The Clock Winder (27 page)

At Elizabeth’s house, now, they would all be gathered around and fussing over her, straightening her veil and brushing her suit. Margaret imagined her standing like a totem pole, dead center, allowing herself to be decorated. But she couldn’t picture her coming down this aisle. She turned in her seat, looking toward the doorway, and saw the ushers just stepping inside with carnations in their buttonholes. They looked back at her, all out of the same perplexed brown eyes. Was she on the correct side of the church? Which was the bride’s side?
She couldn’t remember. She stayed where she was, to the right of the altar, and whisked her fan more rapidly.

People began filing in—old ladies, a few awkward men, women who took command of the church the moment they stepped inside. They clutched the ushers’ arms and beamed at them, whispering as they walked (“How’s your mama? How’s that pretty little sister?”), while the ushers stayed remote and self-conscious, and the women’s husbands, a few steps behind, carried their hats like breakable objects. The organ grew more sure of itself. A fat lady slid into Margaret’s pew, trailing long wisps of Arpege. “I finally did make the Greyhound,” she said.

“Oh, good,” said Margaret.

The fat lady frilled out the ruffles at her elbows, touched both earlobes, and pivoted each foot to peer down at her stocking seams. Margaret turned and looked out the window. If she ducked her head, she got a horizontal slice of grass, ranch-house, and the lower halves of several pastel dresses and two black suits heading toward the church. In the center was Elizabeth’s white skirt, drawing nearer—a sight that startled and scared her, as if she herself were involved in this wedding and nervous about its going well.

The fat lady had started talking, apparently to Margaret. “You knew Hannah couldn’t make it,” she said. “She’s having such a lot of trouble with Everett. But
Nellie
will be here. ‘Oh,’ she told me, ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Been waiting a long time to see that boy get married.’ Well, you know. It came as quite a surprise. I had always thought he would marry Alice Gail Pruitt. I expected to see Liz Abbott die an old maid, to tell you the truth.”

“Why is that?” Margaret asked.

“Well, she’s been mighty difficult. Wouldn’t you say?” She kept looking around the church while she spoke, as if she
had lost something. “Didn’t they do a nice job with the flowers, now. A few more wouldn’t hurt, but—
we
had thought she’d lost Dommie forever, but then he broke off with Alice Gail and came right back here where his heart had been all along. Talk about patient! That boy has the patience of a saint. I just hope Liz knows how lucky she is. And her parents! They’ve been angels to her. I said to Harry, I said, speaking for myself I just don’t know how John and Julia do it. ‘If it were me, Julia,’ I told her once—”

As if on cue, Mrs. Abbott started up the aisle on the arm of an usher. She was an older, heavier Elizabeth, but her speech was a continuation of the fat lady’s. Margaret could hear her clearly as she passed. “That child’s
hair!”
she told the usher. “Oh, I begged her to leave it long. ‘Just till after the wedding,’ I told her, ‘that’s all I ask.’ But wouldn’t you know …” She passed on by, a whispering blue shadow wearing white roses and absently patting the usher’s hand. He kept his eyes on his shoes.

Then the organ paused, and a door at the front creaked open and the minister came out. If she hadn’t known ahead of time, Margaret would never have guessed that he was Elizabeth’s father. He was tall and handsome and frightening, dressed in black with a small black book between his clasped hands. He was followed by two young men. When they had arranged themselves at the front, so that Margaret could tell which was the groom, she sat forward to take a closer look. She had noticed how Elizabeth described him. “Sweet,” she had said—not a word that Margaret would have expected from her. But now she saw that nothing else would have been accurate. Dommie Whitehill’s face was the kind that would stay young and trusting till the day he died; his eyes were wide and dark, his chin was round, his face was pale and scrubbed and hopeful. His short brown hair was neatly flattened with water.
If he had any last-minute doubts, none showed in the clear, shining gaze he directed toward the back of the church.

The organ started up, louder this time. What it played was not the traditional march, but then it couldn’t be what Margaret thought it was either—the wedding music from
Lieutenant Kije
. She looked around her; no one else seemed to find anything funny. She looked toward the aisle and saw a frilly blonde in pink—Elizabeth’s sister, it must be, but softer and prettier—keeping pace with some more dignified music in her head and carrying a nosegay. Behind her came Elizabeth, on the arm of a young man whom Margaret assumed to be the brother-in-law. Elizabeth’s white suit was crisp and trim, but without her dungarees she seemed to lose all her style. She walked as if her shoes were too big for her. A short veil stuck out around her face like a peasant’s kerchief. Her escort scowled at the carpet, but Elizabeth’s face was serene and the music had brought out one of her private half-smiles. They passed Margaret and continued forward, beyond a multitude of flowered hats and whisking fans.

When everyone was in place, Margaret sat back and wiped her damp palms on her skirt. “Things are going to be all right, I believe,” the fat lady whispered. Margaret watched Elizabeth’s father open his black book and carefully lay aside a ribbon marker. “Dearly beloved …” he said. He was one of those ministers who develop a whole new tone of voice in front of a congregation. His words rolled over each other, hollow and doomed. Margaret forgot to listen and watched Elizabeth’s straight white back.

But Elizabeth wasn’t listening either. The moment her father started reading she turned toward Dommie, as if the ceremony were some commercial she already knew by heart. She spoke, not whispering but in a low, clear voice. Margaret was too far away to hear what she said. Dommie turned toward
Elizabeth and parted his lips; Elizabeth waited, but when he said nothing she went on speaking. Her father’s voice crashed above their heads, unnoticed.

Now
no
one was listening. Everyone watched Elizabeth. Whispers traveled down the pews. “You would think just this
once
—” the fat lady said. Even Elizabeth’s father seemed to have stopped hearing what he was saying. He spoke with his eyes on Elizabeth, his finger traveling lower on the page, line by line, without his following it. He was going faster and faster, as if he were running some sort of race. “Do you, Dominick Benjamin …” Dommie’s face turned reluctantly from Elizabeth. “I do,” he said, after a pause. He had the strained, preoccupied look of someone interrupted in the middle of more important things. “Do you, Elizabeth Priscilla …”

Elizabeth’s pause was even longer. A fly spiraled toward the ceiling; someone coughed. Elizabeth drew herself up until she was straight and thin, with her elbows pressed to her sides and her feet close together.

“I don’t,” she said.

No one breathed. Elizabeth’s father snapped his book shut.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t,” she said.

Then she turned around, and the organ gave a start and wheezed into
Lieutenant Kije
again. Elizabeth came down the aisle slowly and steadily with her nosegay held exactly right and her head perfectly level. Oh, why didn’t she just turn and run out that little door at the front? How could she bear to travel all that long way by herself? Margaret thought of leaping up and shouting something, anything, just to pull people’s eyes from Elizabeth. But she didn’t. She stayed silent. After one glance at Dommie, frozen before the pulpit, she stared down the aisle as hard as anyone.

It took several minutes for people to realize what had
happened. They just sat there—even the fat lady. Then the organ dwindled out in the middle of a note, and whispers and rustles started up. Mrs. Abbott rose and marched firmly toward her husband. She looped one arm through his and the other through Dommie’s, and led them back out the little door.

“Did you ever?” all the women were asking, rising and clustering together. “Did you ever
hear
of such a thing?” the fat lady said. “I always did want to see somebody do that,” a man told Margaret. She smiled and sidled out of the pew. In the doorway, Elizabeth’s sister stood circled by more flowered hats. She looked dazed. “I don’t understand, I just don’t understand,” she kept saying. A woman with feather earrings said, “Now tell me this, Polly. Had they had a little quarrel or something?”

“Dommie
wouldn’t quarrel,” an old lady said.

“Did they—”

“She
told
us she’d changed her mind,” Polly said. “Told us just as we left the house. Father said no. He said, ‘Liz, now all the guests are here,’ he said, ‘and you owe them a wedding,’ and she said, ‘Well, all right, if a wedding’s what you want.’ But we never thought, I mean, we thought she meant—and Father said she was sure to feel differently, once she was standing at the altar.”

“Well, of course. Of course she would,” someone said.
“All
brides get cold feet.”

“That’s what he told her,” Polly said. “ ‘And they forget about it an hour later,’ he told her, but Liz said, ‘How do
you
know? Maybe they’re just saying that, and they regret it all their lives. It’s a conspiracy,’ she said—oh, but still I never thought—Mother asked if there were anyone else. I mean, anyone,
you
know, but she said no, and you could tell she meant it, she looked so surprised—”

“Excuse me,” Margaret said. She slid sideways through the crowd until she reached the front steps. Then she shaded her eyes and looked all around her. The sun had bleached everything—the grass, the walk, the highway—but in all that whiteness there was no sign of Elizabeth’s wedding suit. She had vanished. All she had left behind were two high-heeled shoes placed neatly side by side on the bottom step.

Margaret walked to her car very slowly. She wanted to give Elizabeth a chance to catch her, in case she needed a ride. But no one called her name. By the time she reached the highway she was feeling a letdown. Now I suppose I’ll never hear from her again, she thought, I’ll never know how this turned out. Then she opened her car door, and there was Elizabeth on the front seat.

She was slouched so far down that she couldn’t be seen from outside, but she didn’t have a fugitive look. She seemed flattened, exhausted, as if her sitting so low were merely poor posture. “Hi there,” she said.

“Elizabeth!”

“You think you could get me out of here?”

Margaret slid in and slammed the door and started the car, all in one motion. When she pulled onto the highway she left streaks of rubber. Anyone watching would have known it was a get-away car. “Elizabeth,” she said, “are you all right?”

“More or less,” said Elizabeth.

But from the stoniness of her face, Margaret guessed that she wanted to be left in peace.

They flew down the highway, across mirages of water that streaked its surface. Margaret wanted to make sure where they were going, but she was afraid to break the silence. Then they entered Ellington, and Elizabeth sat up straighter and looked out the window. “There’s where I went voting,” she said.

“Boating?” Margaret asked. There was no water anywhere, but she couldn’t believe that Elizabeth would mention voting at a time like this.

“Voting. Voting,” said Elizabeth. “Polly’s husband said I ought to.” She sighed and trailed a hand out the window. “There were all these people lined up. Shopkeepers and housewives and people, just waiting and waiting. So
responsible
. I bet you anything they wait like that every voting day, and put in their single votes that hardly matter and go back to their jobs and do the same chores over and over. Just on and on. Just plodding along. Just getting through till they die. You have to admire that. Don’t you? Before then I never thought of it.”

“I admire you,” Margaret said.

“What for?” said Elizabeth, absently. “But when I was waiting to vote I thought, Wouldn’t you think I could do that much? Make some decisions? Get my life in order? Let my parents breathe easy for once? Well, I tried, and you see what happened. Just before the finish line I think no, what if I’m making a mistake? Sometimes I worry that everyone but me knows something I don’t know: they set out their lives without
wondering
, as if they had a few extras stashed away somewhere. Well, I’ve tried to believe it, but I can’t. Things are so permanent. There’s damage you can’t repair.”

“But it took a lot of courage, doing what you did today,” Margaret said.

“Flashes
of courage are easy,” said Elizabeth, with her mind on something else. Then suddenly she spun around and said, “What’s the matter with you? What are you admiring so much? If I was so brave, how’d I get into that wedding in the
first
place? Oh, think about Dommie, he’s always so sweet and patient. And my family doing all that arranging, and people coming all that way for the wedding. But
Dommie
. He’s never
said a mean thing in his life, or done anything but hope to be loved. What am I going to tell him now?”

From far back in Margaret’s mind, where she hadn’t even known it existed, came the picture of Dommie’s face as he watched Elizabeth leaving him. His eyes were blank and stricken; his mouth was closed, unprotesting. He hadn’t yet realized what was happening to him. He unfolded before her eyes as complete and as finely detailed as if the glance she had given him had taken whole minutes, as if she had known him for years and had memorized that picture of him line by line and dreamed of it every night. She blinked and widened her eyes, tightening her hands on the wheel as she drove.

“Well, shoot, Margaret,” said Elizabeth. “It’s weddings you cry at, not the escapes from them.”

“So,” said Melissa, settling herself in the car. “How’d the wedding go?” “It didn’t.”

“It didn’t? What happened?”

“She got to the altar and said, ‘I don’t,’ ” said Margaret. She laughed, surprising herself. “Well, it really wasn’t funny, of course.”