The Wedding Machine (13 page)
They didn't know if they should do
Dr. and Mr
. or
Mr. and Doctor
or
The Misters
or
Mr. such and such and Mr. such and such
. Quite a quandary, Hilda thought before settling on
Dr. __ and Mr. __.
Now why hasn't Emily Post addressed this yet?
As Hilda walks to the back of the church to take her place for the practice of the processional, she sees LeMar practicing his scales up in the balcony. He keeps squeezing his thick hands into fists, and Hilda can guess that he doesn't want to be completely upstaged in his own church by a pro who has performed at the Met. Sis has met with him several times over the last few weeks to practice his “Ave Maria” solo.
Hilda takes Cousin Willy's arm when she reaches the back of the church. He has agreed to walk her down the aisle for the seating of the mothers. Her husband has divorced her, her father is long dead, and she hasn't talked to her brother for decades, so she appreciates Ray's offering her husband's arm to escort her in and out. They haven't always had the smoothest of friendships, but Hilda is grateful to Ray for coordinating this wedding and looking out for her.
Sis starts to play “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring,” and Ray waves Fiorella and Hilda on down the aisle. Willy pats Hilda's hand as they walk. He smells like Ivory soap and toothpaste, and his nose is as clean and shiny as the hood of his pickup truck on a Sunday afternoon after he washes and waxes it.
“Thank you,” Hilda says to him as she keeps her eye on the familiar altar.
“My pleasure, gal,” he says.
After Ray walks the wedding party through the processional and Capers takes the couple through the vows, everyone steps out into the warm summer evening where a brisk wind means rain and likely a little nip from Eleanor.
Trudi Crenshaw waits in her bright yellow Volkswagen beneath a limb of an old live oak to take Angus and her daughter from the church to the dinner. Hilda watches them from the church steps as Angus opens the door and lifts back the seat to let the child in as the wind tousles a clump of Spanish moss that lands on the bright roof of the car.
Angus sits down gently next to his girlfriend and leans over to give her a kiss. She grins from ear to ear as if she couldn't be more pleased to be with him, the lifesaver of Jasper County. The man who binds up the broken arms and legs of accident-prone children and gives bags of free medicine samples to the poorest and the elderly who are burdened with all kinds of sickness and pain. She's one lucky duck is all Hilda can say. He is the catch of the town, no doubt about it.
The next stop for the wedding party is Alberto's, the new little Italian joint that sits in a strip mall at the lower end of Main Street. It's quite an unconventional rehearsal dinner location, but this piece of the weekend is in the Giornellis' hands and, as Ray reminded her at one of their last wedding meetings, “One must go along with one's daughter's future family.”
As soon as they arrive at Alberto's, Hilda slips into the bathroom to find Miss Cotton, with a little French soap in one hand and a linen hand towel hanging on her arm with Hilda's new initials, HPG, embroidered across the top. The gals have thought of
everything
, and for some reason the tears are there before Hilda has time to stop them, and she scurries into the stall as the foreign voices of what may be the wait staff or perhaps Giuseppe's family echo in the hall outside the bathroom.
This is so unlike me
. Hilda dries her eyes and rubs at the mascara smudges. She can't help but be struck by what her friends have done, looking after her the last few years, and taking over this whole wedding.
Goodness knows I don't deserve their friendship
.
No, Hilda wouldn't have chosen a dark and narrow strip mall restaurant for a rehearsal dinner. Nor would she have chosen to have her daughter and her fiancé's name printed in red on everything from the napkins to the cigarettes to the bottles of Chianti. And the dyed green carnations, well, they're enough to give her the hives, but she doesn't say a word against them.
Thankfully, she is seated by Little Hilda and Giuseppe and his parents while Angus takes his place in the back of the restaurant with Trudi and Dodi. Sis is also at Hilda's table. She's single and easy to put in all sorts of places, but Hilda knows she's been purposefully placed here to support her tonight, and she appreciates Little Hilda's thinking of that. Suddenly the thought occurs to Hilda,
I am a single too.
The food is quite good. The Giornellis have somehow talked the restaurant into serving Giuseppe's paternal grandmother's clam sauce over the pasta, and it is divine. After an ample serving of tiramisu and an offering of champagne, the toasts begin.
Giuseppe's father has done quite well in the knickknack business. He makes the plastic brides and grooms that go on tops of cakes. And a lot of the stuff you see in a place like Party City. He's a little rough around the edges, but it's obvious that he and Fiorella adore their eldest son.
They show a little slide show of their life in New Jersey and of Giuseppe at his graduation from Dartmouth and on the campaign trail with Senator Warren and on the steps of Capitol Hill where he took his first job. The last slide is a photo of their son and Little Hilda kissing in front of the Washington Monument on the night they were engaged. It was last year's Fourth of July celebration on the mall, and there are fireworks blossoming behind them in red and blue.
Angus's toast catches Big Hilda off guard. Just as she sips her cappuccino, her ex-husband ambles up to the microphone and reminisces about his daughter's childhood.
“There was the time she put on Big Hilda's lipstick at age four and grabbed her five-year-old cousin by the neck and kissed him until he cried and begged for release,” he says to the gathering. “And another when Priscilla dared her to slide down the laundry chute and she landed head first on the ironing board and I had to rush home and stitch her forehead up. Then,” he says, “in college during a brief Priscilla-induced tree hugger phase, they set out to walk the Appalachian trail one summer with a few other classmates and instead of me talking her out of it, she talked me into coming along, and I followed her and her crew for one month up and over the Blue Ridge Mountains until I got dysentery so bad that Cousin Willy had to come pick me up and bring me home, and still my little girl kept on going.”
“Little Hilda looks fragile,” he says, turning toward Giuseppe as he sums up his speech, “but she's no shrinking flower. The girl got shortchanged in the fear department, and she got a double dose of determination like her mama. She was determined to win your affection, Giuseppe, and she's never been happier. Now you just better hope and pray that she doesn't get her mind set on what kind of car she wants to drive, what kind of home she wants to own, or what kind of gift she'd like for her first anniversary, 'cause, Son, your goose is going to be cooked then. There's no getting this girl to back down.”
He lifts his champagne glass and so does the rest of the crowd, and as Big Hilda takes a sip, a pain shoots through the side of her head, and she can hardly see for a moment. She can't tell if she's got a migraine forming or if she's just angry with Angus for taking a shot at her.
When she focuses again, Vangie Dreggs is up at the microphone giving a toast. The
nerve
! Not even Ray or Kitty B. are planning toasts. It's just not something the women do. But there is the Lone Star pain in their rear end making some crack about the Democratic Party and Senator Warren and New Jersey, and how even though she's a dyed-in-the-wool Texas Republican she'll even be nice to the senator because she thinks so much of Angus and his daughter and Hilda. She calls Hilda a dear friend and says that she and the gals have made all the difference in her life here in Jasper.
Sis rolls her eyes, and Hilda can hear Ray clearing her throat in disdain somewhere behind her. Then her head begins to throb. As the line of Giuseppe's extended relatives and friends form around the microphone with toasts to give, Hilda wonders if anyone will notice if she just lays her head down on the table. It's been several months since she's had a migraine, and this one is blindingâa hammer pounding the base of her head. Her new doctor says they're hormonal, and she expects them to subside once the menopause does.
“Sis,” she leans over and whispers. “I need you to take me home.”
Sis takes one look at Hilda's eye and nods, and Hilda tries to head toward the door without making a scene. She doesn't want to disturb Little Hilda, who is engrossed in a poem Giuseppe's cousins are reciting, but just as she's about to make it to the door, Little Hilda runs up to her. “You aren't leaving, are you, Mama?” she says. “The toasts aren't over, and Giuseppe has something special planned for the end.”
“Darling, I have a migraine,” she says clutching the back of her head.
“But you haven't even heard from half of Giuseppe's family, and I know you'll love hearing what they have to say. This is your chance to get to know them.”
Amidst the crowd of murmurs, Hilda hears Angus let out a contrived cough and in it she hears,
Must you always let us down?
Sis holds her by the elbow as her vision goes blurry. She can feel her knees buckle as the throbbing in her head grows stronger.
“I'm so sorry, darling, but I can't,” she says. “I've got to get to my bed and wait this out.”
Outside it is raining sideways because of the warm gusts from the Eleanor bands. It must not have been coming down for long, but now it flows like a river across the parking lot and into the drainage pipes. Hilda's bronze heels are drenched by the time she reaches Sis's car, a little Toyota, youthful and no-nonsense just like Sis. Oh, and of all things, soft seats that smell like mold. Hilda doesn't know why Sis doesn't spring for leather seats! What else does she have to spend her money on?
Just as she's about to thank Sis and close her front door, she sees stars in front of her eyes and then blackness, and before she knows it she is lying down in her foyer, her fingers grabbing at the wet fringes of the Oriental rug.
When she wakes up again, she is upstairs and Sis tries to open her locked bedroom door. “Go on home,” Hilda says. Then she throws up her clam sauce right then and there all down her overpriced ivory suit.
The next thing she knows, Sis is wiping her mouth and asks her how to get into her bedroom so she can lay her down. Hilda doesn't answer, and Sis puts her in a chair by her vanity and picks the bedroom lock with a bobby pin. She turns on Hilda's bedside light and lets out a faint gasp when she sees what Hilda has done. How she's shoved three king-size pillows under the covers as if someone is sleeping next to her. As if the feel of her husband is still there.
Hilda, too embarrassed to look her in the eye, clutches her own head in an effort to ward off the pain. It's as fierce as ever. Sis lifts Hilda up and helps her out of her suit and slips on a nightgown from her closet. Then Sis brings her some Advil and a cool glass of water, and Hilda lies down on her pillow with lights like the fireworks in her child's engagement photo pounding around her head.
Hilda doesn't remember Sis turning out the lights or closing the sliding doors to her room. When she wakes up she is alone, and she rolls over and puts her arm around the mass of pillows. She envisions Angus getting into Trudi's car and kissing her. She doesn't think that Angus will marry her. They've been dating for two years now, and nothing has come of it.
If Hilda is honest with herself, she will admit that she holds out the thinnest strand of hope that Angus will come back to her. She tries not to think of it often, but in the middle of the night she often imagines how it might work. Angus suddenly on the front stoop of the piazza. Hilda welcoming him into the home they shared for three decades. “I want to come back,” he would say to her. She would nod and smile and say, “Then come.”
“Lord,” she prays to the God she has distanced herself from since she was fourteen. She waves away the idea that He would listen to her and simply says to the darkness around her, to the air in her self-made tomb, “Don't let Angus end up with Trudi.”
She lets out a sigh from somewhere deep in her chest. Then she embraces the wall of pillows, pulling them closely to her side, and drifts back into sleep.
Sis's phone rings early before the doves have made their first coo on the branch outside of her window. Her clock radio reads 5:07 a.m.
“We're sunk,” Sis hears as she groggily presses the receiver to her ear.
“Ray?”
“Pink Point is under water, Sis! Go look outside.”
It takes Sis two rolls to get across her bed as she groans, “The weather channel said we were in the clear last night except for a few outer bands.”
“Well, the storm surge rippled back at high tide, and we're under a couple of inches of water right now. I just swept two flapping shrimp off of my porch steps, okay?”
“Can't you call the pump man?”
“I've tried him, but I can't get him to answer. Willy is banging on his door as I speak. That's how desperate we are.”
Sis peers out of her blinds at the dark morning as the wet branches of her crepe myrtles bob back and forth, casting off their little white flowers like confetti. “All I can say is that I hope to God we've got power in the church so Ina can blow her pipes.”
Ina's the name of the forty-stop organ that was sent back to London to be restored the year after the church hired Sis. A Mrs. Ina Louise Barrett Gardner, a descendant of the church's first priest, The Rev. T. Henry Barrett IV, who took his post here at the chapel of ease in 1794, paid for the organ's trip and restoration. They'd put a little brass plaque over the rows of keyboards with the woman's name on it.
