it was true. “I still feel stupid,” she said. She looked at herself again, and behind the mask of the makeup she could see the Maggie Scanlan she used to be, and around her eyes she could see someone else, someone harder to know, harder to understand. She couldn’t figure out which of them was worth being, or whether it was possible, just for today, to be both at once.
But later, in church, as she stood to one side of Monica, who was serene and lovely in her high-waisted white organdy, without a hint of belly, she knew that she had learned something. It somehow came as no surprise to her as she came up the aisle to look over and see Bruce in one of the pews with his father, staring at her with his mouth slightly open. It seemed perfectly natural to smile slightly at him and then bow her head to sniff the roses in her nosegay, although she could feel the color rising in her cheeks beneath the artificial pink of the rouge. And when it was time for the vows, Maggie’s head came round with a snap as the groom recited his, and she realized that when she had envisioned this moment, thinking about the wedding, she had taken for granted that he would say “I do” in the same voice she had heard say “Oh God” that night on the beach. But his voice was unmistakably the voice of an entirely different person, and after that first swift swivel of her head, she was somehow not at all surprised.
24
TOMMY WAS NOT DRUNK. NEITHER WAS he sober. Dessert had been taken away—it was, as was customary, ice cream and a slice of wedding cake that tasted like sweetened cotton balls—and now a gnarled little man with a cart filled with liqueurs had stopped by his table. Tommy looked at the candy-colored bottles and almost sent him on, then thought better of it and, feeling vaguely English, asked for a brandy. Connie shot him a sidelong look, and he laughed. He was having a good time.
Monica’s wedding reception was being held at a country club just north of Kenwood and several rungs above the Kenwoodie Club. The banquet room was paneled in knotty pine, and the chairs and restroom walls were covered with green-and-red tartan. It was what John Scanlan always referred to disdainfully as “high Episcopal,” and the fact was that James was the first Catholic they’d ever admitted. The membership committee had postponed a decision on his application until after the Kennedy-Nixon presidential election to see which way the wind blew. James had certainly planned a high Episcopalian reception, with meager food and a bad band, all overpriced, but his plans had gone awry. For one thing, the groom’s family had persuaded the band, Jimmy Jones and the Lamplighters, to play a number of polkas, which had been received with much screaming, whooping, and lifting of women old enough to know better into the air. For another, the groom’s father had taken off his cutaway jacket early in the evening, exposing his service revolver, which, he explained to Tommy, he always wore off duty, “just in case.”
“Jesus, in this world, Tom, you never know,” he said feelingly.
“The God’s truth,” Tommy said, having the time of his life and his second Scotch.
Finally, there were John Scanlan’s brothers and sisters, all eleven of them. James spent most of the cocktail hour trying to lay blame—and Tommy suspected that he was prime suspect—for it turned out that after the funeral, someone had mentioned to all of them that they were welcome at Monica’s wedding. Coming down the aisle to take her seat on the arm of one of the ushers, and already concerned that her daughter was going to be sick at the very sight of Communion, poor Cass had been astounded to see almost two dozen people she had not invited sitting in pews very near the front of the church. She had called the country club from the vestry after the service, and asked that two more tables be set up. It was a tight fit.
Tommy spent most of the cocktail hour talking to his aunts and uncles, whom he had never seen very often. None seemed remotely put out that their brother had given them the back of his hand, except for one cut-rate party a year, for the last forty years. “A prince,” John Scanlan’s brother Brian, a sanitation dispatcher in the Bronx,