“I don’t love him, Mother,” Swanny insists, tilting her head back. The last thing she wants is an inky teardrop staining this sumptuous dress, the one item she and Pippi instantly agreed on. It’s yards and yards of vintage satin, a noir nightgown writ large, lush and dragging with puffed sleeves (Swanny loves her arms in it), all in the subtlest tint of yellowed white: the color of a tooth. They ordered it from a designer overseas. Before Pippi would let Corona alter so much as a stitch, she, Pippi, pinned the whole thing herself. It was a nightmarish ordeal. Swanny stood immobile for hours while her mother circled her, pricking her with needles and hissing about the garment’s substandard manufacture. It seemed it would never end until Pippi abruptly stood back and said, “My work here is done,” with such tremendous satisfaction, such confidence and pride, that it felt like she had put a curse on all of Swanny’s enemies. Was that just six weeks ago? Swanny’s eyes fill with ruinous tears once more. “I’ll never love him. Not in this life or the next.”
“That reminds me.” Pippi unsnaps her clamshell purse and produces an amber pill bottle. “You’ll want to be good and doped-up the first few times. Take one of these after dinner.”
Swanny reads the label, incredulous: “Muscle relaxants?”
“Better than tranquilizers, dear. I’ll never forget your poor father’s face that terrible night. He thought he’d killed me. And I was so certain I’d only closed my eyes for a moment.”
The processional music starts up, louder than Swanny would have thought possible from a soloist. The amplified harp emits a yelp of feedback.
“Mother,” Swanny insists, desperate now. Everything has been planned for months. The events of the last two days loom and shrink in proportional importance to those long weeks with her mother, scrapbooking centerpieces, cross-referencing the spousal-abuse termination clause with the divorce law encyclopedia, taste-testing the mail-order sample cakes. “This will be the death of me.”
Pippi’s eyes are the oldest part of her face, and still the sharpest.
“Life is long,” she instructs Swanny, staring her down. “Do you have any idea of the scope of this family’s holdings? Humphrey and I were up till three a.m. going over the books. Things being as they are, your annual dividends will be the GNP of a lesser nation. But if this city ever comes back—and it will, darling, believe me, it will—the real estate properties will put you over the top. Over the top, Swanny. Do you have any idea what that means? The freedom it will give you? You won’t have to answer to anyone—not me, no, not even Duncan, I can see plainly enough he’ll be easy to control. You won’t just be a baroness, you’ll be an empress. You can either seize this opportunity now, or spend the rest of your long, long life wishing that you had.”
Swanny looks down at the simple bouquet of baby’s breath in her hand, knotted up in a lace handkerchief—her mother’s choice. Swanny originally wanted to carry an old silk fan painted with an artful “suicidal lovers” tableau, but she realizes now that it would have looked prop-ish, cartoony, against the luscious curves of her gown. Her mother was right. Her mother is always right.
“Shall we?” says Pippi, offering her arm.
They step into the greenhouse together. Fairy lights glimmer in the topiary trees. The satin runner stretches out before them, a long purple tongue.
* * *
Hot mics in the indoor gazebo:
“But Dad, what if we just keep her around for special occasions? She’s, like, imprinted on me, she’s going to be a waste for anyone else.”
“That girl is going to the Quiet Place in North Statesville at five thirty a.m. tomorrow—it was the soonest they could take her. How could any son of mine get this far in life without learning to properly tie a tie?”
* * *
The wedding march does not have lyrics, but Swanny and Ripple both hear it the same way: no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no…
* * *
Osmond wheels out to perform the ceremony, dressed like a priestly executioner in a black hooded cloak.
“What is death?” he begins, ignoring the unopened prayer book in his lap. Humphrey and Pippi exchange barbed looks—this isn’t in the script—but Swanny gazes at him raptly, an invitation to continue. Ripple scratches his ear. “And why do we rejoice in it so? It is to me of no small anthropological interest that the occasions we come together to consecrate in society are, at heart, concerned with the belching nothing from which we spring, and to which we shall inevitably return. Maiming, disfigurement, philosophic revelation, involuntary celibacy, the highest achievements in the arts and sciences—all pass unmarked by ceremony, and often, by the world’s notice. Births and deaths, births and deaths: these are our sacraments, every one. Even that word, ‘sacrament,’ evokes with etymological cunning the obsidian blade, the bloodstained altar, of the ‘sacrifice,’ the ritual of old that did not simply acknowledge but in fact brought about man’s final transformation from a being of flesh into a being of pure spirit.
“The lone exception, of course, is said to be the business we are employed in now, on this very afternoon: the act of wedding, of binding two souls together in mutual ownership. Marriage appears to be an undertaking by the living, for the living. Like a slave auction, perhaps, or a lawsuit. Yet in truth, marriage too, is a living death—and I the sinister gondolier tasked with ferrying you to its farther shore.
“A name is the mark one leaves upon the Earth, and sooner than we might prefer to think, our names will be all that is left of any of us. But here, now, beneath this seemingly innocuous canopy of flowers, one partner will willingly forsake her name and the other will give up exclusive ownership of his. Mr. and Mrs. Duncan Humphrey Ripple the Fifth. Though this ugly construction is unlikely to appear in common use, it is this renaming that concerns us here today. A marriage is not about the division of property, or the obtainment of health insurance, or sexual congress, or the public affirmation of private sentiment, all of which can be accomplished by more expedient means. A marriage is mutation, the artificial merging of discrete elements from nature that turn monstrous when combined.
“But we would not be human if we did not summon monsters into our midst. Today, young Duncan will devour the baroness whole, and he will die of her poison. In their place, a two-headed creature will emerge, new and strange and born of blood, and we will call this creature ‘Ripple.’ Birth and death, birth and death. And so it shall be until the final reckoning. Swan Lenore, will you allow this?”
She almost misses her cue: “I will.”
“And you, Duncan?”
“I…do?”
Osmond throws back his hood and, with flaming eyes, states the benediction: “Let the fusion begin.”
* * *
After the final initialing of the contract, the party decamps to the Hall of Ancestors, where Ripple’s portrait is to be unveiled. Champagne corks pop like gunshots. Swanny, her mother’s words in mind, has slammed back two flutes before the velvet curtain falls.
The family gathers in front of the painting. The videographers film the tableau of their clustered backs, the canvas they partially obstruct.