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Show He loved the color and shape and weight of words, forming them in his mouth as round as pearls and then pouring them out like pearls from his hand, the roll of long graceful sonorous sentences, all the old tarnished sounds about truth and love and devotion. But his zest for the words restored them, made them shinetf once more. People listened, people heard. To care for another person, to honor another person, to respect another person, to love another person -- we all flowed along with the flow of his words. A part of me came to vivid life. It was a stage, a platform, a ritual, a play, an old, old ceremony, and about me I heard the unrestrained flow of tears, an undercurrent to the rabbi's words, perhaps people mourning their own failures in life and at love, or perhaps simply grieving the fact that mankind has almost always betrayed his capacity to love. But the rabbi went on and I feared for Ben so rigidly at attention: I'd seen sailors drop from such tension. And now about me were the shiftings don the folding chairs, the shufflings of impatience: get it over with. The rabbi heard. He paused briefly, solemnly, and said a few words in Hebrew, strange and alien and aged. There was some ceremonial business, and then some more words in Hebrew, and then the small glass of wine. Amelia lifted it to her lips and drank as if of some elixir which would change her life into a series of golden moments, as if she tasted the essence of happiness. Ben received the glass from her, reverently now, placed his lips where hers had been and drained the wine, but he drank more sternly than she had, as if he knew how hard the future was going to be, how constant the vigilance. Refusing to have the glass wrapped in a napkin, he placed it on the floor on the special cloth, looked at Amelia, and crushed it beneath his heel. What did it mean? That one such pledge is enough for any one glass? A reminder that all things break? I didn't know, but I stood there getting tears in my eyes, moved at last and trying to stop it off. My friends kissed as man and wife. When the ceremony ended people rose from their chairs and swirled about, |
