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anywhere but in the Domain, nor with anyone but Joe and me.
    “So medieval, somehow,” she has said more than once.
    “All that gray stone and green light, and you in the wildflowers like Juliet, and Joe in his gorgeous hood. And only the candles, and the Purcell on the recorder, and of course you and he look exactly like effigies on some old tomb in Westminster Abbey, one that goes back to the Crusades. Are you sure you aren’t brother and sister, separated at birth?”
    “God, I hope not,” Joe said the first time she said it. “If we are we’re surely damned, the way we’ve been carrying on.
    Our issue will be albino idiots with cloven feet.”
    I have thought often of what she said, and what he replied.
    I know he has, too.
    Even his friend Corinne Parker, then a cynical, foul-mouthed, and thoroughly engaging graduate assistant in the Psych Department and now a successful psycholo HILL TOWNS / 25
    gist with a practice in Montview drawn largely from Trinitarians, was touched by the ceremony.
    “It almost made me wish I was straight,” she said not long after the wedding, at the first party we gave in our tiny rented guest cottage behind a big stone house in the village. “The sheer innocence of it could have choked a mastodon. I yearned for white eyelet for a week afterward.”
    Corinne was a lesbian and lived openly with another gay woman in a garage apartment out near the Inn. Nobody particularly cared. One’s sexuality has never been of much concern at Trinity; sensuality is as much an element up here as the thin pure air and the cold sweet spring water. How could it not be, with all this closeness, this raptness, this sheer youngness? Same-sex relationships have always flour-ished here, usually as those all-consuming first friendships that seem peculiar to small colleges, but lines of demarcation blur on the Mountain. The church had an unofficial stance against homosexuality in my time at Trinity, of course, but could hardly afford to make a thing about it, given the ardency of the friendships born in seminary, and generally didn’t bother anyway. Far better to save the salvos for the real sins of venality, materialism, and general worldly tacki-ness.
    “You could have white eyelet if you wanted it,” Joe said, ruffling her short copper thatch. “Who said it’s strictly for girls? Ol’ Cat here is built like a fourteen-year-old basketball center.”
    “I’d look like a fireplug with a tea napkin slung over it,”
    Corinne snarled. “Cat looked like Ophelia on her best day.
    Nope. Amy and I are going to tie the knot in black leather on Harleys, with Three Dog Night for a processional. Y’all can come if you’ll behave.”

    26 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
    Amy left the garage apartment and the Mountain the following year, but Corinne has stayed on, good therapist and good friend that she is. She has another friend now, but when she comes to our house it is usually alone. She said to me once, a few years after Lacey was born, “I know it isn’t any of my business, Cat, but if you ever feel like talking to somebody about this agoraphobic stuff, I think I could help you. I’ve had some real successes with it….”
    I hugged her. “Rinnie, I’m not agoraphobic. I’m just exactly where I want to be. But thanks anyway,” and she smiled and hugged me back. She seldom mentioned it again, but sometimes, at parties at our house, she looked at me thoughtfully, and I knew what she was thinking.
    She and ’Cesca Leatherberry were the only two Trinity students at our wedding. Dr. and Mrs. Pierce were there, of course, and the professor whose assistant I would become in the fall, and the head of Joe’s department and his wife, and two or three other faculty couples to whom I had grown close in my years with the Pierces. Joe’s mother was bedrid-den with emphysema and his father had been dead for some years, but his older brother and sister, Caleb and Sarah, came, taciturn and solid and swarthy, the living