Chapter 13 Barn Swallow #3
My mother then said, “Sam, I don’t want to spoil the mood but I hope you don’t mind if I ask about Felicity. Is she . . .
well?”
“I guess she’s as well as can be expected. It’s a big adjustment. A really terrible adjustment. We never saw this coming.
I was confident.”
“So you don’t think that she did this,” Miranda said.
“I don’t,” Sam said. “She hasn’t told me who she thinks did it, and it’s entirely possible that she doesn’t even know.”
“Do you always believe your clients?” Patrick asked. “Isn’t it your job to defend them either way?”
“I don’t always believe them. But I believe her.”
Sam mentioned Felicity’s illness, her severe dehydration and pneumonia and the fact that she had recently been hospitalized.
My mother’s expression shifted like a series of slides from compassion to consternation to confusion. There was the instinctive
response to Felicity; there was the informed response. Sam finally switched topics by asking where to put the bags. We’d all
forgotten that he’d never been there before.
There was some small and mostly comic concern about me and Sam sharing a bedroom.
He couldn’t believe that I’d never had a boyfriend stay over at my parents’ house before, but that was true, and even Patrick agreed that it was okay since Sam had “put a ring on it,” which phrase, I would like to be clear, he actually used.
When we got ready to take a drive, my father said, “That coffee will come in handy! Sheboygan isn’t exactly Las Vegas.
Make her bring you back if it gets too boring.
We can watch Rawhide. Did you know that Jimmy Stewart and Leonard Nimoy were—”
Miranda said, “Patrick, enough! Patrick is easily bored. Except by TV Westerns and blueprints and sparkling banter with the
guy who does entablature.”
But she said that with goodwill and affection. It was a statement made by someone who not only loved her husband but admired
him. That I could say the same about Sam, who also did things and knew things that I didn’t entirely understand, was a huge
relief, while also suggesting that people whose marriages were founded on new relationships were lucky, since they would not
run out of things to converse about for years.
In the long northern summer twilight, Sam and I took a drive past the house where Felicity had spent her childhood years,
currently occupied by a couple who looked young enough to be in middle school. We parked on the former grounds of the Starbright
Ministry and I explained Roman Wild’s colorful shenanigans. “My mom and I walked over here last winter, and the place was
a ghost town,” I added.
It still was. There were signs of the construction intent on turning it into a municipal park, but most of the darkened buildings
sat eyeless and moonlit, breathing what I imagined to be a kind of stone-tape despair. We walked down toward the lakeshore
and saw how the paving-stone paths between the buildings were studded with commemorative plaques evidently endowed by former
parishioners, each with a Bible verse: “Do everything in love.” 1 Corinthians 16:14 Ann Wertz Garvin and family, and “You
are the light of the world.” Matthew 5:14 Katherine Furness Dooley and Peter Dooley.
“I know them!” I said. “They had eight kids a year apart.”
“They must have decided on the couples option or they would have needed a way bigger stone,” Sam said.
The plaques were beautiful. The landscaping was beautiful. No detail had been overlooked.
“I never saw inside these places,” I said. “They’re too dark to look in the windows.” I tried the door of what seemed to be
a dormitory of some kind and was shocked that it was open. We walked through the building, clean and tidy, with nice built-in
bunks and desks, but as spooky as one of those abandoned insane asylums so beloved of fake-ghost documentaries. (“What was
that? Did you hear that noise?” “It was Dave, he just texted that he dropped the boom mic . . .” “Dave, did you see something?
Dave? He’s not answering, we should get down there!” “He can’t answer, he broke the mic.”)
Finally, we came to the small chapel near the lake. Sam pushed the door open. By that time it was nearly dark and moonlight
suddenly shot through the stained glass of St. Francis of Assisi. A quote was scrolled in gold: “Oh birds, my brothers and
sisters, you have a great obligation to praise your Creator, who clothed you in feathers and gave you wings to fly . . .”
I had never seen this particular feature of the chapel before. It was as though Felicity was whispering in my ear.
“Birds,” I said.
“Maybe her stepfather was trying to be kind to Felicity,” Sam said.
“Probably he was,” I agreed. “Probably at first, he tried. And you remember, he tried to visit her in jail.”
“That’s true. I know that he dumped her mom, but maybe he wasn’t all bad.”
“I don’t think he was. Maybe he just got too ambitious. Sometimes, things just don’t work out. He’s not a minister anymore.”
It was then that I remembered I’d had another recent dream about Felicity.
It came back to my mind, clear as film. I told Sam about a field trip Felicity and I had been part of when we were just kids, maybe in fifth grade, to Chicago museums and to the Brookfield Zoo.
At the massive zoo, which I’d never seen, there was a program in the new aviary that allowed a few people at a time to stand among the birds in a re-creation of the rain forest. The docent explained that you could get bird poop on your head, and you could even get pecked, but probably not.
Those revelations discouraged most of the girls, but not Felicity—and, since I couldn’t show up as a coward, not me.
You got a little bucket of seeds, which you held in your hands, and the birds would come to you.
The way St. Francis looked in the stained glass was the way Felicity looked that day, in an ecstasy, as brown and orange and blue creatures alighted on her hands and arms and shoulders .
. . but I was terrified; the birds seemed to be dive-bombing me, tiny assassins like in the Daphne du Maurier story, their little eyes fierce and unblinking, their wings pummeling the air.
I finally had to be ushered out of the space, Felicity’s arm around my shoulders, and I now realized this was why I’d been
frightened of birds, large and small, ever since. They really were not the merry little chubby-cheeked angel proxies of Disney
movies but were instead like dinosaurs, cruel, coarse, combative creatures who would kill you in an instant over a crumb of
suet if they didn’t weigh only four ounces.
“They don’t mean to scare you, Reenie,” Felicity said and laughed, but not in an unkind way, when I said that indeed they
did and if she liked them, she was stupid, because if she was studying birds in the desert and she fell and hit her head,
they would pick her flesh until she was nothing but a skeleton bleaching in the sun.
“I think that window is creepy,” I told Sam. “But I’m being like my very cynical father. Always looking for the worm in the
apple.”
“I like him.”
“He liked you. My dad wouldn’t put on a jolly front for the royal family if they came over. The way he treated you was the
equivalent of a ticker-tape parade for Patrick.”
“That’s good. One less mountain to cross,” Sam said, and then asked, “Do you want to get married in church?”
“Oh, Sam, I don’t know. I’m not opposed, though I’m not any kind of believer, but my father would drop dead of a heart attack.
Maybe we could get married outside? Maybe in a bowling alley? Maybe in this place. I like this place. We could convince Patrick
that it’s a municipal building.”
“Okay. I, Samuel Anthony Messina Damiano, take you . . . What’s your middle name?”
“It’s stupid . . .”
“Okay, take you, Irene Stupid . . .”
“It’s Tennyson.”
“Ah, hence the very depressing ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ But really, that’s a beautiful name. I, Samuel Anthony Messina Damiano,
take you, Irene Tennyson Bigelow, to be my wife . . .”
“‘My wedded wife,’ I think it is, ‘to love and to honor, to protect and cherish, to respect and defend, in good times and
hard times, for all the days of our lives.’”
“Is that the usual way? It’s a good way, I like it.”
“I, Irene Tennyson Bigelow, take you, Samuel Anthony Massimo . . .”
“Messina . . .”
“Messina Damiano, to be my wedded husband, to love and to honor, to protect and cherish, to respect and defend, to share my stories and my silence, to be my friend, in good times and hard times, for all the days of our lives” I added then, “I promise never to be jealous of your work or your friends. I promise to tell you the truth except occasionally and never about anything important. I promise to idealize you and look up to you and never insult you in public. I’ll stay up late with you and hire good people to clean the house.
Most of all, I promise to try to make you laugh, even at my expense, even when my rear end is fat and my boobs sag and my ankles swell up if you insist on having a kid.
I promise to love it too, although I can’t imagine loving anyone more than I love you right now.
If we have half of what my parents have and half of what your parents have, it will be enough.
I promise these things in front of St. Francis and these ghosts who’ve probably been waiting a while for a great moment like this one. ”
Sam said, “What about obey? You left out obey.”
I told him, “You can obey me all you want to.”
Sam said, “Those were things I never thought of. They’re things I never knew I needed. But now, I know. And you always knew.”
I kissed his cheek. “So can we just make a video of this? Do we have to do the other now? Invitations and fighting over the
kind of cake?”
“We do, yes. We have to. I know exactly how to do this. All cake is good, if made by a professional. We could have a black-and-white
wedding. It makes all the photos look good. And a black-and-white wedding cake, three layers, three different flavors, like
chocolate, white, and coconut. Me, a fitted black lace bodice over a white tulle tulip skirt . . . the bridesmaids could carry
white roses.”
“I thought you never really thought about this.”
“I thought about it for work, Sam! We had a wedding issue! And you know what they say, it’s a public commitment. Got to show
the flag!”
“Marriage is still the best legal framework to protect children, and with issues of property and inheritance and such. And
families like it. There’s only a fifty-fifty chance it will last, and I don’t mean us, Reenie, because ours will last . . .”
“It’s been months. My relationships aren’t long on . . . on longevity. Months for me are like years for other people. So this
has already stood the test of time.”
“Well, families want to be on the side of hope. I think that’s a good thing.”
I added, “And so are presents. I really want the presents. I love presents.”
“I thought we could say, please, no presents.”
“No presents, no Irene. The real, real truth is, I want everyone to know that you love me. I want you to say it in front of
everyone.”
“We have to have a champagne fountain. I know how tacky that is but Italians require a champagne fountain and a live band.
A live band that plays the tarantella. And a satin purse the bride carries that people put cash in when they dance with her.”
“Like what the strippers had!” I said. “A little pocket on their bikini bottoms.”
“My mother says back in the day, people used to stuff money right in the bride’s garter. I thought that was kind of earthy.”
“Too earthy for me!”
None of those things ever happened.