CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
George and Connie honeymooned for a week at the regal Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, a small rustic island between Michigan and Michigan’s upper peninsula, where cars are forbidden. It was a timelessly classic hotel, open only in the summers. For George and Connie, it meant the end of forbidden fruit.
On June 18, 1950, when they returned to Milwaukee, they moved into their new house in Fox Point, a wealthy suburb that ran up the shoreline of Lake Michigan about eight miles north of downtown Milwaukee. While they had been gone, George’s children, Peggy and Steve, had stayed with his sister, who also lived in Milwaukee. Now, the family of four would live under one roof, looking as much like any traditional American family of four could look, although this was one that lived better than most. It would be an arduous but fun week of turning a house into a home. Boxes were piled in every room and completely took over the garage. All would eventually be opened and their precious contents allocated to the right rooms, closets, shelves, nooks, and crannies.
Connie had been dreaming about this for months and, actually, every day since her engagement to George, and now—on this very day—it was real. She was now married to a wonderful man and she had two children to care for. Her dream had come true. It was the dream of a lifetime. It was only two years ago that she had thought the dream was over, that it could never happen, that she would never be loved by another man, and now she was a wife—and a mother! Even if she could never have children of her own, she had George’s two children to take care of—they needed a mother, and she would be a mother to them.
Being a wife and mother were the only two things she had ever truly wanted in life. Now she was both, and as she stood in the bedroom of their new house, surrounded by furniture, large moving boxes, and stacks and stacks of smaller cartons, tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She looked around the room… all these boxes and not a single box of Kleenex! She went to her sleeves, took a couple of deep breaths, got control of her tears, and with a smile on her face for the silliness of all those tears, began unpacking again.
George was opening the boxes for the kids in their bedrooms, while Connie was working in the master bedroom. She cut off the packing tape of one very large box and tugged open the flaps. It had been consigned to the master bedroom and had “master closet” written on it. She was expecting it to be full of George’s clothes—suits, she imagined—as it was the kind of a box that resembled a closet in a box. It did have a lot of suits in it, all hanging on a dull metal bar that ran through the top of the box. She reached over the flaps of the tall box and pulled a couple of suits out, hung them up in the closet, and returned to the box to pull out a couple more.
As she made a second grab at hangers, she saw something in the bottom of the box that completely surprised her and caught her immediate attention. It was a bundle of fur, possibly a fur coat; she couldn’t tell without removing a few more suits and pulling the mystery item out of the bottom of the box. Anxious to understand what the furry item was, she quickly pulled George’s suits off the metal bar, two at a time in each hand, and set them on the floor. She was staring down at what looked like a blanket of mink, rolled up in the bottom of the box. She pushed the box over on its side, lifted the bottom upward, and watched a big mink coat slide onto the floor. Speechless, she pushed the box aside and stood over the coat for a few seconds staring down at this big surprise that was clumped at her feet. Just then, George walked into the room.
“I see you found Connie’s mink coat.” Connie knew he was referring to his first wife, who coincidentally had been named Connie. George leaned over the coat, groped it for the inside of the back collar, and lifted it, feigning a grunt over its bulk. It was a lot of fur, and Connie quickly went into an expression of total surprise, although shock might more accurately describe the feeling behind her surprise.
“Oh my God, George!” Connie exclaimed as she, unbeknownst to George, realized that she had seen that coat before.
“Yeah,” George quickly reacted to Connie’s surprise. “It’s a big ball of fur! I hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to save it—for you. I want you to have it. Is that okay?”
Connie was speechless as she recalled the one and only time she had seen that coat. She was sure it was the same one because she had never seen a coat with such large cuffs before. It never occurred to her, of course, that the Connie she had met that afternoon in Gimbels two winters ago was George’s Connie—his first wife! Connie easily recalled that one meeting. That poor woman, Connie remembered, had said she had cancer and was taking treatments for it. “Oh my God!” Connie exclaimed to George again, as the whole scene at Gimbels came back to her as if it had been yesterday. The last thing the woman had said to her was, “I hope someday I can return the favor.”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said George, convinced that Connie was simply being overwhelmed by the coat’s exquisite beauty. Holding the coat up and open for her to slip into, he added, “Here, try it on.”
Connie backed slowly into the coat. Her mind raced, as she wondered if she should tell George the story or not. She decided not to. It didn’t seem to be the right time to tell him—maybe some other time.
George hefted it onto her shoulders. “Try that,” he said, triumphantly, clearly happy to have this beautiful coat worn by his new, beautiful wife.
She stepped away from him and modeled it with a twirl one way and then a twirl the other way, smiling at George for the wonderful gift and now smiling with the bittersweet memory of its original owner, whose gift to her was even greater than the most beautiful mink coat Connie had ever seen.
∞
A Love Story with a Little Heartbreak Page 44
