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Kate’s speech, shy, uneducated, and Liverpudlian, had jarred on his ears in the begi
But after a day or two of watching Kate with Tom and Wesley, uncomplainingly doing all sorts of chores on board the ship, handling the man and the boy with the most transparent, undemonstrative love and trust, he had felt ashamed of his first reactions to the woman. Tom was a lucky man, and he told him so and Tom had soberly agreed.
The Mayor came to the end of his speech, rings were exchanged, bride and groom kissed each other. The Mayor kissed the bride, beaming, as though he had brilliantly performed some extraordinarily delicate bureaucratic function.
The last wedding Rudolph had attended had been that of Brad Knight and Virginia Calderwood. He preferred this one.
Rudolph and Gretchen signed the register, after the newlyweds. Rudolph hesitantly kissed the bride. There were finger-mangling handshakes all around, and the entire party trooped out into the sunlight of the town that had been founded more than two thousand years ago by men who must have looked very much like the men who accompanied his brother in the wedding procession.
There was champagne waiting for them at Chez Felix au Port and melon and bouillabaisse for lunch. An accordionist played, the Mayor toasted the bride, Pinky Kimball toasted the bridegroom in Southampton French, Rudolph toasted the couple in French that made the guests gaze at him with wonder and got him a great round of applause when he finished. Jean had brought along a camera and took roll after roll of photographs to commemorate the occasion. It was the first time since the night she had broken her cameras that she had taken any pictures. And Rudolph hadn’t suggested it. She had suggested it herself.
The lunch broke up at four o’clock and all the guests, some of them weaving now, paraded the bridal couple back to where the Clothilde lay at the quay. On the after deck there was a big crate tied up in red ribbon. It was Rudolph’s wedding gift and he had arranged for it to be put aboard during the festivities. He had had it shipped over from New York to Thomas’s agent, with instructions to hold it until the wedding day.
Thomas read the card. “What the hell is this?” he asked Rudolph.
“Open it and find out.”
Dwyer went to get a hammer and chisel and the bridegroom stripped down to the waist and with all the guests crowding around, broke open the crate. Inside it was a beautiful Bendix radar set and sca
Thomas held the set up triumphantly, and the guests applauded Rudolph again, as though he personally had invented and manufactured the machine with his own hands.
There were tears in Thomas’s eyes, a little drunken, to be sure, as he thanked Rudolph. “Radar,” he said. “I’ve been wanting this for years.”
“I thought it made a fitting wedding present,” Rudolph said. “Mark the horizon, recognize obstacles, avoid wrecks.”
Kate, sea-going wife, kept touching the machine as though it were a delightful young puppy.
“I tell you,” Thomas said, “this is the greatest goddamn wedding anybody ever had.”
The plan was to set sail that afternoon for Portofino. They would stay along the coast past Monte Carlo, Menton, and San Remo, then cross the Gulf of Genoa during the night and make a landfall on the Italian mainland some time the next morning. The météo was good and the entire voyage, according to Thomas, shouldn’t take more than fifteen hours.
Dwyer and Wesley wouldn’t allow Thomas or Kate to touch a line, but made them sit enthroned on the afterdeck while they got the Clothilde under way. As the anchor finally came up and the ship turned its nose seaward, from various boats in the harbor there came the sound of horns, in salute, and a fishing boat full of flowers accompanied them to the buoy, with two men strewing the flowers in their wake.
As they hit the gentle swell of open water they could see the white towers of Nice far off across the Baie des Anges.
“What a place to live,” Rudolph said. “France.”
“Especially,” Thomas said, “if you’re not a Frenchman.”
III
Gretchen and Rudolph sat in deck chairs near the stern of the Clothilde, watching the sun begin to set behind them. They were just opposite the Nice airport and could watch the jets swoop in, one every few minutes. Coming in, their wings gleamed in the level sunlight and nearly touched the silvery sea as they landed. Taking off, they climbed above the escarpment of Monaco, still brightly sunlit to the east. How pleasant it was to be moving at ten knots, Rudolph thought, and watch everybody else going at five hundred.
Jean was below putting Enid to bed. When she was on deck Enid wore a small orange life-jacket and she was attached by a line around her waist to a metal loop on the pilot house to make sure she wasn’t lost overboard. The bridegroom was forward sleeping off his champagne. Dwyer was with Kate in the galley preparing di
Gretchen and Rudolph were wearing sweaters, too. “What a luxury it is,” Rudolph said, “to be cold in July.”
“You’re glad you came, aren’t you?” Gretchen asked.
“Very glad,” Rudolph said.
“The family restored,” Gretchen said. “No, not even that. Assembled, for the first time. And by Tom, of all people.”
“He’s learned something we never quite learned,” Rudolph said.
“He certainly has. Have you noticed—wherever he goes, he moves in an atmosphere of love. His wife, Dwyer, all those friends at the wedding. Even his own son.” She laughed shortly.
She had talked to Rudolph about her visit with Billy in Brussels before she had come down to Antibes to join them, so Rudolph knew what was behind the laugh. Billy, safe in an Army office as a typist and clerk, was, she had told Rudolph, cynical, ambitionless, sweating out his time, mocking of everything and everybody, including his mother, incurious about the wealth of the Old World around him, shacking up with silly girls in Brussels and Paris, one after the other, smoking marijuana, if he wasn’t going in for stronger stuff, risking jail with the same lack of interest that he had risked getting kicked out of college, unwavering in his icy attitude toward his mother. At their last di
“In a way,” Gretchen had told Rudolph, “maybe he’s right. Hateful but right. When he says the word phoney. You know better than anyone about me. When the time came I didn’t tell him, ‘Go to prison,’ or ‘Desert.’ I just called my influential brother and saved my son’s miserable skin and let other mothers persuade their sons to go to prison or desert or march on the Pentagon, or go die in the jungle someplace. Anyway, I’ve signed my last petition.”