Or should I heed the persistent call of my best friend?
2
Hungry Lions, Circling
Ann
Summer 1961–Spring 1962, Boulder. On its face, my decision that Jack was “The One” reeked of a teenybopper’s fantasy. We had never kissed, never even dated. Yet despite the absence of even a hint of carnal hanky-panky, it was, I believed, a rational, mature decision. It grew from several wrenching romantic encounters during my early university years.
The first began in June 1961 when my family journeyed to West Point to celebrate my brother Bonner’s graduation from the United States Military Academy. It was a five-day whirlwind of tours, luncheons, picnics, dinners, receptions, dances, concerts, military parades, and Army-Navy sports competitions. Every cadet—all were men in those days—had to have a date. As did, my brother insisted, all visiting single women. He set me up with Geoff, a second-year cadet in his company. We were together for every event, from morning brunch until we whispered reluctant good night at the first strains of the bugled curfew. Swept up by June Week magic, we were soon plotting when and where we would see each other next.
Later that summer, Geoff spent several days at our ranch in Colorado. And over Christmas at his parents’ home in upstate New York, we got pinned, a step shy of being engaged. Not long after, he proposed we marry after he graduated in June 1963. “Imagine this,” he wrote. “We promenade from the Old Cadet Chapel through the Arch of Sabers, followed by a grand honeymoon after the long grind I’ve been through.”
I was a sophomore. “Impossible. I’ll still be a year short of finishing my ‘grind.’”
“Forget the degree. I’ll take care of you,” he wrote.
Me, a college dropout? And a kept woman? My next letter zinged, “Think again, buster.”
He fired back, “You expect me to wait until you get your PhD?”
His oozing sarcasm squelched the flame. I told him it was over. He called. He wrote. I didn’t want to be mean, but eventually I quit responding.
It wounded us both deeply, but I had to get past it. I began dating again, and other romantic imbroglios plunged me into deeper troughs of pain:
Ian, a CU physics teaching assistant. After three dates, he sent flowers, talked of a ring, wrote passionate letters. “You are the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. I love you sincerely and lastingly.” I loved his English accent and his passion for our Colorado mountains. But not him.
Wilcox, an army lieutenant, also courtesy of my brother. He was a party guy who blitzed me with thirty-six “Darlin’” and “Sweetie” letters—none with the intellectual meat to spark my continuing interest.
Benjamin, a Colorado School of Mines engineering student. A mountain of a man with a lumberjack beard, he was soft-spoken, kindhearted, and fun. He graduated ahead of me, moved to California, and called every day, long distance. At our first reunion, I had to fight him off physically. He didn’t believe that no meant NO. He begged forgiveness. Too late. He had betrayed my trust.
Charming guys all, but they squeezed me to suffocation. It crushed me to inflict heartache on them, and my studies suffered.
Here’s what puzzled me: I wasn’t a guy magnet. Heads didn’t turn when I walked into a room. I didn’t sport flashy outfits, waggle my hips, or display any cleavage. I didn’t spend hours layering on makeup or have long, flowing waves like the women in the Halo ads. My hair was curly, often frizzy. And I had ten thousand freckles. If I flirted, it was wordplay, not pouty lips, batting eyelashes, or heaving breasts. On weekends, I didn’t haunt the beer joints near campus, drink myself into a stupor, and later rationalize that drunken sex was the height of ecstasy.
My solution? Take matters into my own hands and preselect a mate. No more leaving the marriage question to chance. No more suffering the slings and arrows of the weekend dating game.
Once I made that decision, it didn’t take me long to zero in on my choice: Jack Sigg.
My brother’s best friend and roommate at West Point. Smart. Charming. And a big plus: everyone in my family liked him.
I had seen him in person only three times, but it was enough to generate sparks. The first was six years earlier, when families of plebes (freshmen) trundled to West Point to celebrate Christmas with their newly minted cadet sons. After Bonner introduced us, Jack turned to my brother and said, “Well . . . where have you been hiding this lovely lady?” He took my gloved hand in both of his and brought it to his lips for a courtly kiss. All the while, his playful blue eyes danced with mine. A warm glow, like the embers of a summer’s campfire, swept through me. Wow! This guy was a college man. West Point! And I was a mere sophomore in high school.
Four years later, at his and Bonner’s graduation, those embers flared again when I cruised close enough to Jack to feel the heat of him. A company commander, he was dashing in his dress whites. I was now a college girl, and when he took my hand, I held his in both of mine. I lingered. He squeezed. “It’s been a long time,” he said. I hoped he didn’t notice my staccato breathing.
That was it, though. Soon after, Bonner unknowingly diverted my attentions by setting me up with Geoff. The sparks that sizzled in Jack’s presence were snuffed out when I saw him that June Week with a dazzling girl on his arm.
My third encounter with Jack came a month later when he and Bonner made a trip to the ranch before they headed off to ranger training. I was spellbound in Jack’s orbit, where the air was energizing and the conversation invigorating. Late one afternoon, when Bonner helped Dad tune up a cranky tractor, I took Jack horseback riding to my favorite spot on the Rio Grande, which ran through our ranch. We paused to let our horses drink. In the distance, the Sangre de Cristo Range had begun to glow purple-red in the sunset. “That’s magnificent!” Jack said. “Nothing like the Appalachians back home.”
He loved my mountains. The man had taste.
For a few splendid moments we seemed in tune.
Sadly, for the rest of their visit, I was not party to their adventures. He was a race car and I was a scooter. He left after a week, without really noticing me. Or so I thought.
Summer 1962–Fall 1963. Now that I had chosen Jack as The One, I took the next step and sent him a “hello” letter. I entertained him with stories of college life in Boulder and asked him to tell me about Germany, where he was stationed. He wrote right back. That fall he inquired about my classes and asked me to send any papers I’d written—“not only to tell me more about you, but for my own education.” I was flattered.
In one letter he asked, “How’s Geoff? I haven’t heard from him in months. Are you two still planning to get married?”
I told him Geoff and I had broken up and asked Jack about his dazzling date at June Week. “The ‘dazzle’ was quick to fade,” he wrote. “Next I heard she was marrying one of my classmates . . . but I ran into him at Grafenwohr and found out that was off too. C’est la guerre.”
All right! The runway was clear.
For a year, our letters grazed on the topics of the day—Cuba, the Cold War, poverty and racism at home—and on our own plans for education and our futures. Then the second week of November 1963, an extra-thick envelope arrived, bursting at the seams. He’d probably been guarding the Czech-German border again—lonely evenings there had fostered a number of long letters. But Jack’s tone had changed. First, he cataloged his “faults”:
Some people say I’m too ambitious, but I’m weak compared to my ability to meet my own high standards. I’m a daydreamer, a romantic prone to illusions of grandeur and happy-ever-after endings. I’m hard to live with, picky, a neatnik, a perfectionist.
He said his adviser had made him rewrite his Rhodes scholarship bio because he’d used “I” a hundred times. A Rhodes nominee? A huge honor, not a “flaw” at all. The letter wasn’t a confession, but a clever rationale for why I should find him irresistible. Eight pages into his opus, I hit this pronouncement: “Why the sham before? You! You fulfill my dreams for the girl I want to marry.”
Marry? The girl I want to marry! My skin tingled. My knees went rubbery. I jumped up, paced the room, flung my window open, gulped in fresh air. He wants to marry me? I raced back to my desk and read on. “I was afraid to tell you the truth. If I’m out of bounds here, please let us remain friends.”
He was afraid to tell me the truth? Whew! I had daydreamed this declaration for nearly two years. I wrapped my arms around my head to prevent an explosion, leaped up again, paced back to the window. Marry me? Holy cow!
Jack transcended my highest hopes. In the top 10 percent of his West Point class, he was a graduate of Airborne and Ranger schools, one of the first in his class promoted to troop commander, with an invitation in hand to teach math or tactics at West Point, his choice.
Better yet, our letters had revealed his belief that a husband should be a stalwart supporter of his wife’s career goals and should see her as an equal partner in achieving his. He was no “male chauvinist pig,” the ultimate epithet for men too blind to recognize women’s talents. A bonus: We had the same values about love (precedes sex) and marriage (a lifelong commitment). I could flourish with Jack. As the daughter of a career officer, I knew army life.
Our correspondence blossomed like a century plant, as if the seeds had been gestating all along. Jack began to sign off with “Love” and soon “All my love.” His letters and audiotapes became steeped in unabashed passion. How could I resist such declarations as these:
I keep feeling so confident our envisioned dreams of unbounded joy will become actuality, and gloriously soon. Am engulfed by desire to be with you. Am bursting with hopefulness. I cannot fathom any course other than the beginning of a new life together. Anything else is unthinkable.
I sat in my office today almost three hours preparing a speech to the troops. All I could think about was you sitting on my lap. Can’t get you out of my mind. I think of you always, always.
Soon his weekly letter count exceeded that of all the guys writing their girls in our dorm. I knew. As mail clerk, I handled every letter.
In the midst of this letter tornado, a mere four weeks later, he invited me to spend Christmas with him in Germany. He would pay. Oh my, alone with him in Europe? How bold. Shocking really. Was I ready for that? No! Besides, there wasn’t time to renew my passport.
Terry
Friday, 22 November 1963, Boulder. I bounded into the CU School of Journalism reading room for a late sack lunch. Friday again. A lonely weekend lay ahead.
Inside the door, my former girlfriend Sarah grabbed me and pulled me into the typewriter lab, her cheeks stained with tears. She had broken up with me two weeks earlier, and we had been greeting each other in our classes like mere acquaintances. I’d never seen her cry. She was too tough.
“They’ve killed President Kennedy,” she said.
That’s how I found out. From Sarah. In the J-School basement. At exactly 12:42 p.m.
We held each other shamelessly, locked together as one, this time in shock, not lust.
Over that endless four-day weekend, it wasn’t Sarah I comforted. Or who comforted me. After Sarah took off, I called Annie. All afternoon, she and I wandered benumbed through campus, unable to fathom the news from Dallas. Like zombies, we ended up with several other journalism students, all uninvited, at Professor Mitchell’s home, crammed into his living room for four days. We sat on the floor, ate cold pizza, and stared silently into the black-and-white TV. JFK’s funeral fell on my birthday. I didn’t tell anyone.
Americans everywhere came out of that weekend with images burned into our minds: Jacqueline Kennedy as stoic as she was elegant. Little John-John at attention, saluting his dead father. The white horses pulling the president’s flag-draped caisson up Pennsylvania Avenue to the cadence of muffled drums. The riderless black stallion, stirrups holding empty backward-facing riding boots. Lee Harvey Oswald’s contorted face as he was struck by the bullet from Jack Ruby’s gun. An endless spiral of anguish.
We all ached with our own personal grief. Annie’s and mine was the loss of a visionary president who created the Peace Corps. After Kennedy’s inauguration almost two years before, if you had asked me to state my main goal in life, I would have said, “To join the Peace Corps.” JFK had touched me personally when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Within weeks, I had applied and been accepted to go to Colombia in the summer of 1961.
But that April, my father was killed by a drunk driver, and Mom was hospitalized for six weeks. When she got out, she was hobbled for months, both legs broken. My sister, Pam, was fourteen, and my brothers, Greg and Randy, were eleven and nine. Grandma came to help, but I couldn’t leave them for two years, so I turned down the Peace Corps and spent that summer at home.
Of course, nothing was the same. Dad was gone. Mom was crippled. Grandma and I and the kids were barely able to hold our broken family together. My dreams were dashed.
After I turned down the Peace Corps, I was convinced they’d never consider me again. That was it. And now, JFK murdered. Not only my dreams crushed, but the entire nation’s.
Ann
Saturday, January 4, 1964, Boulder. When I returned to CU after Christmas, a bundle of letters and two audiotapes from Jack awaited me. One tape, labeled Airmail, Special Delivery, was postmarked December 21, two weeks prior. Special Delivery? A note inside demanded, “Read this first! Make sure no one overhears what I have said on this tape!” He needed an answer, he added, ASAP.
ASAP? Too late for that!
In the last carrel at the far end of the music library, I settled in for his grand secret: “The letter from you today made me extremely happy. You are wonderful. I look at your picture and think of you hours on end. It’s ruining my military efficiency.”
His voice was fluid, no awkward pauses. I closed my eyes, imagining him beside me. Curiously, he began describing the carrot in his goulash soup. “The stem is old and withered where it meets the carrot, but peeking out is a sprig of green—new life!”
The man found poetry in day-to-day minutiae. I chuckled.
“This is also about new life, and it must remain a secret,” he said. “I spent this evening calming a girl who is three months pregnant. I can’t describe how difficult it is to try to console someone sobbing like that.” He paused. “I’m telling you this because we need your help.”
We? I stopped the tape. We? He and the girl needed my help?
What? You’ve gotten a girl pregnant? You, the quintessential Boy Scout grown into a West Point officer: duty, honor, country above all else? The thought hung like a noxious gas. Okay, Ann, hear him out. At least he’s got the courage to confess.
My hand shook, but I turned the player back on. “The girl is pregnant by your brother.” Jack sighed. “She’s German. Bonner doesn’t want to marry her, and we agree that is probably best.”
An overheard conversation from Dad’s office replayed itself in my mind: Dad lecturing Bonner before he left for Germany as I sat reading in the adjacent family room. “Messing with German females will torpedo your career,” Dad said. “They’ll yank your top secret clearance, and you’ll never see it again.” Memories of World Wars I and II were too fresh, he said.
Bonner responded, “Yes, sir. I know that, sir.” His tone said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m not stupid.”
I could see years of Bonner’s sacrifices fizzle. He had stayed in the US the year we lived in Italy so he could graduate from a top American high school and get a congressional appointment to West Point. Four years of rigorous study next, followed by punishing training in Airborne and Ranger schools. He had the smarts and personality to mingle with leaders and motivate troops. He was thoughtful and considerate. I was proud of him. But at that moment, I wanted to slap him for thinking with his penis instead of with his brain.
Rooted in that stuffy carrel, I ricocheted from anger to disbelief to sadness—for Bonner and the girl, even though I’d never met her. How could you, my own brother?
Over the next two hours, I mined these additional facts: The girl, Gretchen Schumacher, had been a serious girlfriend. She loved him, but he didn’t love her enough to give up his career. Distraught over her condition and Bonner’s response, she had decided to have her baby in the States so her family, friends, and employer wouldn’t know she had sinned.
There was more. Abandoned, the girl was sobbing nonstop. Unbelievably, having described her as a basket case, Jack asked if she could come to Boulder so she could “cry on my shoulder.” He coated his request in a compliment: “If I were pregnant, I’d want to talk to you.”
I snorted, right there in the library. If he were pregnant? Ha! As if asking a simple favor, he added, “Write and let me know if it’s okay for her to come.”
To top it off, he said Bonner hadn’t told Mom or Dad. “Please don’t tell them. Or Bonner. He’s paying for everything, but it’s better if he doesn’t know I’m sending her to you.” Great. Jack expected me to keep two secrets, one from my parents and one from my brother. The kicker? Gretchen would board a plane for Colorado on January 6—two days off.
Finals would begin in a week. I was buried under term papers to write, tests to cram for, and a pile of books to finish for my four English lit classes. Plus untold pages to transcribe, with dictionary in hand, for second-year Russian. I sweated through the week, polished off my papers, and headed into finals sleep deprived.
No word from Gretchen. I was a wreck. Six days after her scheduled departure, she still hadn’t arrived. I swore Terry to secrecy and spilled the whole mess, including my fear that Gretchen had gotten lost. What would I tell Jack?
“She’ll show up. Deal with it then,” he said.
Thanks a lot, Ter!
Gretchen called on January 13, a week late. “I’m here! In America! Denver. And eating Mexican food. I love it! Jack wishes you well. From his description, you are the most amazing girl in America. When can we meet? Tomorrow?”
Well, no. I had finals. And my job. We agreed on Saturday.
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 2
