Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage by Dina Matos McGreevey Page A

fund-raiser, I’d also had a lot of experience as an event planner—and when they came back from the printer, I went online to get directions to include in the invitations. This was about four weeks before our wedding date, so when I realized that the online photograph didn’t remotely resemble the chapel we’d chosen, I called Jim in a panic. He happened to be in D.C. that day. As soon as he could, Jim went to Georgetown and discovered that, sure enough, there was an error in the paperwork. Instead of being given permission to marry in Copley Crypt, a cozy little cave of a chapel, we’d been given permission to marry in St. William’s Chapel—a large, drafty barn.
    “It’s awful,” Jim said when he called me a couple of hours later. “It’s much too big, not intimate at all. The rugs are frayed, the seats are old and uncomfortable. We can’t get married in this place.”
    “OK,” I said. My panic had subsided now, and I switched back to event-planner mode. “I’ll take care of it.” I remembered that the catering director at Hay-Adams had said we could also marry there if we wanted. I called him right away. Luckily, the ballroom was available all day, which meant we could have our ceremony there, as well as our reception.
    We had known all along that, because Jim was divorced, the ceremony wouldn’t be performed by a Catholic priest, so we’d asked Robert Counselman, an Episcopal priest and Jim’s friend, if he could come to Washington and officiate.
    “Sure,” Father Counselman said. “I’d be honored.”
    That’s when we encountered our next glitch. Father Counselman had spoken too soon. As it turned out, he didn’t have the authority to marry us in Washington, D.C., because it was outside his jurisdiction. Luckily, he figured out an alternative pretty quickly. We’d have to come to his church, Trinity Episcopal in Woodbridge, sometime before we left for D.C., where he’d take care of the legally binding technicalities—a set of no-frills “I do’s.” Then, on what we continued to think of as our “real” wedding day, he would come to the Hay-Adams and perform a more elaborate ceremony. With those issues resolved, we went forward with our plans.
    On October 4, Jim and I were scheduled to meet Father Counselman at 7:00 P.M. at his church. Jim was coming from a fund-raiser for Al Gore at Jon Bon Jovi’s house but had promised to leave early and get to the church on time to meet me and Kevin McCabe, his best man, and Celia, my matron of honor. Beyond the five of us, no one knew about the Thursday-night vows. Why should we have told anyone? To us, it wasn’t the “real” wedding. No wedding rings, no music. Just technicalities and paperwork.
    It rained torrentially that day, and Jim called to say he was running late.
    “The rain is so bad, and there’s so much mud here that our wheels just keep spinning,” he said. “We are really stuck in the mud. We’ll get out, but it’ll take a couple of guys to give us a push.”
    In a movie, with appropriate music, the image of a car spinning its wheels in the muck might correctly augur the future that awaited us. But this was real life, and so, at least for that day, the mud was just mud and the rain was just rain.
    I was wearing an off-white suit for the occasion, which luckily was protected by my raincoat. Nevertheless, after arriving at the church, I had spent the first few minutes getting mud off my stockings and fixing my makeup, which was threatening to wash out. The four of us stood around in Father Counselman’s office, a plain room with a desk and some bookshelves. No altar, and if there was a cross, I don’t remember it.
    Suddenly Jim burst in. “Sorry I’m late, folks,” he said, turning to me and giving me a wet hug. He kissed me and held my hand, then took his place in the little semicircle where we’d all been standing.
    “Well, is everyone ready?” Father Counselman asked, after a few more minutes of chat.
    Jim squeezed