The Time of Her Life (34 page)

Lily’s mother had arranged for the prelude and wedding music to be performed by a string quartet and a singer from the College
of Music of Cincinnati, and although the strings were muted by the heat, the soprano’s voice was vivid. Lily’s five attendants
and the two flower girls, sprinkling rose petals from a basket they carried between them, made their way along the shady aisle
beneath those tall trees and emerged blinking in the sudden dazzle of sunlight in the garden, proceeding in traditional hesitation
step along the freshly raked gravel path dividing the rows and rows of chairs set out upon the grass.

One by one they arranged themselves across from the groomsmen on the other side of the trellised arbor where huge, clumsy-seeming
bumblebees drank from the throats of the trumpet flowers, causing a little uneasiness among the
bridesmaids. Robert’s father stood directly beneath the arbor, smiling solemnly, ignoring the bees, and waited to perform
the marriage ceremony.

But when Lily emerged on Leo’s arm from the shadows of the fervidly blooming catalpa trees, Warren startled visibly, lifting
his hand and splaying his fingers across his chest. His gesture expressed not only surprise but dismay, and it appeared to
a few of the onlookers that Warren hadn’t believed until that moment that it was a
marriage
that was about to take place. It caught the attention of the assembled guests particularly, of course, because Warren was
playing out a role that generally fell to the groom. It was Robert, though, who grasped Warren’s arm to steady him. Nevertheless,
just for a moment Warren’s attitude was stripped bare of any pretense, as if he were a man who had lost any possibility of
comfort in the world.

Lily saw nothing of that momentary drama. But Warren had been taken unawares by this clear bit of evidence that his youth
was over. That he and Robert and Lily had become adults. It was the moment when he understood for the first time—grasped the
clean, severe truth of the fact—that the three of them had become who they had become, and from now on the association of
their youth would be relegated to nostalgic musings and remembrances. It was the first moment that Warren looked back at the
years of his childhood and thought that they seemed to have flown by so fast.

Lily stepped from the filtered light into the blinding sunshine, her hand resting lightly on Leo Scofield’s arm, so that she
paused for a moment when he did while he waited to get his bearings in the bright day. For just an instant while she hesitated
alongside her father she had a cursory glimpse of the waiting bridal party. She caught the gleam of her cousin Warren’s fair
hair in juxtaposition to Robert’s darker head, and a hazy, amorphous happiness clarified itself in one swift thought before
she stepped forward once again: Here we are together. The three of us. Here we are again at last. And then she remembered
to move forward with care in order to
accommodate her heavy satin train. She considered the next step and then the next, her mind fully concentrated on her progress.
But in those few seconds, that fragmentary passage of time, she had satisfied herself that Robert Butler and Warren Scofield
were both hers once again and ever after. And everyone looking on had seen—just during that tiny hesitation as she had stepped
from the shadows into the sudden, shimmering, metallic illumination, in her pale dress and with her yellow hair—that Lily
was as shocking and slender and brilliant with potential as the blade of a knife.

It was one of those singular moments that is seared into a collective sensibility. In that instant when simultaneously Lily
stepped into the garden on her father’s arm and Warren Scofield clutched his heart, there was a redefinition of Lily. That
day in 1913, at just a little past two o’clock in the afternoon, on Saturday, June 28, Lily accumulated real consequence in
the town of Washburn. Within the blink of an eye she acquired a reputation for possessing unparalleled charm and remarkable,
if unconventional, beauty. It was the very same moment, of course, that Warren Scofield was privately acknowledged by many
of the wedding guests to have suffered a broken heart.

“Riveting…. An austerely, exquisitely beautiful book…. Dew’s sophistication is matched by her ability to keep the reader glued
to the page.” —D
AN
C
RYER
,
Newsday

“A writer with a special gift for charting the subtle tidal flow of emotions that make up daily life…. Mrs. Dew can convey,
with a skill matched by few writers today, the quick, peculiar shifts in feelings that we experience, moment to moment, day
to day…. In
The Time of Her Life
, she uses this ability to map out the ambiguities of the Parkses’ marriage, and to show the devastating consequences that
this unstable alliance has on their daughter.”

—M
ICHIKO
K
AKUTANI
,
New York Times

“A powerful and disturbing book about a family gone wrong.”

—A
NNE
T
YLER

“Without sentimentality or bitterness, Robb Forman Dew portrays the feral, stray, sly motives wriggling through the foundations
of the American home…. Once Dew starts up her story, nothing can stop it.”

—J
UDITH
M
OORE
,
Los Angeles Times