She paused before saying, “I do.” And then it was too late to stop her. “I want to tell you that you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
This wasn’t what I meant, this wasn’t the story I wanted to hear, but of course it was the only story she could tell me in that moment, and I should have known better before asking. I’d heard this story so many times I could have told it to myself.
“No one ever said that to me before I got married, and I want to make sure someone says it to you. Do you want to do this?”
WHEN MY PARENTS met at the Riviera, a bar in the Village, early in 1967, they were both still married to other people. Mom was a “copy girl” at the publication she still calls Sporty Illustrations, and Dad was an editor at Tower Books, a “factory of paperback originals.” He saw contracts go out to writers he was sure he could best, and he soon hatched a plan to get one himself, to fund a trip to Africa and Europe where he could become “a real writer.” It had worked for Hemingway. He got my mom a contract, too, and they typed their way across the Atlantic on a freighter with cheap fare. I have a picture of them leaning against the railing, the wind blowing my mom’s long straight hair across her face, my dad’s white shirt flapping against his tan skin, his sunglasses dark on his face.
They spent some weeks living in Tangier before settling in Rome, where they wrote novels to fulfill the first contracts and got new contracts to write more. It seemed this could be a great way to make a living. Letters from Mom to her parents from that time reveal plans to live there indefinitely. Those letters don’t mention the annulment my mother’s father helped her organize before she left, but they do make it sound as if Mom and Dad kept separate apartments, as if it were a funny and sometimes irritating coincidence that George was also living in Rome. Really they shared a rooftop apartment above a restaurant. Had their mail delivered to the American Express office.
Six months into the trip, something happened and my mother returned to the U.S. alone. Sometimes she says she was expected home for Christmas. Sometimes she says she was fleeing a failing relationship. She says, “Anyway, your dad wanted to stay in Europe to confront his art,” using air quotes so I know it’s not her phrase. She says, “Anyway, I was just sure it wasn’t going to work out with us.”
But my father had another idea. Within a few months, he’d returned to New York with plans to win her back. She says when he emerged from the airplane “he was covered from head to toe with eczema,” and the implication is that this manifestation of his heartbreak on his skin softened her, broke her heart, brought her back to him.
By the time she took him to Albany to meet her parents, it was summer. Dad’s skin had cleared up and his position in her life was safe. My grandmother—black sleeveless dress, black stockings and pumps—stood tall in the doorway of her suburban home as my folks climbed out of the car. My dad had a good six inches on her, but that didn’t make her short. He approached slowly and stayed on the lower step. He bowed low before exclaiming, “My God, it’s Mrs. Robinson.” She loved him from the first.
I wonder what my trim, silver-haired grandfather thought of this charming stranger, his mop of untamed black hair, his thick rusty mustache. Was he as quick to hand over his firstborn again so soon? I can almost see him there, just inside the house mixing a gin and tonic and muttering to himself about this stranger’s saccharine words seeping through the screen.
After dinner that night—I picture smoked salmon on simple white china—Mom and Dad headed north. They landed at a motel on the shores of Lake George and eloped in the morning.
“I WANT TO do this,” I said to my mom in her bedroom. My voice was smaller and less confident than I intended. Maybe she hugged me before she headed back to the party. Watching her go, I felt a familiar yearning, a wish to call her back to me, to ask her to take me up into her arms and tell me that everything was going to be all right. But just as I’d learned to do when I was little, I shut that feeling out, turned to my face in the mirror, pasted on a smile.
Then it wasn’t long before someone told me that James had arrived, that it was time. I walked to the top of the stairs and stood where we used to sit and listen to their dinner parties when we were tiny, and I could hear Dad’s deep voice and loud laughter wafting up at me through the years, and for a moment I lost my balance and thought the heels on these stupid shoes were too damn high. I grabbed the banister with my shaking left hand, looked down and saw my brother smiling up at me. His face blurred and he was Dad, hair longer and smile broader and shoulders wider.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, it was Josh’s voice that whispered, “You look beautiful,” but maybe it sounded like Dad. I smiled and blushed and Michele snapped the camera, but the flash didn’t go off and I knew the picture was lost, the one picture I ever would have seen of me and my dad. Tears sprang to my eyes as I rounded the corner and there was my aunt Libby in her striped dress.
“Does anyone have a Kleenex?” she asked. “Jules and I have this thing.” Her voice wavered as she, right there in the middle of me walking down this makeshift aisle, reminded us of all the Thanksgivings during which we’ve cried when we caught each other’s eye as someone spoke aloud the Robert Burns poem before the meal. I realized no one said it this year—we were so preoccupied with the wedding a few days away—and as if to make up for the neglect, or to bring myself back into this moment, I said it in my head as I crossed my childhood living room:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.
But do I have meat or do I want it? Which one am I in the poem? Because how it feels is that something is missing, and even when there’s a feast on the table I’m hungry and alone.
When I arrived at the front of the room, the windowsills heavy with purple day lilies, Ngoni, Kathleen the priest, my beautiful sister Nan, and Dave the blond best man were each looking my way, and I had to shake out those thoughts and return. I focused on Ngoni’s herringbone suit, his black hair cut short to his head, his tidy wire-rim glasses, the deep browns of his skin and eyes coming together in a shy smile. His cheek twitched just a little.
Kathleen looked at me long before she told what she said might be an apocryphal story. “In antiquity,” she said, “when a marriage procession and a funeral procession came together at an intersection,” she said, “the marriage procession had the right of way.”
I was conjugating verbs in my head, left turns and triangles and ceremonies not my own. She saw my confusion, Kathleen the priest, and so explained it to let me catch up.
“The story tells us that love is more powerful than death.” She joined our hands there in front of the family who knew what she meant.
Then it was Ngoni’s turn, and he took out the papers on which he’d typed up some words from the book of Ruth: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
I was too hot and couldn’t focus my eyes and my head was thumping and pumping. I turned to Nan and asked for the John Donne book she was holding, opened it to the page I’d marked, but the book shook in my hands and I couldn’t see the words, so I took a deep breath and tried to get steady.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a dreame of thee. . . .
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,
And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,
Where can we finde two better hemispheares
Without sharpe North, without declining West?
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so