The Wedding

At half past eight in the morning on the tenth of January we were in the clerk’s office in Canandaigua. The same woman was at the same window. She handed him the license across the counter and he signed the receipt and I signed under him, and that took four minutes.

Bea drove. Otto rode in the back seat with his head on Mila’s lap and Mila rode with her hands folded, and it was eleven degrees and the lake was white all the way across. Nobody said much. Bea is not a talker in the morning and I am not a talker at all, and Mila had been told to be good and was being good, and the whole car smelled of the flowers on the seat between us.

The church is the small white one on the hill above the village, twelve rows and a wood stove at the back and a window behind the altar with a lamb in it. There were eleven people in the building, including the minister, who had known the Voss family forty years, and Otto, who waited in the vestibule because I asked him to.

He stood at the front in a dark suit with his hands at his sides, and I came up the aisle in a gray dress that was fifty years old and mended at the shoulder, and with nothing on my head, because the veil had gone back in its box and I had not opened the box again, and I was not nervous; I have been asked about that a hundred times and the answer has never changed.

The minister began. He got as far as the second sentence.

The door at the back of the church opened and two men came in with snow on their shoulders, and everybody turned around, because in a town that size you know every car, and nobody knew theirs.

The first one walked up the aisle and put a folder on the rail. He was about sixty and wore his glasses on a cord, and he did the whole thing without looking at me once, which I have thought about for years and have decided was courtesy.

“I am sorry to interrupt this,” he said. “My name is Dale Corbett and I am an attorney. This man cannot marry.”

Then he said the facts, and he said them like a man reading a meter.

On the twenty-second of November, 2008, in this county, Adrian Voss married Sabine Mercier. There had been no divorce, no annulment, no separation agreement. The record is on file with the clerk of the county and he had a certified copy of it in the folder, and he opened the folder and turned it around and held it up, and you could see the seal on it from the third row.

He said two more things. He said that the Mercier family had paid the household expenses of Coldbrook since 2008 and that he had the statements to prove it. He said that it had taken him four months to find out what he had just said in four minutes, that it had cost his client a great deal of money, and that he would say the rest of it in front of a judge if anybody wanted him to.

The second man stayed in the aisle with his hat in both hands and did not come forward. He was small and well dressed and he had a scarf, and he had a scar on the back of his right hand, three marks in a row, and I noticed it because I notice hands.

“My sister is in that house,” he said. “She has been in that house since 2008. I am her brother. I am the one who pays for it.”

Then he said, “He would not let me move her.”

The room was very quiet. The minister had stepped back from the rail and was holding his book against his chest the way a man holds a book when he does not know what else to do with his hands.

Adrian did not shout and he did not explain himself to the room. He looked at me. That is the part that made it worse, and it is the part I remember.

“Ask me,” he said.

So I asked him, in front of eleven people, standing in a gray dress with a bouquet in my hand.

“November of 2008. She was thirty-two. Her mother was alive, and the family had money and a name in Miami and a name in Port-au-Prince, and there was a diagnosis on the table that had been on the table for seven years.” He said it the way a man gives a report from a place he has been. “If she is not my wife, she is a patient with a number in a county file. The family loses her and the family loses the business and she goes somewhere I cannot get to her. So she is my wife. She has been my wife every day since, and I have paid for every one of those days, and I have not put her in a place that locks its front door.”

“You could have told me,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Any day since April.”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

“Because you would have gone,” he said. “And I was not finished with you.”

That is the answer. Whatever else he said that morning, he said that, and it is the most honest sentence he ever gave me, and it lasted him about two seconds before he turned it over and began calling it something else.

I asked one more question. It was the only practical question anybody asked in that building.

“Is she in the house now.”

“Yes,” he said.

We drove back in Bea’s car with the flowers on the seat between us. Mila asked one question from the back, with Otto’s head on her knees, and the question was, “Is he coming home,” and nobody answered her, and she did not ask it again.

The north wing door is at the end of the second-floor corridor. It has a different lock from the rest of the house, a deadbolt with a key on a hook, and I had walked past it two hundred times in nine months and had never once seen it open.

Bernice opened it at half past twelve.

I want to be careful about what I write next, because there are two ways to write it and one of them is false. The false way is the one that makes her a thing. She was not a thing.

She was thirty-five. She was thin in a way that had a reason. Her hair was braided and pinned, with a piece of it down on the left. She came down the corridor at a walk that was not quite a walk—three steps and then a half step, three and a half, the way a record does when the table is not level—and Bernice walked beside her with a hand about six inches from her elbow and did not touch her.

She wore a blue housedress and one blue slipper and one brown shoe. Her hands were never still. They opened and closed and turned over and were still, and then were not.

She stopped in front of me.

She looked at the flowers in my hand and then at my face, and she did not look at me the way a sick person looks at a visitor. She looked at me the way you look at a new person at a table: once, quickly, and with attention.

“Who is this,” she said.

“Ruth,” Bernice said. “The teacher.”

“The teacher.” She thought about it for a second. “You are the one who reads to the child.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said. “She does not know her eights.”

Then she said, “The tea was cold this morning.”

“I am sorry,” I said. I do not know why I said that. It was the only thing there was to say to her.

Sabine Mercier Voss looked at the flowers again and took one out of the bunch—one white rose, on its stem—and put it in the pocket of the blue dress, and then she turned around and went back down the corridor the way she had come, three steps and a half step, and Bernice went with her, and the door at the end of the corridor closed and the deadbolt went over.

I stood in the hall with the bouquet in my hand, and there were five people in that corridor, and I counted them, because that is what I do.