When Donna Adelsberg ran into her best friend’s ex-husband at the supermarket a few years ago, she intended to leave him standing by the deli with his pastrami and her cold shoulder.
“I hadn’t seen him in years, and I had pictured all these things I would say to him if I ever saw him,” said Ms. Adelsberg of Lutherville, Md. “I wanted to be prickly. Because that’s what you do when you have a best girlfriend. You’re on her side.”
Peter Bronson Tracy, the man standing before her, had been married to Linda Wilk Tracy, Ms. Adelsberg’s longtime friend.
Ms. Adelsberg’s mild revenge fantasy instead was derailed by Mr. Tracy’s demeanor that day at Graul’s, the local grocer. Something in Mr. Tracy had shifted since his 2015 divorce “He started talking about Linda,” she said, “telling me how much he appreciated my support of her. He was really sentimental.”
Ms. Tracy, 63, and Mr. Tracy, 67, had met in 1975 at a toga party at Ohio Wesleyan University, in Delaware, Ohio, where both were students. They were married three years later, a month shy of Ms. Tracy’s 21st birthday. Theirs was a match built on a mutual desire for reinvention. Ms. Tracy grew up in a Jewish family — her father was a surgeon and her mother a stay-at-home parent who later owned a party supply shop — with three brothers in Wilmington, Del. Mr. Tracy had been an only child in what he called a “WASPy” Washington, Conn., household.
Mr. Tracy fell in love with Ms. Tracy’s warmth and instinct to nurture. Her love for him had rebellion at its roots, both said. “I was a blue blood,” he said. He was a lacrosse-playing boarding school boy at the Berkshire School in Sheffield, Mass., “and that was different for Linda.” By the time they were married, he had converted to Judaism and she had learned plenty about lacrosse, which Mr. Tracy went on to play at Ohio Wesleyan and still plays recreationally.
As 20-somethings, Mr. and Mrs. Tracy settled in Cockeysville, Md. He went to work managing a construction company. She started out as a clothing boutique manager before beginning a decades-long career as an executive assistant in the surgery department at Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1981, their son Joshua was born. Six years later came a second son, Joel. Life got busy.
Like their father, both Tracy boys gravitated to sports before they were old enough to tie their shoes. Joshua and Joel both dabbled in soccer and football before settling on lacrosse as their No. 1 sport. Games, tournaments and the road trips required to get to them gobbled the family’s weekends and holidays. By the time Joel left for college in 2005, the Tracys were seasoned sports parents. Not only had they sent both boys to college to play Division 1 lacrosse (Joshua to Ohio State, Joel to Brown), they had done it while both worked full time and moved their family into a bigger house in Lutherville.
Their marriage was a machine powered by family goals, and it never stopped humming. If trouble was looming, neither acknowledged it. And then the bottom dropped out.
When Ms. Tracy tries to trace the path that nudged them to the precipice of divorce in 2015, after 37 years of marriage, she talks first about her struggle with adjusting to life as an empty-nester, in the mid-2000s. “From my perspective, it was supposed to be, ‘Now it’s our turn to have fun, to rediscover each other,’” she said. “But Peter thought, Now that I don’t have to take anybody to practice and go to games, I’m going to play more lacrosse.”
A more concrete beginning of the end came in 2009, when a friend died suddenly of a heart attack. At the funeral, Ms. Tracy encouraged Mr. Tracy to get his own heart checked. When doctors told him he had asymptomatic coronary artery disease and would need a quadruple bypass, he began his withdrawal from the marriage.
Mr. Tracy’s reaction to his diagnosis had been disbelief. “This is going to sound naïve, but I was 57 and it was the first time in my life it occurred to me that my body could let me down,” he said. “I had always been an athlete.” When he asked if he could put his surgery off six weeks to play in a lacrosse tournament and doctors told him no, he felt helpless. And scared. “You come out of that surgery needing a lot of taking care of, and I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t want to be dependent on anybody.”
This included his wife. The nurturing instinct that attracted him to Ms. Tracy suddenly felt smothering. “I didn’t want her taking care of me,” he said.
Ms. Tracy, sensing his resistance, felt stung. “To me, it felt like he wanted me to get the hell away from him,” Ms. Tracy said. Her friends, including Ms. Adelsberg, rallied. “Linda was devastated, but for the longest time she was trying to work with him on some of the issues he was having,” Ms. Adelsberg said. “She was optimistic until it was clear that optimism wasn’t going to win.”
After more than a year of post-surgery tension, Mr. Tracy moved out in 2012. “I thought it would be temporary, but it didn’t turn out that way,” he said.
Their sons were stunned. “I didn’t take it very well, and I don’t think my brother did, either,” said Joshua Tracy, now a professional glassblower in Baltimore; Joel Tracy works as a high school teacher in Brooklyn. “You grow up, and you get to a certain point and you figure, if something’s going to happen, it would have happened by now. It blindsided all four of us.”
Between the separation and the day the divorce was official in 2015, Ms. Tracy lost her mother to lung cancer and her father to complications from Alzheimer’s disease. The universe, she felt, was telling her something. “I knew I had to heal myself, try to figure things out and learn to be alone,” she said.
In his new home in Pikesville, 10 minutes away from Lutherville, Mr. Tracy focused on his commercial building and management company, KasCon, while piecing together a new life. He maintained personal if not geographical distance. “I missed my family, but I backed off because I thought it was best for Linda and the boys,” he said.
Eventually, with the help of friends and therapy, Ms. Tracy found her footing as a single person. She tried online dating with what she called “mixed results.”
“I met a number of interesting people as well as some truly not interesting people,” she said. “I truly believed I was going to have another great love in my life.” Mr. Tracy had already dipped into the dating pool. But he was having trouble letting go the past. “Linda was always on my mind,” he said.
By 2017, the Tracy sons’ sense of loss and confusion over their parents’ broken relationship was dissolving. Each was thinking about marriage himself. “I was finally feeling whole again,” Joel Tracy said.
Both got engaged within a few months of each other, prompting Mr. and Ms. Tracy to consider their responsibilities as parents of two soon-to-be grooms. Ms. Tracy wanted to take the families of her future daughters-in-law to dinner. To be cordial, she asked Mr. Tracy if he wanted to join. “He readily agreed,” she said. “As crazy as it sounds, there was never a lot of acrimony between us. And we wanted our sons to know we could come together for them, that we could play nicely in the sandbox together.”
At the time, neither realized just how nicely they might play together again. When Joel got engaged in March 2018, his parents took a train to Manhattan to meet his fiancée’s parents. Sometime during that three-hour journey, Mr. Tracy spilled the contents of his heart. “I told Linda I was always in love with her, despite our divorce and separation,” he said.
By the time of Joshua’s June 2018 wedding in Baltimore, the Tracys had begun meeting, secretly, for walks and breakfast dates in Lutherville. “We wanted to keep it on the down low because I didn’t want to do anything to steal the thunder of the bride and groom,” Ms. Tracy said. Despite their efforts, the cat was mostly out of the bag by Joshua’s wedding reception.
“Peter held my hand during the ceremony, and people observed us dancing,” she said. “A couple of my girlfriends pulled me aside and said, ‘Is there something we should know?’”
Their sons got suspicious, too. “Everyone was coming up to me at the wedding like, ‘What’s going on with your parents?’” Joshua said. “I was on cloud nine to begin with. This was like the cherry on top.”
In May 2019, Mr. and Ms. Tracy bought a new house together in Lutherville. In September, they took a three-week trip to Italy. Mr. Tracy had already bought an engagement ring to replace the one Ms. Tracy traded in after their divorce for diamond stud earrings. On the evening of Sept. 28, after they finished dinner at Trattoria Al Giardinetto da Severino in Venice, he took Ms. Tracy’s hand and, for the second time in four decades, asked her to marry him.
Once again, she said yes.
On Dec. 28, at the Center Club in Baltimore, they were married in front of 30 family members and close friends. Joshua, who was ordained by the Universal Life Church, officiated, with Joel taking part in the ceremony.
The bride, in a move that surprised friends who has asked whether she planned to wear cream or gold, wore a black tuxedo she found at Octavia, a Baltimore boutique, and paired it with three strands of pearls. Mr. Tracy wore a custom suit by Tom James. He entered to a piano rendition of Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on My Mind.” When she entered, carrying a bouquet of lilies, the piano player switched to “At Last.”
“Our parents have shown us that when two halves come together to form a whole, the results can be quite wonderful for quite some time,” Joshua said. “But sometimes those halves drift apart, and only when they heal and grow can they become whole for themselves again. Two halves don’t make a whole, two wholes make a whole.” Through tears, he added, “Mom and Dad, it is a privilege and an honor to bear witness to this union today.”
Before he pronounced them remarried, he paused to hear vows they had written for each other. Mr. Tracy choked back a sob as he recalled first setting eyes on Ms. Tracy in 1974. “I realize now the perfect match has always been there,” he said.
Ms. Tracy sounded an optimistic note. “Remember,” she said. “It’s never too late to live happily ever after.”
On This Day
When Dec. 28, 2019
Where The Center Club, Baltimore
Mazel Tov At the end of the ceremony, Joel Tracy passed his father a glass to break underfoot, a Jewish tradition. His brother, Joshua, said, “May your love sustain you and keep you together for as long as it takes the pieces of the glass to come back together. In other words, may you stay together forever.”
Old Tracys, New Tracy Among the wedding guests who weren’t present for the 1978 wedding was the Tracy’s new grandson, Charles Wyatt Tracy, who was born in October to Joel and his wife, Alyssa Tracy. Charlie’s birth accounted in part for the post-Christmas ceremony. “We wanted to wait to until he had his shots and could travel,” Ms. Tracy said.
Perfect Pair After a cocktail hour in a nearby reception room at the Center Club, guests dined on crab cake and filet mignon. Dessert was Alsatian cheesecake.
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