76
As always seemed to be the case, by the time I began to imagine the shape of the immediate future, Gwyneth already knew what came next, what came after what came next, and what came after that, as well. Regarding foresight and wise planning, she was her father’s daughter. Before picking me up in the Land Rover, by the pond in Riverside Commons, more than eight hours earlier, she had by phone set the appointment in the Egyptian Theater, had arranged for her guardian to expect us, with the child, in the darkest hour of the night, and had suggested that he might be required, perhaps with unseemly haste, to perform a duty of his office before daybreak.
I was honored that she should want my proposal, joyous when it was accepted, and somewhat dizzied when Gwyneth took from around her neck a delicate gold chain on which hung a ring fashioned from a nail. Either the nail must have been very old and worn or the point had been rounded with a file. The shank was bent into a smooth and perfect circle, and the head, which resembled in shape the setting for a diamond, was engraved with a tiny lazy eight, the symbol for infinity. The artist, Simon, made it for her because he believed she had freed him from the self-crucifixion of his addiction. In an accompanying note, he wrote that one day she would meet a man who would so love her that, if his sacrifice would spare her from death, he would straighten the nail and drive it through his own heart.
“Simon was as melodramatic as he was talented,” she said, “but he was also right.”
Father Hanlon had only begun to explain the necessary simplicity with which we must proceed when from the house above us came the hard crash and then the brittle ringing fall of shattered glass, as if not one window but three or four had exploded simultaneously.
Not even Gwyneth, with all her foresight, had anticipated such a frontal assault in the penultimate moment.
Regarding the basement ceiling with apprehension, Father Hanlon said, “The stairhead door locks from the kitchen, but not from this side.”
I snatched up a chrome-and-red-vinyl chair, which might once have been part of a dinette set, and hurried to the stairs. On the landing at the top, I was relieved to discover that the door opened toward me rather than into the kitchen. I tipped the chair onto its back legs and jammed the header under the knob, bracing the door shut.
By the time I returned to the basement, heavy footsteps sounded in the rooms above. They blundered first in one direction and then in another, as though the intruder must be drunk or confused.
“Who is it?” Moriah asked. “What does he want?”
I didn’t know, couldn’t guess, but judging by Gwyneth’s grim expression, she had at least a firm suspicion.
Among the old furniture stored in the basement was a prie-dieu that had previously been in the sacristy of St. Sebastian’s but had been moved when it was replaced with a new one. The padded kneeling bench was wide enough for two. Father Hanlon stood on the other side of it, his face averted but his voice steady and full.
In the house overhead, something crashed over with thunderous impact, perhaps a breakfront or a tall chest of drawers, and dust sifted down upon us from the basement ceiling.
I didn’t want to delay our vows for even a minute. But if these were the last hours of the world as we had known it, nothing was less important than it had been, and in fact everything was more important than it had ever been before. And so I said to the priest, “Are you sure this is right? I’m not of your church.”
“By your nature,” he said, evading my eyes, “you are of all churches and in need of none. Never have I conducted a marriage service with fewer doubts than I have now.”
If a house could be eviscerated, the sound that now came from the ground floor must be guts of wire torn through cartilage that was lath and through flesh that was plaster. I imagined that someone leaped to a chandelier, his full weight depended from it, swinging like a crazed ape, the dangling crystals clinking against one another and plummeting to the floor like glass grenades amidst the cracking-knuckle sounds of chain links torquing and the hard stutter of mounting screws stripping out of the junction box in the ceiling. Again the building shook as something heavy fell from a height. The lights dimmed, fluttered, and chased flurries of moth-wing shadows across the basement, but we were not cast into darkness.
“Addison, wilt thou take Gwyneth, here present, for thy lawful wife, according to the rite of our Holy Mother the Church?”
“I will.”
As the marriage service continued, the tumult overhead seemed surely to be the work of an entire wrecking crew of psychopaths, of many eager hands wielding sledgehammers and prybars, smashing glass, splitting wood, ripping up flooring, tossing furniture in a frenzy of destructive glee. A series of explosions sounded not like bomb blasts but like the whumps of aircraft breaking the sound barrier, as if numerous visitors were being imported from a distant kingdom, coming into the house at tremendous speed, great hands of air clapping to announce each arrival. But though they raised a racket, they didn’t call out to one another or curse, or rage, as if they were creatures who never spoke except to deceive and who, in this late hour of the world, no longer had any reason to lie, no purpose for their tongues.
Yet our voices were clear through the roar, and before long Gwyneth said, “… to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”
At last, whatever beast or horde of beasts might be laying waste to the rectory, a destroyer arrived at the braced door at the top of the basement stairs and shook it more violently than the exterior door had been shaken earlier. The chrome header of the chair shrieked against the twisting doorknob. With the bone-in-socket sound of an animated skeleton, the pivot pins rattled in the knuckles of the hinge barrels, the latch bolt squealed in the plate fixed to the door frame.
Speaking sacred names that sealed our vows, the priest joined Gwyneth and me in matrimony, that we should face together whatever might lie ahead of us, the two of us now one, always one throughout our days on Earth and ever after.
We sprang to our feet. Pulling on her coat, small and quick and perhaps afraid, Moriah headed toward the exterior door, and Father Hanlon shepherded us after her, through bands of light and shadow, with dust descending from the cracked ceiling as if in reminder of our origins. There we paused, and Gwyneth put her arms around him and said that she loved him. If the contact tortured the priest, it exalted him as well, and if his face was wrenched with anguish and sorrow, it was also informed by hope. I said that he should come with us, and he said that he couldn’t, that he needed to remain behind to comfort the dying.
He gave me a sealed envelope and said that it held a treasure, and I tucked it into an inner jacket pocket with the envelope that contained the only things I had taken from my three windowless rooms.
The basement door opened onto nothing worse than icy wind and hurled snow. Climbing the stairs and sprinting across the yard, we didn’t dare look back to see by what bleak light the previously dark windows of the rectory might now be brightened and what grotesque forms and ghastly shadows might loom behind them.
When the three of us were safely in the Land Rover, Gwyneth reversed into the alley, and for a moment I could see past the side of the garage, into the lamplit passage between that building and the property wall, along which we had made our way moments earlier. Snow falling in thick torrents, shuddered by capricious wind into strange writhing forms, playing tricks with light and shadow, might conjure legions of demons in the imagination, but I believe that what I saw in pursuit of us was as real as the snow through which it forged.