The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (15 page)

Well, she’d known he was due home for the summer, but he hadn’t told her which day. She pretended not to recognize him. She and Ira finished their song, and then she reverted to Serena’s role and marched back up the aisle, minus Max, so Sugar could practice the timing on “Born to Be with You.” After that Serena clapped her hands and shouted, “Okay, gang!” and they prepared to leave, all talking at once. They were thinking of going out for pizza. They swarmed toward Maggie, who waited at the rear of the church, but Boris stayed where he was, facing forward. He would be expecting Maggie to join him. She studied the back of his head, which was
block-like and immobile. Serena handed her her purse and said, “You’ve got company, I see.” Right behind Serena was Ira. He stopped in front of Maggie and looked down at her. He said, “Will you be going for pizza?”

Maggie said, “I guess not.”

He nodded, blank-faced, and left. But he walked in a different direction from the others, as if he didn’t feel they would welcome him without Maggie. Which of course was nonsense.

Maggie went back up the aisle and sat next to Boris, and they kissed. She said, “How was your trip?” and he said, “Who was that you were singing with?” at exactly the same instant. She pretended she hadn’t heard. “How was your trip?” she asked again, and he said, “Wasn’t that Ira Moran?”

“Who, the one singing?” she asked.

“That was Ira Moran! You told me he was dead!”

“It was a misunderstanding,” she said.

“I heard you say it, Maggie.”

“I mean I misunderstood that he was dead. He was only, um, wounded.”

“Ah,” Boris said. He turned that over in his mind.

“It was only a flesh wound, was all,” Maggie told him. “A scalp wound.” She wondered if the two terms contradicted each other. She riffled quickly through various movies she had seen.

“So then what? He just comes walking in one day?” Boris asked. “I mean he just pops up, like some kind of ghost? How did it happen, exactly?”

“Boris,” Maggie said, “I fail to comprehend why you keep dwelling on this in such a tiresome fashion.”

“Oh. Well. Sorry,” Boris said.

(Had she really sounded so authoritative? She found it hard to imagine, looking back.)

On the morning of the wedding, Maggie got up early and walked to Serena’s apartment—the second floor of a formstone row house—to help her dress. Serena seemed unruffled but her mother was all in a dither. Anita’s habit when she was nervous was to speak very fast and with practically no punctuation, like someone in a hard-sell commercial. “Why she won’t roll her hair like everybody else when I told her way last week I said hon nobody wears long hair anymore you ought to go to the beauty shop and get you a nice little flip to peek out under your veil …” She was rushing around the shabby, sparsely equipped kitchen in a dirty pink satin bathrobe, with a cigarette dangling from her lips. She was making a great clatter but not much was getting accomplished. Serena, lazy and nonchalant in one of Max’s big shirts, said, “Take it easy, Mom, will you?” She told Maggie, “Mom thinks we ought to change the whole ceremony.”

“Change it how?” Maggie asked.

“She doesn’t have any bridesmaids!” Anita said. “She doesn’t have a maid of honor even and what’s worse there’s no kind of masculine person to walk her down the aisle!”

“She’s upset she has to walk me down the aisle,” Serena told Maggie.

“Oh if only your uncle Maynard would come and do it instead!” Anita cried. “Maybe we should move the wedding up a week and give him another chance because the way you have it now is all cockeyed it’s too oddball I can just picture how those hoity-toity Gills will be scrupulizing me and smirking amongst themselves and besides that last perm I got scorched the tip-ends of my hair
I
can’t walk down the aisle.”

“Let’s go get me dressed,” Serena told Maggie, and she led her away.

In Serena’s room, which was really just half of Anita’s room curtained off with a draggled aqua bed sheet, Serena sat down at her vanity table. She said, “I thought of giving her a belt of whiskey, but I worried it might backfire.”

Maggie said, “Serena, are you sure you ought to be marrying Max?”

Serena squawked and wheeled to face her. She said, “Maggie Daley, don’t you start with me! I’ve already got my wedding cake frosted.”

“But I mean how do you know? How can you be certain you chose the right man?”

“I can be certain because I’ve come to the end of the line,” Serena said, turning back to the mirror. Her voice was at normal level now. She patted on liquid foundation, expertly dotting her chin and forehead and cheeks. “It’s just
time
to marry, that’s all,” she said. “I’m so tired of dating! I’m so tired of keeping up a good front! I want to sit on the couch with a regular, normal husband and watch TV for a thousand years. It’s going to be like getting out of a girdle; that’s exactly how I picture it.”

“What are you saying?” Maggie asked. She was almost afraid of the answer. “Are you telling me you don’t really love Max?”

“Of course I love him,” Serena said. She blended the dots into her skin. “But I’ve loved other people as much. I loved Terry Simpson our sophomore year—remember him? But it wasn’t time to get married then, so Terry is not the one I’m marrying.”

Maggie didn’t know what to think. Did everybody feel that way? Had the grownups been spreading fairy tales? “The minute I saw Eleanor,” her oldest brother had told her once, “I said, ‘That girl is going to be my wife someday.’ ” It hadn’t occurred to Maggie that he might simply have been ready for a wife, and therefore had his eye out for the likeliest prospect.

So there again, Serena had managed to color Maggie’s view of things. “We’re not in the hands of fate after all,” she seemed to be saying. “Or if we are, we can wrest ourselves free anytime we care to.”

Maggie sat down on the bed and watched Serena applying her rouge. In Max’s shirt, Serena looked casual and sporty, like anybody’s girl next door. “When this is over,” she told Maggie, “I’m going to dye my wedding dress purple. Might as well get some use out of it.”

Maggie gazed at her thoughtfully.

The wedding was due to start at eleven, but Anita wanted to get to the church much earlier, she said, in case of mishaps. Maggie rode with them in Anita’s ancient Chevrolet. Serena drove because Anita said she was too nervous, and since Serena’s skirt billowed over so much of the seat, Maggie and Anita sat in back. Anita was talking nonstop and sprinkling cigarette ashes across the lap of her shiny peach mother-of-the-bride dress. “Now that I think of it Serena I can’t imagine why you’re holding your reception in the Angels of Charity building which is so damn far away and every time I’ve tried to find it I’ve gotten all turned around and had to ask directions from passing strangers …”

They came to the Alluring Lingerie Shop, and Serena double-parked and heaved her cascades of satin out of the car in order to go model her dress for Mrs. Knowlton, her employer. While they waited for her, Anita said, “Honestly you’d suppose if you can rent a man to come tend your bar or fix your toilet or check on why your door won’t lock it wouldn’t be any problem at all to engage one for the five teensy minutes it takes to walk your daughter down the aisle don’t you agree?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Maggie said, and she dug absently into a hole in the vinyl seat and pulled out a wad of cotton batting.

“Sometimes I think she’s trying to show me up,” Anita said.

Maggie didn’t know how to answer that.

Finally Serena returned to the car, bearing a wrapped gift. “Mrs. Knowlton told me not to open this till our wedding night,” she said. Maggie blushed and slid her eyes toward Anita. Anita merely gazed out the window, sending two long streamers of smoke from her nostrils.

In the church, Reverend Connors led Serena and her mother to a side room. Maggie went to wait for the other singers. Mary Jean was already there, and soon Sissy arrived with her husband and her mother-in-law. No Ira, though. Well, there was plenty of time. Maggie took her long white choir robe from its hanger and slipped it over her head, losing herself in its folds, and then of course she emerged all tousled and had to go off to comb her hair. But even when she returned, Ira was not to be seen.

The first of the guests had arrived. Boris sat in one of the pews, uncomfortably close. He was listening to a lady in a spotted veil and he was nodding intelligently, respectfully, but Maggie felt there was something tense about the set of his head. She looked toward the entrance. Other people were straggling in now, her parents and the Wrights next door and Serena’s old baton teacher. No sign of the long, dark shape that was Ira Moran.

After she had let him walk off alone the night before, he must have decided to vanish altogether.

“Excuse me,” she said. She bumped down the row of folding chairs and hurried through the vestibule. One of her full sleeves caught on the knob of the open door and yanked her up short in a foolish way, but she shook herself loose before anybody noticed, she thought. She paused on the front steps. “Well, hi!” an old classmate said. “Um …” Maggie murmured, and she shaded her eyes and looked up and down the street. All she saw
were more guests. She felt a moment’s impatience with them; they seemed so frivolous. They were smiling and greeting each other in that gracious style they used only at church, and the women turned their toes out fastidiously as they walked, and their white gloves glinted in the sunlight.

In the doorway, Boris said, “Maggie?”

She didn’t turn around. She ran down the steps with her robe flowing behind her. The steps were the wide, exceptionally shallow sort unsuited for any normal human stride; she was forced to adopt a limping, uneven rhythm. “Maggie!” Boris cried, so she had to run on after reaching the sidewalk. She shouldered her way between guests and then was past them, skimming down the street, ballooning white linen like a sailboat in a wind.

Sam’s Frame Shop was only two blocks from the church, but they were long blocks and it was a warm June morning. She was damp and breathless when she arrived. She pulled open the plate-glass door and stepped into a close, cheerless interior with a worn linoleum floor. L-shaped samples of moldings hung from hooks on a yellowing pegboard wall, and the counter was painted a thick, cold gray. Behind this counter stood a bent old man in a visor, with shocks of white hair poking every which way. Ira’s father.

She was surprised to find him there. The way she’d heard it, he never set foot in the shop anymore. She hesitated, and he said, “Can I help you, miss?”

She had always thought Ira had the darkest eyes she’d ever seen, but this man’s eyes were darker. She couldn’t even tell where they were focused; she had the fleeting notion that he might be blind.

“I was looking for Ira,” she told him.

“Ira’s not working today. He’s got some kind of event.”

“Yes, a wedding; he’s singing at a wedding,” she said. “But he hasn’t shown up yet, so I came to get him.”

“Oh?” Sam said. He moved his head closer to her, leading with his nose, not lessening in the least his impression of a blind man. “You wouldn’t be Margaret, would you?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

He thought that over. He gave an abrupt, wheezy chuckle.

“Margaret M. Daley,” he said.

She stood her ground.

“So you assumed Ira was dead,” he said.

“Is he here?” she asked.

“He’s upstairs, dressing.”

“Could you call him, please?”

“How did you suppose he’d died?” he asked her.

“I mistook him for someone else. Monty Rand,” she said, mumbling the words. “Monty got killed in boot camp.”

“Boot camp!”

“Could you call Ira for me, please?”

“You’d never find Ira in boot camp,” Sam told her. “Ira’s got dependents, just as much as if he was married. Not that he ever could be married in view of our situation. My heart has been acting up on me for years and one of his sisters is not quite right in the head. Why, I don’t believe the army would have him even if he volunteered! Then me and the girls would have to go on welfare; we’d be a burden on the government. ‘Get along with you,’ those army folks would tell him. ‘Go on back to them that need you. We’ve got no use for you here.’ ”

Maggie heard feet running down a set of stairs somewhere—a muffled, drumming sound. A door opened in the pegboard wall behind the counter and Ira said, “Pop—”

He stopped and looked at her. He wore a dark, ill-fitting suit and a stiff white shirt, with a navy tie dangling unknotted from his collar.

“We’ll be late for the wedding,” she told him.

He shot back a cuff and checked his watch.

“Come on!” she said. It wasn’t only the wedding she was thinking of. She felt there was something dangerous about staying around Ira’s father.

And sure enough, Sam said, “Me and your little friend here was just discussing you going into the army.”

“Army?”

“
Ira
couldn’t join the army, I told her. He’s got us.”

Ira said, “Well, anyhow, Pop, I ought to be back from this thing in a couple of hours.”

“You really have to take that long? That’s most of the morning!” Sam turned to Maggie and said, “Saturday’s our busiest day at work.”

Maggie wondered why, in that case, the shop was empty. She said, “Yes, well, we should be—”

“In fact, if Ira joined the army we’d just have to close this place up,” Sam said. “Sell it off lock, stock, and barrel, when it’s been in the family for forty-two years come October.”

“What are you talking about?” Ira asked him. “Why would I want to join the army?”

“Your little friend here thought you’d gone into the army and got yourself killed,” Sam told him.

“Oh,” Ira said. Now the danger must have dawned on him too, for this time it was he who said, “We should be going.”

“She thought you’d blown yourself up in boot camp,” Sam told him. He gave another of his wheezy chuckles. There was something molelike and relentless about that way he led with his nose, Maggie felt. “Ups and writes
me a letter of condolence,” he said. “Ha!” He told Maggie, “Gave me quite a start. I had this half-second or so where I thought, Wait a minute. Has Ira
passed
? First I knew of it, if so. And first I’d heard of you. First I’d heard of any girl, matter of fact, in years. I mean it’s not like he has any friends anymore. His chums at school were that brainy crowd that went away to college and by now they’ve all lost touch with him and he doesn’t see a soul his own age. ‘Look here!’ I told him. ‘A girl at last!’ After I’d withstood the shock. ‘Better grab her while you got the chance,’ I told him.”