I shall continue to subvert your dirty Americanism. I shall continue to move to overthrow the perversion my country has become, for I detest it. I look forward to your term on the Board of Regents—for my subversion is yet to begin.
Somehow, the New Conservative, a campus newspaper created that fall to counter the Colorado Daily, got a copy of my letter. In mid-November, on page one, they headlined my tirade. A week later, they reprinted my entire letter, verbatim—the letter Annie so vehemently upbraided me about, the letter that taught me that for most people, hate is mighty strong language. And when you add America as the direct object, it’s the worst of the four-letter words.
Yes, the letter was hot. I should have asked Annie to edit it. I didn’t. I had foolishly let the Daily controversy push her away when I needed her most.
Nearly two years later, in sunny California, Barry Goldwater actually did me a huge favor—he eradicated my qualms about supporting Lyndon Johnson in the November 1964 election. Though I feared President Johnson would plunge us deeper into Vietnam, I believed Goldwater would precipitate a nuclear war.
Goldwater had hammered Kennedy and Johnson for being “soft” on Communism, for opening a hotline with the Soviet Union, for failing to “remake” the United Nations. He demanded the US “get tough.” His attacks on our foreign policy brought back memories of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which happened during those weeks of the Colorado Daily brouhaha.
October 22. Monday. President Kennedy on TV, calm but stern. The rumors were true. Soviet troops had streamed into Cuba—nearly forty thousand of them. American spy planes had photographed bomber bases and missile launch sites under construction on the island, plus actual missiles. Soviet nuclear missiles within range of every major American city, with launch sites activated. Unimaginable!
The president said, “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
A full retaliatory response. My God, he meant war! Nuclear war.
He had declared a quarantine around Cuba. The US Navy would blockade the island and board any ship transporting weapons to Cuba. The US put its fleet of B-52 long-range bombers—armed with nuclear weapons—in the air around the clock. An arsenal of midrange B-47 bombers sat armed and ready for takeoff on fifteen minutes’ notice. American missile sites were put on high alert. On Thursday, October 25, the Soviet tanker Bucharest passed through the blockade unchallenged. Soon after, a Soviet SAM missile shot down an American U-2 spy plane taking photos over Cuba, killing the pilot.
I’d seen On the Beach and read the book. We were doomed. I gassed up my car and left Boulder for home. I’d be safer there—no bases or missile sites or weapons plants in the San Luis Valley to attract Soviet nuclear bombs. But if worse came to worse, if it were a worldwide nuclear holocaust, at least I’d die with my family.
I spent the last week of that October in Center. The Colorado Daily faded into the past. In Center, no one talked about the football team’s latest win, potato prices, or whether we could finish harvest before the ground froze. Every conversation—in Skeffs’ Grocery, Walker’s Clothing, the post office, on the street—was about Nikita Khrushchev, SAC bombers, ICBMs, U-2 spy planes, Polaris submarine ballistic missiles, and Soviet Divina surface-to-air missiles. About first strike capability and MIGs and F-102s.
Every night at six, our whole family fell silent in front of the CBS evening news, and Mom didn’t start dinner until after Walter Cronkite signed off.
I drove into town every day that week. Same topic at Center High, and Sunday at the Methodist church—Mrs. Bemenderfer cast aside the topics in her Sunday school lesson plan. We talked about war and death and our chances of getting into heaven.
None of us knew it then, but in Washington and Moscow, diplomats and politicians were meeting around the clock, drafting secret messages, proposals, and counterproposals.
November 2, Friday. President Kennedy on TV again. Khrushchev had agreed to dismantle the bases in Cuba. They would crate up their missiles and ship them back to the Soviet Union. In response, the United Sates would remove its ballistic missiles from Turkey and Italy, the ones pointed toward the Soviet Union. And America pledged never again to invade Cuba.
Crisis over. War averted. We’d all live after all.
I drove back to Boulder in time for classes on November 5. I tried not to think about On the Beach, but I couldn’t get the strains of “Waltzing Matilda” out of my head, particularly those last moments together for Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner before he returns in his submarine for the voyage that will bring certain death in radioactive America . . . and before she dies in Melbourne in the approaching nuclear cloud. How could we be sure insanity wouldn’t prevail? That no one with a wild hair would press the button, send a missile aloft, and unleash Armageddon?
Since that week, I thought we had forever averted the threat of nuclear war. But now, two years after that near cataclysm, “Waltzing Matilda” again shrieked at me like a chimera from hell. If a levelheaded president like JFK could have brought us so close to nuclear war, I was sure that Goldwater would pitch us over the brink. His bellicose acceptance speech proved it.
Annie hadn’t heard of Goldwater’s nomination, I was sure of it. Had she been there with me, we would have dissected his speech and mulled over what his candidacy meant for America’s amped-up meddling in Vietnam and the Republican Party platform (which had rejected a plank affirming the constitutionality of President Johnson’s new Civil Rights Act).
I spent the morning writing to her, six pages’ worth—half of it filling her in on Goldwater’s nomination, the other half taking her on a tour of San Francisco with me. At the end I wrote:
An advertisement in the concert program last night reads: “The Hamilton is offering a limited number of brand-new redecorated and beautifully furnished apartments on lease . . . one bedroom townhouses from $360 (a month).” Marry me and let’s move to San Francisco and watch the fog roll in and the sun set over the ocean and the city. Better bring a few coins of your own.
She would laugh at the thought. My senior year, I had rented a room in the basement of a suburban ranch-style home for forty-five dollars a month—triple my outlay when I’d lived in the furnace room of a decrepit old apartment building.
Annie hated the eight-by-fifteen-foot concrete cell that fronted the monstrous old furnace. No linoleum or rug, merely grimy unpainted cement. Two-burner hot plate. Tiny sink. No bathroom, just a toilet one foot from the furnace and a showerhead mounted on a pipe behind the toilet. I had to straddle the toilet to shower. My single bed completely filled the adjacent “bedroom.” The furnace-room suite cost me fifteen dollars a month, and it was more than cozy warm during the grip of winter.
Ann
Thursday, July 16, 1964, West Berlin. In a crowded little coffee shop I enjoyed the last bites of my scrambled eggs with Preiselbeeren (cranberries)—my new favorite breakfast. My only task was to rest from the stress of my foray into East Berlin. Rest from all-night train rides, past and future. Rest from the emotional jangle of Terry versus Jack that had kept me on edge for weeks. I’d play tourist until my train to Landshut that evening.
First stop, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church—famous before World War II for its architecture and famous afterward for its devastation. It had been left unchanged for more than a decade before they built a rueful monument to the mayhem of war. I felt dwarfed by the single remaining war-damaged spire that dominated Kurfürstendamm Avenue and grieved silently above the hurly-burly of this street below. At least five other spires, which apparently had housed belfries, were gone. Such an architectural beauty, destroyed because it was in the path of war. Sure, some things are more important than preserving beauty—like life and liberty. Still . . .
As I strolled into the sanctuary, I wondered what Jack would have done had he rolled
into Berlin in his tank and seen the enemy lodged in the belfries, firing machine guns and bazookas at his troops. For two weeks, we had marveled at the extraordinary architecture across Germany, France, and Italy. But I was sure he wouldn’t have hesitated to take out enemies hiding inside a church, to blow them—and the church—to smithereens.
How could he? How could he not?
And what would Terry do? Nothing. He’d be rotting in jail for refusing to go to war.
Two men. So much alike, yet worlds apart on this fundamental point. I could see both sides, but I didn’t have the courage of either of them. Not Jack’s, for his willingness to face men firing at him, lobbing mortars, dropping bombs, intent on killing him and his men. He’d fight to the death.
Or Terry’s, for his unwillingness to kill another human, period. His was a different kind of courage, a commitment to principles so powerful that he would endure society’s scorn, to become, for many, the enemy in our own country, to go to jail, to shame his family, to be forever tarred not as courageous, but as a coward. And most likely, whether or not he got drafted—and had to face the consequences—he’d continue to oppose war.
In my heart, I would choose peace over war, life over death, so I was wracked with this question: How did I fall so far from my family tree?
A memory from first grade in Honolulu flashed in my mind. Bonner and his fourth grade buddies decided to “have a war.” They conned us little girls into collecting ammunition for them—three-inch-long dried tropical bean pods, hard as nails, with dart-sharp points at each end. These tan beans fell from trees in every yard, providing an abundant source of harm. Flattered by the big boys’ attention, we girls ran off to do their bidding.
But then in my mind, I heard Grandma’s voice: You could put someone’s eye out with those! I deserted the munitions-gathering crew and wandered off to play on the swings. Before long, the combined forces of the big boys and their little conscripts surrounded me on my swing. Every one of them—including my friends and my own brother—threw pods at me.
I swung higher and higher to dodge their missiles, and fortunately, none connected, not physically. Though the wounds to my feelings weren’t all that deep, they were indelible. Simply put, I knew that war was a bad idea. I was right. They were wrong. That certainty followed me into adulthood.
Sitting in a pew in that enormous church, I asked myself, Could I support Terry’s choice if he went to jail rather than to war? The thought scared me. And what about the “lesser” things, his challenges to authority, for example, like that scurrilous letter to Dale Atkins. That letter could come back to bite him. Another thing was his passion about the state of world affairs—like that time during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he jumped into his car and drove home to dodge the bombs or, if worse came to worse, to roast with his family. How long until he joined some of those antiwar protests I’d read about in the paper? Explain that to my family and friends!
Dang, thoughts of Terry and Jack had commandeered my mind, even in this peaceful place. Again. I fled from the church into a nearby shop and headed for the women’s accessories—something, anything that wouldn’t remind me of either one.
Friday, July 17, 1964, Landshut. Bonner met me with a boisterous nuzzle, a gesture he used in childhood both to annoy me and to express affection without betraying that he loved his freckle-faced sister. At least, that’s what I told myself. “Sorry, Jack’s at the border,” he said. “You’re stuck with me till tomorrow.” Then he peppered me with questions.
Did you climb the Eiffel Tower?
“Of course.”
Did you see nude sunbathers at Saint-Tropez?
“Yep, you shoulda been there.”
How were the Kirtleys?
“They treated us like long-lost family.”
Did you and Jack sleep together?
What? I looked at him deadpan. “Yep.”
He didn’t pursue it, and I didn’t tell him we didn’t have sex. Stew over that nugget, brother. If it burnished Jack’s stature, so be it. Still, it must have been tough to protect his little sister from his best friend, and his best friend from his little sister. Ha!
That evening, we joined several lieutenants with wives or girlfriends for dinner at the officers’ club, where the tables huddled around a polished dance floor. As drinks flowed, the group got rowdy. Next thing I knew, everyone at the table was comparing noses—actually feeling each other’s noses, a stupid drinking game. When the group whooped over their discovery that Bonner and I were the only ones with cold noses, I pulled him up to the dance floor. “Save the Last Dance for Me” offered a perfect exit. He was a great dancer, and we changed the atmosphere as the other couples followed us onto the floor. We danced, changed partners, and danced until my feet ached and my eyelids drooped.
Bonner walked me back to the teachers’ quarters, angling past his room for my mail. “I shouldn’t have to tell you this again,” he said. “Don’t import your own men when you come to visit me.”
He handed me a bundle of envelopes, all from Terry, all addressed in print-shop font, not typed or handwritten, and as gaudy as circus flyers. My name, emblazoned in red, was flanked by Greek columns. Scattered over the front were black and red Keystone Kops. One letter was festooned with a sticker—“AIR PAR AVION MAIL”—and an eight-cent airmail stamp, plus a thirty-cent “Special Delivery” stamp and sticker. Bonner was as steely eyed as a gunslinger. “And don’t break my best friend’s heart.”
Good heavens, was this the pot calling the kettle black? “Breaking Jack’s heart would hurt me far more than it would hurt you,” I told him. I retreated to my room, lined up Terry’s letters, and opened the special-delivery one—four typed pages. The first page:
I have told you many times I love you. It has been said truthfully and honestly, but I have sometimes wondered if I was attracted not by you, but by love. Could it be love of love, with you as a vehicle rather than as the end? I hoped not. I am now positive it is you, not the abstract concept, whom I love.
I could picture him, hunched over his typewriter, pounding away, so insistent that I believe his every word. At the top of the second page, I gasped.
Annie, I am announcing formally and officially (since I always manage to do things awkwardly) that I am proposing to you. I want you to marry me.
You can exist without me, and me without you—if not forever, at least for twenty-four months. Twenty-four months is only a bit of time in retrospect; but, dammit, in the present, it will be an eternity. Annie, we can make it without each other, but I want so much more than just to make it. I want us to have that fulfilling life together—and there now seems little reason to postpone it for two long years.
Marry Terry? Now? What about the Peace Corps? And my job in Glendale? I read quickly, determined to finish before tears spilled.
It has been only a month, but seconds have seemed like hours; the last time I saw you belongs to some hazy past of long-gone years, not a mere thirty days. Darn you, you have become an integral part of me—life means you, and us; it does not mean being separated from you, especially for twenty-four long months. I don’t think you have found more in Jack than you have found in me. At least, I hope not. If you have, forgive my intrusion—but don’t forget what I have asked of you.
I have never asked anyone to marry me, so I hope this is okay. I tried not to mess it up. And I hope this doesn’t shock you too much. I am completely serious, completely sober, and completely sure this is what we should do. Besides, I love you, even if you do have eighty million freckles.
Forgive my intrusion? Oh my. He had inserted himself into the heart of my dilemma and then asked forgiveness for nailing it. I did love him. But I loved Jack too.
Terry’s letter was so tender, so perceptive, and so . . . funny, so typically Terry. Where’s the drum roll, Ter, and the post horns? “I want you to marry me.” Where’s the bended knee? And the entreaty? Shall I edit this for you? No, no, it’s so . . . so you.
Oh, I missed him s
o much. But I had no one to turn to for advice. He had hijacked my best friend, my confidant.
And tonight, somewhere along the German-Czech border, was the Other Guy—the one who had squired me around Europe for two glorious weeks, the one I would see tomorrow morning. He would read this news in my face. What would I tell him? What would I tell Terry? A silent scream wracked my insides. I don’t know! Don’t pressure me! Either of you!
I jolted awake at 2 a.m., my curls stuck to my neck, stiff with salt, the lamp blazing, and Terry’s letters, save for the one lying on my chest, still lined up patiently.
The second letter transported me to Silverton, beneath the achingly blue sky framed by mountains too massive for the speck of town below. He took me on his escapades, every day a different heart-stopping adventure—an ice-encrusted lake (in July!), a flower-studded high meadow, a jeep caper down a cliff on a narrow ledge, suspended thousands of feet above the valley. I shivered with excitement and fear. Fear for Terry. And myself. I was a wimp compared to the outdoorsy penchants of either of these guys.
In each letter, Terry hummed the refrain of his persistent question:
July 2, Silverton. How I wish I knew the one thing to say or do that would assure our marriage.
July 4, Silverton. All you have to do in regard to the letter of two days ago is send a one-word note: “Yes.”
July 7, Silverton. Unfortunately, as you sit down to read these accumulated letters, your mind will be filled with thoughts of your trip and of your companion—hardly the time to consider seriously any such request as the one I have made and must repeat again.
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 25
