Jenny Got Married (part one of two)

Jenny Got Married

Make no mistake, a wedding is the bride’s day. Tonight my Jenny got married.  Jenny is not my daughter as I don’t have my own children. Yet, no, that’s not exactly so.  I’ll defer to Mr. Chip’s dying words, “I thought I heard you saying it was a pity… pity I never had any children. But you’re wrong. I have. Thousands of them.”   

Both Mr. Chipping and I have no biological offspring, but we have many ‘kids’ we taught and watched grow up, many we keep in touch with, a few who as dear to us as family, perhaps even more so.  My kids are not bound to me by blood or biological obligation.  That they choose to have me in their lives, and, to the extent that Jenny has, is of her want, and I love her for it. 

The venue: our city’s art museum, a magnificent structure built in the 1930’s of Georgia pink marble and a collection of over 11,000 pieces.  The galleries were open to guests, some of whom perused them following the wedding ceremony in the fountain court and before dinner.  I felt the need to check in with Lady Redesdale. “How have you been?” I asked. “It’s been a while.”

Not quite a decade ago, Jenny arrived at the school where I am a Spanish teacher.  She was a transfer in her sophomore year from a very small town out state.  She was timid and pretty and unsure with huge, gorgeous brown eyes.  Instantly I felt the need to watch over her from a distance when I recognized that she would instantly attract the wrong kind of attention from the ‘big city’ boys for whom she appeared to be a walking piece of candy.  Of course, there was very little I could and did do, but it didn’t stop me from keeping tabs on her.  She, like all young people, would have to figure these things out on her own.  Jenny did.  It was a jagged line that took her from a rough little town in green acres to a very affluent independent school in the city to Jenny discovering her creative talents to bad boys to good times and a few falls from grace that were tantamount to getting knee-capped with an axe handle.       

On one occasion, a tragic event in Jenny’s life landed her in the hospital where she nearly died.  The following day in class, taking roll, all aware of the incident, I stopped on her name and said to the small class of older teenagers, “we almost lost our Jenny last night, didn’t we,” and just sat looking at the desk.  Everything just stopped. Long enough for a student and friend of Jenny’s to walk to my desk, put an arm around me and whisper in my ear, “but we didn’t, Mr. Fino, we didn’t.”   

Jenny’s problems opened a dark, Pandora’s box of horrors in her life at that time.  She tumbled down an abyss of uncertainty, detachment from good people, into distrust and bad situations.  Jenny struggled, bedight with confusion draped in denial yet so wounded and directionless.

At that time, when she was seventeen, her parents okayed me to come pick her up on a rainy Saturday to get her out a bit, with someone they knew to be trusted and safe.  They knew that Jenny considered me to be someone with just enough distance that she would open up, someone she talked to, and she did. 

So we went to the museum on that rainy Saturday.  Jenny seemed then so resigned and forlorn, and it worried me.  The love-of-life tractor beam had drained from her big, beautiful eyes and she just wasn’t interested.  In anything.  Jenny shuffled the galleries in slippers, flannel warm-ups and a too-big fleece that she wrapped herself in like a child’s smell blanket.  I knew she loved art, and I also recognized that she didn’t quite know how to navigate this place.  

Eventually we arrived at the portrait of Lady Redesdale by English artist John Hoppner. 

 

Jenny stopped and the two made a connection. “I think she has a few things to tell, you, Jenny… take your time.”  

Jenny did.  About ten minutes.  Just staring that that painting, looking into Lady Resendale’s languid, calling eyes.  It was the most interest Jenny had shown in anything for a long time.  They must have had quite the talk.