The Porch of the Church

continued

We'd written our families that the marriage was set for 10:00 A.M., a more seemly sounding hour than our actual appointment at the Mairie, 9:50.

For days Mme. Brulhart had been in a lather of excitement. On the twentieth, she woke the entire household at 5:30 and provided a standup breakfast. When I'd put on my dark blue suit and rechecked the suitcase packed for the honeymoon, there were over two hours to wait.

Through the front window at 8:45, I saw John making his way over the snow drifts, a bouquet of miniature white carnations in his mittened hand. We set out for the trolley stop, Mme. Brulhart marching erectly between us to remind us that we still faced an hour of celibacy. White-haired, patrician Mme. de Marignac joined us outside the marriage clerk's office on the third floor. The 9:40 couple emerged, and the four of us filed in.

At a desk beneath a huge wooden wall clock sat a gray-bearded man in gold-rimmed spectacles. John and I took two straight-backed chairs across from him, our witnesses on either side of us. Without preamble the man began to read aloud from the form in his hands. The husband was to control all finances, make all decisions, have sole say over the upbringing of children. The husband will choose the conjugal residence. . . . The church affiliation of the husband will constitute the church membership of his dependents. . . .

I wondered if Mme. Brulhart and Mme. de Marignac, sitting stiffly to our left and right, were recalling the same words read long ago to them and lived out day by day, I suspected, in their marriages. I clutched my carnations, answered "Oui, monsieur" to a number of questions, and signed my name -- below John's -- to the marriage certificate. At 9:56 on the clock above him, the bearded officiant rose and held out his hand.

"Puis-je etre Ie premier de vous feliciter, Madame." May I be the first to wish you well, Madame.

At "Madame" I glanced automatically right and left, but neither Mme. Brulhart nor Mme. de Marignac moved to take the outstretched hand. And with a start I realized that "Madame" was me. The four of us left the room as the 10:00 wedding party entered. Going down the stairs, John and I paused on the second-floor landing and put a ring on each other's finger.

In the wording of the marriage certificate, and certainly in the eyes of our two landladies, this ceremony was a preliminary only, a mere legality prior to the real marriage, which must take place in church. "We'll have a church wedding when we get home," we assured the two women untruthfully.

Since October we'd been setting francs aside for our wedding trip. In Bern, the Swiss capital, two hours by train from Geneva, we checked into the ornate Bellevue. We were back in Geneva the next day. In the real, non-student world, the hoarded cash had lasted less than twenty-four hours. "We'll have a church wedding in the States," we repeated to Mme. de Marignac as she unlocked the door to our room. Her stern-lipped silence told us she doubted such an ecclesiastic event would ever take place -- and in fifty-nine years it never has.