We had our own on-site boutique for wedding gowns and tuxedo rentals and fittings — hell, we’d even clean and store your garments for you while you were away on your honeymoon — and we had a travel agency who subcontracted for us, as we also had wedding consultants, jewelers, videogra phers, still photographers (both the arty ones who specialized in photos of your toenail polish on the day of the wedding and the conventional photographers who barked directions at the assembled family far into the night), nannies, priests, ministers, shamans, polarity therapists, a really maniacal florist called Bruce, a wide array of deejays — guys and gals equipped to spin Christian-only selections, Tex-Mex, music from Hindi films and the occasional death-metal wedding medley — and we could get actual musicians, if you preferred. We’d even had Dick Roseman’s combo, The Sons of Liberty, do a medley of “My Funny Valentine,”“In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,”“I Will Always Love You”and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,”without a rest between selections. (It was gratifying for me to watch the old folks shake it up to contemporary numbers.) We had a three-story, fifteen-hundred-slip parking facility on site, convenient access to I-87, I-90 and the Taconic, and a staff of 175 full- and part-time employees on twenty-four-hour call. We had everything from publicists to dicers of crudites to public orators (need a brush-up for that toast?) — all for the purpose of making your wedding the high watermark of your American life. We had done up to fifteen weddings in a single day (it was a Saturday in February, 1991, during the Gulf War) and, since the Mansion on the Hill first threw open its door for a gala double wedding (the Gifford twins, from Balston Spa, who married Shaun and Maurice Wick-ett) in June of 1987, we had performed, up to the time of my first day there, 1,963 weddings, many of them memorable, life-affirming, even spectacular ceremonies. We had never had an incidence of serious violence.
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This was the raw data that Glenda gave me, anyway, Sis. The arrangement of the facts is my own, and in truth, the arrangement of facts constitutes the job I was engaged to perform at the Mansion on the Hill. Because Glenda Manzini (in 1990 she married Dave Manzini, a developer from Schenectady) couldn’t really have hated her job any more than she did. Glenda Manzini, whose marriage (her second) was apparently not the most loving ever in upstate history (although she’s not alone; I estimate an even thousand divorces resulting from the conjugal rites consummated so far at my place of business), was a cynic, a skeptic, a woman of little faith when it came to the institution through which she made her living. She occasionally referred to the wedding party as the cattle; she occasionally referred to the brides as the hookers and to herself, manager of the Mansion on the Hill, as the Madame, as in, The Madame, Andrew, would like it if you would get the hell out of her office so that she can tabulate these receipts, or, Please tell the Hatfields and the McCoys that the Madame cannot untangle their differences for them, although the Madame does know the names of some first-rate couples counselors. In the absence of an enthusiasm for our product line or for business writing in general, Glenda Manzini hired me to tackle some of her responsibilities for her. I gave the facts the best possible spin. Glenda, as you probably have guessed, was good with numbers. With the profits and losses. Glenda was good at additional charges. Glenda was good at doubling the price on a floral arrangement, for example, because the Vietnamese poppies absolutely had to be on the tables, because they were so… je ne sais quoi. Glenda was good at double-booking a partic ular suite and then auctioning the space to the higher bidder. Glenda was good at quoting a figure for a band and then adding instruments so that the price increased astronomically. One time she padded a quartet with two vocalists, an eight-piece horn section, an African drumming ensemble, a dijeridoo and a harmonium.
The other thing I should probably be up-front about is that Glenda Manzini was a total knockout. A bombshell. A vision of celestial loveliness. I hate to go on about it, but there was that single strand of Glenda’s amber hair always falling over her eyes; there was her near constant attention to her makeup; there was her total command of business issues and her complete unsentimentality. Or maybe it was her stockings, always in black, with a really provocative seam following the aerodynamically sleek lines of her calves. Or maybe it was her barely concealed sadness. I’d never met anyone quite as uncomfortable as Glenda, but this didn’t bother me at first. My life had changed since the Chicken Mask.
Meanwhile, it goes without saying that the Mansion on the Hill wasn’t a mansion at all. It was a homely cinder-block edifice formerly occupied by the Colonie Athletic Club. A trucking operation used the space before that. And the Mansion wasn’t on any hill, either, because geologically speaking we’re in a valley here. We’re part of some recent glacial scouring.
On my first day, Glenda made every effort to insure that my work environment would be as unpleasant as possible. I’d barely set down my extra-large coffee with two half-and-halfs and five sugars and my assortment of cream-filled donuts (I was hoping these would please my new teammates) when Glenda bodychecked me, tipped me over into my reclining desk chair, with several huge stacks of file material.
— Andy, listen up. In April we have an Orthodox Jewish ceremony taking place at 3 P.M. in Niagara while at the same time there are going to be some very faithful Islamic-Americans next door in Ticonderoga. I don’t want these two groups to come in contact with one another at any time, understand? I don’t want any kind of diplomatic incident. Its your job to figure out how to persuade one of these groups to be first out of the gate, at noon, and its your job to make them think that they’re really lucky to have the opportunity. And Andy? The el-Mohammed wedding, the Muslim wedding, needs prayer mats. See if you can get some from the discount stores. Don’t waste a lot of money on this.
This is a good indication of Glenda’s management style. Some other procedural tidbits: she frequently assigned a dozen rewrites on her correspondence. She had a violent dislike for semicolons. I was to double-space twice underneath the date on her letters, before typing the salutation, on pain of death. I was never, ever to use one of those cursive word-processing fonts. I was to bring her coffee first thing in the morning, without speaking to her until she had entirely finished a second cup and also a pair of ibuprofen tablets, preferably the elongated, easy-to-swallow variety. I was never to ask her about her weekend or her evening or anything else, including her holidays, unless she asked me first. If her door was closed, I was not to open it. And if I ever reversed the digits in a phone number when taking a message for her, I could count on a pink slip that very afternoon.
Right away, that first A.M., after this litany of scares, after Glenda retreated into her chronically underheated lair, there was a swell of sympathetic mumbles from my coworkers, who numbered, in the front office, about a dozen. They were offering condolences. They had seen the likes of me come and go. Glenda, however, who keenly appreciated the element of surprise as a way of insuring discipline, was not quite done. She reappeared suddenly by my desk — as if by secret entrance — with a half-dozen additional commands. I was to find a new sign for her private parking space, I was to find a new floral wholesaler for the next fiscal quarter, I was to refill her prescription for birth-control pills. This last request was spooky enough, but it wasn’t the end of the discussion. From there Glenda started getting personaclass="underline"