Tying the Knot

I SEE IN YESTERDAY'S New York Sunday Times that Cintra Eglin went and set her nuptials for the spring with Wayne Clifford Wilcox. "Cintra Eglin Sets Nuptials For Spring," the headline says.

Seems that Cintra--she's got a middle name too, just like Wayne, and it's Emlen--puts in her day's work as a legal assistant with an office called Drinker, Biddle & Reath, which is a law firm over in Philadelphia. Wayne, on the other hand, toils as an investment officer with the Republic Venture Group in Dallas.

Judging from what the author of the article wrote next, Cintra went to high school at the Princeton Day School, which on a map of New Jersey is fairly near the town of Lawrenceville; that's where Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Wilson Eglin make their home, according to the article. Mrs. Thomas Wilson Eglin--the author didn't say whether her name's Cintra too--is the chairman of the board of that day school so I guess she and Cintra had a lot in common to talk about around the Eglin dinner table. Which you'd think would have made Thomas Wilson feel left out, except he's in the schooling business too, being dean of students at the Lawrenceville School, as the article tells you.

In fact, when you think about it, poor Cintra must have been just about fed up with all that New Jersey school talk, since she's gone and hurried off into the legal assistant business in Philadelphia.

That was probably quite a break for Cintra to make, going off to Philadelphia like she did. But I wager she was happy to be somewhere else besides the Lawrenceville-Princeton area for a change. The article only mentions one time until now that she made it out of New Jersey--to get presented at the Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball in New York in 1977. Why, she even went to college in Princeton, in the university they've got there, and so she must have seen quite a bit more of her folks than most young people in college ever want to. Maybe she even lived at the Eglin home in Lawrenceville the whole time. And you know what that means: more talk about school stuff.

Anyway, she went and picked a place for starting out on her own that wouldn't be too traumatic for her--Philadelphia, I mean. The New York Times reporter found out that Cintra's grandparents on her father's side, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald C. Eglin, live in Bryn Mawr, which is not far from Philadelphia on a map of Pennsylvania. As for her other grandfather, Charles H. Baird, he lives right smack in Philadelphia.

Now you might be wondering what Wayne Clifford Willcox over in Dallas has to do with any of this. Seems that his roots are way out in Pasadena, California, him being the son of Dr. and Mrs. Jonas Clifford Willcox of that city. Dr. Willcox is an orthodontist right in Pasadena, the article says. Before he went down to become an investment officer in Dallas, he got himself a master's degree at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Before that, he went to Princeton University too, graduating in 1975.

Now even when I read about all those facts concerning Cintra and Wayne--who are going to tie the knot in the spring, don't forget--I still had a big question I wanted to know the answer to, and I was kind of surprised that a newspaper as respectable as The New York Times, which writes about wars and complicated politics all over the world, left this question hanging.

See, Wayne graduated from college in 1975, two years before Cinta got presented at her Debutante Cotillion. I haven't seen one of those cotillions ever, but I'm told a girl gets one when she's about a senior in high school, or maybe her first year in college if she drags her feet about it. Assuming Wayne and Cintra had a pretty normal education, when he was a college boy at Princeton, she was a seventh-up-to-tenth grader at her mother's day school.

The rest of their lives, as far as I can make out, they were never in the same county, and they still aren't, her working with the Drinker folks in Philadelphia and him being an investment officer way down in Dallas.

So the question that The New York Times didn't answer for me is: when did Wayne and Cintra first get to know each other? When Wayne was at the university and Cintra was in seventh grade? I've heard of steamier romances, but I can't imagine the dean of students would have tolerated this one. Maybe Cintra used to visit Wayne at the Wharton School when she was down in the area visiting her grandparents, but those hardly seem like the best circumstances for a young couple to get to know one another.

What I finally wound up concluding is that Wayne and Cintra just don't know each other that well at all, except for possibly a couple of conversations around the Eglin dinner table in Lawrenceville. Which explains, when you stop to think about it, why Cintra went and set her nuptials for the spring, like the story said.