Cassandra at the Wedding

My 7 highlights

• It was increasingly clear to me that I intended to go, that I didn’t intend to spend another night, at least not this one, in the apartment. There were all kinds of indications: I stripped the sheets off my bed and put them into a laundry bag; and I folded the cover over the keyboard of the piano, a piano which was half mine, but which I’d scarcely touched, as they say of pianos, since Judith, who owned the other half, went to New York. I should have folded the cover over the keyboard nine months ago, and locked it. There was a key someplace.

• I didn’t even know who the groom was beyond that he was a graduate medical student she met in New York, and his name was Lynch, or maybe even Finch. Yes. Finch. John Thomas Finch. Where’d she meet him—Birdland?

• Well, what’s he like?” I said. My father didn’t ask whom I had in mind, but he didn’t answer the question either. He got philosophical instead and gave me a speech about how it’s not easy to say what anyone’s like, even among people you think you know well; and this hit me because, like most of papa’s propositions, it was infuriatingly true

• As I say, if you move, if you push a little, you can get from Berkeley to our ranch in five hours, and the reason why we never cared to in the old days was that we had to work up to home life by degrees, steel ourselves somewhat for the three-part welcome we were in for from our grandmother and our mother and our father, who loved us fiercely in three different ways. We loved them too, six different ways, but we mostly took our time about getting home.

• We got to the chapel late, I remember, and they took us in by a side entrance and put us into a little room of our own behind a scrim and someone was playing “Sheep May Safely Graze” quite imprecisely on a Hammond organ in some other room. I felt identified with the organ, droning along unable to be very clear

• I went over to the table, set my glass down, picked up Judith’s, and tasted it. Fairly strong, really quite a robust drink for her, though not in a class with mine

• organ, droning along unable to be very clear