Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [60]
I was seated at a table diagonally across the dance floor from the wedding party. It was lodged in a corner near an opening in the tent and came to be known that night as the “John’s friends’ table.” Kissy was there, along with Rob and his girlfriend Frannie, and Billy Noonan, a wag from Boston who told salty jokes most of the night, his eyes narrowed and needful of your response.
To my right was Jeffrey Ledbetter. He was seeing John’s cousin Kerry but wasn’t seated with her either. I knew him but not well. He’d also gone to Brown, and there had been no missing him on campus. Heads above anyone else, he was always bounding somewhere, with his Irish setter at his side. Radiant and fearless, he wore his hair long, and I saw him as a kind of Daniel Boone, rallying others over the mountain. He was from Arkansas, from a politically active family, and he let you know about both right away. John had visited him in Little Rock, and there had been some famous camping fiasco in the Ozarks, each of them telling the tale with a different twist. “Our boy did well,” Jeffrey whispered after John gave his toast. He told me he was glad I was with John, glad I made his friend happy, and we talked of love that night.
Months after the wedding, Jeffrey would die of an aneurysm. When John found out, he wept through the night, inconsolable. He had lost a close friend, one who was so young, but I knew that it was more. “We were simpatico, you know,” he said, as I held him, the boy whom death had touched many times, who made friends easily, and for whom life, in some ways, opened like a parting sea, but for whom intimacy and trust were rare. He’d had that with Jeffrey. When he returned from the memorial service, his grief had settled, and he spoke philosophically. Jeffrey had died in the middle of a snowball fight. There was poetry in that, right? And the autopsy had revealed a congenital heart defect that, if known, would have meant an entirely different life for him—a life that his twin/friend sensed would not have matched his spirit.
The wedding was studded with beautiful women. On the other side of the tent, before the toasts, as John busied himself with best man duties, I saw him laughing with an attractive bridesmaid he’d once had a dalliance with. He’d told me about it, and although he’d brushed it aside and said it was nothing to be jealous of, I was. I remember because it was the first time I had felt that with him—not the seething sort, but an opening, a soft sinking recognition of how deeply I’d fallen, how much I adored him, and how well I could be hurt.
John sent his cousins by the table to check up on me and make sure I was amused. Willie Smith was courtly, with sad eyes, and he delivered messages in a muffled voice. Timmy Shriver took it upon himself to relay all the weaknesses of his younger cousin’s character and each and every childhood failing. John was skinny, he wasn’t a good athlete, he dressed like a sissy. “Why are you with this guy?” he prodded. I noted the code of the beloved cousins: The more you love, the more you tease. The band had begun “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” and like a white knight, Anthony Radziwill interrupted Timmy’s spiel and asked me to dance.
Anthony, son of Jackie’s sister, Lee, had grown up in England and looked proper in his groomsman’s jacket. Through his father, Stanislas Radziwill, he was a Polish prince, although the title was now a courtesy and he