The Wedding
“’Matrimony,’ sings Homer the poet, ‘is a holy estate and not lightly to be entered into’”
--Perfect Behavior
Perhaps we should have dreamed on indefinitely had not something occurred to cause us to set a date for our wedding. My brother-in-law, Fred Blair, came in one noon-time with the abrupt announcement that he needed a vacation.
“Why don’t you and Bess take a team and a camping outfit and drive across country to the old Woodbine reunion?” suggested my mother, with her ready generosity and longing to see her boys and girls get every possible enjoyment out of life. “I will furnish the outfit and go along to take care of Baby Wayne.”
“Hurrah for Muffie!” said Fred, instantly won over to the plan.
“I wish I could go,” I said, looking at Fred Smith who had come in for lunch with Fred B.
“You might make it your honeymoon trip,” suggested Bess, slyly.
Fred asked me afterward if we shouldn’t be married and go with Bess and the others on the trip. We set the day for August third.
“I suppose we should be married in the church,” I said. “Everyone will expect it.” Fred looked uncomfortable, but he consented.
Of course I could not accuse him of doing it on purpose, but before we could make any further plans for a church wedding he sustained an injury to his leg, while he was engaged in telephone work, that promised to keep him limping and on crutches for weeks.
“Now you can’t have your church wedding, Ruth,” said Fred to me the next evening.
“No,” I answered, “but I’ll tell you what will be more fun than a church wedding. No one is expecting us to be married now until your leg is better; but we will just ask my family and yours to come in and have ice cream with us some night the way we do sometimes in summer, and then your father can marry us, and we can go on the trip with Fred and Bess after all. Only no one will know about it beforehand, except just your father and my mother. Won’t that be fun?”
“That will be just great,” he began, but stopped suddenly. “I’m afraid you won’t be happy to have it that way when everyone is expecting us to have a big wedding.”
“Indeed,” I told him. “Don’t you know that it is a girl’s privilege to have her wedding just as she wishes, and if I happen to want it the way you want it there is no more for you to say.”
Then I went to ask my mother if she was willing, and he went home to ask his father. “Tell Ruth that she is my first choice for you out of all the church,” was the word Fred brought me from his father; but my mother said when I asked her that there were many men who would have made life easier for me than Fred could, and more comfortable and happier in many ways.
“Yes,” I said, “Fred told me the other evening that as an educator and church man he would probably never be able to give me the comforts and simple luxuries to which I have been accustomed. He was pleased when I told him that I could not think of any place where we could be of greater service to humanity than in the place which he would probably occupy with his father. But so far as happiness is concerned,” I maintained stoutly, “I would be happier living in a dugout with Fred Smith than in a palace with any other man in the world.”
“Well, Fred is a good, intelligent, noble boy,” said my mother with her wise, kindly smile. “He has given you his first love, and will make you a good husband. But even if I did not think so I would not dare to interfere. You have given him such a love that anything which I might say would be of no avail.”
The selfishness of youth! How I enjoyed the idea of the surprise I was planning for all our relatives who could be persuaded to come to an impromptu gathering for which no definite purpose had been named. I made the house sweet with great ferns and my favorite roses from the corner of the garden, and laid out my prettiest little evening dress, the only one Fred had ever noticed or spoken of, a soft crepe de chine the color of a moss rose, daintily fashioned, and rich with its one shining string of exquisite pearl trimming. And in all my happiness, I had no thought for the dear ones who would have so loved to have planned and worked with me for my happy evening, nor of those other relatives and friends who could not be there because I had insisted on keeping our wedding my secret.
All of my family who lived in Lamoni were there except Bess’ husband who insisted on going to the weekly prayer meeting. I think I should have been tempted to whisper in his ear, but I was afraid that if he stayed Bess would suspect something; and it was Bess whom I most feared would find out about my wedding before I was ready. It was always hard to keep a secret from Bess.
Father Smith had succeeded better. He had met his older girls’ objections to the long walk by bringing out the ponies, and one of the younger boys was persuaded into his white collar and shoes only because his father had said: “Ruth will be disappointed not to have them all there after she has spent her day getting ready her cakes and cream.” Hale figured that the cake was worth the necktie and shoes, especially as Ruth’s cakes had something of a reputation in those days.
When Audentia and Benjamin arrived I began to sense a sort of suppressed excitement in the atmosphere that I did not understand; but the pretty berry spoon which was hidden in Ben’s pocket all during the confusion and was slyly presented before the evening was over proved that Audentia at least suspected. They had been living with Father Smith since the death of Fred’s mother.
“Brother Joseph,” I said, drawing him aside as soon as he arrived, “something has been bothering me. I am afraid that if you put it in the ceremony that I am to obey Fred, I shall speak right up and say ‘No!’ and proceed to argue the matter out right in the middle of the ceremony. I don’t believe in married people having to command and obey each other. I prefer cooperation.”
But Brother Joseph kindly assured me that our church, as was quite typical of its careful distinction between the fundamental and the formal in matters of tradition, had long since stricken the objectionable word from the ceremony.
By nine o’clock everything was ready. Precisely on the hour Brother Joseph arose, and, standing in dignity and repose in his best black suit, began to speak. An expression of amazement and perplexity passed over the audience. Bess said afterwards that she thought Brother Joseph was losing his mind. You see Bess was really surprised. But to me the dear old father’s words seemed entirely pertinent. He said that he had been giving away daughters and receiving sons for several years, and was now pleased to give away a son and receive a daughter.
Surely there was nothing irrelevant about the words, but if his splendid poise seemed a little less evident than usual it was scarcely surprising, for the company had slid forward in their chairs and were looking at him and then at each other in a most disconcerting manner.
He called on Fred and me to take our places in the doorway between the library and the living room. We did so very calmly. Fred leaned his crutches against the bookcase, I remember, as he took my hand. Thanks to my public training, I was, I suppose, behaving with decorum. But I can remember just how I wanted to jump up and down and say, “Ha, ha! didn’t we play a good joke on everyone?”
As it eventually dawned on the assembled relatives just how good a joke had been played on them, there broke loose such a commotion as had never before been experience in the annals of our two ultra-conservative families. Surprise we had expected, of course, but we were certainly not prepared for the resentment and indignation which radiated from the greater number of those assembled brothers and sister and their wives and husbands. Each one, it seemed, thought that everyone else had been told about the affair excepting himself.
What a volley of comments, questions, exclamations: Brother Joseph standing to one side serenely, his eyes twinkling with amusement; Fred, his face quite passive; and I, glorying in this, my greatest dramatic role!
Bess, rosy-cheeked, golden-haired, sank back into her chair with an audible, “Well, I’ll give up!” I knew she would be wondering next if my cakes were as nice as usual.
“Let us be quiet now,” said Father Smith presently.
Then only did the strange disapproval of the spectators take definite form. My older sister’s husband, tall, saturnine, with the blood of the LaBoiteaux glowing in his dark cheeks and black flashing eyes, jumped to his feet, and pointing an accusing finger at the president of the Latter Day Saint Church shouted:
“Your license! I demand your license!”
“O Fred,” I gasped, as I turned to him in dismay, “I never thought of a license!”
“Why, that’s all right pet,” said Fred smiling, “What do you suppose father and I drove all the way to Leon for this morning?”
Well, I have sometimes wondered just what would have happened if Fred had forgotten to get the license. The joke would certainly have been on us for all time to come. And when I think about it, I wonder increasingly how it happened that he did not forget it. Any man who would forget to pay his wife’s street car fare or her hotel bill-but no, he does not like to be reminded of such lapses, and I will not speak.
The simple prayer was soon said, and in the pause before the short ceremony of our church was read I look up to see my mother’s eyes shining bravely through here tears.
The wedding was soon over. It was lovely, and everyone was duly astonished. As I look back upon it there is only one thought which comes to cloud my happiness. I know that I should not have been a happier bride in a cream colored satin and orange blossoms than I was in crepe de chine and moss roses. A thousand gift-brining guests could not have been more precious to me than the faces which looked into mine as I made my most solemn covenant; but it was of those who were not there that I thought. And I know that it was not so much for their sakes that I wished that they might have been there, nor even that they might have seen me, in my great romantic comedy-drama, but I wished that they might have been there to see him-my husband!
There is a book written by Don Odgen Stewart, call Perfect Behavior. It is avowedly a discussion of the latest thing in etiquette but is in reality intended to cheer and amuse jaded humanity with a farcical description of its modes of conduct.
A friend brought me this book once when I was ill, and the girls and I enjoyed a hilarious evening or two reading it aloud. Mr. Smith, however, was not particularly taken with the sketch. He listened awhile, tolerantly but a little bored, and then went on about something else and left us to our fun.
In this book there is a chapter devoted to weddings, and with admirable seriousness the author begins an impossible dissertation with the remark, which he attributes to Homes, concerning the holiness of the state of matrimony. How if a book of so light of frivolous a nature admits the importance of entering into a marriage, how much more so should my husband whose mind is so little given to nonsense that such a book wrings nothing from him but a contemptuous smile?
And, having reached the “lived-happily-ever-after” point of the story, I find this statement more nearly applicable to the condition which has come about than anything else which I can say. In all the years he has not failed in the duty which took upon himself at this, our wedding. Friends and relatives who have been in our home have commented on his thoughtfulness, and the cheerful willingness with which he has always performed the little services that make a woman’s home life happy. Old Georgia, who came to help us when Lois was little, used even to say with a gentle smile suffusing her good old black face: “Mr. Smith, he done spoil dat chile,” but I think old Georgia was only a little bit jealous. You see, she like to spoil me herself.
It has always been his custom to bring a light breakfast to me before I get up. Once after his father died, I remember, I told him that now his time and thoughts would be more full than ever and he must not any longer think of paying me such unnecessary attentions. There were tears in his eyes when he answered me. “Why, Ruth,” he said, seriously, “if you deprive me of the privilege of serving you in those ways, you will be taking from me one of the sweetest things in my life.”
Consequently, if I have ever wanted to complain, as meddle-aged women sometimes do, that the years have not made more fluent a man already hesitant in the expression of his deep-hidden emotions, or that the love letters, which I have received from time to time when he has remembered the date of our anniversary or some on has reminded him that it was St. Valentine’s day, are so infrequent that I have put them all away in the family bible, and so formally composed that they might easily have come from any good etiquette book, except perhaps Don Stewart’s, I have only to think of this. In his mind, devotion is most adequately expressed in service
Previous chapter (4)
Next chapter (6)
Frederick Madison Smith page
Who Was Who intro page