The Wedding Rehearsal
by Sperry Hunt
A Saturday in June, 1918.
Streaming through the landing window of her home, the sun falls on Jean as she looks up the stairway. Eight-years-old, she looks like Alice in Wonderland in her white dress.
“Momma?” she calls out too softly to be heard. “It’s hot. Can I go outside?”
Jean waits, then waits a minute more. She unbuckles her shoes and mounts the stairs, easing her weight on each tread. Cresting the last step, she skims her stockings across the varnish. She peeks around a door jam to find the four-poster empty. She crosses the carpet and leans into the screen porch where Momma and the baby face one another asleep on the daybed. A pillow bracing his back, the boy pooches his lips against his mother’s breast. A tempting breeze soughs through the crisp leaves outside.
The girl steals back down the stairs, pulls on her shoes and slips past the French doors into the stifling living room. She glances at a gilt clock on the mantle as it ticks toward one o’clock. Beside the clock stands a photograph of her father in his uniform. He has been with the Army in France since Thanksgiving. The thrust of his jaw speaks of his strength, which Jean misses, and of his temper which she does not.
She pads past the velvet couch and lifts the latch on the louvered door. She slides quietly through the doorway and flies down the steps in a patter and a rustle. Skipping up the sidewalk, Jean pauses in a dapple of shade to close her eyes and taste the breeze with her skin. Further along – in front of the Horton’s house – she leans her back against an oak and watches a pair of gibbering squirrels skitter among the limbs above her. Across the street a mockingbird apes their chatter.
A bark startles Jean as the Horton’s Scottie tears around a hedge his leash flouncing behind him.
“Toodles!” Mrs. Horton trills from the side yard.
Jean pulls herself from the tree, rushes around the corner and dashes up the empty sidewalk stopping in the first patch of shade. A column of black automobiles stands along the curb. A middle-aged man in a dark suit emerges from one of the cars. He hastens toward Jean then turns onto a walkway. He hustles up the stairs and into a brick bungalow with broad eves and a black shake roof. Behind its deep porch; wide, screened windows reveal the back of a crowd facing the fireplace ahead.
“A wedding,” Jean whispers excitedly. She pauses for a moment to look behind her. She draws a full breath and strolls up the walk with the careless air of an invited guest. She mounts the steps, strides across the porch and slips through the unattended screen door.
The interior is plain and handsome with dark beams, white plaster and bronze light fixtures. An electric fan thrums overhead. A candlestick telephone and a spray of flowers rise from a plain, white table by the door.
Jean wipes her forehead with her sleeve and glances to her left where a white cake and a tall stack of small plates ascend from a dining room table. To her right elderly women fan themselves from chairs arranged along the front windows. The ladies lean forward listening to the solemn voice of a man beyond a crowd of onlookers. To her right, the floor cracks beneath the weight of a restless fat man. Glancing above his oily red hair, the girl sees the orange ball of a cat’s face poking between the white banisters of a staircase. Someone shuts an ice box door in the rear of the house, rattling the bottles inside.
Jean walks on tiptoes along the back of the crowd struggling to see the wedding couple. She passes a blonde woman in a hobble skirt and a feathered Robin Hood hat. The lady stands beside a gaunt man in a brown suit draping loosely across his bony shoulders. Beyond him, a short, powerful man twists his neck popping a joint loudly.
Jean continues moving forward, sliding between two gray-haired men with flushed cheeks and sweat rolling down their necks. Threading her way through the crowd, she finds herself in a well of towering guests.
Sighing deeply, Jean attracts the attention of a tall boy in a cream linen suit. Fifteen-years-old, his oiled black hair is combed straight back. He stares down at Jean who rocks left and right, searching for a seam in the bulwark before her. Having younger sisters, the boy is familiar with the girl’s situation.
He taps her shoulder and opens his hands to her.
Jean hesitates. She doesn’t know him, but there is a naturalness about him that eases her caution. She raises her hands. In one swift move, he sweeps her up and swings her across his body. She scissors her legs around his waist, reaches across his back and grasps his shoulder.
“Can you see okay?” he whispers adjusting his arm beneath her.
She nods then turns quickly toward the bride and the groom facing one another before man standing before the fireplace.
In the moments that follow, the boy and the girl feel each other’s heat. They draw one another’s breath, and they listen to the couple’s earnest vows.
When they meet again ten years later, neither recognizes the other. The occasion is the girl’s debut party where the boy is now a man just out of law school. He has arrived late. He is struck immediately by the fine face and manner of Jean as she dances with one man after another. He waits for a break then startles her by snatching her dance card from her hand. Smiling with his whole face, he offers her another with his own name penciled on every row. She laughs. They talk about the weather, the clarinet player and her ambition to be a great artist.
As the music comes up, a hopeful young man approaches, his own dance card extended toward her.
“Next dance, Charles,” she says hold up a finger. “I promise.”
Jean takes the young lawyer’s hand. They clutch one another again as they dance.
Forty years after that night, the couple sits beside their swimming pool watching their grandchildren. One mentions a recent home wedding. The other speaks of another wedding long ago. It is not until then that my parents realized that they met as children watching a wedding in each other’s arms.
They were married on April 29th, 1931.