Iona said, “We’re sorry, Grandma.”
Dante Picarazzi said, “When you think about it, it’s not so bad, really.”
“Syncretism!” Owen’s Aunt Opal exclaimed.
Who knows where she got the word?
There was another knock on the door. Pierre, finding this beyond belief, struggled his way between bodies to open it. The grinning trucker from Sidney was standing in the hallway, hefting a pony beer keg on his broad shoulder, in his free hand stacked plastic cups.
Ursula walked up behind him, her orange hair newly spiked, wiping sleep from her eyes. She asked, “Did someone hear a door slam?”
Critical mass was reached when the trucker from Sidney invited Ursula to join him in Iona’s bedroom and the thirteen tried to sort themselves out. Owen directed traffic with a bullhorn rolled from Iona’s Cosmopolitan magazine. “Plenty of room here, plenty of room. Men, stay against the walls! Women on the bed!”
Carlo petted his Dick Tracy mustache as he snickered and said, “Hubba hubba.”
Natalie, Iona, Mrs. Christiansen, Opal, Onetta, Nell, and Ursula obeyed Owen’s instructions. Mrs. Christiansen got to a tottering stand on the mattress as she shouted, “There seems to be some contention over who is marrying Mademoiselle Clairvaux.”
Immediately half the room pointed to Pierre, and the other half pointed to Dick. They felt accused. They shrank.
And then Iona’s double bed gave way from the weight, its wooden frame fracturing with a shriek.
Confusion ensued.
Reverend Picarazzi sidled up to Owen and confided, “I think the floor could go next.”
Owen shifted his weight from his right foot to his left and heard an elephant groan from the joists. He raised his Cosmo. “Uh, people? We have a situation here.”
In the mass exodus, Mrs. Christiansen told Iona, “Let’s see: we have Cracker Barrel cheese left. There’s still some of that good ambrosia . . .”
Opal said, “I could cook up something.”
And all yelled in unison, “No!”
30
Outside Mrs. Christiansen’s rooming house, the confederacy of onlookers had doubled in number. Lawn chairs and picnic tables had been teamstered over. Orville Tetlow’s wife was filling coffee cups from a chuffing urn on a card table. A girl was walking along and holding out a pastry box and people chose donuts from it. Inquiring minds had congested around Bert Slaughterbeck as he held forth. “Whereas if it was poltergeists, I think you’d see some of that levitation and telekinesis, plus those little red pig eyes and books flying across the room.”
And now there was a buffet in the upstairs hallway. Mrs. Christiansen brought out her best silver coffee service and china. Toasts and pastries were in white-napkined baskets. It looked like a catered affair.
Carlo moonily stared at Iona’s room, still thinking, One heart, one bed, one troth, and he said to no one in particular, “I just hope she learns to love again.”
Owen hauled a chair up to the buffet table and was ravening with great relish as he told the priest, “What I did was combine about sixty percent cabernet sauvignon grape and about thirty percent merlot, plus some cabernet franc and malbec to keep it true to the soft and fruity . . .”
Natalie interrupted to fill Owen’s coffee cup.
Owen asked her, “Any progress on your end?”
“Two say I should marry Pierre. Two say Dick. Two say it is usually hotter in August. Iona is abstaining. What do you think?”
“We could be a little cooler this year.”
The Reverend Picarazzi kicked his shin.
“Oh that,” Owen said. “Well, I’m a silent partner in ‘Smith et Fils’ now, so my choice would be whatever makes Pierre happiest.”
And then the Reverend Picarazzi spoke and the river of his sentences was so slowed by his tiredness that she understood many words. “You and your fiancé,” he said, inter-locking his fingers, “you fit together, you mesh. You accessorize each other, so to speak. And Iona and Dick: peas in a pod. Hand in glove. But you switch the parties around—if you don’t mind my saying—it’s a shtickl crazy. You find yourself thinking, What shoes do I wear with this? I haven’t any wisdom; I just call ’em like I see ’em.”
She smiled and got up and went to Iona’s room, where six women gathered to dispassionately list Pierre Smith’s good and bad points.