Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham Page B

every instance, badly dressed. With the help of Todd's father, Mary had rented the ballroom at the country club, and had had it impeccably decorated with urns of white lilacs and centerpieces of cream-colored roses. She'd enlisted a caterer to provide Rock Cornish game hens, wild rice, and French-cut string beans with slivered almonds for over two hundred. She had made no mistakes, and now into her white-and-cream reception marched a brigade of foremen who'd been hired specifically because they could bully other men into building houses as quickly and cheaply as possible. They were married to just the kind of women you'd expect: brassy, in loud dresses and too much jewelry, their hair teased and tortured into great stiff piles on top of their heads. Todd's mother and his two aunts wore simple page boys and dressed in pure colors, and Mary suffered over her own French twist. Her dress was frosted pink—she silently thanked God she had decided against a ruffle at the bodice. As she danced with Billy, who was straight-backed and self-conscious in his blue gabardine suit, she watched Susan laughing with two of her bridesmaids, and it seemed that Susan had gone to another country, where all the girls were effortlessly thin and beautiful and all the boys had futures sturdy as suspension bridges. Even through the graceful hush of the pill she felt, again, a little storm of emotion that might have been anger and might have been fear. She didn't want either feeling, not on a day like this. She concentrated on her daughter's beauty, her remarkable ease and charm. This one, at least, was safe. Mary hummed along with the band, a few bars of “Begin the Beguine.” She said to Billy, “Seems like the wedding's a success.”
    He said, “I guess any wedding's a success, huh? I mean, as long as they really get married, it's worked.”
    “If that was all that mattered, they could've gone to a justice of the peace and saved your father about five thousand dollars.”
    “C'mon. Did this shindig really cost five grand?”
    “You'd be surprised how things add up. You kids have no idea.”
    He whistled. “Five grand,” he said. “For one party.”
    “When you get married,” she said, “your father'll be off the hook. Your wife's family will have to pay.”
    “When I get married,” he said, “we'll go to a justice of the peace. If somebody wants to fork over five thousand bucks, we'll take the cash and spend, like, a year in Europe.”
    “The girl you marry may feel differently.”
    “I wouldn't marry somebody who felt that differently.”
    The number ended, and Billy walked Mary back to her table. As she walked with her hand on her son's elbow, Mary's pink shoes shed their cool minty light against the indigo carpet of the country-club ballroom. This was her son, on his way to Harvard. She was conscious of his new height, the size of his hands. She loved him so. He was still hers, the most intelligent of her children, full of promise and afflicted with a ravaged complexion that only increased the terrible weight of her love. He was at once ethereal and painfully human. He, alone among her children, suffered hurts and prides she could read.

    That night she lay in bed in her nightgown, watching Constantine undress. His body, gone slack and hairy, now inspired in her a tenderness that had almost as much to do with motherhood as it did with passion. Her husband might have been her oldest child, a difficult and obstreperous boy who lived outside the realm of her control. She could love him, more or less, when she thought of him as a wayward boy, one who occasionally did harm to others, who was subject to violent fits of temper, but whose decent heart would outlive his youthful fury. In his middle age Constantine had turned boyish, and she lived with him that way, as a boy with a pudgy body and a petulant streak. Wearing only his Jockey shorts, he sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Well, there she goes. She's