We all know about weddings. There's a beautiful bride in an expensive white dress symbolizing virginity (or at least chasteness) and a man who accepts the responsibility of protecting and cherishing her. When my mother was really displeased with my behavior, her threat was "no one will marry you." She was thirty when she married and I'm sure the same threat had haunted her. She kept her marriage vows all her life, not just all my father's life, which was shorter. Close to the end of her own life she said, "I should have divorced him."
I asked why. We didn't really know the implications of a closed skull concussion even then, though part of the problem was probably metabolic. I didn't want him in my wedding but pretended that he was the traditional father escorting his daughter up the aisle. He pretended the same thing and so we got through the ceremony. The real father/daughter pair was the groom and the matron of honor, who was a year older than me and who had forced the marriage of her parents by her conception. I will be criticized for saying this because small towns are conservative, partly to "keep the peace" by preserving appearances
Bob's idea of a proposal was to present me with a catalog from one of the Browning Mercantile's suppliers and to tell me to pick out the rings. The "engagement" ring was a solitaire with a high quality diamond of about a quarter-carat. He was excited that he could get a $500 ring for half-price. He didn't say anything about the investment value, but I found out after the divorce that "used" diamonds are not that valuable, no matter their quality. I had to sign a paper surrendering my claim to this diamond, since most of the value is in the sentiments. It was like putting a child up for adoption, but I needed grocery money.
Bob would not wear a ring, using the argument that it might cause his finger to be torn off by machinery. The age of the argument was clued when he said then he wouldn't be able to play the cornet. He hadn't played the cornet for a decade. Anyway, it soon became clear that this was his mother's diamond. She obsessed about me losing the diamond into the endless batches of plaster and investment which were mixed by hand. I finally stopped wearing it and wore a little wider plain band.
The jeweler inscribed our initials and the date in the original plain gold band. It was already inscribed "14 K." When I came back to this town on the edge of the rez, I started wearing my wedding band on the little finger of my right hand, which is the only place it fits now. I use a turquoise guard band to symbolize something -- not sure what. It's a cheap ring and the turquoise is falling out.
My mother was in charge of almost everything but I set out one day to find a dress, thinking along the lines of a beige suit. But I stepped off the escalator in M and F and there were two dresses, just alike, one in gold and one in white, both in the size that both Margaret and I wore. Obviously I bought them. $35 each for an empire sleeveless brocade dress bodice and chiffon skirt with a brocade surcoat, both floor length. It was easy to find two organdy "flower girl" dresses, though the organist -- who had appointed himself the majordomo who could override even my mother -- said that the girls were too old to be "flower girls" and would have to be referred to as "junior bridesmaids." I don't think we bothered to tell him that the matron of honor was the groom's daughter, or that the best man was my brother simply because he was the oldest male available. We drafted cousins for the ushers. They didn't know Bob.
But the officious organist was scandalized by my mother's choice of a piper for music. (Keying off us both being Scots families -- mostly.) He could take charge so strongly because the church was between "officiants"-- ministers. He said such a heathen instrument could not enter the sanctuary, so we had the piper stand at the head of the aisle and pipe us over to the reception. Bob slipped him some money to keep playing over there. It was one of his fondest little ceremonies, slipping money to keep the musician playing. (When the new minister arrived, he was a piper himself and sometimes entered the sanctuary playing his instrument as he proceeded up to the altar. )
As a minister myself, decades later, I soon became disenchanted with rigamarole but even in 1966 I would NOT do the garter thing, nor did I bother with "borrowed and blue." No fond mother put her heirloom necklace on my neck -- she was already paying for the whole ceremony. In fact, it was a redemption of her ferocious father making such a fuss about her own wedding that he refused to attend and prevented her mother from attending. The same thing had happened to her mother, my grandmother In my mother's case the fight was because my father kept announcing he was an atheist. In my grandmother's case it was because her father thought the groom was beneath her. Both were surface arguments for the fact that they felt they "owned" their daughters and that they were trading stock that they would rather keep until a better offer came along.
The photographer kept us so long that we barely got any cake ourselves. As you can see, he did a professional job, but I didn't really like the way I looked. When we got back home I asked Bob to take a proper bridal portrait of me and he did. I had to improvise the pearls since the gardenias were long gone. My mother said she thought the pearls were better anyway.
This is the photo Bob took. My father liked it so much that he made lots of copies by taking a photo of the photo (this was before copy machines) and sent them to relatives. I think he rather implied that he took the original photo. He loved it because he so badly wanted to press me into the mold of the pretty princess who is full of airs and graces, as his sister was. Very Brit gentry.
Conventionally, grooms are supposed to be two years older, make maybe $2,000 more a year than the bride, and be two inches taller. Bob was not two inches taller unless he wore cowboy boots, but his mother prevented that because to her mind it was more important to wear proper shoes. Anyway, she was quite a bit taller than her husband.
We married after years of already being intimate. When I said either we married, or I was going to have to look for a new teaching job elsewhere, Bob cried out, "You women come along and make yourselves indispensable and then you threaten to leave." And I did leave eventually. The tipping point into conventional marriage was that I went to Browning to teach high school English and did that for five years. But as soon as I got involved with Bob, he pulled me into his work. No pay. In 1965 the school board included three fathers whose daughters had gotten pregnant out of wedlock. Their solution was to freeze the salaries of all the teachers known to be sleeping with someone. There were about half-a-dozen of us. The lawyers had advised the board that this would be better than outright firing us all, because we were less likely to challenge it. The others all quit.
I taught for another year. But I was too tired to teach well and Bob's career was taking off. I knew that if I simply stopped teaching and went onto his payroll, Bob would use the blur between the hours I was doing "his" work and the hours I was simply living there to control me and what I did. It would be minimum pay -- I worked in the summer for $1 an hour, which was the same as he paid the local Indian labor. They were often more skillful than I was and certainly stronger, but tourists were scared of them.
When we married, he wanted me on the payroll still, but I insisted on a monthly allowance instead: $100 and all I could charge at the Browning Merc because he was still paying for the groceries. When his second wife divorced him, he was chagrined to discover that she had run up bills all over town, esp. at the jewelry store, which had to threaten a lawsuit to make Bob pay it. His strategy in life was to simply be inert, to passively resist all weddings and divorces and bills and intimate emotions.
I loved this impossible man but it was like living with a big ball bearing. I got depressed and so did he. So, the end. After the alimony was settled and all that (lump sum, $1200) he came into a huge sale (the whole rodeo series) and bought a ranch. I had gone back to teaching, but in a couple of years I moved on from teaching and Browning, both. He hated to be blamed, to be the bad guy. To me, he was not.
The photos had been part of the rigmarole suggested by my mother, but we ended up being glad in spite of everything. In a few years my father died, Bob's daughter died, her oldest daughter (junior bridesmaid) died, and just after the divorce in 1970 Bob's father died. I was not allowed to sit with Bob's family at his Masonic funeral. In the years afterwards, my brother has died, and both mothers have died. There was no ceremony for my brother. I didn't know my mother-in-law had died until years later.
The expressions on the "ushers" are revealing. Margaret was buried in her matron of honor dress. She weighed sixty pounds and the casket was closed. I attended the Catholic graveside ceremony with Bob as his wife. She had been divorced and remarried but the Pope's permission to annul the first marriage came just in time for her to have a funeral Mass. It was Bob's second wife, who had originally converted Margaret to Catholicism, who drove through the petition for annulment.
So human ceremonies of rejoicing, tragedy and convenience are markers throughout our lives -- sometimes just what they seem and other times not exactly "Red Weddings" but streaked with raw emotion. The witnesses do not always know what's going on. I haven't regretted my marriage, but I never want to do it again.
Post-ceremonial tristesse. There was no honeymoon. We went straight home on the train and back to work. In summer we took the grandkids because of Margaret's cancer. We had Lane for the summer he turned six. I now realize so much later that's he's in NONE of these photos, for the summer he turned six. But that's another story. A happy one.
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