Trepidation, resolve, and reconciliation

Last in a four-part series exploring the experiences of two brothers, one gay and one straight, celebrating their weddings this year.

On the sand of an artificial beach, near the roar of a man-made waterfall, flanked by more than a few surgically enhanced female physiques, Brian Hyett stands under a merciless desert sun and flashes a winning smile.

"This," Hyett says, "is what my gay brother does for me."

It is early May, and Hyett and 10 of his closest friends have come to the garish casinos of Las Vegas for an American rite of passage.

Hyett, a 30-year-old medical student from Brookline, will marry Amy Lowenthal, 27, of Lexington in a late-summer ceremony drawing on ancient ritual and family tradition.

The invitations are printed. The bridal dress has been fitted. The wedding cake is to be a confectioner's dream.

Now, it is time to play.

And Eric Hyett, Brian's 33-year-old brother, is chief choreographer of this bachelor-party weekend of limousines, liquor, and late-night revelry.

Eric helped choose the venue, booked the reservations, and is making sure the young men -- friends from Brian's days at Brookline High and Cornell -- not only party hard by night, but find time to relax by day.

As another mechanically propelled wave crashes nearby, the irony of Eric's role as master of ceremonies is not lost on the lounging men from Massachusetts.

Brian and Amy's wedding, still four months away, is a celebrated certainty.

But on this May day, just 16 days before Eric plans to marry his partner, Joshua Glazer, their wedding remains in doubt -- threatened by modern politics and musty procedure.

No one is throwing them a bachelor party.

"The guys this weekend were all talking about what a bachelor party would be for Josh and me," Eric said. "If I'm going to have a bachelor party, I don't want Josh there, right?"

But Josh is here -- here amid the glitz, in the national capital of quickie marriages and quicker divorces. The couple worry about what will greet them when they fly to Boston in two weeks to stake their claim to a marriage license many believe they have no right to hold.

As Brian's bachelor party winds down, and the revelers hail cabs to the airport to catch eastbound flights, Eric and Josh huddle in the corner of a dim casino cafe.

There will be no joyous run-up to their wedding. Instead, there is angst and anger -- and resolve.

"They are actively trying to take this away from us as it's happening," Eric said. "How good can that really feel?"

They live now in Laguna Beach, Calif. Eric holds a high-paying job at an information services company, and Josh is trying to get a wedding planning business off the ground. Within weeks, they will close on a home in nearby Lake Forest, where they hope to raise a family of adopted children.

As scantily clad waitresses brush past with carts of cocktails, the men bristle at the decision of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to enforce a 1913 law that would deny same-sex couples from out of state the right to marry in the Commonwealth.

"I am a Brookline High graduate, went to college in Massachusetts, went to grad school in Massachusetts, lived two-thirds of my entire life in the state," Eric said. "I am as Massachusetts as you can possibly get. ... Every couple deserves the right to get married in the state where they come from."

Josh agreed. "Isn't that what most people do?" he said. "I mean someone goes back to someone's family, usually."

"And why," Eric asked, "should Josh have to suddenly qualify as a Massachusetts resident? I mean that's ridiculous. These laws date back to the days of the worst chapters in recent history. Maybe in our country's history. It makes me mad on a daily basis to think about it."

As they speak, they already hold tickets for a trip to Boston and have begun to sketch plans to satisfy the legalities that may be imposed on them in Massachusetts.

And just after dawn on Saturday, May 15, they are aboard an American Airlines jetliner as it touches down at Logan International Airport after an overnight flight from Los Angeles.

Sixty hours later, they would be flying home.

Last-minute logistics

As the Hyett brothers prepare for their weddings, seven years have passed since their parents' marriage dissolved. The brothers have achieved separate, close relationships with their mother and father. But Norman and Barbara Hyett remain separated by a silent, icy gulf.

Barbara still conducts poetry workshops out of the family homestead in Brookline, and is dating a Brandeis professor, Martin Levin. Norman, now a retired school counselor and psychologist, has remarried. He lives with his wife, Maxine, a psychologist, in her childhood home in Winthrop, and is the captain of a charter fishing boat.

On the day before Massachusetts is to make history, becoming the first state to sanction same-sex marriage, a surprise spring rainstorm has blown up to wash away plans for the boys to join in a wedding-eve expedition for striped bass aboard Captain Hyett's craft.

Instead Norman, Brian, and the grooms-to-be -- Eric and Josh -- sit in the living room of Norman's tastefully decorated, oceanfront home, where they anticipate 11th-hour glitches and work out last-minute logistics.

Eric and Josh now hold a lease to an apartment in Norman and Maxine's home, a document that they hope will establish legal residency in Massachusetts and pass muster tomorrow morning in the Brookline town clerk's office.

"How dare they ask," Eric said. "But if they happen to, we've got stuff."

And the couple is wrestling with whether some traditions common in heterosexual unions make sense for gay couples. Should they call themselves husband and husband? Spouse and spouse? Partners in life?

"How about dude and dude?" Eric later jokes.

They have decided to register for gifts, choosing linens and dinnerware from Bloomingdale's, and kitchen appliances from Williams-Sonoma.

Josh, meanwhile, is weighing a more personal choice. He may take Eric's name.

"I know Eric's not going to do it," he said. "It's his career that's kind of at the prominent end of the spectrum right now. And I think that's what it was ..... based on years ago. So I don't know if I would change it completely to Hyett. But I might do like Glazer-Hyett. I haven't firmly decided."

Josh's mother, Joan, has begun to plan a large wedding ceremony on Long Island, for the autumn of 2005. The guest list will number about 200.

But for now, all that can wait. As a slanting rain obscures the ocean vistas beyond Winthrop Shore Drive, there is deeper talk of destiny, legacy, history -- and the difference between the marriage Brian looks forward to on Aug. 29 and the one Eric and Josh anxiously anticipate in 24 hours.

"What I need from Brian as a best man tomorrow [is]: Just stand by us every step of the way," Eric said. "We're marching. We might as well be marching in Alabama here. ... This is a political march."

"That's exactly how I feel about it," said Brian, seated next to his brother on a sofa.

"I want to hold [your] hand," said Eric, "and say, 'You know what? We're marching together.'"

For Brian, the inequity between his wedding to Amy and Eric's to Josh has never stood in sharper relief.

"That's what all this press has been about," he said. "You know, gay wedding. Gay. And it's just the saddest thing to me that it has to have that label. To me, this is a wedding. Yes, it's trailblazing. But these two guys love each other. They're getting married. I almost just want to take the 'gay' out. ... For me, I don't say my brother is having a gay wedding."

Brian remembers when a friend once asked him if he wished Eric were straight. "And the only reason that I said yes at the time had nothing to do with my own feelings," Brian said. "It's harder to be gay. I mean, probably, if you guys were born again and had the choice, you would probably choose whatever was the easiest."

No, Eric politely corrected his brother, he would not.

"It seems logical," Eric told Brian. "But part of what's made my life 10 times more interesting has been the experience, not just the struggle, but the joy of being gay. I don't think people focus on that. People are always like, 'Oh it must be so hard.' There are lots of advantages."

Such as: The movable feast of friendships that gay life can bring. The freedom from societal expectations that one "must" get married. The luxury of living, if you choose, outside the mainstream.

"Which is why," Eric later reflected, "the fact that Josh and I have chosen to live what appears to be a conventional life is such a radical decision. ... Not everybody in Massachusetts is rushing out to marry. It's pretty much a minority of gay people who are rushing out to do it."

If, 15 years earlier, Eric's coming out as a gay man struck the Hyetts like a lightning bolt, his sexuality no longer electrifies and rumbles through the family atmosphere.

"I think we've all evolved with this," Norman said. "It's been a big change from when I first knew that Eric was gay to now. It's like such a different time in history, in my own history, in my own life and where I am. It's nothing. I'm excited that you're getting married. That's all."

Later that night, as Eric and Josh join 10,000 supporters and onlookers outside Cambridge City Hall to watch as Massachusetts begins to permit gays and lesbians to apply for marriage licenses, they appear caught up in the sweep of history.

At one point, Josh suggests that they apply for their license right there, right then. But with family members arriving in the morning for their "march" on Brookline Town Hall, he quickly reconsiders.

As the large municipal clock strikes midnight, a thunderous ovation of affirmation tears through the crowd that packs the City Hall grounds and spills onto Massachusetts Avenue.

"I can't tell you how good this feels," Eric says. The sense of affirmation is palpable. He and Josh share a kiss as they walk along Mass. Ave.

All thoughts are now on tomorrow: Wedding day.

Brian hopes they will encounter no protesters. "Because I'm going to want to deck somebody if they really cross the line," he said.

And both brothers find themselves trying to imagine what it will be like in the morning when the Hyett family assembles in full for the first time in seven years.

Two families coming together

Eric Hyett spent what he hoped would be his last night as a single man in his old bedroom in his childhood home in Brookline, where his mother still lives.

At 6:15 a.m., 15 same-sex couples already waited for their marriage licenses in the lobby of Brookline Town Hall. At about the same time, Eric's early-morning sleep is interrupted by a telephone call.

Rabbi Emily Gopen Lipof of Temple Ohabei Shalom is on the line. She has been a longtime family friend and counselor. And now, before she can agree to marry the two men, she has some questions.

"What do you love about each other?" she asks Eric. "Why Josh?"

And, with Josh now on the other line, she repeats the question.

"Why Eric?" she wants to know.

Lipof, who has been a rabbi for 17 years, reached her position by unconventional means. "I didn't go to the big school," she said. Ordained at age 47 after raising five children, she is credited with bringing new energy to her Brookline synagogue.

For years, her guidelines for marriage have been simple: No interfaith marriages. No gay commitment ceremonies.

"It was always easier to say no than yes, and I didn't get asked too often," she said.

But now she had. As the public debate over same-sex marriage unfolded this year, Lipof listened carefully to its tone and substance.

"And in two minutes I knew exactly how I felt about it," she said. "With all the promiscuity going on in this world, people who are committed to each other and want to remain committed to each other [will] certainly do as well as the heterosexuals have done with 50 percent divorce. I just suddenly couldn't understand why this shouldn't be done."

Yes, she told Eric and Josh. She would marry them.

With a rabbi now willing to bless them, all that stands between the men and marriage is a local clerk and a municipal judge. Within minutes Eric and Josh are in their car for the short ride to Town Hall.

If they had steeled themselves for pickets and protesters and ugly clashes, what they found at Town Hall was a sense of celebration that would make them smile all morning.

A quartet played light music in the lobby corner. Supporters offered trays of juice, muffins, and egg-and-sausage biscuits. As couples left with marriage certificates in hand, they were greeted with cheers and a canopy of floating soap bubbles.

And when Norman, who approached the Town Hall entrance from a rear parking lot, met Barbara, who carried red balloons and approached from the street out front, they did not hesitate.

They hugged. A natural, friendly, years-overdue embrace. Norman's wife and Barbara's companion stood to the side.

"Oh, my God," Barbara told the man she lived with for 31 years. "Can you believe this? Isn't this amazing?"

The last time they had been together, for Brian's 30th birthday in a bowling alley last December, they had barely acknowledged each other.

"My mother couldn't even be in the same room with him," Brian recalled. "And that was the taste that was in my mouth coming into Monday. I was afraid they would let their shtick get into the way of what was really happening. Luckily, that never happened."

The brothers quickly dubbed the doorstep greeting as "the hug heard ‘round the world."

Later Barbara and Norman chatted about how they collected their first set of dishes by pulling them from boxes of dish detergent. And they remembered something else: the day their son told them that he was gay.

Barbara recalled how she immediately mourned for the Radcliffe daughter-in-law she would never know, the wedding she would never witness, the grandchildren she would never bounce on her knee.

"Norman was sitting there, and so he remembered," Barbara said later. "We never thought we'd see this."

To see his parents talking again -- if only briefly -- moved Eric nearly to tears.

"I can't tell you how special that was for me," he told his mother.

"Wasn't that amazing?" Barbara said.

"Yeah, it was," Eric replied softly.

"Thank you," his mother told him. "Your happiness means everything to me."

Now, it was 9 a.m. and Eric and Josh, the 41st couple in line that morning, were waiting their turn at the town clerk's counter. They wore dark suits with new blue ties, a gift from Brian. Their lapels carried red boutonnieres selected by Barbara.

At 9:15, as they stepped up to the clerk's counter, Joan Glazer wiped away tears. "I guess I think it's real now," she said.

Eric and Josh carried a doctor's note that pronounced them syphilis free, a state requirement for all marriages. For identification, they had passports and the lease for the apartment in Norman and Maxine's Winthrop home. They swore they knew of no legal impediment to their marriage.

And, after handing over $35, they walked out to cheers, carrying a certificate stating their intent to wed and listing the residence in Winthrop.

Under a warm morning sun, the couple and their extended family marched 150 yards across the street to municipal court, where they asked a judge to waive the state's three-day waiting period.

"I grew up here," Eric told the judge. "I went to Brookline High. My mom resides here."

After a two-minute hearing, they had their waiver.

And after a speedy return trip to Brookline clerk's counter, they walked away with their license to marry as their families cheered.

As they left for the synagogue, they passed a poster board in the town hall lobby labeled "An Historic Day of Inclusion."

On it, other couples had scrawled: "It's About Time!" or "May Love Prevail!"

In careful script, Eric left a message of his own:

"Two families -- coming together. One new family begins. Eric Hyett & Josh Glazer. Married. May 17, 2004."

A married couple

When it was founded in 1842, Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline was the first Jewish congregation in Massachusetts. Its newest home on Beacon Street, a stately Byzantine-Romanesque edifice with a domed sanctuary, was completed in 1928. Translated directly, its name means "lovers of peace."

Eric and Brian Hyett celebrated their bar mitzvahs there in the 1980s. As a boy, Eric worked there as a secretary and clerk, finding time to sneak away and explore the synagogue's subterranean passageways.

After a group picture on the temple's steps, the Hyett-Glazer wedding party moves into the temple's offices, where Eric introduces Josh to Rabbi Lipof for the first time.

"This is Josh, my partner," he said, quickly adding: "My spouse-to-be."

As the couple retreats to the rabbi's office for a brief meeting, their family members file into the temple's chapel. There are nine of them: Norman and Maxine; Barbara and her companion, Marty; Brian and Amy; and the Glazers, Joan and Ira, and Josh's younger brother, Justin.

They sit on simple folding chairs as Eric and Josh, suddenly solemn, stand before Lipof.

"May you be blessed from this house of God," she begins. "Oh, God, who created us all, bring to Eric and Josh an understanding of who they are as individuals and who they are as a couple. Teach them to renew their love continuously as you renewed creation. May their concern and loving faithfulness towards each other reflect your unending care and devotion to all your children. Amen."

The small congregation laughs politely as Eric and Josh assure Lipof this is the first wedding day for each.

"You have both come here with your individual hopes and dreams, learnings and experiences, and for many years you've sought fulfillment in your separate ways," the rabbi tells them. "And then your paths met, and at this moment they officially, legally merge.

"Your journey has not always been an easy one. Is that fair?"

It is, Eric and Josh agree.

The rabbi tells the story of a little boy who leads his sister up a mountain path. The little girl frets about the rough passage over barely navigable terrain.

"My goodness," she complained. "This isn't a path at all. It's all rock and bumps."

"Sure it is," replied the brother. "The bumps are what you climb on."

As Eric and Josh nod in agreement, Lipof's analogy is clear.

"And climb you have -- to this moment," she said.

Lipof and the congregation's cantor prayed that the couple, so immersed now in the politics of the moment, would come to fully appreciate its more personal significance.

"I pray that with this union, you will place your happiness in each other's safe-keeping, and that you will guard it well. Continue as you do now to really hear and understand each other; to cook together; to take walks on the beach with [your dog] Flo together; to do all of that together.

"But never forget your independence. How important it is to remain yourself and to appreciate each other for what each of you is. Then will your independence be equal, your dependence mutual, and your obligation reciprocal.

"You know there's no new way to say, 'I love you.' You can only do that by taking care of each other and caring for each other by defending and supporting, comforting each other. And in celebrating the joys together with no sense of jealousy or judgment, then yours will be truly a good marriage -- one that will endure."

As Norman and Maxine, Barbara and Marty, Brian and Amy, and Ira and Joan held hands, the rabbi offered her final blessing.

And then to cheers from family members who only now had begun to fully savor the celebration, she made official a union unlike any in the temple's history.

"In the presence of this community and those you love," Lipof began formally.

And then as her voice strongly intensified, her diction clearly emphasized the history-making content of her words.

"And according to the laws of the state of Massachusetts, I pronounce you a married couple."

Eric and Josh embraced and kissed.

And then they stood in the center of a circle of joyous family members, who danced around them, repeating a traditional, celebratory verse in Hebrew.

"Siman tov u'mazal tov, u'mazal tov v'siman tov," they sang. "Siman tov u'mazal tov, u'mazal tov v'siman tov."

It means "a good sign and good luck."

 Audio: Eric and Josh's wedding ceremony

‘What is, is'

If the reunion of the Hyett family was ephemeral -- born of a sense of duty and ceremony -- there was clearly something deeper at work, too.

"Life's too short to walk around with anger," Norman said. He was happy to see his former wife smiling and on the arm of a man who enjoys her company.

Their sons were always at the center of the marriage, he said. And nothing has dislodged that elemental truth.

"We just talked about how great the kids were and what a good job we did as parents," he said. "And we did. The best part of our marriage was these boys. And that's where we put our best energies. It's great to see her happy and having a partner and all that.

"That's great. Life moves on."

Barbara knows that, too.

"I said there's going to be some healing here," she said in a temple hallway after the wedding. "Do I feel it? Norman and I hugged? We kissed?" There was a sense of unreality about it all, she said.

And a sense of closure, too.

Two months before Eric's wedding, Barbara returned alone to the fourth-floor Brookline High School classroom where she and Norman for 10 years had talked about the tensions and triumphs of their long marriage. She wanted to "redeem" herself and her message.

"God, this is so banal," she told 20 riveted students in an alternative-education classroom. "I can't believe my life that I thought was so glamorous was so banal. What? The guy took off."

When a student asked whether her divorce had soured her children about choosing marriage for themselves, she did not hesitate.

"Both my children are in love," she said. "They've chosen wonderful, loving people. And it appears everyone is heading in the right direction. It seems to take a lot of luck, marriage."

As they begin their married life, Eric and Josh understand that.

They want to spend the rest of their life together. They hope to raise children. They want to grow old with each other and perhaps retire someplace warm. And they want to be left alone.

"I am not an activist in my life, and I choose to live a very quiet and for the most part private life," Eric said. "And for us to thrust ourselves into the spotlight over this issue has been something that's been both uncomfortable and completely necessary for us."

Josh said those who view their marriage as something exotic, or odd, or offensive should look more closely.

"At the end of the day, what is our life? Eric comes home from work. We have dinner. And we have a life and a home together. ..... To us, it doesn't feel any different."

At a post-wedding luncheon in a downtown Boston restaurant, Brian toasted his new brother-in-law.

And then he turned to his older brother -- the little boy to whom he had whispered goodnight in the darkness of their childhood bedrooms -- and raised his glass.

He recalled riding the T back to Brookline on the winter's day in 1989 after Eric summoned him to Harvard to tell him he was gay. Dreams he'd had for their adult lives seemed, at the time, forever dashed.

"I was let down at 14 in part that I would never get to be the best man at your wedding," Brian told Eric. "Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that after Eric came out that that would be able to come to fruition. Thanks for giving that back to me."

 Audio: Giving the toast at one another's weddings

Eleven days from today, Brian and Amy will stand where Eric and Josh have. In a solemn ceremony. Before family and friends. And Rabbi Emily Gopen Lipof.

Brian is ready.

"I saw my parents' divorce as a challenge to me," he said. "Like I could do better than that. Not that they didn't have a great marriage for many years. But still, I could do better than that. Mostly in terms of getting to know my partner really well before I got married, which I think my dad and my mom were very much kids and probably could have spent another year dating and really trying to work some of their issues out before they tied the knot. For me, I feel Amy and I have done that."

On Aug. 29, Barbara and Norman will stand by their youngest son as he walks down the aisle toward his bride.

"They hardly speak, but I'm still going to be one happy man on my wedding day. I will feel genuine love for each of them, and they will feel genuine love for me. You know what? To be loved by both your parents, there's plenty of successful marriages in which the kid doesn't feel that way."

When he was younger and his family in Brookline still called themselves the "Flying Hyetts," Brian would chafe at his father's stock answer whenever strange coincidences or miraculous events would unfold around them.

"My mom or my brother or myself would say: 'What are the chances of that?'

"And my dad would always say, 'One hundred percent.'

"At the time, it was a little annoying, but in retrospect I must say I agree with that philosophy.

"What is, is. And that's my final conclusion now about my family."

End of series.

Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com. Patricia Wen can be reached at wen@globe.com.