Authors: Ayelet Waldman
Red Hook Road
ALSO BY AYELET WALDMAN
FICTION
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
Daughter’s Keeper
NONFICTION
Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes,
Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
To Michael, as ever
Part 1 -
The First Summer
Part 2 -
The Second Summer
Part 3 -
The Third Summer
Part 4 -
The Fourth Summer
The flower girl had lost her basket of rose petals and could not bear to have the photograph taken without it. Altogether she had been something of a disappointment in her role. She had forgotten to sprinkle the petals as she walked down the aisle of the church, remembering only once she reached the front pew. Perhaps she had been distracted by the transformation of the nave, the oiled and gleaming oak pews, the glass wall sconces sparkling, their long tapered candles lit for the first time in years, all the shutters on the windows flung open, letting in the light of the golden afternoon. And, everywhere, flowers. Purple and blue hydrangea woven into vines, long swags draped between the rows of pews and across the back of the altar. Shiny brass buckets of lupines and greenery on either side of the twin curved staircases leading up to the pulpit.
The flower girl had been adopted as a toddler from Cambodia and, despite the good intentions of her adoptive mother, had never before been included in this kind of family event. When she finally remembered her assignment, she widened her dark eyes, scooped up a handful of the white petals from her basket, and threw them back up the aisle as hard as she could. They made it no farther than the second row, where they flurried down onto the messy gray topknot of the vice president of the Red Hook Library Ladies’ Auxiliary. There was a burst of laughter, and the bride, measuring her way down the aisle, paused in midstride. The laughter abated. Would the bride be upset at the disturbance of her stately procession, so perfectly executed in last night’s rehearsal? Or would she exhibit the sense of humor reported by the groom to have been what first attracted him to her when they met ten years before?
The bride, honey-haired, with a high, smooth forehead and wide-set
eyes the color of agate, hesitated only a moment before she grinned. Anxiously held breaths were exhaled and everyone took up his or her prior occupation. The weepers dug through their purses for bits of crumpled tissue. The pinchpennies resumed their calculations of the bills for flowers and candles. The gossips craned their necks to take careful note of who had and who had not been invited. The young women committed to memory every bead, pearl, strap, button, and length of silk of the bridal gown so they could later describe it in sufficient detail to those who had not been fortunate enough to garner an invitation of their own. The young men toyed with the keys in their pockets and longed for the ceremony to end so they could get to the music and the bar. The children fidgeted. And the older men glanced surreptitiously at their watches, trying to figure out if the ceremony would outlast the rubber game of the White Sox series at Fenway.
Now, after the service, standing on the top step of the pretty white clapboard church, the flower girl wept over the loss of her ribbon-and-rose-bedecked basket, and the bride promised her that the photograph would not be taken until it was found. Two of the groomsmen were dispatched to search inside the church. The lilac-clad bridesmaids went off to hunt among the rose arbors and white stone paths of the church’s garden, where the wedding guests waited in the shade cast by the church’s tall steeple, enjoying the view of sailboats cutting white grooves across the small cove, and ignoring the pastor’s warnings not to crush his carefully tended flower beds. To his wife’s annoyance, the father of the bride insisted on looking for the basket in the bridal couple’s waiting limousine. “But the flower girl was never
in
the limo,” the mother of the bride said. The father of the bride could not deny this, but nonetheless went to have a look. This was the way of their marriage. Although they were in staunch agreement that she knew best, he would generally ignore her advice.
As for the father of the groom, he had slipped around the back of the church for a much-needed cigarette. When the photographer tried to reassemble the party on the front steps of the church, he appeared to have joined the flower basket in its nuptial limbo. There was some alarm when his absence was noted, primarily on the part of his current girlfriend, who had insinuated herself, some thought brazenly, into the photograph. His
ex-wife, the mother of the groom, turned to her younger son, the best man, and said, “Get your father. He’s around back having a cigarette.” To the photographer she said, “We’ll start without him if we have to. Won’t be the first time.”
The photographer busied himself with the bridal couple, adjusting the straps of the bride’s beaded bodice to cover the tan lines from her bathing suit, swirling her long silk train around her feet, and arranging her pearl-edged, tulle veil fetchingly over her right shoulder. He pulled loose a single curl of her blond hair and twisted it around his finger so that it sprang into place, framing and softening the broad planes of her cheek. He spent some time on her lush bouquet, shifting around the purple irises, lobelia, and periwinkle to disclose the lupines, the very last of the season and, he’d been told, the bride’s favorite flower. A few minutes before, he had gotten a fine shot as the couple ran out of the church into a shower of silver and gold Mylar confetti. The confetti caught the late afternoon sun and he’d captured the bride and groom laughing and ducking beneath a winking archway of light. Now, tiny flecks of fire were nestled in the whorls of the bride’s intricately arranged hair and in the tulle netting of her veil. Bright shards of light starred the groom’s shoulders.
Perfect, the photographer thought. The beautiful bride and handsome groom, the family in their finery arrayed against the crisp lines of the white clapboard church, the sapphire sea just visible at the edges of the frame. If only he could get them all to keep still.
“Do we want to take those off?” the photographer said, pointing to the groom’s steel-framed glasses.
The groom glanced at the bride, who nodded. He tried to slip the glasses into his jacket pocket but it was a brand-new pocket, still sewn shut. “Give them to me,” his mother said. He handed over the glasses and blinked his pale blue eyes. Without his glasses on his features looked softer, more boyish, his face gentle beneath his mariner’s tan and peeling nose—even vulnerable—as though his outmoded aviator frames had afforded him a kind of armor, a protective visor. The bride smiled sweetly at his defenseless expression and he gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “Watch her makeup,” the photographer said.
“It’s all right,” the bride said.
The father of the bride returned from his pointless search of the limousine, and the photographer found a place for him on the steps, taking care to hide the man’s feet. Early this afternoon, when the father of the bride went to put on his black dress shoes, he had sat on the edge of the old iron bedstead in the bedroom of the family’s summer home, holding them in his hands, and said, “Fuck.”
His wife turned from the mirror, where she was attempting to rub away some of the foundation she’d inexpertly applied to her face. “What’s wrong?”
Wordlessly he held up two black oxfords, almost but not quite identical, the toes of both shoes curving in the same direction.
“For heaven’s sake,” his wife said. There was an obvious observation to be made about his having two left feet, but she forbore.
There had been no time to drive the thirty miles to the closest shoe store, and anyone who might have lent him a pair of dress shoes was coming to the wedding. His wife having vetoed the only other choices in his summer closet (Birkenstock sandals and taxicab-yellow gardening clogs), he wore his tennis shoes with his suit. He would wear the same outfit two days later, but by then his inappropriate footwear would be the least of anyone’s concerns.
The photographer placed the mother of the bride next to her husband. “Smile,” he said, his tone hovering somewhere between affection and reproach. “You’re happy!”
And she
was
happy, and proud, too. But she was also fretting about getting over to the Grange Hall for the reception before the guests started to show up. Earlier she’d had no choice but to leave the caterer struggling on his own to light the Grange Hall’s balky old stove. He had shooed her away, promising he would either get it working or use the stove in her own kitchen next door. But she was still worried that the passed hors d’oeuvres would not be ready in time for the arrival of the guests.
“Come stand next to me, Dad,” the mother of the bride called to her father, who sat perched on a low stone wall that separated the plain-faced church from the wild summer profusion of the garden.