A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties

by Terry Marshall

  “Wow, great visit!” I said as we pulled out of the driveway late the next afternoon. “Mom and the kids think you’re a saint.”

  She slid her hand across my thigh. “I am, hon. But wait until we get to Silverton.”

  That night, I parked beyond Molas Pass at the last switchback before descending into Silverton.

  Below us was a scene unimaginable in summer: the snow-covered hamlet itself, rows of streetlights like low-hung stars shimmering on the gently falling snow. Massive Kendall and Sultan mountains, their trees buried beneath incalculable feet of snow, towered over the town like a pair of albino giants facing off for battle. “My God, it’s gorgeous,” Rachael said.

  In town, we crunched to a stop across from the Standard office. Allen was gone for the week, and Rachael and I had his place overlooking Greene Street to ourselves. When we opened the car doors, an arctic blast sucked our breath away. We dashed to the entrance and up the stairs. Allen’s bachelor pad was shirt-sleeves warm, as if he had stepped out for an errand. We plopped onto his sofa, pretending we had mushed in by dogsled.

  Long after midnight, lights out, we stood bewitched at the bay window. Falling snow blurred the buildings across the street. Sultan Mountain disappeared into the mist. I snuggled Rachael from behind, hands clasped at her tummy. She leaned back into me, swaying to some imagined symphony. I nuzzled her hair. Then in one wild instant, we flung off our clothes and made love on Allen’s white wall-to-wall carpet, as plush as a royal bedchamber.

  Midmorning on Thursday, we slogged over to the Grand Imperial under a brilliant, cloudless sky. After a leisurely brunch, we hiked to Snarky’s Market, filled a shopping cart with provisions, and retired to Allen’s lair for a weeklong tryst.

  But after only two days of carnal delight, I awoke Sunday anxious to get back to Boulder. Half my vacation gone, and I had a term paper I hadn’t started and final exams the second week back. Rachael sat cross-legged on the bed, eyeing me. “Awake at last? It’s the Sabbath. I’m starved. How about breakfast in bed?”

  “Great. What’s on the menu?”

  “Me.”

  We eventually crawled out of bed and whipped up Spanish omelets and toast. Sitting side by side on the floor gazing out at the winter scape, we talked away the morning. She made lunch. Afterward I shouldered my backpack and headed out.

  “No, you can’t run off like that,” she said, tugging at my arm. “I haven’t kissed you goodbye.” It was a ploy, but she roped and hog-tied me. We kissed and then made love again on the floor. I left Silverton late afternoon—with a four-hundred-mile trip on icy roads ahead.

  The next day in Boulder, I flogged myself for having rejected Rachael’s plea to stay in Silverton a full week. “I’ll treat you to a Playboy romp,” she had said.

  My response: “I can’t. Too much homework.” Jeez, no girl had ever offered such a gift. What a wuss I’d been!

  The sad irony of it all: I spent the first four days wishing I’d stayed and only three days writing my term paper.

  Despite my having wimped out on her, Rachael immediately resumed her flurry of letters. By January 21, she’d sent ten. I’d more than kept pace.

  Then things changed.

  Friday, January 24, 1964. Three days without a letter from Rachael. What gives?

  Saturday, January 25. Nothing.

  Monday and Tuesday, January 27 and 28. Two more days with no mail. I had sent three letters since the twenty-first. Had I offended her?

  Another full week, January 29–February 3. I had written three more letters, ten single-spaced typewritten pages, all with pleas for a response. No answer.

  Tuesday, February 4. “And now for a long overdue letter,” Rachael wrote. “We might have been, but we’re no longer (I hope) in trouble.”

  In trouble? What?

  She had missed her period. She had been to the doctor to . . . my God . . . to see if she was pregnant! But good news: “It finally came. In fact, I exploded all over my sleeping bag.”

  Friday, February 7. She’d been to the doctor again. “Now he’s less sure I’m not in that ‘delicate condition.’”

  I had been firm about using condoms. I wracked my brain. Damn, Christmas night! They were in my backpack in the car, but I couldn’t brave the cold to go get them. “I’ll pull out,” I had promised. “You’d better,” she’d said. That was absolutely the only time it could have happened.

  Tuesday, February 11. Another doctor’s visit. Her letter had turned from if to what now? We loved being together, but we weren’t in love. We had been up front about that. Marriage, she said, was out of the question. So was raising a child as an unwed mother or giving it up for adoption. Her conclusion: “The only solution is an abortion.”

  The word hit like a sledgehammer. Abortion didn’t exist in my vocabulary, not even as a debate topic. I had been raised Methodist, active in Sunday school and youth programs, and though I had abandoned religion in college, abortion was sin, pure and simple. I didn’t ask why. It just was. The church said it was.

  I didn’t ponder whether life began at conception or at what stage a fetus could be considered an unborn human being. Nor did I debate whether it was a woman’s right to choose to be a mother. Abortion was wrong. Period.

  It was also illegal.

  I twisted myself into a knot, wrestling with abortion as a moral issue, as well as a practical one. Rachael was right about not getting married. We weren’t in love. Like Laura Lee and her high school boyfriend, Rachael and I had been swept away by passion. Laura Lee married the guy. Misery followed. He worked day labor jobs. They couldn’t pay their bills. They fought. She left him. They divorced. And then she consigned herself to a second marriage she didn’t want. Her new marriage wouldn’t last, I was sure of it. No way could I let Rachael face the struggle that Laura Lee had weathered—and still faced.

  My angst over the idea of an abortion had been more than I could cope with. I told Annie everything. She was disgusted that I had been so irresponsible to get a woman pregnant, and horrified because she also considered abortion a sin and a crime. Annie and I scoured my predicament for every nuance, over coffee, on long walks across campus, at Sunday dinners that lingered far into the night.

  She helped me weigh the options without telling me what to do, challenging my every word but supporting me too. She wanted Rachael and me to find the best solution for us, even though she’d never met Rachael. Our conversations were the ones I should have had with Rachael. But Rachael was in Silverton. We couldn’t talk face-to-face, and we couldn’t afford long-distance calls.

  Through the ordeal, I remained outwardly calm. But inside, Rachael’s pregnancy dogged me everywhere—in the shower, over breakfast, on my bike, in the middle of conversations, in class.

  One day I noticed the professor staring at me. A wry grin slid across his face. The class giggled. “We’re discussing portraiture, Terry. I asked for your thoughts on synchronizing an electronic flash with a single flood lamp.”

  My thought: How’d you know about Rachael?

  Fortunately, I kept my mouth shut. Another day, I was alone with Annie in the J-School reading room. I closed the door, and my voice shattered the silence. “What the hell am I gonna do, Annie? What?” My lip quivered. I hated that. A man had to be strong.

  When I was alone, silence strangled me. I turned on the radio the instant I entered my apartment to keep thoughts of pregnant Rachael at bay. I couldn’t study. Or read. Or think.

  At night, memories swirled incessantly. Naked Rachael stretched out on Nossaman’s white carpet. Rachael beside me as I drove, her hand performing magic. Bare-butt Rachael brushing against me as she set lunch on the table. “How’s this, hon? Will this do it for you?”

  Night after night, my exhausted psyche tried to alter the past: Christmas night in Silverton. Rachael’s ready. I’m eager. But this time, fireman-quick, I jump into my clothes, brave the arctic night, sprint to the car, grab my backpack, and race back. She teases on a condom. We go at it with
abandon. Pure pleasure. No mess. No pregnancy.

  Worse, I was plagued by Dickensian nightmares.

  Laura Lee’s precious two-year-old tugs at my sleeve. She’s holding her nose. She slaps a soggy diaper into my hand. “He peed again, Daddy. Make him stop.” Rachael’s and my naked baby is on his back on the white carpet, pee shooting up like a geyser. From the bedroom, Rachael’s screams curdle the air. Damn, here comes another one. She spurts them out in litters, like puppies. I’m working two jobs, and we’re mired in debt. Another one we have to give away.

  One night it was Rachael curled up in a lambing pen in the sheep shed. She’s in labor, panting, but it’s not working. “Hang on,” I say. I kiss her cheek. It’s wool! She’s a ewe, not Rachael at all. No sweat, I’ve done this before. I thrust my hand down the passage, grab the kid by its forelegs, and drag it out. Blood’s everywhere. The kid staggers to its feet. But the ewe is no longer struggling. No heartbeat. “Sorry, little guy, your mom didn’t make it,” I say. The kid smiles and waves. “Thanks, Dad,” it says. The kid’s a human! A girl. With Rachael’s luxurious black hair.

  Saturday, February 15. Another letter from Rachael. She had no money, not even for a bus ticket to Denver. Time was running out. “The problem isn’t going to get any smaller,” she quipped. But she was also worried about us. “I can’t help but feel this has ruined everything we had, or might hope to have, but I would appreciate you standing by me for the time being.”

  Jesus! In the us, I’d been consistent. It was our problem, not hers alone. Rachael was right. Abortion was the only solution for us. She was broke. “I’ll pay for everything,” I wrote. But I urged her to wait until we could discuss it in person.

  Wednesday, February 19. “Dr. Perini says there’s no doubt I’m pregnant, and if I’m going to do something about it, I’d better do it soon. To be blunt, I will leave here the day I get the money.” She added, “I’ve been missing you something terrible, but couldn’t say so for fear you would think I was trying to con you into marrying me over this.”

  I got her letter on February 20. A half hour later, I wired her money for a bus to Boulder.

  It was thirty-seven degrees on Saturday when Rachael hopped off the bus with her ski jacket over her arm. “In Silverton, only pansies wear coats in weather this warm,” she said. She kissed me, no innocent peck on the cheek either.

  She didn’t look pregnant. Or feel pregnant. We laced our joy at being together with a searching face-to-face discussion of whether abortion really was our only option. Without any assurances she would be safe, the risks terrified us both. But we had to do this. I tapped into the haphazard network of “a friend who knows a guy who has a friend who . . .” and got phone numbers of three abortion doctors, one in Wyoming, another in Nebraska, and the third in Kansas City. Which was the “right” one?

  Sunday night, I drove her home to Denver and promised to call once I had lined up a doctor. “If Mom or Dad answers,” she said, “tell them you’re from CU. They think I’m going back to school. They have no idea I’m pregnant.”

  It took me a week to nail down the arrangements. On March 3, Rachael stayed the night, and we left at dawn for Huntersville, Nebraska, 325 miles from Boulder and 150 miles of two-lane road beyond the nearest city. Twenty miles from Huntersville, I hit a patch of black ice and spun the car in a heart-stopping 360. I crept into town at ten miles an hour, white-knuckled. The town had a tiny café, a six-unit 1930s motel straight out of the movie Psycho, and a medical clinic that must have been a gas station in a previous life.

  Dr. Wagner welcomed us like family. Gray-haired with a kind smile, he was risking his medical license to clean up the mess we’d made. No lecture, blame, or disdain. Just quiet compassion.

  We had no idea if Dr. Wagner had the skills to perform a safe abortion or if his clinic was even clean. Were his instruments properly sterilized? We didn’t inspect his facility or ask for credentials. We certainly didn’t ask how many successful abortions he had performed. We stumbled blindly ahead. Could Rachael be maimed or even die? We didn’t know. I counted out a hundred and twenty-five dollars in advance—a fourth of the savings I’d begun squirreling away in high school when I was a printer’s devil at thirty-five cents an hour.

  “Can Terry come hold my hand?” Rachael asked.

  “I will hold your hand, dear,” the nurse said. “It’s more professional that way.”

  Rachael forced a weak little wave and disappeared into the operating room. I slumped into a faded green plastic chair.

  A sign on the operating room door read “Private. No Entry.” It morphs into neon: “Libertine boyfriends stay out / YOU knocked her up / WE fix her up.” I conjure up an image of Dr. Wagner behind that door. He brandishes a three-foot-long hypodermic needle. “Spread those gorgeous gams, sweetie,” he says. “You’ll feel a slight pinch, and then it’ll all be over.” He’s lying. He’ll kill her. Jesus! Minutes tick by. I listen. Rachael shrieks. I smash down the door. He’s poised over her, scalpel raised. No, it’s a butcher knife. I flatten him with a flying tackle, wrest the knife away. “Sorry, Romeo,” he says, “your hundred and twenty-five bucks is nonrefundable.”

  Finally the door opened. The nurse steered Rachael out. She was dazed and unsteady. We sat her down. I held her hand. It was cold and a bit shaky. Later, in the scuzzy motel room, she was as tender as ever, albeit too sore to move. “Just hold me. I want you close,” she said.

  We went to the café for dinner, but Rachael didn’t eat. The thought of food nauseated her. The next day, we made the long drive back to Colorado, and I took her home to Denver. That same night, she wrote, “You have been nothing short of wonderful these last two days. It lacked only one thing: You didn’t get any studying done.”

  She wrote fondly about taking up where we had left off at Christmas. But her fear, expressed before she left Silverton, proved prophetic: “I can’t help but feel this has ruined everything.” The abortion had forced me to think about us as a couple, of how little time we had spent with each other, even though we’d been “together” for three and a half months. Four torrid weekends, mostly in bed. Eleven nights.

  On March 10, a mere week after Huntersville, I told Rachael the blunt truth, not in person as I should have, but in a letter, in words I soon regretted for their callousness. “I know I am not in love and that the possibility of it developing into something along that line seems rather remote.” I went on, “Sex without love isn’t enough”—the same words Sarah had used when she cut me loose four months earlier.

  Rachael and I exchanged several letters that spring. When she bled excessively one morning and her temperature climbed to 103, she fretted but toughed it out. She stayed in Denver, found a job, picked up with old friends, and made new ones.

  In those letters, we revisited our relationship—our thoughts, our words, our actions. She wounded me with angry invectives and scraped the wounds raw. With talons extended, I slashed back. In our bitter exchanges, she wept. I swore. But both of us apologized for our hurtful words. More than once.

  In the end, we plumbed our souls and resurrected the joy in what we’d had together and praised each other for that. Her final letter, dated June 8, 1964, came to me in Center. “I’m still enthralled with my job, and I’ve met someone. Ted and I are happy together, and we’ve made a resolution never to go to bed angry with each other.”

  Did she have long-term complications, physical or emotional? Did the abortion affect her ability to have children? Only the ensuing years could provide the answers. Rachael knew my family and our address and phone number, and she was no shrinking violet. She would have gotten in touch with me again if she thought there was anything I needed to know.

  I never heard from her again.

  Before the abortion, before Rachael left Silverton, Annie and I spent scores of hours together agonizing, not only over Rachael, but also over Gretchen, Annie’s brother’s girlfriend. For a bit of cheer amid the gloom, Annie and I took in a local theatre production a
nd a couple of movies, my treat. Not dates, merely time-outs from the two crises.

  Sometime during those painful weeks, I realized I was indeed in love—not with my lover, but with my best friend.

  Friday, 6 a.m., 3 July 1964, Silverton. The sun rose and lit up John Ross’s apartment before I could finish my letter to Annie. I had to get to work. I downed a bowl of Wheaties and a couple of slices of toast, raced off to the Standard, and chained myself to the Linotype. Allen always had plenty to keep me busy.

  After work, he and I relaxed over dinner and drinks at the Grand Imperial. By nine, half-soused, we were both lamenting our dismal love lives. “You should have married that Annie gal when you had a chance, Marshall,” he said. “I told you that in May.”

  Poor Allen. He wanted a girlfriend so badly, but he could be shy around women. “Yeah, and you should be sleeping with Janet Billings. Or young Miss What’s-Her-Name from last summer. Or that redhead from Durango.”

  I had to pee, and when I came back, Allen was gone. The bartender shrugged. “You know Nossaman. By now he’s up there in that eagle’s nest of his, crying in that scruffy beard.”

  I walked the length of Greene Street and continued on to the river, El Rio de las Animas Perdidas. That was us, Allen and me, lost souls, alone in Silverton. Unlike Allen, though, I had a prospect, a damn good one. Hiking back, I caught myself humming. That was Silverton, night sky so full, so bright you didn’t need a flashlight. Love really did bloom at night here. And the brilliant moon really could break your heart.

  Back in John’s apartment, I finished my letter to Annie. Before sliding it into one of my fancy envelopes, I scrawled a PS. “All you have to do in regard to my letter of July 1 is send me a one-word note: ‘YES.’”