From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  CR: We have more presents with the seal of the House of Representatives engraved on them!

  SR: In fact, many look like they were stolen because they just say U.S. Representative “X” on them. One of our favorites, a great conversation stopper in New York in the sixties, was a cake server signed by Senator Strom Thurmond. Cokie’s mother was incredibly well organized, every present got a number so we could tell who gave it to us, and all these years later we still find little numbered stickers on the back of a tray or dish we don’t use very often. But Lindy left some of the organization to Cokie, and she managed to fall down on one key issue.

  CR: Here I was, frantically making notes about everything that had to get done—apartments, china, priests, all that. My boss at the TV production company where I was working, Sophie Altman, gave us a party on the Wednesday before the Saturday wedding, and when Steve flew in from New York, I immediately asked, “Did you pick up the wedding rings?” With some irritation, he answered, “Yes, yes, I picked up the wedding rings.” I said, “Good, that’s it, that means we’re set. I’ve picked up the dress, we’ve got the rings, Uncle Robbie and Arthur Goldberg are set, and so the one other thing is…marriage license!” I had completely and totally forgotten about the marriage license. So the next morning at the crack of dawn we went out to Rockville, the county seat, now something of a suburban horror, but then a beautiful little town with a pre–Civil War courthouse. Sitting there was what was surely a pre–Civil War clerk in a pre–Civil War gray sweater. We told her we needed to apply for our marriage license and she informed us of a forty-eight-hour waiting period. “Okay,” we said, “we’ll pick it up on Saturday.” “Closed on Saturday,” came the oh-so-self-satisfied response. Steven kept trying to argue with her, “But—but—but we’re having fifteen hundred people at the wedding on Saturday!” She was really loving this now: “Sorry, you’ll just have to get married on Monday.” Poor Steven was practically in tears: “But the president’s coming!” None of this impressed her one bit. I was asking more practical questions like, “What’s the fine for getting married without a license?” Which tells you a lot about our subsequent life—I was always the one more willing to break the rules, or at least bend them. Then we had to call my parents for help—not exactly an easy call to make—and my father dispatched my brother, who was licensed to practice law in the state of Maryland. It doesn’t get more humiliating than that—my big brother to the rescue! When he found a judge to waive the forty-eight-hour waiting period, the judge told Tommy, “You’re lucky you caught me now because I have a full docket today and a full docket tomorrow and there is no way I would’ve seen you.” We got in just under the wire with the marriage license, and my father’s press secretary thought this was such a funny story he released it to the news wires. So it was in newspapers all over the country that I had forgotten to get our marriage license. It was unbelievably embarrassing. That Saturday night my uncle Robert, the priest, asked from the altar, “Has somebody got the marriage license?” Which I’ve never heard before or since at any wedding. He wanted to make sure it was legal.

  SR: Of course it wasn’t your normal wedding, with the president coming, and I think that was the first day I got a taste of life in the public eye.

  CR: It wasn’t normal in a lot of ways. My grandmother wouldn’t let me into the bathroom to get dressed. I stood in the hall outside the door, begging, “Coco, I really need to get in there, I’m getting married!” And she kept saying, “Darling, just another minute, just another minute. If you give me a whole minute, I’ll let you borrow my eye shadow.” (My thrice-widowed grandmother had an interesting perspective on the institution of marriage. “All of life is one long date,” she used to tell my sister and me. “When you’re married, you have to date the man you’re married to, but before and after him, you can date whomever you please.”) When I finally did get in the bathroom, my father started banging on the door shouting, “Cokie, you’ve got to come out of there. The president’s here.” And I blew up: “Well, the bride’s not!”

  Then I hustled and bustled to get ready, run downstairs, and rush outside to get married because the president was there! The wedding party lined up outside, including my not-quite-five-year-old nephew Hale, who was the ring bearer. We have pictures of his mother carefully tying the rings onto the little satin pillow he carried. But just as the trumpet started Purcell’s “Voluntary,” Hale turned to my father and said, “Pawpaw, I lost the ring.” We have a picture of that moment, too! We all started scrambling around looking for the ring, with my father pulling on my arm, insisting, “Come on, Cokie, we’ve got to do this now. We’ve got to do this wedding!” Wedding guests handed me their rings. We didn’t know which one was lost, so I had about a half-dozen men’s and women’s rings on my fingers, but I protested, “No, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going on without the ring.” My sister, the matron of honor, kept trying not to laugh as I stamped my foot, pouting: “Daddy, the symbolism of this is just all wrong.” And he said, “Cokie, don’t you think there’s enough symbolism going on here for one night?”

  He persuaded me to go down the aisle, but I was all teary. There’s nothing worse than teary brides; they always make you wonder if they should be doing this. Fortunately, my niece, who was not quite four, saved me. She was the flower girl, and at the rehearsal the night before, my mother kept repeating, “Strew the petals, Elizabeth, strew the petals.” Instead she took clumps of petals and dumped them out of her little basket, making everyone laugh, including me. Then of course she ran out of flowers halfway down the aisle, so she had to retreat and collect a bunch to refill her basket. It was so funny that I cracked up and from there on out I had a good time. When I got under the chuppah, I learned it was Steve’s ring that was missing. It landed in the bushes where the doctor who always travels with the president found it with his little ear light before the ceremony was over.

  SR: Remember, this was 1966, I was twenty-three, the Vietnam War was heating up. The president was not all that popular with people our age and my ushers had threatened, only half-jokingly, to march down the aisle chanting, “End the war in Vietnam.” Not such a great idea. But my ushers did perform one important job. There were only two or three rows of chairs, reserved for elderly aunts and cabinet officers. Everyone else had to stand. At one point a tall man with a crew cut in a red dinner jacket, a brusque, aggressive fellow, pushed his way to the front.

  CR: It was a black-tie wedding.

  SR: Following instructions, one of my ushers asked him, “Excuse me, sir, these seats are reserved, so could you please tell me who you are?” At that point he drew himself up to his full height and said, “I am the head of Steven’s draft board.” Which he was. His name was Harold Tucker, an old friend of my father’s. They had run many losing political campaigns together—being a reform Democrat in Hudson County, New Jersey, was not a promising career. But they had actually won once, helping elect a high-school drafting teacher as mayor of Bayonne. And as the payoff for that one victory, this man had become the postmaster, and in that job he was head of the draft board, a rather important man in my life. So we kicked someone out, I think it was Justice Tom Clark, and Harold got his seat!

  One of the most memorable parts of the ceremony was Arthur Goldberg’s talk. He turned to Cokie and said, “In my tradition a home has rarely been a castle; throughout the ages it is something far higher, a sanctuary.” He was right about that—eleven years later we moved back into that same house where we were married and it has been a sanctuary for us ever since. Then he said to me, “Be careful not to cause a woman to weep, for God counts her tears.” He got that one right, too.

  CR: I don’t much remember what happened after that. It was a beautiful night. There were lots and lots of people. We were in the receiving line forever and ever. Gene McCarthy kept bringing us champagne because we were stuck in the receiving line for so long.

  SR: My new mother-in-law, who had been slaving for weeks cooking for this extravaganza, lo
oked like she didn’t have a care in the world as she greeted almost every one of the fifteen hundred guests by name. The ones she didn’t know she simply called “Darlin’,” her all-purpose form of address. My brother later said that watching Lindy perform that night was like watching Heifetz play the violin or DiMaggio play baseball—nobody did it better. I don’t think we ever got off the receiving line.

  CR: No, we did. There are pictures of us dancing. We definitely danced. It was a truly special wedding; my mother had done a fabulous job. A big tent covered the side yard, and white flowers, including my favorite, lilies of the valley, decorated the whole thing; the chuppah was covered with flowers as well. Mamma remembered an outdoor wedding from her youth where the bridesmaids, instead of marching all the way forward, unwound a ribbon and formed the aisle. So we did the same thing. The bridesmaids carried baskets of multicolored flowers and each one wore any long white dress she wanted to wear. But my sister and my best friend and Steve’s sister did process down the aisle, and they wore these awful 1966 dresses I chose for them, olive green with cotton lace flounces. Horrible. When our daughter Becca and I went dress shopping for her wedding, we carried around one of my wedding pictures, because she was trying to decide whether to wear the same veil that I wore. The picture included my sister in that dreadful dress. The wedding-dress saleswomen took one look and laughed: “Sixty-five, sixty-six, right?”

  SR: Our parents had started married life in such a different way, at such a different time—right in the middle of the Depression. They all told stories about how they didn’t have any money. Hale helped work his way through college giving out gum samples to other students and writing for a New Orleans newspaper. He and Lindy used to talk about sharing one po’boy sandwich for dinner. My folks would return used soda bottles to scrape up enough change to afford the movies, and lunch was often a ketchup sandwich.

  CR: There’s a very funny story about my parents’ first date. My mother claims they originally met her freshman year of college at a dance when Daddy said to her, “Lindy Claiborne, I’m going to marry you someday.” He denied that mightily, but at some point they did go out and his car, an old Model A Ford, broke down. They had to keep stopping and filling it with water from the ditch next to the road. They got home very, very late. Mamma lived with her grandmother Morrison, her mother’s mother, who ran a boardinghouse in New Orleans. Daddy kept saying to her, “Don’t you think we ought to call your grandmother and let her know why we’re so late?” Mamma said, “She absolutely never wakes up. We would just be bothering her.” When they got home, every light was on. My great-grandmother was up and pacing, furious. My father was abashed beyond belief and not too pleased with my mother. Her grandfather Claiborne had died that night and they had been trying to reach her to tell her. Which was the only reason her grandmother was up. Then Daddy went to his house, he was living at home of course, and his mother was also pacing the floor, also furious at the hour. She demanded, “What kind of girl would keep you out until all hours of the night like that?” And he said, “A wonderful girl that you’d be lucky if you ever got to meet.” But their serious dating didn’t start until later, when Mamma had graduated from college and was teaching school.

  SR: After my parents met, on Mom’s seventeenth birthday, they never dated anyone else, but they got married secretly, at City Hall in New York. Which is maybe the exact opposite of having fifteen hundred people at your wedding. They didn’t have enough money to set up housekeeping, but they wanted to be married, so they went to City Hall on their lunch hour with a couple of friends. My father had been saving money for a wedding lunch, that was about all he could afford, and as he told the story, he was carrying this coin bank with him. It was a metal bank, and he dropped it, right in the middle of the ceremony. Fortunately, it didn’t break, but it made a horrendous crash. After the wedding they didn’t tell anyone. They were both still living at home, with their own parents, only a few blocks apart. My mother’s older sister was also married and was living with her husband in the family house. A few months later my aunt and uncle got enough money together to rent their own place, and the day they moved out my father and mother announced that they had in fact been married for three months. And my father moved in the same day.

  CR: And he lived in that house until you were what? Ten years old?

  SR: Thirteen. Half a house really, because we only lived on one of the two floors.

  CR: Well, my parents had a real wedding. It was in New Roads, Louisiana, the country town where Mamma had grown up. Daddy must have graduated from law school in June and they got married in January, when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-three. Mamma’s saved the accounts from the local newspaper which describe old St. Mary’s Church, which was filled with camellias from her neighbors’ gardens, and the reception at her uncle’s house. Her father died when she was only two, and when this uncle told her that her daddy was dead, she told him he would have to be her Uncle Daddy. And that’s what we all called him. It was a big family wedding in the country, and when the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon ten days later, they found many of the houseguests still there, having a wonderful time.

  SR: After our wedding we were going to spend the night downtown…

  CR:…at the Hay Adams Hotel…

  SR:…and fly off to Puerto Rico the next day. But because we were in the receiving line the whole time, neither one of us had anything much to eat. When we were driving downtown Cokie insisted we go to…

  CR: Eddie Leonard’s Sandwich Shop, which was a real dive but it was the only thing open at that time of the night. I was starving and he wouldn’t take me to the Eddie Leonard’s Sandwich Shop. I thought this was a terrible failing as a husband.

  SR: Something I’ve always regretted. It would have been a cool thing to do. But I wasn’t exactly a cool kind of guy.

  CR: Then we got to the Hay Adams and I had told them that it was our wedding night, which I thought merited at least a bottle of champagne in the room. But no! Then the next morning, after we flew to Puerto Rico, my mother told me that the weather turned terrible, just absolutely terrifying. Hurricanelike weather. No tent on earth would have protected the wedding against that weather.

  SR: Over the years since our own wedding, lots of other Jewish-Christian couples have talked to us and some have asked our advice about how to handle the actual ceremony. We’re careful to stress we have no formulas that work for everybody. But I do think we learned several things from that process, and one was inclusion. Every effort that makes people feel wanted or respected is worth doing. We have young friends, a Catholic-Jewish couple, who got married under a chuppah, but the canopy was draped with an Irish lace tablecloth. In another case the bride’s elderly father insisted on bringing his homemade chopped liver to the reception—that was his way of contributing. Each couple works out the details for itself, but the basic idea of inclusion is very important. The other thing I’ve always believed is that the wedding itself becomes a metaphor for how you solve problems in a relationship. Part of that is tolerance. Part of that is realizing that when one partner feels really strongly about something, they get a little more weight. Part of that is figuring out what is really important, just listening to the other person.

  CR: And listening to yourself as well. Saying to yourself, “Hold on here, does this really matter to me?” There are so many times when I automatically react: “That’s the way I thought it would be or that was my image of it.” And then, at least on my better days, I say to myself, “Why? Does it really matter?” Actually, I found myself going through that with Becca’s wedding, too. She would say to me, “I don’t want a white bouquet, I want a multicolored bouquet of bright flowers.” My first reaction was, “That’s wrong, brides don’t do that.” Then I thought, “Why not? What’s wrong with that?” I think that’s a very good jumping-off point for a marriage, to say to yourself, “Hold on here, is this really important to me or is this just some notion that I have?”

  SR: Marriag
e is not only a ceremony between two people. It is a communal event, symbolizing a relationship between families and friends and relatives. That’s one of the reasons we never listened to my parents when they only half-jokingly suggested we elope so they wouldn’t have to deal with what could have been an uncomfortable ordeal. We worked hard to make it comfortable for them, and that told them something about how we would try to always make them comfortable. Cokie had wanted to be a bride ever since she was a little girl; she wanted a wedding. But more than that, even at that young age we somehow understood that the guests serve as witnesses, people who promise to support this young couple. That’s a real job. That’s a real responsibility. Healthy marriages need those kinds of relationships and connections—as role models and advice givers and shoulders to cry on—as we’ve learned over and over through the years. Marriage is hard enough, and doing it in isolation without those support systems makes it much more difficult. So if we had been faced with any sort of a breach with our families, it would have been devastating. From the beginning part of what we saw in each other was a shared value about family. So for us, there was only one possibility and that was to do both, to embrace both traditions. In some ways it was easier because there was an equality about the whole situation. We each care about our own traditions and our own families. We could see why the other did and we could respect that strength of commitment and not expect the other to compromise too much because each of us knew we wouldn’t. In a curious way, that was a source of strength. It was never a puzzlement to me why Cokie was devoted to her family and her faith. I never for one second expected her to become more like me or accept my faith. I give our parents credit. They did come to understand what we had been trying to tell them. That the labels were less important than the core values and the individuals involved. In an ideal world, they would have preferred some things to be different. But they did come to see what we were trying to tell them, and have been wonderful about it ever since.