Cassandra at the Wedding

Cassandra at the Wedding. By Dorothy Baker. 256 pages.

According to New York Magazine, everyone is reading Cassandra at the Wedding. Based on the number of Goodreads ratings, this is not actually true¹, which is a shame because it is quite good. Reissued by a few publishers since its initial publication in 1962, it has accumulated a quiet, durable reputation, the kind of book passed between friends rather than splashily promoted on bestseller lists.

The novel follows twin sisters Cassandra and Judith Edwards over the weekend of Judith’s wedding. Cassandra, a graduate student at Berkeley, drives back to the family ranch in the California foothills with the half-formed intention of stopping the wedding.

The narration alternates between Cassandra and Judith, but it’s Cassandra’s voice that dominates the narrative. Brilliant and acerbic simultaneously, it’s clear from the beginning that Cassandra is not a stable person when she reflects on the option of jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge:

The bridge looked good again. The sun was on it, and it took on something of the appeal of a bright exit sign in an auditorium that is crowded and airless and where you are listening to a lecture, as I so often do, that is in no way brilliant. But lectures can’t all be brilliant, of course; they can be sat through and listened to for what there is in them, and if the exit sign is dazzling it can still be ignored. Besides, my guide assures me that I am not, at heart, a jumper; it’s not my sort of thing. I’m given to conjecture only, and to restlessness, and I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I’d go home, attend my sister’s wedding as invited, help hook-and-zip her into whatever she wore, take over the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger, wherever she chose to receive it, and hold my peace when it became a question of speaking now or forever holding it.

Stubborn to a fault, Cassandra refuses to refer to Judith’s fiance by his actual name, John Thomas Finch, making up other names for him instead. The refusal is petty and deliberate; she knows it is petty, and that is the point. To name him would be to admit him into the world she shares with her sister, and Cassandra has no intention of admitting anyone. She views him as an interloper into a life she had planned with Judith, a life she keeps describing as if she were already married to her. Much of what makes Cassandra’s voice so propulsive is this gap between her intelligence and behavior: she narrates her own pettiness with absolute knowledge she is being petty, and does it anyway.

“You’re overwhelming. It’s some sort of crazy vitality and it goes out like rays. I’d forgotten what it’s like to be with you—kind of a circus. Only—” She stopped, and I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to prod her. Maybe the best would be to keep her stopped, but before I thought how to do it it was too late. “The trouble is that just when it’s all fun, all high and wild, you do a switch and have to be rescued all of a sudden. I remember I was all to pieces laughing at something or other, and wham there you were telling me that if I married Walter Thorson, which is what you kept calling Jack Finch, you’d die in a booby hatch in a strait-jacket and I’d better believe it. And I couldn’t make the transition all that fast, so I said, ‘No, don’t do that, don’t die in a booby hatch in a strait-jacket, wear that dress you charged to gran at Magnin’s, it’s better on you somehow, looser.’ And then—oh boy—”

At least within her own family, Cassandra can get away with her behavior. Judith is afraid her sister will go to pieces if forced to confront the truth. Her father, a philosopher who would rather drink alone than teach, is wrapped up in tying every conversation back to Pyrrhonian skepticism. And granny is too caught up in the wedding itself to notice that Cassandra is deeply unwell.

Judith, in contrast, is more conventional and more level-headed than her sister. When she narrates, the novel’s temperature drops. Her voice is calmer, less performative, and more interested in the practical business of disentangling herself from a family that has chosen to isolate itself from the rest of the world. Nine months ago, Judith left her sister behind in Berkeley to study at Juilliard, and now she’s returning to their ranch with a fiance in tow. The move east reads, to Cassandra at least, as a deliberate act of distance — one chosen as much for its geography as for its prestige. Judith has not stopped loving her sister; she has simply realized that distance is the only form of love she can sustain.

Cassandra tries every trick in the book to get Judith to call off the wedding, to get her to see that her sister is the one she is meant to be with. She tries to convince Judith, needling, reminding her of the life they had together, the former plans they had together. She threatens to fall apart if Judith goes through with the wedding. Judith reminds her that when she lived with her sister, Cassandra took her for granted:

“You’re shaking,” Jude said. “I know,” I said, “I do it every time I think how lonely I was in that apartment.” “I know what you mean,” Jude said, again in that rather unemphatic throw-away voice. “I was pretty lonely there myself.” “When?” I said, quite emphatically. She kept surprising me. She waited a minute, and then said, “All the time we lived there. You’d come home, take a bath, change your clothes, take the car and be away either all night or else most of it. That’s how I got to be a pretty good musician; I had so much time to practice, waiting around for you to come home.”

When all of that fails, Cassandra decides that she is better off dead; she overdoses on the barbiturates prescribed by her psychiatrist for sleep.

Fortunately, Doctor John Thomas Finch has just graduated from medical school, finds Cassandra and resuscitates her. She recovers and the wedding continues as planned. Cassandra accepts that she is losing a part of herself, and heads back to Berkeley shortly after the ceremony. She strikes up a relationship with a (female) lover she had been avoiding, determined to find a new lease on life. She ends the book walking across the Golden Gate Bridge:

I was wearing loafers and socks and on the way back I was walking faster and one of my socks kept crawling down behind my heel. I stopped and pulled it up two or three times, and finally I slipped the shoe off and dropped the sock over the side and stood where I was and watched it go. Or tried to. It took immense concentration to stay with it. When I thought I’d lost it for good, the wind caught it far down and I saw it flash in the sunlight, once, and again, and maybe even a third time. But after that I don’t know. It was out of sight a long time before it could have hit the water.

Identity

You’ll notice I mentioned a sister, a father, and a grandma, but not a mother. What happened to her? Jane Edwards died two years ago of lung cancer. The twins always refer to her as Jane, never as “mom” or “mother”. Jane was a fairly successful writer, with multiple novels, plays, and screenplays to her name. The family’s income seems to derive from that legacy, as none of them have jobs themselves.

Part of Cassandra’s problems stem from coming to terms with her mother’s death. She’s a graduate student writing a thesis about French novelists her own age, but she’d rather be writing the novels herself. She’s afraid of not living up to her mother’s legacy, or worse, superseding it and destroying her memory:

it’s not easy for the child of a writer to become a writer. I don’t see why; it just isn’t. It’s something about not wanting to be compared. And not wanting to measure up, or not measure up; or cash in either. It’s not that I have anything against my mother. I loved her, I think; but my mother’s only been dead three years, just short of three years, and I’d rather wait a decent interval and then try. Or not try.

Jane and their father, much to grandma’s exasperation, insisted on raising them as separate people, not leaning into their identical twinship. They never dressed them alike, and encouraged them to pursue separate hobbies. When grandmother gave them both accordions and encouraged them to have an act together, Jane “just about hit the roof.” The effort was somewhat successful - Cassandra is the maniacal writer, prone to outrageousness and irony, whereas Judith’s talents lie in music, conventionality and clear thinking.

But despite (or maybe because of) their best efforts, Cassandra does not see herself as distinct from her sister. When she looks in the mirror, Cassandra doesn’t see herself, she sees Judith:

I looked across the space behind the bar and saw my face in a blue mirror between two shelves of bottles. The bottles looked familiar enough, but I didn’t immediately recognize the face, mostly, I think, because I didn’t want to. It’s a face that’s given me a lot of trouble. But I looked again in a moment or two, unable not to, and this time I let myself know who it was. It was the face of my sister Judith

What is Cassandra without her sister? Not much, it turns out. When Judith leaves for Julliard, Cassandra wastes away. She stops eating. She is in a psychiatrist’s office within three weeks of the separation. All that’s left in their apartment is a piano collecting dust: only Judith can play it. The careful work of individuation Jane and their father did – the separate hobbies, the separate dresses, the refusal to let the twins be a duo – produced two whole people on paper and only one functional adult in practice.

Nothing symbolizes the twins’ entwined identity more than the first piece of identical clothing they own. Cassandra buys a white dress for the wedding (an amazing faux pas in itself) and it turns out to be the same dress Jude has picked as her bridal gown. When Cassandra discovers they picked the same dress, she nearly dies of embarrassment. To buy a white dress for your sister’s wedding is to dress for the marriage you wanted to be in; to discover that you and the bride have independently chosen the same one is to discover that Jane’s project of individuation has its limits. After a lifetime of being raised into separate lives, the twins reach, at the moment of separation, for the same garment.

But the show must go on, and the twins wear the same dress for the wedding. As Cassandra reflects that this day could have been her funeral she grows into her new identity, not as one of a pair but a fully formed person. It’s not a sudden breakthrough, but a gradual realization born of practical necessity: the wedding she tried to stop is taking place and the funeral she tried to make happen, didn’t. What is left is the unfamiliar work of building a self that does not have Judith as her constant companion, work that before this weekend she had never seriously considered.

Lonerism

at the point they stopped being strangers I always wished they’d be strangers again.

The Edwards family, both as a unit and as individuals keep the rest of the world at arm’s length. The father drinks alone on the ranch rather than teach philosophy. Once Judith leaves, Cassandra makes every excuse not to leave the apartment. And while we don’t know much about Jane, we do know the family intended a private funeral. It never occurred to any of them that anyone else might attend. Only grandmother, the most conventional family member, mentions having any friends.

One reason the Edwards can live in such seclusion is their material comfort. Jane’s writing career has provided for the family; none of them have jobs. Unlike many contemporary novels of the period that portrayed material prosperity as spiritually empty, the Edwards clearly enjoy the fruits of Jane’s labor. The family likes their swimming pool, clothing, and pianos and derive substantial happiness from them. The poison of materialism in Cassandra at the Wedding is more subtle than simply trying to fill a void with stuff: their prosperity has isolated them from their fellow man.

as a family we’d been something of a closed corporation; nobody could buy in because we didn’t need anybody. We would come home at night from a high school that never heard of Bartók and play the quartets on our own phonograph; when somebody wanted to run Cass for president of the girls’ league, Jane read her Yeats’s “Leaders of the Crowd” and she went back to school the next day and refused the nomination. Over and over it went that way—we had our own pinnacle to look down from. But when we went to college we couldn’t quite keep it the way it was on the ranch. We tried, but it wasn’t the same. We couldn’t oppose the whole world

But Jane’s legacy is more than just wealth. She also taught them to disdain the whole world. A nomination for class president was in her mind, not an honor but a moral test. “Leaders of the Crowd” is a short, contemptuous poem about how mass thought corrupts the thinker. To read it to a teenager is to teach her that the ordinary social ladder is beneath her, and that climbing it would be a small but real act of self-betrayal. By the time the twins reach college and find that the rest of the world is not arranged on the same pinnacle, they are already disabled for ordinary life. They know how to be Edwards. They do not know how to be among other people.

Judith is able to adapt to ordinary life in a way Cassandra isn’t. Within a few months of leaving Berkeley for Julliard she has made friends, found her way around New York, and become engaged to be married. The Edwards-ness wears off; the part of her that was a half becomes whole. Cassandra, meanwhile, flails. She drifts into a series of superficial relationships, then ducks her lover’s calls. She stops eating and drinks to excess. She spends most of her time hiding in the apartment, letting the piano collect dust, working on a thesis she cares very little for. The same upbringing produces two outcomes because Judith is willing to be ordinary and Cassandra is not. Judith makes friends; Cassandra would rather perform an interesting solitude.

The cost is Cassandra’s sanity. She takes after her father, unable to see past the world inside her own head. But where her father has settled into a manageable form of self-absorption, drinking on the ranch and tying every conversation back to Pyrrhonian skepticism, Cassandra is unable to cope. Her interior life is more vivid, her grievances sharper, her demand that the world rearrange itself around her more intense. When the world declines to do so, she decides she would rather not live in it. Cassandra cannot be around other people, but she can’t be without them either.

After recovering, Cassandra learns to open up. She is the one who suggests the wedding to have a number of guests, where Judith jumped the gun and gets married at the courthouse before even going to see her family. Once she returns to Berkeley, she re-connects with the lover whose calls she had been ducking. None of this is a transformation; she is still Cassandra. She is still the acerbic manic-depressive woman considering suicide at the end as she was at the beginning. But she is willing to be one person among many. She is willing to consider what it is like to be someone else. The lonerism that has organized her family for a generation has nearly killed her. The least she can do is starting to let others in.

Alcoholism

The emblem of good women is always this anxiety about drinking – other people’s drinking. And I knew why. Because alcohol releases truth and truth is something good women never care to hear. It frightens them. They only want to hear clichés about how lovely it is to be home again, and what an exciting occasion this is, not only a glad reunion but with a wedding thrown in,

Another vice that haunts the Edwards family is alcohol. The father drinks on the ranch in the slow, steady way of someone for whom the day is mostly a vehicle for the evening’s glass. Cassandra starts the novel in a bar, ginning up the courage to drive home. It is implied that Jane drank as well. The book treats their drinking without alarm or sentimentality. Nobody hides bottles. The drinking is part of the texture of life with the Edwards, as steady and unremarked upon as the swimming pool.

What Cassandra’s passage above reveals is her attitude towards alcohol. In her account, it releases the truth – and truth is precisely what the rest of the wedding party would rather not hear. Her drink is not really a vice; it is a tool for sending a message. Cassandra does not consider that the truth she is telling is only her truth, not reality.

But what Cassandra doesn’t account for is that alcohol is slowly wearing the family down. The father has, in fact, drunk himself out of a profession and Jane was killed by her excesses. Cassandra is going down the same path: the drinking sharpens her manias, deepens her lows, and combines unhelpfully with the barbiturates her psychiatrist has prescribed for sleep. Cassandra may sneer at those sober women, but she has a worldview that requires alcohol to say anything difficult at all. A family in which truth requires a drink is a family in which most of the day’s truths go unspoken.

And for all the home truths Cassandra speaks under the influence, she also uses alcohol to hide from the truth. On her first night back at the ranch, drunk, she hatches a plan: she will drive to the airport, intercept Jack Finch, and tell him the wedding is off. She informs Judith that she will fall to pieces and die in a mental asylum if the marriage goes through. Judith hears all this, decides her sister is too drunk to be argued with, and waits for the light of day (and sobriety) — to tell her that the marriage is in fact going ahead.

In Baker’s novel, the alcoholics are not brutes who abuse each other. The father is essentially harmless, even if he reeks of Hennessy. Cassandra is sharper-tongued than she would be otherwise, and more reckless, but not violent; her drunkenness reads less like menace than like a heightening of an already vivid temperament. Alcohol is not a direct evil in Cassandra at the Wedding. What author Dorothy Baker gives us instead is a milder, more domestic version of alcoholism: a family in which everyone is functional, everyone is good company at dinner, and everyone is, over the years, quietly declining together.

The Verdict

Cassandra at the Wedding is an underrated tragicomedy of a dysfunctional family. The Edwards may not have the fame of J.D. Salinger’s Caulfields or the literary stature of Dostoevsky’s Karamazovs. But the patterns the book traces, the way money buys distance, the difficulty of living in the shadow of a dead parent, the slow decay brought on by alcohol still resonate sixty years later.

It is also wonderful sentence by sentence: dry, vicious, quotable. Cassandra’s voice – acerbic, intelligent, theatrically aware of her own theatre – is delightful and infuriating at the same time. Baker lets it run for a long stretch before quietly handing the microphone to Judith, whose calmer, plainer narration undercuts Cassandra’s manic narration. The shift is technically deft and dramatically devastating: things Cassandra has insisted on for chapters look completely different from across the table. The book is also short, earning all of its 256 pages. There are no padded scenes, no detours into back-story, no chapters that exist to set up other chapters.

Cassandra at the Wedding is a small, sharp, beautifully written novel about a family that has built itself into a corner. The New York Magazine piece had it wrong on the facts: not everyone is reading it. But perhaps more people should and pass it on to their friends and family. That is how the book has lasted sixty years. It is how it will last sixty more.