31. The Vows
Chapter thirty-one
The Vows
Max, Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore
Max, The Vows
The bishop makes the sign of the cross.
Nel nome del Padre e del Figlio e dello Spirito Santo.
(In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.)
Amen, says the room.
He continues,
La grazia del Signore nostro Gesù Cristo, l'amore di Dio e la comunione dello Spirito Santo siano con tutti voi.
(The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.)
E con il tuo spirito.
(And with your spirit. Says the room.)
The bishop continues with the marriage rite. His Italian is the Italian of a man who has been doing this for forty years and has used these exact words a few thousand times, and who is going to say them today as if they have never been said before.
Because the couple in front of him have not heard it before with the two of them present together here. And he respects this asymmetry.
Lorenzo Jr. is at my left ear, very quietly translating. I have been working in two languages for four months and I know the words. I let Lorenzo Jr. speak anyway because he wants to and because his voice is part of what is happening.
The bishop proceeds with a brief homily in Italian. He does not name Marco. He does not need to. He speaks of the families who arrive at this sacrament with their dead present in the room, and how the dead arrive with them not as absence but as the architecture they built.
He speaks of the work of marriage, which is the work of becoming the room your children will be sheltered in. He speaks of patience, which he says is the form love takes when it is doing its real work. He looks at me when he says the word patience. He looks at Alex when he says the word room.
Then he closes the homily.
He turns to Alex first. He says her name, Alessandra, the full name, which she has used perhaps twelve times in her life and almost never in front of me. Then, very quietly, in Italian, three words that Lorenzo Jr. does not translate.
Alex’s eyes do not move from the bishop’s face. She nods once. He places his right hand briefly on her shoulder, the way one places a hand on the shoulder of a person whose father is in the room invisibly, and steps back.
The questions of the Rite. Have you come here freely and without reservation? Will you love and honor each other for the rest of your lives? Will you accept children lovingly from God and bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?
We answer in turn. She answers yes. I answer yes.
Then the vows we wrote ourselves. The bishop indicates that we may say them now. He steps a half-pace back. The room is silent.
Alex turns to face me directly. Her hand is still in mine. Her eyes are on me. She is, for the first time since I have known her, completely unguarded. She is also, very carefully, not crying.
"Max."
"Alex."
"I will not need you to be more than you are. I will not need you to be different than you are. I will be honest with you. I will be the person you can come home to. I will let you come home."
She pauses. She breathes once. She does not look away.
"I am thirty-three years old and I have wanted this for nine of those years and I am asking for it now, in front of these people, in this room. Yes."
The chapel does not move. The cellist is silent. The cathedral around us, larger than the chapel, holds the silence the way a cathedral holds silence.
Then mine. The version I had written was three pages. Rewritten ten times in the last four nights. The final version this morning was still four paragraphs long. None of it is what I am going to say.
"Alex."
"Max."
A second of silence. A second to find the sentence. The sentence arrives.
"I have known what I wanted since I was twenty-six. I waited because you were not ready. I would have waited longer. I am not waiting any more."
A pause. A breath. The thing in the chest that has been holding for fourteen days lets go a quarter of an inch.
"Yes."
Alex laughs once, very quietly, the laugh that has been in this book all along, and reaches for the ring she has been holding for Lorenzo Jr. since the start of the ceremony. The matched band. White gold, narrow, the same line of darker gold running along the inside.
She takes my left hand. She slides the ring onto my finger. Her hands are not shaking. She has, somewhere in the last four months, settled.
“Con questo anello, ti sposo,” she says.(With this ring, I marry you.)
The ring is on. It does not feel like a ring. It feels like something that has just become part of the hand. The metal is warm because she has been holding it for an hour.
Then mine. The ring out of the inside pocket. Her left hand into mine. The ring sliding on. Her hand is small and sure under mine and she watches the ring go on and watches me, in turn.
"Con questo anello, ti sposo," I say, in the Italian I have been practicing for two weeks in front of Lorenzo Jr.
The bishop steps forward. He places his right hand over our joined hands. He speaks the words of the Rite, in Italian, that bind the sacrament.
"Ciò che Dio ha unito, l’uomo non lo separi."(What God has joined, let no man separate.)
Then, quieter, in the closing of the Rite.
"Vi dichiaro uniti in matrimonio."(I declare you united in marriage.)
He does not announce that I may kiss the bride. The Rite does not require it. He simply lifts his hand from ours and steps back to give us the moment.
Alex looks at me. I look at her. Two seconds. Then I lean down because she is shorter than I am and she rises onto the balls of her feet because she has been planning this part of it.
And we kiss in a side chapel of Santa Maria del Fiore at one twenty in the afternoon on a Saturday in October, in front of fifty people who flew in for this. And the cathedral makes the sound cathedrals make when something has just landed correctly. The guests stand and clap.
We are married.
Max, The Reception
The reception is in the courtyard of the villa. I have, by my count, said yes seventeen times in the first hour. Yes to the toasts. Yes to the photographs.
Yes to the dance with my mother-in-law-who-is-not-here-but-whose-photograph-Alex-has-on-the-table-by-the-musicians. Yes to the second photograph. Yes to the cake. I do not know whose decision the cake was. The cake is excellent.
The music starts. The first dance is not announced; it begins. Alex and I are in the middle of the courtyard in the soft light from the lanterns, and I am holding her, and we are moving slowly to something I do not recognize and which she has selected and which is right.
Halfway through the second song, two children approach.
Matteo and Elena, in their wedding clothes, walking across the courtyard with the look of two children who have decided something together.
They have planned this. I have known Matteo for eight months and I have raised Elena for five years and I can recognize the face they are wearing, which is the face of a small operation.
Elena gets there first. She does not address Alex. She addresses me.
"May I dance with you, daddy?"
Matteo, half a step behind, has been holding her hand and lets it go. He addresses Alex.
"May I dance with you, mom?"
A pause. Then, by way of explanation, with the gravity of a child who has thought about this:
"Mommy is for babies now."
The courtyard registers this. There is a half-second of silence and then the room breaks into something that is part laugh and part cheer and part the sound a room makes when it recognizes that two children have just done something the room did not know it needed.
Alex puts her hand against my chest, briefly, and steps back. I let her go.
Matteo offers Alex his arm in the manner of someone who has watched men do this and has decided this is the version he will be using. Alex takes it. He leads her to the open part of the floor.
They begin to dance, and Alex’s expression has already given out, and so has Matteo’s, and the two of them are giggling before they have completed a full turn.
Elena, meanwhile, has taken both of my hands.
She does not look up at me for permission. She steps onto the toes of my shoes, one foot, then the other, and settles her small weight there.
"Come on daddy. Move. Move."
I move.
We go around the floor with my five-year-old daughter standing on my polished shoes, her hands in mine, her face concentrating on the geometry of the choreography she is now executing. She is wearing the cream silk dress Renata cut for her three weeks ago.
The shoes she is standing on were polished this morning. The shoes she is wearing are not yet making contact with the floor.
I do not look at Alex during this. I cannot look at Alex during this.
If I look at Alex during this I will not be able to keep dancing.
I look at the top of Elena’s head, the careful part in her hair, and I move us in a slow circle around the floor while my daughter rides on my feet through the first dance of her life.
Giulia approaches at one point with a man she is introducing to me as if I have not met him. I have met him. I introduced him to the family at the start of the reception and lost track of him within ten minutes because Giulia has had him in a corner.
"This is Philippe," she says.
Philippe Vaudrey is thirty-five. His father is the senior partner at Banque de Vaudrey & Cie. His mother is a Hohenlohe-Langenburg by birth. He is in New York co-managing the bank’s expansion into private client work and our firm is co-counsel on the legal portfolio transfer.
He is graceful and quiet and does not perform pedigree, which in his pedigree is the only acceptable thing to do.
Giulia, who has not been visibly interested in any man in the years I have known her, is standing six inches closer to him than the room requires.
"How was the flight?" I say to Philippe.
"Very direct. I came in on the Stearman."
Giulia: "You flew yourself?"
"Cubs and Stearmans, yes. Tail-draggers. It is a whole thing."
"What is a tail-dragger."
"A taildragger has the third wheel under the tail instead of the nose. The pilot has to fly the airplane on the ground until it stops. It is the way airplanes used to fly before they got polite."
"That sounds correct."
Philippe smiles at this. Giulia, who at thirty has perfected the art of giving men nothing, gives him about two seconds of something. Then she catches herself and gives him nothing again.
Filed. A look across the courtyard. Alex has clocked it. Alex meets my eye and does not change her expression. We do not say anything to each other. We are very good at this part.
Max, The Desk
Late evening. The reception has thinned.
Most of the guests have moved into the great room where someone has put on music.
Alex has been moving through the courtyard for hours with Lorenzo Jr. and Diana and Margot and the Florentine collector and a series of women from the atelier who I have not been introduced to but who hug Alex like family.
She has been thanked perhaps eighty times. She has thanked back perhaps a hundred. She has not stopped smiling.
At midnight she is gone. I find her in the small library off the courtyard, the one with the desk, the one where she has been writing every morning for four months. She is at the desk. She has taken her shoes off. She is holding two pieces of paper.
From the door.
Two pieces of paper I have not seen and yet recognize.
One is the letter her mother wrote her years ago and the other is the letter I wrote her on the morning of the day I gave her the ring.
She has been carrying them in her jacket pocket for ten months.
She unfolds them now in the desk lamp light and reads them once.
No interruption.
She reads them carefully. She folds them again. She puts them in the top drawer of the desk. The desk that was her mother’s. The desk that is hers. The drawer closes.
She turns and sees me at the door.
"How long have you been there?"
"A minute."
"You should be at the party."
"You should be at the party."
"Yes."
She crosses the room and puts her arms around me. I put mine around her. We stand like this for a moment in the library at midnight in Florence in October.
"What are you thinking?" she says.
Honestly considered.
"I do not understand any of these flowers."
She laughs into my shoulder.
"But I love you."
"Yes," she says. "Me too."
Music drifts in from the great room. Someone has put on something slow. Alex’s head is on my shoulder. Her hand is in mine. She is mine and I am hers and the dead are in the room with us and the living are in the courtyard and Florence is asleep around all of it.