“He shouldn’t have rushed down to Miami the way he did,” Natalie said, feeling her cheeks redden.
“Why not?” said Madeline, with a slow Byron-like grin. It was strange to see echoes of his traits in his family. Mrs. Henry held her head as Byron did, erect on a long neck. It made him seem more remote. He wasn’t just himself any more, her young companion of Jastrow’s library and of Poland, or even the son of a forbidding father, but part of a quite alien group.
The church was full. From the moment she went in, Natalie felt uncomfortable. Cathedrals gave her no uneasiness. They were just sights to see, and Roman Catholicism, though she could write a good paper about it, was like Mohammedanism, a complex closed-off structure. A Protestant church was the place of the other religion, the one she would be if she weren’t a Jew. Coming into one, she trod hostile territory. Rhoda didn’t make quite enough room for her in the pew, and Natalie had to push her a little, murmuring an excuse, to step clear of the aisle.
All around, women wore bright or pastel colors. Officers and air cadets in white and gold abounded. And Natalie stood at a May wedding in black linen, hastily selected out of a vague sense that she was still in mourning and didn’t belong here. People peered at her and whispered. It wasn’t her imagination: they did. How charming and fine the church was, with its dark carved wooden ceiling arching up from pink stone walls; and what stunning masses of flowers! How pleasant, comfortable, and normal to be born an Episcopalian or a Methodist, and how perfect to be married this way! Perhaps A.J. was right, and encouraging Byron had been irresponsible. Leslie Slote was an arid bookish pagan like herself, and they had even talked of being married by a judge.
The robed minister appeared, book in hand, and the ceremony began.
As the bride paced down the aisle on the congressman’s arm, moving like a big beautiful cat, Rhoda started to cry. Memories of Warren as a little boy, memories of her own wedding, of other weddings, of young men who had wanted to marry her, of herself — a mother before twenty of the baby who had grown into this handsome groom — flooded her mind: she bowed her head in the perky hat and brought out the handkerchief. For the moment she lost her awareness of the melancholy Jewish girl in black beside her, and even of Palmer Kirby towering above people three rows back. When Victor Henry softly took her hand, she clasped his and pressed it to her thigh. What fine sons they had, standing up there together!
And Pug stood slightly hunched almost at attention, his face sombre and rigid, wondering at the speed with which his life was going, and realizing again how little he allowed himself to think about Warren, because he had such inordinately high hopes for him.
Standing up beside his brother, Byron felt many eyes measuring and comparing them. Warren’s uniform, and the other uniforms in the church, troubled him. His Italian suit with its exaggerated lines, beside Warren’s naturally cut whites, seemed to Byron as soft and frivolous as a woman’s dress.
As Janice lifted her veil for the kiss, she and Warren exchanged a deep, knowing, intimately amused glance.
“How are you doing?” he murmured.
“Oh, still standing up. God knows how, you dog.”
And with the minister beaming on them, they embraced, kissed, and laughed, there in the church in each other’s arms, over the war-born joke that would last their whole lives and that nobody else would ever know.
Cars piled up in front of the beach club, only a few hundred yards from the Lacouture house, and a jocund crowd poured into the canopied entrance for the wedding brunch.
“I swear, I must be the only Jew in Pensacola,” Natalie said, hanging back a little on Byron’s arm. “When I walk through that door, I’m going to set off gongs.”
He burst out laughing. “It’s not quite that bad.”
She looked pleased at making him laugh. “Maybe not. I do think your mother might be a wee bit happier if a wall had fallen on me in Warsaw.”
At that moment, Rhoda, half a dozen paces behind them, was responding to a comment by a Washington cousin that Byron’s girl looked striking. “Yes, doesn’t she? So interesting. She might almost be an Armenian or an Arab. Byron met her in Italy.”
Champagne glass in hand, Byron firmly took Natalie around the wedding party from room to room, introducing her. “Don’t say I’m your fiancee,” Natalie ordered him at the start. “Let them think what they please, but don’t let’s get into all that.” She met Captain Henry’s father, an engineer retired from the lumber trade, a short withered upright man with thick white hair, who had travelled in from California and who looked as though he had worked hard all his life; and his surprisingly fat brother, who ran a soft-drink business in Seattle: and other Henrys; and a knot of Rhoda’s kin, Grovers of Washington. The clothes, the manners, the speech of the Washington relatives set them off not only from the California people, but even from Lacouture’s Pensacola friends, who by comparison seemed a Babbitty lot.
Janice and Warren came and stayed, joking, eating, drinking, and dancing. Nobody would have blamed them, in view of their limited time, for vanishing after a round of handshakes, but they evinced no impatience for the joys of their new state.
Warren asked Natalie to dance, and as soon as they were out on the floor, he said. “I told Byron this morning that I’m for you. That was sight unseen.”
“Do you always take such blind risks? A flier should be more prudent.”
“I know about what you did in Warsaw. That’s enough.”
“You’re cheering me up. I feel awfully out of place here.”
“You shouldn’t. Janice is as much for you as I am. Byron seems changed already,” Warren said. “There’s a lot to him, but nobody’s ever pressed the right button. I’ve always hoped that someday a girl would, and I think you’re the girl.”
Rhoda Henry swooped past, champagne glass in hand, and gathered them up to join a large family table by the window. Possibly because of the wine, she was acting more cordial to Natalie. At the table Lacouture was declaring, with relish for his own pat phrases, that the President’s request for fifty thousand airplanes a year was “politically hysterical, fiscally irresponsible, and industrially inconceivable.” Even the German air force didn’t have ten thousand planes all told; and it didn’t have a single bomber that could fly as far as Scotland, let alone across the Atlantic. A billion dollars! The interventionist press was whooping it up, naturally, but if the debate in Congress could go on for more than a week, the appropriation would be licked. “We have three thousand miles of good green water between us and Europe,” he said, “and that’s better protection for us than half a million airplanes. Roosevelt just wants new planes in a hurry to give to England and France. But he’ll never come out and
“You’re willing to see the British and French go down, then,” Pug Henry said.
“That’s how the question’s usually put,” said Lacouture. “Ask me if I’m willing to send three million American boys overseas against the Germans, so as to prop up the old status quo in Europe. Because that’s what this is all about, and don’t ever forget it.”
Palmer Kirby put in, “The British navy’s propping up our own status quo free of charge, Congressman. If the Nazis get hold of it, that’ll extend Hitler’s reach to Pensacola Bay.”
Lacouture said jovially, “Yes, I can just see the
This raised a laugh among the assorted in-laws around the table, and Rhoda said” “What a charming thought.”
Victor Henry said, “This isn’t where they’ll come.”
“They’re not coming at all,” Lacouture said. “That’s
“I’m from Denver,” said Kirby, and I’m Irish.” He and Victor Henry had glanced at Natalie when Lacouture mentioned the Jews.
“Well, error is contagious,” said the congressman with great good nature, “and it knows no boundaries.”
This easy amused war talk over turkey, roast beef, and champagne, by a broad picture windows looking out at beach umbrellas, white sand, and heeling sailboats, had been irritating Natalie extremely. Lacouture’s last
