Without hesitation he replied, “What a great idea!”
If he didn’t own it, I would have expected him to stammer, to back-pedal, and to find some reason not to go to Three Arch Bay. When he didn’t, my spirits lifted. Finally, I was going to get some tangible proof that he was who he said he was, that he owned what he said he owned. I followed John’s instructions and turned where he directed, but we found the street closed off by a guarded wrought-iron gate.
“I didn’t know they put this up,” John said. “I guess we can’t go by the house.”
“Why not go up to the guard and tell him who you are?” I asked. “Tell him you own the big house on the point.”
“No.”
“Why not? It’s your house.”
“I’m not going to disturb the renters,” he said coldly. “Besides, I don’t have any proof with me. The guard won’t let us in without that.”
No matter how much I prodded and pleaded, he was adamant. We were not going into that development that day. I pulled the car around and headed up the coast. John must have sensed my disappointment.
“Pull off the road, right there,” he said pointing to a dirt turnoff. “We’ll be able to see the roof of the house from there.”
So to appease my need for something concrete, something tangible, I parked the car, and pulled out my camera. I took a picture of the house, or at least the roof of a house that I believed belonged to John and his sister, Lydia. I secretly wished John’s stories would not be so difficult to validate.
We continued up the coast, talking, as newlyweds do, of the future and all the great experiences ahead of us. “Just more thing,” I teased as we sat on the plane, its engines whirring, ready for takeoff. “Now that we’re married, you can get my spouse card so we can shop at the naval base commissary, and I can officially prove I’m the admiral’s wife.”
John grabbed my right hand and kissed it.
“Anything for my new bride,” John said as the plane lifted off from the runway, heading northward toward home and our new life together.
PART TWO
Patience
SEVEN
The Bliss
The sun slipped lower and created intense orange splashes and purple streaks in the Mexico City sky, but I couldn’t enjoy its beauty. Not now. Not on this street, in the historic but run-down part of the city. Not in front of a locked, dilapidated colonial church, with John pounding on the heavy timber-and-iron front doors. No, definitely not now, with our religious wedding plans rapidly disintegrating right before my eyes, as our civil ceremony had done two months earlier in Tijuana.
It was déjà vu. I was miserable then. I was miserable now. Why had I let John talk me into joining him at the end of his business trip? We should have done this in the United States. As the tears welled up, I valiantly fought them back.
I craved a religious ceremony, a blessing from God, essential so I could feel truly married. I needed something more than a piece of paper with Spanish writing and vows in that crummy office in Tijuana. Even though I was no longer a practicing Catholic, God’s presence in my life was very important. Was this blessing worth it if it caused this much pain?
We were a ridiculous sight, a wedding party of eight, dressed in fancy clothes, standing around on a darkening street, whispering like conspirators. Adamo and Sophia, John’s Mexican business partners, agreed to stand up for us. They brought along their two children and two business associates when their last meeting of the day ran late.
“I don’t know what happened,” John said. “I called two days ago and made all the arrangements with the minister.”
“The lights are on inside the church,” Adamo said.
“I hear voices,” Sophia added. “Somebody’s in there.”
The lump in my throat kept me silent.
John started pounding again and yelling in Spanish. Adamo joined in. The doors didn’t open. They pounded harder. The ruckus attracted the locals and a young policeman walking his beat. He strutted up to John and demanded to know what was going on. I cringed. Policemen intimidate me, no matter what nationality.
John quickly explained. The policeman glanced at me, and a smile spread across his pockmarked face. I returned the smile and relaxed a little. He banged the ancient door with his night-stick and yelled, “
Policía! Abre la puerta!
” Nothing happened. He banged on the door again and repeated himself, even louder. Finally, the ancient door creaked and an old man with sparse white hair stuck his head out.
The policeman jabbered at him, and the door opened even wider. We shuffled in and the policeman went on his way. John continued to argue with the old man as the rest of the wedding party slid into the last pew and waited. The old man shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, then waddled across the chipped tile floor up the main aisle toward the vestibule.
“He’s going to get the minister,” John said. “We’ll have this straightened out in no time, and we’ll have our religious wedding.” He gave me one of his everything-is-going-to-be-all-right grins. It didn’t help.
The dimly lit church reeked of passing time, a time when the rich built what today’s poor could not maintain. Faded paint peeled from the ceiling. Votive candles flickered in bent iron holders, and ragged red curtains covered the carved confessional doorways. Disappointment crept over me, and I struggled to breathe. The walls closed in on me. I needed to get out of there at once. I needed fresh air. I needed to be alone.
I bolted outside and stood near the corner, under the dim street-light, and looked back at the old church. The wedding bouquet dangled sadly by my side. My free hand wiped away the river of tears that rolled down my cheeks. I was the crying bride, a pathetic vision dressed in a long-sleeved, floor-length ivory voile dress, with ivory lace at the collar, wrists, and hem. Men and women stared. Children stared. Dogs stared. I didn’t care.
I should have paid attention to the warning signs that appeared earlier in the day. First, the hotel power went out. Then the flowers didn’t show up and we had to scramble to find a florist for last-minute bouquets and boutonnieres.
Sophia emerged from the church, followed by the rest of the party. John strode over and put his arm around me. He was not smiling. “I talked to the minister,” he said. “He’s had a change of heart about marrying us, so he called it off. He said he left a message at the hotel this morning.”
“If he did, we never got it. Why did he renege?”
John hugged me even tighter. It felt good to be in his arms. I relaxed into his chest.
“He said he had second thoughts about marrying a divorced woman.”
“What!” My body tensed and I withdrew from John’s caress. “How could he? We have the letter from the Concord pastor to cover that.”
I grabbed my purse from Sophia and dug around until I pulled out a tattered envelope. I slapped it into the air. “What about this? Doesn’t it count for anything?”
Before we left for this latest business trip to Mexico City, Sophia had cautioned us that we might need a letter from a minister in the States, giving an approval of why I, as a divorced person, should be married in a religious ceremony. Fortunately, we found the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Clayton. He understood why my first marriage had failed; my first husband’s infidelities had put a rift between us that could no longer be tolerated. So he wrote the letter.
“I told him about the letter,” John said. “He doesn’t care. He said he didn’t want to be party to a union made in sin.”
“Sin? I’m not sinful.” I paused to let the words sink in. “Oh my, it’s my fault we can’t do this in Mexico,” I wailed. “I feel like a fallen woman.”
The teachings of the Catholic Church, ingrained in me as a youngster, flooded my consciousness and produced big-time guilt. The Church had denied me access to the sacraments at home, so a church wedding was not possible there. Here, now, it was happening all over again.
I was inconsolable as we all piled into the two taxis that had been patiently waiting for our fiasco to finish. Back at the Hotel Chapultepec, as we gathered in the bar my dark mood continued to lay a pall of gloom on everyone. I decided to drown my sorrows in drink.
“I’ll have two double margaritas,” I said. “On the rocks.”
With drinks delivered, John raised his for a toast.
“To my bride,” he said as he smiled. He raised his glass again and toasted the two businessmen and Adamo, who were still with us. Finally, he looked at me. “We will have our religious ceremony before we go home.” He leaned down and kissed my salty, tear-stained lips. I drained my first drink without coming up for air.
“I want a picture of this moment,” I said. “Where’s my camera?” That’s me. No matter what’s happening in my life, I like to record it on film even if it’s not at the happiest of times, as it was now.
“Oh, my God.” John gasped. “You told me to take care of it. I set it down in the pew at the church. With all the commotion I forgot to pick it up. Be right back.”
He jumped up and ran outside for a taxi. Normally I would have been angry at such thoughtless treatment of one of my prized belongings. Now I just smiled, settled back into the caress of the soft bar chair, sipped my second drink, and slipped into oblivion, hoping that somewhere, sometime soon, we would create a happy memory of a religious ceremony in Mexico City.
Several days after we returned from Mexico City we hosted a party for our family and friends. What they expected as an afternoon Christmas party was, in fact, our wedding reception, planned discreetly so no one would feel obligated to bring a gift.
We had created the “Mexico City Wedding” story, and John regaled the guests with how we finally found an English-speaking minister who married us in the Union Evangelical Church. The ceremony appeased me. The church, in an upscale part of the city, had been romantically embellished with fresh pine Christmas wreaths, red bows, poinsettias, and tall white flickering candles.
John held up my left hand to show off the ring he had slipped on my finger at the religious ceremony. I thought the ring, with its semiprecious green stones, looked far too masculine. But because John’s cousin had supposedly made it, I kept my thoughts to myself.
“This marriage is bound to last,” John said with a twinkle in his eye. “We’ve been married three times now.”
That brought the house down with laughter. We ate Chinese food brought from San Francisco, cut a large three-tiered wedding cake, and watched George and Ted blow out candles on a joint birthday cake. After the last guests shuffled out the door, I grabbed the bag with the mail that had accumulated while we were gone. With all the last-minute preparations for the party, it was my first opportunity to look at it.
“Here, give me that,” John said. “You relax while I sort.”
I sat on the brick hearth, next to the crackling fire, and watched John quickly creating piles on the coffee table. Bills, advertisements, Christmas cards, and . . . six returned wedding announcements. We had sent them out in the middle of November to announce our Tijuana wedding. I reached over, quickly grabbed the pile, and read the names of John’s children, his grandmother, and his sister beneath the NO SUCH PERSON AT THIS ADDRESS stamp. Pain pinched my face into a frown.
“John, what happened? Did you get all the addresses wrong?” He got up from the couch, sat down beside me on the hearth, and grabbed the envelopes from my trembling hands.
“No, the addresses are fine.” He sighed. “Yesterday I briefly scratched through the mail. When I saw the envelopes, I called my grandmother. It’s the same old story. She said the whole family is upset about us getting married. You know, the you’re-a-gold-digger-and-out-of-my-class routine.”
I shook my head. “I wish they were here, John, to assess the situation fairly. Why can’t they accept me the way my family and friends have accepted you?”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. What could he say that hadn’t been said before during one of our why-don’t-they-like-me conversations? But we were married now. Why couldn’t they be happy for us? I knew I must be missing something, but I couldn’t imagine what. Perhaps I feared the truth, afraid it might change the happiness I thought I had found, or that it would irrevocably change my relationship with John. I could not take that chance. So I let it alone to gnaw away slowly at my peace of mind.
John placed his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye. “Someday, they will know the wonderful person that you are. We’ll just have to be patient.”
Three weeks later we left for Hawaii to enjoy our delayed honeymoon. We flew first class, and it got even better when we checked into the recently renovated Moana Hotel, one of the first hotels on Waikiki Beach. The hotel looked like its original image on the black-and-white postcards in the lobby. It didn’t have air conditioning, but we didn’t need it. We were in love, glowing with that everything-is-wonderful aura of newlyweds, despite our ages. The ceiling paddle fans stirred the tropical ocean breeze. It was deliciously romantic.
On Sunday afternoon we strolled down the beach boulevard, hand in hand, drifting in and out of gift shops and art galleries. At the window of the Center Art Gallery we paused. “Oh, look at the original Red Skelton painting,” I said. “Let’s go inside. I love Red’s clowns.”
Red Skelton was a comedic icon of the twentieth century. He started his vaudeville career in 1928 and eventually carried his talent into movie theaters and television. When my dad finally broke down and got a TV set in 1957, the family would gather in front of it and watch Red deliver good, clean comedy. It set the standard for comedy for the next twenty years.
We were barely two steps inside the gallery door when a tall, thin man with curly gray hair approached. His open shirt revealed several gold chains around his neck. He introduced himself as Isaac Rosen, a customer representative there. When John introduced himself as “Admiral Perry,” Isaac’s eyes lit up, his smile got even wider, and he vigorously shook John’s hand. I felt like a fish being circled by a shark. I wanted to escape.