Spooner by Pete Dexter Page A

card tables Calmer borrowed from his friend Sibilski, who taught mathematics at the school, and then went to the A&P to
     pick up ham and cheese and Ritz crackers, then to a liquor store for refreshments.
    All week the relatives had been coming into town, most of them checking in to the Baldwin Hotel downtown. In the days before
     the wedding, they arrived at the house in the middle of the morning, and Calmer worked like a crazy man, finding reasons to
     be somewhere else.
    All the aunts from Spooner’s mother’s side showed up, and most of their children. Uncle Arthur, the famous concert pianist,
     flew into Atlanta from his home in New York, then hired a taxi to drive him to Milledgeville. He paid for all the family’s
     rooms at the hotel.
    There was no one from South Dakota.
    One night after supper, with the relatives in the house and Calmer doing dishes in the kitchen, Uncle Don, who was a circuit
     judge in Birmingham, Alabama, had several drinks and offered the observation that in his experience, a man was best served
     to begin all endeavors boldly, particularly marriage. Not running errands like the maid. Uncle Don was a tiny, round-shaped
     human much admired in Birmingham legal circles for pronouncements of just this sort, issued in a resonant, deep baritone that
     didn’t seem possible, coming from his small, soft body.
    The air in the house was heavy and wet from all the relatives inside, and in this sort of proximity to each other the aunts
     were like high-strung dogs, snapping blindly at any movement out on the periphery, and if one of them took a step back—showed
     weakness to the others—it was
woe is me
for her.
    On the other hand, the aunts were all tender for Uncle Arthur. He was famous and rich and talented—the living proof, in spite
     of the financial calamities and shame that had befallen the family when they were children, that the Whitlowes were still
     an accomplished and exceptional house. He got drunk and would laugh sometimes until he cried, and he hugged his sisters all
     the time, occasionally two at the same time (which, to Calmer’s eyes, recalled priming chickens for a cockfight), but the
     sisters all seemed to take some pleasure in Uncle Arthur’s hugging, even two at a time, although as a rule the family did
     not enjoy the press of one another’s flesh, which is not to suggest that the sisters didn’t hug and kiss hello and good-bye,
     as none of them wanted to be seen as the one who couldn’t stand it, an unmistakable sign of weakness, and each of them understood
     that any such sign of weakness was an instinctive signal to the others to go ahead and rip out her throat.

    Thus by the time the wedding rolled around, the aunts had been bristling at each other and baring teeth and generally mixing
     it up for three days, and their husbands had been trying to stay out of the way—all except Uncle Don, who loved the sound
     of his own voice too much for his own good and was roughed up several times when he didn’t know enough to shut up—and in the
     end things sorted out the same way they always sorted out, which was that Daisy, the oldest, could still make the rest of
     them cry.
    The wedding was short and hot, and afterward a spectacular bowl carved out of ice arrived in a truck from Atlanta, and Uncle
     Arthur filled it with champagne punch and then poured Spooner a glass and gave him one of his black, European cigarettes.
     Uncle Arthur addressed him as
Warren, old man
. Spooner’s aunts sat in the folding chairs, getting louder as they drank, two of them recalling that Arthur hadn’t got them
     fancy ice bowls for their weddings (not to mention the hundreds of pansies frozen inside it), and remarking with some satisfaction
     on the growing number of bugs floating in the champagne, and the pity that the ice had to melt, that the beauty of it couldn’t
     be preserved forever. And guessed how much it must have cost him to have something like that trucked in from