The Body in the Boudoir (26 page)

Author's Note

E
ve was the first bride and saved a fortune on her dress. The reception—a partially eaten apple—wouldn't have set God the Father back much either, although He might possibly have wished He'd thought to spring for wedding insurance. Since then, through the ages and across the globe, the basic notion of joining two lives through ritual has remained unchanged. The ceremonies and celebratory rites are an entirely different matter.

Our forebears might recognize some of our modern customs. Take rings, for example. The ancient Egyptians believed that a vein ran from the second finger of the left hand directly to the heart, hence the spot for the bride's ring in many countries. World War II servicemen returning to the U.S. brought the European custom of a double-ring ceremony. Today most grooms here opt for a wedding band. Those who don't may have the anonymous canard in mind: “Marriage is a three-ring circus. First comes the engagement ring. Then the wedding ring—and then the suffer-ring.” A fact new to me concerned the bride's wedding ring during Colonial times in this country. An engaged woman was given a wedding thimble. The bottom was cut off for the ring itself (presumably ahead of the ceremony).

“Bridal” comes from Middle English and refers to the wedding feast with its copious amounts of “bridale”—“bride ale.” The word “wed” or “wedde,” an older term, also derives from Middle English and meant “pledge.” A man pledged goods in exchange for the bride. Bride prices, dowries, a father “giving away” his daughter, transferring his power over her to another man, all remind us that marriage across societies and time periods was primarily a financial transaction and the practice of marrying for love is not very old.

Nuptial superstitions know no time limits and we're all familiar with the one about the groom not seeing the bride before the ceremony, common in numerous cultures, as well as the importance of adhering to “something old,” linking past and present; “something new,” to ensure a bright future; “something borrowed,” a token from a happily married friend or relative so her good luck rubs off; “something blue,” the color traditionally symbolizes fidelity and purity. In modern weddings the bride usually wears a blue garter. My sister, like Faith's sister, Hope, was my maid of honor and made a lovely garter for me. A friend, Helen Scovel Grey, realized in a panic on her wedding day that she didn't have a blue garter or anything else of that hue. A creative bridesmaid ran to the closest CVS and bought a bottle of blue nail polish. Among Helen's wedding pictures is one in which a single toe is being adorned. She's been married for twenty-three years. Superstitions are best not broken. And she had a sixpence in her shoe, as the last line of the rhyme specifies. Sixpences are often passed down from mother to daughter for even more luck.

The time of year one marries is very important as well. In China couples select an auspicious date, taking into account the animal zodiac symbol of the years of their births. The pragmatism of early New Englanders gave rise to the superstitious belief that it was unlucky to marry in December, October, or May, as they avoided the bad weather during winter months and they needed to devote the others to planting and reaping. “Marry in May and you'll rue the day” also refers to the time period during most of the month following Easter when the Catholic Church prohibited marriages, a prohibition no longer in effect.

A bridal bouquet speaks the language of flowers. Ivy stands for fidelity, and the Greeks believed it symbolized an indissoluble union. Red roses mean love, and when carried with white ones connote unity. White lilacs stand for innocence; lily of the valley, purity; and orange blossoms—especially popular in Victorian times—happiness and fertility. Marigolds, among Queen Victoria's flowers when she married Prince Albert, signify passion, as in sensuality. Considering that theirs was an epitome of marital love and loyalty, producing nine children, the blossoms worked. After the wedding, some of the myrtle from Victoria's bouquet was planted, and royal brides ever since, including Kate Middleton, the most recent, have carried a sprig from the bush for luck. Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding is also generally cited as the start of the widespread adoption of white, as brides copied her satin gown in Europe and North America. In China, India, Vietnam, and some other Asian countries red garments are traditionally worn, although the bride often changes into a white Western dress for the reception. In Japan, a bride may wear as many as three different wedding kimonos as well as a Western gown.

The Greeks and Romans did not carry bouquets but wore wreaths on their heads and garlands around their necks, sometimes carrying them as well. The garlands were composed of herbs, spices, and garlic to ward off evil spirits. Once again that nuptial trendsetter Queen Victoria popularized a custom—that of using fresh flowers in a bride's bouquet. Victorian and Edwardian bouquets on both sides of the ocean were large. Princess Diana carried a replica of an Edwardian one to match the broad width of her dress. The cascading result—gardenias, freesia, stephanotis, ivy, and other flora—was forty-two inches long and fifteen inches wide. The florists, Longmans, assembled three identical bouquets, remembering that in 1947 the orchid one they had made for then Princess Elizabeth went missing following the ceremony and had to be re-created later for the official photographs.

Another wonderful story from my friend Helen's wedding. On the morning of the big day the females in her wedding party gathered around a large table in her home, a parsonage, to make the bouquets and boutonnières. The same group had gathered some weeks earlier at her grandmother Deborah Webster Greeley's house, where she taught them how to make the decorations for Helen's wedding cake. She had the molds and other equipment and they all had a fine time creating white and dark red roses, various sizes of sugar bells, and green leaves (gently assigned to those less adept at roses). Deborah Greeley, president of the Herb Society of New England at the time, made the three-tiered cake itself closer to the big day, adding fresh herbs around the base—ivy for faith and divinity, sage for wisdom, rosemary for remembrance, and thyme for courage. If you ever happen upon the now out-of-print book
A Basket of Herbs: A Book of American Sentiments,
illustrated by wonderful Tasha Tudor, to which Mrs. Greeley contributed, grab it!

Weddings are mnemonics—of ones we've attended, ones we've been in, even ones we've watched on the big screen. Who can forget the wedding scene in
The Graduate
? And Molly Ringwald's sister weaving down the aisle in
Sixteen Candles
? Or Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in
The Philadelphia Story
? And then there are
Four Weddings and a Funeral;
the original
Father of the Bride;
Fiddler on the Roof;
Fred Astaire dancing on the floor, walls, and ceiling in
Royal Wedding;
and
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
(which must have caused a huge blip in Windex sales). We, especially women, love celebrity weddings—the tasteful and the trashy. We delight in the details and hope for the best. And we read and reread our much-loved books about weddings. Some of my favorites:
Delta Wedding,
Eudora Welty;
The Wedding,
Dorothy West;
The Member of the Wedding,
Carson McCullers;
Weddings Are Murder,
Valerie Wolzien; and a new favorite,
Somebody Is Going to Die if Lilly Beth Doesn't Catch That Bouquet: The Official Southern Ladies' Guide to Hosting the Perfect Wedding,
Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays. (These are the same very funny, very savvy ladies who wrote a guide to hosting the perfect funeral,
Being Dead Is No Excuse
.) I also like to go back to the books of my childhood for happily-ever-afters—Lucy Maud Montgomery's
Anne's House of Dreams,
where Anne comes down the stairs, “the first bride of Green Gables, slender and shining-eyed, in the mist of her maiden veil, with her arms full of roses,” to Gilbert waiting below “with adoring eyes.”

And now a word about wedding cakes. These are among the oldest of our nuptial traditions, dating back to Roman times when, after eating a piece of a sweet barley bread loaf, the groom broke it over his bride's head to ensure good luck. Perhaps picking out the crumbs was one of the wedding night's activities! Since then the cake went through numerous configurations, appearing as “Bride's Pie” in the seventeenth century. Some of the cakes were more like what we now call fruitcake. Mrs. Beeton's recipe for “Rich Bride Cake” calls for five pounds of the finest flour, three pounds of fresh butter, five pounds of currants, two pounds of sifted loaf sugar, nutmegs, mace, cloves, sixteen eggs, a pound of sweet almonds, a half pound each of candied citron and candied orange, plus a gill each of wine and brandy. Rich indeed.

Queen Victoria again. Hers weighed in at three hundred pounds, measured three yards wide and fourteen inches tall. It was adorned with roses and topped with an ice sculpture of Britannia surrounded by cupids. Guests were sent home with boxes containing small pieces and more were sent all over the empire in celebration. They turn up every once in a while in drawers and attics. In 1947 the cake Queen Elizabeth cut surpassed that of her ancestress. It weighed five hundred pounds and was nine feet tall. There were twelve cakes in all at her reception. Princess Di had one cake, five feet tall, but there were two copies waiting in the wings lest an accident occur. The cake featured the Windsor coat of arms in marzipan.

It is not known exactly where and when the custom of sending guests home with a small piece of the cake, usually in a little box, originated, but it remains widespread. Put the token under your pillow and you will dream of your future spouse. If already married, the act will lead to good luck in general.

Placing their hands on the knife to cut the first slice of cake is the initial task a married couple performs together and symbolizes their union. Feeding each other from that slice has become common, although when one or both smush the cake into the new spouse's mouth, the act may be a portent of rocky shoals rather than smooth sailing together.

Wrapping the top layer of the tiered cake to freeze until a couple's first wedding anniversary is now customary.

It's supposed to be bad luck for a bride to bake her own cake, but my friend Melissa, who turned out a dozen single-layer dense chocolate ones, her favorite, the day before to accompany the traditional cake, recently celebrated her fortieth anniversary. Thinking of her tale, I had the idea that I would ask a number of friends for the recipes, and stories, of their wedding cakes. Picturing the cake Helen Scovel Grey's grandmother had made, I asked Helen's mother to send me the recipe. Faith Greeley Scovel, like her mother, made wedding cakes for friends and relatives, complete with sugar bells and icing decorations. What she sent is a treat, four pages of instructions for “Silver White Cake,” with many notes for multiplying the amounts and obvious signs, even in the ancient xerox, of much use—in places dripped batter has obscured the printing. Faith Scovel noted that the recipe probably originated from Fannie Farmer or
The Joy of Cooking,
both of which have excellent, easy-to-duplicate recipes for as impressive a cake as the $500-plus ones appearing at today's often over-the-top receptions. Faith Scovel also sent me a wedding cake recipe from her husband's great-grandmother, that appeared in her mother-in-law Myra Scovel's memoir,
The Happiest Summer.
It seems to be an American interpretation of Mrs. Beeton's recipe, although it calls for twenty eggs! It also lists molasses and grape juice as ingredients.

My own wedding cake had three layers, a delicious traditional white cake concoction decorated with buttercream frosting, hearts, and the small fruitcake layer on top trimmed with fresh white French lilacs. When we went to cut it, much as we loved the trimmings, our favorite one was the finger mark a dear friend's three-year-old boy had made. He just couldn't wait.

Whatever you choose, whether it be two cupcakes for an elopement, a groom's cake shaped like the helmet of his favorite football team, a tall cone of profiteroles filled with pastry cream and held together with caramel and spun sugar—
croquembouche,
the French wedding gateau—or three tiers with the nuptial couple on top, may you have your cake and eat it, too.

I love weddings. I love hearing about them, looking at wedding albums, and most of all attending them. And yes, I always get choked up when the couples exchange their vows. I've been to weddings in churches, synagogues, chapels, homes, museums, hotels, restaurants, in city halls, in tents, on beaches, in fields, in backyards, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. The brides and grooms have ranged in age from eighteen to ninety. The music has been as simple as a single guitar to the full New Orleans Children's Chorus (and after the ceremony a streetcar took guests to the reception in the Garden District!). The ceremonies have included several civil ones and most religions. I've learned that “tying the knot” (a Celtic custom) figures both symbolically and literally in many cultures. The Hindu wedding ceremony, over five thousand years old, incorporates ritual tyings of various kinds, binding together not only the bride and groom but also their two families. This joining was joyously acted out during the reception at Lakshmi Reddy and Andrew Kleinberg's wedding as the two families—wearing saris, yarmulkes, and all manner of dress—hoisted the bride and groom on chairs and danced the hora.

The longest wedding I've attended was in Beaujolais, France, the festive nuptials of our baker's daughter. We were living in Lyon at the time and our three-year-old son was one of the
garçons d'honneur,
looking very sweet in pale blue. The wedding began early on Saturday with the civil ceremony at the mayor's office, followed by the church ceremony, and then the entire village was invited to the farm for brioche and wine—with music and dancing. An only slightly smaller number of guests then went to a reception hall for food, more music, and dancing. The celebration lasted well into the following day (and in an earlier time it would have been several days). Onion soup gratinée was served in the wee hours, possibly to keep one's strength up! People came and went, children slept on jacket-cushioned benches. At one point we all took a walk around a nearby pond. It was absolutely wonderful.