Then September 1966, and who was this? A heavyset young woman standing in front of a picnic table, wearing a silly miniskirt that exposed her broad thighs. Her face was large and shiny. Rebecca felt embarrassed for her; she seemed like such an interloper, so presumptuous, beaming straight at the camera while other, more entitled people (Mother Davitch, Aunt Joyce) wrapped leftovers in waxed paper.
She slid a glance around the audience, but nobody made any comment.
Christmas 1967, and Min Foo scowled from her father’s arms, her two clenched fists like tiny spools of thread. “There I am!” Min Foo said, hugging Lateesha on her lap.
As if Min Foo’s arrival had been the whole point of the movie, a card proclaiming The End promptly filled the screen. A few people clapped. Then another card popped up listing family members in order of appearance. Paul P. Davitch, Joyce Mays Davitch, Zebulon Davitch, M.D…. Rebecca went on watching, transfixed, but the children were drifting away now and the adults had started talking among themselves. Biddy called, “Folks? Are you listening? Cake will be served in the dining room.” Emmy and Joey were elbowing each other for space on the piano bench; Lateesha was chasing balloons; Poppy was telling J.J. that Joyce had been much prettier than the camera made her out to be.
The credits ended, followed by more snow. Rebecca bent to press the Rewind button, and then she went out to the dining room where a sizable group already stood admiring the mammoth birthday cake.
“My name wasn’t on the card,” she told Zeb.
Without turning, he said, “Hmm?”
“They didn’t list me on the card when they rolled the credits.”
Miss Nancy plucked Rebecca’s sleeve. “Could I just say something?” she asked. “In view of Mr. Davitch’s limitations, I’m not at all in favor of ankle weights for his walks.”
From behind them, Min Foo said, “Didn’t I tell them so? Didn’t I tell Patch? ‘The poor man can barely stagger around as it is,’ I said, ‘and now you want to tie lead weights to his ankles?’”
“I heard that!” Patch called from the other side of the room. “Criticize, criticize! Why don’t you say it to my face, if that’s how you feel?”
“I did say it to your face.”
Meanwhile, Rebecca’s mother was telling Alice Farmer how well the folks in Church Valley got along with the Colored; Haydn was resuming on the stereo; Emmy and Joey were playing “Heart and Soul” on the piano. Biddy was using the butane torch to light the candles on the cake — an actual one hundred candles, as Rebecca had insisted, plus an extra to grow on. They ringed each of the lower tiers and completely covered the top except for the center, where a little ceramic man stood — one half of a bride-and-groom set — wearing a black tailcoat and a tiny, bushy mustache very much like Poppy’s. “Aww,” several people said when they saw him. Poppy himself watched gravely, standing very straight with both hands on the crook of his cane.
Now Barry started singing “Happy Birthday,” swooping his arms above his head like an orchestra conductor. It was good to have somebody else, for a change, play the part of cruise-ship director. Rebecca chimed in on the second note, and the others joined by twos and threes as the song continued. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”
At the end, as always, a couple of the children went on singing. “How o-old are you, how o-old are you…” Their voices were so frail that Rebecca could hear, besides, Haydn on the stereo and “Heart and Soul” on the piano and “Stardust” on the VCR, which somebody must have started running all over again. The Military Symphony — at least this second section of it, whatever it was called — didn’t sound military at all; it sounded delicate and sad. And “Heart and Soul” had always struck her as so haunting, such an oddly haunting melody in view of the fact that it was literally child’s play. And anyone would agree that “Stardust” was a melancholy song. So that was probably why, in the middle of “How Old Are You?” she felt an ache of homesickness, right there in her own house.
But she brushed it aside, and, “Make a wish! Make a wish!” she chanted, until the others took it up. Poppy braced himself, sucked in a huge breath, and blew out every last candle.
Well, he did have help. Danny and Peter, whom he must have enlisted earlier, leaned forward at either side of him and blew when he did, which made everybody laugh. “It still counts, though!” Poppy said. “I still get my wish. Don’t I?”
“Of course you do,” Rebecca told him.
She stepped forward to take his arm, planning to settle him in a chair, but he resisted. Instead he stood for a long, silent moment watching Biddy pluck the candles from the cake. “Boy, that is kind of pitiful,” he said finally. “A groom without his bride like that.”
He was right, Rebecca realized. They should have thought how it would look: the poor little man all dressed up, all alone on his expanse of deforested icing. Well, too late now, for Poppy had already been reminded of his poem. “You’re given a special welcome when you get to heaven late…”
Min Foo blamed Hakim. That blasted videotape, she said in a piercing whisper, with Aunt Joyce in every frame, just about, reminding Poppy all over again that she was dead.
Hakim said, “So? He would otherwise forget?”
Lateesha asked if she could lick the frosting off the candles. Mr. Hardesty’s walker made a sound like inch, inch as he hobbled toward a chair. “The journey may be lonely, but the end is worth the wait,” Poppy finished. “The sight of your beloved, smiling at the gate.”
And then, without missing a beat, “Why! That wouldn’t be fondant icing, would it?”
“It would indeed,” Biddy told him.
“Fondant icing! My favorite! Oh, my.”
What Peter had said was right, Rebecca thought. You could still enjoy a party even if you didn’t remember it later.
* * *
The champagne was a top brand; Rebecca had made sure of that. Ordinarily they’d have drunk something cheaper — just sparkling wine, to be honest — but not today. Barry gave a whistle when she handed him a bottle to open. “Pretty classy,” he told her, and she said, “Well, we don’t observe a hundredth birthday every day of the week.” Even the little ones got the real thing. She poured a drop for each of them herself, over Biddy’s protests that they would never know the difference.
“A toast!” she said when everyone had a glass. She raised her own glass. She was standing in the center of the front parlor, surrounded by so many people that some were all the way back in the dining room, and at the moment she wasn’t even sure where Poppy was located. But she said, “To Poppy!” She cleared her throat.
“He’s beginning to seem perennial;
We’re observing his centennial.
So shout it from the chandeliers:
We wish him another hundred years!”
“To Poppy,” they all murmured. And then, in the silence when the others were drinking, Patch said clearly, “Oh, Lord, Beck is back to those everlasting rhymes of hers.”
Rebecca’s eyes stung. She swallowed her sip of champagne and blinked to clear her vision.
From over near the fireplace, Poppy said, “Thank you, all.”
He was standing next to Mr. Hardesty and grasping one side of the walker, so that at first glance it seemed the two men were holding hands. When he had everybody’s attention, he said, “Well. This has been just what I dreamed of, I tell you. From the very start of the day, it’s been perfect. Sunshine on my bedspread when I opened my eyes; radiators coming on all dusty-smelling and cozy. Waffles for breakfast, that puffy kind that are light inside but crispy outside, and one-hundred-percent maple syrup heated first in the microwave and then poured over in a pool and left a moment to soak, so the waffles swell and turn spongy and every crumb of them is sopping with that toasty, nutty flavor…”