A Wedding in December Read online

  Innes stood on a street in the Richmond section of the city and watched the sun fall below a layer of olive cloud. The light moved along the road toward the surgeon, illuminating first a wooden house at the far corner, then a buggy with a pair of Clydesdales, and finally a woman struggling with a baby carriage on the cindered pavement. The luster of the wet street made Innes squint. He set down his cardboard suitcase — dented from its journey in the hold of the ferry and streaked with some­thing that resembled axle grease — and covered the sun with his palm. He was preternaturally aware of clarity and color. The woman with the baby carriage gazed upward. A man in a naval uniform — a man who might have seen any number of visual phenomena on the high seas — turned to look behind him. Through a window next to Innes, a wooden mantle was set aflame, the grill of the panes making rectangular patterns on a pink-tinged wall.

  The pellucid light was not an omen, Innes decided, pick­ing up the streaked suitcase. Such displays were merely facts of physics — of luminosity and angles, of wavelengths and emissions.

  Agnes didn't actually know if there was an Innes Finch in Halifax at that time. The odds would be much against it, wouldn't they, though she supposed that it was possible. More astonishing things had happened. Maybe there was only an Ian Finch or an Innes Findlay. But Agnes's Innes was now so real to her that when she thought about the incident, it was his narrative that intruded. This was a pattern, if not actually a habit, that Agnes was familiar with. Over the years, she had had to learn how to translate the global to the personal for her students, and she found she often did this in her own life as well. Whenever she witnessed or learned of an event too horrific to be absorbed, she began — not entirely subcon­sciously and not without some will — to imagine a specific person affected by that tragedy so that she could better understand it. She'd done it the previous spring when she'd seen, in her rearview mirror, a woman in a Volvo lose control of her vehicle, swerve er­ratically, and then begin to tumble end over end away from Agnes as she watched. She still thought from time to time about the woman's bewildered face, and then about her life as it might have been, even though she'd had only a second's glimpse of her. She could still see the woman's kitchen with its granite counter, and her son, perhaps fifteen, who sat at that counter eating cheddar cheese on Wheat Thins, his backpack slung against a chair, an algebra book spread out and touching an empty milk glass. Agnes imag­ined the boy waiting, at first oblivious and then mildly concerned, past 6:00, and then 7:00, until his father walked in the door — he, too, puzzled and then alarmed. What had happened to his wife, the boy's mother, who was just then lying in a hospital in Maine and who would, Agnes had decided, survive her horrific accident?

  Agnes had done this as well after the catastrophe at the World Trade Center earlier in the fall. For days, Agnes had walked around in a kind of disbelieving daze until she'd happened to read a para­graph in the New York Times describing a young Hispanic woman who had died on the 102nd floor of the North Tower. As soon as Agnes had set down the paper, a life had begun to spool backward from the moment the woman had reached out toward the coffee machine and Flight n had struck the building. That woman was real to Agnes now, her life elaborate and complicated, and when­ever someone mentioned the tragedy, Agnes had what amounted to fond memories of the woman and her daughter.

  Innes Finch knocked on a door opened by a woman holding a skein of red yarn. Mrs. Fraser owned the house to which he had traveled and in which he had arranged to stay for sev­eral months. She seemed surprised to see Innes, though he had written that he would arrive before 4:00. Perhaps it was his appearance — tired, windblown, and on no account prepossess­ing — that made her hesitate.

  "Come in," she demanded, perhaps wishing to make up for the tepid greeting. Innes stepped over the threshold and dripped onto a tiled floor. He held the suitcase, self-conscious now about the axle grease. He could have wiped it off in the harbor. He could have demanded that a steward do it for him, though Innes had never been good at giving orders. "I'm Mrs. Fraser," she added unnecessarily, her hands imprisoned in the wool.

  Behind the skein of yarn was a structured bosom that Innes guessed would be hard to the touch. Mrs. Fraser was fifty-five possibly, fifty if she was unlucky in her looks. Her hair was as tightly corseted as her body, though her face creased unexpect­edly into a nervous smile. Innes wondered why she might be nervous. Her posture was impressive.

  "Dr. Fraser won't be home until six o'clock," she said. "He's at hospital. A complication with a surgery. Are you hungry? Do you need a bath? You could set that by the door, and I'll have it taken up to your room."

  Innes had yet to say a word.

  A man appeared, slow and slightly sullen. He was dressed in tie and jacket, though there was no mistaking him for anything but a servant. He took the suitcase and began to climb the stairs, treading heavily, a hand on the banister, each footfall a small and unwarranted reproach.

  Innes took off his gloves and set them on the table.

  "The coatrack is in the corner," Mrs. Fraser said.

  "Could I give you a hand with that?" Innes asked, meaning the red yarn. He extended his arms to the twisted skein.

  Mrs. Fraser hooked the coiled wool over the back of a ma­hogany chair. "You’d better come with me," she said. "I'll show you to your room. You must be wanting cocoa and a hot bath."

  It was Agnes's opinion that at that moment in time Innes Finch wanted cocoa and a hot bath and a great deal more: challenging work and easy love; exciting risk; exceptional beauty.

  Agnes didn't think that she had been particularly lucky in her own looks. Her face was prematurely weathered, a result of having stood on the sidelines of several hundred field hockey games and practices, as well as having spent nearly thirty years on the coast of Maine. She had a strong body, but not an elegant one. She was only five feet, four inches tall, which, these days, was considered short (her varsity girls towered over her). Her hair was light brown, cropped close to the head, and lately it had begun to frizz in the hu­midity, which she found annoying. She did have, however, beauti­ful eyes — deep set and dark brown in color, the only feature about which she routinely received compliments. When she first started teaching, she used to wear wool skirts with oxford cloth shirts each day to her classes. Now, with the looser dress code, she usually put on a pair of chinos and a polo shirt. She prided herself on the fact that she still had a waist.

  For twelve of the seventeen years Agnes had taught at Kidd, she had resided in school housing. Some of the faculty lived on the beach in small cottages referred to as shacks, but most lived on campus in dorm apartments. After more than a decade of duty as a dorm parent, Agnes now had a condo, leased to her until she stopped teaching, at which time it would revert to the school.

  It was an unusual condo, carved from one of the larger houses, and Agnes thought she could be quite happy there until she retired. She lived in a corner of the house that included a two-story turret. On the first floor, she had a kitchen and a living room, and in the turret itself a large round table surrounded by a leather banquette and windows. She lived at that table, eating, correcting papers, and composing lineups and drills for her teams. On the second floor was a large bath and, in the turret, her bed, not round, the head­board situated so that she could look out to sea, an activity that consumed an inordinate amount of her time. She also had a small balcony off the bedroom on which she could sit and do the same with a cappuccino in hand, the expensive machine a gift from her sister, who worked for Citibank in New York.

  Nearly every residence on the campus had a view — of surf, of pebbled beach, of rocky coastline. The campus land had been left untended so that it was all beach scrub and footpaths between buildings. Though there was a certain drama in being perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean, the feel of the school was more homely than grand. In winter, the wind was terrific. Whole months went by when Agnes did not open her windows for fear that the wind would blow over her plants. An old golf course had been turn
ed into playing fields, with the gymnasium situated directly in its center. From the team's practice field, Agnes could see not only the ocean but also the wild hydrangeas that surrounded the head­master's house. Most of the students quickly grew oblivious to their exhilarating surroundings, though occasionally Agnes would see one of them sitting on the rocks, looking out to sea. Despite any number of signs prohibiting it, the students sometimes rowed out to Pepperell Island to drink and party, and inevitably one would attempt to mount the narrow spiral stairway in the aban­doned lighthouse. The student would make it to the top and then would blanch on the way down when it became obvious there was nothing to hold on to: one slip might send him or her plummeting into the dark well of the tower. Miraculously, no one had died doing it.

  Agnes loved the campus and its cinnamon beach plums inter­mingled with fuchsia roses, a hardy species that managed to survive the northern New England coastal winters, the roses always in bloom in June and again during the first weeks of September. She wished she knew birds, because Fenton was a birder's paradise. They were in the marshes with the goldenrod and the stiff, clean air. It was well-known that many of the residents of Fenton — the true natives, all 148 of them — lived well into their nineties, a fact Agnes didn't think could be attributed entirely to genetics. Flowers set in Fenton water lasted for weeks. (Agnes drank a great deal of the local water, imagining it as a preservative.) She was charmed by the jumbled roofline of the village and the stretch of expensive honky-tonk beach houses. She was endlessly captivated by the squat curves of the lobster boats just offshore, with their engines thrumming and the lone silhouettes on the sterns. She even liked the 1940s look of the naked telephone wires stretching along the beach road to the village, suggesting a thread-thin link with the outside world. There was at Kidd a vast sense of natural privilege, of entitlement, of having something others spent millions to get — houses with views of the Atlantic — and which was, incidentally, no small attraction for the parents who sent their children there.

  Agnes realized suddenly that she might have missed the exit. She did this all the time, daydreamed when she should be paying atten­tion to her driving. She glanced at the handwritten directions on the seat beside her. She could get off at the next exit, at which time she could orient herself. It had been a long drive, and there was a cramp running all along her right thigh from her knee to her but­tocks. She tried to maneuver the leg into a different position but couldn't. She had to apply a steady pressure to the gas pedal.

  The clock on the dashboard read 12:00 noon. Agnes was hungry despite the stop in southern Maine. She couldn't imagine Nora's house as an inn. Agnes had visited the place before, but only when Carl Laski had lived there, and once again for his funeral. She re­membered it as primitive and dark, with a dismal kitchen and a warren of tiny rooms upstairs. Her own bedroom had lacked suffi­cient heat and had had on the bed a crazy quilt of velvet and silk that Nora had found at a flea market. It was frayed at some of the seams, but it was a wonderful object to behold, the labor aston­ishing. Agnes hoped Nora had kept the quilt. Agnes had heard, in lengthy letters written in Nora's precise and upright hand, of all the renovations and of their exorbitant cost, and of Nora's belief that the inn would soon begin to pay off some of the monstrous debt. The money that Carl Laski had left Nora was gone now, but Nora's last letter had sounded optimistic. The inn was booked through to the end of February. Nora complained about having to write letters and not being able to reach Agnes via e-mail, but Agnes believed Nora enjoyed the letters, the writing of them as much as the receiv­ing of them.

  Agnes drove for what seemed like a long stretch and then pulled into a rest area. She parked her car, grabbed her backpack, and went inside the building. After visiting the bathroom, she stood in line for a coffee and a doughnut and then found a table at which to sit. When she'd finished the doughnut, she wiped her hands on a paper napkin and rummaged through her backpack. She took out her notebook and a pen.

  Agnes had never written a short story before, despite having taught both English and history. The writing was a secret. She hadn't even told Jim. Perhaps one day, if she finished the story, she would send it to him.

  Mrs. Fraser lingered for a moment in the doorway of the room she had assigned to Innes, as if impressing his face and form to her memory, as if the man might vanish as quickly as he had come. Mrs. Fraser had two daughters, and young men of good appearance produced in her a double-pronged anxiety: her daughters currently had no husbands, and the Frasers had no sons. Mrs. Fraser announced that dinner would be at 8:00. At Innes's school, the students had dressed for dinner, trailing whiffs of formaldehyde to the dining room. At home, his family had dressed only on Sundays. The place where dinner was called "supper" seemed very far away now, farther even than the dis­tance that five years of medical school and a war had put be­tween them.

  His brother, Martin, was in France; Innes was in Halifax. Innes had imperfect feet and a childhood asthma that inexplica­bly had disappeared in the months after he had failed his mili­tary physical. He thought often of trying again. It was said they didn't care about the feet now. But his professors had insisted that he could better serve his country by honing his surgical skills. Soldiers were taking shrapnel to the eyes. A man's sight might be saved. If the war was still on when he finished his train­ing (though dear God let's hope not), Innes could go abroad and do some good.

  Innes was twenty-seven, late to his vocation.

  He touched a small stain on the marble top of a dresser and wondered whose room he had usurped. The mirror above the bureau tilted in its frame, and Innes adjusted it so that he could see himself. Years of studying and northern light had left his skin pale, his hair dark. His eyes were a Prussian blue that seemed ge­netically wrong in such an unremarkable face. Looking at him, one was reminded of coming upon the ocean in the middle of the winter. Though the color had leached itself from the land­scape, the blue of the water was just as vivid as in July.

  He set his books upon the marble dresser top. Inside were all the words he had had to study. He brushed his palm against the pebbled leather. The books were well-made. A thousand times they'd been opened, and yet the spines still held.

  The texts had taught him some of what he had to know. The rest he had learned during his clinical studies. He now under­stood, for example, how a man was likely to react to the news that he would be blind for the rest of his life. First there would be the facial paralysis, descending to the body, an eerie immobil­ity that could last for minutes. Then there would be the shock that blotted out physical and emotional pain, a kind of merciful interlude. Innes had hardly ever heard a patient cry out immedi­ately. Instead the mind created images and scenes of how it would be to live without one's sight, to be forever blind, trying it on like a suit of clothes. And then, finally, the weakened limbs, the need to put a hand to a chair for support. Even the youngest and strongest of them walked away as if bludgeoned.

  Innes had gravitated to surgery and to ophthalmology in par­ticular because his mother had begun to go blind when Innes was thirteen. This caused him to think about eyes all the time and, as he grew older, to try to invent ingenious methods to help his mother to see. Once he fashioned a kind of metal corona that she was to wear around her face so as to trap more light. An­other time, he went to a druggist to learn how to grind a pair of lenses. The lenses were so heavy, however, that his mother couldn't keep the spectacles on the bridge of her nose. She finally told him to stop: it was enough, she said, that Innes himself had perfect vision.

  Innes went south to Maine to medical school, but now he had come home. Not to the fishing village in Cape Breton where his mother and sister made nets and sweaters, but to the city he had always longed for. He would complete his training at Dalhousie with Dr. Fraser. And then he would go out into the world.

  History, Agnes always told her students on the first day of school, was not a matter of dates and battles, but rather one of stories. She would tell them stories, she announ
ced, and they would listen. But as Agnes put her pen and notebook away, she wondered this: Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influ­enced by the imagination?

  Agnes left the rest area and drove in the direction of the inn. After a short time, she spotted the sign she was looking for. She realized, as she slowed for the exit, that she was excited. Who would be there? Harrison, for one. And Bill and Bridget. Rob. Jerry and his wife, whom Agnes had never met — had any of them met the wife? Agnes hadn't seen Harrison or Rob or Jerry in more than twenty years. She would hug them, of course, but they would be strangers to her. She thought about all the days that had intervened since they'd last spoken to one another. And it was then that she recog­nized the source of her excitement. They would know Jim. She would actually be able to say Jim's name aloud to them. Of course, they would know him only as Mr. Mitchell, the young English teacher who had introduced them first to Whitman and O'Neill and then to Kerouac and to Sylvia Plath. He had made them laugh even as they had imagined themselves budding intellectuals. Agnes would be able to say — oh so casually — Remember Mr. Mitchell?

  (A muscular chest, a gap between a belt buckle and his pelvic bones. A pang — a longing as familiar to Agnes as breathing — moved through her body, and she waited for it to pass.)

  Would she tell them? Did it matter now? Yes, of course it mat­tered. Jim was still married. But if she'd been able to tell them, what would they say? They would be shocked. Their Agnes — sturdy, studious, and sometimes stubborn (though surely they had never thought her sexy) — involved in an affair with a man who had once been their teacher.