Betrayal In Blood. Michael Benson
the concession stand. On her left arm was her grandfather Carol, who was several inches shorter than she was. On her right arm was her father Leroy Bassett, who towered above her.
Tabby was dressed in a full wedding gown with veil. The dress was formfitting to her curvaceous figure. From the entrance on, the veil gave Tabby trouble. If the video was any indication, she was forced to spend much of the day doing everything with one hand because she was adjusting the veil with the other.
The camera person got in closer for the actual wedding ceremony than for the rehearsal. Because of the zoom, viewers of the tape could see Arnold and Tabby’s faces as they exchanged vows and gave each other rings. Again “Let It Be Me” was played. This time it turned into a sing-along. The bride sang along, too. Her eyes were closed as she tilted back her head to sing, appearing blissful through her parting veil.
The ceremony over, there was applause as Arnold kissed his bride and they headed to the back of the room for the reception line. This time Tabby did not skip. There would be no skipping in those sparkly white shoes with the extremely high heels.
The camera focused on Tabby’s face during the entire reception line. Everybody got a hug and a kiss. A woman came up from behind Tabby at one point and gave her some distressing news—perhaps Arnold was in the parking lot with his friends instead of wherever he was supposed to be. For a flashing instant, she was “Bride-zilla.” She wagged a finger and told that woman what to do in no uncertain terms. Then, flick, like the switch had been turned from off to on, Tabby met eyes with the next person in the reception line and her face lit up with a grin. She was hugging and kissing everyone again, seemingly mindless of whatever was upsetting her a moment before.
The tape then cut to the outside. The professional photographer was doing her job. The entire wedding party and close relatives had gathered in the sun. They lined up in various combinations, stood up straight, squinted into the sun, smiled, and the photographer took their picture.
Someone had apparently informed the best man and the ushers that they had to get through the photo session before they could remove their clip-on ties, and the thought of freeing themselves from that simulated noose had them antsy.
A photo of Arnold with the maid of honor, Samantha, and the other bridesmaids was taken, and then the photographer asked for a picture of just Tabatha with the best man and ushers. The men whooped and hollered and moved in to get a good spot near the bride.
“Come on, boys, you can all be huggin’ on me,” Tabby said. “I love the attention!”
After that last shot of Tabby and the boys, the photographer said, “That’s it,” indicating that she had all of the photos she needed.
“All right!” exclaimed the groom’s buddies, and off came the clip-on ties.
Then everyone, except for the camera person, left. The bride stood alone in the sunshine for a moment. She looked at the camera and slowly stuck out her unusually long tongue. She didn’t stick it out in the conventional “fresh” manner, though. Bridal Tabby unfurled her tongue, stretching it at the roots. Speaking only of the action as a physical anomaly, and without religious symbolism, one could call the movement of Tabby’s tongue serpentine. Her lips were parted as she wagged her tongue, as if she were doing a dead-on impression of Gene Simmons, the lead singer for the rock group Kiss. She retracted the tongue with a grin and the scene ended.
Then the videotape took us back inside, where the band, a quartet, had set up—drums, guitar, bass, and vocal. The singer was a woman, the others men. They were all in their forties. Perhaps they were the Starlite Ramblers. The guitar player stepped up to the mike and without introducing himself or the band, everyone already knew who they were, he said that Arnold had a request for the first number. For the first dance the bride and groom would dance to the Spencer Davis Group classic “Gimme Some Lovin’.”
As soon as the song started, the newlyweds stepped lively onto the dance floor and began to dance rock style, without touching. And the many overweight spectators sat and applauded mildly. With that, the camera person put the camera away, thinking perhaps that the time for recording was through and the time for partying had begun.
When Tabby and Arnold were first married, Arnold was still studying engineering at Alfred. Soon after, he took a job at a processed-food manufacturer in Avon, New York, a town in Monroe County, just south of Rochester.
The Bassetts did not like the idea of Tabby moving away, but if she had to go someplace, they were glad it was to the Rochester area, because there was a Community of Christ branch there.
Vivian Bryant, the minister there, was a friend of Essie’s, going back a long time. The Bryants would look after Tabby in the big city. Now a new congregation would get to hear Tabby’s beautiful singing voice during Sunday services.
According to Tabatha’s aunt Lorraine Warriner, Tabby was eager to leave little Greenwood and move to the big city. “She wasn’t a small-town girl,” Lorraine said. “She liked the excitement of having more things to do.”
Tabby’s grandmother and sister disagreed. They didn’t believe that Tabby was overly restless living in the Southern Tier. She went to Rochester because her husband got a job there, it was as simple as that.
While Tabby was getting married to her high-school sweetheart at the Howard Community Center during August 1996, the Rochester branch of the Cleveland-based franchise Hyatt Legal Services discontinued operations.
Out of a job, Kevin Bryant went into private practice and opened up his own office in the Rochester suburb of Greece, which butts up against the northwest side of the city. Kevin C. Bryant Law Offices was located on Ridge Road West.
When Kevin learned that Tabatha Bryant, the pretty blonde he remembered from summer church get-togethers, was moving to Avis Street in Rochester with her young husband, he did one step better than look after her. He gave her a job. Not long after moving to Monroe County, Tabby was gainfully employed as a secretary at the Greece law offices of Kevin C. Bryant, Esq.
At Kevin’s office, Tabatha worked on wills, real estate closings, bankruptcies, civil lawsuits, misdemeanor criminal cases. The law office was an exciting world. Some of Kevin’s clients were well-known, some famous, and some notorious. There were prostitutes and pimps and gangsters, who all led wild lives. It wasn’t long before Tabby realized she was happier in her work world in Greece with Kevin than she was in her domestic world with Arnold in Avon. She loved going to work. She dreaded going home.
Tabby and Arnold Martin had only been married for about a year when trouble brewed. They fought. When Tabby complained to her grandmother about Arnold, she always made it clear that her husband was not physically abusing her. It was verbal abuse. They were arguing. A lot. And she’d had enough.
Tabby asked Kevin to handle her divorce for her, and he agreed happily to get her a divorce-lawyer who could do the job quickly.
Arnold Martin, now without a wife, eventually left his job in Avon, New York, and moved back to the Southern Tier to do computer work at a hospital.
CHAPTER 11
The Bride in the Red Shoes
The transition went this way, and it happened in a matter of months: Kevin made Tabby his employee, then his client, then his live-in girlfriend, then his wife.
On December 26, 1997, Tabby and Kevin—who was only two months younger than Tabby’s mother—were married in Fairport, New York. It had been only sixteen months since she had gotten married for the first time, to Arnold, in the Howard Community Center.
In Fairport, for her second wedding, she wanted to tweak the notion that she, being a divorcée, was no longer pure, so Tabby became one of the few brides to be married in red shoes. One of Kevin’s sisters told Tabby that brides couldn’t wear red shoes, but this only served to make Tabby more stubborn. She took her vows, from the ankles down, with a Jezebel-like defiance.
Tabby’s