The Lockwood Concern (31 page)

list to discover, individually, that the elderly, square-jawed, iron-faced gentleman who greeted everyone was not Theron Wynne, the bride's father; but they quickly found out what was what and who was who. If the bride's father could not afford such a display, at least he, or his daughter, stood in well enough with the money branch, and that was the next best thing. "Do you wish we were being married in the church in Hilltop, without all this fuss?" said George Lockwood the day before the wedding. "Truthfully, no. He has all that money, Cousin Tom, and all the fuss doesn't bother me. I feel as though I were just going to a big wedding, instead of being the bride." "You don't feel like a bride?" "No. Tomorrow I will, I'll have to act the part and I'm not very good at acting. He'll want me to be pretty, and modest, all the things the bride should be. But all this other business might as well be happening to someone else. How do you feel?" "Probably like your father must feel. That we have to be here, but only out of courtesy. Not to you, but to your cousin. The one that's most pleased, next to Mr. Wynne, is my father. He and my mother had a big wedding, too, for those times." "I wish your mother could have been here." "Yes," said George Lockwood, but in truth he had not previously given any thought to his mother. The Presbyterian Wynnes and the Lutheran Lockwoods agreed that the only nearby churches - the Methodist of the Welsh and the Roman Catholic of the hish - were not suitable, and Tom Wynne's wish to have the religious ceremony in his house was complied with more or less automatically. The decision limited the number of persons who could attend the ceremony, but in Tom Wynne's words, it meant fewer weeping women. It also restricted the number of young people in the bridal party, a fact which Abraham Lockwood did not find to his liking. "I wish you could have had more ushers," he told his son. "Why? Four's enough, with Pen." "Oh, it's nice to have a lot of ushers," said Abraham Lockwood, thinking of the Lockwood Concern. "Why?" said George Lockwood. "It'd be different if it were a big church wedding, but with so few at the ceremony it'd be ostentatious of me to surround myself with ten or fifteen friends of mine." "Ostentatious. You are quite right," said Abraham Lockwood. The boy pleased him; he was that much more alert to the rules of good form, thus already habituated to one of the essentials of the Concern. The bride and groom marched and stood and waltzed through the ceremonies, religious and secular; briefly touching and being touched by a thousand men and women; saying a word, uttering a name, smiling when they did not know or could not remember a face in the brigade of guests. Late in the reception there was a shower of rain, and in the confusion of guests hurrying from tent to tent, George and Agnes Lockwood sneaked up to the mansion and changed into their traveling clothes. Inexplicably the cry, "They're leaving, " went around and became a solid chorus, and the crowd pushed inside the mansion and blocked the main stairway. Standing on the first landing, Agnes looked down at the crowd and then in dismay at George. "They'll let us through, don't worry," he said. "Where's your bouquet? You haven't thrown your bouquet!" someone called to her. "I don't know what I did with it," said Agnes to her husband. "Never mind," he said, and then, to the crowd: "Will you let us through, please?" "Your bouquet Your bouquet!" It became a chant, and now for the first time Agnes lost her poise. The mass of humanity, the half but only half humorous demand for her bouquet, and then, at the far edge of the crowd, the sight of her father helpless to reach her to say goodbye - were all too much for her. "I'm frightened," she said to her husband, and seized his arm. "Nobody's going to hurt you," he said, roughly. "They'll throw a little rice, that's all." "I can't go down these stairs. I can't move. Take me around the back stairs," she said. "Please!" "Oh, Christ. All right." A Brewster landau with a pair of cobs and Tom Wynne's coachman on the box was waiting as a decoy at the foot of the porch steps. Its purpose was to mislead the guests while the bride and groom slipped out a side door and eluded the more exuberant merrymakers by riding off in a mule-drawn ambulance. "We can go out the kitchen door and make a run for it," said George Lockwood. The maneuver was successful, and the bride and groom drove away unnoticed while the clamor continued inside the mansion and on the porch and lawn. They sat on folded blankets inside the meat wagon, as the miners called it, and the mules proceeded at a dainty trot to the railway siding. It was about three miles from the mansion to the waiting locomotive and coach that would take them to Mauch Chunk. Agnes was still shaking and out of breath when they reached the siding. "Now don't have hysterics," said George Lockwood. "That's what I've been fighting. I'm sorry, but I haven't been able to say a word." "That's all right. Just try to calm down." They were alone in the coach. "Nobody's going to bother you now," said George Lockwood. "We'll be at Mauch Chunk in plenty of time for the New York train, and nobody's going to know us. We'll be in New York City before eleven o'clock." Once aboard the New York train Agnes Wynne Lockwood relaxed with an audible sigh. "Everything went well right up to the end, and then something happened to me. I did everything wrong. I never said goodbye to Cousin Tom. I didn't throw my bouquet, and Ruth Hagenbeck was so counting on it. And then those people packed in there, and poor Father. You didn't see him, did you?" "No." "I'll never forget his face. Trying to smile to me, but hemmed in, crushed, and unable to move in or out. Mother was there to help me change, but poor Father. I know he wanted to give me one last kiss." "Really, Agnes. I'm not planning to drop you into the Hudson River." "Poor George. I wouldn't blame you if you did." "Would you mind if I went out and smoked a cigarette?" "Not at all. I wish I had something like a cigarette, but you go ahead and maybe I'll collapse for a few minutes." They had a suite in the hotel, and Agnes immediately declared she was hungry. "You must be, too," she said. "We haven't really had anything all day." "Shall we have champagne?" "Do you mind if we don't? I never want to taste it again. All I want is something like scrambled eggs and some tea." "All right. Scrambled eggs for two. Pot of tea. Pot of coffee, and a split of champagne." "Very good sir," said the waiter. "In about twenty minutes, sir?" Agnes unpacked, hung things in the wardrobe and put other things in the bureau drawers, gazed out the window at the midnight activity in Herald Square, but did not succeed in using up the half hour that passed before the supper arrived. She was wearing a shirtwaist and skirt, part of her going-away outfit. "I wish you'd say something," she said. "What would you like me to say?" "Well, we're usually so talkative." "I know we are, but circumstances are different now." "That's why I wish you'd talk." "They affect me, too, Agnes. The circumstances." "Oh. I guess I didn't think of that. I didn't think of your side of it. Purely selfish on my part. Well, I'm glad you're nervous, too. Mothers tell their daughters some things, but I never heard of a mother yet that advised her daughter on how to make conversation on the wedding night." "There's all the time in the world for conversation." "All the same, I wish I had something to talk about for five minutes now." "You're talking. Keep on." "But you're not helping. Ah, our supper." The tactful waiter had brought two champagne glasses, and when he left, George Lockwood raised his glass. "To you, Agnes, I hope you'll be happy." "Of course I'll be happy, George. We have something to gether that maybe I don't altogether understand it, but it's us." They touched glasses, sipped the wine, and began their first conjugal meal. "I wasn't so hungry after all," said Agnes. She got up and went to the bedroom, closing the door behind her. Fifteen, twenty minutes later he opened the bedroom door. The room was in darkness and Agnes was in bed. "Are you awake?" he said. "Heavens, yes," she said. "I've never been so awake in all my life." He undressed and got into bed beside her, immediately discovering that she was completely nude. He had not touched a woman's body in a year's time, and in the frenzy of first holding her to him he moved his hand everywhere, and she put her arms around his neck. But after the first minute his hand returned to her hard nipples and found no softness behind them. From the waist up she was almost a boy, and he had so much and for so long wanted a woman. He opened her legs and entered her, and she came back at him like a woman in pleasure and some pain, and that much she knew how to do. She brought him quickly to climax and held on to him while trying to reach it herself, but he slid out of her and she was a long time in realizing that for now she must give up.. They had not spoken a word, but now she said, "You'll teach me, won't you?" "Yes," he said. But he could not teach her to be Lalie Fenstermacher. On the death of Tom Wynne, a year after her marriage to George Lockwood and five months after her first miscarriage, Agnes Lockwood inherited $100,000 outright and $50,000 in a trust fund for her children, if any, the same to become hers if after ten years she had no living children. It was small money in comparison with George Lockwood's personal fortune and his prospective inheritance from Abraham Lockwood; but it was hers. The trust fund for the children was being administered by a Wilkes-Barre bank - seventy miles removed from Swedish Haven. The $100,000 was in the form of stocks and bonds of the Wynne Coal Company, which she could not dispose of without first offering to sell back to the Company. "It's nice to be independent," said George Lockwood. "Well, it is," said Agnes Lockwood. "Now I don't have to ask you for money all the time." "I haven't noticed that you ask me all the time." "Every time I need it." "Have I ever refused you? Have I ever even questioned you?" "No, you're very generous. But it's always been your money. Now I have a little of my own, and if I buy you something, you won't be paying for it. It's nice to be able to give things, George." "Yes. It gets a bit tiresome you'll find. To be always on the giving end, I mean." "Well, hereafter you can be on the receiving end, too." "It'll be a novelty, I assure you." "I, on the other hand, have never been able to give as many things as I wanted to." "You were never poor, Agnes." "Not exactly, but money was always scarce. We paid no rent, we bought things wholesale at the Company store. We got passes on the railroad when we traveled. But Father never had much cash, and Mother's family had to watch every penny." "Well, your father's well fixed now. What's he going to do with his hundred thousand?" "Take Mother on a trip to Egypt, first. Then he wants to write a book." "About Egypt?" "Oh, no. A sort of history of the Wynne family in the United States, but mostly about Cousin Tom Wynne. And he'd like to get in a lot of things about the woods and streams that he loves to roam around. Father was never meant to be cooped up in an office." "I just wonder who'd buy a book about Tom Wynne and the woods up that way. I know I'd read a book about my grandfather, but not one about Tom Wynne. Unless of course your father intends to expose some family secret. But knowing him, I don't expect that." "You're always so sure that Cousin Tom had some guilty secrets to expose." "I'm convinced that any man that has over $5000 has some guilty secrets." "Does that include the Lockwood family?" "Good Lord, I could begin with the Lockwood family." "But you're honest, and your father's honest." "Till proven otherwise." "George, you always like to pose as semi-rascal. Why?" "It's not a pose, Agnes," he said. "I think you want to be like your father." "You don't think my father's a rascal, or a semi-rascal, surely?" "He's much closer to it than you are. As old as he is, and even if he is my father-in-law, he can make me feel as if I didn't have any clothes on, just the way he looks at me sometimes." "Don't I make you feel that way too?" "It isn't the same. All you have to do is ask me, or not even ask me. We're husband and wife, and we have that relation. Those relations. But your father is my father-in-law, and he shouldn't be thinking those things." "You can't hang a man for his thoughts." "No. Not for his thoughts." "The way you say that - has there ever been more than thoughts?" "Not with me." "With someone else? My father and someone else? Someone in particular?" "Maybe it only happened once." "Really? What?" "Something I saw. Last Friday. He was sitting by the summer house, in his rocker, and there was a woman there sitting beside him. I could see she had her hand in his trousers, fondling "Who was the woman?" "I didn't know her. I'd never seen her before. But she had her hand all the way in." "I'll be damned. Right out in the open? Where were you?" "In the bay window, the second-story bay window. I didn't know he was expecting company, and I was surprised to see he had someone with him." "Is that all she did?" "All I saw, but I watched them for at least five minutes and they went right on talking while she fondled him." "He do anything to her?" "No, not a thing. She wasn't a young woman, by any means. But she was stylishly dressed. It could have been someone he'd known a long time ago, but I never knew people that old carried on that way." "I didn't think they could." "Well, it was quite a shock to me, to see those two old people laughing and talking and the woman with her hand in your father's trousers." "I wonder who it could have been. And yet I don't suppose I'll ever know. Unless she comes back. Would you recognize her if you saw her again?" "Oh, I think I would," said Agnes Wynne. "My father is an old rascal, and no semi about it." "And you're tickled to death. You're so proud of him." "I'll sing you a song we used to sing in college. It's very naughty, mind you." "That shouldn't stop you," she said. "Here goes: 'I dreamt that I tickled my grandfather's balls/with a little sweet-oil and a feather/but the thing that tickled the old man the most/was rubbing his two balls together.' "'I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,"' said Agnes. "It's from an opera, I think. Such pretty music and what a nasty thing to do with it." "Oh, don't be a prude, Agnes. It's no more than what you've been telling me, made into a song." "You don't understand, George, honestly you don't. What I've been telling you about your father - the way he affects me, and the thing I saw - they don't shock me. Well, they do shock me. But I'm only shocked because...I guess I don't know why. Or I know why but I can't explain it." "If it happened to your