Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [6]
Ian somehow knew exactly how that would feel: her body narrowing between his palms like a slender, graceful vase.
Danny and Lucy were married a week later, in the Presbyterian church on Dober Street that the Bedloes sporadically attended. Lucy wore a rose-colored suit and a white pillbox hat with a bow. She stood in front of the minister with her arm linked through Danny’s, and her feet were placed primly together so that Ian’s eyes were riveted to the seams on the backs of her stockings. He had never seen seams on stockings before, if you didn’t count old black-and-white movies. He wondered how she got them so straight. They looked like two fountain-pen lines drawn with the aid of a ruler.
Pathetically few guests dotted the bride’s side of the church. The first pew held a couple of waitresses from the Fill ’Er Up Café, both wearing cone-shaped hairdos that made them seem the tallest people present. Behind them sat the pharmacist and his wife, with Lucy’s two children huddled against the wife. Ian had met the children at a family dinner the night before, and he hadn’t thought much of them. Agatha was as cloddish as her name—plain and thick, pasty-faced. Thomas was thin and dark and nimble but no more responsive to grownups. During the wedding they both gazed elsewhere—up at the vaulted ceiling, around at the pebbly pink windows—till Mrs. Myrdal leaned over and whispered sharply. Agatha was the kind of child who breathed through her mouth.
But the groom’s side! First came the parents, Doug Bedloe belted in and slicked down in an unfamiliar way and Bee wearing a new striped dress from Hutzler’s. Then in the second pew, a row of Daleys—Claudia and her husband, Macy, and all five of their rustling, fidgeting children, even little Ellen, although a sitter had been hired to lurk at the rear of the church just in case. Ian sat in the third pew with Cicely, holding hands. And if he turned around, he could see Danny’s friends from high school and his co-workers from the post office and just about the whole neighborhood as well: the Cahns, the Crains, the Mercers, Cicely’s parents and her brother Stevie, Mrs. Jordan in her bald fur stole even on this warm May day, and every last one of the foreigners—a row of tan young men wearing identical shiny black suits. The foreigners never missed a chance to attend a celebration.
The minister spoke at some length about the institution of marriage. Danny shifted his weight a few times but Lucy stayed dutifully motionless. Ian wondered why a hat like hers was called a pillbox. It looked more like a pill than a box, he thought—a big white aspirin.
Cicely squeezed his hand and Ian squeezed back, but not as hard. (She was wearing his class ring, bulky as a brass knuckle.) Distantly, he registered the bridal couple’s “I do’s”—Danny’s so emphatic that the younger Daleys giggled, Lucy’s throaty and endearing. Then Dr. Prescott pronounced them man and wife, and they kissed. It wasn’t one of those show-off kisses you sometimes see at weddings. Lucy just turned and looked up into Danny’s eyes, and Danny set both hands on her shoulders and bent to press his lips against hers very gently. After that they stepped back and smiled at the guests, and everyone rose and came forward to offer congratulations.
The reception was held at the Bedloes’, with fancy little cakes that Bee and Claudia had been baking for days, and Doug’s famous spiked punch in a plastic garbage can reserved only for that purpose, and bottled soft drinks for the children. There were more than enough children. Claudia’s brood chased each