At Weddings and Wakes Read Online Free PDF Page B

a piece of newspaper, dirtying her hands and each white skinless potato so that by the time she was finished she looked as if she herself had plucked them from the field. She handed the pot to Aunt May, who rinsed them at the sink and then put them on to boil. Their mother fanned herself with a wet dish towel. Aunt May’s glasses were rimmed with dots of perspiration that looked under the thick lenses like caught tears.
    Momma got up to sprinkle some more flour and cut out the biscuits with a tumbler, when the front door opened and closed. “There’s Agnes,” May said just as another door, the one off the living room, opened and closed again.
    â€œAt last,” their mother said and left the room.
    When she returned she held a silver ice bucket with a hinged handle and a silver set of tongs. She set them in the sink and then went to the refrigerator and withdrew two trays of ice from its small steaming box of a freezer. She brought these to the sink and banged and cracked and muttered under her breath until she had the bucket filled. She ran water into the trays and carefully returned them to the freezer while Aunt May filled the kettle and put it on the stove.
    The end of this long dull day was not yet near but it was at
last a possibility and the children sat up a little as they snapped the remaining beans in half and tossed them with some finality into the colander.
    Their mother lifted the silver ice bucket. Aunt May lifted her glasses and wiped a Kleenex across her eyes. In single file the children followed the two women into the living room, where the lights seemed to go up by themselves.
    The tableau was familiar and enchanting and would be remembered by the children for the rest of their lives with the same nostalgia and bitterness with which they recalled the Latin Mass. Their mother placed the ice bucket on the lacquered surface of the delicate cart as Aunt May moved past her to take the huge green chair in the corner. A door off the living room opened and Aunt Agnes emerged, broad and tall and severe, in a slim black skirt and pale silk blouse, stockings, and flat black slippers embroidered with red and gold. She accepted a kiss from each of the children (her perfume thick and mellow, the perfume that filled theater lobbies and office buildings) and then moved to the silver cart, where she slid open a small door and one by one took out three stubby glasses etched with white lilies. She dropped two pieces of ice into each and then from the crowd of elegant bottles, square and round and dimpled, plucked one that was dark green, with a red-and-silver stopper. She poured ginger ale into each of the three glasses and then handed them one at a time to the children. They took them to the couch just as Aunt Veronica entered the room from Momma’s bedroom door. She was dressed now, in a shiny cotton dress of pale beige with small, windblown sailboats circling its wide hem. With some makeup on and the sunlight behind her, her face seemed less abused and her smile for a moment disguised both the scars and the puffiness and made her seem young and fresh and pretty.
    She went to the couch and taking the younger girl on her
lap spoke warmly to her three sisters, the vibration of her deep voice, the press of her soft breasts, even the beating of her heart, making themselves felt through the material of the girl’s thin summer dress and all along her spine.
    This was the aunt she loved most. Her sister preferred Agnes and was watching her now with great care, memorizing the way she poured the liquor into the tall pitcher of ice, stirred it with a glass rod, poured it again through a silver strainer and into each delicately stemmed glass. Her brother preferred May and so it might only have been by default that the youngest one offered her loyalty to Veronica, but once offered, it had stuck fast. Veronica, after all, was the youngest one, too—the youngest child of the dead mother who had lived only a