At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott Page B

had designed into the tulle skirt of their mother’s gown, and the deep blue velvet one in her own.)
    Kneeling beside her, they watched their mother dip her head and press her folded hands into her brow. There was
black velvet on the collar and the cuffs of her short tweed coat, a bright gold clasp on the black pocketbook that hung from her arm. She’d been a bride in this church years and years before they were born, when she was still thin and their father wore a khaki uniform. Aunt Agnes had selected this church, not their parish church at all, but, she had claimed, the loveliest, the loftiest in the city, what with its pale stone and rosetta glass and soft, bleached light. Bombs were already falling and young soldiers dying in fields across the ocean, but because Aunt Agnes had taken control the day was perfect. “One perfect day at least” was what their mother said Aunt Agnes had called it. And if during the months of preparation it had seemed at times that Agnes had forgotten that this was a day meant to celebrate love, not elegance—there had been fights, the children understood, terrible rows, right up until the morning of the wedding—then she was forgiven each time their mother recounted for them the glory of that perfect day when she was young and thin and fearless.
    When she blessed herself again the children followed her out of the pew and around to the back of the empty church, the boy listening to the sound of his black shoes against the stone floor and imagining himself a priest in a long, black cassock, gifted through his ordination with both the power to change bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood and the privilege to stride across his church like this at any hour; the older girl praying furiously—one Our Father, one Hail Mary, one Glory Be—raising with each trio of prayers another soul out of purgatory and into heaven, as the old nun at her school had told her she had, on this day alone, the power to do; the youngest watching her mother carefully as she again reached into her purse, this time extracting three quarters. The children slipped the coins into the metal slot beside the flickering
rows of candles (the sound of the coins somehow the exact same taste and texture of the cold air itself), solemnly chose a thin stick from its container of white sand, and with much debate and hesitation, took the flame from one candle and lit another. They knelt and blessed themselves yet again and when enough time had passed stood to join their mother at the side altar where, with their own solemn deliberateness, she was writing her parents’ names in the parish book of the dead.
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    In Momma’s rooms the heat was turned up too high and the radiator dripped and hissed with the effort to sustain it.
    â€œI can’t imagine,” Aunt May told their mother, “how any marriage can outlast so much remembering. Every slight and insult. You remember everything.”
    The children turned the pages of their dull magazines. “If I didn’t,” their mother said steadily, “I would have come back here a long time ago.”
    The older girl rolled from her stomach to her back, her magazine held in the air. It was a new Playbill, but for a play that featured only three actors, and so after she’d read through their biographies and studied the list of scenes (a drawing room late one morning, afternoon of the same day, and later that evening, assuring her that time moved no faster on that stage than this one) and then had chosen from the many advertisements the restaurant she preferred—French, three steps down, with strolling violins—she’d begun studying the magazine from various angles and directions, imagining how it would appear to her if she had one eye, was half blind, was bedridden and forced to read with it held straight-armed above her head.
    Beside her, her brother turned the pages of another new addition to the magazine