What I thought was that the celebration had gone sour. What I thought was that Iris looked like the prettiest thing I’d ever seen in my life, her eyes lit with indignation, her mouth puckered, the whitefish at her command. I tried on a grin. “I don’t know,” I murmured, “but personally? I don’t want to die.”
I was trying for levity, trying to take us all someplace else and expunge the strutting dictator from my celebratory dinner, but no one laughed. They just looked at me — even Aunt Marjorie, the mildest person I’ve ever known — as if I’d admitted to fraud or child rape or murder. War. We were in the grip of war, and there was no shaking it off.
It was Iris who came to my rescue. She’d taken a moment to slip the fork between her lips and masticate her fish and a sliver of green bean. “That’s my point,” she said, still chewing. “I don’t want to die either. Nobody does.”
My mother waved a hand in dismissal. “You’re too young yet. You don’t understand. There’s a larger picture here, and a larger issue—”
“Hey,” Tommy said, as if he were awakening from a nap, “anybody want another beer — or cocktail?”
We walked my mother and Aunt Marjorie back to their hotel, then went out for a nightcap, just the three of us, and finally took Iris back to the dorm just before curfew. A dozen couples were sitting around the lounge gazing into each other’s eyes. One of the girls had a conspicuous grass stain on her skirt — a stripe of vivid green against a beige that was almost white — and a guy I vaguely recognized was on the sofa with his girl, leaning in so close he looked as if he’d been glued to her. Her feet were on the floor, though — that was the rule — and so were his. The RA — the same blonde with the limp hair — had her head buried in a book.
Tommy had slowed down considerably as the evening wore on, and now, as we crossed the lounge to a semi-private spot against the far wall, behind the RA’s desk, he wasn’t so much walking as lurching. Iris’s arm was linked in mine. We stood there bunched against the wall a moment, while Tommy struggled to light a cigarette — he dropped the cigarette twice to the carpet, then dropped the matches. “Listen,” he said, straightening up and squinting round the room as if he’d never seen men and women necking before, “I’ve got to — it’s hot in here, isn’t it? Listen, I’ve got to go find a lavatory somewhere, all right?”
We watched him pull one foot and then the other up off the carpet, moving as if the solid floor had suddenly been converted to a trampoline, and then he was out the door, a smell of the scented night air trailing behind him. “Good old Tommy,” I said, for lack of anything better to say. “He must be a swell brother. You’re really lucky, you know that?”
Iris was drawn into herself, leaning back against the wall, her shoulders narrowed as if she were cold. She was watching me closely. Her arms — lovely arms, beautiful arms, the shapeliest, most perfectly formed arms I’d ever seen — were folded across her breasts, but she dropped them now to her sides, as if she were opening herself up to me. We had kissed here before, in this very spot, just out of sight of the RA, but the kisses had been constrained and proper, or as proper as they could be given the fact that we were pressed up against the wall in a place where the lamplight was dimmest and our tongues had just begun to discover a new function altogether. She didn’t believe in petting or premarital sex of any kind, raised a Catholic and haunted by it, diminished by what had been imposed on her and helpless to escape it. “You don’t mind, do you?” she’d whispered one night, her breath hot on my face, the taste of her on my lips. “No,” I’d said, “no, I don’t mind.”
But now — tonight, on my big night, the night before the graduation ceremony and all the uncertainty it implied — she took hold of me and pressed her body to mine so that I could feel her breasts go soft against my chest. Her voice was so low it was barely audible. “Kiss me,” she whispered.
The ceremony went off as planned, the speeches sufficiently inspiring, the weather cooperating, President Wells exercising his handshake and handing over the diplomas one after another as a gentle breeze came down out of Illinois to animate our robes and tug ever so gently at the girls’ hairdos. Afterward, there was a private reception at Prok’s — he’d insisted, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, it was the least he could do for a young man who’d done so much for him — and we got to glory among the flowers and sample Mac’s punch and Prok’s liqueurs. My mother didn’t really hit it off with Mac, which wasn’t unusual for her — she’d always worn her reserve like a suit of armor and had never really warmed to people, not till she’d mixed with them four or five times, and even then there was no guarantee — but there was something deeper and more complex involved here, and I’d probably cite Freud at this juncture but for the fact that Prok so rigorously educated me against him.
Prok, though, was a different story — she seemed to take to him right away. Of course, he went out of his way to make my mother feel comfortable, zeroing right in on her and giving her an extended tour of the garden, all the while soliciting her opinion on the dahlias or the heliotropes — or the azaleas that just seemed to thrive in the most acidic conditions he could provide, and had she tried coffee grounds? Coffee grounds were one of the most convenient and effective ways of changing the pH factor of the soil, at least as far as Prok had been able to discover. Of course you had to be mindful of chlorosis, but that could be cured by the addition of iron chelate to the soil, well worked in, needless to say …
I watched them draw slowly away from the main body of the party, my mother balancing a tiny liqueur glass in one gloved hand, the sun glancing off the crown of her hat and making a glowing transparency of the single long trailing feather, Prok nodding and gesticulating as he guided her down the path. He was dressed formally, in what we (that is, Corcoran, Rutledge and I) came to regard as his uniform: dark suit, white shirt, crisply knotted bow tie in a two-color geometric pattern. I could see that he was a bit on edge because of having to give up a day’s work, first for the academic convocation at the graduation ceremony and now for this little gathering, but to the uneducated eye he seemed as relaxed and charming as an antebellum plantation owner showing off his holdings. The children were playing an extended game of croquet, while Iris, Tommy and I sat under a tree with my Aunt Marjorie and Mac, who’d kicked off her shoes and was forever dashing back and forth from the house with a tray of canapés or the persimmon tarts she’d baked herself that morning in my honor.
We were talking of everything but the war, because the war was happening someplace else, far across the sea, and this was our day — Tommy’s, Iris’s and mine — and there was no reason to let the darkness intrude. My aunt, never a loquacious woman, not unless she was gossiping with her sister-in-law, sat in a wicker chair with her ankles crossed and smiled a faraway smile, thinking perhaps of her husband, who’d been killed at Ipres in the first war. Mac, when she was with us, held forth charmingly on any number of subjects, including the Girl Scouts, knitting — Aunt Marjorie perked up a bit here — and, of course, sex research. It was all very relaxed.
At one point, just as the children ended their game with a shout of triumph from one of the girls, Iris pushed herself up off the lawn, patting down her dress as if she’d been lying there in the grass since it first sprouted. “Why don’t we play?” she said. “You, me and Tommy. Come on.”
If I hesitated (and I might have, lulled by her presence — and Mac’s — as well as the golden fluid issuing from the flask on command), she wouldn’t hear of it.