I didn’t screw up the rings, although both were small. Moreover, Dottie had found a way to bribe and pacify the diaper man with the old croquet ball. If the big baby stood (and remained standing) between Dottie and my grandmother, Dottie let him hold the sacred orb. If the infant emeritus dropped to all fours and started to crawl, Dottie took away his croquet ball. For a while, it worked.

Who cared that Henrik was limping? Henrik had no duties that required him to walk or stand; he had his lacrosse stick to use as a cane or a crutch when he hobbled around. The girl jocks were glad that he wouldn’t be asking them to dance.

In their bridesmaids’ dresses, the bare-shouldered girl jocks looked lithesome and strong. They were the fittest bridesmaids I’ve ever seen, especially for an older bride, and Molly was a strapping physical specimen among maids of honor. The night groomer didn’t just loom large. The décolletage of the bridesmaids’ dresses was cut exceedingly low, but Molly was showing the most cleavage.

Of course, my mom’s dress was the whitest and the prettiest; she may not have had humdingers, but that tightly corseted dress made the most of them. The neckline was an unusually low one for my mother. For such a small person, Little Ray was showing what amounted to a lot of cleavage for her. Even in the shade of the tent, the brightness of my mom’s white dress was dazzling. I suddenly saw what the zither man had seen in her: my mother was as beautiful as Alida Valli in The Third Man. In another world, if not in New Hampshire, Ray Brewster could have been a baroness.

Yet how could I have overlooked the aura of arrival that emanated from my aunts? Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had not neglected their foremost family characteristic—their sense of foreboding was as keen as ever. If those two didn’t see doom coming, they went looking for it. Nora told me later that her mother and Aunt Martha had been on the rampage in the Front Street house shortly before the ceremony started. Those two were opening every closet door and peering inside, hoping to catch the snowshoer with his pants down—“caught in the act of sodomizing someone, or being sodomized by someone,” as Nora put it.