The Spouse

It’s Friday evening, and Veronica R. Heller ’05 is waiting to see her husband.

Sitting in the grass in front of Lamont, backpack beside her, Heller prepares for a familiar ritual. For the last three years, she alternated visits to her then-fiance and now-husband Mark Alfano, a senior at Princeton. She’s got a seven-hour journey from the Square to her husband’s front door ahead of her, but she’s used to it.

It’s just that this year a few things have changed, starting with the whole “wife” business.

“I am a wife, but that word doesn’t apply to me,” Heller says.

Sitting poised on the ground, with a lacy cardigan framing her bright blue eyes, she looks like a Jane Austen heroine.

This August, the Cabot House senior and her boyfriend Mark made a longtime commitment legal.

“Now I feel like a lot of the pressure’s off,” says Heller, who is planning a larger ceremony for the summer. “Now I have to say ‘my husband,’ and that’s very bizarre.”

Next on her plate are graduate school applications; Stanford, Columbia, New York University—wherever she and her husband can study together.

And then there’s the thesis, on poets Hopkins and Hardy, whose deadlines are creeping closer every day.

“I’m losing my mind right now,” says Heller. “For the first time in my Harvard career, I’m taking classes that aren’t English or cores.”

Heller and Alfano’s courtship was quick. The summer before their senior year of high school, they met at the prestigious New Jersey Scholars Program.

“I see this guy in a very brightly colored Hawaiian shirt playing Frisbee,” Heller says. That was the start of conversations that lasted late into the night.

The two began dating two months later, after their first kiss at a Scholars reunion. Engagement came two months after. Each wore silver rings with a quotation from the Song of Solomon in Hebrew: “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”

“We obviously hit it off,” Heller says. She kept the engagement a secret—even from her sister and mother—just as Jane Fairfax did in the Jane Austen novel “Emma,” she says. The differences in their family backgrounds—hers leaned liberal, his conservative—also complicated matters.

“If I had told them that I was engaged, that would have not gone very well,” she said.

The decisive moment came finally two years later, the summer after freshman year. “They looked like they’d been pole-axed,” Heller said.

That wasn’t the case for her roommates right before Heller’s plunge into marital bliss this August. Sarah M. Fine, one of Veronica’s roommates, wrote to Heller by e-mail about the upcoming marriage over the summer.

“I think she just wanted to make sure that she wasn’t on a wavelength that was all her own,” said Fine. By then, she said, Alfano had become “sort of a part of our room.”

Heller, not being the Bride Magazine type, opted for a small marriage ceremony at a Cranford, N.J., courthouse. A man lounging in shorts and munching on a Snickers bar also witnessed the ceremony—unlike the other haunters of the violations bureau, he hadn’t mustered the tact to scoot away from the group of friends and family.

The marriage was a prelude to the larger event and party that she’ll have this summer, filled with songs and poetry, with her father administering the vows instead of an outsider.

After years of weekends spent scribing sonnets to Alfano, she’ll read a Shakespearean classic that not only typifies their long-distance relationship, but also features her huband’s first name, Mark. That’s 116— “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments...”—a favorite among the Austen set, having been featured in 1995’s Sense and Sensibility.

Though Alfano was her first boyfriend, she feels that there’s no chance that she’ll regret her decision to marry early. “It just seemed inevitable,” she says. “I’m not afraid that there’s someone out there who would be more perfect for me.”

But now, the honeymoon’s over, and she’s fallen back to reality—a thesis to start, applications to send, and a wedding party to plan.

“I wish I could wake up five months from now and have it all over,” Heller says.

Five months from now is a dream she and Alfano have been planning for years. Next year, they hope to be studying in the same city, if not in the same University, earning their Masters’ degrees. Then onto PhDs, teaching jobs, research—children?

Heller laughs at the thought. “I can barely organize my binders. I can’t see myself managing a human life,” she says. “Mark and I have earned our time together”—that is, alone.

This weekend at Princeton, after the four-hour bus ride and the drive home, the happy couple took refuge at a Bela Fleck and the Flecktones concert, far away from theses or grad-school talk.

Heller still remembers the not-so-lovely first impression Mark made on her father years ago. The couple had fallen asleep on the couch downstairs after talking late into the night—and were startled awake at 3 a.m. by her father’s angry screaming.

What a contrast to the second semester of junior year, when she and Mark both studied in Oxford and lived three doors down from each other, a first test of their powers of cohabitation.

“We learned that we can do it,” she said.