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“She was riding sidesaddle,” said Tom evenly. “She should not have been riding sidesaddle, damn her.”
“Now, who would that be?” asked John, with that oiled and easy polite but false voice of his. “What woman is that!”
At noon the next day, Mike and I drove John out to Kilcock. He had practiced some great healthy crutch bounds and was apishly exuberant at his prowess, and when we reached Courtown he was out of the car ahead of us and half across the bricks when Ricki came running down the steps.
“My God! Where were you! Be careful! What happened?”
At which point John dropped his crutches and fell writhing in the drive.
Which, of course, shut Ricki up.
We all half-lifted, half-carried John into the house.
Ricki opened her trembling mouth, but John lifted his great glovelike hand and, eyes shut, husked:
“Only brandy will kill the pain!”
She brought the brandy, and over her shoulder he spied Tom’s champagne cases in the corridor.
“Is that crud still here?” he said. “Where’s the Dom Perignon?”
“Where’s Tom?” Ricki countered.
The wedding was delayed for more than a week out of respect for the lady, who, as it turned out, had not ridden sidesaddle but whose misfortune it was to be a small object under a more than substantial burden.
On the day of her memorial service, Tom spoke seriously of going home.
A fight ensued.
When Lisa finally convinced Tom to stay, she fell into a depression and warned of a similar trip, because Tom insisted on not ordering a fresh wedding cake and on keeping the old one as a dust-catcher for more than a full week of mourning.
Only John’s intervention stopped the fights. Only a long and inebriated dinner at Jammet’s, the best French restaurant in Ireland, restored their humor.
“Quiet!” said John as we dined. “The kitchen door as it opens and shuts, opens, shuts! Listen!”
We listened.
As the door squealed wide on its hinges, the voice of the chef could be heard shrieking in frenzies at his cooks.
Open:
A shriek!
Shut:
Silence.
Open:
A scream!
Shut:
Silence.
“You hear that?” whispered John.
Open. Shriek!
“That’s you, Tom.”
Shut, silence. Open, scream.
“That’s you, Lisa.”
Open, shut, open, shut.
Scream, shriek, shriek, scream.
“Tom, Lisa, Lisa, Tom!”
“My God!” cried Lisa.
“Dear Jesus!” said Tom.
Scream, silence, scream.
“Is that us?” both said.
“Or an approximation,” said John, his cigarillo smoking in his languid mouth. “Give or take a decibel. Champagne?”
John refilled our glasses and ordered more.
Tom and Lisa laughed so much they had to grab each other, and then their heads fell to each other’s shoulders, choking and breathless.
Very late, John called the chef out to stand in the kitchen door.
Wild applause greeted him. Amazed, he shrugged, nodded, and vanished.
As John paid the bill, Tom said, very slowly, “Okay. She was not riding sidesaddle.”
“I was hoping you’d say that, Tom.” John exhaled a long slow stream of cigarillo smoke, laying out the tip. “I was hoping you would.”
Mike and I picked up the Unitarian minister, the Reverend Mr. Hicks, the night before the great hunt wedding and drove him to Kilcock.
On his way to the car he had something fine to say about Dublin. As we drove from Dublin he had something truly excellent to say about the outskirts and the River Liffey, and when we hit the green countryside he was most effusive of all. It seemed there was no speck or seam visible on, in, or through this county or the next. Or if flaws were there, he chose to ignore them for the virtues. Given time, he would speak the list. Meanwhile, the hunt wedding lay like white lace on the morning shore ahead and he focused on it, with his pursed mouth, his red pointy nose, and his flushed eyeballs.
As we churned gravel in the yard, he gasped, “Thank God, there’s no moon! The less seen of me arriving, the better!”
“The whole town will see you through the windows tomorrow,” I observed, dryly, “holding the pagan service and fluting the blasphemous oration.”
The Reverend Mr. Hicks turned to a shape carved from a moonstone. “Find me a bottle,” he husked, “and put me to bed.”
I awoke just before dawn in a high attic servant’s room and lay conjuring the great day in the morning this was promised to be.
The theater of Ireland waited.
I thought I heard brogues below, going home late from Finn’s or arriving early for the Protestant Embarrassment.
I thought I heard the huntsman’s horn, practicing on the green rim of the world.
I imagined I heard a fox yipping in response.
There was a small shadow on the edge of the land; the hunted beast, I was sure, arriving to be first onstage.
Then, sprawled in bed, eyes shut, I conjured up the arrival of hounds in tumult and then horses, shivering their skin over their flesh, in bad need of psychologists’ advice, and none here. That was silly, of course. Horses and hounds do not arrive first. The kennelmaster must lead one and the various bluebloods rein and reassure the others. Yet I did hear blood cries and yawps somewhere in my half sleep, and the jingling of accoutrements galloped to a halt.
Not wishing to be stage director to it all, I churned over into a whimpering and talkative sleep, warning myself to burrow deep and listen not.
Only to hear John’s voice at the door to my room, as he stirred the parquetry with his crutches. “No use, kid. Time to get up.”
And the real hounds and horses arrived below.
All was in readiness. The stale wedding cake, growing more ancient by the hour, awaited. The tooth-aching and tongue-blistering champagne was laid by.
The horses were steaming the air and smiling derisive smiles in the courtyard.
The hounds were padding in circles, wetting bricks, hooves, and boots.
The lords and ladies and the owners of liquor shops all across Eire had arrived, of course, and dismounted to the nibbling smiles of horses and the suspicious protests of the hounds.
“Stirrup cups for all!” someone cried.
“That’s before we ride,” a lady corrected. “And it’s just for the groom.”
“What I meant to say is, is the bar open?”
“There is no bar,” announced the Reverend Mr. Hicks, standing so straight and correct it was obvious he had just been there, “but there is champagne, good silver buckets and bad. Beware of the shilling poison up front. Demand the pound sterling Mumm’s.”
The horses were quickly abandoned and the hounds left to harass the kennelmaster and water the yard.
The guests booted up the steps, making hollow clubbing sounds on the concrete, their faces distorted not by fun house mirrors but by ancestry alone. Time and the patient chromosome had worked their clay, bucking the teeth, rheuming the eye, elongating the lip, beaking the nose, cleaving the chin, hollowing the cheek, jugging the ears, eroding the hair, tufting the eyebrows, bleaching the eyelids, waxing the complexion, pocking the brow, and knobbing the elbows, wrists, and fingers. Some looked as if they had stood too many years inside and looking out from stable doors.
My God, I thought, what a jumble sale of skulls and ears, lower lips and high-flung eyebrows. Here danced the spider, there thundered the hippo, here the spaniel eye wet itself with Irish sunlight, there the hound mouth drooped into despairs of days when no sun rose. Not quite crayfish, a fiddle-crab liquor salesman sidled up the steps, bringing with him the eyes of Adonis locked in a face so crimson he might have parboiled himself for breakfast. Here they all came, in pink or black coats, with bloated brows, insucked nostrils, and wharf-piling jaws.
I reeled back and drifted with the clamor of boots to see elbows shoving about in the rummage for Mumm’s as against Twelvetrees bubbly.
“Who put the poison above and the remedy below?”
Instant silence followed as they beheld Tom Himself nodding his face toward the obscure-and-terrible as against the famed-and-fabulous.
“Let’s have a tasting,” someone said. “Compare old Sour Ditch to Kingsblood Royal.”
Tom could not prevent as several dozen hands emptied the tooth-destroyer to make way for Mumm’s mouthwash.
All was almost in readiness. Along with the killing wine and its cure, to one side were a few caviar sticks and cheese biscuits that Tom had laid on, while farther on, an ice floe frozen forever, the bridal cake waited for eternity.
Since it had already stalled eight days, its mesa and sides stalwart in the hours and quarter month just passed, the cake had an air of Miss Havisham about it, which, spied, was declared sotto voce innumerable times in earshot of the butlers and maids, who adjusted their ties and aprons and searched the ceiling for deliverance.
There was a sneeze.
Lisa appeared at the top of the stairs, only to sneeze again, spin about, and run back up. There was a sound of nose-blowing: the faintest whiff of hunting horn. Lisa returned, steadied herself, and sneezed on the way down.
“I wonder if this is a Freudian cold,” she said beneath the Kleenex over her nose.
“What in hell do you mean by that?” Tom scowled.
“Maybe my nose doesn’t want to get married.” Lisa followed this with a quick laugh.
“Very funny. Very, very funny. Well, if your nose wants to call off the wedding, let it speak.” Tom showed his teeth, nibbling the air much like the courtyard horses, to prove his humor.
Lisa half turned to flee, but another sneeze froze her in place. Any further retreat ceased when several crutches punched down the stairs, swinging between them in his pink coat the director as clown, the happy huntsman as lunatic gymnast. Taking the steps two at a time and swinging his long booted legs as if to project himself over our heads, John descended, talking over his shoulder and not minding where he fiddled his supports.
“It took an hour for the damned ambulance to get there; meanwhile, I twitched and snaked around and screamed so loud that windows slammed a hundred yards off. Six shots didn’t stop my yells. At the hospital, the Doc took one look, turned me over, and—crack! like a kick in the spine—the pain stopped, as did my screams. Then, by God, I began to laugh.”
Turning from John, I plowed through the champagne mob. “Get me one of those,” called John. “Make it two. Hello, Lisa, don’t you look fine, just fine!”
Lisa sneezed.
“My God, look at your nose, Lisa,” John commiserated. “So damn red it looks as if you’d been up five nights boozing!”
Lisa held to her stomach with one hand, her nose with the other, and ran upstairs.
“Thanks a lot,” said Ricki, halfway down.
“What’d I do?” John protested. “Where’s she going?”
“To powder her nose, dimwit.”
“Where’s Mr. Hicks?” said John, escaping swiftly in leapfrog vaults.
“Hello, hello!” He stopped in midhop to wave at all the windows along the back of the dining room, where two dozen or so local noses imprinted the panes.
The villagers, mad, angry, or irritated housewives, hesitated, not knowing how to swallow John’s happy salute.
A few waved back. The rest pulled off, not taken in by his apish Protestant amiability.
“Welcome, welcome!” John called, knowing they could not hear. “It’s the Hollywood sinner here, born in sin, living in sin, and soon to die, writhing, in sin. Hello!”
