Part 3 — Mothers Wedding Dress Hem
Inside the hem, wrapped flat in plastic, I found three things. A small savings passbook. A sealed envelope. And a photograph of a baby girl in a yellow knitted cap.
The passbook came from a credit union in Wilkes-Barre. Mom opened it in 1974 and fed it fifteen and twenty dollars at a time from every alteration she ever took in. With fifty years of interest, the balance was a little over $180,000. All those years of pins in her mouth, and my mother had quietly been a saver.
The envelope was addressed in her hand: For Glenn, to be read aloud only if Paulette is in the room. I read it at the front of the chapel while a hundred and forty brides listened without moving.
Mom wrote that at nineteen, before she met my father, she had a baby girl and was unable to keep her. She placed the child with a family in Allentown and signed the papers with a broken heart. She never told us, she wrote, because she feared we would think less of her.
The baby grew up to be the woman in the wedding dress. Her name was Naomi. She had found my mother ten years ago, and they had met quietly every month in the front room, over alterations that did not need doing.
The dress was my mothers own. She had never laid it in my fathers casket. She had made a copy for him. Her real dress she kept, and she asked Naomi to wear it on the day of her funeral, so that the daughter she had given up could walk the aisle she never could.
Paulette had known. At sixteen she found the adoption papers in a drawer, and she had never forgiven Mom for keeping a secret, or Naomi for existing. Her anger was never really about money, it was about a door she thought had been closed to her.
The funeral director set a hand on Paulettes shoulder, and she sat down in the front pew. Naomi knelt beside her. She said, I never wanted anything from this family but to know where I came from. Paulette said nothing for a full minute. Then she took her sisters hand.
The passbook belonged to all three of us, and Mom had written that too. One third each. Naomi tried to refuse hers. Paulette, of all people, put the passbook in her palm and closed her fingers over it.
We used part of the money to fix the roof on Prospect Avenue, the roof Paulette said we could never afford. The rest went into a fund in Moms name that sews bridal gowns for women who cannot pay for one.
The brides stayed for the luncheon in the church hall, and nobody ate cookies from a paper plate. Paulette carved the ham herself. Before she left, Naomi stood in the front room beside the old sewing machine, and then she set the yellow knitted cap on the windowsill, next to the pin cushion, where it still sits.
