John's Wife: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

course, when Mitch’s son married the builder’s daughter, so dazzlingly beautiful on the day, people said the sight of her made their eyes smart. Her mother, too, was a looker in her day, as many present were reminded when the bride glided into view, though there was a mischievous fiery-eyed edge to Audrey’s darker beauty that her gentle and radiant daughter, beloved by all who knew her as Audrey was not, did not possess. The church was wall-to-wall that memorable day with political bigwigs from the state capital and visiting business cronies of the two family patriarchs, together with all the schoolfriends of the bride, including a penpal all the way from Paris, France, a complementary pack of John’s fraternity brothers down from the university, whooping it up like puppies, Waldo among them, still unmarried then, a multitude of family, friends, and employees, and a great congregation of ordinary townsfolk, young and old, enthralled witnesses to this grand and extravagant event, so full, it seemed, of meaning for them all. Kate the librarian, a thoughtful soul, remarked to her friend Harriet on the occasion (Harriet had just expressed her disappointment that Oxford’s and Kate’s son Yale was not after all the groom, adding with a regretful sigh that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and this wedding just proved it) that, yes, great ingatherings of this kind did indeed confirm the community’s traditional view of itself, but confirmation was also a kind of transformation: this town, unchanging, would never be the same again. On the day, few would have read any but auspicious omens in such an oracle. Daphne, as the maid of honor, was paired with John’s handsome fraternity brother Bruce, his best man: lucky sidekicks, everyone thought, headed for a Hollywood ending. Daphne thought so, too, and it might have happened, were it not, she supposed, for the penpal, and had Daphne behaved herself, too much perhaps to ask. Instead, it was John’s cousin Maynard Junior who, aching rather for the leg that wore it, caught the bridal garter and paid the piper, a day he remembered as the morning after the last day of his life. Full of regret, Maynard. But years, wives, lives later: he still had the garter.
    Daphne’s fourth and most recent husband, old Stu, golfing buddy of the groom’s father, supplier of Ford trucks to the bride’s, and so an honored guest at the wedding, remembered it as a day of destiny, helped along in this remembering, never good at it by himself, by one of Gordon’s strangely prophetic photographs, the yellowed eighteen-year-old clipping of which from The Town Crier he kept as long as he lived, framed, on his office desk down at the car lot: “ LET HIM EAT CAKE! ” it said. “ MAID OF HONOR NOURISHES WEDDING GUEST. ” That was at the reception, whiskey by then having eased his allergic reaction to the airless church, or anyhow made his suffering seem more remote. It was a real cattleyard in that church, to put a plain word on it, a perfumed crowd so thick you couldn’t breathe, and where there weren’t people there were flowers, heaps of them everywhere, so piled up the brick walls seemed to fall away behind them, a delight to the eye maybe but not to Stu’s tender passages: he had to load up on the antihistamines to keep from wrecking the service with his explosive country-boy sneezing, and even so spent half the ceremony with his head ducked, his wife Winnie, his wife back then, tut-tutting scornfully at his side while down in his lap he quaked and wheezed like an old hounddog with a bone in his throat. There were more flowers at the reception, too, bombing him afresh with their fragrant rot, Audrey must have bought out the whole damned county, but ice-cold whiskey now as well to wash down the antihistamines and scour out the rust—a dangerous chemistry maybe, but by then Stu badly needed both and cared not a goose’s fart for the consequences nor for tedious Winnie’s