“Then plan your own wedding, why don’t you?” Peggy darted through the door into the hallway. Her feet clacked rapidly up the stairs. Their father wasn’t far behind. Soon enough came the clinking of the stopper in the crystal decanter, then the decanter’s lip against the rim of a highball glass.
Her mother pursed her lips. Any mention of Rosemary’s wedding put the same queasy expression on her face. “I’m sure she didn’t mean that,” she said. “It’s just nerves.”
Rosemary gave her own grim smile and retrieved the scattered slips of paper, one for each guest who had circled Peggy’s big day on the calendar. Rosemary’s wedding day hadn’t had the mayor, the borough president, or a single city councilman. It hadn’t had much of anything. The service was conducted in a small side chapel used for baptisms, and was followed by a somber lunch at an Italian restaurant. There hadn’t been time to get a proper wedding gown made, and even with alterations, the gown her own mother had worn twenty-five years earlier would never have fit her. She settled for something off the rack in Bloomingdale’s bridal shop. As the pinch-faced clerk rang up the purchase and stowed the gown in a pink box, she stared rather obviously at Rosemary’s midsection. But for all the humiliations surrounding her not-so-big day—and there were plenty—what Rosemary remembered most clearly was the weather: piercing cold beneath a crystal-blue sky, the kind of cold that brought sharp tears to your eyes and sucked the breath out of you. As they exited the chapel, the wind came hard off the Hudson and absolutely ransacked them; it pushed through their coats, riffled their pockets, snatched at hats and scarves. It was the first time that Mr. and Mrs. Martin Dempsey had stepped into the light of day, and no doubt Rosemary’s mother saw it as an omen, an ill wind to chill their hearts and remind them what comes of giving in to fiery passion.
But that’s not how Rosemary saw it. The wind hit her and she laughed, high and joyous. It was an odd thing to do with everyone else so stoic and resigned—everyone except for her and Martin. When she laughed he took her hand and he kissed her. Not the chaste kiss they had exchanged in the chapel in front of a small knot of friends and sad-faced aunts. This was a full-on-the-mouth kiss and it thrilled her the way that blast of cold air had. Her parents heard her laugh, they saw the kiss, they did not approve—but what did she care? She was a fallen thing in their eyes, never to be made whole. Through long weeks of shame and tears, she had seen herself as they saw her, but in that moment she was free. The life that came next would be hard, but it would be hers—hers and Martin’s. She had crossed over into a country from which there was no return, and if it was the custom of this land to kiss your husband in broad daylight, buffeted by a wind that burned your flesh but made you feel alive, then so be it. They would cross the border, hand in hand.
IN THE LIVING room, which Birdie insisted on calling the parlor, Dennis Dwyer poured himself a drink. He’d learned long ago that if you kept the booze in its bottle, you looked like a drunk, but if you emptied it into a fancy cut-glass decanter, you were a man who appreciated the finer things in life. He knocked the first back in one go, and as the heat spread down his throat and through his limbs, he stared into the glass as if it contained more than a space for his next drink. His second was bigger than the first and as he raised it to his lips he became aware that he wasn’t alone. Kate had commandeered the sofa—which Birdie called the divan—and was lining up a row of straw-haired dolls in pinafores and crinolines. She worked methodically, her little mouth quietly shaping some nursery rhyme, or else a conversation between her and the dolls. Dwyer stared at her, waiting for her to notice that her grandfather was in the room. She worked her way down the line of dolls, patting some on the head and poking others in their glassy, unblinking eyes. When she reached the end, she turned toward Dwyer and pasted on a big toothy grin.
Dwyer sipped the second Scotch. The girl still had that frozen smile on her face.
“What are you looking at?” he said.
She shrugged, a big stagy shrug—the Our Gang movies, that’s where that one belonged—and turned back to her dolls. Dwyer had another sip and eased himself into the armchair, which Birdie hadn’t yet come up with a better name for. He regarded the drink in his hand. He would nurse it, make it look like his first.
Why did each daughter’s wedding have to come with such a bitter taste? Years ago, he had steeled himself for the sucker’s bargain you made when you threw a wedding: the women make all the decisions and you write the checks. And then on the big day you walk your daughter down the aisle and hand her over to some sweaty-palmed happyjack. You get her back for one dance at the reception, you make your toast, and you watch your wife cry her eyes out all day long and into the night. Fine, he got it. There were even moments that he regarded as his by right, those rituals that he looked forward to performing. The stately walk into the church, the toast—he had never been much for dancing—those were all things he could do, and do well. Birdie’s crying was something he would have to endure, but there would be her sisters, those old biddies, to help absorb some of the tears.
He hadn’t counted on the fiasco with Rosemary. Knocked up by that piss-poor Irishman, fresh off the boat and looking to stick his thing into the first American girl stupid enough to open her legs—and that girl had been his Rosemary, whom he’d raised to be better than that. Loads better. And a musician! Dwyer knew that Martin spent his time with the coloreds, so what could you expect? If Rosemary had been looking for a way to put a knife into her father’s heart—to pay him back for setting her curfew too early when she was at St. Barnabas, or for telling her she had to go to Mount St. Vincent instead of one of those New England colleges where the girls ran around with Protestants or else with each other (he’d heard those rumors)—well, mister, then she had found it. And it wasn’t exactly a private disappointment, the kind where you can close your door and keep it in the family. Was there anyone in the Bronx who didn’t know that Dennis Dwyer’s daughter had gone to the altar with a bun in the oven? By God, that had cost some votes. He tried to explain the hurry-up wedding as two crazy kids in love—They’ll drive you nuts, what can you do?—but once the baby was born you just had to do the math.