At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page A

out the hillside of gray monuments that seemed to rise up from under the highway they were on as if it were an outcropping of the city itself, a vestige of the land the brownstones and the factories and the tall buildings had first been placed on.
    And then the land flattened black and through the cracks in their windows they could smell the air’s first change: the smell of swamp, bilge, salt ocean. It touched their skin with a
damp coolness that seemed at once to gather the city’s soot into rings at their necks and wrists and in the creases behind their elbows. They searched the darkness and made out the distant lights and then saw the darkness slowly form itself into houses and trees and schoolyards lit by pale lamps. The road became smooth beneath the tires, their eyes felt heavy. In the stirring silence of the car’s first pause they heard crickets, the watery rustle of leaves, of thick trees touching one another just above their heads. Now the ride was slow and silent and easy, the turns feeling each time like those final turns, slow and arbitrary and without destination, that their minds took in the moments before sleep.
    The air at last cooling, the day’s long wait nearly over. At a final stoplight their father said into the silence, into the aimless turns their thoughts were taking: “You know, people are dying to get in there.”
    And they smiled, vague in everything but their comfort and their weariness. Only vaguely aware (they heard their mother gathering up her pocketbook and her shopping bag) that for now they have left the dead behind them.

 
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    LAST IN JULY, first in August. He made the sign of the cross above their heads whenever he said it, smiling and mocking but also refusing to let his own irony alter his belief that this was indeed the way he blessed them. One week in July and one in August.
    The geography of their struggle, then, was west to east. She, Lucy, his wife, pulling them in to the thickest, most thickly populated part of the Island, to the swarming city where they’d both been raised; he, when his two weeks opened up before him like a trick door in what had seemed all year to be the solid wall of daily work, taking them out to the farthest, greenest reaches of the Island, to the very tip of the two long fingers that would seem to direct their eyes, as he himself would do each evening, to the wide expanse of the sea.
    Every year it was a different cottage, never any bigger than Momma’s rooms in the city and always, it seemed to the children, built for the most part with wire mesh screens: screen porch front and back, screen doors, patched window screens. There was the mildew each year, the cedar scent of empty bureau drawers, damp throw rugs on wood or curling linoleum. Always the chipped and mismatched dishes, the odd
collection of silverware, a kitchen table that needed a matchbook under one leg; a sock under the bed and a Reader’s Digest in the cupboard the only trace of the family that had vacated just two hours before.
    Mrs. Smiley was the landlord on the south shore, Mr. Porter the owner on the north. On the July Saturday when they arrived they would stop first, always, at the landlord’s house to pick up the key, and what to the children had seemed a long, monotonous car ride was suddenly obliterated by this new short journey between this detour and their final destination. Mr. Porter or his wife would hand out the key from behind their own screen door. Their house had the bay behind it and a wide green lawn in front where a family of stone gnomes watched humorlessly the endless struggle of a wooden goose with a wheel of paddle wings trying to take flight. There were Chinese lanterns strung across the patio at the back of the house—the children could see a corner of them from the gravel drive—and in the front a badminton net and a croquet set and a poured concrete bird bath that held at its center, like a prized egg, a