Free The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman Page A

when his June birthday came in at 366 in the Selective Service lottery.
    My parents had not raised us to be observant Jews, with our High Holidays-only attendance at the Reform temple, and ourfuzzy observation of a Hanukkah-Christmas hybrid. Still, Pammy surprised my parents one April night, not calling first from Amherst, but arriving home at suppertime with an announcement. She and Danny, who was at that very moment two streets away breaking the same news to his parents, were
engaged
. Not “thinking of getting married” but formally engaged, with an .85-carat perfect diamond held by five prongs that Danny had had on layaway since his sophomore year. He could have chosen something bigger for the same price, Pammy told us proudly, her fingernails freshly lacquered in hospital-white, but Danny had chosen the better gem over the grander one.
    She saved for last what would become the central embarrassment of the match—that she had agreed to be married in a Catholic church by a priest. Otherwise, she explained, their marriage wouldn’t be recognized by Rome or by God, which not only mattered a great deal to Danny’s parents, grandparents, and one great-grandmother, but had everything to do with where he spent eternity.
    That made sense, didn’t it? Pammy demanded. Danny’s parents were religious and we were not. She was just going to sign a piece of paper that said she’d raise her children Catholic—no big deal. Danny could take them to church. She’d still be Jewish.
    The big deal was that all the Jews we’d heard of who married outside our religion picked people who were lukewarm about their own. Affianced young men and women from other denominations converted. There were Hebrew lessons, circumcisions, ritual baths. My parents saw it all around them—the hotel weddings, the justices of the peace, the judges, the Unitarian ministers uniting Jews and halfhearted Christians in ceremonies that didn’t mention God. Even if the outsider stopped short of full conversion, he or she embraced Judaism, joining discussion groups at the temple, presiding at seders, topping bagels with lox.
    Not Pammy and Danny. They were married in a Gothic cathedral of a Catholic church on Beacon Street, on a Saturday, by apre-Vatican II holdout of a priest, with most of the not-very-religious Jewish relatives boycotting both ceremony and reception. Those who did come didn’t mix. Danny’s relatives, to a person, took communion. At the reception, college friends and cousins initiated a big loud hora, elevating the new Mr. and Mrs. Daniel O’Connor, Jr., in chairs while the O’Connor kin clapped and cheered the way only
goyim
and Hasidim do in the face of such extremes of religion and folk dancing.
    My grandparents refused to go. The Cohens, we lied, were now living year-round in West Palm Beach. The Marxes—well, you understand: Saturday is the Jewish people’s Sabbath.
    The no-shows failed to send presents. My mother, ignoring the one-year grace period allowed by Emily Post for wedding gifts, called the laggards and gave them a piece of her mind: Danny O’Connor was a good boy. Pamela could have done a lot worse. His love for her was written all over his freckled face, and always had been. Maybe he wasn’t a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, but he had a serious and quiet way about him, and his draft number was the highest in the land. He wasn’t afraid of work—he’d been putting money in the bank from the moment he could push a lawn mower.
    Give us some credit. Do you think we would have gone along with this for all these years if Danny O’Connor was—what?—some Irish hooligan? The wedding you missed to make some point that was none of your damn business had been a beautiful affair, and Pamela the most gorgeous bride.
    But
this
, no present—not a candy dish, not an egg cup, not a, a, a Whitman’s Sampler—was too hard to hold her tongue over. How did they think it looked to the O’Connors, whose relatives attended