“Do you think I don’t know who these flowers were meant for?” she said to me. “Are you trying to embarrass Mr. Morris?”
She then hotly announced they were on their way to a wedding, even though Mr. Morris tried his best to hush her. The bride in question, she went on, before her companion could stop her, was none other than Malia.
“That’s what you get for snooping around, miss,” she said to me. “The truth and nothing but.”
“But why wasn’t I invited?” I had tried to befriend Malia from the start, when we were only girls. Despite my attempts, she had always been shy and somewhat standoffish. Still, I was surprised not to be invited to such an important event.
“Don’t you understand? Your father can’t know—he doesn’t believe in such unions. The groom is a regular fellow. Your father would waste no time in letting Malia go. If you had known, there might be a situation.”
I was hurt and mortified that I’d been kept in the dark. “A situation? Do you mean to say I would tell him and betray her?”
Who were we to each other, after all this time? Did she not know where my loyalties lay? I glared at Maureen and briskly moved away from her, as though she were a stranger, for at that moment I thought perhaps she was. Now she was the one to look at me with a hurt expression.
“You weren’t told out of concern for your welfare,” Mr. Morris stepped in to say. “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
“Really?” I said, blinking back tears. “When you didn’t know the world, when you’d never spoken to a woman or walked down a street or stood in the rain, that didn’t hurt you?”
Maureen approached and tried to make amends. “Please understand,” she said, but I did not. I was deeply wounded by yet another deception, having been treated as if I were a child who couldn’t be trusted. When Maureen attempted to embrace me, I shrugged from beneath her touch. I wouldn’t say good-bye, and watched sullenly as they went on their way.
I hated to be thought of as my father’s daughter and nothing more. I might have flounced off, but curiosity had always been my downfall, and now it bloomed inside my breast. I left behind the fish I’d bought for some street cats, then followed Maureen and Mr. Morris down Neptune Avenue to Ocean Parkway. It was a long walk. Their destination was the Church of the Guardian Angel, an imposing Gothic stone building. I had never been to a Catholic church before, and this one had rows of beautiful pine pews and carved fittings. It was a space that could accommodate more than three hundred worshipers. Today there were perhaps fifteen attendees, half of them people I recognized from the museum. The Durante brothers, wearing stylish black suits, stood up in place of Malia’s father, a man she’d never known, and walked her down the aisle. There was the moody scent of incense, and dozens of candles were aglow. If an angel were ever to come to earth, I thought this would surely be the place he would choose for his arrival.
I ducked behind a column so that I might remain hidden from view during the service, not that anyone would notice me. All eyes were on Malia and her betrothed, both of whom stood like wondrous statues at the altar while the priest recited prayers in Latin. The prayers were like music, a river of words I didn’t understand, though I recognized them as a blessing. From where I was concealed, Malia looked nothing like the Butterfly Girl, that marvelous creature who perched on a wooden swing in the Museum of Extraordinary Things, resplendent in her orange and black costume, wings fashioned of silk and wire strapped in place of the arms she would have had if she’d been another girl. Now she wore a white taffeta dress, and a stunning veil of Portuguese-made lace tumbling down her back. Her groom stood beside her, a man of average height and appearance, love-struck, unable to take his eyes from his bride. He was a completely ordinary individual, not handsome or tall, and from bits of murmured conversation I overheard, I learned he was a streetcar driver. That was how they’d met, on a streetcar Malia and her mother had taken on an outing to Brighton Beach.
Many people cried during the ceremony, Maureen among them. She downright wept, and I was surprised to see her so emotionally wrought. Afterward, the guests rushed to congratulate both bride and groom before heading off to a small celebration at the groom’s family’s house. By then, I was halfway home. Because I couldn’t bear to go back to my father’s house, I went to the shore instead. I sat on a bench and breathed in the salt air. My gloved hands were folded on my lap, and the cotton fabric felt as if it had been spun from shards of glass. I knew what was inside of me: the green tendrils of jealousy. I wanted nothing more than to be an ordinary girl with the man I’d seen in the woods in love with me, though this seemed a more impossible occurrence than swimming out into Gravesend Bay, across the Atlantic Ocean to my father’s homeland of France.