You know there are plenty of people who don’t go to church who wouldn’t accept Nick and Ted, either. Why do I have to pay for all that?”

Mabel stroked Jenny’s hair. “Oh, honey.” All her granddaughter was asking was for them to gather as a family for a few hours inside a church—and for that she did not deserve Pandora’s box as her wedding gift. A church was just a place, Mabel told herself, nothing more. She kissed Jenny’s cheek. “You have your wedding wherever you like.”

The girl brightened instantly. “And you’ll take pictures?”

“No, Jenny, I’m too old for that. Can’t I just be a guest?”

“Not all of them. Just at the reception—whatever strikes you. We’ll pay somebody to do the ceremony and all the formal stuff.” Jenny clasped her hands, as if in prayer. “Please? I’ve told all my friends about my famous grandmother.”

“I’m not famous.”

“Well, nobody else I know has ever had a grandmother on
60 Minutes
.” She winked at Mabel. “Not a grandmother who wasn’t a criminal, I mean.” Jenny picked up the bread basket and headed back to the dining room, tossing another grin over her shoulder as she passed through the door.

Jenny’s soft-focus view of the world and her generation’s obsession with celebrity made the girl recall that interview as cause for rejoicing—entirely forgetting the reason for it. Mabel hadn’t wanted to do it at all, but her editor had urged her on. “It’s not just anybody,” he said. “It’s Ed Bradley. He was wounded covering the war in Cambodia.”

Mabel’s book,
The Never-Ending War,
had grown from the series of photographs she had taken of young men bound for Vietnam. How she wished she could have captured just one moment for all the tens of thousands of Indiana boys who had gone, but working as hard and as long as she could work, she’d managed only a slivered fraction—a few over twelve hundred in seven years. Of those, about half had kept their word and returned to her for one more session. Sixty-three, she knew, would never come back—either killed or reported missing in action. But twenty-nine of the men who returned had joined with Mabel in a new project, letting her photograph them once a year so that others could one day look at the progressive images and understand something of the cost the veterans themselves could not otherwise express. These photos had become the book. If it hadn’t been released the same month the Wall was dedicated in Washington,
The Never-Ending War
would have sold very modestly, with little notice, but somehow word had gotten to nearly every news station in the country, and, eventually, to a producer at
60 Minutes
.

Mabel had always liked Ed Bradley, who spoke with the warm rhythm of a man who loved music. He’d come to Indianapolis to interview her, and when he leaned across her own kitchen table and fixed her with those sad, earnest eyes of his—eyes that had known suffering and cherished joy—the cameras she had dreaded melted away. “What did you learn from these men, the veterans?” he asked.

“That for them, that war won’t ever be over,” she said. “I don’t think any real war ever is—large, small, between countries, between people. Even the wars inside ourselves. Something always remains.”

“Feeling better now, Mama?” Daisy knelt before her on the marble floor and whispered, “If you don’t think you can do it, you don’t have to.”

“It’s okay,” Mabel said. “I’m okay.”

“Barry’s gone off somewhere with the priest,” Daisy said, “and I have to go check on Jenny, but Nick’s here. He’ll take you in.”

She looked up to see Nick in an elegant dove gray suit, offering her his hand with a flourish. “May-belle,” he said, “may I have the pleasure of escorting you to your seat?”

Mabel placed her hand in his. “If you had a top hat, you’d look just like Louis Jourdan.”

Nick smiled, bowed to her slightly, and wound her arm in his. A halfdozen bearded old men in robes, the sun lighting their faces with the ferocity of heaven, glared at Mabel and her friend as they made their progress up the aisle. She could identify only Moses, who carried the stone tablets. “I suppose they’re all prophets,” she said.

Nick nodded toward the windows that encircled the altar. “Looks like they put all the angels up front with the priest—too good for the ordinary sinner.”

The figures in the altar windows were clearly angels, with their heads ringed by halos and the hint of white wings rising up behind them. Strange how they were all portrayed as young men—beautiful young men, pretty as girls. Like the surly old prophets, the angels were draped in robes, but of lighter colors—saffron and rose instead of mud brown and purple—all except one, who wore bright blue armor. He looked like Nick, nearly forty years ago, when he played George Gibbs to Daisy’s Emily Webb in
Our Town
.

At times like these, when someone else would have prodded Mabel to explain her trembling, Nick held her hand, as her Paul would have done. They shared the gift, these two, of understanding without the need to ask questions. Mabel looked again at the blue-armored angel. Was it a blessing or merely luck that she’d had two such rare friends?

Mabel slid sideways into the pew, the second from the front, and sat down. “Where’s Teddy?” she asked, pulling Nick down beside her.

“He’ll be along later—said something about decorating the getaway car.”

“Oh, no!” Mabel clapped a hand over her mouth to keep her laugh from echoing through the sanctuary.

“Don’t worry, Belle. Nothing too wild. He promised to stick to the conservative hetero theme—cans and old shoes. Boring!”

Mabel glanced over her shoulder toward the entrance. “Think this crowd will be able to handle seeing you two together?”

“Nary a worry. The priest told me it’s been a whole ten years since the Episcopalians voted us children of God. Isn’t that good news?” He picked up a hymnal and thumbed through it. “But just in case, Jenny’s been feeding the troublesome in-laws a story about Ted and me as bachelor roomies.”

“Like in
The Odd Couple
?” Mabel let her laugh go this time. “All ex-wives and stewardesses? Who will ever believe that?”

Nick leaned his head against hers. “Just the ones that have to if they’re going to get through the day without a coronary. People believe what they want to believe.”

Mabel started to get up. “I’m going to have a talk with Jenny. Right now.”

“Geez, Belle, your timing needs work.” With a tug on her hand, he drew her back down to her seat. “It’s okay, really. Let’s not have our Stonewall today. We’re here to celebrate. Jenny’s still at that age where she’s afraid of what people will think of her. And anyway, these are just the special-occasion relatives—all the everyday ones know.” Nick squeezed her hand playfully and grinned. “Besides, Ted’s determined to get them at Thanksgiving—the familiest of holidays.” He fanned the pages of the hymnal. “So many songs about a guy nobody can see.”

Mabel took the hymnal from him. “I don’t think I know any of these,” she said, stopping suddenly on an open page. “There’s this one: ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.’”

“Well, that’s no surprise,” Nick said. “Look at all the battle images around here. An angel in armor.” He pointed to the marble font. “Shields all over that thing.”

“Did I ever tell you? One of my veterans—Charlie Brock—told me his platoon used to sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ whenever they got an order to strike a village. Part of the black humor that kept them going: ‘Like a mighty army moves the Church of God; / Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.’” Mabel pressed a tear from her eye. “Charlie said he never cared about whether it was true—the story going around that a peace symbol was a broken cross. That’s why he wore one, he told me. Said there wasn’t any way to move forward without breaking the cross.”

A rapping sound at the back of the sanctuary caused them both to turn. Barry was waving for Nick.

“My cue,” Nick said, kissing Mabel on the cheek. “One of the ushers didn’t show, so I’ve been elected as understudy.”

Alone in the pew, she stared down at the open page of the hymnal, trying to remember the tune, but it eluded her, one phrase seeming right while the next slipped away into some odd key. Behind her, she could feel the ancient prophets judging her with their burning eyes. Moses was considering crashing one of the stone tablets over her head.

If she went to the priest to confess—did Episcopal priests hear confessions?—if she told him that in saving Bertie she had lost her, if she told him that even now there were times she could barely lift her head from the weight of guilt she bore over Wallace’s death, would he quote the words of this hymn to her?

Did we in our strength confide,

Our striving would be losing—