The Marriage Book (4 page)

The other morning I was leaving the house and I found you in the kitchen, looking out the window while talking to Debbie on the phone. The morning sun fell across your hair and hands. I
reached down and touched your hand, a hand made noble by its years of service and duty. I left that morning feeling like a king because you were mine.

I don’t mean to sound morose, but I simply bring it to your attention that we will probably both not leave on the same day. The crispness of the fall air reminds us that we cannot have summer forever. Someday, all too soon one of us will be forced to test the shattering emptiness that we have seen transpire in the lives of couples who have gone on before us. One of us will go first but the other will celebrate our treasure, our union and love with a transcending joy. We will not sorrow not as those who have no hope. I walk so much slower now, and a little stooped. It’s not because I’m tired or weary, but no one can walk fast, who is weighted down with great dreams and precious memories. My biggest apology is that I was never able to rebuke and turn back the wild, hurried pace of the years. There have been times when I actually dreamed that I might be the one person who could defeat old-age and remain in full health just for you. It was not to be. As I have repeated so many times: “Old ‘Father Time’ is still undefeated.” Darn him!

Come walk with me my love. Just not too fast, we will not hurry, because there are still places to go, people to bless and vistas to see. We will continue to pace ourselves. And can I say it one more time with deep meaning and emphasis? “I love you.” Happy 59th!!!

B

BED

JOHN HEYWOOD

PROVERB, 1546

Author of such epigrams as “the fat is in the fire” and “the more the merrier,” British playwright and poet John Heywood (1497–1580) was a favorite of Henry VIII.

In house to kepe household when folkes will needes wed,

Moe thinges belonge than foure bare legges in a bed.

BEATRICE CAMPBELL, CIRCA 1934

The first actress to play Eliza Doolittle in
Pygmalion
, Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1865–1940) was George Bernard Shaw’s friend and a famed correspondent of his (see
Passion
).
The New Yorker
writer Alexander Woollcott cited this as her definition of marriage.

Marriage is the result of the deep, deep longing for the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue.

MALLORY HOTEL POSTCARD, CIRCA 1940

When the Mallory Hotel in Portland, Oregon, wanted to attract romantic couples, it had a twenty-five-foot round bed custom made and promoted with this postcard. On the back, this description: “This unusual bed is entirely custom-built, including Beautyrest mattress—and box spring. Ideal for wedding nights, anniversaries or just sleeping!”

ROBERT FARRAR CAPON

BED AND BOARD
, 1965

Bed and Board
was the first of twenty-seven books written by Robert Farrar Capon (1925–2013), an Episcopal priest who was vicar for a Port Jefferson, New York, congregation for nearly three decades. After a falling-out with the church surrounding his divorce from his wife of twenty-seven years, Capon devoted himself to writing, both about theology and cooking and, in the case of some of his most popular books, about both.

Capon’s bestselling book was
The Supper of the Lamb
. He also wrote frequently about food and wine for the
New York Times
and
Newsday
.

I shall get to the Board and its adjuncts by and by. Table and rooftree, nursery and kitchen, even patio and rumpus room, will all have their turn. But the first must come first, and that is the Bed: the couple’s initial piece of real estate. The things that come later in a marriage are, one way or another, extensions of this—added parcels, adjacent lots, buffer strips and subdivisions. The bed itself is their first soil, the uncrossed plain waiting for boundary and marker, for plough and seed. If this is well laid and planted, the rest will have order and comeliness; if not, they will be senseless bits of gerrymandering, spreading far and wide for reasons that have nothing to do with the good of the people of the land. The bed is the heart of home, the arena of love, the seedbed of life, and the one constant point of meeting. It is the place where, night by night, forgiveness and fair speech return that the sun go not down upon their wrath; where the perfunctory kiss and the entirely ceremonial pat on the backside become unction and grace. [The bed] is the oldest, friendliest thing in anybody’s marriage, the first used and the last left, and no one can praise it enough.

But there is mystery in it too. It is a strange piece of terrain, and finding ourselves in it is as unlikely as it is marvelous. We marry on attack or rebound. We come at each other for an assortment of pretty thin and transitory reasons. We ask, and are taken in matrimony; and in the haste of charge or retreat, we find ourselves thrown down into a very small piece of ground indeed. The marriage bed is a trench; adversity has made us bedfellows. I turn over at night. I try to see where I am and who is with me. It is not what I imagined at all. Where are the two triumphant giants of love I expected, where the conqueror smiling at conqueror? There are only the two of us, crouched down here under a barrage of years, bills and petty grievances, waiting for a signal which shows no sign of coming. Most likely we shall die in this trench. There is really no place else to go, so in the meantime we talk to each other. The sum and substance of what we manage to say, however, is “Well, here we are.”

TONI MORRISON

JAZZ
, 1992

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and numerous other honors, Toni Morrison (1931–) is a literary icon. Her sixth novel,
Jazz,
is set in Harlem during the twenties, tracing a story of love, adultery, and murder. In this passage, Morrison’s narrator reflects on the main characters, Joe and Violet, as the dramatic storms in their marriage come to a seemingly quiet close.

It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together never mind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are under the covers because they don’t have to look at themselves anymore; there is no stud’s eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers.

BEGINNINGS

JULIA WARD HOWE

LETTER TO ANN ELIZA WARD, 1846

The future author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) had been married only three years when she sent these words of wisdom to her younger sister.

My poor dear little Ante-nuptial, I will write to you, and I will come to you, though I can do you no good—sentiment and sympathy I have none, but such insipidity as I have give I unto thee. . . . Dear Annie, your marriage is to me a grave and solemn matter. I hardly allow myself to think about it. God give you all happiness, dearest child. Some sufferings and trials I fear you must have, for after all, the entering into single combat, hand to hand, with the realities of life, will be strange and painful to one who has hitherto lived, enjoyed, and suffered,
en l’air
, as you have done. . . . To be happily married seems to me the best thing for a woman. Oh! my sweet Annie, may you be happy—your maidenhood has been pure, sinless, loving, beautiful—you have no remorses, no anxious thought about the past. You have lived to make the earth more beautiful and bright—may your married life be as holy and harmless—may it be more complete, and more acceptable to God than your single life could possibly have been. Marriage, like death, is a debt we owe to nature, and though it costs us something to pay it, yet are we more content and better
established
in peace, when we have paid it. A young girl is a loose flower or flower seed, blown about by the wind, it may be cruelly battered, may be utterly blighted and lost to this world, but the matron is the same flower or seed planted, springing up and bearing fruit unto eternal life.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

“MARRIAGE MORNING,” CIRCA 1867

Nearly twenty years after his own marriage to Emily Sellwood, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) wrote the lyrics for a song cycle by Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame). “Marriage Morning” was the last section of “The Window; Or, The Song of the Wrens.” The words weren’t published until 1871 because, as Sullivan wrote in a letter, “[Tennyson] thinks they are too light, and will damage his reputation.”

Light, so low upon earth,

You send a flash to the sun.

Here is the golden close of love, All my wooing is done.

Oh, the woods and the meadows,

Woods where we hid from the wet, Stiles where we stay’d to be kind, Meadows in which we met!

Light, so low in the vale You flash and lighten afar,

For this is the golden morning of love, And you are his morning star.

Flash, I am coming, I come,

By meadow and stile and wood,

Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart, Into my heart and my blood!

Heart, are you great enough

For a love that never tires?

O heart, are you great enough for love?

I have heard of thorns and briers.

Over the thorns and briers,

Over the meadows and stiles,

Over the world to the end of it

Flash for a million miles.

KWEI-LI

LETTER TO HER HUSBAND, CIRCA 1886

Kwei-Li was the daughter of a Chinese viceroy and was about eighteen when, in an arranged marriage, she became the wife of a nobleman who was eventually governor of Jiangsu Province. Living in Suzhou, she wrote exquisitely to her husband while he was traveling the world with his master, Prince Chung.

Kwei-Li’s letters were originally translated and published by a missionary’s wife named Elizabeth Cooper. In her introduction to a new edition, Eileen Goudge concedes the possibility that Cooper, in the tradition of missionary writers, embellished or created the letters. Along with Goudge, however, we prefer to think that Kwei-Li was a real person.

Can I ever forget that day when first I came to my husband’s people? I had the one great consolation of a bride, my parents had not sent me away empty-handed. The procession was almost a
li
in length and I watched with a swelling heart the many tens of coolies carrying my household goods. There were the silken coverlets for the beds, and they were folded to show their richness and carried on red lacquered tables of great value. There were the household utensils of many kinds, the vegetable dishes, the baskets, the camphor-wood baskets containing my clothing, tens
upon tens of them; and I said within my heart as they passed me by, “Enter my new home before me. Help me to find a loving welcome.” Then at the end of the chanting procession I came in my red chair of marriage, so closely covered I could barely breathe. My trembling feet could scarce support me as they helped me from the chair, and my hand shook with fear as I was being led into my new household. She stood bravely before you, that little girl dressed in red and gold, her hair twined with pearls and jade, her arms heavy with bracelets and with rings on each tiny finger, but with all her bravery she was frightened—frightened. She was away from her parents for the first time, away from all who loved her, and she knew if she did not meet with approval in her new home her rice-bowl would be full of bitterness for many moons to come.