Ax Murder With A Dull Ax

Given how it started, it’s amazing we’re still going.

Photos from the author’s family collection

It is the summer of 1971, and I am 19. I am riding shotgun in Paula, a robin’s egg blue 1965 VW, bug, piloted by my fiancé, David. We are heading back to Jersey City from Long Island after a rip-snorting Donnybrook between me and my parents over the wedding that is supposed to be happening in early September.

David is shell-shocked. He comes from a quiet WASP family where voices are generally not raised at the dinner table (at least not when everyone is sober. Throw some Manhattans supplemented by Ritz crackers topped with horseradish and peanut butter and all bets were off.)

In my family, a sprawling Southern Italian clan, no one needed alcohol to raise a ruckus. We shouted at one another on the regular, how else would anyone know we existed? And a wedding fight? Ordinarily, this shouldn’t have been a big deal. Weddings, I learned from years of observation, were a blood sport, in which families vie for dominance. The rules were clear, the objective plain…scorched earth, no prisoners. And by wedding, I mean reception. The actual ceremony at a church was a bothersome preliminary. Some women even attended the church service with their hair in rollers (covered with a scarf per the RC regulation that females cover their heads) because the main event was yet to happen. I knew all this, what child of my background could help it? But I had been an observer. Now I was in the ring. But with whom was I battling?

This fight isn’t interfamily… David’s folks are in hiding, hoping they won’t be caught in the crossfire; praying to their Episcopalian gods for strength. No, this is an internecine death match. Adrenaline coursing, I have this electrifying epiphany: I am trying to make everyone happy, and no one is. The only person I know how to make happy is myself.

I need to back up. I am a bookworm — was then, and am now. It’s probably my mother’s fault… she named me after a book, Pamela, which English majors assure me that she couldn’t possibly have read, given Richardson’s treatment of the eponymous heroine. I read to escape — not that I had a hard life by any rational definition — even so, losing myself in books was essential to my survival. One day, when I was 15 or so, my mom interrupted my prattling about something to remark: You know, Pamela, you are a little weird. I preferred to think of myself as romantic.

David and I had been carrying on an epistolary relationship for the three years he had been in college, maintaining against the odds, our high school romance. It struck us one day, that we were wasting good time, and we could take our fate into our own hands! We announced that we planned to get married ASAP — I would drop out of college and we’d spend his senior year together, then I’d go back to complete my degree.

My parents reacted with fury. This didn’t deter me, much to their puzzlement. My folks lived in a transplanted to the US version of feudal, patriarchal Sicily, where you alienate your family at the peril of your life, and where women were killed by their brothers for besmirching the honor of their clan. I lived in the 1960s USA of the Baby Boom where I believed I was free, even obligated!! to follow my individual desires. Plus what could be more romantic than parental objections to a love match!!? It only convinced me I was correct.

My folks eventually caved, because after all, college for girls? Not that big a deal. And by caved, I mean they went all in. We set a date — early September, fewer than six months away. My mother wanted the whole deal, which included, among other things, limousines, five bridesmaids, two flower girls, industrial strength cocktail hour, sit-down dinner, open bar, Venetian table: the works. For which they would have happily paid to the last penny. But there was a price — my cooperation.

Co-operation meant staying home on Long Island and helping my mom get the wedding planned, which she saw as a full-time occupation. I had zero interest in this.

I was enjoying life. David and I were renting a walk-up apartment in Jersey City, straight out of La Boheme, all cockroaches and peeling linoleum, He was an intern in a summer program run by his all-male college where the college guys worked with local Catholic schools run by the Sisters of Charity in a low-income neighborhood. The other guys lived in a converted brownstone whose resident adult was Father Kearney, a genuine radical priest — he helped run a methadone clinic and knew the Berrigan brothers, who at the time were leading figures in the resistance to the war in Vietnam.

I told my parents I was helping with the summer program, which I was, and living with the Sisters of Charity in THEIR CONVENT, which I was not. I even gave them the phone number, which thankfully, they never called.

We would make sporadic trips home on the weekends so I could help my mother work on the event, my compromise.

Back to the epiphany: The fight that caused it was operatic. My beleaguered father had been trying to stay neutral, but at the dinner in question, he snapped and began to berate me soundly, and loudly. On the car ride back to Jersey City, a resolve formed.

I called my mother to inform her the big wedding was off. She begged me to change my mind, money had been spent, how would it all look but her begging only dug me in further. What sort of a romantic would I be to cave into money and social pressure? I was going to do things MY way.

What was my way? A quiet civil ceremony at City Hall in Manhattan, then a nice dinner for our folks afterward that I would cook myself in the residence house.

Romance: Meet Reality

First, I was only 19. City Hall required that I be 21 to be married without parents in attendance.

We had the license, the blood test, and even the witnesses (our two best friends from HS) but it wasn’t allowed.

Second, my mother thought I had truly lost my mind. Drive to do what??? Where???

There were many heated phone calls, including one in which she accused Father Kearney of not being a real priest, and he told her she had blinders on. Finally, at her wit’s end, she declared, exasperated, “When you have your own daughter, THEN you can have the kind of wedding you want.”

Impasse. For a hot minute, I thought I was defeated. But what would the 19th-century heroines of the books I loved do if by any chance they were transported into opposite land, where things work out best if you lie to your parents, and live in sin?

They would persevere! We enlisted Father Kearney. He was able to record marriages in the files of a local parish, part of his side hustle traveling the Northeast with a rabbi golfing buddy. They would jointly officiate at mixed marriages, soothing families, and breaking par. He kindly agreed to help. And the afternoon right after that phone call we knocked on his door and said, Let’s do this! Now.

He looked at us. “Let me get dressed, “he said, “not used to officiating in a T-Shirt.”

I, too, changed from cut-offs and a t-shirt to a home-made dress and we met up in the dining room of the residence hall.

Father Kearney obligingly faked the addresses on the license — as it was for New York State, not New Jersey, we declared our intentions to marry, and he did the by the power vested in me thing. Bingo. Hitched. And because of course we did, we called my parents and forgot to call David’s, who had to learn the news second hand.

That was 53 years ago today. It’s clear to me now that I wasn’t a romantic at all. My epiphany: I am trying to make everyone happy, and no one is. The only person I know how to make happy is myself was an acknowledgement of reality.

Starting with a five-minute wedding and a fake marriage license, what made me happy was facing the real world on my terms. It also meant facing the consequences, which included living in a converted garage and buying our food with the money I earned nannying for a rich lady who critiqued my washing of her underwear. And finding that when I was depressed about leaving school, I had a partner who figured out a way to help me through until I went back.

Sometimes younger people ask me what the secret is to a long relationship, particularly one where the partners get along tolerably well. I don’t have much to add beyond the guidance that can be found in self-help books and advice columns, except for this one piece of wisdom.

Never confuse the wedding with the marriage.