Alf’s nurse Columbia would not have been surprised at this display, that Gretchen was a real take-charge girl, that was definitely the impression she had brought back from the wedding, though it was not her immediate one. Her first impression had been that Gretchen was ill-tempered and pushy, stomping around aggressively in her orthopedic boot as if she were hammering nails, a haughty and sharp-tongued shrew who was abusive to Corny and quarrelsome with strangers and, on top of it, blind as a mole, which in some ways she unfortunately resembled. Not a good start. But her bad humor, Lumby soon learned, was mostly her brother’s fault as usual. Gretchen had arranged a whole series of appointments with doctors and labs and county clerks and photographers and justices of the peace and what all, and Corny had wandered off to play a pinball machine somewhere and had missed them all, meaning everything had got thrown off by a day, the lesser things just abandoned. Luckily it was only a civil marriage and they had no big honeymoon plans (though those reservations had to be changed, too), but still, Columbia could understand how her baby brother, who had also somehow managed to misplace the rings (they found them finally in the lining of his tatty jacket, bought for a quarter off the Salvation Army racks — the rings, of course, Gretchen herself had purchased), could exasperate a person. Certainly he had tested his own family’s patience over the past few years with his indolent numskull ways, ever since that awful high school graduation trip to Paris. When Corny had announced the wedding to them in a phonecall a few days before, startling everyone, her father assumed the stupid boy must have got some damned hippie pregnant. Lumby didn’t think so. She had played doctors with Corny once upon a time, and so had some idea what his problems were. On the other hand, she could not imagine who would marry the little dummy, and so drove up to the ceremony feeling nearly as skeptical as her father did. She was the only member of the family to attend, acting as one of the witnesses, Harvie being totally out of touch, her father too depressed to go. Her father was depressed all the time back then, it was a kind of endless soapbox routine and frankly getting a bit much to take. It was like he thought he was the only one who missed Yale and Mom. Lumby was mad that he wouldn’t go up there with her, and she let him know how she felt about it — what kind of father was he, for pete’s sake? — but given the sort of wedding that it was, it was probably just as well. He and Corny would have just got into another whining match, and her father, half blind himself, would not have noticed what a real find Gretchen was, and so, like the man who wasted the only wishes he ever got, might have turned her off before she could ever come here and work her magic on them all.
Oxford’s failing in truth was not in wasting wishes, but in having no clear second wish when the only wish he ever wished did not come true. Oxford was a reasonable man, and his sole desire was simply that the world be at least as reasonable as he was, a certain recipe for despair as just about anyone in town could have told him, and as often did close friends like Alf, closer when they both were suddenly left alone and then more often, too: “Human reason is an evolutionary deformity, my friend, an aberrant mutation, a miserable freak. Don’t trust it. The life force itself is savage and mindless. Ruthless. Like a trapped beast. Believe me, I witness its stupid cruelty every day. And in its ruthlessness, it engenders monsters, human reason just one of its grotesque miscreations. Just thinking about it, Oxford, is enough to make you shit your britches. The brain thinking about itself: better than a damned enema.” This said by the old gynecologist, emergency room surgeon, and general practitioner over hot bitter coffee in the Sixth Street Cafe, peering out the window at a dirty rain splashing the cracked blacktop in the empty center of a decentered town. A pause. A rueful sigh. “The only consolation is that monsters, cast off by the force that made them, usually self-destruct. Sooner or later.” Oxford had no reply. He could only gaze out through his tears upon the horror, somewhat fuzzy because of his myopia. Alf’s and Oxford’s wives, Harriet and Kate, friends in life, had paired themselves in untimely death as well, perishing of lingering diseases of the inner organs two years apart (though Oxford’s Kate had cut her suffering short with an overdose of sleeping pills, taken from the store), a double loss to the community and a reminder to all of the brevity of life’s fitful fever, as Ellsworth put it, in a rhyme with “forever grieve her,” in his special Town Crier eulogy to Kate as the longtime city librarian. Perhaps it was this morbid reminder that had caused Alf that particular day, two years of grieving fever welling up behind his own eyes, to leave his finger inside John’s wife a contemplative moment longer than he needed to, or that made Marge cry when she saw the wrecking ball bring down the old Pioneer Hotel which she had never even entered except when obliged, as at John’s wedding, for example, or that inspired Nikko the golf pro to abandon his wife Daphne a few weeks later and run off with the orthodontist’s uninhibited teenage daughter, or that prompted young Cornell to drop completely out of sight for a year and more, further sorrowing his heartbroken father, left now with so little. Poor Oxford. His wife was dead, two of his sons had turned into wildly irresponsible crackbrains, utterly unrecognizable even to those who loved them, the third, the one with the most promise, had been senselessly killed in a distant war, and he himself was reduced to living alone with his churlish daughter, a fat and rather stupid girl who had tried but failed both pre-med and pharmacy, and had ended up working now as a practical nurse for Alf, largely thanks to her father having asked this of his old colleague as a personal favor, so the downtown pharmacist had reason, his noble and rational dreams of a noble and rational world come to such ruin, to feel a bit crushed in the spirit. Cornell had been his last fond hope, his most bitter disappointment, and so he saw nothing to cheer about when his mad son surfaced suddenly a year or two after his mother’s burial to announce his impending marriage to the staggering half-blind creature described shortly thereafter by his daughter on the telephone. The woman sounded like the very emblem of that deformity Oxford’s dream of reason had become. She will be the death of me, or anyway of my sanity, he thought, weeping as he often did in those dark days, when he hung up. He was wrong about this, however. As he admitted to his friend Alf over a sunny midmorning feast of blueberry pancakes and vanilla icecream many years later, his tears long dried and two of his eight grandchildren in the double stroller at his side, Gretchen was in truth the real son he no longer had.