The High-Ceilinged Room

continued

On the radio a few years later, I heard a sermon about judgment day. "Narrow is the way which leadeth unto life!" the preacher thundered. I'd never heard that verse from the Gospel of Matthew-or much else from the Bible. But as the minister enumerated the requirements for admission to heaven, I nodded. Squarely in front of the gates of Paradise stood the Mairie of Geneva.

It was mid-November before we worked our way back up the rungs of authority to that high-ceilinged room. By then John and I had known each other three months, and for half that time had been pursuing authorization to marry What if, we pleaded with the senior official, we were to provide written permission from my parents?

"An affidavit," John added in a stroke of insight into Swiss mentality

"Legally documented," I picked up on it.

"Duly notarized," said John.

At affidavit the official looked up, at documented he nodded, at notarized he actually smiled. It was possible... with the proper papers, properly certified…

We cabled a plea to New York for a notarized statement approving the marriage, and in a week's time it arrived at Mme. Brulhart's pension: my parents' signatures and a notary's above an elaborate embossed seal that, we were sure, would satisfy the most bureaucratic eye.

It did not.

The official scanned it, shaking his head. It was too…it just didn't…"Look! The wife's signature is above the husband's. That's wrong to start with." There was only one document where there ought to be two. And so on.

We were as downcast pushing our bikes back up the hill as we'd been elated rolling down. From our separate pensions we wrote my parents twin descriptions of the latest rejection. We must have caught the flavor of fussy Swiss officialdom, because a week after our letters reached New York, two truly spectacular documents arrived on rue Charles Bonnet.

They were notarized statements worded the same as before, but this time on thick, cream-colored, legal-length paper encased in glassine and bound in royal blue folders. In addition to the crimp-seal of the notary, the sheets had a lower border made up of that postwar American novelty, grocery store savings stamps. Along the top was a row of eagles from my brother's ink-pad set, on the outside of the folders, the shield-shaped seal of The Schindler Bureau of Investigation.

My sister had added the clinching detail. A woman's signature, we'd written, carried little weight in Swiss law. Swiss women could not even vote -- nor, as Mme. Brulhart said, would a decent woman want to. To the sheet with Daddy's signature, therefore, Caroline had glued her treasured second-prize red ribbon from the local cat show.

It was these works of art that we carried to the Maine the next day We worried, in fact, that my fun-loving family had made too much of a game of it. But not even a suspicion of humor, apparently, brightened those solemn precincts. At the sight of the documents the senior official beamed. Now these were properly executed papers! We caught a certain wistfulness in his voice and feared for future applicants.

Two days later we were issued a marriage license.