Starting a New Family

One of my colleagues at United Press was Deezy Scott, a fascinating young woman who just had transferred from UP in Atlanta. We became close friends. She asked me to join them for dinner when her brother Bucher (pronounced BOOK-er) came into port from one of his North Sea convoys. So the happiest marriage anyone could hope for came about because I turned the wrong way on 42nd Street.

 

It was war and time was speeded up. Bucher and I met, fell in love, and decided to marry immediately. I had met his family on a visit to Atlanta, ostensibly as his sister Deezy’s friend and United Press Radio associate. They restrained any misgivings they may have had when Bucher called to tell them our plans.

My family was another matter. Tears and storms and a request to think it over and call back in a few hours. We spent the intervening time getting blood tests and getting a marriage license from a fatherly civil servant who sat us down and quizzed us firmly before agreeing to provide it.

A charming movie showing at that time, The Clock, described exactly the sort of panic running around through the rain that we went through.

When I called Dad back, he reported that Mother was on the train to New York. We met her in trepidation (on my part) and terror (on Bucher’s). It was not a comfortable taxi ride back to the apartment that I shared with two friends. They had vanished, either because of their own plans or by design.

Mother wept, she stormed, she wailed, she threatened. Nothing she said shook our determination, no matter how much it shook us emotionally. Suddenly Mother looked, up, beamed, and said, “I brought a dress to wear to the wedding.”

She also, it developed, had brought a hard-to-find bottle of whiskey. She sent Bucher out to buy soda. He met Deezy on the stairs.

“How is it going,” D. asked.

“Rough,” replied Bucher, “but at least she brought some Bourbon.”

Bucher continued on his errand and Deezy came up to the apartment to meet Mother. They were instant soul mates. Both women could be difficult, but both had enormous charm. The rapport between Mother and Deezy was a big help through the next two days.

Soon Bucher was back; we all were relaxing with drinks, which were more curative than social; and Mother began planning.

First, she asked us to wait one day to give Dad and my sister Mary time to get to New York. That gave her one day to set up the kind of informal wedding that had been in vogue when she was a girl. She booked the Bride’s Chapel of The Little Church Around The Corner. She made reservations for a wedding breakfast at Del Monico’s. She tracked down the Personal Shopper who had helped outfit her for boarding school. She ordered flowers, including a bouquet of Lilies of the Amazon.

The Personal Shopper, whose name I have forgotten but whose whirlwind sweep through the stores I never will, was a minute little person whom I mentally classed as a contemporary of Methuselah. Shopping was not easy during the war, but she found what they called a “dressmaker suit” in soft blue wool. A satin-and-lace gown and peignoir set, and other lingerie items followed. She was unsuccessful in finding the flared-leg satin-and-lace panties, beloved by Hollywood, which I wanted.

I forget the rest of the day. Mother was Organizing. So was Deezy. With hotel rooms almost impossible to find, D. called a friend who was manager of the Hotel Astor in Times Square and secured a room for us for the week remaining before Bucher’s ship sailed. I assume that Mother, Deezy, Bucher, and I had dinner together, but have no idea where. I don’t even know where Mother stayed. Possibly Deezy helped find her an hotel room.

Dad arrived early the morning of the wedding. He was his usual self-contained, comfortable self, more concerned with his daughter’s happiness than with his reservations about so giddy a marriage.

Mary arrived soon after, breathless and half-paralyzed after an all-night train ride from college in Ohio. She was delightfully supportive but obviously shocked at her older sister’s uncharacteristically impulsive behavior. Grinning as she opened her overnight case, she handed me a book she said I should have: Sane Sex Life And Sane Sex Living—the classic hush-hush reference book for college girls at the time.

A taxi deposited us at the church before ten. It was a gloomy day with storm clouds billowing overhead. I retired to a small chamber to check the seams of my stockings and the shine of my nose. Through the door swirled the indefatigable Personal Shopper. She beamed as she thrust a small paper bag into my hands. She had found the last item on my wish list! There in the antechamber to the church, moments before the ceremony, I stepped daintily into my glamorous panties.

Meanwhile, Bucher arrived at the church with Deezy and his best man, one of Deezy and my best friends from United Press. As Bucher told the story, a strange man with a dour expression and Midwestern accent walked over to him, extended a hand in welcome, and said, “I guess we should get to know each other. My name’s Van Brunt.”

The Bride’s Chapel of the famous small church is a tiny wedding cake of a room, elaborate in decoration but intimate in feeling. I walked down the short aisle on Dad’s arm to meet my love, unfamiliar in his new officer’s uniform with its three gold stripes on the sleeves. The silver-haired minister, dignified in his embroidered robes, had a deep, rolling voice, which anchored the hastily arranged service in devout tradition. Fortunately, the service was brief. Even so, when we were asked to kneel, my Presbyterian bridegroom, unfamiliar with the ritual and exhausted by emotion, sank back to sit on his heels as I knelt upright at his side.

In moments the service ended. The minister quietly prompted, “You may now kiss the bride.” Bucher did. It was a fervent kiss, one in which I rather suspected he collapsed against my lips, much as he had collapsed on his heels earlier.

The minister leaned forward and gently commented, “There’ll be other times.”

Bucher and I broke, grinned, and retreated from the chapel, nodding to family and friends as we went. As we emerged from the front door of the church, the sun broke through the overcast. A great shaft of light fell exactly where we were standing, as if promising in that moment the happiness granted us through the years of our marriage.

We moved on to “Del Monico’s.” It was an elegant, staid old restaurant with excellent service. I have a faint recollection of our round table, lovely flowers in the middle, gleaming silver and crystal. What we ate, what anyone said, I do not know. All I remember is Bucher’s and my looking at each other and holding hands whenever we could.

Somehow we reached the hotel where our pleasant room overlooked Times Square. About an hour later my very embarrassed room mate knocked on the door, sheepishly delivering a gift bottle of wine that she thought she had arranged to have put in the room before our arrival.

 

We married on the Second of May, 1945. Two days later, Times Square erupted with joy as the first, false report of the end of the war in Europe burst on a waiting country. To our amusement, we learned that Bucher’s best man, Jay Breen, was the one responsible for sending the message out on the radio wire a few hours earlier than it should have been released.

Times Square was a sea of wildly celebrating people. There was no traffic for blocks. Service men mingled with the crowd, grabbing and kissing every female they could find, from little girls to grannies—all in an excess of happiness that meant no offense and gave none.

 

After three days of honeymooning, both Bucher and I had to return to work. He was standing night watch on the ship, which was under repairs somewhere in the New York area. I was working the overnight shift at UP. Bucher left at midnight, and I went out an hour later. The hotel doorman refused to let me walk to the nearby subway alone through the milling thousands, but sedately accompanied me to the stairway leading down to my train, night after night. Bucher and I often wondered what the hotel staff thought about the strange midnight behavior of their obviously enraptured honeymoon couple. A few days later Bucher sailed back to England, a happier, safer trip than the ones he had made for the past five years.

 

After the war, Bucher and I returned to Atlanta, where his family lived. He built up a small-boat-and-motor business.

Our son Alex chose his birthday carefully…Christmas day, 1948. I returned with him from the hospital to our apartment four days later. It poured that morning with one of the gray deluges that, in Atlanta, usually wait until after final Christmas festivities to begin. The thin young men in my ambulance enveloped stretcher and me neatly in an enormous sheet of plastic. Feeling ridiculously like the Christmas turkey I so recently had taken home from the market, I made my inert but joyous return.

I do not remember my first hour at home clearly. I have an amused recollection of the oh-so-decorous way the two young attendants lifted me from the stretcher and, with a deft flick of the encompassing blanket, deposited me under my covers intact.

There were people…my parents down from Michigan for the holidays and for the birth of their first grandchild: Dad almost stern in his attempt to keep out of the way of the frantic and intimate activity surging in our small apartment, but with his eyes shining; Mother sailing through the storm in full command, her hat unnoticed despite the apron around her waist.

And I remember Bucher refused to relinquish his son to anyone after the father-neglecting treatment he had received in the hospital. Then, magically, it was calm. Alex was asleep in his beribboned bassinet at the foot of our bed.

Three years later, our daughter Carli arrived on February 4, 1952.