Gail Bowen: The Glass Coffin

Jill’s intensity about Bryn unnerved me, and I tried to lighten the moment. “Without stretch marks, labour pains, or jeopardizing your status as a size six,” I said.

For a split second, the mask of the radiant bride slipped. “Nothing good is free, Jo. You know that.” Jill gave me a thin smile, straightened her shoulders, and turned to the other members of her wedding party. “Time to get festive,” she said. “Everybody has to meet everybody else, and given what’s ahead, we could all use a drink.”

Angus, who had never made a halfway commitment to anything in his life, had transformed our house into an oasis of New Age serenity: yellow and white candles dispelled darkness and promised new beginnings; pine and cedar boughs filled the air with the sharp green scent of renewal; crystal bowls glittered with chips of quartz for courage and chunks of rich blue sodalite for old knowledge. Taylor, a skilled artist and a romantic, had made place cards in which exotic birds carried laurel wedding crowns in their beaks. My contribution to the bliss had been Bill Evans’s Moonbeams, my personal conduit to transcendence. As far as I could tell, we had made all the right choices, but five minutes into the party I didn’t need Angus’s Enlightened Web sites to tell me the energy in the room was spirit-suckingly negative.

Our party was small, just six people besides my family. There had been a mix-up about luggage at the airport, and Felix Schiff, Jill’s business partner, had stayed behind to clear up the tangle. As I was hanging up coats and ushering people into the living room, Jill introduced me to Evan’s sister, Claudia; his second wife’s twin sister, Tracy Lowell; and the best man, Gabe Leventhal. One way or another, they shared a lot of history, and if the emotional undercurrents that eddied around us were any indication, there was nothing in that history to inspire a Hallmark card.

Most of the tension in the room sprang from Tracy Lowell. My throat had tightened when I saw her in the light of the front hall. Her resemblance to her twin was uncanny: the same dark bangs, artfully fringed over the high forehead; the same spiky-lashed round eyes and spoiled cherub’s mouth. There was, however, a significant difference. In Black Spikes and Slow Waves, Annie Lowell was luminous with the glow of youth; time had drained the lustre from her sister’s face. Both women were as frenetically fragile as hummingbirds, but unlike her twin, Tracy had lived to reap what she had sown.

With her sequinned white shirt, Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals, fluttering hands, and hard-edged trilling laugh, she had the mark of a woman who would become dangerous with drink. I was relieved when she rejected liquor in favour of good old Colombian coffee. But as she knocked back cup after cup, I began to wish she’d switch to Jack Daniel’s. Halfway through the cocktail hour, Tracy had enough caffeine in her to jump-start a Buick.

Taylor was wired too, but her adrenaline rush came from the purest of sources. She was wearing a swooshy dress; she was going to be up long after bedtime; and the next day she was going to get her hair styled by a real hairdresser and be the flower girl in a wedding. She had also discovered that passing around the canapes gave her an excuse to get up-close-and-personal with everyone else at the party. She’d already swung by to report that Jill and Claudia were on the back deck smoking cigarettes; that Mr. MacLeish and Mr. Leventhal were arguing; that when Mr. Leventhal talked, he sounded like Columbo on A that Bryn was super-shy; and that Angus was acting like a total dweeb trying to make her like him. By the time my daughter swept through with the smoked trout rolls, she had stumbled upon some really big news. “You know what?” she stage-whispered. “That lady with the sparkly top is on TV. She’s the Broken Wand Fairy on ‘Magictown.’ ”

I took a second look at Tracy. “I didn’t recognize her without her tutu and her orange sneakers,” I said. “But I think you’re right.”

“I knew it!” Taylor whooped with delight, tilting her plate and sending a dozen canapes to the floor. Our Bouvier, Willie, bent his head to investigate, but Taylor’s recovery was laser-quick. In the blink of an eye, she’d grabbed the errant trout rolls, flicked off the dog hair, and rearranged them on the plate.

“Nobody will ever know,” she said.

“We’ll know,” I said. “Taylor, you’re going to have to scrape those into the garbage and start again.”

“They’re too good to throw out,” she said. “I’m going to eat them.”

“Me too,” Claudia MacLeish, an athletic blonde in a navy V-necked cardigan, extended a freckled hand and snagged some trout. “If dog hair could kill you, I’d have been dead long ago. I own a pair of Rottweilers.”

Taylor’s head shot up. “I love Rottweilers. Jo says people aren’t fair about them – they’re really nice dogs unless they have bad owners.”

Claudia licked her fingers contentedly. “Jo’s very astute,” she said. “With Rotties, it’s all in how you handle them. They need to recognize the pack leader – same as people.” Claudia glanced across the room at Tracy Lowell, whose zoned-out smile suggested she was headed for trouble. “A case for alpha intervention if ever I saw one,” Claudia said, popping another trout roll in her mouth. “Time to remind Tracy who’s boss.”

Claudia gave Willie a final pat, walked over to the fireplace, and murmured a few words in the ear of the woman who had once been her sister-in-law. Whatever she said appeared to do the trick. The chords in Tracy’s neck showed the strain, but her all-Canadian smile was dazzling. By the time the best man stepped forward to propose a toast, the Broken Wand Fairy from “Magictown” was delivering a socko performance.

Stocky, swarthy, seriously in need of a haircut, and dressed in a suit that hadn’t been pressed since “Columbo” was in first run, Gabe Leventhal was hardly a casting director’s idea of either a best man or a pre-eminent film critic, but he was both. When Jill told me that Gabe was coming west for the wedding, I’d felt a schoolgirl flutter. I’d been reading his column, “Leventhal on Film,” since university days. Unlike Shakespeare’s Leontes, Gabe Leventhal was not “a feather for each wind that blows.” He loved movies, and he had enough respect for the people who plunked down hard coin on the basis of his opinions to maintain stringent standards. More than once I had left the paper folded at “Leventhal on Film” beside Angus’s breakfast plate. Angus believed newspapers had as much relevance to his life as eight-track cassette players, but he thought Gabe Leventhal was cool. That night as Gabe put down his unlit cigar and raised his glass to Jill, Angus paid him the ultimate tribute: he stopped mooning over Bryn and snapped to.

“Before today,” Gabe said, “my only knowledge of Saskatchewan came from a movie.”

Jill winced. “A godawful movie. I’d almost managed to delete it from my memory bank.” She turned to Bryn. “It was called Saskatchewan , and it was about a Mountie who courageously drove a Sioux war party out of here and back to the U.S.A.”

“Talk about unenlightened,” Angus said, glancing at his young goddess to make sure she was on side.

“Two mitigating factors,” Jill said. “It was made in 1954, and Alan Ladd played the Mountie.”

Gabe looked at her with real interest. “You’re a fan?”

“From the moment I saw Shane.”

“I own every movie Alan Ladd ever made,” Gabe said. “If you’re ever in New York, you’ve got a standing invitation…”

Bryn hadn’t murmured more than a pleasantry all evening, but Gabe’s words ignited her. “We’re moving to New York,” she said. “All of us. Jill’s show’s going to be syndicated.”