"How could you know that, dad?"
The left corner of his mouth drew upward, almost imperceptibly, a half-smile that I had seen in rare moments like these when he was about to explain something complicated and profound, almost unknowable; simply, clearly and in few words.
"Corey, I knew that truth when I met your mother. I know it when I see it in our son."
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The wedding was a simple, intimate event.
Holly and I exchanged our vows in the late afternoon of the second Saturday in October of 1977 in a small, white, wood-frame Presbyterian Church with a picturesque steeple in the Mark Twain National Forest about 20 miles from Van Buren. It stood off a narrow, crumbling blacktop road in a dale framed between two gentle mountains about two miles apart. Her grandfather's and great-grandfather's apple orchard that became our own little Eden on our first Saturday together in June was about a half mile down the same road. Her family's roots were deep in this church: her great-grandfather became its pastor at the age of 20 after serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. Her grandfather had been a deacon. It's where her dad brought her as a child - her hair pigtailed in ribbons and bows, according to old black-and-white snapshots - when they attended Sunday School and worship services.
Attendance was limited to a few family members, some intimate longtime friends and a string folk quartet that provided music for the ceremony in the chapel as well as the reception on the freshly mown church grounds afterward. All told, about 30 people.
Dad was my best man. Holly's friend since her kindergarten days, Emily Ann Crowther, was her maid of honor, and my older sister, Nell, and was a bridesmaid. Holly's cousin Arthur Raymer - the son of her father's brother and her closest living male relative - served in place of her dad and gave into the bonds of matrimony.
It was a mix of traditional vows - richer, poorer; better or worse; sickness and health; forsaking all others, et cetera, all prompted by the church's pastor - and the new. Holly and I both recited our own promises to each other, not so much words memorized but certainties etched on our hearts for months that flowed from us extemporaneously, perfect in their human imperfection.
As the sun dipped behind the mountain to the west and illuminated a canopy of magenta, gold and pink across the heavens, the string quartet - a violin, a guitar, a mandolin and a base - played sweet folk and bluegrass ballads. The lone variation was when the violinist, as if to prove her mettle, took on "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" with an ambitious fiddle solo and pulled it off superbly, vocals and instrumentation. Two years later, Charlie Daniels would take the same tune to the top of both rock and country music charts and earn millions from it.
The highlight, however, was the tune to which Holly and I had our first dance as husband and wife, a slow, folksy and romantic arrangement of "It Had To Be You," popularized by Billie Holliday and later Frank Sinatra. Played by a string ensemble steeped in bluegrass, it was a stretch to pull off the pop classic. The result was an arrangement of almost otherworldly beauty, its melody alternately carried by fiddle and guitar and kept afloat by a stand-up base and a dobro.
The song had become almost an anthem between us - a testament to our first meeting that sweltering Friday evening at Conway's, our relationship, our romance and, now, our family. It was something said offhand as we drove along Interstate 55 between Memphis and Jackson on our way to the Gulf, and I don't recall whether she said it first or I did. It didn't matter. At our next rest stop, I scoured my cassette collection and found a mix tape with the Holliday version of the song, popped it in and fast-forwarded to that track. Right there, we decided this would be
our song
. Now, as Holly and I held each other and swayed gently to the fiddle's poignant strains, we took turns singing the lyrics against the other's cheek in voices barely above a whisper, audible to no one else, shared only by us two.
The photos from that afternoon are breathtaking. Holly chose a local photographer whose pictures from the earliest years of the Vietnam War won a Pulitzer Prize for the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1960s before he retired to the tranquility of the southern Missouri Ozarks where he shot breathtaking wildlife photos he had recently published in a book. He did an occasional special event for pay if it interested him. Once she explained the rustic venue - a simple, antebellum church late in the afternoon in a scenic Ozark valley - the creative potential of the event and our consent to allow him to use selected shots for gallery exhibitions persuaded him to do the shoot for us.
My favorite shot shows Holly and me in our first dance. She is in her simple, white wedding dress, illuminated by the warm glow from rows of clear incandescent lights strung from poles over the outdoor reception area. The blazing sunset beyond gives the frame a dramatic timelessness and an enduring emotional charge. In the frame, she and I are just left of the center, encircled by the people dearest to us who are clearly enraptured by the moment. To the right of the frame is the quartet.
There was no bar, and that was intentional. There were far too many narrow, serpentine backroads through those hills for wedding guests with liquor under their belts to safely navigate. Besides, obtaining an on-premises liquor permit on church property inside federal park land in one of Missouri's most sparsely populated counties would have been red tape nightmare, particularly on short notice.
But mom and dad managed to bring in eight magnums of chilled champagne and enough flutes that all present could toast the newlywed couple. And the first toast, by dad, was equal to the moment.
"To my son, Corey, my new daughter, Holly, and the family they establish here today - a blessing to us all that God proves in this moment that he intended all along."
Holly even allowed herself a sip before discreetly handing the mostly full glass off to Emily Ann to finish.
Then, on mom's direction, the guests formed a corridor through which we marched, in a shower of rice, to a waiting chauffeured black Cadillac that would drive Holly and me to the grand Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis. The next morning, we would fly to New York City for a brief honeymoon getaway and a Broadway play or two.
But this was our wedding night, a moment we would never forget. As the limo pulled away from the tiny country church on our three-hour ride through the Missouri darkness to St. Louis, the excitement and adrenaline of the day began to ebb, and the realization that we were now a family in the eyes of both the Lord and the law sank in. The chauffeur raised the tinted glass privacy partition separating the front seat and the expansive rear seat, and we put it to its best use: we fell asleep in each other's arms and would stay that way until we hit the lights and noises of downtown St. Louis.
●●●
For the second time in a month, Holly and I undressed each other in the penthouse bridal suite of a luxury hotel in front of a window with an expansive view of the Mississippi River below. I had carried her over the threshold of the suite's door, kindly held open by a Chase Park Plaza bell captain who had the situational awareness to immediately excuse himself and lock the door behind him.
There, on the plush Egyptian cotton sheets in a room illuminated only by tapers that were discreetly lit as we checked in downstairs, we slowly, tenderly, sweetly made love inside the sanction of wedlock for the first time. An hour of leisurely sex later, Holly achieved a long climax followed by mine. Where groans and moans and grunts often marked those moments, on this night whispered professions of love took their place. We fell asleep face-to-face shortly afterward, our arms and legs entangled and woke the same way when the Sunday morning sun began to flood our suite.
At check-in the previous evening, we had asked the desk clerk to schedule our in-room breakfast of eggs Benedict for 10 a.m. We quickly abandoned preliminary mid-morning foreplay and scrambled to find our bathrobes when room service tapped on the door at precisely that hour. We dined naked in bed and picked up our erotic teasing after clearing the trays off the bed. Two frenzied orgasms and 40 minutes later, we scurried to rinse the fuck musk off ourselves, dress and catch our 1:30 p.m. flight to New York.
I gave Holly the window seat on the left side of the first-class cabin. She had never been to New York, and I wanted her to have an opportunity to see it first from the air, depending on the weather and the plane's approach. As I hoped, the jet began its descent near Philadelphia, meaning it would swoop low over suburban New Jersey, close enough to the Hudson River that Holly could see landmarks she had glimpsed only on television or magazines: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the new World Trade Center towers in Manhattan, maybe the Statue of Liberty before the plane banked left over the bay, completing its 180-degree turn over Coney Island and southern Long Island before descending over Brooklyn and Queens, affording Holly a view of Manhattan from the east before dipping down into LaGuardia.
Her face beamed with childlike mirth at the cityscape beneath her as the jet took its last dip earthward and its tires screeched on the concrete runway.
She found charm everywhere in the city that never sleeps. The bulbous, old yellow Medallion taxi cabs that outnumbered private passenger cars and buses. The ubiquitous massive billboards and lights that blazed day and night in Times Square, the towers that made Manhattan's streets feel like deep, narrow canyons, the vastness of Central Park in the midst of it all and the opulence of the Plaza Hotel. She was Dorothy taking in every square foot of the Emerald City of Oz. We didn't have the bridal suite - not at the Plaza - but our room on the 18th floor afforded a view of Central Park near the penthouses of the rich and famous along Fifth Avenue.
Our first night we feasted along Mulberry Street in Little Italy - drinks in one café, entrees in another, tiramisu and espresso in a third. On the way back, we asked the cabbie to let us out as we passed by Rockefeller Center and we took in the sights. By the time the doorman welcomed us back to the Plaza, it was half past midnight, yet it felt we had only been gone an hour or two, not five.
Holly had two requests for Broadway shows: "Man of La Mancha," the musicalized story of the deluded knight, Don Quixote, playing at the Palace Theatre, and "Hair," the riotous rock opera in the eighth year of its original run from 1969, the year its nude cast scandalized Broadway even during and the Summer of Love and Woodstock. It was playing at the Biltmore Theater. Those filled our second and third evenings.
