Authors: Donald Westlake
“I don’t see that at all,” Edna said. “Keep your eyes on the road.”
“My eyes
are
on the road. Mother, please! I have the right to know about my own father.”
“The right!” Even for Edna, that word was flung out with startling fury. “Did
I
have the right to know him? I thought I did, but I was wrong. He knew
me,
God knows, and here you are.”
“You’ve never said a word about him.” Myrtle found herself awed by it, by Edna’s years of silence, by her own blithe acceptance of the status quo, never questioning, never wondering. “Can he be that bad?” she asked, believing the answer would simply have to be
no.
But the answer was, “He’s worse. Take my word for it.”
“But how can I?” Myrtle pleaded. “How can I take your word, when you don’t
give
me any words? Mother, I’ve always tried to be a good daughter, I’ve always —”
“You have,” Edna said, suddenly quieter, less agitated. Myrtle risked a quick sidelong glance, and Edna was now brooding at the dashboard, as though the words
mene mene tekel upharsin
had suddenly appeared there. Myrtle was surprised and touched to see this softening of her mother’s features. Imperfectly seen though her face might be in the light of dusk, some harsh level of reserve or defense was abruptly gone.
And abruptly back: “Watch the road!”
Myrtle’s eyes snapped forward. The two–lane blacktop road was now bringing them past the Mexican restaurant at the edge of Dudson Center; they were less than fifteen minutes from home.
Myrtle hadn’t at all wanted to give up the pursuit. It was true the people in the backseat of the Cadillac kept turning around to look at her, it was true the Cadillac was driving in circles around the countryside, it was true these things suggested they’d realized they were being followed and therefore had no intention of going on to their original destination until she stopped following them, but what did any of that matter? She didn’t care where they were going, she cared only about
who they were.
Or not even all of them, only the one: her father. To her way of thinking, if she followed them long enough, if she made her presence both obvious and inevitable, sooner or later wouldn’t they have to either arrive somewhere, or at least
stop
somewhere, so that she could get out of her car and go look at them, see them, talk to them? Talk to
him?
But Edna had said no. “They’re on to us,” she snarled out of the side of her mouth, displaying another previously unknown side to her personality. “Forget it, Myrtle. We’ll go home.”
“But we’re so close! If we lose them —”
“We won’t lose that son of a bitch,” Edna had said grimly. “If he’s back — and he’s back, all right, damn his eyes — one of these black days he’ll come around, you see if he doesn’t. It’s only a matter of time. Myrtle, if they take that goddamn left again up there, you
don’t
follow them! You go straight ahead!”
And the Cadillac
had
taken the g — — — left, and obedient Myrtle, the good daughter, had gone straight ahead. And now they were almost home, the adventure almost finished, long before it had ever really begun. Myrtle had no faith in her mother’s conviction that her father would “come around” one of these days, black or otherwise; after all these years, why should he?
And he’d been so close!
Once Mother gets out of this car, Myrtle thought, I’ve lost the truth forever. “Please,” she said, so faintly she wasn’t sure Edna would be able to hear her at all.
The answer was a sigh; another surprising example of softness. In a voice so gentle as to be almost unrecognizable, Edna said, “Don’t ask me these things, Myrtle.”
Her own voice as soft as her mother’s, Myrtle said, “But it hurts not to know.”
“It never used to,” Edna said with a return of her normal tartness.
“Well, it does now,” Myrtle said. “Knowing you just won’t
talk
about it.”
“For Christ’s sake, Myrtle,” Edna cried, “don’t you think it hurts
me?
Don’t you think that’s why I don’t
want
to talk about the goddamn man?”
“You must have loved him very much,” Myrtle said, gently and consolingly, the way they do such scenes in the movies. She’d never imagined the day would come when she’d play such a scene herself.
“God knows,” Edna answered bitterly. “I suppose, at the time, I must have thought I …” But then she shook her head, eyes flashing. Sharply she said, “And what did I get out of it?”
“Well, me,” Myrtle reminded her, and tried a little smile, saying, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“At the time?” Edna’s answering smile was twisted and lived only on one side of her face. “It wasn’t so wonderful, either, back then. Not in North Dudson.”
“I can’t even imagine it.”
Edna cocked an eye at her as Myrtle stopped for a red light on Main Street. Ahead, the windows of the library gleamed yellow in the gloaming. “No, I don’t suppose you can imagine it,” Edna said. “Did I do that to you? Well, I guess I did.”
“Do what to me?”
“The light’s green,” Edna said.
Myrtle, feeling an impatience and an irritation that were rare in her, looked out at the green light and tromped down on the accelerator. The Ford bucked across the intersection, not quite stalling, but then Myrtle settled down to her normal way of driving.
Musingly, not even having noticed Myrtle’s
jack rabbit start
— which is what she would have called it, with withering disapproval, under normal circumstances — Edna said, “I brought you up to be careful, cautious, obedient, mild …”
Laughing, but awkward and self–conscious, Myrtle said, “You make me sound like a Girl Scout.”
“You are a Girl Scout,” her mother told her, without pleasure. “I wasn’t brought up that way,” she went on. “I was brought up to be independent, make up my own mind, take my own chances. And what did it get me? Tom Jimson. That’s why I went the other way with you.”
Excited, Myrtle said, “Tom Jimson? Is that his name?”
“I’m not even sure of that much,” Edna said. “It’s one of the names he told me. The one he told me most often, so maybe it’s his.”
“What was he like?” Myrtle asked.
“Satan,” Edna said.
“Oh, Mother,” Myrtle said, and smiled in condescension. She knew this story. Edna had been madly in love with … Tom Jimson … and he’d abandoned her, pregnant and unwed, and the hurt was still there.
Now
Edna thought he was Satan.
Then
she’d loved him. So how bad, really, could he be?
Myrtle made the turn onto Elm Street, and then the turn onto Albany Street. Ahead lay Spring Street, and beyond that Myrtle Street. “Myrtle Jimson,” she said softly, testing the sound of it.
“Hah!” Edna snorted. “That was
never
in it, believe me!”
“I wonder where they were going,” Myrtle said.
“Well, not to church,” Edna told her. “I can tell you that much.”
The road outside, Church Lane, curving up into these foothills from State Highway 112, came nowhere but here, to the Elizabeth Grace Dudson Memorial Reformed Congregational Unitarian Church of Putkin Township. (Five different churches, and five separate congregations, had been combined down to this one, absorbing the remnants of churches flooded by the reservoir or emptied by shrinking attendance.) Since Church Lane ended here, the road simply ballooned at its terminus into a large parking area, from which the asphalt path ran straight up the slight incline to the church front door. The white of the church, the rich indigos and maroons and golds and olives of the stained–glass windows, the varied greens of the surrounding lawn and hillside, the bottomless black of the asphalt, were never more beautiful than now, in the fading light at the end of another perfect day.
And even more beautiful than the church and its setting was the bride, blushing pink in her swaths of organdy white, climbing from the family station wagon with her parents and baby sister. They were the first arrivals, half an hour before the scheduled ceremony, father looking uncomfortable and thick–fingered in his awkwardly fitting dark suit and badly knotted red tie, baby sister an excited bonbon in puffy peach, mother beribboned and bowed in lavender, dabbing at her tear–filled eyes with a lavender hankie and saying, “I
told
you not to go all the way, you little tramp. Just get him off with your
hand,
for heaven’s sake! Oh, I
so
wanted a June wedding!”
“
Mother!
” the bride replied, elaborately ill–tempered. “I’ll be
showing
by then.”
“Let’s get this thing over with,” said father, and led the way heavy–footed up the path and into the church.
Snickering cousins of the bride came next, some to be ushers and flower girls, some just to hang out, and two burly fellows in blocky wool jackets who’d volunteered to be parking lot attendants, to see to it that all of the cars of all of the guests would fit in this space at the end of Church Lane.
Relatives of the bride continued to predominate for the first ten minutes or so; giggling awkward large–jointed people wearing their “best” clothes, saved for weddings, funerals, Easter, and appearances in court. Soon this group began to be supplemented by members of the groom’s family: skinnier, shorter, snake–hipped people with can–opener noses and no asses, dressed in Naugahyde jackets and polyester shirts and vinyl trousers and plastic shoes, as though they weren’t human beings at all but were actually a chain dental service’s waiting room. Intermixed with these, in warm–up jackets and pressed designer jeans, were the groom’s pals, acne–flaring youths full of sidelong looks and nervous laughter, knowing this was more than likely a foretaste of their own doom: “There but for the grace of the Akron Rubber Company go I.” The bride’s girlfriends arrived in a too–crowded–car cluster and hovered together like magnetized iron filings, all demonstrating the latest soap opera fashion trends and each of them a sealed bubble of self–consciousness and self–absorption. The groom, a jerky marionette in a rented tux, a wide–eyed pale–faced boy with spiky hair and protuberant ears, appeared with his grim suspicious parents and entered the church with all the false macho assurance of Jimmy Cagney on his way to the electric chair. The church door shut behind him with a hollower boom than it had given anyone else.
As the hour of the service approached, the last few cars, each with its couple snarlingly blaming each other for causing them to be late, came tearing up Church Lane and was slotted into one of the remaining spaces by the volunteer attendants. And then it was TIME. The attendants grinned at each other, pleased with their accomplishment, and were about to turn and enter the church themselves when headlights alerted them to one last car load of wedding guests. “They
are
gonna be late!” one attendant told the other, and both stepped out to the road to wave frantically at the oncoming car to get a move on.
Instead of which, at first it slowed down, as though the driver were suddenly uncertain of his welcome. “Come on, come on!” shouted an attendant, and ran forward, still waving. The car was a new Caddy — a lot better than
most
of the cars here — and the driver had the narrow nose and bewildered expression that suggested to the attendants (cousins of the bride) that these people represented the groom’s side.
“Park over there!” the attendant yelled, pointing at one of the few remaining slots.
The driver had lowered his window, the better to display his confusion. He said, “The church …”
“That’s right! That’s right! There’s the church right there, it’s the only thing on this
road!
Come on, will ya, you’re late!”
Someone in the car said something to the driver, who nodded and said, “I guess we might as well.”
So then at last the Caddy was driven to its slot, all four of its doors opened, and a bunch of extremely unlikely wedding guests emerged. The attendants, waiting for them, exchanged a knowing glance that silently said,
Groom’s side, no question.
Along with the sharp–nosed driver were a short fat round troll, a gloomy slope–shouldered guy, and a mean–looking old geezer. Shepherded by the attendants, these four made their way up the walk and into the now–full church, where the ceremony hadn’t yet begun after all, having been delayed by both a sudden loss of courage on the groom’s part (being treated now from an uncle’s flask) and a screaming cat fight between the bride and her mother.
A tuxedoed usher approached the latecomers, while the attendants went off to the seats saved for them by other cousins. Leaning toward the new arrivals, the usher murmured, “Bride or groom?”
They stared at him. The sharp–nosed one said, “Huh?”
The usher was used by now to the wedding guests being under–rehearsed. Patiently, gesturing to the pews on both sides of the central aisle, he said, “Are you with the bride’s party or the groom’s?”
“Oh,” said the sharp–nosed one.
“Bride,” said the mean–looking old man, but at the same instant, “Groom,” said the pessimistic–looking guy.
This
under–rehearsed was ridiculous. “Surely,” the usher began, “you know whi —”
“
We’re
with the groom,” the pessimist explained. “
They’re
with the bride.”
“Oh,” the usher said, and looked around for empty seats on both sides of the aisle. “Here’s two for the bridal party,” he said, “and two over —”
He broke off, astonished, because the group seemed to be arguing fiercely and almost silently among themselves as to which of them was to be with which. Noticing him noticing them, they cut that business short and sorted themselves out with no further trouble, except for sharp looks back and forth. The usher seated the pessimist and the little round man among the bride’s family and friends, then placed the mean–looking old man and the sharp–nosed fellow in among the partisans of the groom.
As he did so, the uncle with the flask (tucked away out of sight) emerged from a side door down by the altar and made his somewhat unsteady way (he’d been medicating himself as well, since the cap was off anyway) to his seat on the aisle down near the front on the groom’s side. He was still settling himself and grinning his report on the groom’s condition to his neighbors when the mother of the bride, rather red of face and grim of expression, but with shoulders triumphantly squared, came from the rear of the church, escorted by an usher, and marched down the center aisle to sit in the front row.
A moment of extremely suspenseful silence ensued, during which the minister’s wife, out of sight in the vestry, placed the needle on the turning record, and a scratchy but full–throated version of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” poured forth from the speakers mounted high in the four corners of the nave.
As the music swelled and the minister came out of the vestry to stand by the chancel rail, the mean–looking old guy with the bridal party gave a disgusted look across the aisle at the pessimist among the groom’s people. The pessimist gave him the disgusted look right back, then shook his head and sat back to watch the wedding.
The music stopped. The speakers in the corners of the nave said, “Tick … tick … ti —” And stopped.
The minister stepped forward, crossing the front of the church behind the chancel rail, smiling bland encouragement at the parents and immediate family in the front row. He was a round–faced round–shouldered slender amiable man with a round sparsely haired head and round highly reflecting spectacles, and he wore thick–soled black shoes like a cop and a long–sleeved black dress with a white dickey at the neck. The black dress showed off his round potbelly as he crossed to the pulpit and climbed the circular staircase.
On the bride’s side of the aisle, the mean–looking old guy leaned forward and looked significantly across the aisle at the pessimist, who didn’t seem to want to have his eye caught. But the old guy kept nodding, and widening his eyes, and waving his eyebrows, until finally everybody else in the immediate area was in on it, so then at last the pessimist turned and nodded — “I know, I know” — which didn’t keep the old guy from pointing very significantly with his eyebrows and ears and elbows and nose and temples toward the general area of the pulpit and the climbing minister. The pessimist sighed and folded his arms and faced determinedly forward. The little dumpling beside him kept looking back and forth between the pessimist and the old guy, open–mouthed and eager. Next to the old guy, the sharp–nosed fellow ignored the whole thing, concentrating instead on the cleavage in the dress of the friend of the bride on his other side.
Meantime, the minister had attained the pulpit, from where he beamed out amiably upon his congregation. After pausing to adjust the microphone on its gooseneck stalk in front of him, at last he said, “Well, we all want to thank Felix Mendelssohn for sharing that wonderful music with us. And now, if you’ll all rise.”
Shckr — shckr —
shckroop.
“Very good, very good.” The minister’s face and smile were at the pulpit, but his voice came from the four upper corners of the nave. “And now,” he said, “we will all turn to our neighbor, and we will greet our neighbor with a handshake and a hug.”
Embarrassed laughter and throat–clearing filled the church, but everyone (except the mean–looking old guy) obeyed. The sharp–nosed fellow very enthusiastically embraced the friend of the bride next to him, while the pessimist and the dumpling hugged each other in a much more gingerly fashion.
“Very good, very good,” the minister’s voice boomed down at them from the four corners of the nave. “Resume your seats, resume your seats.”
Schlff — schlff —
fflrp.
“Very good.” The minister’s eyeglasses reflected the interior of the church, creating gothic wonders where none in fact existed. Beaming around at the congregation, giving them back this much more interesting reflection of themselves, he said, “We have come here this evening, in the sight of God and man, mindful of the laws of God and the laws of the State of New York, to join in holy wedlock Tiffany and Bob.”
He paused. He beamed his sweet smile into the farthest corner of his domain. He said, “You know, the blessed state of matrimony …”
His voice went on, for some extended time, but the words did not enter one brain in that church. A great glazed comatosity o’ercame the congregation, a state of slow enchantment like that in the forest in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Like the residents of Brigadoon, the people in the church drifted in a long and dreamless sleep, freed of struggle and expectation.
“… with Bob. Bob?”
A slow sigh escaped the slumbering assembly, a faint and lingering breath. Shoulders moved, hands twitched in laps, bottoms shifted on the wooden pews. Eyes began to focus, and there was Bob, as if by magic, a bowed beanpole inaptly in a black tux at the head of the central aisle, standing with his look–alike best man — slightly heavier, grinning in nervous relief, left hand clutching jacket pocket (no doubt to feel the ring still safe within) — the two of them in profile to the crowd, Bob blinking like the terrorists’ kidnap victim he was, the beaming minister descending the pulpit and striding toward the lectern set up just within the chancel rail. The speakers in the corners, said, “Tick … tick … tick …” and a slow, heavy–beated, orchestral version of “Here Comes the Bride” battered the people below.