The Corrections

June 13, 1987 ) matched the color scheme. Most important of all was that the bride and groom themselves match: have similar backgrounds and ages and educations. Sometimes, at a wedding hosted by less good friends of Enid’s, the bride would beheavier or significantly older than the groom, or the groom’s family would hail from a farm town upstate and be obviously overawed by Deepmire’s elegance. Enid felt sorry for the principals at a reception like that. She just knew the marriage was going to be a struggle from day one. More typically, though, the only discordant note at Deepmire would be an off-color toast offered by some secondary groomsman, often a college buddy of the groom, often mustached or weak-chinned, invariably flushed with liquor, who sounded as if he didn’t come from the Midwest at all but from some more eastern urban place, and who tried to show off by making a “humorous” reference to premarital sex, causing both groom and bride to blush or to laugh with their eyes closed (not, Enid felt, because they were amused but because they were naturally tactful and didn’t want the offender to realize how offensive his remark was) while Alfred inclined his head deafly and Enid cast her eye around the room until she found a friend with whom she could exchange a reassuring frown.
    Alfred loved weddings, too. They seemed to him the one kind of party that had a real purpose. Under their spell he authorized purchases (a new dress for Enid, a new suit for himself, a top-quality ten-piece teakwood salad-bowl set for a gift) that he ordinarily would have vetoed as unreasonable.
    Enid had looked forward, some day when Denise was older and had finished college, to hosting a really elegant wedding and reception (though not, alas, at Deepmire, since, almost alone among their better friends, the Lamberts could not afford the astronomical Deepmire fees) for Denise and a tall, broad-shouldered, possibly Scandinavian young man whose flaxen hair would offset the defect of the too-dark and too-curly hair Denise had inherited from Enid but who would otherwise be her match. And so it just about broke Enid’s heart when, one October night, not three weeks after Chuck Meisner had given his daughter Cindythe most lavish reception ever undertaken at Deepmire, with all the men in tails, and a champagne fountain, and a helicopter on the eighteenth fairway, and a brass octet playing fanfares, Denise called home with the news that she and her boss had driven to Atlantic City and gotten married in a courthouse. Enid, who had a very strong stomach (never got sick, never), had to hand the phone to Alfred and go kneel in the bathroom and take deep breaths.
    The previous spring, in Philadelphia, she and Alfred had eaten a late lunch at the noisy restaurant where Denise was ruining her hands and wasting her youth. After their lunch, which was quite good but much too rich, Denise had made a point of introducing them to the “chef” under whom she’d studied and for whom she was now boiling and toiling. This “chef,” Emile Berger, was a short, unsmiling, middle-aged Jew from Montreal whose idea of dressing for work was to wear an old white T-shirt (like a cook , not a chef, Enid thought; no jacket, no toque) and whose idea of shaving was to skip it. Enid would have disliked Emile and snubbed him even if she hadn’t gathered, from Denise’s way of hanging on his words, that he had an unhealthy degree of influence with her daughter. “Those are such rich crab cakes,” she accused in the kitchen. “ One bite and I was stuffed.” To which, instead of apologizing and deprecating himself, as any polite St. Judean would have done, Emile responded by agreeing that, yes, if it could be managed, and the flavor was good, a “lite” crab cake would be a wonderful thing, but the question, Mrs. Lambert, was how to manage it? Eh? How to make crabmeat “lite”? Denise was following this exchange hungrily, as if she’d scripted it or were memorizing it. Outside the restaurant, before she returned to her fourteen-hour shift, Enid made sure to say to her: “He certainly is a short little man! So Jewish-looking.” Her tone was less controlled than she might have wished, a little squeakier and thinner at the edges, and she could tell from the distant look in Denise’s eyes and froma bitterness around her mouth that she’d bruised her daughter’s feelings. Then again, all she’d done was speak the truth. And she never, not for a