A Common Life (13 page)

Miss Sadie Baxter sat at her dressing table in her slip and robe, near the open window of the bedroom she’d occupied since she was nine years old. The rain clouds had rolled away, the sun was shining, and the birds were singing—what more could any human want or ask for?

She carefully combed the gray hair from her brush, rolled it into a tidy ball, and let it fall soundlessly into the wastebasket that bore the faded decal of a camellia blossom.

Where had the years gone? One day she’d sat here brushing hair the color of chestnuts, and the next time she looked up, she was old and gray. She remembered sitting on this same stool, looking into this same mirror, reading Willard Porter’s love letter and believing herself to be beautiful. . . .

“Willard!” she whispered, recalling the letter she had committed to memory, the letter he wrote on her twenty-first birthday:

Soon afterward, Willard had been killed and buried in France, and many years went by before she learned the name he had engraved on the beam.

“‘For lo, the winter is past . . . ,’” she murmured, gazing from her window into the orchard. Learning the name, Winterpast, had indeed given her much joy and pleasure.

“‘. . . the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come. . . .’”

The time of the singing of birds had come for the father and Cynthia.

Miss Sadie looked into the mirror and smiled. Yes, it was their time, now.

At four-fifteen, Cynthia urged Katherine to give her a few minutes alone. So much had gone on in the last days and weeks, she said, that she was quite breathless.

“What if you should fall down the stairs?” Katherine inquired. “And your hair, it’s still in curlers!”

Cynthia had known Katherine for just under two hours, but already reckoned her to be a woman who minced no words.

“I’m not going to fall down the stairs,” she said. “And the curlers come out in a flash. I must say you look smashing in Olivia’s suit, really you do, the color is wonderful on you.”

“I’ve never worn anything this short in my life!” fumed Katherine, peering into the full-length mirror and tugging at her skirt. “I look exactly like Big Bird, I had no
idea
I was so knock-kneed. I’ll scandalize the church, your friends will think we’re riffraff.”

“They’ll think no such thing, they’ve all been dying to meet you.” Cynthia urged Katherine toward the door of her bedroom, the bedroom that would, tonight, belong to Walter and Katherine, who currently had no room of their own at all, poor souls.

“I’ll take your bouquet out of the parish hall refrigerator,” said Katherine, “and see you in the narthex.” What could she do with a bride who wanted to be alone? As for herself, she had sprained her ankle twenty minutes before her own wedding and if friends hadn’t surrounded her, she might still be lying by the fish pond at that dreadful hotel in the Poconos.

At five ’til five, Father Tim shot his French cuffs and exchanged meaningful glances with Walter and the bishop.

They were cooped into the six-by-eight-foot sacristy like three roosters, he thought, and not a breath of air stirring.

He walked to the door and pushed it open. Avis Packard’s cigarette smoke blew in.

“’Scuse me,” said Avis, peering into the sacristy at what he considered a sight for sore eyes. There was their pope, dolled up in a long white robe and the oddest-looking headgear he ever laid eyes on, not to mention that long stick with a curve at the end, which was probably for snatching people up by the neck when they dozed off in the pew. Avis took a deep drag off his filtered Pall Mall and threw it in the bushes.

At precisely five o’clock, Father Tim heard the organ. What was going on? Why hadn’t anyone come to the outer sacristy door to tell them the bride had arrived?

“Don’t go out there!” he nearly shouted, as the bishop’s hand went for the door that led to the sanctuary. “Walter, please find Katherine, find out what’s going on.” Somebody had missed a signal, somehow. He felt oddly uneasy.

At five after five, Walter reappeared, looking mystified. “Katherine can’t find Cynthia. She was supposed to meet her in the narthex at five ’til.”

Ten minutes late! Cynthia Coppersmith was the very soul of punctuality.

He had a gut feeling, and it wasn’t good. “I’ll be back,” he said, sprinting through the open door.

“I’ll come with you!” said Walter.

“No! Stay here!”

He dashed up Old Church Lane, cut through Baxter Park, and hit her back steps running.

“Cynthia!” He was trembling as he opened the unlocked door and ran into the hall. He stood for a moment, panting and bewildered, as Violet rubbed against his pant leg. He wished he could find cats more agreeable.

He took the stairs two at a time and hung a left into her bedroom. “Cynthia!”

“Timothy!”

She was beating on her bathroom door from the inside. “Timothy! I can’t get out!”

He spied the blasted doorknob lying on the floor. He picked it up and stuck the stem back in the hole and cranked the knob to the right and the door opened and he saw his bride in her chenile robe and pink curlers, looking agonized.

“Oh, Timothy . . .”

“Don’t talk,” he said. “Don’t even tell me. How can I help you, what can I do?”

She raced to the closet and took out her suit. “I already have my panty hose on, so I’m not starting from scratch. Stand outside and I’ll do my best. Pray for me, darling! Oh, I’m so sorry, I should have borrowed something blue for good luck, what a dreadful mess. . . .”

He stood in the hall and checked his watch. Five-seventeen.

Violet rubbed against his ankle. He felt his jaws beginning to lock.

“OK, you can come in now, I have my suit on, where are my shoes, oh, good grief, how did they get there, I can’t believe this, Timothy, I couldn’t help it, the knob just
fell off,
I yelled out the window and nobody heard, it was awful—”

“Don’t talk!” he said, coming into the room. Why was he commanding her not to talk? Let the poor woman talk if she wanted to! Helpless—that’s what he felt.

She thumped onto the bench at her dressing table and powdered her face and outlined her lips with a pencil and put on lipstick.

Five-twenty.

Then she did something to her eyebrows and eyelids.

Five-twenty-two.

She sprayed the wisteria scent on her wrists and rubbed them together and touched her wrists to her ears.

He could see Stuart pacing the sacristy, Katherine wringing her hands, Walter going beserk, the entire congregation getting up and walking out, the ham, covered by Saran Wrap, abandoned in the refrigerator....

“Oh, dreadful, oh, horrid!” she cried, finishing her mascara with a shaking hand. “And I just remembered, you’re not supposed to see the bride before the ceremony!”

“Too late!” he said, eyeing his watch. “Five twenty-four.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming!”

She got up and dashed toward him.

“Curlers,” he said, his jaws cranking still further into the lock position.

She plucked curlers from her head like so many feathers from a chicken, and tossed them into the air. They literally rained around the room; he’d never seen anything like it.

“No time to brush!” She looked into the mirror and ran her fingers through her hair. “There! Best I can do. God help me!”

She turned to him now, and he felt a great jolt from heart to spleen. She was so astonishingly beautiful, so radiant, so fresh, it captured his very breath. Thanks be to God, his custard was back....

She grabbed her handbag from the chair. “We can take my car!”

“No place to park!”

“So,” she cried, as they headed for the stairs, “race you!”

I
n the ninth row of the epistle side, next to the stained-glass window of Christ carrying the lost lamb, Hope Winchester blushed to recall her once-ardent crush on Father Tim. She’d taken every precaution to make certain he knew nothing of it, and now it seemed idiotic to have felt that way about someone twice her age.

She remembered the fluttering of her heart when he came into the bookstore, and all her hard work to learn special words that would intrigue him. She would never admit such a thing to another soul, but she believed herself to be the only person in Mitford who could converse on his level. When she’d learned about Cynthia months ago, she had forced herself to stop thinking such nonsense altogether, and was now truly happy that he and his neighbor had found each other. They seemed perfect together.

Still, on occasion, she missed her old habit of looking for him to pass the shop window and wave, or stop in; and she missed pondering what book she might order that would please and surprise him.

It wasn’t that she’d ever wanted to marry him, for heaven’s sake, or even be in love with him; it was just that he was so very kind and gentle and made her feel special. Plus he was a lot like herself, deep and sensitive, not to mention a lover of the romantic poets she’d adored since junior high. Early on, she had made it a point to read Wordsworth again, weeping over the Lucy poems, so she could quote passages and dig out morsels to attract his imagination.

“Come in out of the
fretful stir
!” she once said as he popped through the door at Happy Endings.

He had looked up and smiled. “Wordsworth!” he exclaimed, obviously pleased.

How many people would recognize two little words among a poet’s thousands? She had felt positively thrilled.

Opening her purse, she examined the contents for the Kleenex she’d stuffed in at the last minute. Though she thought it fatuous to cry at weddings, she deemed it wise to be prepared.

In the fourth row of the epistle side, Gene Bolick wondered what on earth was going on. His watch said five-fifteen. He knew Richard well enough to know he was looking pale after hammering down on the organ all this time with nothing happening.

He glanced again at the bishop’s wife, whose head was bowed. Was she praying that the father hadn’t chickened out at the last minute? Wouldn’t that be a corker if their priest was on a plane bound for the Azores? He didn’t know where the Azores were located, but figured it was a distance.