THE WEDDING

The Army turned me loose at Fort Sheridan on the tenth of October, 1945 — a separation center that happens to sit next door to Lake Forest, a convenience I put down at the time to the luck that follows me about, though I have since learned who pays for that kind of luck. Ten days later they married me, in a stone church the machine-tool money had built, and I have never since attended an occasion of any size that ran so nearly to the minute.

Prosser came for me at the Deerpath Inn at half past nine — the same spare, dry article of LaSalle Street who had sold me a bride and a career across one lunch in Santa Fe — and went down the order of the day in the car like a man reading a bill of lading. The ushers would be six Halsted cousins: "Mrs. Halsted felt that with your own friends so scattered by the war, it would be simplest." The best man was a cousin named Stuart, whom I was assured I had met at the engagement dinner; I had never met him in my life, and said of course. "And Mrs. Halsted asks that you be married in uniform. With the ribbon."

"I had thought the grey suit—"

"The uniform," said Prosser, turning the page. "With the ribbon."

You will observe that not one article on the day's manifest was supplied by the groom. I observed nothing. I was twenty-two, decorated, and about to be rich, and October on that shore is the money's own season — the lake hammered silver, the oaks gone over to copper — and I rode through it like a young pasha reviewing his estates.

The church deserves a word. Stone, low, English by intention, sixty years old and letting on to six hundred; the Halsteds had given the tower outright, were down for a memorial window from each of two wars, and attended perhaps four Sundays in the year, to see how the investment was performing.¹ By eleven the pews were filling with the North Shore in feathers — matrons who had spent the war defending the meat ration from horseback, and their daughters, who are bred like the shore's own retrievers, for coat and disposition, whatever thinking the line required having been done two generations back by somebody in trade. My side of the aisle could have gone home in one taxicab: my mother, in a blue dress and a hat off Steinway Street she had told me the price of, a price being plain information to her and never a confession; Kowalczyk beside her in his good suit, reading the order of service like a schematic; and a Fort Monmouth sergeant I had wired at the last moment so the taxi shouldn't be empty. The cousins seated six hundred people the way men move a lawn party indoors ahead of rain, smooth and fast; it is the family talent.

Dr. Chase did the office in a baritone the parish must have hired by the pound; he had preached sacrifice up and down that shore through a war his congregation had experienced chiefly as a shortage of gardeners, and he gave us the whole organ of it now. Bunny came down the aisle on her father's arm in her grandmother's lace, and she was lovely the way that money's daughters are lovely, without effort and without argument. At the rail she looked me over once through the veil, haircut to ribbon, and whispered, "Mother was right about the uniform." I took it then for a girl's nothing; I have had half a century to decide what else it may have been, and I am no further along. The old man gave her away — I let the phrase stand, since somebody at that rail was certainly being given away, and it has taken me the writing of these papers to make out who — and we said the words, and Stuart had the ring out on the first try, having rehearsed it, I don't doubt, at the plant.

On the steps they posed us for the photographers, the medal outward; the Tribune ran it under "HERO OF THE ATOMIC DESERT WEDS," which was accurate in every word taken separately.² Then the club, and the receiving line, which is the worst hour of any wedding unless saying graceful nothings to strangers happens to be your trade. "So this is the boy from the photograph," said a dowager built like a monitor's turret. "You lay over those instruments with that terrible thing going off at your back."

"I hardly thought about it, ma'am," I said, which had been true the first time I said it and was becoming truer with use.

"Fred Halsted," said an uncle, taking my hand in a grip that had set castings. "I ran the Cicero works straight through the war. Three shifts, thirty-one months — tooling for Willow Run, and for a customer down in Tennessee nobody would name for us till August. I figure you and I were in the same line, Corporal, only I got paid." He laughed like a drop-forge. "And now Washington's cancelled forty million in orders, and come spring they'll be dumping war-surplus lathes on my market for dimes. You know what that means, young man?" I said it sounded hard. "It means new lines," he said, with relish. "New patents. New business. And a family man in the front rooms where the government does its buying. Welcome to the firm."

At the breakfast the champagne came up out of a cellar that had never heard of the war, and Uncle Fred gave the toast: in this family, he said, we don't make speeches, we make deliveries — "so, ladies and gentlemen: to the bride, and to the newest acquisition of Halsted Tool & Die." He said it for a joke, and the room laughed the way a board laughs at the chairman's joke, promptly and in units, and I laughed loudest of anybody, being the only man present who thought it was one.

Mrs. Halsted took my mother down that whole company on her own arm and presented her like visiting nobility, without one false note; that class does its manners the way its plants had run the war, three shifts and no seconds, and I was glad of it, and disliked noticing how glad. My mother straightened my ribbon with two fingers, exactly as she had straightened my collar for P.S. 85, and said, "You made all this yourself, Jay." She believed it. She was never once in her life wrong on purpose, and I let her be wrong, and we will move along now, as I did then. Kowalczyk pumped my hand and told me the church had the finest public-address wiring he had seen outside a broadcast house, and he had looked.

Between the breakfast and the dancing, Prosser collected me the way a good butler collects a coat, and walked me down a paneled corridor to the library, where my father-in-law stood with his back to the fire. I had met Mr. Halsted twice and had perhaps thirty words off him in total: a wide, quiet man of sixty with a machinist's forearms under a banker's tailoring. He said, "Whiskey," not as a question, and, "Sit down."

Prosser dealt the settlement onto the desk like patience. "Mrs. Klipspringer's property remains Mrs. Klipspringer's," he said pleasantly, turning the pages for me to sign. "The trust is administered from our office. The house on Green Bay Road is in her name. Your salary is paid by Halsted Instrument & Export, and reviewed annually by the board."

"Which board?" I said.

"Me," said Mr. Halsted.

I signed eleven times, and when I had done, Prosser gathered in every sheet, including the blotter, and I was handed nothing whatever to keep — my own religion, as the reader of the first bundle knows, practiced on me for once instead of by me — and I sat admiring the observance with my collar going damp.³

Mr. Halsted looked at me a while over his glass. "I bought machine tools all through this war with two histories apiece," he said. "Never cared. A machine's history is the seller's story; its work is my business. Barbara picked you. I picked your work. Keep each to its own bench and you and I will get on fifty years." He was out by almost nothing; it ran to fifty years and some odd months. And I will tell you exactly how that read from my chair: it read as a compliment. A man does not put his daughter and his government business into one pair of hands unless there is something out of the common in the hands; I took the compliment neat, and I have never in my life managed to see a hook while I was admiring the bait.

I will give the young fellow with nothing but nerve and a profile the whole art here, gratis, since I'll be dead when he reads it: if you mean to marry money, understand that they will know what you are before the soup — before the banns, likely before you know yourself — so waste no performance of honesty on them. Your entire business is to be an article worth stocking: sign whatever is put in front of you, admire the fittings, and draw the allowance with the air of a man conferring a favor. It has kept me fifty years, and it will keep you.

At four I danced with my wife while six hundred watched, and out of professional habit I ran my needles over her as we turned — the same instruments I had run over generals and physicists — and they returned what they had returned since the first afternoon I met her: nothing. Flat calm to the horizon. I had Oppenheimer read inside a fortnight, and I could not have told you whether the woman in my arms was happy. I put it down that afternoon to there being nothing in there to read — she was a Northwestern girl, after all, and I had once spent six hours at the University of Chicago on courier work, which gives a man standards — and if you have read the last bundle you know which way the reading had been running all along. I never did establish that it stopped.

At five she went up to change and came down in a going-away suit the color of the oaks, and there was rice on the coachwork of a borrowed Packard and the six cousins bareheaded on the drive. The luggage had been packed and loaded by other hands — all but my old Army duffel, which I had packed myself, and which carried, folded into a shirt at the bottom, a plain card with a Berlin address that I had been meaning to burn since New Mexico. I had had a month of stoves and matches. It rode with us, and I felt it the way you feel a tooth.

Prosser leaned in at the window while the driver shut his door, and laid an envelope in my hand like a man completing a delivery, which he was. "You have a compartment on the night train; the Homestead expects you tomorrow. Mr. Sennett's office asks me to confirm the arrangements. You sail from New York on the second."

"The second," I said. "Of November?"

"The firm regrets the honeymoon," said Prosser, in the voice of a firm regretting nothing, and stepped back, and we went off down the drive through the rice.

I opened the envelope on Sheridan Road. Orders — cut, stamped, and dated the twelfth of October, eight days before my wedding: passage, priorities, billeting; Frankfurt first, and after Frankfurt wherever the gathering was good. Bunny watched me read them with her gloves folded in her lap.

"Germany," she said — not asking. "Daddy told me. Whatever is it you're to do over there, Jay?"

"Gather things up," I said.

"Yes," she said, and settled back, serene as the lake going by. "That's what Daddy said too." And I rode down that shore toward my wedding night with orders in my breast pocket and another man's address in my duffel, thoroughly content, adding up everything I believed I had just acquired.⁴