Same Dress, Second Husband

When my first husband died in 2005, I boxed up some of his things for the boys when they were older. His hospital ID, pager, and stethoscope. His wallet and all of its contents (driver’s license, about $40.00, an expired Blockbuster membership card). And a bunch of his T-shirts.

Reuben was a big man, and at the time it was hard to imagine the boys ever wearing any of his clothing. They were one, three, five and seven at the time of his death, more or less.

Fifteen years later, when I finally pulled the box out of storage, the stethoscope and pager were sorely outdated. But the shirts fit. With a little room to spare.

Even Bruce, practical by nature, picked up a shirt or two. These were shirts made out of thick cotton, not like the flimsy stuff available these days that falls apart after a summer. I guess he thought he might as well wear these and save himself a trip to Gift and Thrift for good second hand shirts.

Is it weird to see my second husband walking around in my first husband’s shirts? Or my boys, now men themselves, wearing their dead father’s clothing?

I guess it is, in a way, but not as weird as the rest of life. And it’s also comforting to see the boys grow into the shape and character of both of their fathers. I see Reuben in their eyes and foreheads, whether they’re wearing his shirts or not. And I see Bruce in their mannerisms and hear him echoed in their idioms regardless of what they wear.

Often, I find myself grateful that Bruce is not territorial about Reuben. We don’t feel disloyal if we talk about Reuben or if old friends express surprise at how much the boys favor him. (Other friends think the guys look like Bruce. Still others think they look like me.) Bruce is confident, comfortable in his own space, and not threatened by our PB memories. Our lives fall into two chapters, PB and AB–Pre Bruce and After Bruce.

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This year my youngest sister’s birthday fell on Thanksgiving day. She has one more year this side of 50. She and her husband invited us to join them in DC for a weekend to celebrate.

A few weeks ago, she sent me a message–Hey Rose! I just ordered a flapper dress. What are you wearing? Part of our excursion was going to be an evening at our nephew’s bar in Mount Pleasant. Right before covid, he and three partners bought and opened their first business. Before they could even get started, covid shut them down for a year. They had just reopened, no small feat.

The place is a speakeasy, identified only by a number on a door next to a dentist’s office. There’s a typewritten note on the inside saying something cryptic about what to do if you need to leave something for “o.k.” The bar’s name is O.K.P.B.

So my sister Becky thought it would be fun to visit our nephew’s establishment in 1920s attire. Her husband sent Bruce a link to various Leonardo DiCaprio suits from The Great Gatsby.

Mind you, Bruce gets his clothing from Gift and Thrift and would rather butcher turkeys than go shopping. When a fedora showed up in a cardboard box in our garage I knew I had to come up with something to wear.

I have a 1920s style dress in a dry clean bag hanging in my closet. It’s a tea-length gown, ivory lace over satin, hand made by my mother. My daughter-in-law Leigha wore it when she married Christian in our walnut grove at the farm two summers ago.

Before that, I wore it when I married Reuben in 1995.

It has been a wedding dress twice, and in between it was the base for Lady Galadriel’s gown when Reuben and I filled half a movie theater with friends and family in full costume for opening night of The Two Towers and Return of the King. (For The Fellowship of the Ring, we just went in elven cloaks and each film after that the costumes got more and more elaborate.) I took off the lace cap sleeves of my wedding dress to build the sweeping sleeves for Galadriel’s costume, and I remember my mother saying, “I’m not going to help you put the original ones back on again if you ever change your mind!” I still have them, tucked into tissue paper in a box, along with satin roses and strings of pearl beads I took off the dress when it was reinvented for Middle Earth.

So I pulled out the dress for it’s fourth incarnation, bought opera gloves and lipstick, and we went to DC the weekend after Thanksgiving.

I think we thoroughly embarrassed our nephew Dylan, but he put a good face on it, mixing a hundred different drinks from memory over the course of the evening, shaking up some with egg white, some with freshly crushed mint leaves, garnishing one with a slivered orange peel, pouring one over a block of hand chipped ice, slipping a pat of butter into another streaming hot. Talking to us all the while, never losing track of proportion, never looking up a recipe.

I should end with a nod to new wine in old wineskins. Yes, of course that’s true. And. Sometimes you need old wineskins to bridge the past with the future. An old dress, reinvented. An old shirt, reworn.

It might lead to a place that’s totally new.