The wedding picture

They were married in the winter of 1938. She had sewn her own dress with the help of her mother. Her team of fellow hat-makers had helped her design her head-dress.

It was the only time that Jean would wear a tuxedo and white tie.

For the rest of their lives together, they slept under a large framed copy of their wedding portrait. That picture came to symbolize who they were. It survived the war. It was sacred to them, not to fall into the wrong hands.

Margo had always been appalled at the sight of old family pictures for sale at the flea market.

"I can't believe anyone could do this to their family!" she'd say. She was unable to imagine that anyone could be forgotten by their kin, their sepia portrait mildewing in a rickety frame. In those days, she could remember the names and relationships of people in several photo albums. She had stories about every one of them. Stories that were linked together in a meandering recollection of events.

"This here," she would say. "is your grandfather's sister. I never liked her. Your grandfather had two brothers and a sister. Their father died when he was just ten. He was the youngest. The sister and the older brothers had to go to work to help their mother. But your grandfather was allowed to study past fifth grade. His mother cleaned houses. I never liked the sister. She had a filthy mouth. Always swearing and saying bad things. I don't understand people who do this. We didn't mix with her very much. She did come to our wedding. I think she may have been pregnant with her second at the time. Let me seen, your mother was born in 1940 and she and so-and-so are 3 years apart, so that makes so-and-so a year older that she because I remember..." And on and on.

Shortly before he took his own life, Jean destroyed the big wedding portrait. He made sure that neither he nor Margo would ever end up for sale. A handful of smaller copies can be found in the family album. I took a snapshot of this one on the day before Jean's funeral.

Margo would disapprove of my publishing their picture on a public blog. But she is gone now. And I want to world to see how smart and hoepful she and Jean were on their wedding day.

The road

Jean and Margo met on the road that runs east-west parallel to the North sea, crossing every town along the coast. A windy, rain-beaten road bordered by long canals used to transport coal from the mines in Douai,fifty miles south, to the Dunkirk harbor and to Belgium and the Netherlands.

They walked two miles to work, four times a day, to commute from their parents' houses in St. Pol sur mer to their jobs on either side of the Jean Bart Plazza in Dunkirk. She was a hatmaker. He was an apprentice accountant for the French Electricity Company. She'd completed fifth grade. Since he was the youngest of his family, with two older brothers supporting his mother, he'd been allowed to study through the eighth grade and learn a trade.

Neither of them was allowed to frequent the dance halls or the beach. The road was where they socialized with people their age, most of them school friends or friends of relatives.

They'd seen each other plenty of times before Jean got the nerves to approach her. They were eighteen and it was a long courtship. Her father was very strict; she'd half made her mind to forego marriage and become a nun. But Jean was patient and determined - two qualities that would sustain him throughout life - he was also bold.

Long after they'd started walking together and Margo was still refusing to hold his hand or come close, he invited her to spend a few moments in the downtown park after work. He'd borrowed a camera from a friend. Althoug she wouldn't have her picture taken with him, she agreed to snap pictures of each other standing under an elm.

A few days later, Jean spent an evening cutting out his portrait with his mother's sewing scissors. He carefully glued the cutout next to Margo's own portrait and the next time he met her on the road, offered the picture of the made-up couple.

The cutout portrait was a decisive moment in their relationship. She had needed help visualizing her future with this good looking man who rode a red bicyle and wore a leather coat. He'd made her laugh. She started to hold his hand discreetly and to engage in a long battle with her father to earn her right to her own life and happiness.

The cut-out picture of Jean and Margo holds no special place in the family album. To them, it was but a small incident in their lige together, far less important their actual wedding day six years later. In fact, you would have to know what to look for to notice my grandfather's handiwork.

The love letters

In the months before he committed suicide, my grandfather destroyed all the letters he and Margo had written to each other during their long engagement and his five years as a POW in Germany. But I did find two small handmade cards in the drawer of their nightstand.

The first, in Margo's large, round handwriting simply says: "A good feast day and a big kiss. Margot." On the opposite page, the artist who drew the card wrote a few verses from Musset:

"Do not believe that my heart

Could ever forget you

It could cease beating

But never stop loving you."

The other card is a small rectangle of Bristol paper. Someone - perhaps Jean or one of his fellow POWs - painted a Lily-of-the-valley (Margo's favorite flower, which she grew outside the kitchen door) and a small pink flower. The other side is covered in Jean's tiny scrawl:

"My dear, I am sending you this small card for the birthday of our little Monique and for yours as well, in memory of the Lily-of -the-valley I was able to give you in years past on May 1st. Best wishes and tender kisses. Yours. Jean."

And below a thin line:

"Big kisses to Monique on her special day. I hope that she will like the card from her dad."

I wonder if the restrained tone of both cards had to do with the censors that read the mail between the POWs and their families. Or was it that my grandparents' formality extended to their private lives? They were never outwardly tender toward each other, except at the very end, when Margo lost her sight. Jean would hold her hand then, and do small things for her. And he did mourn her for sixteen long months before deciding to take his life.

"She was such a good woman" he kept repeating the days following the funeral. "Such a good woman." As if he'd just come to the realization.