The question is a stunner. Pru says "Yes" in a whisper and takes the first sip from her glass of créme de menthe.

Nelson looks so glazed his mother prompts, "Nelson."

He wipes his mouth and whines, "I said I'd do it, didn't I? I've been here all summer trying to work things out. I'm not going back to school, I'll never graduate now, because of this. What more do you people want?"

All flinch into silence but Harry, who says, "I thought you didn't like Kent."

"I didn't, much. But I'd put in my time and would just as soon have gotten the degree, for what it's worth, which isn't much. All summer, Dad, you kept bugging me about college and I wanted to say, O.K., O.K., you're right, but you didn't know the story, you didn't know about Pru."

"Don't marry me then," Pru says quickly, quietly.

The boy looks sideways at her on the sofa and sinks lower into the cushions. "I'd just as soon," he says. "It's time I got serious."

"We can get married and still go back for a year and have you finish." Pru has transferred her hands to her lap and with them the little glass of green; she gazes down into it and speaks steadily, as if she is drawing up out of its tiny well words often rehearsed, her responses to Nelson's complaints.

"Naa," Nelson says, shamed. "That seems silly. If I'm gonna be married, let's really do it, with a job and clunky old station wagon and a crummy ranch house and all that drill. There's nothing I can get at Kent'll make me better at pushing Dad's little Japanese kiddy cars off on people. If Mom and Mom-mom can twist his arm so he'll take me in."

"Jesus, how you distort!" Harry cries. "We'll all take you in, how can we help but? But you'd be worth a helluva lot more to the company and what's more to yoursef if you'd finish up at college. Because I keep saying this I'm treated around here like a monster." He turns to Archie Campbell, forgetting how low the man is sitting and saying over his head, "Sorry about all this chitchat, it's hardly up your alley."

"No," the young man mellifluously disagrees, "it's part of the picture." Of Pru he asks, "What would be your preference, of where to live for the coming year? The first year of married life, all the little books say, sets the tone for all the rest."

With one hand Pru brushes back her long hair from her shoulders as if angry. "I don't have such happy associations with Kent," she allows. "I'd be happy to begin in a fresh place."

Campbell's pipe is filling the room with a sweetish tweedy perfume. Probably less than thirty and there's nothing they can throw at him that he hasn't fielded before. A pro: Rabbit can respect that. But how did he let himself get queer?

Ma Springer says in a spiteful voice, "You may wonder now why they don't wait that year."

The small man's big head turns and he beams. "No, I hadn't wondered at that."

"She's got herself in a family way," the old lady declares, needlessly.

"With Nelson's help, of course," the minister smiles.

Janice tries to intervene: "Mother, these things happen."

Ma snaps back, "Don't tell me. I haven't forgotten it happened to you."

"Mother."

"This is horrible," Nelson announces from the sofa. "What'd we drag this poor guy in here for anyway? Pru and I didn't ask to be married in a church, I don't believe any of that stuff anyway."

"You don't?" Harry is shocked, hurt.

"No, Dad. When you're dead, you're dead."

"You are?"

"Come off it, you know you are, everybody knows it down deep."

"Nobody knows for sure," Pru points out in a quiet voice.

Nelson asks her furiously, "How many dead people have you seen?"

Even as a child, Harry remembers, Nelson's face would get white around the gills when he was angry. He would get nervous stomach aches, and clutch at the edge of the banister on his way upstairs to get his books. They would send him off to school anyway. Harry still had his job at Verity and Janice was working part-time at the lot and they had no babysitter. School was the babysitter.

Reverend Campbell, puffing unrufed on his aromatic pipe, asks Pru another question. "How do your parents feel about your being married outside of the Roman faith?"

That tender blush returns, deepening the green of her eyes. "Only my mother was a Catholic actually, and I think by the time I came along she had pretty much given up. I was baptized but never confirmed, though there was this confirmation dress my sisters had worn. Daddy had beaten it out of her I guess you could say. He didn't like having all the children to feed."

"What was his denomination?"

"He was a nothing."

Harry remembers out loud, "Nelson's grandfather came from a Catholic background. His mother was Irish. My dad's side, I'm talking about. Hell, what I think about religion is -'

All eyes are upon him.

"- is without a little of it, you'll sink."

Saying this, he gazes toward Nelson, mostly because the child's vivid pale-gilled face falls at the center of his field of vision. That muskrat haircut: it suggests to Harry a convict's shaved head that has grown out. The boy sneers. "Well don't sink, Dad, whatever you do."

Janice leans forward to speak to Pru in that mannerly mature woman's bosomy voice she can produce now. "I wish you could persuade your parents to come to the wedding."

Ma Springer says, trying a more placating tone, since she has got the minister here and the conference is not delivering for her, "Around here the Episcopalians are thought the next thing to the Catholics anyway."

Pru shakes her head, her red hair flicking, a creature at bay. She says, "My parents and I don't talk much. They didn't approve of something I did before I met Nelson, and they wouldn't approve of this, the way I am now."

"What did you do?" Harry asks.

She doesn't seem to have heard, saying as if to herself, "I've learned to take care of myself without them."

"I'll say this," Campbell says pleasantly, his pipe having gone dead and its relighting having occupied his attention for the last minute. "I'm experiencing some difficulty wrapping my mind around" – the phrase brings out his mischievous grin, stretched like that guy's on Mad – "performing a church ceremony for two persons one of whom belongs to the Church of Rome and the other, he has just told us, is an atheist." He gives a nod to Nelson. "Now the bishop gives us more latitude in these matters than we used to have. The other day I married a divorced Japanese man, but with an Episcopal background, to a young woman who originally wanted the words `Universal Mother' substituted for `God' in the service. We talked her out of that. But in this case, good people, I really don't see much indication that Nelson and his very charming fiancée are at all prepared for, or desirous of, what you might call our brand of magic." He releases a great cloud of smoke and closes his lips in that prissy satisfied way of pipe-smokers, waiting to be contradicted.

Ma Springer is struggling as if to rise from the Barcalounger. "Well no grandson of Fred Springer is going to get married in a Roman Catholic church!" Her head falls back on the padded headrest. Her gills look purple.

"Oh," Archie Campbell says cheerfully. "I don't think my dear friend Father McGahern could handle them either. The young lady was never even confirmed. You know," he adds, knitting his hands at one knee and gazing into space, "a lot of wonderful, dynamic marriages have been made in City Hall. Or a UnitarianUniversalist service. My friend Jim Hancock of the fellowship in Maiden Springs has more than once taken some of our problem betrothals."

Rabbit jumps up. Something awful is being done here, he doesn't know exactly what, or to whom. "Anybody besides me for another drink?"

Without looking at Harry, Campbell holds out a glass which has become empty, as has Pru's little glass of créme de menthe. The green of it has all gone into her eyes. The minister is telling her, and Nelson, "Truly, under some circumstances, even for the most devout it can be the appropriate recourse. At a later date, the wedding can be consecrated in a church; we see a number now of these reaffirmations of wedding vows."