The Wedding Album
There were colors that I loved, Candy Land blue most of all. It did not matter to me if I won the game, the first to reach the pink frosted cottage with the ‘home sweet home’ sign. Being stuck in the molasses swamp was no crisis if it meant prolonging the play, offering more chances to draw a double blue card from the deck. For a child, colors are a sweet threat; any shade of the rainbow can engulf perception in a way that is both suffocating and pleasurable. Can a five-year-old be nostalgic? Something in that blue pulled at me like an ancient homeland. Twenty years later driving through New Mexico I looked up at that cerulean dome and realized that my encounter with Candy Land blue was my first conscious esthetic experience, it was the color of forever, my introduction to the sublime. I devoured blue popsicles in order to ingest that beauty, I wanted that cool hint of the infinite inside me, filling out the corner pockets of my body. My adolescent coveting of a blue sparkle drum kit was yet another manifestation of my desire to interact with and be subsumed by the glinting contradictory feelings of expansion and return.
But this is a story of black and white, of elegance and ritual, of grown-up things that both intrigued and mystified. I am speaking of my parents’ wedding album. With gold lettering embossing Our Wedding across a cushioned white cover, it was, by my estimation, the most refined thing in my family’s possession. To dip into its mysteries, the album had to be exhumed from a deep drawer like a sacred object. At 8×10 inches, the photographs were big by snapshot standards, opened on a child’s lap; it was enormous and weighty, making the simple turning of gold tipped pages ceremonial. From triple-deckers to veteran’s row houses, we lived in a variety of apartments and flats in the working class suburbs of Boston: over the years I sat on floors of linoleum, unfinished oak and shag carpet, completely lost in the monochromatic world of November 21, 1953. Looking at the wedding album was a fully sensual experience; the pictures made me feel things. Something of those blacks and whites, the velvety darkness of my father’s tuxedo and the shimmering whiteness of my mom’s gown passed through my eyes and seeped into my body; I shivered with quiet pleasure.
My mother was born in East Boston, my father in Medford Massachusetts, both in the year 1930. They met on the course sands of Revere Beach not long before my father joined the Marines and was sent off to lose a piece of his soul in the ‘police action’ later called the Korean War. My dad was half French-Canadian and half Irish, an exotic blend in the eyes of my pure Irish mom. Dating was brief and non-committal, although my mom was secretly smitten. Some mild affection was exchanged in letters during my dad’s two-year deployment, but when he returned he was almost desperate to marry, as if to cleave to another would offer salvation. A diffident and skinny girl, my mom was frightened and thrilled at the prospect. Her hesitation was eased by my father’s obvious admiration and loyalty to his sister, the radiant Alice. My mom’s chaste devotion to that other Alice equaled her shy desire for her betrothed. The promise of that parallel relationship sealed the deal; they would be sisters-in-law, the two dark-haired Alice’s, talking, and laughing into the future together.
The date for the wedding was set, my mother’s twenty-third birthday, November 21, 1953 at the Immaculate Conception Church in Medford, Massachusetts. The first pictures in the album are the staged gestures of bridal preparation. My mom adjusts her hair as she stands in front of a large scalloped edged mirror, smiling at her reflection in the hand held mirror. In the next image, her older sister Janice, the Maid of Honor, helps to adjust the veil. Turn the page and there is Janice placing the garter on her left leg. For years this image mystified me; what is that lacy thing my aunt is holding halfway up my mom’s leg? What was that look between them? It appears to me now to be some odd combination of glee and embarrassment, which is an incomprehensible juxtaposition of emotions for a child. I would try to shake off such nagging questions and marvel at my mom’s satin gown luminous in the reflected light of the photographer’s flash.
My mom’s parents do not appear in the wedding album. Her mother, another Alice, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm the previous year and since then her father had been drowning his grief in gin. Her father was a fire chief in East Boston, his slicked back white hair, puffy pink face sprouting out of starched collars and quiet swagger made him a kind of working-class Irish royalty and his absence was glaring. Consequently it was her older brother Frederick who would walk her down the aisle. Uncle Fred was a slight man with a big laugh. With his chunky glasses and less-than-macho demeanor, you might not have guessed that he had served in both World War II and the Korean War. Although shorter than my mom he stands proud and elegant, the muscle memory of his military training filling out his impeccable tuxedo.
The modern wedding is an amalgam of pagan and Christian rituals: for example, the throwing of the bouquet has origins in the Greek myth of the Apple of Discord in which the fruit inscribed with the words ‘fairest of them all’ was tossed into a wedding celebration that included Hera, Athena and Aphrodite among the guests; the resulting epic struggle presaged the Trojan War. Before Queen Victoria’s wedding made wearing white a tradition in 1840, the color of the bride’s gown had far less symbolic significance. If one were to parse the choreography of weddings since the mid-20th century, it would seem like a collection of moments staged for the camera. Like a slow motion flip book, the narrative unfolds through an accumulation of details which in my parent’s case included the pinning of corsages, the gathering of bridesmaids, groomsmen escorting people to their seats in the church, the priest blessing the couple, the exchange of vows and rings, the first kiss, and then the triumphant stroll under a shower of rice. When the wedding party reconvened at the reception, further rituals were enacted such as the first dance, the cutting of the cake and the tossing of the garter and the bouquet.
This particular two-image sequence held me transfixed. In the foreground stand my parents, my mom’s head thrown back with that same gleeful expression I never saw in our daily lives together. My dad looks toward the photographer appearing utterly detached while propping up my mother’s elbow as she tosses some mysterious object toward the ceiling. Choreographed by the photographer, my parent’s position and gestures are exactly the same in both photographs – my dad’s inscrutable expression with the ever-present cigarette tucked between his fingers and my mom smiling ear-to-ear enfolded in her gown like a glossy meringue. What was so strangely funny to me then was the crowd of people behind them shifting from female to male. It would be decades before I was introduced to such terms as gender and homosocial but I was struck by this spectacle of separation. What did it mean? And what were they all reaching for, so desperately, so enthusiastically? Until my mother complained I was harming the album’s binding, I liked to flip those two pages back and forth rapidly, creating a kind of slapstick effect of stasis and change – a stage on which my parents do not seem to notice the stroboscopic switch between aunt and uncle, man and woman.
Although every bit as staged as the others, the final image of the album has the look of a paparazzi shot; my parent’s have shed their formal wear and are now dressed in their fancy street clothes as they burst out of the door of the reception hall toward some glamorous future. I was sitting in that future as I looked up from the cold floor comparing the poise and elegance in that photo album to the threadbare chaos that surrounded me. The wedding album provided evidence of a time of controlled beauty, where emotions were pure and wholesome and adult intentions easily understood. It was a kind of negative proof that I must have been living in some kind of alternate reality where none of that was true. I studied the images for clues; was there a hint of spiritual corruption, of inadvertently taking the wrong path in life? Was there a spectre of future domestic terror haunting my mother’s joyful eyes? I could not comprehend the discrepancy between the image and where I found myself. When I gazed up at uncle Fred during parties, instead of that proud and self-contained man, I couldn’t help but see a red-faced maniac, who laughed too loudly, slurred his words and was known on occasion to threaten his brother with the carving knife pulled from the Thanksgiving turkey. There are no photographs of such moments of course, yet their vivid imprint is fixed in our family history.
I caught occasional glimpses of that rare elegance when my parents dressed up to go out on a Saturday night. I loved obliquely observing their preparations: the shaving, the spritzing of perfume, the soft roar of the hair dryer, the tightening of the neck tie, the insertion of cuff links, the click of high heels on the floor, the kisses goodnight, the exhortations to be good, the faint trace of lipstick left upon our cheeks. With noses pressed against the window we would watch them climb into the car and drive away. If it were simply a heartwarming theater play, we could drop the curtain now, but a few hours later the night would come to a ragged and unsatisfying end, with stair stumbling, loosened collars, red-rimmed eyes, the lingering stink of cigarettes, the clink of ice cubes, voices raising from murmurs to shouts, slamming doors, a car speeding away and with me, kneeling beside my bed in the dark, pleading for divine intervention.
This essay is an excerpt from a book in progress titled, Available Light: An Anecdotal History in Photography
