A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [2]
“How did they reconnect?” he asked now.
“Our twenty-fifth. Did you ever go to any of the reunions?”
He shook his head. He’d told himself that he hadn’t gone for Evelyn’s sake. She was Canadian, she wouldn’t have known anyone, the journey would have consumed too many of her precious days off. But Harrison couldn’t satisfactorily explain why he hadn’t gone by himself. The simple answer, he supposed, was that he hadn’t wanted to. The sight of the invitations had produced in him an anxiety he had no intention of exploring. Even this small reunion—this hasty wedding—had made him hesitate.
“You?” he asked.
Nora shook her head, and Harrison was not surprised. He could not imagine Carl Laski at a Kidd reunion.
“Have you seen any of the others?” Nora asked. “Since school, I mean?”
“Well, Bill,” he said. “And I met Jerry in New York about five years ago. We had drinks.”
“He’s coming with his wife, Julie,” Nora said. “What was it like, meeting Jerry?”
“He mostly wanted me to know how successful he’d become,” Harrison said and then shrugged to take the edge off the unkind comment.
“You’re staying until Sunday?” Nora asked.
“I think that’s the plan.”
Harrison had flown from Toronto to Hartford, rented a car, and driven to the Massachusetts Turnpike, which he had followed west. He’d realized, as he’d driven, that he’d never been to western Massachusetts. When he had visited New England before, it had always been to Boston and then straight on to Kidd in Maine. Never inland. He’d known of the Berkshires, of course. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was world famous. Edith Wharton had summered in Lenox. Melville had written Moby Dick in Pittsfield.
“There are some good walks,” Nora said, gesturing toward the windows. “The weather . . . the weather is amazing.”
“It’s been unseasonable in Toronto as well. Very mild.”
“Each day has been more beautiful than the last,” she said. “I think Nature means to mock us.”
“How so?”
“9/11.”
Harrison nodded slowly.
“All that horror. All that grief.” She paused. “People . . . people are stopping one another on the streets and saying, Can you imagine? and Isn’t this extraordinary? and Enjoy it while you can.”
“They say the temperature is breaking all records.”
“I think it will reach seventy-two today,” she said.
“Surely a record for the first week in December.”
“I wonder . . . I wonder if the idea is that the sins of man, more terrible than anyone’s ability to imagine them, are nothing in the face of Nature’s bounty and serenity,” Nora said.
“Nature a supreme being?” Harrison asked, puzzled.
“Entity?”
“A terrible one at times.”
“Not today.”
“No, not today,” Harrison said.
“Or . . . or are we meant to be reminded of a reason to stay alive? To savor each day as if it might be the last?”
“Nature capable of grace?” Harrison asked. “I like that.”
Nora laughed, reached forward, and touched him lightly at the tip of his knee. “Listen to us,” she said. “We’re so pretentious. We used to do this all the time in Mr. Mitchell’s class, didn’t we?”
“We did,” he said, glad that she remembered, more gladdened by her sudden touch.
“It’s great to see you,” she said with seemingly genuine pleasure.
“Where were you when it happened?” he asked.
“Here. In the kitchen. I turned on the TV just before the second plane hit. Judy, my assistant—you’re bound to meet her—came in and told me. What about you?”
“I was in Toronto,” he said. “I was eating breakfast. I had a cup of coffee and the newspaper. On the television, the announcer’s voice changed in pitch, and I looked up in time to see a plane hit the second tower.”
The images of that day had played and replayed for hours, Canadian television more willing to air the most horrific images