Chapter 17 #2
He wanted it.
They were married for the second time at four in the afternoon on the second Saturday in October, in the room at the back of the second floor, above Dalton Books, in a building Erin Brooks owned outright.
There were fifty-one people in it, all standing, because there was nowhere to sit.
It had taken them four months to clear that room and Graham had done most of it himself on weekends, in a T-shirt, with a rented dumpster in the alley, and had one memorable Sunday carried three hundred pounds of somebody's abandoned filing cabinets down an outside staircase with a bookseller and had come up afterward unable to lift his arms and profoundly, visibly, obviously happy.
Wyatt was seven. He carried the rings on a cushion and he did not drop them, and it should be recorded that he had been practicing, and that when it was over he told four separate adults that he had practiced.
Shannon cried from about the second sentence and denied it continuously.
Adelaide sat in the one chair, in a hat, being fussed over.
Bev Kaplan came up from New York and said, loudly, to a room full of people who did not know her, that she was the only person present who had known the bride's actual name for the whole eight years, and was extremely pleased with herself about it.
And Graham Lockwood stood in front of his wife in a room he had emptied with his own hands and said his half from memory, because he had refused to have it written down.
"I said no to my family six years ago and I didn't tell you," he said. "That's the beginning of it, and everybody in this room has read about it, which is exactly what I deserve.
"So here's the rest, out loud, in front of all of you, on the record.
" He was not performing. He had his hands at his sides and his voice was steady and slightly too loud, the way people are when they are determined.
"I love you. I have loved you since a dock in July seven years ago.
I will not be quiet about it again — not to my mother, not to a board, not to a woman at a table in Boston, not for one hour of the rest of my life.
"I'm not going to promise to be perfect, because you'd hate that and it isn't true. I'm going to promise the useful one." He looked at her. "I will end things. Cleanly, and early, and out loud, and the first time you ever hear about any of it will be from me."
Erin, holding a bunch of flowers he had paid for and which did not count, said her half.
"You're not a project," she said. "I want that said in front of everyone, because there are people in this room who think I took you back and there are people who think I let you back in, and both of those are wrong and I'm not having it.
"I chose you. On a path, in October, with nothing in my hands, and nobody asked me to — you'd made sure of that.
" Her voice did not shake and she was distantly, enormously proud of it.
"I'm not going to say I'll never leave, because I did leave, and I'd do it again if I had to, and you know that, and it is the reason you can believe the rest of this.
"So: I'm not going anywhere. Not one day at a time.
Not while we work on it." She looked at him.
"For good. That's the promise. I'm your wife, I'm going to be your wife when I'm eighty, and I'd like everybody here to hear me say it so that nobody in this state ever asks either of us how it's going again. "
Somebody at the back — it was Owen — said, "Hear, hear," and the whole room laughed, and Wyatt, who had been holding a cushion for half an hour, said "Is it done?" in a voice that carried, and it brought the house down.
And then Adelaide Lockwood stood up out of the one chair.
Nobody had asked her to. There were no speeches scheduled; Erin had been extremely firm about that with three separate people, because she had spent five years at tables where somebody stood up and said something graceful about the family, and she had said, in June, in her own kitchen, nobody is toasting anybody in that room.
Her mother-in-law stood up anyway, at seventy-six, with one hand on the back of the chair, and the room went quiet the way rooms do.
"I'll be short," Adelaide said, "because I have been careful for fifty-three years and I am told it is very boring.
"Six years ago this family sat in a study and decided what to do about a young woman who was pregnant, and I was in the house that night, and I did not go down the stairs.
" Her voice was perfectly clear. "I have thought about the stairs every day since.
I could have gone down them at any point in the next five years, and I did not, until a November when I finally ran out of not being willing — and by then she had done the whole of it herself, alone, in the dark, at two in the morning, with a small lamp on. "
Erin, holding flowers, did not move.
"So I am not going to congratulate my son," Adelaide said.
"He has been congratulated quite enough for six months and most of it by people who have not read the book properly.
" A ripple through the room. "I am going to say this instead, in front of everybody, since apparently that is what we do now.
"Erin. You did not come into this family.
" She looked at her, entirely steadily. "This family has come into yours.
It is your building and it is your name and it is your town, and every single one of us is here because you allowed it, and I have waited fifty-three years to watch somebody do that, and I would not have missed it for the world. "
She sat down.
There was about a second and a half of absolute silence.
Then Shannon Gallagher, from three feet away, said "Yes," loudly and wetly, and the entire room went up.
They were pronounced married at about twenty past four.
Graham kissed his wife in a room above a bookshop with fifty-one people cheering and a seven-year-old making a noise of theatrical disgust at knee height, and Erin laughed into his mouth so hard she had to stop and put her forehead on his shoulder, and he held the back of her head with one hand and said something into her hair that only she heard.
The party went until two, which nobody had planned.
There was a fiddle at some point. There was a great deal of chowder, made by Dot from the market, who had cooked for a hundred and had been personally offended by the number fifty-one.
Shannon danced with Owen and then with Gail Norquist, who turned out — to the astonishment of everyone who had ever met her — to be a spectacular dancer.
Adelaide left at nine and kissed Erin at the top of the stairs and said, "I have never in my life been to a party in a building somebody's wife owned," with such naked satisfaction that Erin had to go and stand in the kitchen for a minute.
Wyatt fell asleep at half past ten under the table with the good glasses on it and was carried down to Shannon's car by his father, and did not wake up, and was gone for two nights.
By one in the morning there were nine people left, and by two there were none.
Erin took her shoes off at the top of the stairs.
The apartment was warm and quiet and smelled like other people's perfume and somebody's cigarette from the fire escape. There were glasses everywhere. There was a chair on its side by the window, for reasons nobody would ever establish.
Graham came up behind her and put his arms around her waist and his chin on her shoulder, and they stood there in the doorway of two rooms and a kitchen and looked at the wreckage.
"Fifty-one people," he said.
"Fifty-one people."
"In a bookshop."
"In my bookshop," Erin said, and felt him laugh against her back.
He turned her around.
And this was the difference, and she knew it at the time, standing there in a hallway at two in the morning with her shoes in her hand: a year ago in this apartment they had come through that door like two people who had been starving, and it had been necessary and enormous and neither of them had been able to breathe.
Tonight he took the shoes out of her hand and put them on the floor and took his time.
"Mrs. Lockwood," he said.
"Ms. Brooks."