A Good House (37 page)

When Bill heard the first bars of what he considered to be a legitimate waltz, he bowed low to Margaret and guided her in among the others. He was astonishingly smooth for a man in his eighties, smooth as butter.

Daphne moved from table to table alone to talk to the guests and to thank them. Maggie and Josh had opened many of the gifts and people had been thoughtful in the choices, and generous. After she’d finished her rounds, as she was making her way back to her table, she noticed Patrick walking across the floor toward her. He was going to ask her to dance, and what could be more normal, more civilized? Of course he would be counting on her not to make a scene in front of all these people, “a public spectacle of yourself,” as Grandma Ferguson used to call it, which, when Daphne was a girl, had never failed to make her extremely curious about private spectacles. She had imagined these going on behind closed doors all over town, muted and bound by walls and unwitnessed, but still, as the word itself suggested, spectacular, still something to be part of.

Those nearly forgotten Saturday nights out at the Casino dances had not been for naught. Unlike Josh, unlike John, neither of whom was old enough or experienced enough to understand that it was necessary to take control of a woman on the dance floor, Patrick guided her with confidence and grace, and listening to the old Motown song, she was almost charmed. But she was waiting for him to acknowledge his responsibility, his mistake. It did not have to be complicated, he did not have to dredge up a fake humility. He could say, for instance, All right, I’m sorry, I likely overstepped. I am sorry. When he tried instead for the pretence of oblivion, nodding at people and smiling, lifting his arm from her back to wave to someone sitting at a table, she let go his hand and pinched the flesh above his thumb, hard. “I want you to leave us alone,” she said.

Anyone watching them dance and talk might have thought Patrick was having one of the best nights of his life. His reportedly brilliant niece was successfully launched into the world with her equally brilliant young husband, and Daphne looked so obviously, deservedly content. Many people assumed it had been Patrick’s money that had made things a little easier for Daphne.

“Don’t you ever ask yourself,” he asked, nodding again at someone behind her, “if this might be too much for the girls to carry? If
you
might be too much for them to carry?”

“No,” she said. “That is
not
something I ask myself. You think you know them but you haven’t got even a partial understanding of how strong they are.” She pinched him again.

“Jesus,” he said, dropping his hand to his side. “Are they in the habit of inflicting pain on innocent bystanders like their brat mother?”

“We can only hope,” she said.

The song ended and Patrick took her back to her table, and before she could sit down Murray was beside her, leading her onto the floor again.

After he got her surrounded, buried in the crowd of dancers, he asked, “Did you get a chance to share a few thoughts with Patrick?”

“One or two,” she said.

He pulled her a bit closer but only to steady her. “There is a small
possibility that he’s right,” he said. “He sometimes does have a wonky kind of instinct. You have to give him that.”

“Are you ready to give him that?” she asked. “Is Kate ready?” Saying Kate’s name, she realized that it was not very fair to Kate, using her for this.

“I’m just wondering if it could be time,” he said. “We didn’t ever decide that it would never happen. Did we? Was that our intention?”

“What if it doesn’t make them happy?” she asked, shaking a bit now, her hands and her arms and her bare shoulders. “What then?”

“Why wouldn’t it?” he asked, pulling back to look down at her face, which meant he expected an answer. He didn’t get his answer but in the expectation, in the blunt calm of his expectation, the conceit that had long since settled in a dark, guarded corner of her heart, the conviction that it was enough to mean no harm, that this could keep her safe, and innocent, shifted. Shifted and broke apart and came scraping out into the open chambers of her heart like jagged shards of shrapnel. For better or worse, Murray had decided that this was the day to let her know what the lie had cost him, and that he might want recompense. That he might be prepared, finally, to desert her.

When he turned her to move off the floor, he put his hand, absently, on the firm rise of her rear end. She could feel in the dead weight of the gesture how little it meant to him now and she remembered that hand, or an entirely different hand attached to an entirely different man, resting comfortably on her body, at home on her body, anywhere.

Just before they joined the others at the table, he bent down to her. “This is something we could do,” he said, already leaving her, reaching out for Sarah, who apparently had made him promise her a jive, if jives there were.

She watched Murray and Sarah go at it. They were not the only ones on the floor, as Murray had no doubt feared, because Jill and Ryan and Rebecca and her boyfriend soon joined them. Watching Murray spin Sarah, watching him pull her in close and fling her out again, she wondered where on earth he’d learned to do that. And then she thought, Things are going to change.

She excused herself to go to the clammy cement-block washroom,
telling herself as she skirted the dancers, as she nodded and laughed at her dancing guests, this whole damned wedding was a mistake. My mistake. The kids didn’t care if they had a big day, it was me, greedy for a good time. For all of us to be together, to mark their happiness with a bit of our own. She was almost at the washroom door when Patrick’s John grabbed her hand and suggested with some quick footwork and a quirky grin and a hopeful tilt of his head that they could join the jivers. “Can’t,” she said, pointing to the washroom. “Sorry.” John just shrugged and gave her a quick bear hug before he let her go, holding her a few seconds longer than he might have because Stephen was coming at them with his video camera, ducking through the dancers in his beautiful waistcoat, a fine blue silk shot with gold thread.

She was making her way to the washroom to cry and John’s bear hug had nearly brought it on before she got herself free. And what might John have done if this middle-aged woman, this aunt whom he probably assumed to be entirely grown up and without any serious doubts in her heart, and certainly without shrapnel, had started to bawl in his strong, innocent arms? Laugh and hug her harder, that was her best guess. People like John, young people, seemed to put a lot of faith in a big, spontaneous display of physical affection and, from what she’d seen, most of them were absolutely sincere with their hugs, as if the raunchy pleasure of sex, so highly prized and so hard won by their parents, was finally not quite enough.

The washroom was stuffed full of high-spirited young women touching up their lipstick and blush and mascara and trading earrings and hiking their carefully understated but elegant dresses high to adjust their pantyhose. Friends, all of them. Brash, beautiful, and dangerous to know, that’s what they’d called themselves when they were teenagers stretched out on Daphne’s sofa and across her chairs and sprawled on the rug with pillows, their legs intertwined as they talked far into their teenaged nights, deciding together exactly what kind of women they were getting ready to become.

She could not retreat back out to the dance floor because in this riotous company she herself quickly became what these young women believed her to be, which was nothing more or less than
their friend’s middle-aged mother, the lovely, proud, and evidently beloved mother of the bride. Pleased for her and with themselves, because in fact almost all of them had grown up to be what both she and most of their own mothers had promised they might, they passed her around the small crowded washroom, from embrace to embrace, and after she finally got herself safely locked in a cubicle she couldn’t even pee, let alone cry.

Sitting there waiting for a reasoned calm to overtake her, willing it, because it was something very much like calm she was going to need, she listened to the excited voices on the other side of the partition as they interrupted and contradicted and verified each other, each one of them fighting to hold her own in the chaos. It is chaos, she thought. That’s what they provide for each other. There was a softening of the voices and then the more distinct sound of only two or three of them still standing at the mirrors and then the certain silence of an emptied room. Calm in an empty washroom, she thought. Well, fine.

She opened the cubicle door to a wavy, squared-off reflection of her small, proud, evidently beloved self in a deep raspberry linen two-piece dress, the colour Jill’s decision and just exactly right for this day, for this night of dancing. Turning on the tap at the sink, at the mirror, which was not wavy at all if you stood close enough, she saw in the damp, god-awful light that her bare shoulders looked cold but that her hair, a thick, robust, and envied silver grey, was holding fine, and that the skin on her neck beneath her jaw was smooth and taut, and that her face was broken, illuminated by a clean, white, unanticipated smile. A smile from nowhere.

At the house, before they’d come over to the dance, she had gathered her hair and tied it at the nape of her neck with a soft, wide silver ribbon and she understood now, in this clammy quiet, that she had gathered and secured her hair deliberately, to expose the widow’s peak, to remind at least a few of the dancers, to remind herself, that there had once been among them a very pretty woman named Sylvia. Who would have danced her heart out on a night like this. So, she thought, placing a hand over each bare shoulder, watching the smile die off like one of Jill’s alien dreams, this is the kind of
thing I might do with my life. I could amuse myself with the arrangement of hair, and memories. I could make myself smile.

The music had stopped. When she came out of the washroom, she saw that Maggie and Jill had gone to the middle of the cleared dance floor. Everyone made a large circle around them as Maggie lifted the satin hem of her gown and Jill pulled Sylvia’s white lace garter down and slipped it over Maggie’s arched foot. A small herd of young men stood ready, not one of them even pretending to look anxious to be anyone’s groom, and when Maggie turned to throw the garter over her shoulder toward them, it was caught by Andy’s six-year-old grandson Tom, a soccer player in his first suit, who dove hard to the floor to make his catch. It looked as if Jill had decided that she might want to wear the garter too, some day, because she kicked off her buttercup yellow heels and chased the squealing Tom through the crowd to make him give it up.

Patrick and Murray, after they’d had their turns with Maggie and Margaret and Daphne and Jill and Andy and Sarah and Meg, danced with their wives, sometimes switching off, although Stephanie and Kate tried to assure them they didn’t have to be babysat. These two women did have much in common and when they were not up dancing they were content to huddle together at one of the front tables, a white woman in a black dress and a black woman in a white dress, watching the dancers and drinking wine and chatting easily, guessing correctly that the people who moved past the table who couldn’t recall their names would call them simply the second wives. But they didn’t care. This was what they were, almost happy sixty-year-old second wives.

After several glasses of wine, certainly more than she might have had under normal circumstances, Kate leaned close to Stephanie’s ear. “So tell me,” she said. “Has everyone just always known?”

Stephanie shook her head. “No,” she said. “No. Not at all. I’ve always assumed it was some married doctor. Or two married doctors.”

Kate lifted her wineglass at Patrick’s son John, who was dancing past with a child lifted up into his arms, his own sweet daughter done up in a layered froth of pale organza. As they danced, the child
rested her fat cheek on his shoulder and watched the strangers’ faces floating around her own, fighting with all her small might to resist the pull of sleep.

“I wonder if I did realize,” Kate said, “at some subterranean level. And it would be interesting to know now how much I actually care.”

“I’m sorry for you in this,” Stephanie said, thinking, God help me, what a paltry combination of words.

“Maybe it’s all right,” Kate said. She was grinning at Margaret, who looked almost jubilant in the sturdy young arms of the best man, what was his name? Mark. “There is a possibility that I can live with this,” she said. “It would take a very large effort to foul things for Maggie and Jill. And what kind of person would do that?” She turned to look at Stephanie’s face. “Am I such a person?”

Stephanie, too, was smiling at Margaret and Mark, who were approaching the table now. “This Mark,” she said, just under her breath, “is an astonishingly handsome young man. Oh, if I were young again,” she said, “I’d have me some of that.” Studying the small movements of Margaret’s face as she came near, a face that was at that moment a miraculous combination of absolute control and a beautifully aged contentment, Stephanie decided that this thing they had ahead of them, the death of Daphne’s private, puzzling lie and the subsequent exposure of the bald and simple truth, could easily, with just a bit of carelessness, turn into something beyond even Margaret’s orchestration. “I can’t say if you are such a person,” she said to Kate, quietly. “I shouldn’t say. But I think not.”

Kate had pulled her chair up closer to the table to allow Margaret to pass behind her. “I suppose I think not too,” she said, and just as she was saying these words, Margaret leaned down to kiss the top of her head. A coincidence, she thought, surely. Margaret was the last person who would believe she could be bought with a kiss on the top of the head.

After the short visit from Margaret and Mark, Sarah drifted by the table and throughout the evening Andy sat down with them several times and started to talk, but she never stayed long. Someone always turned up to coax her to her feet and she went every time, eager and laughing and by the end of the night sweating, which she
said had embarrassed her once upon a time but didn’t now. All night people made a point of telling Andy how wonderful she looked. For some reason, maybe Krissy had given her a nudge in that direction, she had started to colour her hair blonde again and she could still dress because she hadn’t gained an ounce in forty years, not since she was a teenager. She’d tell you this.