raisehightheroofbeamcarpentersseymouranintroduction(编辑修改稿)

raisehightheroofbeamcarpentersseymouranintroduction(编辑修改稿)内容摘要：

looking little canvas zipper bag, in one of those steel boxes at Penn Station. To make things still more provocative, as I was wandering around in the garment district trying to find an empty cab, a second lieutenant in the Signal Corps, whom I39。 d apparently overlooked saluting, crossing Seventh Avenue, suddenly took out a fountain pen and wrote down my name, serial number, and address while a number of civilians looked interestedly on. I was limp when I finally got into a cab. I gave the driver directions that would take me at least as far as 39。 Carl and Amy39。 s39。 old house. As soon as we arrived in that block, however, it was very simple. One just followed the crowd. There was even a canvas canopy. A moment later, I entered an enormous old brownstone and was met by a very handsome, lavenderhaired woman, who asked me whether I was a friend of the bride or the groom. I said the groom. 39。 Oh,39。 she said, 39。 well, we39。 re just bunching everybody up together.39。 She laughed rather immoderately, and showed me to what seemed to be the last vacant folding chair in a very crowded outsize room. I have a thirteenyearold blackout in my mind with regard to the overall physical details of the room. Beyond the fact that it was jampacked and stifling hot, I can remember only two things: that there was an an playing almost directly behind me, and that the woman in the seat directly at my right turned to me and enthusiastically stagewhispered, 39。 I39。 m Helen Silsburn!39。 From the location of our seats, I gathered that she was not the bride39。 s mother, but, to play it safe, I smiled and nodded gregariously, and was about to say who I was, but she put a decorous finger to her lips, and we both faced front. It was then, roughly, three o39。 clock. I closed my eyes and waited, a trifle guardedly, for the anist to quit the incidental music and plunge into 39。 Lohengrin39。 . I haven39。 t a very clear idea of how the next hour and a quarter passed, aside from the cardinal fact that there was no plunging into 39。 Lohengrin39。 . I remember a little dispersed band of unfamiliar faces that surreptitiously turned around, now and then, to sec who was coughing. And I remember that the woman at my right addressed me once again, in the same rather festive whisper. 39。 There must be some delay,39。 she said. 39。 Have you ever seen Judge Ranker? He has the face of a saint.39。 And I remember the an music veering peculiarly, almost desperately, at one point, from Bach to early Rodgers and Hart. On the whole, though, I39。 m afraid, I passed the time paying little sympathetic hospital calls on myself for being obliged to suppress my coughing spells. I had a sustained, cowardly notion, the entire time I was in the room, that I was about to hemorrhage, or, at the very least, fracture a rib, despite the corset of adhesive tape I was wearing. At twenty minutes past four or, to put it another, blunter way, an hour and twenty minutes past what seemed to be all reasonable hope the unmarried bride, her head down, a parent stationed on either side of her, was helped out of the building and conducted, fragilely, down a long flight of stone steps to the sidewalk. She was then deposited almost hand over hand, it seemed into the first of the sleek black hired cars that were waiting, doubleparked, at the curb. It was an excessively graphic moment a tabloid moment and, as tabloid moments go, it had its full plement of eyewitnesses, for the wedding guests (myself among them) had already begun to pour out of the building, however decorously, in alert, not to say goggleeyed, droves. If there 4 was any even faintly lenitive aspect of the spectacle, the weather itself was responsible for it. The June sun was so hot and so glaring, of such multiflashbulblike mediacy, that the image of the bride, as she made her almost invalided way down the stone steps, tended to blur where blurring mattered most. Once the bridal car was at least physically removed from the scene, the tension on the sidewalk especially around the mouth of the canvas canopy, at the curb, where I, for one, was loitering deteriorated into what, had the building been a church, and had it been a Sunday, might have been taken for fairly normal congregationdispersing confusion. Then, very suddenly, the emphasized word came reportedly from the bride39。 s Uncle Al that the wedding guests were to use the cars standing at the curb。 that is, reception or no reception, change of plans or no change of plans. If the reaction in my vicinity was any criterion, the offer was generally received as a kind of beau geste. It didn39。 t quite go without saying, however, that the cars were to be 39。 used39。 only after a formidablelooking platoon of people referred to as the bride39。 s 39。 immediate family39。 had taken what transportation they needed to quit the scene. And, after a somewhat mysterious and bottlenecklike delay (during which I remained peculiarly riveted to the spot), 39。 the immediate family39。 did indeed begin to make its exodus, as many as six or seven persons to a car, or as few as three or four. The number, gathered, depended upon the age, demeanour, and hip spread of the first occupants in possession. Suddenly, at someone39。 s parting but markedly crisp suggestion, I found myself stationed at the curb, directly at the mouth of the canvas canopy, attending to helping people into cars. How I had been singled out to fill this post deserves some small speculation. So far as I know, the unidentified, middleaged man of action who had picked me for the job hadn39。 t a glimmer of a notion that I was the bridegroom39。 s brother. Therefore, it seems logical that I was singled out for other, far less poetic reasons. The year was 1942. 1 was twentythree, and newly drafted into the Army. It strikes me that it was solely my age, my uniform, and the unmistakably serviceable, olivedrab aura about me that had left no doubt concerning my eligibility to fil。