A Wedding in December

  Harrison expected a sudden chill, but the air that came in from the small veranda outside the library was warm. "You and Agnes have stayed friends, I take it," he said as he stood.

  "Yes. We ... we don't see each other much, but we write. She's kind of old-fashioned. Our Agnes. She stayed on at Kidd. She teaches there."

  Harrison remembered Agnes's sturdy body, her dreamy nature, her fascination with history.

  "She finally bought a computer when the school put a gun to her head," Nora said. "She hides it under the bed and takes it out only to post her grades."

  Harrison laughed.

  "Bridget's mother and sister will come for the wedding. Bill's family won't come. They're angry with him for . . . well, for leaving his wife and daughter for Bridget. Bridget's son is bringing a friend to keep him company. They're fifteen. It'll be a small wedding. More a wedding supper than a wedding. Though Bill is intent upon the details. I've helped him plan the flowers and the menu. He wants it to be . . . perfect. For Bridget."

  "What's wrong with her?" Harrison asked.

  "Breast cancer."

  Harrison sucked in his breath. The mother of a fifteen-year-old boy. He didn't want to think about it.

  He shaded his eyes with his hand. "What's that over there?" he asked.

  "It's the top of a roller coaster," Nora said cheerfully. "In the summer, with binoculars, you can see the people in the cars. You can watch them make the long, slow climb to the top and then hurtle out of sight below the trees. Then, as if by magic, you can see them emerge again. They seem to spin off into the air."

  "I've never been on a roller coaster," Harrison confessed. The closest I've ever come is when my mother used to take me to Cin­erama when I was a kid."

  "I don't think I ever went to Cinerama."

  "It was the first of the wide-screen movies. It made you feel as though you were right there — sitting in the car of a roller coaster, or climbing a mountain. It was meant to give you the thrill and sensation of movement."

  "I can't do it anymore," she said. "The roller coaster. Carl did though. He'd snatch at any excuse to go. He'd borrow children if necessary." She looked at her watch, and Harrison thought about the notion of borrowing children. "Tell me about yourself," she said.

  "Not much to tell."

  "You're married."

  "Yes. My wife and I live in Toronto with our two boys, Charlie and Tom. Evelyn, my wife, is an estate lawyer."

  "How did you end up there? In Toronto?"

  "Evelyn is from Toronto."

  "You're ... in publishing?"

  "Yes."

  Nora rocked herself in a chair. "Tell me more about your wife."

  "Evelyn? Well, let's see. She's French Canadian. She's tall and has short blond hair. I think her hair might actually be gray now, but she never lets anyone see it. She's a very good mother."

  Harrison had then a quick image of Evelyn and the boys at home. He could see the interior of their town house, particularly the small, cluttered kitchen. A jumble of laundry, including his boys' slippery red hockey shirts, would have spilled out onto the floor from the alcove where the washer and dryer were stowed. He could see the breakfast table with its boxes of American cereal that the boys favored, a tea bag rolled and hardened on a saucer. Evelyn would be in a pink cashmere robe Harrison had given her for her birthday, and her hair would be askew from sleep. In the back­ground would be the steady patter of an early morning news show. And Harrison realized, as he saw and heard this scene, that he did not wish himself there. With that realization came an emptiness he was all too familiar with, an emptiness that opened up whenever he found himself alone in a foreign place — a sense of floating, of not being anchored in the way that chores and hockey games and en­gagements will do. "My older son, Charlie, who's eleven, has Eve­lyn's looks but my disposition," Harrison said, "while Tom, who's nine, is the spitting image of me, but has Evelyn's disposition." He paused. "It's occasionally deeply unsettling," he added, smiling.

  "And what disposition would that be?" Nora asked.

  "Evelyns?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh, I think most people would say she tends to be somewhat more dramatic than I am," Harrison answered, feeling mildly disloyal.

  "And so you would be . . ."

  "More even tempered," he said.

  "Yes. I can see that," Nora said.

  Sometimes Evelyn seemed closer to Harrison the farther away he was from her in a strict physical sense. When they were separated, he tended to think of her with more fondness than when he was with her, and he wondered if she felt the same. He sometimes thought that he had disappointed her in marriage — or, rather, that marriage, with its promise of constant love and physical inti­macy, had disappointed them both. In her most dramatic and, par­adoxically, romantic moments, Evelyn reproached herself for not having loved Harrison enough; but he couldn't ease her mind on this point without admitting to the death of hope. Together, they cared for the boys, attended to their jobs, and had made, he thought, a good family. And occasionally there were moments of true joy, as when one or the other of the boys would say something winsome at the dinner table, and Harrison would catch Evelyn's eye, or as when, lying together in the bed, having made love in the forgiving half-light of an early Sunday morning, a kind of weekly hurdle crossed, Evelyn would put her head on his chest and he would stroke her shoulder, and a brief contentment would envelop them before they drifted off to sleep.

  "Tell me a story," Nora said.

  Harrison laughed. "You used to do this all the time."

  "So I did."

  He let his mind go blank. He sat in a rocker opposite and let some seconds pass.

  "Once I was staying at Le Concorde in Quebec City," he said. "I had a view toward the Frontenac, down the Grande-Allee. Between my hotel and the Frontenac, there were a dozen rooftops. All shapes and sizes. And on one of these rooftops, there were four teenage boys. They had brooms, and I thought at first they'd been sent to the roof by maintenance to sweep off the snow. But it soon became apparent to me that they were making a hockey rink. The prospect of that was horrible, you see, because there was no guardrail, no barrier, and if one of the boys body checked the other, say, or if one simply lost his footing, he'd have slipped right off the roof. And died, presumably. The building was at least seven sto­ries up."

  Nora tilted her head, waiting for more.

  "I couldn't take my eyes off them," Harrison said. "And yet, strangely, I didn't do anything. I didn't know what the name of the building was, and I thought that if I went out onto the street, I wouldn't be able to see which rooftop it was. So I did nothing."

  "What happened?"

  "Nothing."

  Nora rested her chin on the back of her hand. "What else?"

  Harrison thought a minute. "Before I left to come here," he said, "I watched my wife get dressed for work. She had on two different socks. One long and one short. She hadn't shaved her legs."

  "How did you feel about that?"

  "I was faintly repulsed," he admitted. "I love my wife, by the way."

  "But you see," Nora said, "you didn't include these facts. You ed­ited. You would have omitted those details. If you'd been asked to give an account of yourself. And then I would have ... I would have a very different picture of you."

  "How so?"

  "I now know that you're willing to share small secrets. You might be a closet coward. You probably don't like to get too involved. You're capable of being faintly repulsed by someone you love."

  "Didn't you know these things already?"

  "We were children then," Nora said. "We're . . . we're entirely different now."

  Are we? Harrison wondered.

  "What's that over there?" he asked, pointing. "That plume of smoke? It looks lethal."

  "A paper bag factory. They say it's perfectly safe. But I don't be­lieve it."

  "Quite a forest," he said.

  "It's deceptive. You can see only the tops of the trees from here. Below
them, there are houses and roads and power lines. Even a McDonald's."

  "Say it isn't so," Harrison said with mock horror.

  "Afraid it is. There's a real forest behind the inn, though."

  He craned his neck, but the roof blocked any view of the woods behind the inn. "The inn does well?" he asked.

  "Surprisingly. It works the way I hoped it would work. There are . . . there are always problems — the too-low toilet seats being the most frequent complaint."

  "I hadn't noticed."

  "But many of our guests have returned. And they've told their friends about it. This year we're booked through to the end of Feb­ruary."

  "Well done."

  "I hadn't meant to compete. It hadn't ever really crossed my mind. I just wanted something of my own. But I am. Competing. With a whole string of B and Bs throughout the Berkshires."

  "Who makes up your clientele?" he asked.

  "Mostly people from Boston and New York. Looking to escape the cities. They profess to come for the charm — a sort of New England charm I find hokey. So I don't offer it. Apart from these L.L.Bean rockers we're sitting on. Or they come with an ideal of family togetherness that invariably unravels as the weekend pro­gresses."

  "You sound a bit cynical."

  "What people really come for is the promise of sex and food and material goods. Not necessarily in that order. The outlets are just ten minutes away."

  "Under all those trees."

  Nora nodded.

  "I'm actually hot sitting here," Harrison said with some surprise.

  "Take off your sweater."

  "I think I will. If we were primitive people, we'd be frightened by this, wouldn't we? This freakish weather."

  "The inn was reviewed last year in New York Magazine" Nora said. "The reviewer wrote that one could sit on the porch in De­cember. He meant sit on the porch in a parka, but this year you can do it in shirtsleeves. The sun bakes the clapboards."

  "The lawn is still green," he said.

  "By this time of year, there's usually snow on the ground. Men who haven't been on sleds in years like to show off to their wives and children before their knees give out." She glanced at her watch. "I really have to go," she said, standing. "I have a rehearsal lunch. There's another wedding tomorrow. Agnes and Rob should be here by one. We'll have a private room for the dinner tonight. And of course one for tomorrow evening."

  "Is that usual?" Harrison asked. "To have more than one wed­ding a weekend?"

  "Oh, yes," Nora said. "I've sometimes had four in a weekend, all with rehearsal dinners. The trick. . . the trick is to keep the brides from running into one another. Each wants to think herself unique."

  "Don't we all?" he said.

  Nora smiled.

  "I thought I might go for a walk," he said, standing as well. "I had breakfast on the way here."

  "Good. So you're all set." 1 am.

  Nora took a step away from him but then glanced back. "I sup­pose someone will mention Stephen?" she asked.

  The name produced in Harrison, as it always did, a clench in his gut along with a slight oil slick of shame. He stood still and waited.

  "I've been thinking about him a lot," Nora added.

  Harrison was silent.

  "Do you remember the funeral?"

  'Of course," he said quietly.

  Grief, seen up close like that, is unbearable. It was so much worse than ours. So much more intense. It made me realize how shallowly we'd loved him."

  "Perhaps," Harrison said, though at the time his love for his friend had felt intense enough.

  "You and I haven't spoken to each other since the night of the party," Nora said.

  "No, we haven't."

  Nora looked at him for a moment, and he felt her scrutiny. "I wonder if this wasn't a mistake, agreeing to have the wedding here," she said. "Having you come is a little bit like taking a stick and poking it into a clear pond and watching the mud eddy up into the water."

  "Was the pond so clear before I came?" he asked.

  "It was," Nora said. "Yes, I think it was."

  She turned, and Harrison watched her walk away along a narrow gravel path that circled around to the front of the inn. She moved briskly, head down, though she must have known he was looking at her. And doing so, he had a sudden and sharp memory of Nora as she had been when he'd seen her walking along a side street in Maine. He'd always remembered where and when he'd met Nora, but it had been years since he'd actually been able to see it as he could now. The clarity of the image took his breath away, and he thought, as he picked up his sweater from the rocker, that other such sharp pictures might reveal themselves during the weekend to come. For a moment, he stood with his hands on his hips and braced himself, even as he admired the spectacular view.

  Agnes was writing about the Halifax explosion. She'd first learned about the blast early last summer while on a short vacation to Nova Scotia, a trip arranged by her local public radio station in conjunction with the history department at Kidd Academy. Hali­fax in early June had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as ex­cursions go, it had been something of a strain — an unexpected tedium made worse by dismal weather, an unending rain that had so chilled her hands and feet, shed had to warm them up each night using the hair dryer in her hotel room. Activities had been scheduled — tours into the countryside and to museums and so on — but Agnes had been happiest when on her own. In the mornings, she would do her five-mile run, shower, and breakfast, and if there were no appealing outings that day, she would walk the streets, enjoying her temporary freedom from the routine of aca­demic life at Kidd.

  On one of those walks, she stopped at a bookstore that had in its window a copy of a book entitled A Flash Brighter than the Sun: The Halifax Explosion. Intrigued, Agnes went inside, located the book, and riffled through its pages, paying close attention to the photographs of the city in the days immediately following the blast. She remembered in particular a picture of a child sitting on a white iron hospital bed, her eyes bandaged, her hair cut short in a man­ner similar to the way in which Agnes's own mother used to cut and comb her hair when Agnes was a girl: in a sort of bowl with the top of the hair drawn back into an elastic band that sat to one side of the crown of her head. There were other photographs in the book as well, of wooden buildings that had gracefully imploded and of acres of devastation, as if the city were Dresden or London in a future war.

  Agnes purchased the book, tucked it into her backpack, and then walked on to a coffee shop where she ordered a cappuccino. She sat at her table, oblivious to the other patrons, and read that on the morning of December 6,1917, a munitions ship, the Imo out of Belgium, collided in Halifax Harbor with a French freighter, the Mont Blanc, a ship carrying picric acid, benzole, and TNT to the conflict in Europe. The collision, which occurred shortly before 8:30 in the morning, caused a considerable stir in the Canadian city, the resulting fire bringing the citizens of Halifax to their win­dows to view the spectacle. Curiosity and a kind of compelling beauty caused them to linger, ignoring their breakfasts and the ironing and the need to go to school. Though Canada was involved in the war, Halifax had seen no action. It was instead a feeder city, supplying both men and materiel to Europe. A fire in the harbor, then, was a bit of excitement in what promised to be an otherwise uneventful day.

  When the Mont Blanc exploded at 9:05, the windows of the houses near the harbor shattered, sending slivers of glass into the faces and eyes of many of those who were watching. Before day's end, 2,000 people died, 9,000 were wounded, and nearly 200 were completely or partially blinded, many of them children.

  One of the reasons Agnes had begun writing about the Halifax ex­plosion was that she'd had some visual disturbances of her own — odd liquid blips at the periphery of her eyesight that rose like oily bubbles in a cylinder. For a few weeks now, she'd been consider­ing going to an ophthalmologist. Of course her eyesight was precious to her. She could hardly do her job without it. For seventeen years, she had been a history
teacher as well as the coach of the girls' varsity field hockey team at Kidd Academy, a coed prepara­tory school located in northeastern Maine, a school to which she herself had gone.

  Agnes particularly liked the history of Kidd Academy founded in 1921 by textile manufacturer James Kidd, who had bought sev­eral of the larger summerhouses on the bluff just outside the vil­lage of Fenton, Maine, thinking to make of them a small boarding school for exceptional students — his son, of course, being one of them. Acquiring in a quiet manner most of the twenty-room "cot­tages" from the summer folk who'd been coming to the seacoast vil­lage for generations (but who were finding it harder and harder to keep up the behemoths without the legions of servants their own parents had employed), Kidd had the empty buildings winterized and set up as classrooms or dormitories. The old houses lent them­selves to dorms, with their long corridors and many small bed­rooms, and Agnes was sometimes amazed at how the school continued to have about it the air of a summer community. There were no Gothic spires at Kidd, no vast lawns. The weathered, shin­gled buildings were rarely taller than two or three stories. Cars were not permitted on campus, though the students managed them any­way, striking bargains with the natives for their garages in advance of the school year.

  Agnes first joined the faculty of Kidd, where she had been a stu­dent, in the early 1980s, having spent five years teaching in the public schools, to which she was ill suited and vice versa. She was what she supposed people in Halifax in 1917 would have called a spinster. It was a hateful word that Agnes hesitated to say even in her thoughts, not only because of its antiquated and insulting nature but also because it suggested a bloodless woman of indeterminate age, whereas Agnes, apart from the new thing with the eyes, was in good health, excellent physical condition, and of a vety precise age, which was forty-four.

  When Agnes thought about the Halifax explosion, she imagined a man named Innes Finch, a young surgeon trained at the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin, arriving in Halifax on the afternoon of December 5. So far, Agnes had written: