Her own voice as soft as her mother’s, Myrtle said, “But it hurts not to know.”
“It never used to,” Edna said with a return of her normal tartness.
“Well, it does now,” Myrtle said. “Knowing you just won’t talk about it.”
“For Christ’s sake, Myrtle,” Edna cried, “don’t you think it hurts me? Don’t you think that’s why I don’t want to talk about the goddamn man?”
“You must have loved him very much,” Myrtle said, gently and consolingly, the way they do such scenes in the movies. She’d never imagined the day would come when she’d play such a scene herself.
“God knows,” Edna answered bitterly. “I suppose, at the time, I must have thought I…” But then she shook her head, eyes flashing. Sharply she said, “And what did I get out of it?”
“Well, me,” Myrtle reminded her, and tried a little smile, saying, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“At the time?” Edna’s answering smile was twisted and lived only on one side of her face. “It wasn’t so wonderful, either, back then. Not in North Dudson.”
“I can’t even imagine it.”
Edna cocked an eye at her as Myrtle stopped for a red light on Main Street. Ahead, the windows of the library gleamed yellow in the gloaming. “No, I don’t suppose you can imagine it,” Edna said. “Did I do that to you? Well, I guess I did.”
“Do what to me?”
“The light’s green,” Edna said.
Myrtle, feeling an impatience and an irritation that were rare in her, looked out at the green light and tromped down on the accelerator. The Ford bucked across the intersection, not quite stalling, but then Myrtle settled down to her normal way of driving.
Musingly, not even having noticed Myrtle’s jack rabbit start—which is what she would have called it, with withering disapproval, under normal circumstances—Edna said, “I brought you up to be careful, cautious, obedient, mild…”
Laughing, but awkward and self-conscious, Myrtle said, “You make me sound like a Girl Scout.”
“You are a Girl Scout,” her mother told her, without pleasure. “I wasn’t brought up that way,” she went on. “I was brought up to be independent, make up my own mind, take my own chances. And what did it get me? Tom Jimson. That’s why I went the other way with you.”
Excited, Myrtle said, “Tom Jimson? Is that his name?”
“I’m not even sure of that much,” Edna said. “It’s one of the names he told me. The one he told me most often, so maybe it’s his.”
“What was he like?” Myrtle asked.
“Satan,” Edna said.
“Oh, Mother,” Myrtle said, and smiled in condescension. She knew this story. Edna had been madly in love with… Tom Jimson… and he’d abandoned her, pregnant and unwed, and the hurt was still there. Now Edna thought he was Satan. Then she’d loved him. So how bad, really, could he be?
Myrtle made the turn onto Elm Street, and then the turn onto Albany Street. Ahead lay Spring Street, and beyond that Myrtle Street. “Myrtle Jimson,” she said softly, testing the sound of it.
“Hah!” Edna snorted. “That was never in it, believe me!”
“I wonder where they were going,” Myrtle said.
“Well, not to church,” Edna told her. “I can tell you that much.”
TWENTY-TWO
The church was beautiful in the waning light of day. A small white clapboard structure with a graceful steeple, it nestled into its rustic setting like a diamond in a fold of green felt. The hillside behind it was a rich tumble of evergreens mixed with stands of beech and birch and oak, falling away to well-manicured lawn that swept like a thick-piled carpet around the tidy white building with its oval-topped stained-glass windows well spaced along both side walls.
The road outside, Church Lane, curving up into these foothills from State Highway 112, came nowhere but here, to the Elizabeth Grace Dudson Memorial Reformed Congregational Unitarian Church of Putkin Township. (Five different churches, and five separate congregations, had been combined down to this one, absorbing the remnants of churches flooded by the reservoir or emptied by shrinking attendance.) Since Church Lane ended here, the road simply ballooned at its terminus into a large parking area, from which the asphalt path ran straight up the slight incline to the church front door. The white of the church, the rich indigos and maroons and golds and olives of the stained-glass windows, the varied greens of the surrounding lawn and hillside, the bottomless black of the asphalt, were never more beautiful than now, in the fading light at the end of another perfect day.
And even more beautiful than the church and its setting was the bride, blushing pink in her swaths of organdy white, climbing from the family station wagon with her parents and baby sister. They were the first arrivals, half an hour before the scheduled ceremony, father looking uncomfortable and thick-fingered in his awkwardly fitting dark suit and badly knotted red tie, baby sister an excited bonbon in puffy peach, mother beribboned and bowed in lavender, dabbing at her tear-filled eyes with a lavender hankie and saying, “I told you not to go all the way, you little tramp. Just get him off with your hand, for heaven’s sake! Oh, I so wanted a June wedding!”
“Mother!” the bride replied, elaborately ill-tempered. “I’ll be showing by then.”
“Let’s get this thing over with,” said father, and led the way heavy-footed up the path and into the church.
Snickering cousins of the bride came next, some to be ushers and flower girls, some just to hang out, and two burly fellows in blocky wool jackets who’d volunteered to be parking lot attendants, to see to it that all of the cars of all of the guests would fit in this space at the end of Church Lane.
Relatives of the bride continued to predominate for the first ten minutes or so; giggling awkward large-jointed people wearing their “best” clothes, saved for weddings, funerals, Easter, and appearances in court. Soon this group began to be supplemented by members of the groom’s family: skinnier, shorter, snake-hipped people with can-opener noses and no asses, dressed in Naugahyde jackets and polyester shirts and vinyl trousers and plastic shoes, as though they weren’t human beings at all but were actually a chain dental service’s waiting room. Intermixed with these, in warm-up jackets and pressed designer jeans, were the groom’s pals, acne-flaring youths full of sidelong looks and nervous laughter, knowing this was more than likely a foretaste of their own doom: “There but for the grace of the Akron Rubber Company go I.” The bride’s girlfriends arrived in a too-crowded-car cluster and hovered together like magnetized iron filings, all demonstrating the latest soap opera fashion trends and each of them a sealed bubble of self-consciousness and self-absorption. The groom, a jerky marionette in a rented tux, a wide-eyed pale-faced boy with spiky hair and protuberant ears, appeared with his grim suspicious parents and entered the church with all the false macho assurance of Jimmy Cagney on his way to the electric chair. The church door shut behind him with a hollower boom than it had given anyone else.
As the hour of the service approached, the last few cars, each with its couple snarlingly blaming each other for causing them to be late, came tearing up Church Lane and was slotted into one of the remaining spaces by the volunteer attendants. And then it was TIME. The attendants grinned at each other, pleased with their accomplishment, and were about to turn and enter the church themselves when headlights alerted them to one last car load of wedding guests. “They are gonna be late!” one attendant told the other, and both stepped out to the road to wave frantically at the oncoming car to get a move on.