Clothes are my biggest weakness, Ellie had told Boardwalk Bulletin. But luckily my figures the kind that everything hangs really well on, so I don’t have to spend a fortune to look good.
At the end of the hall they turned left and entered the side door of a small chapel, carpeted wall to wall in beige and lined with sleek beige pews. Already the pews were nearly filled with elderly women and three or four widely spaced men. Most of the women wore stylish dresses; a few wore bathrobes. Several people in wheelchairs formed an extra row at the rear. Delia and Noah stood gazing about until a dark young boy in a suit approached and offered Delia his arm. “We’re seating everyone helter-skelter,” he told her. “Wherever we can find room.”
“Well, Noah here won’t need a seat. He’s the best man.”
“Hey there, Noah. I’m Peter. Son of the bride,” the boy said. He had not inherited Binky’s small, pursed features or her rosy coloring; just her easy manner of talking to people. He told Noah, “You’re supposed to go through that door up front. Your grandpa’s already waiting.”
Noah sent Delia one last imploring glance, and she grinned at him and brushed his hair off his forehead. “Good luck,” she said.
Then she let Peter escort her to one of the few remaining seats, between a woman in a brown-and-white dress and an old man fiddling with his hearing aid. The old man had the aisle seat and merely moved his bony knees to one side so she could get past. It was the woman who helped her out of her coat. “Isn’t this exciting?” she asked Delia. She had a freckled, finely wrinkled face lit with a gracious expression, and a crimp of orange-sherbet hair that must once have been red. “It’s our very first Senior City wedding! We don’t count Paul and Ginny Mellors; they eloped. Are you a relation?”
“Just a friend.”
“The board is in a tizzy, I can tell you. They want to charge Binky higher rates because she’s underage. Otherwise the young folks will be flooding in, they claim, on account of our security and our managed health care. My name’s Aileen, by the way.”
“I’m Delia.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Delia. What I say is, hell’s bells, Binky’s such a lambie-pie I think we ought to pay her! She’ll be a huge addition to our Sunday Socials.”
Just then, Ellie appeared at the side entrance.
Delia knew her immediately-the tinsel hair, the pulpy red mouth. She wore a long, cream-colored coat just one shade off from her skin, and she stood poised, looking somehow stiller than ordinary women, until an usher approached. This was not Peter but his brother, evidently-someone equally dark but more stockily built. Ellie took his arm and walked toward the front, the hem of her coat swaying classily. Where would she find a seat, though? All the pews were jam-packed. The usher seemed to be informing her of this; she listened, pooching her lips and frowning. They were crossing in front of the pulpit now. On the other side, several people-mostly kitchen staff, in aprons-lined the wall, and Ellie was deposited in their midst. What a pity, Delia thought, that the one daughter who’d shown up should have to stand!
But no, another daughter was here as well-a wan, wraithlike woman who rose from her seat and edged past a row of knees to join Ellie. The second woman had fair hair too, but it was cut so brutally short that in places it seemed scraped off her skull. Behind cupped fingers, she whispered something to Ellie. Then they both turned and looked straight at Delia.
Guiltily, Delia lowered her eyes. She should have smiled at the two of them, but instead she pretended to be absorbed in conversation with Aileen. “That’s Mary Lou Simms playing the organ,” Aileen was saying. Delia hadn’t noticed there was an organ, but now she heard a wispy rendition of “Blessed Assurance.” From the old man on her right came a piercing whistle, something to do with his hearing aid. “Oh, and there’s Reverend Merrill,” Aileen said. “Isn’t he striking?”
Reverend Merrill was not all that striking in Delia’s opinion, but he wore his black robe with a certain flair. He strode toward the pulpit, swinging a Bible in one hand. Behind him came Nat and Noah. Nat held himself rigidly erect; he was doing without his cane today. Noah was getting so tall, Delia realized. Now that he took his position next to Nat, she could see how he had shot up, just in the few months she’d known him.
The organ slithered into the “Wedding March.” Everyone looked toward the rear.
First came a stouter, plainer version of Binky-the matron of honor, in a wide blue gown, with square-cut gray hair and a broad, pleasant face. Then Binky herself, in white. She looked lovely. She was carrying pink roses and beaming joyously as she floated down the aisle. Her two nieces, as bulky as their mother, plodded behind with fistfuls of her train.
“Oh, what a vision!” Aileen said. “Did you ever see anything sweeter?” Delia’s other seatmate was gnawing open a blister pack of batteries. Over by the wall, Ellie’s white face blazed fixedly, but it didn’t seem to be Binky she was watching.
The bridal procession reached the front, and Nat, proudly stern, gave Binky his arm and turned toward the minister.
It was a very brief ceremony-just the vows and the exchange of rings. Noah did fine. He produced the ring on cue, and he didn’t drop it. But all of this Delia observed with only part of her attention, while with another part-her tensed, wary, innermost part-she was conscious every moment of Ellie Miller’s unwavering stare in her direction.
All the guests were invited to Nat’s apartment afterward-anybody who wanted to come. There was a great press of frail bodies milling out of the chapel. Delia offered support to arms as withered and soft as day-old balloons. She packed mothball-smelling woolens into elevators, and then, upstairs, she settled more women than she would have thought possible onto the swampy cushions of Nat’s couch. They were all looking forward to Binky’s cake. It seemed they preferred homemade, and were glad she hadn’t had time to order the towering pagoda she had dreamed of. “We get store-bought in the cafeteria all the time,” one woman told Delia. “Sent over from Brinhart’s Bakery. Tastes like Band-Aids.”
Delia looked for Ellie but didn’t see her, or Dudi either. Although in this crush, people were easily missed.
She threaded her way toward Binky, who was cutting squares of sheet cake, with her train looped over her arm. “Do you think it went all right?” Binky asked. Her headpiece of pink roses slanted toward one ear like a rakish halo.
“It went perfectly,” Delia said. She started distributing the cake. Nat, meanwhile, was pouring champagne, which he sent around with Binky’s two sons and her nieces. They ran out of stemware and had to open a pack of disposable tumblers.
When everyone was served, Nat proposed a toast. “To my beautiful, beautiful bride,” he said, and he made a little speech about how life was not a straight line-either downward or upward, either one-but something more irregular, a zigzag or a corkscrew or sometimes a scribble. “And sometimes,” he said, “you get to what you thought was the end and you find it’s a whole new beginning.” He raised his glass toward Binky, and his eyes were suspiciously shiny.
One of the women on the couch said Binky must have grated her own lemon zest. “I can always tell fresh-grated zest,” she said. “It’s no use trying to substitute that brown dust that comes in bottles.” She licked crumbs off her fork in a contemplative way. Her face had gone past merely old to that stage where it seemed formed of disintegrating particles, without a single clear demarcation. Did there come a point, Delia wondered, after you’d outlived every one of your friends, when you began to believe you might be the first to escape death altogether?
She relieved Binky of her cake knife and cut more slices, which she carried around on a platter in case people wanted seconds. In the bedroom, a young woman in a nurse’s white pantsuit was holding forth on various hospitals, referring familiarly to “Saint Joe” and “Holy Trin” while a circle of residents listened spellbound. Two men were playing chess in a corner; one of them asked Delia if he could take an extra piece of cake for his wife on Floor Four. Aileen, Delia’s former seatmate, was nodding and smiling as a fur-stoled woman described other weddings she’d been to. “And then Lois: she was a lucky one! Married a man with all his major appliances, including convection oven.”