Thirteen
Unlike most of her peers, Nina hadn’t come to her marriage a virgin.
She wasn’t a virgin the morning of her first wedding, either, the one that did not result in marriage.
She was to wed her high school boyfriend.
He’d finished college and was working in his father’s accounting firm.
The years of heavy petting in the front seat of his car had progressed in the last months to quick and furtive sex in the back seat.
They were careful, but it was still nerve-racking, counting the days between periods.
Nina couldn’t wait until they were married and could go to sleep and wake up together and do all the other things married people did in an actual bed.
The wedding was scheduled for a brilliant Saturday in May on the North Shore of Long Island.
They planned a small ceremony at church and a cake and champagne reception in her parents’ backyard.
She’d stood in her bedroom window the morning of the wedding and watched her father and a neighbor unfold rental chairs nearly levitating with happiness.
When Patrick showed up at the door of her bedroom as the photographer was taking a picture of Nina pinning a corsage onto the lapel of her mother’s pale blue suit, she still didn’t suspect a thing.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, shooing him out of the room, laughing.
“Where’s your tux?” Then she noticed his eyes were red-rimmed.
He’d been crying. And she knew. She knew because he didn’t look at her in the white organza wedding gown embroidered with tiny shamrocks, a nod to his family, and whistle or grin or even say, You’re beautiful. He said: “I’m so sorry.”
After they made all the phone calls, and her father quietly asked the rental company to come pick up the chairs and tables and they distributed pieces of cake to the neighbors, after she returned all the gifts and spent so many hours crying in her room it seemed impossible her body could still produce tears, after she’d gone by herself to see Cheaper by the Dozen and as the lights went down spotted Patrick walking down the aisle with two buckets of popcorn and a tall blonde, she asked her boss about transferring out of Manhattan.
She was a secretary for a medium-sized advertising agency in Midtown, and she was good at her job.
“You like snow?” her boss asked her, out of the blue, a few weeks later.
“There’s an opening in the office in Rochester.
” Nina wasn’t even sure she knew where Rochester was.
Before Syracuse? Before Buffalo? It didn’t matter. She said yes.
In the years between Patrick and Sam, Nina made a good life for herself in Rochester.
She was happy enough. Not that happiness was ever a conscious goal, it was more of a gentle hope, a belief that if she worked hard to make good choices, practice kindness, rise up to meet her own personal moral code—based on the only thing about Catholicism that made perfect sense to her, do unto others—that the universe wouldn’t reward her exactly, but might smooth the path a little.
Both she and Patrick had come from families who went to church every Sunday, and when he pressed for sex, she was terrified by what might happen if they were caught, or worse.
“Nina,” Patrick had pleaded with her for weeks and weeks, “there is a difference between believing in God and believing in the church. We break rules all the time because they’re dumb.
What do a bunch of celibate priests and nuns know about love?
You think God is sending them special information?
These rules were made-up. We don’t have to follow them.
” And so they hadn’t and she would forever be grateful to Patrick for releasing her from the fear that had been instilled in her by the church.
What he said made more sense to her than any ponderous sermon.
She became a cheerful C she was part of their ad hoc family.
Nina was happy. So nobody was more surprised than she when she started dating Sam Larkin.
He was one of the creative directors at her agency working mostly on the local phone company and Xerox—two huge accounts.
As the office manager, she scheduled all the conference rooms. He never sent his secretary to schedule his meetings; he came to her desk to do it himself.
The first time he asked her out to dinner, she thought he was teasing.
“Teasing?” he said, confused. “Why?”
She politely declined and he bided his time.
He kept stopping by her desk. Pointing out certain local art shows or telling her about the new restaurants he’d tried.
When they talked about their pending weekends, he was always doing something interesting.
Going to the art museum or the planetarium or to see the philharmonic or to a local park.
Or he was taking the train to New York City for a show or the ballet.
She assumed he brought dates on these occasions.
He never asked her to join him, but he would recap the events on Monday.
She didn’t know anything about opera or classical music, but he never made her feel dumb.
He made her feel like telling her about Brahms or Verdi or Tchaikovsky was the best part of his day.
He was a perfect gentleman. He wooed her with information and good manners.
After a few months, by which time she was dying for him to ask her out again, when he suggested she might want to accompany him to the local awards dinner—Sam and the agency were nominated—he barely got the sentence out before she blurted, “I’d love to. ”
By then, they knew each other more than a little.
And after six weeks of dating and dinner with his parents, who seemed both nervous and thrilled that he’d brought someone home to meet them (had he never brought anyone home before?), they were engaged.
He proposed with his grandmother’s opal-and-emerald wedding ring.
Sam’s mother was frail, and his father had heart problems, and Sam wanted a small and quick wedding, before he lost one of them.
They would both be dead before Clara was born, barely two years into marriage.