A Life in Four Colors Part Fifty-Three

While my parents had welcomed Susan as a part of the family, the situation with Susan's family was much more complex... and much less friendly.

Susan's mother died in the fall of 1970, just as Susan and I were first giving voice to our dreams of spending our lives together. Susan spoke very little of her mother's death, which was ruled a suicide by the coroner and the Cedartown police department. Susan never fully accepted that determination, and always suspected that it was an accidental overdose of prescription pain medications. Susan's sister (who actually found her mother's body and got word to Susan, who was at work but rushed home, arriving even before the ambulance) also felt like it was not an intentional suicide.

Susan's mother's death affected Susan for years, as the loss of a parent almost always does. The suicide ruling made it even more disturbing for Susan, who struggled with sorrow, loss, and anguish as well as confusion and doubt--and a little bit of guilt. Susan always wanted to know without a doubt what happened... and she wanted to know if in some way she or other members of her family had pushed her mother to suicide if it was a suicide. She would never get the answers she desired, and it always troubled her.

Susan's father and her grandmother were not happy when Susan and I told them of our plans to get married. Her father actually told her that he would not give his permission. Susan pointed out to him that, since she was 19 at the time, she didn't need his permission and wasn't asking for it. Susan's father had a volatile temper made even more so by his heavy drinking. While he never used physical violence against her, his rage would lead to loud outbursts filled with abusive language. We experienced his vitriol first-hand on that day.

Susan's grandmother (her father's mother) was manipulative in a totally different way. She constantly undermined everyone in the family, criticizing them and excoriating them and and controlling them by playing on their fears, insecurities, and sometimes on their guilt. She instilled fears in her grandchildren (including Susan) that took years to overcome. Susan's grandfather had given up long before I met them, and was a lost, broken alcoholic by the time I first met him. I suspect that Susan's grandmother had likewise destroyed Susan's father's ambition and self-worth as well, which is he and Susan's mother had never moved out of the same house where they had lived when he was a child--a run-down duplex in a slum block that was eventually razed by the city.

I would have thought her father would have wanted Susan to escape from such a home life, but quite the contrary: he wanted her to remain there, contributing a significant portion of each week's paycheck to the family budget. Her grandmother was even more harsh in condemning the plans for us to marry; she told Susan that she was turning her back on them, abandoning the family, condemning them all to a horrible life.

To her credit, Susan remained undeterred. I talked with her father and her grandmother, trying to assure them that I wanted to help Susan achieve the sort of life she deserved. My words fell on deaf ears.

I was so concerned about Susan that I talked with my parents and they agreed to a plan whereby Susan would move into my family's home if necessary. She would take my bedroom, and I would sleep on the sofa in the living room for the few months until our wedding. We never had to follow that plan, thankfully. After a week or so, anger was replaced with taciturn sullenness, as if they thought that not speaking to Susan would change her mind. It did not.

To his credit, Susan's grandfather (who had always treated me with a level of courtesy and a modicum of hospitality) told her that he did approve. "You have to get away from here," he told her.  "You have to take care of her," he told me. It was the only time in his life that I knew him to speak against Susan's grandmother's wishes--and even then, he did so when Susan's grandmother was not present to hear his words.

So as we began tp make final arrangements for our wedding, Susan's Aunt Willie--her mother's sister, who looked so very much like Susan's mother--stepped in to help. It was Willie who performed all the alterations on Susan's wedding dress. It was Willie who helped us with the plans for the wedding. It was Willie who told Susan that if she needed a place to stay, she could stay with them (which would have been much closer to Susan's job in the payroll department of the Arrow Shirt Factory in Cedartown).

In a move that seemed almost precognitive, Susan gave me her comics and her books and her records (which she said were now our comics and our books and our records) and asked me to keep them at my parents' house in Rome until we got married. Her decision turned out to be a wise one; just a week or so afterwards, her father went through the house when Susan was at work, looking for those "damn comic books," as he called them. He blamed them for bringing Susan and me together, and intended to burn them all. Thankfully, they were safely stored away beyond his reach by that time.

As the date of our wedding approached, we planned our wedding without Susan's father's and grandmother's presence. Her aunt continued to help Susan, showing up at the wedding to fill the role that Susan's mother would have filled. Susan's sister was a flower girl; her brother was a groomsman.

Just a week before the wedding, her grandmother told Susan that she planned to be there. Susan told her that she would agree only if her grandmother would promise that she would not cause any disruption. Her grandmother acquiesced to Susan's request--and true to her word, she attended the wedding without any outward display of the anger and disapproval with which she had met the news that we intended to get married. Unlike Susan's father, she had at least accepted the inevitability of our wedding.

And thus on Tuesday, June 15th, 1971, Susan and I were married in Cedartown. Why a Tuesday? Because Susan and I had met on June 15th, 1968, and we wanted to get married on that same date--even if it was  a Tuesday. It was a modest church ceremony with about fifty people--mostly our friends and immediate family--in attendance. There was a brief reception afterwards, but neither Susan nor I ate very much; we were eager to change into casual clothes and go to our new home.

Once we got home, I did the ceremonial carrying of my bride across the threshold. About a minute later, Susan looked at me and said, "Are you as hungry as I am?" I assured her that I was. "Do you want to go to Rome and get a pizza first?" And so, on the evening of our wedding, before we spent our first night together, we drove a half-hour to Rome, where we got an Italian sausage, pepperoni, mushroom, green pepper, and black olive pizza at Village Inn on Shorter Avenue, just as we had on so many Saturday nights when we were dating. And as long as Village Inn was open in West Rome, we always thought of it as "our pizza place." (To this day, I still remember the fennel-rich flavor of their Italian sausage, which was unlike any that we ever found at any other pizza place.)

And after we enjoyed our favorite pizza at "our pizza place," we drove back to Cedartown and spent the first of 17,569 nights as husband and wife.