My mother is wearing her wedding dress, yards of white satin and lace, and she has her veil pushed back from her head, held in place by a wreath of flowers, which looks, in its slight blurriness, like a crown of tiny diamonds. My mother is wearing a simple string of pearls. My father is staring straight out at the camera and smiling. My mother is holding a glass of what I think must be champagne, and she is also smiling, but she is looking just slightly off to the side, as though something restless in her draws her from the center. In her right hand she is holding a bridal bouquet, most of which lies outside the space of the photograph; on her left hand, the hand holding the glass, her engagement ring is sparkling in the light.

When my parents were married, my grandfather’s illness and death had eaten most of my mother’s money, and my father had not yet taken over at the bank. The reception was just drinks, at the Plaza. It was in December. I have always imagined it like this: the ceremony ended, and my parents led all their friends and relations out into the crisp air of December. Everyone proceeded down Fifth Avenue in the light snow. The Plaza fountain would have been filled with small pines and lit with strings of Christmas lights.

This is what my mother once told me: on her wedding morning, she woke feeling tense and anxious. Her mother was busy getting dressed, and she also got dressed. Her mother came and corrected her hair, and corrected the way the dress hung, and then fussed about her own hair and her own dress. No one spoke to her about anything but her dress and her hair. And all the time she wondered whether she was making a terrible mistake. But when she got to her own wedding ceremony, and walked to the foot of the aisle, she saw my father look back at her. “It was like a thousand lights had suddenly gone on,” she told me. “He looked so happy, happier than I had ever seen anyone look, and all for me; and I stopped being afraid, and I knew that I wasn’t making a mistake, that I was doing the best thing I’d ever done.” I can imagine the music—my father would have selected the music carefully—how its steady rhythms must have kept my mother walking down the aisle slowly and ceremonially, kept my father standing at the head of the aisle, kept them from doing anything more, for the moment, than look at each other. The photo in the silver frame, taken at the reception, is the aftermath of that look, and you can almost hear the music, a wedding march, romantic and precise, compelling them forward as only marches can.