All was almost in readiness. Along with the killing wine and its cure, to one side were a few caviar sticks and cheese biscuits that Tom had laid on, while farther on, an ice floe frozen forever, the bridal cake waited for eternity.
Since it had already stalled eight days, its mesa and sides stalwart in the hours and quarter month just passed, the cake had an air of Miss Havisham about it, which, spied, was declared sotto voce innumerable times in earshot of the butlers and maids, who adjusted their ties and aprons and searched the ceiling for deliverance.
There was a sneeze.
Lisa appeared at the top of the stairs, only to sneeze again, spin about, and run back up. There was a sound of nose-blowing: the faintest whiff of hunting horn. Lisa returned, steadied herself, and sneezed on the way down.
“I wonder if this is a Freudian cold,” she said beneath the Kleenex over her nose.
“What in hell do you mean by that?” Tom scowled.
“Maybe my nose doesn’t want to get married.” Lisa followed this with a quick laugh.
“Very funny. Very, very funny. Well, if your nose wants to call off the wedding, let it speak.” Tom showed his teeth, nibbling the air much like the courtyard horses, to prove his humor.
Lisa half turned to flee, but another sneeze froze her in place. Any further retreat ceased when several crutches punched down the stairs, swinging between them in his pink coat the director as clown, the happy huntsman as lunatic gymnast. Taking the steps two at a time and swinging his long booted legs as if to project himself over our heads, John descended, talking over his shoulder and not minding where he fiddled his supports.
“It took an hour for the damned ambulance to get there; meanwhile, I twitched and snaked around and screamed so loud that windows slammed a hundred yards off. Six shots didn’t stop my yells. At the hospital, the Doc took one look, turned me over, and—crack! like a kick in the spine—the pain stopped, as did my screams. Then, by God, I began to laugh.”
Turning from John, I plowed through the champagne mob. “Get me one of those,” called John. “Make it two. Hello, Lisa, don’t you look fine, just fine!”
Lisa sneezed.
“My God, look at your nose, Lisa,” John commiserated. “So damn red it looks as if you’d been up five nights boozing!”
Lisa held to her stomach with one hand, her nose with the other, and ran upstairs.
“Thanks a lot,” said Ricki, halfway down.
“What’d I do?” John protested. “Where’s she going?”
“To powder her nose, dimwit.”
“Where’s Mr. Hicks?” said John, escaping swiftly in leapfrog vaults.
“Hello, hello!” He stopped in midhop to wave at all the windows along the back of the dining room, where two dozen or so local noses imprinted the panes.
The villagers, mad, angry, or irritated housewives, hesitated, not knowing how to swallow John’s happy salute.
A few waved back. The rest pulled off, not taken in by his apish Protestant amiability.
“Welcome, welcome!” John called, knowing they could not hear. “It’s the Hollywood sinner here, born in sin, living in sin, and soon to die, writhing, in sin. Hello!”
Some must have read his lips, for no fewer than a half dozen indignant villagers leaped back as if he had leavened the air with brimstone.
“Drink this against the day.” I arrived with the champagne.
“But will it cure at noon?” John drank.
“One hour at a time,” I said. “Where’s the reverend? Oh, there he is. Reverend!”
The reverend came from the hall, smelling of hounds and horses. “I have been out commiserating with them for partaking in this wicked enterprise,” he said, and added quickly, “Oh, not the wedding, for sure. But the hunt. Everyone seems happy. But no one has invited the fox.”
“We asked, but he pleaded business.” John smiled. “Are we ready?”
The Reverend Mr. Hicks grabbed a champagne from a tray as it passed, gulped it, and said, “As we’ll ever be.”
The lords and ladies and liquor merchants gathered, simmering with the good drinks, hiccuping with the bad—a medley of pink coats, celebrating joy; and black, promising unfaithful husbands and mournful wives.
The Reverend Mr. Hicks positioned himself in front of the glare of Tom and the dabbed-at and snuffling nose of Lisa, who peered around as if blind.
“Shouldn’t there be a Bible?” she wondered.
A Bible, the reverend almost cried out, as he searched his empty hands.
Tom scowled but said:
“Yes. While Unitarian, we are Protestants. A Bible!”
The reverend looked around for someone to fill his hands with such a useful tool, which Ricki did in great haste, wondering if it was proper.
Off balance in two ways, the weight of the thing being one, Unitarian practice another, the reverend clenched the book but did not open it, fearing that some lost chapter or verse might leap to disquiet his mind and capsize the ceremony. Placing the Bible like a brick on the lectern, an ignored cornerstone to his peroration, he lit out:
“Have you been living in sin?” he cried.
There was a still moment. I saw the muscles under Tom’s pink riding coat flex and tear themselves in several directions; one to punch, one to pray.
I saw the clear crystal lid come down over one of Tom’s blazing eyes, in profile, shutting out the dear minister.
Lisa’s tongue wandered along her upper lip, seeking a response, and, finding none, slipped back to neutral.
“What was that again?” Tom’s eyes were burning lenses. If they’d been out in the sun, the Reverend Mr. Hicks would long since have gone up in smoke.
“Sin,” said the Reverend Hicks. “Have you been living in it?”
Silence.
Tom said, “As a matter of fact, we have.”
Lisa jabbed his elbow and stared at the floor. There was an outbreak of muffled coughing.
“Oh,” said the Reverend Mr. Hicks. “Well, then.”
What followed was not a ceremony but a sermon and not a sermon but a lecture. Sin was the subject, and the bridal couple the object. Without actual circling and sniffing their hems and cuffs, the reverend managed to make everyone in the room acutely aware of underwear and of ties that choked. He wandered off the subject and then wandered back. It was sin this and sin that, sins of the lovers and future husbands, sins of the put-upon and not always guaranteed brides. Somewhere along in the hour he mislaid the ceremony. Finding it in the corners of his eyes, and in Tom’s concentrated glare, Mr. Hicks hesitated and was about to ricochet back to pure sin, if sin ever was pure, when John shortened the hour.
He let one crutch slip. It slammed the floor with a fine crack and rebounding clatter.
“Tom and Lisa, do you take each other as man and wife!” cried the Reverend Mr. Hicks.
It was over! No one heard the shots or saw wounds or blood. There was a shared gasp from three dozen throats. The reverend slapped his revised Unitarian Bible shut on mostly empty pages, and the locals from the pub and the town villagers, pressed to the windows, leaped back as if caught by lightning, to avoid the direct-current gaze of Tom, and at his elbow the downcast eyes of Lisa, still recirculating her blush. The reverend ran for the champagne. By some accident never to be explained in Ireland, some of the