The Courthouse Steps Sixty Five Years Later

The cedar chest

I did not go over the next day. I needed a day. But on Thursday I went back after school, and Grandpa was asleep in his recliner with the Twins replay on, and Grandma was folding dish towels at the kitchen table with great care, matching the corners, folding them in thirds the way she has my whole life.

I did not bring up the party. I’d stopped asking about the money. It was Glen’s call, and Grandpa had made his, and I was done pushing on a door two people I love were holding shut.

But I wanted to see the picture.

I knew it existed. I’d seen it once when I was little, maybe seven or eight, when Grandma was looking for a tablecloth for Easter and lifted the lid of the cedar chest at the foot of her bed.

A small black-and-white photograph with a scalloped white border, the kind they printed back then. She had held it up to me and said, “That’s your grandpa and me, the day we got married,” and then she’d put it back, and I’d never thought about it again.

“Grandma,” I said, “do you still have your wedding picture? The one on the courthouse steps?”

She stopped folding.

“In the cedar chest,” she said, without having to think about it at all. “Under the good tablecloths. The Christmas one’s on top.”

That is the thing nobody tells you about Alzheimer’s when it’s early. People think it is like a light switch, on or off. It is not. It is like a house where the hallways keep moving around. Some rooms you can’t find anymore. Some rooms are exactly where they always were, with the lights on.

I went into the bedroom and lifted the lid. The cedar smell came up, sharp and clean, and there was the red Christmas tablecloth with the poinsettias, and under it the white linen one for funerals and confirmations, and under that a flat brown envelope with nothing written on it.

The photograph was smaller than I remembered. Maybe three inches by four. Two kids on wide stone steps, in front of the big doors.

Grandma was twenty. She had a white dress on, just below the knee, and a short lace veil pinned back from her face, and a little bouquet in both hands, and she was smiling straight at the camera.

Grandpa was twenty-three. He had a white shirt and a thin black tie and a haircut so short you could see his scalp, and a carnation on his lapel, and he was standing so close to her their sleeves touched, like he could not believe his luck.

On the back, in blue ink, in Grandma’s old handwriting, before her hand got shaky: Arnie and me. Oct. 14, 1961. Courthouse.

I brought it out to the kitchen and set it down on the table in front of her, on top of the towels.

She looked at it for a long time. Long enough that I wondered if she knew who they were.

Then she touched the edge of the veil in the picture with one finger.

“That’s my mother’s veil,” she said. “She wore it in 1938. She made me promise to keep it nice.” She looked up at me. “Is it still in the cedar chest?”

I went back and looked. It was. Folded in tissue paper at the very bottom, gone the color of heavy cream, the lace thin as frost on a window.