1
I park the car, cross the small lot, and enter the center. There are only a few people inside—event assistants, and a handful of Spanish-speaking staff busy with the food. I have arrived before everyone else for the wedding.
I go out through the back.
On the other side of a narrow footpath is a wide lawn. There is only one person there.
She is sitting in a reclining chair under a maple tree, wearing a casual black dress with small floral patterns. It is a clear, mild day in mid-May.
I walk up to her and say hello. It turns out she is also here for the wedding and, like me, has arrived too soon.
We talk, off and on, about nothing in particular.
She has dark hair, is around thirty, slim. There is something about her—something familiar—as if I had met her before, though I cannot recall where, or when, or how. She wears a simple wreath of green twigs and small flowers.
We look out over the lawn, the kind of New England scene one sees in May—green lawn, a lightly clouded sky, maples with their thin, almost translucent leaves fully out. She tells me what character she has come as. I do not quite catch it.
The wreath—green twigs, small flowers—makes me think of something I cannot quite place. A line from some poem, perhaps. Or a figure from a play. It comes and goes.
Then, out of nowhere, some lines come to me, and I begin to say them without thinking:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…”
Her eyes are half closed. On her face is a faint smile—the kind one sees in people in their sleep: sweet, relaxed, almost happy. Her body rests easily in the chair. The sun, the air, and the lines I murmur seem to make her drowsy.
“…and every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade…”
As I murmur on, I lean over her. I hold her face in my hands for a moment, then begin to kiss her, softly, slowly.
There is no resistance, as if she had expected it.
At one point she half opens her eyes. She looks at me, not quite understanding, then closes them again.
In those few moments, there is nothing but a kind of tenderness, as if one had, at last, come home.
I think of Amherst. Of the letter to the world that went unanswered. Of epilepsy. Of a life like a loaded gun. Of oysters shipped from Boston by horse-drawn carriage. Of what a billow be.
Strangely, instead of May, it is fall foliage that comes to mind. I find myself wishing I would not have to come out of this, would not have to go out and face life, the world, ever again.
2
I hear the sound of a keyboard coming from the patio at the rear of the center. The open bar is in service. Guests have gradually gathered on and around the patio, most of them with a drink in hand.
A small flock of children, all in costumes of one kind or another, led by a few young adults—also dressed as characters from fairy tales—passes noisily through the crowd and heads toward the woods.
I get up and make my way to the patio, promising to bring back two drinks.
On my way back to the tree, I run into the bridegroom’s father, who insists that I come along with him and say hello to Jonathan, the bride’s father.
Jon is a tall man of slender build, with a small head and a deeply receding hairline. There is something about him that makes me think he might be a salesman.
“Jon Tuttle,” he says.
“Nice to meet you,” I say, trying to free one hand to shake his.
He speaks in spurts, his speech somewhat inarticulate. He does not seem to notice that I am holding two drinks. He begins to explain the wedding—why this particular venue, why many of the guests are dressed as characters from classic plays and fairy tales.
The only Tuttle I know, back where I come from, is a family friend, and I have been under the impression that Tuttle is a French name. I ask him if his family is also of French origin.
“No, not at all,” he says, leaning in slightly, as if to press the point. “Tuttle is an English name, not a French one. If you know the history of New England, you know that the Tuttle family has been here since the seventeenth century. As a matter of fact, this park right here was donated by the family to the town.”
I find what Mr. Tuttle is saying fascinating and, at the same time, feel a slight embarrassment at my own ignorance.
All the while, I catch myself craning my head, looking back toward the tree on the lawn.
After a while, someone comes for Jonathan, and I am able to return to where the tree is.
There is no one there. The chair is empty.
I look around. No one.
For a moment I stand there, holding the two drinks, confused. I shake my head, force out a small laugh, but I am still puzzled.
All the guests are at the patio. The keyboard keeps playing.
3
I meet the bride’s uncle, Nate, and his Scottish wife, Margaret Blackburn.
Nate is short and wide-shouldered, with large teeth. His suit jacket hangs open, a brightly colored tie swinging from side to side as he talks. In many ways he is the opposite of his brother. He reminds me of a man named Gary I once met in Michigan. I cannot quite tell what line of work he is in.
Nate introduces me to his wife—Maggie. She has been standing beside him, beside me, all along, yet for some reason I have not felt her presence until that moment.
I turn to look at her and am immediately struck by the strange, almost immaterial impression she gives. She has very fair skin, rare in its pallor, and long, straight gray hair. Her eyes are a clear, translucent gray—so clear that one feels one is not simply looking at a person, or even at her eyes, but into something beyond them, as if her inner life were just as transparent.
I have the odd feeling that if I were to keep looking for even a second longer, those eyes might melt like ice into water and run down her cheeks.
“This is my wife, Maggie,” Nate says.
“Hello, Maggie.” I shift the drinks slightly and take her hand.
“Maggie has Alzheimer’s,” Nate adds.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say.
Her eyes meet mine—steady, unwavering. There is something in the way she looks at me. It is the gaze of an adult, but without posture, without intention, without anything to convey—just a steady, unguarded look.
It is hard to tell whether she understands what her husband has just said.
But that steady gaze, like a faint smile, goes straight to the deepest part of you.
“Are you, by any chance, related to the Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn?” I ask Maggie. “She won the Nobel Prize—something about the ends of chromosomes. Telomeres. The way cells age, or don’t.”
Maggie listens with visible effort as I speak.
I am not quite sure why I say what I have just said, and almost at once I feel a quiet regret.
Despite the fragile, almost ephemeral state of her being, in that steady gaze I still sense traces of someone who was once fully present—understanding, dignified, and, perhaps, quietly assertive.
I withdraw, for a moment, from Maggie’s gaze and lift my head again, looking toward the tree on the lawn—the reclining chair beneath it.
How can this be, I murmur to myself.
“I’ll see you at the ceremony,” Nate says. His remark brings me back.
“Nice to meet you,” I say—to Nate, and to Maggie.
4
Meandering through the crowd on the patio, I go into the visitor center, wondering whether she might be inside.
I see an exceptionally tall young man standing in the center of the room beside a souvenir stand. He looks foreign and wears trousers with shoulder stripes—the kind that makes you think of old Europe. Standing close beside him is a young woman, a blonde, also tall, though still a head shorter than the man. She is dressed in a housemaid’s costume: a headpiece and a short white apron tied at the waist.
I cannot recall when I last read Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales, but I feel sure there are no pairs in those tales in which the man is a lumberjack and the woman a kitchen maid in an English country estate.
Seeing me come in with the look of a man searching for something, the young man looks down from his height and asks, with a smile and a foreign accent, whether I am looking for something.
I am almost on the verge of telling them what I am looking for—a woman, slim, dark-haired, wearing a wreath of twigs and small flowers. Instead, I turn my head toward the glass doors and look out in the direction of the maple tree on the lawn.
I offer them a brief thanks.
Before heading back out, I cast a glance at the souvenir stand and the nature-themed items on its shelves.
5
At some point, guests begin to walk, slowly and in small groups, toward the grove beside the center.
The wedding itself is informal. Several dozen folding chairs have been set out on the ground in a small clearing among the trees, beneath a few large, old ones.
I follow the others into the woods and take a seat in the back.
Everyone seems to be here now. There are many women, but I do not see the dark-haired young woman—the one in the wreath, in the black dress with small floral patterns.
How strange.
I feel certain she is here for the wedding—she told me so herself, and she has come as a character.
A mixed feeling rises in me: part disappointment, part puzzlement, as if I had lost something along the way and could no longer recall where.
There is one tree in particular—bent, almost crooked—and that is where the couple stands, along with the best man and the maid of honor. A harpist sits a few steps away, playing something quiet—perhaps Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, or something like it.
There are no Bibles, no formal liturgy—just someone reading aloud, something that seems to have been written by the bridegroom, or perhaps by a friend. The couple had wanted it this way, I learn from Jonathan.
Once again my eyes move over the audience. The only dark-haired woman is the harpist, whose modest manner and the gray at her temples suggest she is in her late forties, or early fifties.
Later, when the ceremony is over and everyone begins to make their way back toward the large tent set up for the occasion, I find myself leaving the woods along the grassy path, following the harpist a few steps ahead of me.
As I come out from the trees, I see that she has just opened the trunk of her car and is loading her harp into it.
“You played beautifully,” I say. “Lovely music.”
She answers with a smile.
I feel a slight urge to ask her whether she has, by any chance, seen a dark-haired young woman, wearing a wreath of twigs and small flowers, dressed in a black dress with a floral pattern.
I find myself wishing she would know.
6
In the front of the large tent, off to one side, sits the band—percussion, violin, and brass. The lead singer, the soul of the band, holds a ukulele close to her chest. She is a woman who has passed her prime, but even so, traces of her former charm and quiet beauty are still discernible. For the occasion she wears a Hawaiian flower wreath and a low-key, flowing dress.
I take my seat. Next to the flowers on the table is a name card with my name on it, handwritten in beautiful cursive—a thing belonging to a bygone era, rarely seen these days.
After the meal, after Mr. Tuttle and the mother of the bridegroom have each given their speech, the floor is opened for dancing. The music grows livelier.
Mrs. Tuttle stops by, and we chat for a while. Kathleen, as she is called, is a tall woman with light blue eyes and ginger hair, of Irish descent, dressed in a long gown—dignified, composed. She tells me about her reading group and the most recent book they have read. It is a book about Watergate. Through her talk I get a glimpse of her life—the cultural part of it, at least—and I am impressed. Still, I cannot help but think: a book about something distant, a world already gone.
As we speak, one of her daughters passes by.
“Emily,” Mrs. Tuttle says, stopping the young woman. “This is Sean. He used to be a philosophy teacher.”
She turns to me. “Emily attended Bowdoin. She majored in philosophy.”
Emily and I exchange a few words. In between, her mother mentions the names Socrates and Wittgenstein, and Emily gently cuts her short.
I can already sense she is not interested in the subject. She is likely on her way to meet someone waiting for her on the dance floor. From the few dismissive things she says about her former major, I feel that philosophy belongs to a part of her life she would rather leave behind.
The band strikes the first notes of another jazz piece. Mrs. Tuttle is about to move off as well. She shakes my hand again.
“We are so glad you came!”
7
As the wedding banquet winds down and the band moves into softer jazz, the younger crowd begins to drift away from the tent toward a bonfire burning at the far edge of the lawn.
I walk across the field, drawn by the fire—the bright flames, the shifting shadows of faces and figures flickering in its light.
As I walk, images from the afternoon begin to return. I feel, as if still lingering, the sensation of my hands cupping her warm face; her breathing seems close by.
What character has she come as? I try to think.
Ophelia? No—that cannot be. Too ironically tragic.
Someone from A Midsummer Night’s Dream? I am not sure.
The wreath, the floral dress. More like a nymph. But what kind—tree nymph, water nymph, something of the air?
I regret not having asked her name. Might it be Titania? Or perhaps Hermia?
I lift my head.
The sky is scattered with small, steady stars. The moon is hidden somewhere—I can see its light on the water, but not the moon itself.
A tree nymph, then?
But I am not sure.
8
Night has settled. The lawn lies wide and dark. The bonfires continue to burn, but the crowd in the tent has thinned.
I feel it is time for me to leave. I go in through the same back entrance by which I came out earlier in the day.
As I pull the door open and step in, but before letting it close behind me, I pause and turn to look once more.
In the dim light, I can just make out the tree—and the empty reclining chair beneath it.
I have, I say to myself, on this day, come to a place unfamiliar to me before; and now, as I leave, it is no more familiar to me than before.
Yego’s Chronicles 