Eleanor is a physician, an internist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Thomas is an architect at a firm in Center City that mostly does institutional work. They met at a Brandywine River Museum lecture in October 2022, at a talk on Andrew Wyeth's later interiors. They both came alone. They both stayed for the reception. They were engaged in March 2024 and married seven months later — fast by some standards, "the right pace for two people in their thirties who have already figured out who they are," as Eleanor put it on tour.
They booked Ashforth in May. They asked one question on their first tour: What does this cost? Eliza emailed them the pricing PDF that night. They emailed back the next morning to say they wanted October 12 for one hundred and forty-five guests, the parterre for the ceremony, the south lawn for the reception, and could they please have a first look in the library. They signed the contract the following Monday.
The ceremony was at four o'clock in the parterre. The boxwood was at autumn peak — the green still saturated but the surrounding oaks gone full bronze. Eleanor wore a long-sleeved ivory column dress with a cathedral veil, no train. Thomas wore a three-piece charcoal wool suit and a single white boutonnière. The officiant was Thomas's college roommate, who had been ordained online twenty-eight hours before the ceremony.
Cocktail hour was in the conservatory. The west light at five o'clock that day was the late-afternoon light the conservatory was built for; guests stood in it and did not move for nearly an hour. The waiters circulated with oysters and small lamb meatballs on bone-china plates the bride's grandmother had loaned for the day. The bar served Brandywine pours and an autumn punch the catering team had built around quince and Madeira.
Dinner was on the south lawn under a sixty-by-one-hundred white tent with clear sides. Fourteen farm tables in long parallel rows, family-style service, a Pennsylvania-Italian menu — pumpkin agnolotti, roasted chicken, late-season vegetables, walnut tortes. The jazz quintet played during dinner from the far end of the tent — quiet, conversational, no microphones. The first dance was Etta James, "At Last." The parents' dances were a Sinatra and a Bill Withers.
The late-night fire was in the library. The fireplace had been lit from five-thirty. By eleven o'clock, when the band shifted to slower material and guests began drifting in from the tent, the library was lit by twelve pillars and the firelight and three small lamps Eleanor's mother had set out herself. The bride and groom danced one slow dance there alone, before the rest of the wedding rejoined. We had to ask the photographer not to publish that photograph; she didn't.
Eleanor and Thomas left at eleven-thirty in a 1968 black Mercedes Pullman, which Thomas's father had restored, and which had been parked in the carriage-house courtyard since noon. There were no sparklers and no rice. Their guests waved from the front steps. Eleanor told Eliza on the phone three days later that the best part of the day had been the cocktail hour in the conservatory — that it had felt, she said, like the first hour of a long marriage.