The Lark: Vol 3, Issue 15, January 2024

The Wedding Cake

by Bill Hudson

On a beautiful sunny day, well eventually sunny day, in May 1975 my wife and I were married.

About a year before and after a two-year engagement, we had decided that it was time to make our relationship official, and not incidentally, seek God’s blessing on it. We needed to organize a marriage. Both our families lived thousands of miles away: my fiancée’s in New Mexico and mine in California, but we wanted to be married in Providence where most of our friends lived. We knew that, if a marriage were to happen, we would be the ones to plan and organize it without family assistance. So, for the next year, while both were starting new jobs, we became marriage planners.

Our first challenge was to find a place to be married and a clergyman to officiate. My fiancée was a cradle Catholic and wanted a Catholic wedding. Arranging one was not a straightforward proposition. Although she had lived in Providence for four years, she had not established a relationship with any Catholic parish. But, as fate (or perhaps providence) would have it, I had just accepted a faculty position at a Catholic college, replete with Dominican priests with the requisite credentials to marry us. Furthermore, we had found a spot on the Providence College campus, called the Grotto, where marriages were often performed. We thought an outdoor May wedding in the Grotto would be delightful. But would I a non-Catholic, a fallen away Quaker, and brand new to the faculty be able to obtain the college’s permission to use the Grotto and obtain the services a priest to perform the ceremony?

So, after only a few weeks on the faculty, I made an appointment with the College chaplain to explore what could be done. Upon hearing my story and to my surprise, the chaplain immediately said yes. That I was new to the faculty and a non-Catholic made no difference, at least, when he learned that I would be marrying a practicing Catholic. The Grotto would be reserved for the last Saturday the following May (with the small College chapel as a backup in case of inclement weather) and, although he could not officiate himself, he would see if his Assistant Chaplin, could do the deed, a providential choice.

We soon met with the Assistant Chaplin. When he learned that my fiancé was Mexican American and bilingual, he showed us a bilingual wedding liturgy and asked if we would like to use it for our wedding. It turns out that the priest had served in a Dominican parish in the Southwest and used the liturgy for couples there. We were delighted. We now had a place, a priest, and bilingual liturgy ready for a May wedding.

There only remained the other elements of the wedding to arrange. Over the next few months, we lined up a best man, maid of honor, and other members of the wedding party. There would not be many invitees, so we only needed a small reception venue. The wife of my Brown dissertation advisor suggested that we hold the reception in the garden of the Handicraft Club where she was a member, located just down the hill from the Brown Van Wickle gates and across from the Providence Athenaeum.  She made the necessary arrangements.

For a caterer, we chose Carr’s. The Carr’s Tearoom, located on the corner of Brown and Angell streets on, what then, was the edge of the Brown campus, was a venerable Providence institution that for decades had served elegant lunches and high teas on pink tablecloths to East Side ladies clad in their fashionable hats and white gloves. As Spring approached, most elements of the wedding seemed to be in place.

One element we overlooked in our planning was that we had scheduled our wedding for the week of Brown graduation. This created a challenge for housing our families since few hotel rooms were available. We managed to find space in our two apartments for my fiancée’s family and found a couple of rooms in the old Minden Hotel on Waterman Street for mine. The Minden had once been an elegant residence for young ladies coming to visit their Brown University beaus, but by 1975 was a rundown, undesirable location – hence the availability of rooms even on Brown graduation weekend. The rooms, however, were clean and my parents and brother gracefully accepted their accommodations.

That night before the wedding the skies opened in a deluge. The rain and wind were unrelenting. Prospects for an open-air wedding in the Grotto on the following morning seemed to be at risk. My fiancée immediately put her mother to work saying rosary after rosary – appealing to divine intervention to end the rain. I spent a fretful night at the Minden with my family, listening to the pounding rain, worrying about what was to come the following day.

In the morning, we made our way to Providence College. The rain seemed to have ended, but threatening clouds remained. Had my soon to be mother-in-law’s prayers been answered? At the Grotto, chairs had been set up for our guests and the priest was busy arranging everything at the altar. The string quartet that we had hired to provide the music soon arrived and began to play. Our guests trickled in and took their seats.

Soon, my beautiful bride was coming down the aisle, on her father’s arm. She was pale and I could tell quite nervous, but, when I saw her, my jitters vanished, and I broke into a wide smile – that remained throughout the ceremony. When my bride arrived at my side she whispered to me to stop smiling – concerned that my goofy grin was not fitting for the solemnity of the occasion and worried as well that our guests would think that she was marrying some escapee from the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I ignored her and kept smiling.

I smiled as the priest intoned the liturgical prayers – alternating in Spanish and English. I smiled through the wedding vows. I smiled as my Dad read the familiar passage from Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians about clashing cymbals and faith, hope and love. Just as the priest was pronouncing the final blessing, the sun broke through the clouds and bathed my bride and me in its light.

At the same time, bells from St. Pius V Church from across the street pealed in celebration.

We turned, arm in arm, and began our walk down the aisle to the sounds of “Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. My new wife now was also smiling with a red glow of joy on her cheeks. Midway on our walk, she squeezed my arm and asked: had I arranged for the Saint Pius bells to ring? I told my first spousal fib: “Of course, it was easy; only took a couple of phone calls.” (In truth, the ringing of the bells was pure coincidence. Our ceremony happened to coincide with a wedding held at St. Pius. The bells were for that wedding.). The fib seemed to be working so well that I began to explain how I had arranged the sunbeam as well but thought I should not push my luck.

After photos with the wedding party and family among the flowering trees on the PC campus, we made our way to the Handicraft Club where wedding guests were already gathered on small tables arranged around the garden. The champagne already was flowing freely and the Carr’s waiters were carrying around hors d’oeuvres and little tea sandwiches. My wife and I consumed little of either as we made our way from table to table, thanking our guests for their attendance and receiving their congratulations.

Soon it was time to cut the cake, a magnificent multi-layered creation by the Carr’s renowned pastry chef, that sat on a table in a room adjoining the garden. In the traditional manner, we, the newly married couple, gripped a knife in our hands and cut the first piece, feeding the first bites to one another. The cake then was cut for distribution to our guests. A helpful member of the Carr’s team, however, carefully saved the top layer of the cake. She told us that it was customary to save and freeze the top layer for good luck, to be thawed and eaten on one’s first anniversary. We had never heard of this but, after the reception, took the layer, carefully wrapped in aluminum foil, back to our apartment, placed it in a freezer bag and lodged it in the rear of our freezer.

Our first anniversary came and went without the cake leaving the freezer. Perhaps we forgot what the Carr’s employee had told us? I do not remember. Soon we moved to our house on Smith Street and the cake found its way to the rear of our freezer there. Our tenth, then twentieth anniversaries passed, and the cake remained, biding its time. When we moved to our house on the East Side of Providence in the late 1990s, the cake found itself in our freezer there. I remained untouched through our thirtieth and fortieth anniversaries.

Some time ago, while trying to find more room in our ever-full freezer, my wife decided that the frozen cake could be moved from the freezer to the refrigerator section. It lingered there for some years, until a couple of months ago, while cleaning the refrigerator, she suggested that it was time for the untouched cake, still in its original foil wrappings to go. We removed what was now a desiccated rock-hard lump. Pulling back a portion of the foil, I declared the cake mummified – producing a frown from my wife. Could this mummified lump of cake symbolize a mummified marriage? Of course not, I quickly said; rather the cake’s hardness, I reasoned, symbolized a solid and enduring marriage. This seemed a pleasanter thought to both of us.

The cake was placed on the kitchen counter, between our Farber ware coffee percolator and our bread box, to await disposal in the kitchen bin. Somehow, however, it has yet to make the trip of a few feet to the waste basket. For several weeks now, it has settled into its place between the coffee pot and the bread. Since removing it from the fridge, we have not spoken of it, as though our mutual vow of silence will avoid the unpleasant moment when, this piece of cake that has been with us for so long, will be no more.

I doubt that the cake will move from its present place for some time to come. Perhaps it will find itself eventually in one of our kitchen cabinets or, more likely, in a plastic bin in the pantry. Perhaps, in a couple of years, on our fiftieth anniversary, we will conceive of some appropriate ceremony for disposing of the cake, but I doubt that will even happen. I expect this layer of wedding cake will remain with us, a perpetual sacramental reminder of that glorious and, eventually, sunny day in May when the story of our marriage began.