Mr. Meany was stirring a glass of champagne with a dill pickle the size of this thick forefinger. He had not drunk a drop of champagne, but he appeared to enjoy using it as a dip for his pickle.
“Are you comin’ home with me, Owen?” Mr. Meany asked. He had announced, from the moment he arrived at the reception, that he couldn’t stay long; my mother and grandmother were most impressed that he’d come at all. He was uncomfortable going out. His simple navy-blue suit was from the same family of cheap material as Owen’s—since Owen was often up in the air in his suit, perhaps Mr. Meany’s suit had been better treated; I could not tell if Mr. Meany had unsewn his side pockets. Owen’s suit was creased—just above the cuffs of his trousers and at the wrists of his jacket sleeves, indicating that his suit had been let down; but the sleeves and trousers had been “let down” so little, Owen appeared to be growing at the rate of an underfed tree.
“I WANT TO STAY,” Owen said.
“Tabby won’t be bringin’ you up the hill on her weddin’ day,” Mr. Meany told him.
“My father or mother will bring Owen home, sir,” Noah said. My cousins—as rough as they could be with other children—had been brought up to be friendly and polite to adults, and Noah’s cheerfulness seemed to surprise Mr. Meany. I introduced him to my cousins, but I could tell that Owen wanted to walk his father away from us, immediately—perhaps fearing that Hester would at any moment emerge from the privet hedge and demand her panties back.
Mr. Meany had come in his pickup, and several of the guests had blocked it in our driveway, so I went with him and Owen to help identify the cars. We were well across the lawn, and quite far from the hedges, when I saw Hester’s bare arm protrude from the dark-green privet. “Just hand them over!” she was saying, and Noah and Simon began to tease her.
“Hand what over?” Simon was saying.
Owen and I wrote down the license-plate nu
mbers of the cars blocking Mr. Meany’s pickup, and then I presented the list to my grandmother, who enjoyed making announcements in a voice based on Maugham’s Mrs. Culver from The Constant Wife. It took us a while to free Mr. Meany from the driveway; Owen was visibly more relaxed after his father had departed.
He was left holding his father’s nearly full glass of champagne, which I advised him not to drink; I was sure it tasted heavily of pickle. We went and stared at the wedding presents, until I acknowledged the propitious placement of the present from Owen and his father.
“I MADE IT MYSELF,” he said. At first I thought he meant the Christmas wrapping paper, but then I realized that he had made the actual present. “MY FATHER HELPED ME SELECT THE PROPER STONE,” Owen admitted. Good God, so it is granite! I thought.
Owen was upset that the newlyweds would not open their presents until after their honeymoon, but he restrained himself from describing the present to me. I would have many years to see it for myself, he explained. Indeed, I would.
It was a brick-shaped piece of the finest granite—“MONUMENT QUALITY, AS GOOD AS THEY GET OUT OF BARRE,” Owen would say. Owen had cut it himself, polished it himself; he had designed and chiseled the border himself, and the engraving was all his, too. He had worked on it after school in the monument shop, and on weekends. It looked like a tombstone for a cherished pet—at best, a marker for a stillborn child; but more appropriate for a cat or a hamster. It was meant to lie lengthwise, like a loaf of bread, and it was engraved with the approximate date of my mother’s marriage to Dan:
JULY
1952
Whether Owen was unsure of the exact date, or whether it would have meant hours more of engraving—or ruined his concept of the aesthetics of the stone—I don’t know. It was too big and heavy for a paperweight. Although Owen later suggested this use for it, he admitted it was more practical as a doorstop. For years—before he gave it to me—Dan Needham dutifully used it as a doorstop and frequently bashed his toes against it. But whatever it would become, it had to be left in the open where Owen would be sure to see it when he visited; he was proud of it, and my mother adored it. Well, my mother adored Owen; if he’d given her a gravestone with the date of death left blank—to be filled in at the appropriate time—she would have loved that, too. As it was, in my opinion—and in Dan’s—Owen did give her a gravestone. It had been made in a monument shop, with grave-marking tools; it may have had her wedding date on it, but it was a miniature tombstone.
And although there was much mirth in evidence at my mother’s wedding, and even my grandmother exhibited an unusual tolerance for the many young and not-so-young adults who were cavorting and jolly with drink, the reception ended in an outburst of bad weather more appropriate for a funeral.
Owen became quite playful regarding his possession of Hester’s panties. He was not one to be bold with girls, and only a fool—or Noah or Simon—would be bold with Hester; but Owen managed to surround himself with the crowd, thus making it embarrassing for Hester to take back her panties. “Give them over, Owen,” she would hiss at him.
“OKAY, SURE, DO YOU WANT THEM?” he would say, reaching for his pocket while standing firmly between Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred.
“Not here!” Hester would say threateningly.
“OH, SO YOU DON’T WANT THEM? CAN I KEEP THEM?” he would say.
Hester stalked him through the party; she was only mildly angry, I thought—or she was mildly enjoying herself. It was a flirtation that made me the slightest bit jealous, and it went on so long that Noah and Simon got bored and began to arm themselves with confetti for my mother and Dan’s eventual departure.
That came sooner than expected, because they had only begun to cut up the wedding cake when the storm started. It had been growing darker and darker, and the wind now carried some light rain in it; but when the thunder and lightning began, the wind dropped and the rain fell heavily and straight down—in sheets. Guests bolted for the cover of the house; my grandmother quickly tired of telling people to wipe their feet. The caterers struggled with the bar and the tables of food; they had set up a tent that extended over only half the terrace, like an awning, but there was not enough room under it for the wedding presents and for all the food and drink; Owen and I helped move the presents inside. My mother and Dan raced upstairs to change their clothes and grab their bags. Uncle Alfred was summoned to fetch the Buick, which he had not vandalized too badly in the usual “Just Married” fashion. “Just Married” was written, with chalk, across the tailgate, but the lettering was almost washed away by the time my mother and Dan came downstairs in their traveling clothes, carrying their luggage.
The wedding guests crowded in the many windows that faced the driveway, to see the honeymooners leave; but they had a confused departure. The rain was pelting down as they tried to put the luggage in the car; Uncle Alfred, in the role of their valet, was soaking wet—and since Simon and Noah had hoarded all the confetti for themselves, they were the only throwers. They threw most of it on their father, on Uncle Alfred, because he was so wet that the confetti stuck to him, instantly turning him into a clown.
People were cheering from the windows of 80 Front Street, but my grandmother was frowning. Chaos disturbed her; mayhem was mayhem, even if people were having a good time; bad weather was bad weather, even if no one seemed to mind. And some of her old crones were watching her, too. (How does royalty react to rain at a wedding? It’s what that Tabby Wheelwright deserves—her in her white dress.) My Aunt Martha risked the rain to hug and kiss my mother and Dan; Simon and Noah plastered her with confetti, too.
Then, as suddenly as the wind had dropped and the rain had fallen, the rain changed to hail. In New Hampshire, you can’t even count on July. Hailstones bounced off the Buick like machine-gun fire, and Dan and my mother jumped into the car; Aunt Martha shrieked and covered her head—she and Uncle Alfred ran to the house. Even Noah and Simon felt the hailstones’ sting; they retreated, too. Someone shouted that a hailstone had broken a champagne glass, left on the terrace. The hailstones struck with such force that the people crowded close to the windows stepped back, away from the glass. Then my mother rolled down the car windows; I thought she was waving good-bye but she was calling for me. I held my jacket over my head, but the hailstones were still painful. One of them, the size of a robin’s egg, struck the bony knob of my elbow and made me wince.
“Good-bye, darling!” my mother said, pulling my head inside the car window and kissing me. “Your grandmother knows where we’re going, but she won’t tell you unless there’s an emergency.”
“Have a good time!” I said. When I looked at 80 Front Street, every downstairs window was a portrait—faces looking at me, and at the honeymooners. Well, almost everyone—not Gravesend’s two holy men; they weren’t watching me, or the newlyweds. At opposite ends of the house, alone in their own little windows, the Rev. Lewis Merrill and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin were watching the sky. Were they taking a religious view of the hailstorm? I wondered. In Rector Wiggin’s case, I imagined he was seeing the weather from the point of view of an ex-pilot—that he was simply observing that it would be a shitty day to fly. But Pastor Merrill was searching the heavens for the source of such a violent storm. Was there anything in the Holy Scriptures that tipped him off about the meaning of hailstones? In their zeal to demonstrate their knowledge of appropriate passages from the Bible, neither minister had offered my mother and Dan that most reassuring blessing from Tobit—the one that goes, “That she and I may grow old together.”
Too bad neither of the ministers thought of that one, but the books of the Apocrypha are usually omitted from Protestant editions of the Bible. There would be no growing old together for Dan Needham and my mother, whose appointment with the ball that Owen hit was only a year away.
I was nearly back inside the house when my mother called me again. “Where’s Owen?” she asked. It took me a while to locate him in the windows, because he was upstairs, in my mother’s bedroom; the f