Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [87]
The newspapers sheepishly recanted their stories a couple of days later when they re-reported Sylvia’s wedding, this time for real. The scene was, in fact, Morristown, New Jersey, where Hetty and Sylvia had occupied a boardinghouse during one of their frequent moves. To keep the actual date as secret as possible, they had sent no formal invitations. Just before nine o’clock on the morning of February 23, a cab pulled up in front of the building. Hetty and Sylvia emerged and dashed for the cab without a word. Reporters and other curious onlookers scrambled to follow the cab on the short ride to the railroad station, where at precisely 9:20 a special reserved car took them and other members of the wedding party on a short trip to Morristown. Sylvia and Wilks were married at noon at St. Peter’s Protestant Episcopal Church. The simple ceremony, performed by the Reverend Philemon F. Sturges, included no bridesmaids. Curiously, Ned does not appear in the newspaper accounts. Perhaps Hetty had told him to stay away, in order to put off speculation. The wedding party was small, not quite filling the front pews of the church. If anything, they were outnumbered by the reporters and curious onlookers who filled the back pews.
During the ceremony, Hetty sat in the front pew, near the center, wearing a black silk gown with white point lace. Sylvia did not wear a traditional white wedding gown. Instead, she wore a rather plain brown dress, festooned with a white feather boa wrapped around her neck, and a hat with a sheer black lace veil, and a white flower and feathers on top.
After the ceremony, there was a reception at the Morristown Inn.
“Mrs. Green, despite the many stories to the effect that she did not altogether approve of the match, seemed in excellent spirits,” the Times reported on February 24. “Even though she would not make any statement about the marriage, she did not seem to object when newspaper photographers shot the wedding party in front of the hotel. She stood in the front line with Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Astor Wilks.”
A formal picture from the wedding survives. It appears to have been taken outdoors, perhaps on the porch of the inn. Except for the bridal bouquet gripped in Sylvia’s white-gloved left hand, it might have been taken at any function. Little about the clothing bespeaks the nuptials that have just taken place; but more, the camera betrays almost no trace of emotion, of joy, at the occasion. Hetty, to the left of the camera, sits straight-backed and fully upright, her hands by her side, her head thrown back and chin raised, a stony expression on her face. Wilks stands in the background, wearing his formal dark coat, a hand on the back of either chair, his distinguished-looking face framed by a bald dome on top and bushy mustache hanging over his unsmiling mouth, and the only pictorial evidence that he is the groom rather than the father of the bride is the slight tilt of his head toward Sylvia. Sylvia is the only one who betrays any emotion, but barely; there is a ghost of a smile on her face. Under the veil and her spectacles one sees, not a full smile, but something in the eyes that indicates a sort of happiness. The picture seems a symbolic as well as actual portrait of this odd family—Hetty, proud, stoic, strong; Sylvia, wan, with some emotion struggling to escape, an expression not of outright joy on her wedding day, but of contentment.
For Sylvia, the transformation from Miss Green to Mrs. Wilks would mean an end to the cheap flats of Hoboken and Brooklyn, listening to her mother’s carpings on the foolish expenditures of others, an end to day coaches, pinching nickels, suffering through her mother’s hagglings, and empty hours at the Chemical National Bank. She had missed several stages of marriage—the happy optimism of newlyweds, when the whole world is bright and full of promise; the chaos of children; and the solidification