My Three Fathers part 1

Marriage has always proved irresistible to my family. We try and fail and try again, somehow maintaining our belief in an institution that has made fools of us all. I’ve married twice; so has my sister. Our mother had three husbands. None of us intended this to happen. We meant to stick our landing on the first try, but we stumbled. My parents divorced when I was five. My mother and my stepfather Mike had their final parting when I was twenty-four. She married Darrell when I was twenty-seven, and they stayed together until he died, in 2018, when I was fifty-four. My problems were never ones of scarcity. I suffered from abundance, too much and too many. There are worse problems to have.

The second time that my sister, Heather, married, in 2005, she wanted a real wedding. She and her new husband, Bill, threw a terrific party in a barn that had been fancied up and turned into an event space. My husband, Karl, and I had eloped a few months before, and those beautiful words of love and commitment were still fresh. We drank the champagne, danced in a line, blew soap bubbles into the night sky above the bride and groom. Only my former stepfather, Mike, was sullen. His third marriage was nearing its end, and he was in love with my mother again. But my mother was happy with Darrell, so Mike danced with me for most of the night.

My father, who had always hated Mike, hated him less now that he, too, had lost my mother. Now my father contented himself with simply hating my mother, even though thirty-six years had passed since she had left him for Mike, in 1969. Beneath the glow of the little white lights that were draped over the ceiling’s crossbeams, my stepfather’s love for my mother and my father’s hatred of her looked remarkably similar.

Darrell noticed none of this. Eight weeks earlier, he had fallen down the brick stairs that led to the back door of the house where he lived with my mother and fractured several vertebrae. He was wearing a brace beneath his suit, beneath his clerical gown. He was a retired Presbyterian minister, and he officiated at my sister’s wedding, despite the pain it caused him to walk and stand and breathe. He hung on through the dinner and then got a ride home.

But the story I want to tell happens just after the wedding and before the reception began, while the photographs were being taken. Or it happened months before that, when I first realized that all three of my mother’s husbands were going to be at Heather’s wedding—the family equivalent of a total solar eclipse. I wanted a picture of that.

I called my father first, since I pegged him as the one most likely to say no, but he surprised me. Sure, he said, fine. He didn’t care.

Then I asked Mike, who would have found a way to get me the North Star had I wanted it. Although he hesitated, he said yes as well. He didn’t like the idea, but as far as I was concerned he didn’t have to like it. It would take two minutes.

Darrell had never met my father, and had met my stepfather only once, in passing. Unlike my father and Mike, Darrell owed me nothing, but he said he’d do it.

The wedding took place in September, on a day that was clear and bright and still a little warm. After Heather and Bill had been photographed with every possible configuration of family and friends, I lined my mother’s husbands up together. In one picture, it’s just the three of them in their dark suits, and in another I am with them in my garnet bridesmaid’s dress. Darrell holds up one of my hands, Mike holds the other, and my father, in the middle, has his hand on my waist. My father is the handsome one, the one whose face registers genuine happiness for the day. Darrell is smiling bravely, his posture very straight in his back brace. And Mike looks as if he’d leap out of the frame the second I let go of his hand.

“We were all standing there waiting on the photographer,” my father told me later on the phone. “And Mike said, ‘You know what she’s doing, don’t you? She’s going to wait until the three of us are dead and then she’s going to write about us. This is the picture that will run with the piece.’ ” My father said that the idea hadn’t occurred to him, and it wouldn’t have occurred to Darrell, but, as soon as Mike said it, they knew he was right.

to be continue..