Anybody my age reading this already knows exactly what I am describing and does not need it drawn for them, and anybody younger can look up the year.
What I will say is this.
We were married that morning. There was a man and there were words and there were two witnesses, one of whom was her cousin and one of whom was a stranger we asked.
She wore that dress. She said yes. I said yes.
Whatever any piece of paper did or did not do in a drawer in that building afterwards, that happened, and I was there, and I am eighty-six and nobody is going to tell me otherwise.
And then we went across the hall to the counter, which is the ordinary part, the paperwork part, the part nobody remembers about their own wedding day.
And she knew. That same afternoon.
He told her at the counter.
Quietly. Leaning in over it, so that the four other people in that hall would not hear, which she noted in the letter and which I have thought about more than almost anything else.
He was careful about it. He took trouble not to embarrass anybody.
And I was outside parking the car, forty feet away, through a window, with the engine still running.
Four or five sentences, apparently. It took him about eleven seconds.
She wrote three of them down in that letter. I have read those three sentences about two hundred times in eleven days and I am not going to reproduce them here.
They are not shocking. That is what people expect and it is wrong.
They are small, and administrative, and almost polite — the sort of thing a man says across a counter when he has said it before and will say it again on Monday.
And that is exactly what makes them what they are.
And she took the paper off him.
And she thanked him. She thanked that man, out loud, and she put that in the letter and she underlined it, and I do not know what to do with that and I have stopped trying.
And then she walked out of that building into the sunshine, to the man in uniform waiting on the step with his back to the door.
And she said: all done.
Two words. On a courthouse step, in a dress she had made herself, four days before her husband got on a plane.
And then she took my arm, and we got in the car, and we drove eleven miles to a diner and had the best afternoon of my life.
She laughed at something the waitress said. I have the photograph.
PART 5
She could have made it legal after 1967, when the law changed.
Two years. That is all it was.
We were in the same town. We had a car by then. There was nothing stopping her at all.
And she had that paper in a tin in the hall cupboard the entire time — the same tin, in the same cupboard, about eleven feet from where I ate my dinner every night for fifty-four years.
She did not.
Not in 1967. Not in 1971, when we bought the house. Not in 1994 when we paid it off.
And this is the part of the letter that took me three days to get through, because I kept having to put it down and walk into another room.
Doing it would have meant telling me. That is all. That is the entire reason.
And if she told me, I would know that four days before I got on that plane, a man behind a counter said something to my wife's face while she stood there on her own in a dress she had made.
She wrote it plainly. There is no self-pity anywhere in those four pages and there is no apology either, which took me three readings to notice and which I am glad about.
She wrote: I didn't want you sitting in some hole out there thinking about that man's face.
And then: you'd have done something.
You'd have gone back in there. You would, Thaddeus, don't tell me you wouldn't.
And then you'd have got on that plane with that on you, and I'd have had to wait a year to find out what it did to you.
She decided all of that on her own.
On a courthouse step. In about eleven seconds — that is her figure, not mine; she wrote it down, and I have thought about those eleven seconds every single hour since.
Twenty-two years old. In a dress she had made on a borrowed machine. With a man in uniform waiting about four yards away with his back to the door.
And then: and afterwards it got a little harder every year, because I'd have had to explain why I hadn't said it the year before.
Sixty years of that.
One decision, made in eleven seconds, and then renewed every single year — at Christmases, at christenings, at four hospital bedsides, at a sixtieth anniversary with a cake on the table and forty people in the room.
By a woman washing up at a sink four feet from me, deciding again, quietly, that this would not be the year.
Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.
In sixty years I never once asked her about that afternoon.
I remember every flower on that dress.
I remember the diner — the booth, the colour of the table, the window.
I remember what she ordered and I remember the name of the waitress, who was called Delphine and who was about nineteen.
And I cannot tell you how long I sat in that car outside the courthouse.
Because I never asked her how long she was in there.
I have tried for eleven days to remember how long I sat there and I cannot do it.
And the reason I cannot is not age. My memory of that day is extraordinary; I have just listed a waitress from 1965.
It is that at the time it was not information. It was a few minutes while I parked a car.
