Chapter Text
At Long Last, Their Happy Ending
Marcia G. Horton, 7:00 a.m. EST May 13, 2012
In 1962, the Xavier children returned to Westchester to found a school. They kept the staff small the first year, just Charles, his sister Raven, a young Doctor Hank McCoy and their friend Erik Lehnsherr.
The sign they put out front said ‘Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters’ and for the whole winter the late Mrs. Xavier’s friends gossiped that gifted was code for troubled. The first batch of students seemed to prove them right.
Xavier’s students were older and hadn’t succeeded in traditional high schools. Alex Summers, one of the earliest students at Xavier’s, admitted the gossips weren’t that off base. He’d been fresh out of juvie when he arrived at the mansion. Today, he’s a retired college professor.
When I arrived, he and the other members of that first class had arranged themselves in a circle of chairs on the school’s front lawn. May 15th marks the school’s 50th anniversary. It is also Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr’s wedding day.
There is no press allowed at the actual wedding, but I shamelessly mined my social network until I found someone who knew the happy couple. I knew Kitty Pride, alum and current teacher at Xavier’s, in college and after I bought her a month of brunches she convinced the happy couple to let me stop by.
As I park my car, Headmistress Ororo Munroe is trying to organize the chaos on the lawn. Under her command, a small army of current students act as ushers, bellhops and - unsettlingly - valets. My distress when a 17 year old senior is handed the keys to a Tesla must be obvious, because Munroe reassures me that all of her valets are excellent drivers. “Erik taught them.” She points him out to me, a towering grey figure watching from a balcony, then guides me into her office.
We find Munroe’s office already occupied by her boyfriend, who has commandeered her desk to perform emergency surgery on a cellphone. He offers her the chair and and after seeing the high heels she’s been wearing, asks if he should go get her sneakers. The man is a true prince. No, literally, he is a prince. Monroe is dating T’Challa, crown prince of Wakanda.
From its website, Xavier’s seems to be a typical private school, with the tuition to match. Despite the high sticker price, Munroe claims it is the school’s mission to offer a place to all qualified students, regardless of their ability to pay. I discover that very few students pay the full tuition price. Some pay nothing at all. Munroe, who was an orphan living on the streets of Cairo when she met Lehnsherr and Xavier, attended here on a full scholarship herself.
Xavier’s measures ‘qualified’ in a different way than most private schools. Their process doesn’t consider test scores or prior school success. Instead, all applicants have to write an essay about a time in their life they felt different or alone. This admission process has excluded applicants from some of the wealthiest families in New York.
Eccentric admission processes aside, Xavier’s has an incredibly high graduation rate and an equally high college admission rate. “We don’t care about their pasts. We’re here to give them a future.” Considering Munroe sat below her framed Masters Degree in School Administration, Xavier’s must be doing something right.
“We have a reputation for being a difficult school to get into. There aren’t many local students here,” Ororo leans back into her chair and slips her shoes off. “There’s the essay, then you have to pass an interview with a panel of current students and staff. I think our record speaks for itself.”
That first ‘troubled’ class? They turned out fine. Alex Summers ended up a physics professor. Sean Cassidy was NYPD and he made Captain before he retired. Armando Muñoz introduced himself as an adventurer, which apparently means he owns an exotic excursions business. Angel Salvadore had a high profile fashion career and although she’s officially retired, if you’re very important and know the right people Salvadore still designs a few couture dresses a year.
Doctor McCoy, who was also present the first year, is well known for his reclusiveness and our Health writing staff offered me a bounty if I could get a photo and quote from him. Unfortunately, someone tipped him off that I was here and and he immediately disappeared into the basement to ‘work.’
Munroe seems grateful for a break from directing the circus outside. “We’re all very happy for Charles and Erik. We’re especially grateful this is their last wedding.” Her exhaustion makes a lot of sense in context as she ticks them off for me. “Vermont in 2000, Canada in 2005, then a quick civil ceremony in the City last year when the Marriage Equality Act passed.”
“You missed one. England, last summer.” Xavier’s sister, Raven Darkholme leans in the doorway. “Don’t forget to tell her about how they went out leaf peeping and called the next day from Bennington saying they had gotten married. Or how they made the Governor be the witness to their civil ceremony.”
Darkholme doesn’t have an office anymore, so she takes me outside to one of the shaded tables on the lawn, far from Munroe’s attempts to present the school and her mentor in the best possible light. From her purse, Darkholme pulls a stack of candid photos she asks me to include in the article. The photos aren’t particularly flattering. “My best friend is marrying my brother. I have to torture them a little.” She says it with a smile but I’m pretty sure she means it. “They’re soulmates. I’m not being romantic, it’s just the way it is. Love at first sight, their own silent language, the whole nine yards. Have you ever lived with roommates like that?”
I have, but never for as long as Darkholme did. Generally, those annoying roommates marry each other and take their lovey-doveyness to their own place. Xavier and Lehnsherr didn’t have that option, not in 1962, and Darkholme couldn’t move out either. All staff are required to live on site.
“Now imagine your disgustingly in love friends get into a political argument about what the future should look like. Erik wasn’t ashamed of who he was, he didn’t want to hide, he was a radical. Charles thought they needed to be patient, to let people’s opinions shift. No one would understand, they would both end up locked up or worse. They would fight about it a few times a year, and the rest of the time it would be fine. Then, Erik called a meeting and announced his resignation. He was done waiting.”
Lehnsherr is well known locally for his short fuse and you can often find his letters to the Editor on this newspaper’s Opinion page. “How did that go?”
“It was all very civil and polite, not like them at all. Erik can be very dramatic, he was more the type to disappear in the middle of the night, goodbye note carved into the front door. He and Charles had talked about it before hand, and Erik finished out the term. Charles even drove him to the airport, then he came home and drank himself to sleep at their chessboard.”
Lehnsherr went on a tour of Europe as a visiting professor. He eventually settled at the University of Sokovia, where he taught mechanical engineering. “I would call Erik and he would sound so miserable. He must have been the surliest teacher ever, even compared to our history teacher.”
For the record, Xavier’s American History teacher calls me Bub, refuses to give me his name (all I eventually discover is “Logan”), will only say he has worked here “Forever,” and that, “It’s a miracle they didn’t kill each other years ago.”
Doctor Gray, an alumna and also the school’s onsite medical doctor, looks a little horrified as he airs their bosses’ dirty laundry, but I do get her to admit that 1989 was tense. “They were fighting all the time. Never in front of us, but I knew anyway.”
Of course, here I am at their wedding twenty years later. Lehnsherr leaving wasn’t the end of their story.
“I wish I could tell you they worked things out like adults but that’s not what happened. I would call Erik, and he would be very sure that he was right and that he wasn’t coming home until Charles gave in. Charles was never going to give in. It could have gone on like that forever, both of them very sure their path was the right one.” Darkholme’s smile vanishes. Even if I hadn’t already learned about the accident in my research, her expression tells me that it wasn’t either of them conceding the argument that brought Lehnsherr home. “One night, Charles was running some errands, and he got hit by a drunk driver.”
The other driver didn’t live through the night. “That's the only reason Erik’s not in jail.”
“Erik came home straight away. Kurt handled everything while I sat at Charles’ bedside.” Darkholme’s son, Kurt, is also a former student, but I don’t get a chance to meet him. Darkholme gives me his apologies and says both Kurt and her husband Azazel are hard to keep track of.
How did they patch things up? “For that, I think you should ask them.”
I find Lehnsherr and Xavier kissing in the pantry and Lehnsherr agrees to give me five minutes if I don't tell anyone where they had been hiding.
Lehnsherr’s study is miraculously guest-free. He flips through a few of the candid photos Darkholme gave to me, something like a smile on his face. He tells me he is holding Xavier up by his belt in most of them. Xavier has been confined to a wheelchair since the accident but it wasn’t guilt that brought Lehnsherr home.
“We decided we weren't going be those old men, full of regret.” Lehnsherr is much more imposing in a button down with combed hair than he looks in Darkholme’s photos. I don't mention his skewed tie. “We settled on a compromise between my goals and his. Charles and I belong together, on the same side. We’ve always found our way back to each other.”
They stopped hiding and came out, together, in 1995. The school stayed open, the classes stayed full, and the world didn't end.
Lehnsherr has his sleeves rolled up and I catch a glimpse of the number tattooed on his arm. He sees me looking but he doesn’t make any effort to cover it up. “I don't have any family left; I was the only one who made it out of the camps. I borrow Charles’, from time to time, and we collected quite a few strays over the years. I was a lone wolf at thirty. Now our wedding is a circus full of nosey former students, parking nightmares and vodka luges.”
Here at Xavier's they seem to take ‘found family’ a bit farther than most people do. I meet quite a few guests who would introduce themselves, then turn and introduce their spouse, who is also one of the alumni. Marie D’Ancanto is milling around on the edges of the crowd on the front lawn, her boyfriend Remy LeBeau on her arm. “We weren’t students here at the same time. I dated Bobby for a while in high school, but other people dated people they met at internships or at work. When they would bring someone home, Professor X and Erik would be sitting in the main room, playing chess. Professor X would do this thing where he would intimidate your date by pretending to be Sherlock Holmes, but Erik was worse. He would always tell them he was ex-Mossad, that before he was a teacher he killed Nazis for a living.”
I thought she was joking, but both Darkholme and Monroe confirm that Lehnsherr once worked for the Israeli government. So yes, this is probably very intimidating for outsiders. Lehnsherr and Xavier perform this act for all their students’ dates, male and female, and they usually slip in a discussion about their excellent self-defense training program.
Xavier’s is a residential school, and I asked D’Ancanto if there was a lot of sneaking around after lights out with her high school sweetheart. She laughed at me. “Nobody sneaks around in this school. Now that you mention it, it was weird how much we got away with. If you ask Doctor Gray the same question she’ll tell you she and Mr. Summers never got a second alone.” Drake, as it turns out, is gay.
LeBeau is a security consultant, D’Ancanto is a mechanical engineer, and they have made a great life together. By all accounts, they’re another Xavier’s success story. Unfortunately, neither of their families see it that way.
LeBeau carefully slides an arm around D’Ancanto’s waist and gestures at the crowd on the lawn. “These people are our family. That’s all that matters.”
I’m not invited to stay for the ceremony, although I hear the dress code is strictly ‘come as you are.’ Darkholme does send me one last photo to include, which I do gladly. Best wishes to the happy couple.
Sidebar
(Appears in yellow, ala the Deadpool comics)
Sidebar:
At one point, while I'm speaking to Darkholme a car rolled up and a man in a tuxedo gets out. Guests are arriving every few minutes, but this gentleman is notable for both his extensive facial scarring and the samurai swords hanging at his side.
The next valet in rotation, a teenage girl with a buzz cut and a septum piercing, just sighs so I decide not to panic.
Logan starts muscling his way through the crowd towards the new arrival. “You said you weren’t coming. We called you three times, you said you couldn’t make it.”
“I thought they would need me in New York,” The man, Wade Wilson, pulls a neatly wrapped gift from the passenger seat, “But there was an issue with licensing.”
When he tries to head towards the appetizers, Logan grabs him by the shoulder. “I need you to lose the blades, Wade. You don’t need these here.”
“But the ninjas-”
“You’re the only ninja here, Wade.” Logan disarms him, and passed the swords to the teenage valet. “Ceramic, really?”
“Just to be safe. You know what he’s capable of, you were there!”
“That never happened. That was someone else, somewhere else.” Logan gives him a push towards the food. “There are little tacos on the buffet.”
When they're out of earshot, Darkholme fills me in. Wilson had served with Logan in the military and ended up part of the school’s large found-family. “Wade has brain cancer.” She doesn't sound embarrassed at his outburst, just sad. “There are some things you can’t fix.”
From the buffet line, I overhear Mr. Wilson yell, “Chimichangas too!” so at least he's having a good time.
Comments Thread:
David Hawthore: FIRST
Dana Smith: How sweet! Love will always find a way. I’m so glad they were able to find each other.
Howard Watkins: All I know is that there’s some weird shit going on at that school. My cousin said he saw Bigfoot there drinking a Maddog 2020. Wake up sheeple!
What a wonderful school for gifted youngsters away from the negative influences. We should all work to protect our young people and treat them with dignity and respect. Congrats to the happy couple with their magnetic personalities.
WHat is there selection process really? Tony fucking Stark couldn’t get in and he tried 2 times!
They do state that they include personality as a factor. Tony Stark is a MASSIVE dick and that is after he learned responsibility in a cave with a box of Stark weapon scraps. Do you think he was any less of a shit as a kid?
My brother applied three times and never got in and he is a God-fearing saint of a kid. I bet it is donors.
Check your capitalization.
Alonzo Anderson: FAGS!!!! THEY ALL sPIT in GOD”S EYE AND WOLL BURN IN HELL!!!!1
1 Corinthians 6:9-11 - Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
Read More Link
Reply, Clair Edmond: You're an embarrassment to the human race, @Alonzo. Take your hate speech somewhere else!
Vera Pizzo: This is a really a nice article about wedding ideas. I make up to $7000 a day helping ppl with their weddings. Find out more @ tinyurl.com/c4jz
Reply, Hua Yang: Seriously? Can’t you hound for business on other sites? This nonsense belongs on Pinterest.
Reply: Savannah Kirby: The link doesn’t even make sense. This isn’t about weddings at all!
I wonder how much of the endowment went to the wedding? How many other students could have gone to school instead? Just asking.
St. John Allerdyce: Damnit, Wade, how do you get into everything?
Reply, Wade Wilson: I’m magic. And I know the author.
Cecilia Lombardo: The Xaveier School should boycott any group affiliated with the Avengers--especially with his new husband being a former professor at the university. Justice for Sokovia!
Reply, Alambek Bataev: Hey, the Avengers did what they had to. If they didn’t stop Ultron he would of destroyed everything. Its a numbers game.
Reply, Cecelia Lombardo: Only because Stark made Ultron. They’re just making every bad guy go to their level. It’s now literal rocket tag and we’re caught in the middle.
Reply: Alambek Bataev: He only made Ultron because evry oversight group has been corrupt. Literally, fucking nazi infiltrators.
Reply, Keira Agar: @Alambek does have a point. You know what machines are doing and don’t deceive like humans. And of all superpowers on the list SHIELD never found telepaths or psychics. It’s not like they could have telepathically scanned a SHIELD agent and found they really were Hydra.
reply, Erik Velde: Didn’t Stark see Terminator? Didn’t you see Terminator?
Sharon Alexander: I am not sure what I think of having all the staff live on site with the students. How soon do the graduates have to move out when they are done? What is the college admission rate?
Wade Wilson: I think it is super cute that they finally got married for the final time. Until the next reboot anyway.
Reply, Ellie Phimister: Can you not? Your weird fourth wall bullshit worked on the reporter but the rest of us are sick of it.
Michael Zachery: They are a great couple- you should see them out on dates, they finish each other's sentences like they can read one another’s minds. when they bother to speak out loud, def one of those couples that just has silent conversations.
Jason Pilon: I have met Lehnsherr, and he was an awful jerk. Can’t see why th prof married the guy more than once.
Reply, Velma McBride: It’s his magnetic personality. You must be immune. Or your a jerk.
Monica Taylor: I can’t see how they didn’t get all of Darkholmes’ outfits in any article. Her best woman array of outfits (6 styles i saw) was on point. Don’t know how she had time to change into all of them with everything the bridal party has to do.
Reply, Fred Wilkinson: Maybe she is a shapeshifter-comes in handy with the wardrobe.
Reply, Monica Taylor: Or she was in show biz. That’ll teach you quick.
Kathleen Kelly: I’m not homophobic, but why do schools have to push the gay agenda on their students? Why can’t they just teach?
Johnny M. Sharkey: I went by there and got HEADACHES. Its just like hte power li nes, the EMFs make my headaches bad.
Its got lots of B. EMFS, the front EMFS don't do that they are the ones the make CANCER! , not surprising that
has Brain Cancer from being there, its not safe for students. They should be sht down!
Images:
1. A Brutalist oil painting by Piotr Rasputin
Caption reads: The man with the cell phone problem is Piotr Rasputin, a painter known for his paintings of Brutalist architecture. Somehow, he’s managed to shatter the screen of his StarkPhone, quite the feat considering you’re supposed to be able to hit them with a sledgehammer.
2. A photo of Erik and Charles wearing ridiculous party hats
Caption reads: Darkeholmes' personal goal for this wedding: Embarrass her brother and best friend
3. A photo of Wade Wilson, with a scarred face, in a tuxedo
No caption
4. A photo of a swan shaped ice luge.
Caption reads: This swan-shaped vodka luge is a gift from former student Robert Drake. Swans, of course, mate for life.
5. A photo of Charles and Erik kissing
6. Three images titled 'From The Web'
Far Left: Munroe and T'Challa embrace. (Comic scan)
Caption reads: Wedding bells for the Prince of Wakanda? Are Ororo and T'Challa next?
Middle: Justin Hammer, in a nice suit (From Iron Man 2)
Caption reads: In the aftermath of Sokovia, Justin Hammer petitions for release.
Far Right: Picture of Remy LeBeau (Channing Tatum)
Caption reads: It takes a thief. LeBeau discusses the private security business.