Andrea Doyle: All the Weddings in the World and None of Them is Mine
Weddings.
Weddings.
Weddings.
My family is one extended Austen novel. A PBS dream. The wedding I was in Lenox, Massachusetts for was if my calculation is right the fifth in the last three years. I am the last one standing. Even Suzanne’s mother Kate spontaneously got married in a big house in Greenwich just the prior Saturday.
I am Andrea Doyle. My dream of my wedding was shattered last year when the man I wanted to and expected to marry told me when he was supposed to be proposing to me that he found somebody to love and that she was not named Andrea Doyle. He has not married her, so far as I have heard, but then again I have not found someone to love myself.
What brought on this harangue was my brother Jamie. I was in an inn in Lenox the night before he married his long-time love and roommate Jennifer Astor. We were in Lenox because Jennie’s parents, retired M. D. s from the city, lived nearby. They, Jamie and Jen, planned on a bigger wedding in May, but with the coronavirus concerns, they opted for a smaller affair near her parents’ place.
It was a very nice inn, and the innkeepers were glad to have me and my friends, Kerry and Suzanne. I say “friends” because I am not sure what the technical word is for our relationship. If you have read this far, you know that Kerry’s mom married my dad after Kerry married Suzanne.
We three were the only ones in the inn. It had a somewhat spooky feel but also gave the sense of what it was like to be in Lenox in the Gilded Age, what with a paneled library and large drawing-room in a baby-blue pastel walls with a high ceiling and large arched windows that overlook and drapes that frame a well-tended garden. Though since it was March, it was too early for any blossoming, or green for that matter. It was the site of the ceremony.
We had a family dinner on Friday, the thirteenth, at a restaurant in town. There, too, we were the only guests. When Kerry, Suzanne, and I returned, we brought perhaps three-quarters of a bottle of good red wine with us and set ourselves up in that drawing-room. The lovebirds sat on the couch, exchanging glances and touches as they are wont to do, while I was across from them in an armchair. I had my stockinged feet on the coffee table, and we talked. The innkeepers were in their rooms on the third floor and left us undisturbed after they set out some chocolates.
I do not know why. Perhaps the inn. Perhaps the wine. Perhaps the imminence of my brother’s wedding. But I spoke about my mom. Wendy Doyle.
My mom was my best friend. By far. I was her only daughter. Eileen—Kerry’s mom and my stepmom—is very different from my mom, but my father is in love with her in a way that is different from but just as true as it was with my mom.
I cannot say there was necessarily anything special about my relationship with my mother. Except that it was my relationship with my mother. What was different was my telling Kerry and Suzanne that no one understood how much I miss her. She died of ovarian cancer in 2014. I was twenty-two and just graduated from college, preparing for med school.
There was not much to say other than how much I pined for her to be around for the little things and the big things. Much as I adored my father, he was not her. So I stopped talking to the girls, afraid I embarrassed them. After a minute, with all of us drinking from our glasses and after we heard the grandfather clock in the hall strike the quarter-hour, Kerry spoke. Her father died when she was sixteen, but she said he was sick for a while and that her mom, Eileen, is what helped her make it through.
“I don’t know. My Mom would be different. But I don’t think of my dad that often. I know that sounds cold, but it is how I feel.”
Suzanne gave Kerry a kiss. “Well, you guys know too well my screwed-up family. My father might as well be dead, especially now that my Mother married Simon. I still hold out hope—”
“Don’t hold your breath, babe,” Kerry interrupted.
“No. Really. If my Mother could come around, there’s hope that he will, too. Look what happened with my Uncle Edward and Aunt Jennie.”
Suzanne’s Uncle Edward reconciled with Suzanne in New York some months earlier and Edward’s wife Jennie shortly followed suit.
“Look.” This was Kerry again. “I am not saying it cannot or will not happen. I am only saying that it probably will not. I hope I am wrong.”
“Still,” Suzanne continued, “I do not know what would have happened if my Mother didn’t come to New York. She was cold to me growing up. If you were to ask me whether I cared about her reconciling with me, I probably would have told you I didn’t. In retrospect, though, now I cannot imagine life without her nearby. It’s like she’s a different person from when I left San Francisco.”
“And your father?” This was me.
“Right now, he is kind of in the same position my Mother was in before she came to me. I am not exactly indifferent to him and his existence, but I do not lose sleep about him. As Kerry says, I hope but I do not have an expectation. If that makes sense.”
Kerry leaned against her wife. “That makes sense, love,” and she ran a hand across Suzanne’s stomach.