At the Kirtleys, Edna Mae was abuzz over a “little get-together” she had planned for that evening—and too busy to notice the signs of our imbroglio at the lake. Her dinner parties were as prestigious as a base commander’s annual fete, and in Verona’s American military community, anyone who was anybody had to be there. She hustled us off to dress for the event.
The party plunged me into a world Mom and Dad had mastered—the casual, yet sophisticated military social, where rank and protocol ruled supreme. Guests glided about with purpose, grace, and perfect posture. Wine and liquor flowed freely. A few might drink too much, but they would never betray themselves by compromising military decorum. Even when the men sported civilian wear, junior officers addressed superiors and their wives as “sir” and “ma’am” and yielded respectfully on the conversation highway. By custom, conversations were lively, cultured repartee without controversy.
But that night, there was a big difference—my lieutenant and I were the guests of honor. Colonel Kirtley introduced Jack as if he were his own son, newly returned from battle. The guests gathered round, men talking tanks, tactics, and tinhorn dictators. The women asked Jack about life on the border. “Are you in a BOQ?” “A barracks?” “A tent?” “A foxhole?” A couple of them painted alluring pictures of their own daughters. The nerve!
I chatted with the women about Neuschwanstein, Paris, Jack’s and my plans for Venice. One officer noticed my last name and asked whether I knew of a Colonel Garretson who commanded the port at Livorno in the late fifties. Before I could answer, Edna Mae piped in with tales of Dad’s successes there and at Pusan and Guam, giving me some cachet of my own.
Despite our rift at the lake, Jack and I managed to sparkle at Edna Mae’s party, the perfect elixir to keep us from wallowing in our separate troughs of despair. We chatted, ate, and drank until we were spent. I fell asleep on top of the bed in my Paris cocktail dress, finally waking up enough to change into my nightie at three in the morning. Jack’s absence as my sleeping partner heightened my anxiety over how we could possibly mend the damaged tapestry of this relationship we had worked so hard to create. But I was grateful for the reprieve from blame Edna Mae’s party had given us.
Friday, July 10, 1964, Verona. Ed and Edna Mae helped us plot out directions to Venice by way of Shakespeare’s famed balcony at Juliet’s house, Casa di Giulietta. It wasn’t high on my list. It seemed hokey to pay homage to a real house where a fictitious teenage girl had been wooed by her equally fictitious boyfriend. But never mind. This was no time to be hard to please.
The tourist-mobbed, larger-than-life statue of Juliet was the dark brown of aged bronze, except for her right breast, shiny as burnished gold. Guys, young and old, stood in line to fondle that breast. Even some girls.
“That’s so weird!” I snorted.
“Oh, not at all,” Jack said. “It’s better luck than the Blarney Stone. You rub her breast, and poof, you and your girl are sealed forever.” He stood tall, arms crossed, sounding matter-of-fact. “I need all the help I can get,” he added.
“Public fondling of a statue? Please don’t,” I said, ignoring the playful, wistful twinkle in his eyes.
“Never. Fondling her would be a travesty after the real thing.” He chanced a sly grin.
I effected a stern look. “I hope I’m better than cold bronze.”
“No question.” Finally, a smile. It rivaled the shiny breast.
We hustled through Juliet’s house and got back in the car. As we took off for Venice, Jack asked, “Do you think we’re ‘star-crossed lovers’?”
“No. If anything, ours should be a match made in heaven. Too bad you don’t believe in heaven.” I heaved a dramatic sigh.
“Jury’s out on heaven now that I’ve had a taste of it. So tell me about the ‘match.’”
“For all the reasons we’ve talked about. Values, education, politics, love. And our army lives—though that could be a drawback, I suppose.”
“No. The army’s clearly a positive.”
“To my folks, sure, but I know how hard military life is—coping with pigheaded brass and misfit soldiers, demands on wives, the drinking, the constant moving, always uprooting the family, years spent apart. And so much uncertainty. Going off to war . . . and maybe not coming back . . .”
That thought dangled in the air, and we both fell silent.
11
Old Haunts, New Confrontations
Terry
Friday, 10 July 1964, Los Gatos, California. Our first full day at Uncle Bob’s place. We had left Center at dawn on Wednesday. Taking turns, Mom, Pam, and I drove seven hundred miles the first day, all the way through the Colorado and Utah mountains to Ely, Nevada. Day two, we racked up five hundred more and arrived wobbly kneed at my cousins’ place late Thursday afternoon. After staying up half the night jawing, not only with Aunt Gwen and Uncle Bob, but with all six Kocher kids, including seven-year-old Marianne, we lazed Friday away.
Saturday, 6:30 a.m., 11 July 1964. Before anyone else got up, I had some time alone to start a letter to Annie—trip notes mostly: the barren landscape through Nevada, the golden hills of California, our terror of driving the California freeways. But I also told her, “I opened my Shakespeare on the way, and oddly enough, it fell to this page, Sonnet 116.” I copied it into the letter:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is a star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Shakespeare was right, I wrote. True love probably can stand separation, no matter how long, “if one can stand up to the loneliness, the doubts, the worries, the vivid imagination of what his love is doing. Shakespeare’s sonnet offers hope. So I’m hoping.”
I added a few lines about the winding two-lane road over Sonora Pass, but by 7 a.m., the Kocher and Marshall cousins were racing through the house like Tasmanian devils. We gulped down breakfast and invaded a beach near Santa Cruz. This was a California summer, exactly as I remembered it from our last trip in 1956.
All the kids—Pam and nineteen-year-old cousin Robert included—frolicked in the surf in a wild chase game, screeching and hooting. I retreated to a secluded dune and sat gouging bits of bark off a piece of driftwood, flicking them down the hillside. The sand squishing between my toes, the waves scrubbing the shore, and the brine-scented air all transported me to the French Riviera. Annie and the lieutenant must have been there by then, he no doubt ogling her in her skimpy bikini while they played footsie in the sand. The images burned holes in my brain, like staring at the sun.
“You really miss her, don’t you?” A girl’s voice, soft and sympathetic.
I jerked around and cupped my eyes against the sun.
“Sorry, the sun’s ferocious, isn’t it? I’ll fix that.” She glided past and planted her feet in the sand, hands on her hips. “How’s this view, cuz? Better?”
Cousin Paula, auburn-haired Paula. Now seventeen, devilishly saucy, and, in a two-piece orange bathing suit, as sexy as a UCLA cheerleader. Last night, we became instant pals over ginger ale after everyone else had gone to bed. No alcohol in the Kocher house—they were hard-core Mormons. I had sensed, though, that Paula would have been open to a glass of wine if I could have finessed it.
“Who? Miss who?” I asked.
“Your Annie! That’s her name, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t mentioned Annie to an
yone. Paula and I had talked politics and current events. Most high school kids gossip about who’s dating whom, but Paula waxed on about civil rights marches and protests. She had read The Wretched of the Earth and Nobody Knows My Name.
But then she lapsed into Barry Goldwater’s voice and countered my every argument that he would be a national disaster as president. When she saw the horrified look on my face, she said, “Got you going, didn’t I? The guy’s a Neanderthal. Even the Republicans aren’t stupid enough to elect him.”
She loved the Peace Corps. She worried about the draft, afraid her brothers would get sent to Vietnam. That was last night. On the beach, the chitchat was personal.
“My Annie, huh? Who says?”
“No one has to. You’re a flashing neon sign. Tell me about her.”
I did, more than I’d told anyone. Our whole history. Everything. She listened. No smart-ass quips. No giggling. She didn’t have a boyfriend. “Mom won’t let me date. But this fall, at college, I’ll be on my own. I hope I find someone who will love me as much as you love Annie. And I hope I can be like her, even the skinny-dipping. It sounds so grown up.” She sighed. “We better go. Sun’s down. We don’t want to start rumors.”
I got back to my letter to Annie after dinner, but only managed a note about sitting beside little Marianne, cutting meat for her. “I really love kids. It reminded me of you, and what we . . .” I was thinking about our kids, hers and mine, but that was presumptuous. I didn’t finish the thought.
Finally, it was quiet, and everyone was asleep except Paula and me. We had spent the evening with our two families, visiting and watching TV. No wonder Annie had written so few letters. She was on the go. So was I.
I had shown Paula a photo of Annie I kept in my wallet—her graduation picture, a studio pose, half-profile, eyes gazing into the future, bouffant do, every hair in place. Paula had borrowed it after dinner, disappeared into her room, and emerged three hours later with a pen-and-ink rendition on heavy art paper, remarkably lifelike. “You can put her on the wall above the bed and dream sweet dreams,” she said. “I’ll touch her up tomorrow and add the freckles. She’ll be perfect.”
We propped the drawing on the coffee table and sat side by side on the sofa. She had been drawing “forever,” she said, and wanted to major in art. Vermeer, Caravaggio, Monet, and a dozen other artists rolled off her tongue as if they were classmates.
We fell silent and soon Paula nodded off. Her hair brushed my cheek, and her head slumped onto my chest. Before us, on the coffee table, Annie was looking discreetly off to the left, chin up, lips parted, but she didn’t say a word. I knew that look. It’s okay, she’s my cousin, I told Annie silently. We were talking is all, just talking. She fell asleep. Annie stared back.
I squeezed lightly at Paula’s shoulder. “Time for bed, Rembrandt. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.” Her eyes blinked open. I pushed myself to my feet, took her by both hands, and tugged. “Come on, kiddo. Your carriage turns into a pumpkin at midnight.”
“I fell asleep, didn’t I? Did I snore? Or say anything dumb?”
“Nope. You were as well behaved as you are attractive.”
“Disgusting, isn’t it? But I get older every day. Good night, dear cuz.”
I kissed the back of her hand. “Thanks for the portrait. Thanks for everything.”
She headed down the hallway, then stopped and turned back. “Thanks for coming, Terry. I meant it about getting older every day. We both are. Think about that.”
Nearly midnight. Alone again. Paula’s drawing was a tailor-made antidote to the flammable mix of loneliness and desire: Annie—regal, determined, a portrait of promise. I cradled her in my hands and carried her to my bedroom, set her on the nightstand, and returned to the letter I had started after dinner. “You’ve seen the Riviera, so there’s nothing I can tell you about beaches,” I wrote. I didn’t mention Paula but confessed I’d been “bothered” by the “fine young bods” trotting past me at the beach. “All I could think of was making love to you.”
I hesitated. Annie and I had talked about making love, but in marriage, not in the throes of passion. She would wait, she told me. No ifs, ands, or buts. We had come perilously close, or should I say gloriously close. We had rounded third base and flirted precipitously with home. But we had never talked about our physical intimacies or written about them. These were acts of passion, expressions of love, spontaneous and unarticulated.
At that moment, it was important to make her understand how lonely it was without her, how committed I was to marriage. I imagined us making love and put it into words, removing each item of clothing, touching her and kissing her, every part of her, and carrying through to a night of glorious sex. The letter was more graphic than I had ever been with her. “Don’t be shocked,” I wrote. “Making love to you would be wonderful.” I signed it “With all my love” and then added “I love you. I want you to marry me,” as if it were some bold new declaration.
I got one of my colorful Annie envelopes from Silverton, sealed the letter inside, and added a stamp. I brought eighteen envelopes, one for each day of the trip plus an extra and a sheet of airmail stamps. Tomorrow, I’d get up early and mail it before anyone saw it. It was bad enough that Pam and the boys razzed me about every letter I sent or received. I didn’t need that from the Kocher kids too.
I hit the bed emotionally spent but pleased I had finished a letter on only my second day in California. “See, you can write every day,” I told the portrait on the nightstand beside me.
Ann
Friday, July 10, 1964, Venice. No camping in Venice, so a hundred strides off the Piazza San Marco, we found a tiny pensione with finely carved furniture, a canopied four-poster bed draped in antique organza, and a private bath, with breakfast—all for a hair under five dollars a night.
We had snacked all day on bite-size pizza, cheese-stuffed dates wrapped in prosciutto, mini-meatballs, and other delights Edna Mae had tucked into her cornucopia picnic bag. Still stuffed at dinnertime, Jack and I opted for crisp Italian bread with a decanter of Chianti. Surrounded by the cheery conviviality of a miniature bar we had stumbled on, we were rosy happy, worries behind us—until Jack asked, “Where and how shall we sleep tonight?”
Another round in the continuing skirmish. Our charming room had one bed, a marginally double bed at that. “Well, next to each other, of course, if that’s not . . . if you’re okay with that.”
“Better than the floor, I guess.”
“Yeah, but think about this—it’s a whole lot cozier than opposite ends of the house. Two endless nights in a row.”
He nodded, but conviviality had fled the bar. We emptied our carafe and downed the last crusts of bread, mothballing any hint of flirtation. After clumping up to our teeny room, we changed in silence and slipped into bed in the dark. Careful not to touch, careful not to send the wrong message or arouse false hopes, I slept poorly.
Saturday, July 11, 1964, Venice. Morning came too early. We stumbled out of bed like strangers, dressed hurriedly with eyes downcast, and swallowed breakfast in silence.
In the piazza, an oasis of calm quieted my mind. We had slipped through a crack in time to a place not polluted by swarming cars, belching buses, and noxious trucks. I nudged Jack with my elbow and whispered. “Listen. Hear that?”
He cocked his ear and looked around quizzically. “No. What?”
“No waspy Vespas terrorizing us at every corner. No cars at all, in fact. Even the air smells scrubbed—if you don’t get too close to the canals.”
“Yes. Peaceful, isn’t it? Just what we need.” With a single gesture, he took in the sprawling Piazza San Marco before us. “The enormity of this piazza puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? Life’s problems seem minute next to the Campanile, the basilica, and the colonnades.”
I nodded. “I like the way you’re thinking. Is this a sign of happier times to come?”
“I hope so. Happy is better than morose.”
“Agreed.” I di
dn’t dare push him too far, too fast. Ambling through the piazza, we chuckled at the ubiquitous, feathery knots of pigeons—sweet-cooing beggars competing for goodies scattered by eager tourists. “You’d think people would realize this isn’t an international bird sanctuary,” I said.
“Or that ten thousand pooping birds leave a nasty legacy for cleanup crews,” he added. “So let’s leave this bird latrine behind and see what else we can discover.”
We struck out to explore Venice, eyes alert, like wary big-game hunters. Minutes later, the meandering lane ended in a cul-de-sac. We backtracked, but angled off to a canal. No bridge. We backtracked again, turned left instead of right, and ended up back at our pensione.
Jack smiled for the first time all day. “Well, aren’t we the intrepid pathfinders?”
A break in the morning’s regret over our first night in Venice?
Nope. We went back to trudging again, silent, in parallel worlds. Deep into the maze, where the pathway narrowed, we lingered atop a picturesque footbridge. I leaned on the white wood parapet and peered into the canal. Jack did the same, nestling his shoulder against mine. My emotional antennae sprang to attention. I had to jog us out of our malaise. “How’d you sleep?”
“Didn’t.”
“Me either. This isn’t what we want. I still love you, you know.”
“Loving you is my curse.”
“Your curse? Really?”
“If I didn’t love you, I could walk away . . . but I can’t.” He looked at me, his hangdog face absolutely mournful. “You still want me around?”
“I . . . I won’t let you go,” I said. “Our Lake Garda calamity wasn’t an end, but a discovery. We’ve been gone what? Ten days! If we can’t navigate the ups and downs of two weeks, there’s no hope for a lifetime together. I might as well throw myself off this bridge.”
“You wouldn’t. Not onto that dead fish.” He scrunched his bushy eyebrows toward the canal below.
“Phew! You’re right—it’d be a stinky grave. I want this story to have a sweet ending.”
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