Jeremy Thrane (40 page)

Who was this blond, ruddy, emu-breeding fellow Fletcher anyway? He looked like a rugby player. Lola’s marriage a few years ago had made barely a squiggle on my internal seismograph, or so I’d thought when I’d heard about it. But now it occurred to me that Fletcher was my brother-in-law just as much as Liam was, whatever that meant. If we’d all grown up in a small town in the Midwest and lived our lives within a mile of
each other, we might have shared the familiar habits and jokes of men in a family together. Perversely, possibly because my woolen pants were itching me and I couldn’t scratch myself because I was standing there in front of everyone, I wished all of a sudden that I belonged to this imaginary small-town family, an extended clan glued together by a shared disinclination to push the envelope, living next door to people we’d grown up with, sticking together through church bazaars, droughts, ice cream socials, drunk-driving accidents. I could have been the bookish bachelor, squiring the town’s spinsters, widows, and divorcees to Fourth of July barbecue suppers. Whenever I arrived at one of my sisters’ houses, my adoring nieces and nephews would have shouted “Uncle Jeremy!” and jumped up and down with excitement. It would have been a trade-off, but I could sort of see why some people did it.

Just then the ballad came to an end, and with it, these thoughts. It had been the minor key, that watery soprano; the moment the song ended, I started to choke with claustrophobia at the thought of such a life. My mother took her hand off my arm, which she had been clutching through the layers of my sleeves this entire time, and produced her own piece of paper, neatly typewritten and unfolded.

“This poem is called,” she said in her ringing, clear, poetessy voice, “ ‘The War Bride.’ It describes another wedding that took place in Berkeley, California, in 1963.”

Without clearing her throat or fussing with the paper as I might have done, she then began to read. As always, she gave a slight intake of breath to indicate the line breaks, which gave the words a portentous weight they may not have had on the page. Rummaging around in my mental family-history archives, I gathered that this poem was concerned with the fact that Emma had married Angus to get free of her mother, and that Lucy had opposed the marriage with all the didactic vigor she possessed; this I gleaned from the series of old-fashionedly feminist images of which the poem was comprised, concluding with the lines, “The alchemy of the ring binds bird to beast and snaps/The cord around my neck/My veil bandages the wounded air/He plunders what she’s spoiled. We all/surrender.” I hoped this wasn’t my mother’s sneaky way of expressing her own disapproval of Liam and repeating history, but fortunately, neither Liam nor Amanda seemed to be listening, judging by
their rapturous, dazed expressions, and everyone else appeared to be either crying or smiling, or both. I’d never been so glad before that everyone tended to space out when poetry was read aloud.

After my mother’s poem, it was time for the real business of the wedding. The justice of the peace, a sane-looking man with a wandering left eye and a wart on his chin, discharged his duties briskly and without undue sentiment, as if hitching people were no more or less momentous than delivering the mail. After the bridal pair exchanged their plain gold bands, he said, “You may kiss the bride” as if it were a no-nonsense directive along the lines of “Sign here for this package.” Liam planted his lips on Amanda’s, and everyone burst into the spontaneous applause that always greeted this moment. Then we all flocked back up the aisle we’d so recently paraded down to stand in a line on the pier behind the rows of chairs.

There was a mass communal bustle for half an hour or so as the newlyweds and their families, me included, were assaulted by all the assembled in what I supposed was called the receiving line. Once everyone had exchanged hand sweat with me or kissed their lipstick off onto my cheek, I followed them all up the gangway, descended the stairs that led belowdecks, and wormed my way through the crowd to the ship’s galley-cum-bar, using my leverage as brother of the bride to take cuts in front of all the lesser guests. It had been thirsty work, handing my sister over to that green-card–seeking rogue. The bar was in the middle of the ship, flanked on either side by narrow corridors leading back to the living quarters and forward to the defunct engine room and the catwalk over the hold, which now served as a dance floor. The portholes showed wavy views of the Hudson River.

“I’ll have a vodka on the rocks,” I told the grizzled old bartender who looked as if he could have been the captain, brought up from the ocean floor and resurrected along with his ship. He looked a lot like the vessel itself; his face was fretted with wrinkles and creases the way every square inch of the ship’s innards was covered with rust.

He obligingly handed me a nice stiff three-fingered drink, and I climbed back up to the aft deck, I supposed it was called, although I supposed I could call it whatever the hell I wanted. I sat on a bench and watched people come two by two up the gangway. Toward New Jersey,
the sun was staining the lowering sky with a toxic Crayola meltdown of coral, tangerine, amber, carmine, a lemon-custardy glow underneath, mirrored in the moving surface of the river, where the pulls and snags of the tide showed their patterned contours in flashes of contrast, dark on one side, light on the other. The wind off the river smelled of algae and oil and the promise of rain.

A tall young woman in a pink dress proffered a loaded tray. I took a goat cheese tartlet and ate it whole; Amanda and Liam’s budget had allowed only for drinks and hors d’oeuvres, no sit-down dinner, even with the money Emma and Leonard had kicked in. They had democratically opted to invite everyone they knew and get them drunk and feed them snacks instead of whittling the list down to a select elite. A plump boy with a shock of red hair trundled behind the tartlet girl with a tray of champagne-filled glasses. In the glow of the sky they looked like chalices of molten gold with trapped air bubbles; they were so appealing, I downed my drink in a gulp and traded my ice-filled glass for a tall, slender flute of champagne. A chartered pleasure boat ablaze with strings of white-hot lights and emitting tinny music cruised by on its way downstream.

Suddenly, I became aware that the man sitting next to me was sending me signals I recognized. I turned and looked him in the eye. He was a younger, spiffier version of the groom.

“Hello there,” I said.

“Hello yourself,” he said in a brogue I found charming in spite of myself.

“You’re a relative of the groom.”

“His little brother Johnny.”

“What a coincidence,” I said. “I’m Amanda’s brother, Jeremy.”

“What does that make us, then?” he asked with a saucy grin. “Kissing cousins, is it?”

No, I thought to myself; it would be too creepy to have sex with someone who looked so much like Liam. “I think it’s more like friendly relations,” I answered.

“Ah,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

The trouble with the whole innuendo game was that you couldn’t suddenly decide to explain yourself point-blank. My next move was to
soften my rejection of him with a dry bit of flattery, but I found my mind lazily slipping away from this conversation. He knew what I was about to say as well as I did, so I might as well spare us both the trouble.

Abruptly, I stood up and drifted up to the bow, where I found my sister Lola and brother-in-law, Fletcher, standing near the steps that led up to the wheel room.

“Jeremy, hello again,” said Fletcher, extending a hand for me to shake. His palm was soft yet tough as suede and easily engulfed my own. He seemed nice enough, but there was something overly boisterous about him, something too breezy and ingratiating. Maybe it was an Aussie characteristic and my reaction was akin to the patronizing dismay Europeans felt for Americans, or maybe any brother would have been suspicious, meeting his sister’s husband for the first time; all I knew was that this must have been much freakier for him than it was for me, coming all the way around the world to stand on a rusty boat drinking champagne with his wife’s peculiar family.

“There you are!” said Amanda, flinging her arms around Lola and me and kissing us each on the cheek. “Come down to the pier for a family picture; the photographer just told me to round you up.”

“Should I come along?” Fletcher asked.

“Of course, Fletcher, you’re family too,” said Amanda immediately, and we all trooped down to the pier to join Emma, Leonard, and Liam.

“Irene!” my mother called. “Over here!”

Irene Rheingold bustled along the pier toward us. She wore a red velvet embroidered caftan that looked like sofa upholstery and a necklace of large clay beads the general size, shape, and color of dog-do.

“I missed your ceremony,” she called to Amanda when she came into earshot. “Something came up; but here I am now.”

“Something came up?” I blurted out before Amanda or Emma could reassure her that they understood perfectly, she was so busy, it was so great that she could make it at all. “Did you have to go to the emergency room? Were you kidnapped? Did aliens abduct you?”

“Oh, you know how it is,” she said airily.

“I saw Richard and Beatrice earlier,” said Amanda. “They said you’d be late.”

“Yes,” said Irene, “good.”

“What,” I persisted, “could possibly have ‘come up’ that was more important than Amanda’s wedding ceremony? You’ve known her since she was born. She’s like your niece.”

“Oh, shut your cakehole, Jeremy,” said Amanda tolerantly.

“Amanda,” Irene gushed, ignoring me completely. “You look so beautiful! Congratulations to all you wonderful, beautiful Thranes and Margolises.”

“And O’Flahertys now,” said Amanda.

“And Barkins!” said Fletcher.

“Line up, everyone,” said the photographer, a stout, businesslike girl in a black schmatte. “The light is perfect. Quick, before the clouds cover the sun.”

I sidled up to Irene and looked her right in the eye as if to say that she had no business whatsoever inserting herself into this photograph and she knew it. She smiled back at me with syrupy sorrow, as if to say that she was disappointed that I felt this way but didn’t care to involve herself in my emotional troubles.

“Smile,” barked the photographer.

We all smiled on cue together, smiled again, then again, changed positions, smiled again and again. When we were finished, Emma leaned over and cupped Lola’s abdomen in her hand. “This one made it into the pictures too,” she said. “I’m so glad.”

I noticed with instantaneous, primitive bloodline-protectiveness that Lola held a glass of champagne; I had to restrain myself from snatching it away from her.

“What are you talking about, Mom?” I said indignantly.

“Well,” Lola said, shooting our mother an impatient look, “we were going to announce it later, but I’m pregnant.” She pronounced it “prignunt,” since she’d picked up a strong Australian accent in all her years there. This was only normal, I supposed, but it never failed to startle me when my sister, whom I’d known since she was born, opened her mouth and talked like a person from another hemisphere.

“But you’re drinking,” I said.

“So?” she said mulishly, blank-faced; an ancient urge to smack her surged in me. “One or two glasses of champagne won’t harm the baby.”

“But how could you even take the chance?” Amanda said.

“It’s my baby,” said Lola.

“Our baby,” said Fletcher, sliding his arm along her shoulders and pulling her to him. I thought I saw her stiffen and resist. I wondered briefly what the dynamics of their marriage were; if we had been a family where everyone stuck around and saw each other all the time, I would probably have been privy whether I liked it or not to Fletcher’s half-drunk confidences on the porch after all the women had gone to bed. Or maybe not. In any case, I didn’t know a thing about the adult Lola, her marriage, or her life. She could fill me in on details and anecdotes and feelings until she was blue in the face, but some things couldn’t be explained, you had to be there; and similarly, what would I tell her about everything that had happened to me since I’d last seen her? How could we ever recover all the time we’d spent apart?

When the photographer began to herd O’Flahertys into photogenic configurations, Leonard plopped himself with a sigh onto a bench, looking around him as if he weren’t quite sure who we all were, or where he was, or why. I could see from his bewildered expression that he was trying very hard to piece it together so he wouldn’t have to embarrass himself by asking his wife to explain it all to him again. When the photographer had finished her portraits and excused everyone, Liam and Fletcher went strolling off along the pier toward the end, lighting cigarettes as they went; my sisters and mother and I watched them go. “They’re making friends,” said Emma. “That’s nice.”

“They’re commiserating,” I said. “ ‘What the hell were we thinking? How will we put up with these Thrane girls for the rest of our lives?’ ”

“They should take Leonard with them,” said Emma. “I’m sure he’s got plenty of advice on that front.”

Amanda burst out, “Lola, you’re having a baby? Oh my God, it just hit me!” She swept Lola into a sisterly embrace; I had forgotten about these gusts of sudden affection that occasionally came over my sisters, causing them to throw themselves upon each other’s necks in a passionate détente.

I felt in my breast pocket for the envelope. “Amanda,” I said. “I have a present for you. Actually, it’s for both of you.”

“For me too?” said Lola, pleased.

“Come on,” I said, herding my rosy-faced, embracing sisters toward
a row of empty folding chairs set along the edge of the pier, facing downriver. “It’s a surprise.”

They settled into chairs on either side of me, quietly excited the way they’d been as little girls whenever I told them I’d written a new play, and they could have the smaller roles if they promised not to fidget during my soliloquies.

“Wait for us!” cried our mother, flocking toward us with Irene on her heels. Both their faces, when I turned to look at them, were agog with an avid, transparent eagerness to be part of whatever we young folk were up to. They took the chairs on either side of Amanda and Lola, giggling and fussing with their chairs until they were as close to my sisters as they could get. My mother rested her chin on Amanda’s shoulder, her eyes on the envelope. I didn’t look at Irene.