At Weddings and Wakes Read Online Free PDF Page A

surrounded by gardens and woods. It was a beautiful day in late spring and the air there smelled of the sea. There were white garden swings, freshly painted, here and there throughout the woods and most of the paths led to small grottoes where the ceramic face of the Sacred Heart or the Blessed Mother, Saint Francis and Saint Anthony, hung from the trunk of a tree. The children rocked the swings and ran down the paths and once or twice with elaborate ceremony knelt down to pray while their father read the newspaper in the car and Momma and their mother visited inside the convent.
    Just as they were growing tired, even of that holy, enchanted place, and had begun to look around for something else, they saw Momma and their mother and Aunt May coming down the white steps of the house. They didn’t recognize her at first, her hair was curly and short, pale red, and she wore a loose black suit that they knew had belonged to their mother, but then the sun caught her glasses as she glanced up at the sky.
    The three women were halfway to the car before their father saw them and then he hurried to put the paper down and get out to open the back door. When the three women had slid in, he shut the door with great gentleness and then, with some sudden impatience, called to the three children. They rode all the way to Brooklyn squeezed beside him in the front seat and only got out to rearrange themselves when they got to Momma’s street. Aunt May touched their hair before she and Momma climbed the steps to the door, to what would become the rest of her life. She touched their hair and
brushed their cheeks and pressed into the hands of each a damp dollar bill folded to the size of a Chiclet.
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    When they’d finished the nuts they crumbled the stiff plastic bags and then walked with her to the corner to throw them into the wastebasket there. The mailman was just passing by and he tipped his hat and called her Miss Towne. She called him Fred and touched the children on the shoulders as she introduced them. “My sister Lucy’s children,” she said, standing behind them. She spread her arms out as if to take them into her embrace, as if he had offered to take a snapshot.
    â€œAren’t they handsome?” he said. He was a thin man with a long face. He wore his blue-gray hat at a jaunty angle. “And don’t they resemble their aunt—the little one especially.”
    â€œOh my,” Aunt May said. “Don’t wish it on her.”
    They crossed again to the other side of the street and walked in the cooler shade of the buildings back to Momma’s. Upstairs again, she gave them tall glasses of ice water and, from the top drawer of the server, three brand-new ball-point pens marked IBM in gold letters. She sat with their mother at the window beside Momma’s empty chair.
    â€œHe’s not the man I married,” their mother soon said, and Aunt May replied, “This is the worst part of the day’s heat.”
    At the dining-room table, drawing battleships and submarines or houses and flowers on white paper napkins, the children recognized the tenor of this code and so made no attempt to crack it for its meaning.
    â€œA different person entirely,” their mother said.
    â€œHow a man treats his children is what would be important to me.”
    â€œThe children won’t always be there. I have to think about me.”
    â€œNone of us will always be here,” Aunt May said.

    Their mother stood and leaned out the window to feel the white sheets on the line. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “These are long dry.”
    As they drew at the table the children were aware only of the squeal of the clothesline pulley and the snap of the sheets. They didn’t look up to see the elegant coordination the two women fell into as they spread out each sheet between them in that narrow space between the dining-room table and Momma’s chair, snapped it