Country Wedding

Berry Fleming

• Publisher: The Permanent Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504009850
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Set in eastern Long Island, in an area reminiscent of the Hamptons, it is a tale about a wedding party: the bride and groom each apprehensive, but for different reasons. On the scene are a former lover of the bride's who makes a sudden appearance and a young swain who is equally taken with the bride-to-be.

1948:—Trains, passenger trains, some electric with folding trolleys like the handles of baby buggies, some steam; chair cars, Pullmans, parlor cars, club cars. Steamships in the New York rivers booming out melodious good-bys over the cross streets like searchlights. New-Look hems at 7 inches (denoting to some a stock market in the doldrums), Tales of the South Pacific at $3.15, gasoline at 26 cents, Lincoln Cosmopolitans at $3,387.75 (by a dealer’s window just north of Penn Station). Early September. Warm. A Friday evening.

There had been fogs over Long Island that summer, floating in across the flesh-colored beaches, blotting up the sunlight, closing off the horizon and the far view—as your middle days close off your own far views, Edridge told himself, who considered he was, at 36, in his middle days. In the damp conductive air you could hear the New York-Montauk trains growling past a mile and a half inland as if throwing back the sound of the surf. Flocks of puzzled swallows would sit mistily on the telephone wires, disappearing right and left into the porous sides of the visible world, packed close together like the wooden markers in Mrs. Mantry’s billiard room; window screens were often covered in the mornings with a gleaming film of moisture that might remind you of the wet forehead of someone badly frightened.

This particular fog rose up out of the Atlantic and drifted into Eastharbor on September eleventh, a shaggy, uncombed, unwelcome guest at the celebration in honor of the wedding next day of Mrs. Mantry’s “daughter, Beatrice, to Mr. Walter Rutledge Pickens”, drifted in at about eight o’clock, just as Maurice, standing in his hard-used patent-leathers at the shoulder of his pianist, lifted his chin as though shaving, padded his collarbone under a white silk handkerchief and, with a restrained but interested and possibly amused smile at the shell-white canvas of the pavilion and Mrs. Mantry’s forty dinner guests, drew his cheerful five into the aphrodisiac strains of the current leader of the Hit Parade—the young clapping with delight at the selection, the old bewildered at what the clapping was for.

Edridge, almost in reflex, as if the tune had waked him up, swung his eyes across the dance floor to the face of one of the forty, gaze taut like a string of Maurice’s violin. For a moment, hardly as long as a half-measure trill, she glanced carelessly into his stare; then a man at her table called her attention to the fog and she looked away beneath the rolled-up walls, and he began to wonder if she had really seen him. When she showed no sign of repeating the glance he offered the angular girl beside him a stoic cigarette and, observing a waiter nearing them magically pouring champagne out of a napkin, he tossed off the rest of his glass.

Until that morning he had had no idea Beatrice was getting married. He supposed his invitation had got lost in a crack somewhere between New York and San Francisco, or even in his San Francisco office; it was understandable her not writing him the news of her engagement, but he was sure she would have sent him an invitation to the wedding—almost sure.

He had thought of calling her on Thursday when he got in but, considering many things, decided against it; then, with Friday’s morning light, simply wanting to see her again, if only across a luncheon table, he had phoned the house in town and, getting no answer, phoned Eastharbor. “You’re coming down for the wedding, aren’t you?” after maybe catching her breath at his name (and maybe not). He said, “Sure. Who’s getting married?” suddenly guessing then it was Beatrice and opening the phone booth door a couple of inches though thinking it was remarkable how genuinely unperturbed he was. “Didn’t you know I was being married!”

He told her he was awfully, awfully sorry, and she said it was sweet of him to say so, voice with a sort of ventriloquist quality as if coming partly from the other Beatrice partly from this one. He listened to a few words about “Wally” (in the this-one voice), whom he remembered as a heavy, slow, sure-footed young man with an almost aesthetic devotion to money. “The wedding’s tomorrow at noon, but you must come down for tonight. There’ll be music and champagne and a most gorgeous peppermint-striped tent on the beach.” He said he wished he could, and she said as if not hearing him, “Take the three-fifteen.”

“Nothing would suit me better, Bee, but I’m going to South America tomorrow at four-thirty.”

That brought a silence of some kind, which she broke by saying there was a train back to New York in the morning at eleven-fifty. “No, wait! That’s going the other way. Montauk wouldn’t help much, would it? I’ll get a timetable.”

He told her not to bother, he would look it up, and she said there was a New York train just after the Montauk one. “It ought to get you back to town in plenty of time. You’d miss the wedding but you’d get music and dinner and champagne.” Which produced a silence on his part which lasted until he heard himself saying, “I’ll look it up at the desk. If you’re right I’ll be there,” knowing as he said it he had better do a little serious figuring first.

For it wasn’t by chance he had landed in New York with two days to spare; he had taken enough gambles in his time and he wasn’t taking any on missing the Southern Prince. One of the high-ups in the conglomerate that owned the steamship company had noticed some copy he had written in the San Francisco office for the Palmer Line; it ended in time with luncheon and a proposal to the New York office of a twelve-layout contract if they put the same man on the job, and New York phoned for him as if he had been a case of whole California blood. “You’ll go down Southern, Saturday the twelfth,” a respectful voice called across the mountains, “and come back Eastern. Have everything worked up and ready to show as soon as Eastern docks.” It was a good thing for the firm, a good thing for him. He had begun to wonder if his wasn’t the long lane that had no turning, but this looked like a turn, the turn.

To have carefully got hmself to New York in plenty of time and now swing right round and cut the plenty down to an hour or so was really putting a good deal of strain on his newly arrived luck. Though the New York office might not have a serious tantrum if they knew he was spending Friday night a hundred miles from Pier 14 he had a feeling if anything happened to make him miss the boat they wouldn’t even wait for Monday to stand him on a carpet and rid themselves of his irresponsible services. And for the fourth time in the sixteen years out of Harvard College he would be on the street. The envelope they had handed him Thursday afternoon containing his ticket had a red-ink line under “4:30 p.m., Pier 14, East River” and he had an idea they meant for him to be there even with broken legs.

But when he got a timetable in the hotel lobby and saw there was a 12:12 from Eastharbor that would put him in Penn Station at two-twenty-five he began to notice how full the September air was of heavy city smells, how the street noises poured about the grim furniture in a sort of oily torrent, how Friday afternoon and evening and Saturday morning stretched out before him interminably, and it began to seem fantastic to think two hours might not be enough: check one suitcase at the station, pick it up at two-thirty, taxi to the boat with an hour and a half to spare.

He did enough repacking to get his evening clothes into his small suitcase (a dinner jacket would have to do, though he would have preferred meeting her again in white tie with a backing of tails), shoved the big one into a station locker and took the 3:15. He probably wouldn’t get a dozen words with Beatrice but it would be good to see her again—see yesterday in today’s new dress, see Philip Edridge vibrating under the cross lights of glad and sorry the groom was Walter not himself.

Testing the old wound? He didn’t think so. He wasn’t what she wanted; at heart. And did he want any woman for keeps? Bag and baggage? He had meant it at the time, offhand though he had made it sound: “What are the chances of marrying me, Bee?” and when her eyes had moved away from his, “California? Don’t you want to see California?” Yet before he reached Cleveland he was sniffing his new freedom like an unexpected warm morning in March; and walking on a station platform somewhere in Wyoming he had realized with something of a shock he was staring at an unknown girl across the tracks—much as he was staring now at one across Beatrice’s dance floor. He had come to smile at those days with a sad shake of the head at the concentrated adolescence of his whole point of view, though it occurred to him now to wonder if there was as much difference in maturity separating the two stares as he would have liked to think; maybe what annoyed him about the adolescent viewpoint—displayed before him now as young Paul Ewing danced with Lilith seeing her as Penelope—was that he knew it too well.

He turned away from the thought to watch the bony lady who might now have been his mother-in-law go whirling past in the spindly arms of an old man in a bob-tailed dress suit in which he could almost smell the moth balls—man and suit as much of another era as a car with a spare tire strapped on the running board, an uncle of Walter’s from “home”; who would probably be grateful if Edridge cut in and danced with the lady immediately to get the ordeal out of the way at once for both of them.

Of the three entries on the list Dr. Pickens handed his black chauffeur—“car greased,” “wipe .38 with oily rag, put in glove compartment,” “evening clothes from attic, hang in sun all day”—all were attended to, but when he unpacked in Eastharbor the smell of moth balls popped out like a jack-in-the-box. He had reached an age of Well, so be it! and he thought, with a few glasses of Mrs. Mantry’s wine, he would probably be offering himself and the moth balls as appropriate twin representatives of the bridegroom’s family, old but still operative and intact.

He had been one of the first to notice the fog. In getting to his feet and attempting to treat his hostess to the old-school bow she seemed to expect of a Southern gentleman as he begged the honor of the opening dance, he winced at the pinch in his game left knee and, recognizing this sign of a falling barometer, glanced out beneath the scalloped eaves of the tent where he had lately seen sand and a listless surf and saw in fact the vindicating opacity of the fog.—When he mentioned it, “That’s Eastharbor’s oldest inhabitant,” Mrs. Mantry said calmly and with, he thought, a good deal of presence of mind for the mother of the bride, who might be forgiven for having none. “He comes to all my parties.”

Swinging her about the floor in generous somewhat alcoholic spirals, he returned to their discussion of the wedding and he told her appreciatively this was the closest his branch of the family had come to folding money since the War Between the States. Mrs. Mantry, embarrassed at the shamelessness of such a confession (to say nothing of the shamelessness of such a backhanded boast of gentility), managed to say they were all “so fond of Wally.”

“Walter,” Dr. Pickens said, (“Wally” being one of Walter’s acquisitions on coming North), “Walter is a very extraordinary boy; he is almost completely normal.”

She gave him a chiding, absentminded smile. If the old rooster was determined to make a caricature of himself she had too much else on her mind to try to prevent it.

“And it isn’t the result of chance,” he said. “Walter was brought up right.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that!”

“No attempt was ever made by my brother and sister-in-law to cultivate his tastes and he can now get as much happiness out of a football game as you and I out of Mozart’s piano concertos. His enjoyment of the Wall Street Journal is as wholehearted and absorbing as mine of Tristam Shandy. And the beauty of that, Mrs. Mantry, is while there’s only one Tristam Shandy, there’s a new Wall Street Journal every day.”

Mrs. Mantry, unfamiliar with the idiom in which someone from Georgia might expect her to reply to all this, simply pressed her discreetly roughed lips together and shot him a reproachful all-purpose smile. She would be glad when tomorrow had come and gone and she could lock her bedroom door and quietly weep a while; not about any specific thing she could name, but the general cogent fact of Beatrice married, Beatrice a wife, Beatrice with her first twenty-seven years defined (a portrait framed and hung, beautiful perhaps, but limited in being finished). Beatrice unthinkably in bed with a man, suffering the indignities she herself had suffered and hadn’t the nerve to warn her of, hoping she had picked up most of the truth at Wellesley.

Her tears wouldn’t be as bitter, though, as if the child had been marrying the other one, the “Other One,” which she suspected had very nearly happened three years ago, (she thought of such things as “happening” and was grateful to a watchful Episcopal God for waving something and drawing him off to the other side of the ring as she had seen those people do in Spain—though she was sorry He hadn’t seen His way clear to keeping him over there twenty-four hours longer). And not as bitter, of course, as if it had been Paul, who, unless she was reading too much into things, would have gladly given up college and married her—older but what of that!—in his charged impulsive way, having to love someone. Wally was by far the best. As Dr. Pickens had been saying, Wally was a gentleman.

Not that she denied the importance of love which was as much to be reckoned with as polio or any of the other adolescent afflictions that sometimes left complications. Never having encountered any reliable immunizing agent, she had tried, during what she considered Beatrice’s most susceptible years, to expose her only to young men with money, so that if the thing should strike it would at any rate be of a kind she was familiar with. She hadn’t approved in the beginning, of her husband’s kindness to Wally that misguided winter in Georgia just as she wouldn’t have approved of his putting a large sum in Bolivian bonds. But when Wally, a gentleman to begin with, was at length promoted into a gleaming office in the New York Central Building and followed the running of the better stocks with Zeiss field glasses like an official at Belmont or Saratoga she felt he had established himself in her own currency and not without forethought, often invited him to her table. She considered love to be what Wally would call a “Highly speculative position”; it could “go off the board” one day. With all you had. Unless you had backed it up with Government obligations of one sort or another; if you married for Treasury bonds or because of your husband’s friends you really had some security, the bonds being as good as the Government, and the friends usually as good as the bonds. So that a successful marriage implied to a large extent a vote of confidence in the Federal Government which, for all practical purposes, was immortal; like Presidents, friends might come and go, but like the office, there would always be occupants.

The other one—Edridge or something—had given her quite a fright, appearing among them at Beatrice’s invitation with the faintly attractive raffishness of a wildcat stock traded over-the-counter; or under it. She had been about to fall back on the usually effective therapy of travel in Europe when Beatrice let drop, with perhaps a little too much nonchalance, that he had gone to California. Out of caution she took the child abroad anyhow, as you might continue for a time with the calamine lotion after the poison ivy has begun to subside, and watching for his envelopes in the mail she culled at Morgan & Cie she had the satisfaction of seeing fewer and fewer. When, at last, Beatrice told her she wanted to marry Wally she felt the strong emotion of a stockholder receiving the first cash dividend from a company that up to then had confined its communications chiefly to statements of good will, and she embraced her daughter with tears of relief.

She was as sorry to see Edridge that evening as she well could be, but she knew it was too late now; her child had reached the age of reason; “it was all over but the shouting,” as she heard them vulgarly put it that winter in Georgia. At first she was afraid he might have the ill manners to be overly attentive to Beatrice, but then as the evening wore on she began to think he wasn’t being attentive enough, attentive at all indeed, and she became a little confused between gratification at his leaving her daughter alone and a distinct crossness at his being able to interest himsel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Country Wedding
• Copyright Page