The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (20 page)

The Weather Channel’s logo was a changing world map that was now two-thirds white, and snow was being reported in Karachi, Seoul, the Solomon Islands, and
Bethlehem, where Christmas Eve services (usually cancelled due to Israeli-Palestinian violence) had been cancelled due to the weather.

At 3:15 P.M., Jim called Paula from the airport to report that Kindra
and David’s flights had both been delayed indefinitely. “And the US Air guy says they’re shutting the airport in Houston down. Dallas International’s already closed, and so are JFK and O’Hare.
How’s Stacey?”

Incorrigible, Paula thought. “Fine,” she said. “Do you want to talk to her?”

“No. Listen, tell her I’m still hoping, but it doesn’t look good.”

Paula told her, but it didn’t have any effect. “Go get your dress on,” Stacey ordered her, “so the minister can run through the service with you, and then you can show Kindra and David where to stand when they get here.”

Paula went and
put on her bridesmaid dress, wishing it wasn’t sleeveless, and they went through the rehearsal with the viola player, who had changed into his tux to get out of his snow-damp clothes, acting as best man. As soon as they were done, Paula went into the vestry to get a sweater out of her suitcase. The minister came in and shut the door. “I’ve been trying to talk to Stacey,” she said. “You’re going
to have to cancel the wedding. The roads are getting really dangerous, and I just heard on the radio they’ve closed the interstate.”

“I know,” Paula said.

“Well, she doesn’t. She’s convinced everything’s going to work out.”

And it might, Paula thought. After all, this is Stacey.

The viola player poked his head in the door. “Good news,” he said.

“The string quartet’s here?” the minister said.

“Jim’s here?” Paula said.

“No, but Shep and Leif found the cello player. He’s got frostbite, but otherwise he’s okay. They’re taking him to the hospital.” He gestured toward the sanctuary. “Do you want to tell the Queen of Denial, or shall I?”

“I will,” Paula said and went back into the sanctuary. “Stacey—”

“Your dress looks beautiful!” Stacey cried and dragged her over to the windows. “Look
how it goes with the snow!”

When the bell rang at a quarter
to four, Luke thought, Finally! Mom! and literally ran to answer the door. It was Aunt Lulla. He looked hopefully past her, but there was no one else pulling into the driveway or coming up the street. “You don’t know anything about cooking a goose, do you?” he asked.

She looked at him a long, silent moment and then handed him the plate
of olives she’d brought and took off her hat, scarf, gloves, plastic boots, and old-lady coat. “Your mother and Madge were always the domestic ones,” she said, “I was the theatrical one,” and while he was digesting that odd piece of information, “Why did you ask? Is your goose cooked?”

“Yes,” he said and led her into the kitchen and showed her the goose, which was now swimming in a sea of fat.

“Good God!” Aunt Lulla said, “where did all that grease come from?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, the first thing to do is pour some of it off before the poor thing drowns.”

“I already did,” Luke said. He took the lid off the saucepan he’d poured the drippings into earlier.

“Well you need to pour off some more,” she said practically, “and you’ll need a larger pan. Or maybe we should just
pour it down the sink and get rid of the evidence.”

“It’s for the gravy,” he said, rummaging in the cupboard under the sink for the big pot his mother had given him to cook spaghetti in.

“Oh, of course,” she said, and then thoughtfully, “I
do
know how to make gravy. Alec Guinness taught me.”

Luke stuck his head out of the cupboard. “Alec Guinness taught you to make
gravy
?”

“It’s not really
all that difficult,” she said, opening the oven door and looking speculatively at the goose. “You wouldn’t happen to have any wine on hand, would you?”

“Yes.” He emerged with the pot. “Why? Will wine counteract the grease?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “But one of the things I learned when I was playing off-Broadway was that when you’re facing a flop or an opening night curtain, it helps to be
a little sloshed.”

“You played off-Broadway?” Luke said. “Mom never told me you were an actress.”

“I wasn’t,” she said, opening cupboard doors. She pulled out two wine glasses. “You should have seen my reviews.”

By 4:00 P.M., all the networks and cable newschannels
had changed their logos to reflect the worsening situation. ABC had
Mega-Blizzard
, NBC had
MacroBlizzard
, and CNN had
Perfect Storm
, with a graphic of a boat being swamped by a gigantic wave. CBS and MSNBC had both gone with
Ice Age
, CBS’s with a question mark, MSNBC’s with an exclamation point and a drawing of the Abominable Snowman. And Fox, ever the responsible news network, was proclaiming,
End of the World!

“
Now
can I freak out?” Chin asked.

“No,” Nathan said, feeding in snowfall rates. “In the first place, it’s Fox.
In the second place, a discontinuity does not necessarily mean the end of the wo—”

The lights flickered. They both stopped and stared at the overhead fluorescents. They flickered again.

“Backup!” Nathan shouted, and they both dived for their terminals, shoved in zip drives, and began frantically typing, looking anxiously up at the lights now and then.

Chin popped the zip disk out of the drive.
“You were saying that a discontinuity isn’t necessarily the end of the world?”

“Yes, but losing this data would be. From now on we back up every fifteen minutes.”

The lights flickered again, went out for an endless ten seconds, and came back on again to Peter Jennings saying, “—Huntsville, Alabama, where thousands are without power. I’m here at Byrd Middle School, which is serving as a temporary
shelter.” He stuck the microphone under the nose of a woman holding a candle. “When did the power go off?” he asked.

“About noon,” she said. “The lights flickered a couple of times before that, but both times the lights came back on, and I thought we were okay, and then I went to fix lunch, and they went off, like that—” she snapped her fingers. “Without any warning.”

“We back up every five
minutes,” Nathan said, and to Chin, who was pulling on his parka, “Where are you going?”

“Out to my car to get a flashlight.”

He came back in ten minutes
later, caked in snow, his ears and cheeks bright red. “It’s four feet deep out there. Tell me again why I shouldn’t freak out,” he said, handing the flashlight to Nathan.

“Because I don’t think this is a discontinuity,” Nathan said. “I think
it’s just a snowstorm.”

“Just a snowstorm?” Chin said, pointing at the TVs, where red-eared, red-cheeked reporters were standing in front of, respectively, a phalanx of snowplows on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, a derailed train in Casper, and a collapsed Wal-Mart in Biloxi, “—from the weight of a record fifty-eight inches of snow,” Brit Hume was saying. “Luckily, there were no injuries here.
In Cincinnati, however—”

“
Fifty-eight
inches,” Chin said. “In
Mississippi.
What if it keeps on snowing and snowing forever till the whole world…?”

“It can’t,” Nathan said. “There isn’t enough moisture in the atmosphere, and no low pressure system over the Gulf to keep pumping moisture up across the lower United States. There’s no low pressure system at all, and no ridge of high pressure to push
against it, no colliding air masses, nothing. Look at this. It started in four different places hundreds of miles from each other, in different latitudes, different altitudes, none of them along a ridge of high pressure. This storm isn’t following any of the rules.”

“But doesn’t that prove it’s a discontinuity?” Chin asked nervously. “Isn’t that one of the signs, that it’s completely different
from what came before?”

“The
climate
would be completely different, the
weather
would be completely different, not the laws of physics.” He pointed to the world map on the mid-right-hand screen. “If this were a discontinuity, you’d see a change in ocean current temps, a shift in the jet stream, changes in wind patterns. There’s none of that. The jet stream hasn’t moved, the rate of melting in
the Antarctic is unchanged, the Gulf Stream’s still there. El Niño’s still there.
Venice
is still there.”

“Yeah, but it’s snowing on the Grand Canal,” Chin said. “So what’s causing the mega-storm?”

“That’s just it. It’s not a mega-storm. If it were, there’d be accompanying ice-storms, hurricane-force winds, microbursts, tornadoes, none of which has shown up on the data. As near as I can tell,
all it’s doing is snowing.” He shook his head. “No, something else is going on.”

“What?”

“I have no idea.” He stared glumly at the screens. “Weather’s a remarkably complex system. Hundreds, thousands of factors we haven’t figured in could be having an effect: cloud dynamics, localized temperature variations, pollution, solar activity. Or it could be something we haven’t even considered: the
effects of de-icers on highway albedo, beach erosion, the migratory patterns of geese. Or the effect on electromagnetic fields of playing ‘White Christmas’ hundreds of times on the radio this week.”

“Four thousand nine hundred and thirty-three,” Chin said.

“What?”

“That’s how many times Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ is played the two weeks before Christmas, with an additional nine thousand
and sixty-two times by other artists. Including Otis Redding, U2, Peggy Lee, the Three Tenors, and the Flaming Lips. I read it on the internet.”

“Nine thousand and sixty-two,” Nathan said. “That’s certainly enough to affect something, all right.”

“I know what you mean,” Chin said. “Have you heard Eminem’s new rap version?”

By 4:15 P.M., the spaghetti pot was two-thirds full of goose
grease,
Luke’s mother and Madge and Shorty still weren’t there, and the goose was nearly done. Luke and Lulla had decided after their third glass of wine apiece to make the gravy.

“And put the tent back on,” Lulla said, sifting flour into a bowl. “One of the things I learned when I was playing the West End is that uncovered is not necessarily better.” She added a cup of water. “Particularly when you’re
doing Shakespeare.”

She shook in some salt and pepper. “I remember a particularly ill-conceived nude
Macbeth
I did with Larry Olivier.” She thrust her hand out dramatically. “‘Is that a dagger that I see before me?’ should not be a laugh line. Richard taught me how to do this,” she said, stirring the mixture briskly with a fork, “It gets the lumps out.”

“Richard? Richard
Burton?
”

“Yes. Adorable
man. Of course he drank like a fish when he was depressed—this was after Liz left him for the second time—but it never seemed to affect his performance in bed
or
in the kitchen. Not like Peter.”

“Peter? Peter Ustinov?”

“O’Toole. Here we go.” Lulla poured the flour mixture into the hot drippings. It disappeared. “It takes a moment to thicken up,” she said hopefully, but after several minutes
of combined staring into the pot, it was no thicker.

“I think we need more flour,” she said, “and a larger bowl. A much larger bowl. And another glass of wine.”

Luke fetched them, and after a good deal of stirring, she added the mixture to the drippings, which immediately began to thicken up. “Oh, good,” she said, stirring. “As John Gielgud used to say, ‘If at first you don’t succeed…’ Oh, dear.”

“What did he say that for?—oh, dear,” Luke said, peering into the pot where the drippings had abruptly thickened into a solid, globular mass.

“That’s not what gravy’s supposed to look like,” Aunt Lulla said.

“No,” Luke said. “We seem to have made a lard ball.”

They both looked at it awhile.

“I don’t suppose we could pass it off as a very large dumpling,” Aunt Lulla suggested.

“No,” Luke said,
trying to chop at it with the fork.

“And I don’t suppose it’ll go down the garbage disposal. Could we stick sesame seeds on it and hang it on a tree and pretend it was a suet ball for the birds?”

“Not unless we want PETA and the Humane Society after us. Besides, wouldn’t that be cannibalism?”

“You’re right,” Aunt Lulla said. “But we’ve got to do something with it before your mother gets here.
I suppose Yucca Mountain’s too far away,” she said thoughtfully. “You wouldn’t have any acid on hand, would you?”

At 4:23 P.M., Slim Rushmore, on
KFLG out of Flagstaff, Arizona, made a valiant effort to change the subject on his talk radio show to school vouchers, usually a sure-fire issue, but his callers weren’t having any of it. “This snow is a clear sign the Apocalypse is near,” a woman from
Colorado Springs informed him. “In the Book of Daniel, it says that God will send snow ‘to purge and to make them white, even to the time of the end,’ and the Book of Psalms promises us ‘snow and vapours, stormy wind fulfilling his word,’ and in the Book of Isaiah…”

After the fourth Scripture (from Job: “For God saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth”) Slim cut her off and took a call from Dwayne
in Poplar Bluffs.

“You know what started all this, don’t you?” Dwayne said belligerently. “When the commies put fluoride in the water back in the fifties.”

At 4:25 P.M., the country club called the church
to say they were closing, none of the food and only two of the staff could get there, and anybody who was still trying to have a wedding in this weather was crazy. “I’ll tell her,” Paula said and went to find
Stacey.

“She’s in putting on her wedding dress,” the viola player said.

Paula moaned.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I tried to explain to her that the rest of the quartet was
not
coming, but I didn’t get anywhere.” He looked at her quizzically. “I’m not getting anywhere with you either, am I?” he asked, and Jim walked in.

He was covered in snow. “The car got stuck,” he said.

“Where are Kindra
and David?”