Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

“Yes, that’s who I’m marrying.”

“Trading Mom in for a new model, huh?”

“Is that what your mother said?”

“No, that’s not what Mom said, it’s what I’m saying.”

“I love her, Lissie.”

“Good, I hope so. You’re fucking up everybody else’s life, I should hope you’re doing it for a good—”

“Lissie, please lower your voice.”

“Why do you have to get married in Rutledge, for Christ’s sake? Must you, must you... advertise to everybody in that town that this is the woman you were fooling around with while you were still married to Mom? Jesus, Dad, don’t you have any decency at all?”

“Lissie, I wish you’d try to understand. Joanna and I...”

“Forget it, I don’t want to hear about you and Joanna. Let’s talk about the weather again, okay? It was very hot in Boston. The forecasters said it was going to be hot tomorrow, too. What time is it, anyway, I lost my watch. I told Mom I’d be back by six. What time is it now?”

“Four-thirty.”

“So soon? Shows how the minutes fly when you’re having a good time, doesn’t it? I’ll just finish this and run along, I’m sure you and Joanna have a lot you want to talk about, big wedding coming up, you must have millions of things to discuss. So,” she said, and swallowed the Scotch remaining in her glass, and put the glass on the coffee table, and stood up. “You put my bag in the hall, didn’t you, I’ll get it, Dad, you don’t have to bother...”

“Lissie...”

“Say goodbye to Joanna for me, will you, I’ll let myself out.”

She went into the entryway, and took her bag from the wall peg. She shrugged it onto her shoulder, tossed her blond hair, and started for the door. She had one hand on the doorknob when she turned to him, and hesitated, and then said, “I love you, Dad,” and went out of the house.

The sky was overcast on that twentieth day of June, and whereas the forecasters had promised sunshine for sometime later in the afternoon, Melanie Kreuger was certain her decision to hold the wedding indoors had been the right one.

The house looked glorious.

There had always been in this house a sense of coziness, the massive beams and posts throughout, the huge brick fireplace in the kitchen, the small, bright pantry with the shelves of china Melanie had brought up from Atlanta, the fine mahogany furniture in the living room and wood-paneled dining room, and in all the bedrooms the canopied beds with their butternut head- and foot-boards and the framed photographs of Civil War soldiers who had been the Kreugers’ ancestors. But today, and this was the Kreugers’ gift to Jamie and Joanna, the house was massed with flowers, the several buckets of riotously blooming daisies on the front doorstep serving only as casual invitations to a profusion of bloom within. The moment they stepped into the house, Jamie and Joanna broke into wide grins.

Larry Kreuger led them into the kitchen where he plucked a bottle of champagne from the tub of ice at the bartender’s feet and popped the cork from it. The bartender looked annoyed as Larry took four stemmed glasses from the row he’d lined up on the wet-sink counter, poured generously into them, and then said, “Before the others arrive. A private toast.” He lifted his glass. “Jamie,” he said, “you’re a good and decent man, and you’ve found yourself a beautiful and gracious woman, and I wish you both every happiness in the world.”

“Amen,” Melanie said, grinning.

“Thank you,” Jamie said, and hugged Joanna close.

There had been talk in the town that it was too early for the Kreugers to be hosting such a celebration; Scarlett had killed herself last October, and this was now only June, barely eight months later. But the occasion was for them, and Melanie told this to Jamie the first time she proposed it on the telephone, a way of coming to terms with life again, of shaking off the persistent grief that seemed threatening to bury her and her husband along with their daughter. Only this past February had the Kreugers been able to spend an entire evening in the company of friends without one or the other of them bursting into tears. Melanie, her voice soft but determined, told Jamie on the phone that she really wanted to do this for him, and that it would be a kindness if he accepted. She did not mention that the first time she’d laughed since the death of her daughter was at a story Joanna told the first time they’d met, in April.

The guests Jamie had invited from his side of the family, so to speak — in addition to his mother and a dozen or more couples from Rutledge and Talmadge — were mostly photographers and their girlfriends or wives, and one might have thought from the number of cameras in evidence that this was a convention of photographic equipment retailers. Even Lew Barker had brought a camera. “First pictures I’ll be taking since I got myself off the street and behind a desk,” he confided to Jamie, and then kissed Joanna on the cheek and said, “There’s still time to get out of this, darling.” The women accompanying the photographers were usually people they’d met in their line of work, which meant that many of the wives and girlfriends were models Joanna instantly recognized from the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

Joanna’s father, a jolly little man who had liked Jamie the moment he’d met him, commented that he had never seen so many beautiful girls in his life. Joanna’s Uncle Izzy Berkowitz, who used to play first desk with the Philharmonic and who had first engendered in her a love for the cello, idly wondered which one of the bearded young men was the rabbi. When Joanna informed him that a Christian minister would be performing the nondenominational ceremony, Uncle Izzy rolled his eyes heavenward and said, “My mother will die.” Joanna’s grandmother, the spry old lady who had first taken Joanna to see Lucia di Lammermoor, whereat Joanna had fallen in love with the lady flute player and the instrument itself, and who had just overheard every word her two no-good sons had exchanged, said, “I haff no intention uff dyink b’fore my dollink iss merrit!” and Jamie suddenly realized upon whom Joanna Jewish patterned her voice. But in addition to Joanna’s many real relatives — and there were many; this was her first marriage — she had also invited “relatives” from her large musical family, all the musicians and composers and conductors and teachers she’d known since starting her lifelong love affair with music in general and the flute in particular. If, like the photographers, all these musicians had brought the tools of their trade with them, there’d have been no room in the house for the people.

The guests kept coming through the front door.

Jamie kept expecting Connie to arrive.

The wedding was set for three o’clock sharp. At five minutes to three, Larry Kreuger asked if he might have everyone’s attention, please, and then he signaled to the minister, and to Jamie and to Joanna, and to Lew Barker who was Jamie’s best man, and to Linda Strong, who played second flute with the New York City Opera Orchestra and who was Joanna’s maid of honor, and to Lissie who’d been standing near the Welsh dresser in the dining room, talking to some kids from Talmadge, and they all went together into the living room.

The words that served as the basis for the simple ceremony were those the minister had suggested, later amended and amplified by Jamie and Joanna to say what they felt should be said about what they were doing here today, in this place, in the company of their fellow men. (He kept expecting Connie to walk through the door.) As they stood before the young pastor whose pregnant wife was sitting just near the window which, open just a crack, billowed the sheer curtains into the room, they each and separately recognized the importance of the vows they would be taking within the next few moments, but Jamie perhaps more than Joanna: he had already taken similar vows once in his lifetime, and he was about to take them again.