Scenes from a wedding
by Stephanie Piper
Are you going to cry?" The makeup artist asks, arranging his palette of shadows and liners and peering at me in the mirror. He doesn't mean now. He means later.
"I'm a mother," I tell him. "It's my youngest son's wedding day. Do the math."
I've treated myself to a three-hour beauty binge at a New York salon. Cry-proof eyeliner is apparently included in the package.
It's been a week of Manhattan Moments. I've mastered the F train and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and the wholesale flower market. I've hauled five boxes of lilies and roses and lemon leaves from Chelsea to Park Slope and arranged them on the church altar. I've hiked through Prospect Park with my husband and presided with him over a rehearsal dinner that, despite my galloping paranoia, came off without a hitch.
Now it's zero hour, the day filtered through a scrim of clouds and lit by glancing September sun. The church is fragrant with the lilies I wrestled with most of yesterday, and I am installed in the front pew, flanked by my family and clutching a white lawn handkerchief. The organist switches from Bach to Faure, and we stand and turn to watch our new daughter drift towards us down the aisle.
Strangely, I do not cry. Not now, and not when my middle son reads gravely from St. Paul or when the newlyweds, their vows complete, beam at one another like explorers who have discovered a new continent. My cup overflows, but my eyes are dry.
One of their friends has written a song to mark the day, and he plays it after communion, a guitar solo that rises and falls and then soars to the highest arch of the white Gothic ceiling. As we listen, rapt, there comes a muted whimper from the vestibule: the bride's year-old nephew, tired and spent.
The final notes fade, and the priest rises. "Remember this," he tells us. "In the midst of beauty, there is always a cry. We cannot hold the beauty to ourselves as though we own it. We must also hear the cry."
At the reception, we mingle in the mahogany paneled rooms of an old mansion and embrace the cousins and nieces and lifelong friends. The cameras flash and the afternoon light slants through the leaded glass windows. At this wedding of musicians, the music never stops. The bride's Irish godfather sings "Molly Malone" and "The Rose of Tralee" and "The Spanish Lady" in a pure tenor, and then my oldest son and another musical friend make their way to the microphone. They will play and sing for the first dance.
The song is called "My New Someone." The bride and groom glide over the polished wood floor, and my eyes fill at last. I want to keep this moment, to hold it fast. It seems that life itself is distilled in this song, this dance, in the faces of my children whirling past. Go slowly, I want to tell them. In the midst of beauty, there is always a cry. Today, it is my own.
October 10, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 41
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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