The Wedding (19 page)

In the crescendo of her conversion, she witnessed the revelation, the word made flesh, Christ coming toward her in the visible body of man. If he but touched her, she would be redeemed. He thrust her down and lay beside her, his mouth against her golden mounds, his hands roaming wherever there was treasure. And then he lay on top of her and took his joy with a frenzy he had never felt before, not even at first mating, not even when his younger heart could climb the peak of pleasure and make the climb again.

When it was over he rolled away from her and gave a great exhausted sigh, like a whoosh of wind in an empty bottle. He lay as still as if he had stopped breathing. She tried to lie without moving too, so that she would not disturb this sleeping rest and peace. In the few minutes before she drifted into her own sweet sleep beside him, she reflected on the day she had just lived through, and the changes it had wrought. She thought about their tenants who had nothing, and how little it would take to improve their lives so much.

She would turn those buildings into a center of hope, a settlement house surrounded by a row of renovated flats. The settlement house, her stoutest house, would have a clinic on the ground floor, a nursery on the floor above, and offices for counseling and job referrals and whatever pressing community needs space permitted. Every flat would have a bathroom,
complete with toilet bowl and tub. She would tear out the unsightly hall toilet that served six families and fouled the dank and sunless air through its open door—left open when not occupied to indicate that it was free to anyone who had business to conduct inside it, including any wandering stumbling drunk off the street to frighten the wits out of some small seated child whose mother had forbidden her to latch the door. Every unkempt cellar would be cleared of its long accumulation of vermin-breeding debris. The rotting foundation would be shored up, and air cracks sealed against the winter’s biting wind and the rats’ bold forays. Furnaces would be installed and radiators would replace the smoky kerosene stoves whose choking fumes were the high price paid for their low yield of heat.

Falling plaster and peeling paint would be stripped, and rotted boards would be ripped out for new ones. Steps would be widened for the old to climb more easily. There would be light from above, electric light, a learning light whose steady illumination on a schoolbook was so much better than the feeble flame from a flickering gas jet that discouraged squinty-eyed study in favor of foolish horsing around. But cooking with gas was something else, something high on her list. A gas range was clean and predictable; it made a mockery of a cussed-at, has-been ghetto coal stove with broken grates and faulty flues and holes breathing soot on everything.

For as long as possible, the rent would stay the same, and never rise higher than warranted. There would be no profits. Repairs and improvements would be a continuing process. If
in time other neighborhood landlords took slow, imitative steps, then in time other neighboring tenants would make a start to a higher level of living, and an area of blight would be reclaimed. These were the bold, all-encompassing plans of salvage and salvation that she would put before the board—a settlement house (named, with their consent, for her husband), and flanking it the renovated flats for low-income families—all to be under the board’s administration, all gifts outright, relinquished without strings, her own inglorious tenure ended.

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.

C
lark 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.