The Wedding Tree Read Online Free PDF

the sofa hung an old sepia-tone photo of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. In the manner of old photos, they were formal and unsmiling. Next to it was a photo of them sitting on the back porch, playing cards and laughing. If Gran hadn’t told me who they were, I never would have recognized them as the same people.
    Gran had taken the porch picture with a Kodak Brownie when she was seventeen. She’d told me she’d hidden in the bushes and caught them unawares so that they wouldn’t stiffen up like a couple of corpses.
    As long as I could remember, Gran always had a camera handy. In the back of the house, she’d had a darkroom, where she used to let me help develop close-ups of flowers and bugs and leaves. I inhaled deeply as I stepped further into the house, hoping to detect a hint of darkroom chemicals. No such luck.
    I’d once told my mother how I loved the smell of Gran’s darkroom.
    â€œOh, I don’t,” Mom had replied. “I think it smells like thwarted dreams and female repression.”
    My mother had been big on female empowerment. Gran said she was a women’s libber, although Mom preferred to think of herself as a feminist. She was certainly a glass-ceiling breaker, a role model for women who wanted more out of life than a home,a husband, and children. She’d told me that Gran had worked as a photographer for the New Orleans newspaper during World War II and had dreamed of being a travel photographer, but she’d been the victim of a “misogynic era” and a “chauvinistic husband.”
    My mother had been talking, of course, about her father.
    According to Mom, he’d been withdrawn and silent, always hiding behind a newspaper or a TV program. When he did talk, it was usually to offer some kind of “helpful” criticism, usually about her appearance or demeanor. She needed to smile more and study less. Her hair always needed combing, or her clothes needed pressing. He was dismissive of her deeply held political convictions or even her stellar grades. “No man wants to marry a know-it-all,” he used to say.
    Mom said he lacked respect for women. Gran said he was just old-fashioned and stubborn and sincerely believed that he knew best. He’d been raised to always please his parents, and he couldn’t understand children wanting a life beyond their family and hometown. Gran said the fact he was paralyzed in his late twenties had left him out of touch with the changing world. My mother said there was no excuse.
    He’d died before I was born, so I don’t have any memories of him. I do have a memory of Gran and my mom visiting his grave when I was about five. They’d taken some roses, and I recall Mom crying as if she were trying to squeeze her soul out of her tear ducts as Gran laid the bouquet on the headstone.
    The savagery of my mother’s grief had scared me. Mom was always in control, always logical, always practical. I thought she was above sentiment. Where had this storm of emotion come from? What could I do to make it stop? Was it somehow my fault?
    Years later, when I was a teenager—I must have been fifteen, because I was driving my mother’s Mercedes and she was in the passenger seat, and the only time she willingly relinquished control of the wheel was when I’d been a student driver—she said something disparaging about her father.
    â€œIf he was such a jerk,” I’d asked, “why did you cry so hard that time we visited his grave?”
    â€œBecause I never had a chance to impress him.” She’d smoothed her already-smooth hair, which was an unusual thing for Mom to do.
    â€œYou wanted to impress him?”
    She’d lifted her shoulders. “‘Impress’ might be the wrong word. I wanted to—oh, I don’t know. He just always made me feel . . .” My mother, who was always so sure of herself and never at a loss for words, had an