Four Days After

My parents arrived thirty minutes before the ceremony.

Four days earlier, I had been near the top of the stairs in our house when somebody called attention to the television. A plane had struck a building in New York. I came down to watch, and I think I saw the second plane hit the other tower. I cannot honestly reconstruct every detail of that morning. I remember the uncertainty that followed, and the fact that our wedding was four days away.

Vincent, my best man, and my younger sister had arrived from England about a week before the wedding. My parents and elder sister were still trying to make the journey, as was Sharon, an old friend from my days at Bart’s in London. She had been an undergraduate when we met, and our friendship had always been entirely platonic. We later shared an apartment for about a year in St. Louis. Somehow, Sharon and my family ended up in Pittsburgh, despite making separate travel arrangements. I cannot reconstruct precisely which flights were cancelled, which resumed or how the travellers found one another. I remember hoping they would arrive, and being relieved when they did.

The decision to proceed apparently made local television news. I recall Andy Banker from Channel 30 covering the wedding that was still going ahead. A wedding is not normally an act of public defiance. In September 2001, even the comparatively simple ambition of assembling one's family for a ceremony had become newsworthy.

Sharon was one of my groomsmen. Yes, a woman. “Groomsman” described her allegiance rather than her sex. In a week when arranging a flight had become a feat of international diplomacy, this was one part of the wedding I could manage without a committee.

We were getting married at the Music Stand in Tower Grove Park, St. Louis. It was September 15, 2001, four days after the attacks. At least they had found one another and a hotel.

I remember the annual Balloon Glow being cancelled that week. Travel plans had fallen apart everywhere. My concern was more particular: I wanted my parents at my wedding.

I had rented morning suits for my father and the groomsmen, and kept them ready. When my father and Sharon finally arrived, I handed over their suits. They changed with very little time to spare. Sharon looked fantastic. Thirty minutes was enough. It was not a method of wedding planning I intended to recommend.

Jayne and I had met the previous year at the Barnes & Noble where she worked. I had come to St. Louis in 1997 for medical residency and to build my future. Meeting her had not been part of the plan when I crossed the Atlantic. Neither had a wedding in a park or a reception at a planetarium. By September 2001, however, these were arrangements we had made together.

I had been more useful on some arrangements than others. Jayne once called, annoyed that I would not express an opinion about the flowers and the cake. I thought I was being agreeable by leaving the choices to her. She wanted an opinion. I had been willing to get married, but had apparently failed to develop a position on icing.

On the music, I had one.

Our first dance was supposed to be Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend.” Queen had been my favorite band throughout my teenage years, and anyone who knew me knew how much I loved Freddie Mercury. I had chosen the song and Jayne had approved. Marriage seemed to me as though it ought to be a friendship more than anything else. The title said what I wanted it to say.

After the ceremony, just the wedding party went over to the Ritz in Clayton to hang out before the reception. We were not staying there. That was where our first dance actually happened, impromptu, to Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String.” I loved that song too.

A more cautious man might have worried about whether a spontaneous first dance in a hotel was quite what management had in mind. I considered it, briefly. There were other things to worry about that week.

I remember that there was considerable good cheer that day, perhaps especially because we were gathering only four days after September 11. In my memory, television reporter Andy Banker covered the wedding for a local news broadcast. I have not been able to find the footage, and I will not pretend to remember every detail of his report. I remember the strange pleasure of having people celebrate together after a week when almost every public image had been of grief.

We had planned Queen and ended up with Sinatra. My parents had arrived. Jayne and I were married. The afternoon had already given us more than we had dared count on.

A park, the Ritz, a planetarium, and eventually the Cheshire Inn for the night. We covered a respectable amount of St. Louis in the course of becoming husband and wife. I remember the Cheshire as quaint, with a name the British and Americans could find different ways to pronounce. I think our room was called Camelot.

Our reception was at the planetarium at the St. Louis Science Center. Jayne’s mother worked as secretary to the president of the Science Center, and I have always suspected that she helped make the arrangements possible. I have wondered whether ours might have been its first wedding reception, but I cannot vouch for that. I cannot now tell you exactly what the venue cost, either. What I do remember is the kindness behind the arrangement. It was a place no ordinary wedding planner would have put on my list when I came to America, and here we were.

We had married at the Music Stand in Tower Grove Park, made it to the Ritz for a dance, and still had a planetarium reception ahead of us. Four years earlier, I had arrived in St. Louis thinking mainly about medical training. I had not imagined this scene, much less the sequence of events that would follow it.

I had arrived with two suitcases, one largely full of books. My parents had made a much more consequential journey from India to Britain when I was too young to remember it. I had inherited the willingness to move countries, though not quite their ideas about what a person should carry from one home to the next.