“Now, now,” said her husband.
“Well, I’m sorry,” the Matron of Honor said to him, but addressing all of us. “But you haven’t been in a room watching that poor kid cry her eyes out for a solid hour. It’s not funny—and don’t you forget it. I’ve heard about grooms getting cold feet, and all that. But you don’t do it at the last minute. I mean you don’t do it so that you’ll embarrass a lot of perfectly nice people half to death and almost break a kid’s spirit and everything! If he’d changed his mind, why didn’t he write to her and at least break it off like a gentleman, for goodness’ sake? Before all the damage was done.”
“All right, take it easy, just take it easy,” her husband said. His chuckle was still there, but it was sounding a trifle strained.
“Well, I mean it! Why couldn’t he write to her and just tell her, like a man, and prevent all this tragedy and everything?” She looked at me, abruptly. “Do you have any idea where he is, by any chance?” she demanded, with metal in her voice. “If you were boyhood friends, you should have some—”
“I just got into New York about two hours ago,” I said nervously. Not only the Matron of Honor but her husband and Mrs. Silsburn as well were now staring at me. “So far, I haven’t even had a chance to get to a phone.” At that point, as I remember, I had a coughing spell. It was genuine enough, but I must say I did very little to suppress it or shorten its duration.
“You had that cough looked at, soldier?” the Lieutenant asked me when I’d come out of it.
At that instant, I had another coughing spell—a perfectly genuine one, oddly enough. I was still turned a sort of half or quarter right in my jump seat, with my body averted just enough toward the front of the car to be able to cough with all due hygienic propriety.
It seems very disorderly, but I think a paragraph ought to be wedged in right here to answer a couple of stumpers. First off, why did I go on sitting in the car? Aside from all incidental considerations, the car was reportedly destined to deliver its occupants to the bride’s parents’ apartment house. No amount of information, first- or seco
nd-hand, that I might have acquired from the prostrate, unmarried bride or from her disturbed (and, very likely, angry) parents could possibly have made up for the awkwardness of my presence in their apartment. Why, then, did I go on sitting in the car? Why didn’t I get out while, say, we were stopped for a red light? And, still more salient, why had I jumped into the car in the first place? . . . There seem to me at least a dozen answers to these questions, and all of them, however dimly, valid enough. I think, though, that I can dispense with them, and just reiterate that the year was 1942, that I was twenty-three, newly drafted, newly advised in the efficacy of keeping close to the herd—and, above all, I felt lonely. One simply jumped into loaded cars, as I see it, and stayed seated in them.
To get back to the plot, I remember that while all three—the Matron of Honor, her husband, and Mrs. Silsburn—were conjunctively staring at me and watching me cough, I glanced over at the tiny elderly man in the back. He was still staring fixedly straight ahead of him. I noticed, almost with gratitude, that his feet didn’t quite touch the floor. They looked like old and valued friends of mine.
“What’s this man supposed to do, anyway?” the Matron of Honor said to me when I’d emerged from my second coughing spell.
“You mean Seymour?” I said. It seemed clear, at first, from her inflection, that she had something singularly ignominious in mind. Then, suddenly, it struck me—and it was sheerly intuitive—that she might well be in secret possession of a motley number of biographical facts about Seymour; that is, the low, regrettably dramatic, and (in my opinion) basically misleading facts about him. That he’d been Billy Black, a national radio “celebrity,” for some six years of his boyhood. Or that, for another example, he’d been a freshman at Columbia when he’d just turned fifteen.
“Yes, Seymour,” said the Matron of Honor. “What’d he do before he was in the Army?”
Again I had the same little effulgent flash of intuition that she knew much more about him than, for some reason, she meant to indicate. It seemed, for one thing, that she knew perfectly well that Seymour had been teaching English before his induction—that he’d been a professor. A professor. For an instant, in fact, as I looked at her, I had a very uncomfortable notion that she might even know that I was Seymour’s brother. It wasn’t a thought to dwell on. Instead, I looked her unsquarely in the eye and said, “He was a chiropodist.” Then, abruptly, I faced around and looked out of my window. The car had been motionless for some minutes, and I had just become aware of the sound of martial drums in the distance, from the general direction of Lexington or Third Avenue.
“It’s a parade!” said Mrs. Silsburn. She had faced around, too.
We were in the upper Eighties. A policeman was stationed in the middle of Madison Avenue and was halting all north- and south-bound traffic. So far as I could tell, he was just halting it; that is, not redirecting it either east or west. There were three or four cars and a bus waiting to move southward, but our car chanced to be the only vehicle aimed uptown. At the immediate corner, and at what I could see of the uptown side street leading toward Fifth Avenue, people were standing two and three deep along the curb and on the walk, waiting, apparently, for a detail of troops, or nurses, or Boy Scouts, or what-have-you, to leave their assembly point at Lexington or Third Avenue and march past.
“Oh, Lord. Wouldn’t you just know?” said the Matron of Honor.
I turned around and very nearly bumped heads with her. She was leaning forward, toward and all but into the space between Mrs. Silsburn and me. Mrs. Silsburn turned toward her, too, with a responsive, rather pained expression.
“We may be here for weeks,” the Matron of Honor said, craning forward to see out of the driver’s windshield. “I should be there now. I told Muriel and her mother I’d be in one of the first cars and that I’d get up to the house in about five minutes. Oh, God! Can’t we do something?”
“I should be there, too,” Mrs. Silsburn said, rather promptly.
“Yes, but I solemnly promised her. The apartment’s gonna be loaded with all kinds of crazy aunts and uncles and absolute strangers, and I told her I’d stand guard with about ten bayonets and see that she got a little privacy and—” She broke off. “Oh, God. This is awful.”
Mrs. Silsburn gave a small, stilted laugh. “I’m afraid I’m one of the crazy aunts,” she said. Clearly, she was affronted.
The Matron of Honor looked at her. “Oh—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you,” she said. She sat back in her seat. “I just meant that their apartment’s so tiny, and if everybody starts pouring in by the dozens—You know what I mean.”
Mrs. Silsburn said nothing, and I didn’t look at her to see just how seriously she’d been affronted by the Matron of Honor’s remark. I remember, though, that I was impressed, in a peculiar sense, with the Matron of Honor’s tone of apology for her little slip about “crazy aunts and uncles.” It had been a genuine apology, but not an embarrassed and, still better, not an obsequious one, and for a moment I had a feeling that, for all her stagy indignation and showy grit, there was something bayonetlike about her, something not altogether unadmirable. (I’ll grant, quickly and readily, that my opinion in this instance has a very limited value. I often feel a rather excessive pull toward people who don’t overapologize.) The point is, however, that right then, for the first time, a small wave of prejudice against the missing groom passed over me, a just perceptible little whitecap of censure for his unexplained absenteeism.
“Let’s see if we can get a little action around here,” the Matron of Honor’s husband said. It was rather the voice of a man who keeps calm under fire. I felt him deploying behind me, and then, abruptly, his head craned into the limited space between Mrs. Silsburn and me. “Driver,” he said peremptorily, and waited for a response. When it came with promptness, his voice became a bit more tractile, democratic: “How long do you think we’ll be tied up here?”
The driver turned around. “You got me, Mac,” he said. He faced front again. He was absorbed in what was going on at the intersection. A minute earlier, a small boy with a partly deflated red balloon had run out into the cleared, forbidden street. He had just been captured and was being dragged back to the curb by his father, who gave the boy two only partly open-handed punches between the shoulder blades. The act was righteously booed by the crowd.
“Did you see what that man did to that child?” Mrs. Silsburn demanded of everyone in general. No one answered her.
“What about asking that cop how long we’re apt to be held up here?” the Matron of Honor’s husband said to the driver. He was still leaning forward. He’d evidently not been altogether satisfied with the laconic reply to his first question. “We’re all in something of a hurry, you know. Do you think you could ask him how long we’re apt to be tied up here?”
Without turning around, the driver rudely shrugged his shoulders. But he turned off his ignition, and got out of the car, slamming the heavy limousine door behind him. He was an untidy, bullish-looking man in partial chauffeur’s livery—a black serge suit, but no cap.
He walked slowly and very independently, not to say insolently, the few steps over to the intersection, where the ranking policeman was directing things. The two then stood talking to each other for an endless amount of time. (I heard the Matron of Honor give a groan, behind me.) Then, suddenly, the two men broke into uproarious laughter—as though they hadn’t really been conversing at all but had been exchanging very short dirty jokes. Then our driver, still laughing uninfectiously, waved a fraternal hand at the cop and walked—slowly—back to the car. He got in, slammed his door shut, extracted a cigarette from a package on the ledge over the dashboard, tucked the cigarette behind his ear, and then, and then only, turned around to make his report to us. “He don’t know,” he said. “We gotta wait for the parade to pass by here.” He gave us, collectively, an indifferent once-over. “After that we can go ahead O.K.” He faced front, disengaged the cigarette from behind his ear, and lit it.