Where Troubles Melt Like Lemon Drops

This is post 15 of Section IV. To begin at the beginning, go here. Section II begins here. Section III begins here. Section IV begins here.

Bennett, Gwen, Chloe and Lizzy had arrived early and thus avoided the Grout menace. Bennett stood as near as he could to the door of the sanctuary, listening to the delectable strains of a string quartet recruited for the occasion and wondering moodily if homosexuals would be the sole heirs of civilized culture in a generation or two. He was dimly aware of a sort of angry buzzing from time to time among the guests, and gathered that the Grout boy was at the bottom of it, but he refused to allow any of that to impair his listening pleasure. Gwen, it is true, had come in from the steps, where she was helping Chloe with Lizzy, ablaze with righteous indignation, but apparently the problem had been handled, because Bennett escaped conscription. Chloe was too busy containing the peripatetic Lizzy to get involved with anything else.
Bennett enjoyed the ceremony, in so far as that was possible. He liked coming in to Haydn’s Emperor Quartet. He enjoyed the other music too, mostly. The counter tenor aria made him feel a bit hinky, but it was mercifully short, and the hymns and prayers were old favorites. Gwen spent the first few minutes whispering some unintelligible story about the man in the loud tie who was stretched out in the back pew massaging his ankle, but once she saw Lizzy and Chloe start down the aisle she squeezed Bennett’s leg and dabbed her eyes like any sentimental mother of a bride. Chloe floated past them in a simple cream satin confection of a dress that caused Bennett himself to get misty-eyed for a moment. It did not escape him that Jack’s square-jawed, granite-faced best man and brother lost his grip on the proceedings from the moment he saw her, and Bennett made a mental note to get to know him better at the reception. Lizzy, who accompanied her mother, holding a pillow with the rings, did indeed look, as her grandmother said, like a little angel, but the heavy bribery this illusion had entailed was apparent when she interrupted the ceremony to enquire in audible stage whispers about when Chloe was planning to purchase the Princess Power movie on special edition DVD as promised. The tactful Stephen, who had settled in a front pew after ushering, eventually removed the little girl, to everyone’s satisfaction.
The reception, at the Enders art museum, was tasteful and gourmet, with a woodwind quintet—Frank was feeling well enough to play—and at the end the happy couple left to catch a flight for a few days on Key West amid a cloud of bubbles and the quintet playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Continue