eccentricities.
The wedding was small upon the insistence of Stephen and Laura. Only the immediate families. Stephen's younger brother was the best man and Barbara Worthington was the maid of honor. There were only thirty guests, but Laura was not spared the usual inane remarks which make any wedding complete.
Stephen's brother, in an odd moment to Laura: 'You don't have a younger sister back home, do you?'
One of Stephen's aunts: 'There's nothing wrong with having a romance with a religious man. I'm sure he didn't make the physical demands upon you before marriage that most men make.'
And, of course, from Barbara, with a twinkle in her eye: 'Some summer romance! You pick off the most eligible bachelor at Lakeside, then marry him so no other girl can borrow him next summer!'
'Sorry,' answered Laura. They exchanged a hug.
'Who says I can't be borrowed?' asked Stephen, overhearing their chatter. He embraced his wife from the back, kissed her on the side of the neck, and, when no one was looking, brushed his hand across her backside.
'I thought you were a gentleman,' she chided sotto voce.
'Only before marriage,' he answered. 'An animal ever after.' There was champagne on his breath.
'Fabulous,' she replied.
'By the way,' he asked, 'who is Peter Whiteside?'
The name came to her as a surprise, particularly from her husband's lips. For a second she had no response. 'Who's Peter Whiteside?' he repeated. 'I want to know.'
'Why do you want to know?'
'Ah, ah,' he chided. 'Husband's rights! And I asked you first.' His voice was teasing, but she recognized its insistence.
'Peter Whiteside,' she said, recovering carefully, 'is a divinely charming man with radiant gray eyes who is urbane, handsome, talented, bears a frightfully stunning resemblance to a tall, athletic Noel Coward… and who also happens to be my father's age, and an old, old friend of the family.'
'Oh,' Stephen said. Half a grin crept across his face. 'I see. Church, army, and club establishment, right?'
Laura let him easily off the hook. 'He served with my father in the war. They've been like this'-two delicate fingers crossed, two polished pink fingernails meeting-'for years.'
'I understand,' he said.
'Why?'
'He sent flowers,' Stephen told his bride of one hour. 'And this note.'
He handed her a small unopened envelope. Laura slid her finger into it and tore. From it, she drew Peter Whiteside's personal calling card, engraved only with his name. Upon it, in the handwriting Laura knew so well, Whiteside had neatly penned in blue ink:
To Lovely Laura, With all my affection and sincere wishes for your lasting happiness, Peter
Laura felt a sensation of warmth toward Peter, something she had never known she had entertained for him. She smiled. She looked up to show her husband the kind note from her father's oldest friend. But Stephen had discreetly disappeared to allow her to read the contents in privacy. Then she smiled again. Her husband, it occurred to her, had been jealous. Jealous of fey, middle-aged Peter! The thought greatly amused her and she tucked the card into her wedding gown. Later in the afternoon, she found the greatest, most gorgeous bouquet of flowers-four dozen magnificent long-stemmed red roses-that she had ever seen in her life. It had been confected in New York, upon wired directions from London. Naturally, it was Peter's.
After the ceremony, they left for Quebec in Stephen's red Nash convertible. They spent their first honeymoon night in a small white guesthouse two miles north of Brattleboro, Vermont, and were served breakfast the next morning by a blushing landlady at the inn's table of honor.
So that's what it would have been like to run an inn, Laura thought idly. Serving breakfast to obvious lovers, both married and illicit.
In Quebec City, they stayed in a suite in a west tower of the Chateau Frontenac and spent time walking the Plains of Abraham. Stephen was fascinated by military operations from other centuries and wanted to inspect the precise location where the French had lost North America.
They stood on the ramparts overlooking the St. Lawrence River and the vastness of the province, which spread northward. 'The French lost because they underestimated the enemy,' Stephen said. 'They never believed that the English could attack by ship up a secure river, then successfully scale these cliffs and invade Quebec.'
Laura nodded.
'Conclusion?' Stephen demanded, assuming a scholarly tone.
'Never underestimate the British Navy,' she said. 'The British Navy hasn't lost a decisive sea battle since 1453 at Castillon.'
He raised his eyebrows and allowed her point. 'A better conclusion,' he demanded.
'With modern implications.'
'I give up.'
'The French are terrible military strategists,' he said. 'Always planning for the last war, not the next one. Like this Maginot Line they have now. All their fortifications stretched from Luxembourg to Switzerland. Know how you cross it?' he asked.
'How?'
'The same way you now get to England,' he said, 'You use airplanes.'
They lunched and laughed at a splendid little country restaurant in Levis, a ferry ride across the St. Lawrence from Quebec, and toward dessert Laura felt an inexplicable pang of sadness.
Stephen had caused it inadvertently. As she examined her feelings she realized how smug one could be in America over the politics of Europe. Hitler, the hoarse fanatical little tyrant of the MGM newsreels, and his pals Mussolini and Franco, were all firmly in power and flagrantly rearming themselves. Central Europe seemed destined to be carved into pieces and the two major democracies of western Europe, France and England, seemed fragile and indecisive. Meanwhile, America slumbered.
Laura thought of England and thought of her father. Both were very distant. Then her thoughts rambled further as she grew very quiet over coffee. She was now thinking of Edward Shawcross.
Married as she was to a different, more exciting man, she began to see Edward in perspective for the first time. It was as if she had stumbled across some torn black and white photograph from an old scrapbook.
Edward had been a decent man, she decided. Thoroughly decent, but painfully predictable. She viewed a variety of images of him, things she had once seen: Edward neatly assembling his books, tightly knotting his tie, sharply combing the part in his hair, methodically planning their engagement and their life. Edward's orderliness had been his finest quality and his most serious undoing. Personal relationships were like that. Laura would opt for chaos and iconoclasm with a man like Stephen every time. Who ever heard, for example, of a divinity student with a red Nash convertible? Who, indeed? And that was just for starters.
Stephen reached across the table and took her hand. Much in the manner of a medieval courtier, he kissed the back of it and snapped her out of her reverie.
'A penny for your thoughts,' he said.
'I was thinking,' she answered, 'of how much I love you.'
FIVE
'It's perfect,' Laura said.
'Then we'll take it,' Stephen said, turning to the rental agent.
It was the autumn of 1937, and with exactly that much discussion, Laura and Stephen rented a comfortably snug white wooden house on a shady New Haven street five minutes' walk from the Yale campus. There Stephen entered divinity school and continued his studies. As the semester passed, Laura and Stephen's circle of friends grew. They invited friends in for dinner, visited other couples, and went out to dinners. Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland, the civil war in Spain, and Mussolini's annexation of Ethiopia were far, far away and rarely discussed. The execution of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnap-slaying of Charles Lindbergh's son was a topic much closer to
