Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
She stood there, her hat still askew, staring at this
woman--this woman with her stiff ankles, her slightly protruding eyes,
her nervous frown, her hat a little sideways--this stranger--this
murderess who had just slain, ruthlessly and forever, a sallow, lively,
high-spirited girl of twenty in a wine-coloured silk wedding gown.
Don't think that Hannah Winter, at sixty, had tried to ape sixteen. She
was not one of those grisly sexagenarians who think that, by wearing
pink, they can combat the ochre of age. Not at all. In dress, conduct,
mode of living she was as an intelligent and modern woman of sixty
should be. The youth of her was in that intangible thing called,
sentimentally, the spirit. It had survived forty years of buffeting, and
disappointment, and sacrifice and hard work. Inside this woman who wore
well-tailored black and small close hats and clean white wash gloves
(even in Chicago) was the girl, Hannah Winter, still curious about this
adventure known as living; still capable of bearing its disappointments
or enjoying its surprises. Still capable, even, of being surprised. And
all this is often the case, all unsuspected by the Marcias until the
Marcias are, themselves, suddenly sixty. When it is too late to say to
the Hannah Winters, "Now I understand."
We know that Hannah Winter had been married in wine-coloured silk, very
stiff and grand. So stiff and rich that the dress would have stood alone
if Hannah had ever thought of subjecting her wedding gown to such
indignity. It was the sort of silk of which it is said that they don't
make such silk now. It was cut square at the neck and trimmed with
passementerie and fringe brought crosswise from breast to skirt hem.
It's in the old photograph and, curiously enough, while Marcia thinks
it's comic, Joan, her nine-year-old daughter, agrees with her
grandmother in thinking it very lovely. And so, in its quaintness and
stiffness and bravery, it is. Only you've got to have imagination.
While wine-coloured silk wouldn't have done for a church wedding it was
quite all right at home; and Hannah Winter's had been a home wedding
(the Winters lived in one of the old three-story red-bricks that may
still be seen, in crumbling desuetude, over on Rush Street) so that
wine-coloured silk for a twenty-year-old bride was quite in the mode.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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