Hostages to Fortune Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the wedding ceremony and the supper afterwards their little party still had the clubhouse to themselves. There in the sitting room he, his best man, and the minister had waited for the bride and her bridesmaid to come downstairs. She wore the cameo brooch that had been Eddie’s grandmother’s and the wristwatch they together had bought her just that morning, a pearl necklace borrowed from Pris, and a blouse the blue of her shining eyes. She carried a bouquet of lilies of the valley gathered in the locust grove beyond the pond, and whenever in later years he looked at Tony’s wedding picture of them hanging on the wall here he smelled again their heady, hypnotic perfume. Pris played the wedding march on the old upright piano and then joined them on the terrace for the service and the exchange of vows and of rings—to avoid embarrassing observations he was wearing his now, although now, following his loss of weight and the thinning of his fingers, he could, for the first time in years, slip it off. The cook had produced a wedding cake. After supper a conspiracy of thoughtfulness and delicacy had emptied the place. The kitchen staff had hurried through their cleaning up and betaken themselves home, Eddie had given himself the night off, the Thayers had chosen a distant section of the stream to fish the evening rise, and now at nightfall the newlyweds had it all to themselves. So determinedly out of this world, care banished, pleasure decreed, it was the perfect hideaway for a honeymoon. Cathy declared she would not have exchanged it for any other.
    The sun had shed over everything its last alchemical glow and then withdrawn, the dusk drew around them its sheltering curtain. By moving her things into his room, their first domestic arrangement, they transformed it into their room. The early nightcap he mixed for them was not entered on the charge account; at Eddie’s insistence, everything was on the house tonight. He put a record on the phonograph and counted his blessings while, to the sobbing of saxophones and the keening of clarinets, Frank Sinatra lamented his lucklessness in love. For him there were friends waiting to throw shoes and rice. He wouldn’t have to dream the rest. The fullness of each moment made it seem that time had stopped to attend upon them. A moon the color of honey beamed down on the flagstones of the terrace. Their hymeneal, the multimyriad murmur of the peepers, with no discordant owl to screech that night, was like some sustained celestial hum, like the voices of the stars, of which the sky was so brim full that the fireflies flickering in the shadows seemed to be a shower of them fallen from the superfluity.
    â€œAlone at last, Mrs. Curtis,” he said.
    â€œMrs. Curtis. Mrs. Curtis. Mrs. Curtis.” She seemed to turn the name one way and another so that its facets might all sparkle like a gem. “That’s me. Mrs. Curtis. That’s my name. I’ve been trying it on myself all afternoon but you’re the first person to call me by it. Oh, dear, I hope I’m not about to spoil things by crying.”
    â€œIt will take a little getting used to,” he said.
    â€œMmh, but already I like the sound of it,” she said.
    â€œMaybe it will seem more like your own when it’s something more than just a name,” he said.
    â€œYes,” she agreed, then, comprehending his meaning, colored so deeply it was visible by moonlight.
    He took her drink from her, set it beside his on the parapet, and there they left them, unfinished.
    Upstairs he swept her off her feet and carried her over the threshold, marveling to himself at her tininess, and then feeling some apprehension over it. She closed the door behind them and he set her down. As he undid her buttons, unzipped her zipper, she said, “I feel like a present being unwrapped. I hope I’m what you were wanting.”
    â€œYou are a present,” he said. “And just what I’ve