The old pastor, who had married Otis and me in 1966, held the white envelope up to the light of the chandelier and read the name on the front to the whole reception hall in his deep Sunday voice. “Mr. Warren Pierce.” The string quartet had put down their bows. Delia stood at the head table with her champagne glass, and I watched the color leave her face from the top down. “Mabel,” she said, in a thin voice, “that man is not here. He left my daughter when she was six. He has not written in sixteen years.” From the last row of folding chairs, beside the open door, a tall man in a gray suit rose slowly to his feet.
I am Mabel Fairchild, eighty two years old, and I had found him in the spring. When I learned that Calvin had signed a prenuptial agreement with a clause about all future inheritance from the Fairchild family, I did what any woman does who has run a factory for fifty years. I hired an investigator. He found a trust, left to Savannah by her paternal grandmother, worth one million one hundred thousand dollars, to be released on the day of her wedding, with the signature of her father. He also found a shoe box in a closet in Atlanta, filled with sixteen years of birthday cards returned by the post office, every one stamped in the handwriting of Delia. Return to sender.
Savannah, in her white dress, stood very still at the head table with her bouquet loose in her hand. She looked at the man in the gray suit, with the gray eyes that were her own. Warren Pierce had taken three steps into the aisle, and he stopped as if afraid to frighten her. “Savannah,” he said hoarsely. “I wrote to you every year. I called your school. I sent a card on every birthday.” The guests had turned in their chairs. Delia gripped the edge of the table, and her knuckles went white, and the groom, Calvin, stood in his rented tuxedo, looking from one face to another.
A white envelope in the hand of an old pastor gave one furniture widow the length of a wedding reception to bring a bride back to her father in Savannah.
I gave my terms standing next to the head table, with my hand on the back of a chair. “Calvin, you will tear up page three of that agreement, here, in front of your wife. Delia, you will give your daughter the box of cards, tonight, and you will apologize to her father. The trust will be released as her grandmother wished, with no strings. And Mr. Pierce will dance with the bride, because it is her wedding day, and a father should have one dance. As for me, I will sit at whatever table you like, as long as it has a view of the floor.”
Delia sagged into her chair, and her voice, when it came, was a small cracked thing. “I was twenty six, and Warren had lost his job and his temper, and I was terrified he would take my little girl,” she said. “I told myself I was protecting her. By the time he got better, I was ashamed that I had lied so long. I returned the cards because every one was a reminder that I had kept her from him.” She turned to her daughter, tears running down her face. “Savannah, I took your father from you. I do not know how to give him back.”
But the old fear surged up. Delia snatched the white envelope off the table, pushed past the cake stand, and ran for the door to the ladies room, clutching it against her silk dress. She had gone half a dozen steps when the old pastor stepped across the aisle with his arms outstretched. The cellist, a burly young man with a bow in his hand, planted himself in front of the second door. Two groomsmen in matching ties moved up behind her, and Savannah said in a clear, steady voice, from the head table, “Mother, please. Do not run from me.”
Delia stopped in the middle of the floor with the envelope in her trembling hands, and the quartet and the guests and the pastor stood perfectly still. She looked at her daughter. Very slowly, she turned around and walked back to the head table, set the envelope in front of Savannah, and sank to her knees on the carpet in her silk dress. “I am sorry,” she said. Savannah lifted the face of her mother in both hands. Then she looked up at her father, and he opened his arms, and the whole hall of two hundred people began, quietly, to weep.
The consequences were mild and full of music. Calvin tore up page three, and then the whole prenup, and tossed the pieces into the champagne bucket. Warren Pierce danced with his daughter to an old song the quartet knew, and she laid her head against his shoulder, and I think half the room did not have a dry eye. Delia wrote to me in the weeks after, and she came to Statesboro on a Tuesday and sat with me on my porch for the whole afternoon. We never spoke of the pillar.
In the name of my husband Otis, who passed in 2022, I started the Otis Fairchild Fund. It pays for tuition and tools for young people learning furniture making and woodworking, and for family counseling for parents who have lost touch with their children, in Bulloch, Screven and Effingham counties. In the first year we sent twenty four apprentices to woodworking school and paid for sixty one counseling sessions. One was a seventeen year old from Springfield, Georgia, who built her first rocking chair, and who sent a card to the father she had not seen in nine years.
On a Sunday in the fall, I sat in the front pew of the big church downtown, in a navy dress and a pearl brooch, with no pillar in sight. Calvin and Savannah sat beside me, and in the row behind us sat Warren Pierce, and beside him, in a gray hat, Delia. The pastor, ninety years old and very frail, climbed into the pulpit and looked over the congregation. “Today,” he said, “I want to speak about the places we are given to sit.” And he smiled right at me, and I smiled back.
