A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [97]
After a few minutes, Josh removed his arm from Agnes’s shoulders and stood just to the right of the wedding party. Harrison winced inwardly, thinking that the man was about to recite a poem or give a homily. Josh couldn’t possibly know Bill and Bridget well enough to do that. Whose idea had this been? But then Harrison heard the first notes of a baritone voice so arresting it caused chills along the back of his neck. Harrison didn’t know the music. The words were in Italian. It must, he thought, be a love song. Harrison saw suddenly that there might have been, before any physical love, an attraction between Rob and Josh that transcended gender or sexuality.
Josh’s voice had power and range. It was a voice almost too large for the room, and yet there was a subtlety to the song that was all quiet yearning. Bill seemed more composed now, and even Agnes had taken a deep breath. Harrison gazed at Nora, who had pulled off a choreographic triumph. A service as beautiful and as meaningful as any Harrison had ever been to, shorter by half, and with the music of angels.
“Well done,” he whispered in her ear.
Nora, in a moment of pride or affection, took Harrison’s hand in both of her own and set it on her lap. And Harrison knew then that Evelyn, years ago, during that long-forgotten and inconsequential fight, had been entirely wrong: Harrison was not in the slightest—not even in the tiniest part—an insulated man.
The trembling started just outside the library when the justice of the peace, a woman Bridget had never met before, began to explain the service. In the background, Bridget could hear Rob’s quiet prelude. Josh, whom Bridget had met only briefly last night, would sing toward the end of the ceremony. Rob had said the man’s voice was beautiful, but then again, Rob might be expected to be biased. Bridget had been to weddings ruined by wobbly sopranos who couldn’t reach the upper registers.
Matt, standing off to one side, looked stricken.
“Matt?” Bridget asked, leaving Bill to absorb the instructions.
“You cool with this, Mom?” Matt gave his hair a quick, nervous swipe.
“The ceremony, you mean?”
“The whole thing,” he said, meeting her eyes, one of Matt’s finer qualities. Matt had friends whose eyes Bridget had never seen.
“This will be easy,” Bridget said. “It’s kind of a cross between a church service and a little play. Someone will cry. I’ll be nervous. You’ll be fine. You don’t have any lines. All you and Brian have to do is stand up straight looking very handsome. Like one of the guards in Macbeth. Remember Macbeth?”
“Mom.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“But I have the rings.”
“Yes, we hope you do,” Bridget said.
“So when do I give them?”
“The justice of the peace will tell you. If you miss that cue, I’ll give you a poke and point to my finger.”
Matt sighed heavily.
“You’ll love it,” Bridget said, patting him on the sleeve of his tuxedo jacket, though she was not at all sure that Matt would be charmed by the ceremony about to take place. She, for example, would not love the service. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to marry Bill. She did. It was that she wished they could get it over with here and now in the hallway. If the justice of the peace could say the words in anticipation of the ceremony, why not just do it here? Why must an audience be involved? But then Bridget thought of all of Nora’s planning, of Rob’s lovely music, of the way the library had been transformed into a space in which a wedding should take place—so, of course, they would have this ceremony. At least it was not the Catholic service Bridget had had the first time she’d been married, an athletic test of endurance if ever there had been one. Ninety minutes of standing, sitting, kneeling for the prayers, up again for the hymns, down for the homily.
There would