By David Martin –
At the conclusion of last week’s story, an outwardly unattractive but inwardly beautiful young seamstress from the early part of the 20th century had told her three seamstress colleagues — outwardly beautiful young women who harbored malicious hearts — that she was engaged to be married and would be making her own wedding dress.
The three shallow seamstresses discovered that the betrothed woman was planning to make her dress out of corduroy. A corduroy wedding dress! The least wicked of the three wanted to tell the young woman what a colossal mistake she was making. The dress, made of different colored scraps of corduroy, would be humiliating, would make the young woman a laughingstock. But the other two wicked seamstresses said, “She thinks she’s so smart getting married before any of us have even had proposals, let her make a fool of herself.”
The plain seamstress never asked the others for an opinion about the dress she worked on, but they came around, false of heart, to tell her how beautiful it was.
On the wedding day, the three mean seamstresses made sure they got aisle seats, the better to witness their colleague’s total humiliation. “Look at the groom,” said the seamstress who had followed the plain woman when she had dinner with her fiance. “I told you he was handsome.”
As indeed he was. Dressed in a fine, expensive suit. Accompanied by equally dashing groomsmen. Why can’t we have men like that, each of the three seamstresses wondered.
The wedding music started and the plain young woman entered the back of the church. The finished corduroy wedding dress was even more of a disaster than the three envious women could have imagined. There seemed to be no plot or plan to the dress. Just scraps of brown and red and white corduroy, layered over each other in a heaping, haphazard manner.
The three young women were beside themselves, seeing their workmate’s total humiliation.
The bride took a few steps when the priest at the front of the church held up his hand. “The music will stop now. The bride and the groom have asked that we have absolute silence in the church. Not a sound, please.”
Everyone complied as the bride began marching down the aisle, swinging her arms. She looked ridiculous. But then…then you could hear the sound all that corduroy was making as it rubbed together. It sounded like … if a beautiful wedding dress had been described to you but if you had never seen a wedding dress … the sound this corduroy wedding dress made as the bride came down the aisle was exactly what a beautiful wedding dress would SOUND like. It whispered, it rustled, it softly sang.
One of the three seamstresses tapped her friends on their shoulders and pointed to the groom. His head was up, he was looking into space, eyes closed, concentrating on the sound of the corduroy wedding dress. “Blind,” said one of the three. When the bride reached her groom, he found her hand and drew her into his arms. “At this moment, you are the most beautiful woman on earth.” One of the three seamstresses, the one whose heart was not so shriveled as the others, wept as she told her two friends, “He’s right.”
