Since he’d stopped speaking, and the retired grammarian began his slow drift toward infancy, Principal Brewster’s sole means of expressing himself was to chew his mustache. But Dottie had shaved it off when he was sleeping—no doubt, what Dottie woulda done in Maine. His beard had stopped growing anyway, and the hairs of his mustache were falling out—or the infant emeritus was pulling them out, and eating them. Dottie’s justification for shaving him, as she so frankly expressed to my grandmother, was neither profound nor illogical, but—to Nana’s thinking—it was vulgar. “The poor fella is becomin’ a baby, Mrs. Brewster. I don’t see babies havin’ much use for any kind of pussy-tickler.” Once Granddaddy Lew’s mustache had been labeled with such a vulgarism, my grandmother did not regret his losing it.

However, when the kiss-the-bride business began, I saw how the infant emeritus reacted. A moment of adult recognition or recollection deepened the diaper man’s frown. My mom had leaned over the snowshoer. She bent him backward when she kissed him, holding him tightly. There were oohs and aahs from the wedding guests, though I thought the kiss my mother gave Elliot Barlow was a tame version of the snowshoer kiss—a PG-13 kiss, we might call it nowadays. But there was something about the way Ray Brewster had delivered her “I do” and the kiss. I saw that the backward-traveling diaper man was flat-out racing through time. The infant emeritus appeared to be fast approaching his time as a father, albeit from light-years away. He seemed suddenly surprised to be holding the old croquet ball, which he dropped at his feet and kicked away from him—I thought the ball rolled under the front row of chairs. The diaper man touched his upper lip, as if feeling for his missing mustache, and I distinctly saw his lips move. Once more, the principal emeritus was mouthing unspoken words, which I could neither hear nor read.

This time, the zither-meister was too far away to read the diaper man’s lips. Besides, the zither man was busy. From the far end of the tent, at the rear of the assembled chairs, nearest the elevated platform for the dancing, the old Austrian was hell-bent on strumming his strings. He was heralding the sacrament of marriage, now sealed by the less-than-snowshoer kiss—the edelweiss man had no time for lip-reading. The wedding guests stood and applauded.