The wedding took place at Church of the Nazarene, where we had both attended since we were little girls, and the entire place bloomed with blue hyacinth, perfume that made me feel almost drunk as I walked in. Hyacinth starts to die the moment it is cut, I told Walter Finley much later that night; they had had the florists there and setting up the arrangements at four in the morning to make sure that they didn’t go brown and limp before the processional.
Tom wore sharp black, Daisy floated in white, and the bridesmaids were in blue voile that made us look a bit like the hyacinth, though perhaps a little more sturdy. I was partnered with Peter Woolsey, a friend of Tom’s from college. He was built like a wall someone dressed up in decent tie and tails, and before the wedding, Tom’s mother charged me with making sure he didn’t drink himself silly and make a rude toast. I did my duty and kept him on champagne until the reception started, and after that, everyone was drinking and making rude toasts, so I gave up and joined in.
The stars danced overhead for Daisy’s wedding, and I found myself with Walter, fresh back from the war, and sporting a rather dashing black sling for his wounded arm. It didn’t keep him from the dance floor, and when he kissed me at one in the morning, I started to laugh as if I had never been kissed before.
It would be a few hours yet before the mother-in-law unit behind my house would be occupied by out-of-town guests, so I took him back there. I liked Walter for his pretty eyes and his generous mouth, for the way he swung me around the dance floor and was so bitingly polite to Audrey Lister that she barely knew she had been insulted. I liked him a great deal, but I also wanted to keep my mind off of what had happened just twenty-four hours before.
Daisy had made me a bridesmaid on account, I suspected, of what I had done for her in March, and I was the only one who was at her house the day before the wedding, when the letter came. We had been making up the garlands that we would carry the next day, hardy daisies and carnations twined into long ropes, wound with long strings of glass beads to make them shine. We coiled them up like snakes in the Fays’ ice box, and I stayed for lunch while Verna Wilcox and Amity Peters went home.
I curled up for a nap on the sun porch, and when I awoke it was dusk. I wondered if I could catch a ride home rather than walking or perhaps if the Fays might not mind my staying the night and going home for my dress and shoes in the morning.
As I was thinking things over in the late afternoon light, Mrs. Fay came in, dressed for an outing in her violet walking dress. She was sharp where her husband and daughter were all curves, and while Mr. Fay, I thought, found me to be a charming novelty, she had no such patience.
“The Columbus cousins are arriving in half an hour and expect to be taken to dinner,” she said, speaking as clipped as she might to a servant. “Do something about Daisy.”
“Do what about Daisy?” I asked, but she was already turning.
“As if anything can be done about that girl,” she said to herself, and then I was left alone.
The lower level of the Buchanan house was a riot of tulle, paper flowers, extra invitations, and luggage for the honeymoon trip. Daisy had wanted an Old World tour, but Tom had won out with the South Seas, and so her luggage was loaded up with light dresses, shoes with blindingly intricate leather cutwork, and cunning straw hats decorated with bands of pure silk ribbon.
I dodged around the dress dummy that had stood in the parlor for six weeks, sized exactly like Daisy and used for her dress fittings when she was too tired to bear the dressmaker’s pins, and climbed the stairs. When I knocked lightly on the door, the only response I got was a deep sob, and so I entered anyway.
Daisy was sprawled on her bed, flat as a playing card, facedown, her head cradled in one hand while the other clung to a completely empty bottle of Sauternes. I had enough experience with the stuff to know that it was sickly sweet going down and burned like fire if it came back up. I closed the door after me, and she didn’t even realize I was there until I pried the bottle from her hand and set it aside.
When I placed it on her windowsill, she rolled over to her side to look at me, her limbs as careless as that of a marionette whose strings had given way.