Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(43)

“Thanks.”

“I just got off the phone with your aunt. I imagine she was hoping against hope for a last-minute invitation, but she claimed she was only calling to ask if I thought Pyoder would object to champagne.”

“Why would he object to champagne?”

“She figured he might expect vodka.”

Kate shrugged. “Not as far as I know,” she said.

“Maybe she was thinking he might want to smash his glass in the fireplace or something,” Uncle Theron said. He was a good deal more cavalier about his sister when he was not in her presence, Kate noticed. “Come on into my office,” he said. “Does Pyoder know that he should knock on the back door?”

Kate sent a glance toward her father. “Yes, I told him,” he said.

“We can look at the vows while we’re waiting. I know we agreed that you’ll do just the bare minimum, but I want to show you what your choices are so you’ll know what you’ll both be promising.”

He led them down a narrow corridor to a small room crammed with books. Books overflowed the shelves and towered in piles on the desk and the seats of the two folding chairs and even the floor. Only the swivel chair behind the desk was usable, but Uncle Theron must have felt that it would have been rude to sit down and let the three of them remain standing. He leaned back against the front of his desk, half sitting on the edge of it, and plucked a book from the top of one stack and opened it to a dog-eared page. “Now, the beginning,” he said, running a finger along one line. “?‘Dearly beloved’ and such. You have no objection to that, I assume.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“And should I ask, ‘Who gives this woman?’?”

Dr. Battista drew a breath to answer, but Kate jumped in with “No!” so she didn’t hear whatever it was that he had planned to say.

“And I’m guessing we’ll do without the promise to obey—knowing you, Kate, heh-heh. Well, in fact almost no one keeps the ‘obey’ in, these days. We’ll just proceed straight to ‘For better or worse.’ Will ‘For better or worse’ be all right?”

“Oh, sure,” Kate said.

It was nice of him to be so accommodating, she thought. He hadn’t said a word about the Battistas’ known lack of religion.

“You’d be surprised at what some couples want omitted nowadays,” he said, closing the book and laying it aside. “And then the vows they write for themselves: some of those you wouldn’t believe. Such as ‘I promise not to talk more than five minutes a day about the cute things the dog did.’?”

“You’re kidding,” Kate said.

“I’m not, I’m afraid.”

She wondered if she could get Pyotr to promise to stop quoting proverbs.

“How about photographs?” Dr. Battista asked.

“How about them?” Uncle Theron said.

“May I take some? During the vows?”

“Well, I suppose so,” Uncle Theron said. “But these are very brief vows.”

“That’s all right. I’d just like to get, you know, a record. And maybe you could snap a photo of the four of us together, afterward.”

“Certainly,” Uncle Theron said. He looked at his watch. “Well! All we need now is a groom.”

It was 11:20, Kate already knew, because she had just checked her own watch. They had arranged to do this at 11:00. But her father said confidently, “He’ll be along.”

“Is he bringing the license?”

“I have it.” Dr. Battista pulled it from his inner breast pocket and handed it to him. “Then on Monday we’ll get things started with Immigration.”

“Well, let’s go ahead to the chapel where you can all wait more comfortably, shall we?”

“They have to be actually married before they can apply,” Dr. Battista said. “It needs to be a fait accompli, evidently.”

“Have you met Miss Brood?” Uncle Theron asked. He had stopped at another doorway leading off from the corridor. A pale woman in her mid-forties, her short fair hair drawn girlishly back from her forehead with a blue plastic barrette, glanced up from her desk and smiled at them. “Miss Brood is my right hand,” he told them. “She’s here seven days a week sometimes, and it’s only a part-time position. Avis, this is my niece Kate, who’s getting married today, and her sister, Bunny, and my brother-in-law, Louis Battista.”

“Congratulations,” Miss Brood said, rising from her chair. She had turned a bright pink, for some reason. She was one of those people who look teary-eyed when they blush.

“Tell them how you got the name ‘Avis,’?” Uncle Theron said. Then, without waiting for her to speak, he said to the others, “She was delivered in a rental car.”

“Oh, Reverend Dell,” Miss Brood said with a tinkly laugh. “They don’t want to hear about that!”

“It was an unexpected birth,” Uncle Theron explained. “Unexpectedly rapid, that is. Of course the birth itself was expected.”

“Well, naturally! It’s not as if Mama intended to have me in the car,” Miss Brood said.

Dr. Battista said, “Thank God it wasn’t a Hertz.”

Miss Brood gave another tinkly laugh, but she kept her eyes on Uncle Theron. She was fiddling with the strand of white glass beads at her throat.