The Wedding Read Free Page B

good. A dog who has to live with children has to have a lot of messy leftovers mixed in with her daily rations.
    Jezebel, her task completed and the earth packed back as neatly as if it had never been disturbed, now made straight tracks for the Coles place, panting in her lumbering haste.
    Lute had bound Tina’s hair into braids. He tugged at them, and her face bent back to him, its innocence dream-washed with love for next door’s mother, even Jezebel’s antics not wholly erasing it.
    Impaling the love on that lifted face, Lute kissed Tina so hard that her teeth caught in the flesh of her lip, and a little trickle of blood filled her throat with nausea. As she clambered over Lute’s knee to give her place to Muffin, he caught her in a bear hug that took her breath away. She gasped from the pain of it. Her ribs felt crushed.
    “That hurts, Daddy,” she said on a sob.
    Barby turned beet red. “Stop it, Daddy,” she saidfiercely, while Muffin beat on his arm, her hand being quicker than her tongue.
    “You know I wouldn’t hurt Tina,” he said, trapping Muffin’s fist and lifting her high above his head to make her laugh. “Tina knows how much I love her.”
    But no one knew really. It was immeasurable. Every man has a child that is his heart’s child. For Lute it was Tina, born of his second wife, a Polack waitress, fresh from her chastity on an upcountry farm, her eye compelled to Lute’s dark handsomeness in the row of amorphous white faces across the counter of a cheap beanery.
    Lute made love to her in the loft. No trick to get her there, who had nowhere to go in the big, indifferent city, and no time wasted in seducing her, since he was a master at seduction and she a trembling novice, learning more than she could bear knowing, loving Lute and hating herself.
    He married her, not because he owed it to her, but to give legitimate paternity to his child that she was carrying. For all the useful obscenities at his disposal he was never known to call anybody “bastard.” And this Polack girl, to whom he had never shown tenderness, or been faithful to, or even acknowledged as his wife, once he had the paper to prove it, treating her like a servant, not even knowing how to treat a servant decently, mocking her Polack ways, never saying two words to her that did not have their roots in obscenity, this girl had called him “nigger, nigger, nigger” in a last-ditch stand against his deadlier venom, and given him the divorce he had been demanding ever since his infidelities narrowed down to one obsession, Delia, cool and bored andBeacon Hill, as far removed from his mode of living as the remotest star.
    He reached up for Delia and pulled her down, down to the level of his debauchery, and he wanted his divorce so he could marry her, whose consent to be married he had miraculously achieved, whose child, his child, without miracles, was already conceived.
    Why Delia, having tried marriage once and found it wanting, found it, too, an expensive entanglement that cost her a good deal of money to buy herself custody of her son, why she would jeopardize that custody, and the happiness and psyche of the son she adored, never knowing when he would know, knowing she could not face his knowing, why, with nothing to gain and all to lose, she would let herself go so far with Lute that there was nothing ahead but disaster was because she, like the Polack, whom she was so unlike, and the wife before the Polack, whom she was even more unlike, carried within her the seed of self-destruction.
    That first wife had been walking the beat, waiting for Lute, or someone like him, to pass. She was a truant from junior high, a baby-faced tramp, hot in her pants, pretty as a picture. Any boy in school would have dated her, but that quirk in her preferred bad to good, black to white. She was a Miss Know-it-all who knew no more than she had read in dirty books.
    She thought her rendezvous in the loft, toward which her quick, unhesitating step