A Hat, a Memory, a Moment

Reprinted with permission of the Boston Herald  

Sitting in church, I remembered. But not until then. Not all morning as I read the papers, did laundry, cleaned the kitchen. Not even as I dressed for church, overdressed really. Who wears a hat anymore, especially for a noon Mass on a hot August day? 

My mother wore hats. She sold them. That's what she did for a living, first at Wethern's in Quincy and then later at Sheridan's at the South Shore Plaza.  She ordered them, unpacked them, fussed with them so that they would sit just right on mannequin heads, and she wore them home every day. The quiet, sedate ones, straws and whimsies, were for weekdays; the more riotous ones, flowered and feathered, she wore to Mass on Sundays. She was a walking advertisement, the price tag tucked deftly inside.  

I wore my hat this day just because. That's what I thought. It had been sitting in its box at the top of the closet since May, since I bought it on a whim. The hat is white straw, dressy, with a thin veil around the brim. 

In church, old wood and candlewax, Sunday smells, it struck me that my wearing it this day was more than happenstance.  It was August 18, my parents' wedding anniversary. It would have been their 50th. 

When I was 4, maybe 5, I believed, with the stubbornness of a child, that I had been at my parents' wedding. I used to announce this to random people. I remember insisting it was true as I waited in line with my mother at the First National Bank. 

"That was Mary Andrew's wedding," my mother explained to me and to assorted strangers again and again. "I was the bridesmaid, not the bride." She always stammered when she said this. And blushed. 

"No, it was your wedding," I would argue. I was positive. She had to have been the bride, because I had never seen anyone so beautiful. 

About her real wedding,  the one I wasn't at, I know little. She was married at St. Patrick's in Cambridge. The church is gone. My father told me the church and the house in which he grew up were both torn down. They were old things, he said. 

In their wedding picture, which hangs in my living room, the only proof of the day, the smiles are serious, forced for the camera. Yet everything I know about my parents' wedding is in that pose. There they are, seven people - the bride, the groom, his brother, her father, Mary Andrews and two men whose names I don't even know. 

I don't know what time my parents got married or where the reception was or even if they had a reception. I don't know how long they were engaged or how my father asked my mother to marry him or if they had a honeymoon, or whose wedding dress my mother wore. 

She borrowed it. She told me this when I was child and she was far younger than I am now. She told me she had to return it after the wedding, but to whom? 

I called my father. They got married at 3 p.m., he said, and they honeymooned in Atlantic City. 

"How did you ask her to marry you?" 

"I don't remember." 

"Was there a party after the wedding?" 

"I don't remember." 

"Whose dress did she borrow?" 

"I don't know." 

My mother's sister, 10 years younger, wasn't at the wedding. Mary Andrews died years ago. 

There is no one to answer my questions. 

My mother kept a baby book in which she wrote about the first seven years of my life. But she kept no record of her own life. I try to piece it together. I try to see her walking down the aisle. I try to feel her. 

On the anniversary of her wedding, in church, wearing a hat she would have worn, I do.