Isn't It Romantic?

Opal whispered, “You don’t think she had her heart set on French fries?”

And Marvyl whispered, “She hasn’t planned a thing.”

“’Cause if she does, those frozen kind you get in cartons are just so quick and easy . . .”

Mrs. Christiansen asked Natalie, “Voulez-vous des pommes frites?” (Would you like fried potatoes?)

She dumped egg shells into the trash compactor and slammed it closed. “Whatever you wish,” she said.

Mrs. Christiansen spun back to Opal. “She’s got a great deal on her mind, if you get my meaning.”

“Oh, I do.”

All three heard a faint rapping on the front screen door and tilted out toward the hallway. Reverend Dante Picarazzi was on the front porch in his black clerics and white Roman collar, his blue Yankees baseball cap in one hand as he shaded his eyes with the other and peered in through the screen. “Afternoon,” he offered.

Opal jumped to the conclusion that he was there for her, though it would have been without precedent. She held a hand with a paring knife to her chest and said, “My word! It’s the Reverend!”

Mrs. Christiansen smiled in a tut-tut way and said with innuendo, “Dante needs to iron out details with Mademoiselle Clairvaux.”

Slowly the meaning dawned upon Opal. “Oh, I see. Oh yes, they really have to talk.”

“Details?” Natalie asked.

Mrs. Christiansen looked to the front porch and called, “Wait there, Reverend. She’ll be right out.”

“Surely you could bend the house rules for a priest,” Opal said.

And Mrs. Christiansen haughtily said, “That would be breaking the rules, not bending them.”

Worriedly, Natalie went out to the front porch, full of mystery about the priest’s visit, and found him swinging his legs like a kid on the glider that hung from the porch ceiling. His Yankees cap was jauntily cocked on his head, his running shoes dangled off the floor, and he was petting a mustache that was still twisted and waxed. With his characteristic torrent of words, the priest said, “Played Toulouse-Lautrec at The Revels. Nailed it.” The Reverend patted a space beside him and as Natalie sat, he rushed on, saying, “I heard the whole megillah from Marvyl.”

And Natalie, whose English, she’d thought, was good, had trouble with his Brooklynese and understood only “heard” and “from Marvyl.”

“Sorry about the royal snafu. Mea culpa. Snail-mail you sent me? Tipping me off? Like a knucklehead I musta lost it.”

She understood “Sorry,” “snail,” “lost.”

“Oy, my desk,” he said. He lifted a hand as high as his ear. “Stacked to here with bubkes.”

With an excess of politeness she said, “I have never heard anyone speak so fast.”

“Well that’s me.” The priest raised his right knee to tie a running shoe that must have been bought in the boy’s department. She wondered if others also had the urge to tousle his hair. “Informed His Eminence about the glitch. Hemmed and hawed, but he’s a mensch; plus he owed me. We got it locked in for Saturday. You cool with that?”

She watched him staring at her and she construed he’d asked a question that required an answer. She nodded her head.

“Right. You shlep up the aisle, deliriously happy, blushing right and left. I greet you and I do the booga-booga. We endure with smiles the fumbling for rings. I say this, I say that; you parrot it back. You know the routine. We need a rehearsal?”

She’d understood hardly a word. She shook her head no.

“Hiya, Dick,” he said.

She glanced out to t

he front yard and saw Dick diffidently standing on the sidewalk in his cattleman’s hat and boots. Shy as a suitor. “Wondered if Mademoiselle Clairvaux would like to go on a horseback ride.”

“Well, that seems highly irregular to me,” Opal said from inside the house.

Natalie tilted and saw that Mrs. Christiansen and Owen’s Aunt Opal were hunched at the front screen door, overhearing.