seriously than Dan took it. All that my mother said to me was that it was better if we were all in one church, and that Dan cared more about his church than she cared about hers-and wasn't it fun for me to be where Owen was? Yes, it was. Thank Heavens for Hurd's Church; that was the unfortunate name of the nondenominational church at Gravesend Academy-it was named after the academy's founder, that childless Puritan, the Rev. Emery Kurd himself. Without the neutral territory of Hurd's Church, my mother might have started an interdenominational war-because where would she have been married? Grandmother wanted the Rev. Lewis Merrill to perform the ceremony, and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin had every reason to expect that he would get to officiate. Fortunately, there was some middle ground. As a faculty member at Gravesend Academy, Dan Needham had a right to use Hurd's Church-especially for the all-important wedding and the quick-to-follow funeral-and Hurd's Church was a
masterpiece of inoffensiveness. No one could remember the denomination of the school minister, a sepulchral old gentleman who favored bow ties and had the habit of pinning his vestment to the floor with an errant stab of his cane; he suffered from gout. His role in Hurd's Church was usually that of a bland master of ceremonies, for he rarely delivered a sermon himself; he introduced one guest preacher after another, each one more flamboyant or controversial than himself. The Rev. 'Pinky' Scammon also taught Religion at Gravesend Academy, where his courses were known to begin and end with apologies for Kierkegaard; but old Pinky Scammon cleverly delegated much of the teaching of his Religion classes to guest preachers, too. He would invariably entice Sunday's minister to stay through the day Monday, and teach his Monday class; the rest of the week, Mr. Scammon devoted to discussing with his students what the interesting guest had said. The gray granite edifice of Hurd's Church, which was so plain it might have been a Registry of Deeds or a Town Library or a Public Water Works, seemed to have composed itself around old Mr. Scammon's gouty limp and his sepulchral features. Hurd's was dark and shabby, but it was comfy-the pews were wide and worn so smooth that they invited instant dozing; the light, which was absorbed by so much stone, was gray but soft; the acoustics, which may have been Hurd's only miracle, were unmuddied and deep. Every preacher sounded better than he was there; every hymn was distinct; each prayer was resonant; the organ had a cathedral tone. If you shut your eyes-and you were inclined to shut your eyes in Hurd's Church-you could imagine you were in Europe. Generations of Gravesend Academy boys had carved up the racks for the hymnals with the names of their girlfriends and the scores of football games; generations of academy maintenance men had sanded away the more flagrant obscenities, although an occasional 'dork-brain' or 'cunt-face' was freshly etched in the wooden slats that secured the tattered copies of The Pilgrim Hymnal. Given the darkness of the place, Hurd's was better suited for a funeral than for a wedding; but my mother had both her wedding and her funeral there. The wedding service at Hurd's was shared by Pastor Merrill and Rector Wiggin, who managed to avoid any awkwardness- or any open demonstration of the competition between them. ?
Old Pinky Scammon nodded peaceably to what both ministers had to say. Those elements of the celebration that allow the impromptu were the responsibility of Mr. Merrill, who was brief and charming-his nervousness was manifest, as usual, only by his slight stutter. Pastor Merrill also got to deliver the 'Dearly beloved' part. ' 'We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony/ '' he began, and I noticed that Kurd's was packed-there was standing-room only. The academy faculty had turned out in droves, and there were the usual droves of women of my grandmother's generation who turned out whenever there was a public opportunity to observe my grandmother, who was-to women her age-the closest that the Gravesend community came to royalty; and there was something special about her having a 'fallen' daughter who was choosing this moment to haul herself back into the ranks of the respectable. That Tabby Wheelwright has some nerve to wear white, I'm sure some of these old crones from my grandmother's bridge club were thinking. But this sense of the richness of gossip that permeated Gravesend society is, on my part, largely hindsight. At the time, I chiefly thought it was a splendid turnout. The Ministry of the Word was muttered by Captain Wiggin, who had no understanding of punctuation; he either trampled over it entirely, or he paused and held his breath so long that you were sure someone was pointing a gun at his head. ' 'O gracious and everliving God, you have created us male and female in your image: Look mercifully upon this man and this woman who come to you seeking your blessing, and assist them with your grace,' ' he gasped. Then Mr. Merrill and Mr. Wiggin indulged in a kind of face-off, with each of them demonstrating his particular notion of pertinent passages from the Bible-Mr. Merrill's passages being more 'pertinent,' Mr. Wiggin's more flowery. It was back to Ephesians for the rector, who intoned that we should pay close attention to 'The Father from whom every family is named'; then he switched to Colossians and that bit about 'Love which binds everything together in harmony'; and, at last, he concluded with Mark-'They are no longer two but one.'
Pastor Merrill started us off with the Song of Solomon- ' 'Many waters cannot quench love,' ' he read. Then he hit us with Corinthians ('Love is patient and kind'), and finished
us off with John-'Love one another as I have loved you.' It was Owen Meany who then blew his nose, which drew my attention to his pew, where Owen sat on a precarious stack of hymnals-in order to see over the Eastman family in general, and Uncle Alfred in particular. There then followed a reception at Front Street. It was a muggy day with a hot, hazy sun, and my grandmother complained that her rose garden was not flattered by the weather; indeed, the roses looked wilted by the heat. It was the kind of day that produces a torpor that can be refreshed by nothing less than a violent thunderstorm; my grandmother complained of the likelihood of a thunderstorm, too. Yet the bar and the buffet tables were set out upon the lawn; the men took off their suit jackets and rolled up their sleeves and loosened their ties and sweated through their shirts-my grandmother particularly disapproved of the men for draping their jackets on the privet hedges, which gave the usually immaculate, dark-green border of the rose garden the appearance of being strewn with litter that had blown in from another part
