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Show Christmas we would go back to Colorado and ride horses over those fields and meadows. Meanwhile, Much Ado About Nothing was a success. I played the role of Benedick perfectly. Well, not perfectly, but at the time it felt that way. And on a Wednesday in late November we drove with Ben and Amelia in her green Chevy downtown to the Cook County Courthouse, took the elevator up to the second floor, where I presented our license and paid the $5 fee for the judge. The clerk took my money and returned a receipt as casually and impersonally as if I had bought a ticket to Disneyland. We walked down a wide corridor to the anteroom of the judge's chambers, there to sit with other couples waiting our turn like patients in a dentist's office. The judge was from downstate Illinois, here in Chicago for a brief time to take his turn at the profit of marriage, but for all that, and the long line of couples waiting, he welcomed us cordially into the chambers. He was no taller than I was, though more thickset and grejiy and prosperous looking, and he smiled and spoke to us with courtesy. He told Kite in her new blue suit that she was a oeautiful bride, and his eyes meant it; he told Amelia he wished ne could have mirried her and Ben too; he told me I was a lucky man, nothing I didn't know but nice to hear. Everyone was smiling, and then everyone stopped smiling and solemnly that man married us. Back in th<=- snteroom everyone looked up nervously, their turns soon to come. We smiled modestly. In the corridor everyone looked at us, everyone knew, and everyone smiLed as if it was all a great joke. Then on the main floor we stepped out of the elevator and joined tne throng, Kite and I just anc ther couple on the streets of Chicago. She took my arm, patted her stomach: "You know, it was kind of nice having the kid along for the ceremony." ,,'e went back to Ricardo's on Rush Street and ace Italian food and drank wine. We passed around the document, our legal binding, our carriage cer- |
