July 10, Los Gatos, California. He quoted Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.” Shakespeare’s words offer hope. So I’m hoping.
Midway through this letter, holy cow, he described—in mortifying de-tail—making love to me. I couldn’t read it. It was too private. But I pressed on, fighting to suppress my anger. Some things you just don’t commit to paper, Ter!
Here we were again, like last spring, Terry barging into my romance with Jack, asking me to fall in love with him. On top of that, he had injected sex so explicit that it conjured up the string of messy relationships he’d paraded in my face: Laura Lee, Sarah, and Rachael—an engaged, divorced mother he lobbied to live with him; an older woman he wanted only for sex; and a young would-be student he got pregnant who ultimately had an abortion (an illegal abortion). He was making it impossible to overlook his transgressions.
Enough. I skimmed the letter and, with trepidation, opened the last one. July 13, also Los Gatos. No sex. Thank goodness. This was about the Republican National Convention. Finally, space to breathe and delight in his antics. Oh, and there he was—picketing and protesting the Republican platform, just as I feared. How typical. But how exciting it must have been to march with like-minded people. I lingered over every word and imagined the passion of the crowd.
Perversely, I looked for the words of love that gave me so much pain. What was wrong with me?
He ended with a plea for me to call so we could talk about marriage. How? The teachers didn’t have a phone. Find a pay phone? And tell the operator what? I’d like to make a collect call to Terry somewhere in America. And can you speak English?
And if I did manage to track him down, what would I say? I don’t know, Ter. I can’t decide. Call to tell him that?
End of letters. I reunited each with its fanciful envelope and buried them all in the bottom of my bag. I didn’t want any nosey roommates skulking around my room while I was gone and snickering over the juicy tidbits.
An hour later, I had cooled off, set aside the sex talk, and turned my thoughts to Terry’s proposal. I lay in a warm glow. After all was said and done, I thought how lucky I was to have Terry in my life, making me feel so full, so alive, sharing his tales, standing up for bedrock principles—despite my ire at his unrelenting campaign to get me into bed.
A second thought chased the first—how incredibly lucky I was to have Jack embrace me in such a short space of time, filling me with joy through this improbable airmail-turned-grand-tour romance. I would be fortunate to marry either one.
13
Farewell to Our Sting Ray Summer
Ann
Saturday, July 18, 1964, Landshut. I startled from a deep sleep to straight-up awake at nine, gobbled a bowl of Rice Krispies, and allowed myself an hour and a half to wash Paris, Saint-Tropez, Verona, Venice, and Berlin out of my dirty clothes. Bonner said Jack would pick me up at five. Before he arrived, I had to figure out how to break the news of Terry’s proposal. No way could I credibly feign a life-is-normal mien. My eyes would telegraph the news. Worse, Jack would sniff it from a mile away. I needed solace—the tranquility of the Isar River.
The Isar mesmerized me with its undulating Salvador Dalí reflection of the old town fort. The image lured me over the bridge, through the arch between the massive battlements, and into the town plaza. Wandering the shiny cobblestone streets, I happened upon a footbridge over the Kleine Isar, a narrow offshoot of its “mama” river. The Kleine offered another Dalí, a tidy, German neighborhood shimmering across the smaller river. There, I communed with sixteenth-century muses, hoping they would offer rhetoric for my coming encounter with Jack.
It had to be a news report. Here’s the latest from my end. Not to angle for a counteroffer. And not to give Jack the impression that a deal with Terry was sealed. The key message: You haven’t been knocked off your steed, and the joust isn’t over.
Promptly at five, Jack bounded into the teachers’ quarters like he’d been promoted to general. “You look fantastic, Miss Garretson.” No embrace, not even an air kiss. But his eyes smoldered with coded smoke signals. We quickly escaped, and Jack steered us out of town. “I know a cozy gasthaus down the road. No soldiers. No emergencies.”
En route, he laid out plans for our final three days together, leading up to Tuesday’s departure ceremonies on the parade grounds. Sunday, we’d go to Helmut’s for lunch and hike Jack’s favorite hill afterward. Later that evening, he’d whip up dinner for my hosts and a few friends. Monday night, the shindig for the departing officers at the club. “It’s a command performance.” He sighed, as if resigning himself to torture.
I chuckled. I was all too familiar with the army way. In fact, I enjoyed the elegant functions, the mingling, the dancing—though not the drinking, the raunchy jokes, and the occasional crude attempt to cop a feel. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “We’ll escape to the dance floor, put our arms around each other, and outfox the PDA cops.”
“You know those ‘PDA cops,’ as you call them, are really inside my head.”
“Sadly, yes. At the same time, I appreciate those guys inside your head and the respect they, and you, show. It’s so different from most guys. Makes me love you even more.”
Minutes later, he pulled off the highway onto a side road and parked in a grove of trees.
“Speaking of putting our arms around each other . . .” He took my face in both hands, and we kissed, as best we could, across the console. “Been dying to do that all week,” he said.
“Nice start, but that gearshift’s an unforgiving chaperone. Meet me outside.” I scrambled out, and we cannoned together in front of the car for a probing, insistent kiss, as fervent as if he were a shipwreck survivor rescued after years adrift.
“I’ve missed you so much,” Jack whispered into my hair. “The week crept by as slowly as a lifetime.”
His words jolted. They were almost identical to Terry’s.
“What’s wrong?”
“Uh, it’s a little chilly out here.” This was not the time to tell him about Terry.
He pulled me close, and I snuggled into the heat of his body. “Thank you for not slathering your face and lips with makeup,” he said. “And thank you for being the real you.”
Over dinner I regaled him with timid-mouse stories about East Berlin and thanked him for his own steadfast service on the border. He asked about the previous night with Bonner. I told him about the drinking and the nose game—how annoyed I was that I almost got sucked into it.
“I know. You get caught in the moment. I’m not proud of this, but I’ve gotten drunk more than once with the gang at the club. I try to stay away. Sorry I wasn’t there to save you.”
“That’s army life. You can’t avoid it.”
“They didn’t get drunk at the University of Colorado? Party U, as I recall.”
“They did, yes. Some of them, particularly the freshmen, newly untethered from mama. But I’ve never been drunk. Nor have the people I hung around with. But drinking’s a way of life in the military, isn’t it? You know—‘have another drink; it could be your last.’”
His eyes narrowed. “That’s harsh. Every workplace has good points and bad. But I do get razzed for avoiding the drinking crowd. Glad to know you avoid them too.”
Conversation faltered. The fifty-pound rock of Terry’s proposal teetered on my back.
He stared me down. “But that’s not what’s on your mind, is it? What’s eating you?”
I took a deep breath. “Well, things have gotten more complicated. I—”
“Your old buddy again! What now?”
“How’d you know?”
“Special-delivery letters don’t go unnoticed. Not ones gigged out for Carnevale.”
So he knew. “What else did your spies tell you?”
“Wrong question. How about our promise to be honest? What do you have to say?”
“I got those letters last night and read them after I got back from the
club. Did your spy tell you what the letters said? Do you want to know?”
He folded his arms, tilted his chair back. “No . . . and yes.”
“Terry proposed. He wants to get married. This summer.”
Jack blinked. The defiance in his eyes vanished. Slowly, he brought the front legs of the chair to the floor. “What are you going to tell him?” His voice sounded as tight as violin strings.
“Nothing. He’s half a world away. I don’t know what to tell him. The only sure thing is this: I am not getting married this summer. To anyone.” I sucked in my breath. This was a truth I hadn’t articulated—even to myself—until now.
“When were you going to tell me? Or were you?”
“Let’s start with when I wasn’t going to tell you. Not in front of the teachers, when you picked me up. ‘Oh, by the way, Jack, Terry proposed—just got the letter last night.’ And it wasn’t an appropriate topic over dinner, when we were so happy to see each other. And certainly not when you said almost exactly the same thing Terry said about how the time crept by last week. ‘Funny, Jack, that’s what Terry tells me!’”
He jolted back like I’d smacked him in the face. “He said that? The same thing?”
I nodded.
“So he attempts to steal my girl by stealing my lines? He’ll try anything, won’t he? I guess we have more in common than the same girl.”
“You’d be amazed.” I shook my head, tried—and failed—to keep a straight face. We both snickered, unable to squelch it.
“But you’re right. There’s no good time for bad news.” He took my hand, fiddled with it, and then looked at me, the light gone from his eyes. “I knew this summer was too good to be true.”
“So, you’re thinking . . . what? It’s over between us? Don’t be such a pessimist, guy.”
“All I know is what I read in your face. And that he has a huge head start.”
“Really? Can you see into my heart? See that I love you deeply? See the struggle between you, my dream come true, and my closest friend? Can you see the pain? Can you feel my agony in knowing at some point I will deeply hurt at least one of you?” I paused to regain my composure. “But maybe you’re right. Maybe it is less painful for you to walk away from me.” Tears lurked; I willed them back. “But before you flee, know that I’ll always be grateful for these weeks together . . . Now, excuse me.”
I dashed ahead of the tsunami of tears and lingered in the ladies room until it was over. When I returned, I was a wreck, eyes red, nose redder, despite my efforts to wash away the evidence.
When I slid into the booth, Jack took my hand, held it to his face, and kissed my palm. “You okay?” he asked.
“Not really. But I’ll survive.”
Jack said nothing. We finished dinner and drove back to Landshut in silence. At the teachers’ door, he kissed my forehead. “See you tomorrow. Nine sharp.” He didn’t linger.
What was the point of being honest if he clammed up? It was just another problem to unravel. I slept poorly, furious at Jack for giving up, furious at Terry for expecting me to marry him this summer—as if marriage were a simple walk in the rain.
Sunday, 8 a.m., July 19, 1964, Landshut. Someone pounded at the door. Jack! An hour early. The teachers had gone to mass. I was eating breakfast, and my hair was a fright.
“Wow. You look wonderful,” he said.
I eyed him suspiciously.
“Seriously, I love the natural you. And I apologize for last night. I might have given the impression I had thrown in the towel.”
“Indeed.”
“Well, I haven’t. I tied up that sorehead and threw him in the closet. I was angry. Not at you but at my unseen rival. I’m on my best behavior today. I promise.”
“Does this mean we’re still on for lunch?”
He kissed me square on the mouth. “You bet—and more.”
That morning we avoided serious conversation by visiting his favorite haunts a final time—the entry to the old walled city, the lederhosen shop, charming back alleys, and St. Martin’s Cathedral, where we nestled in a back pew. The calm of the place mended my frayed mettle. Jack whispered, “You don’t have to be religious to appreciate the serenity of this church.” He gestured. “And the architecture and stained glass.”
I agreed. For today, I would immerse myself in the moment and refuse to be battered by either-ors. I’d focus only on Jack.
Lunch at Helmut’s radiated all the antic joy of my first meeting with this wild-man proprietor, only now I was part of a prodigal couple welcomed home. “Jack, my friend, my son. You are gone so long! I worried . . .” He slipped into German and they both laughed. Jack later translated, “. . . that you had run away to marry your Fräulein!”
We took a last hike into the nearby hills. A lady hike, with me in my sundress and sandals and Jack in his lederhosen, of course.
Dinner with the teachers, their boyfriends, Bonner, and his date introduced me to chef Jack at work in a real kitchen. A simple meal—burgers and fries—but his style was meticulous: hamburger richly seasoned and massaged into identical patties, and tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, and onions arranged in a colorful artwork. He cut the potatoes into precise strips, fried, drained, dried, and fried them again. I tasted one. “Wow, light and crunchy. You are a master!”
“My special secret,” he said. “The double frying makes all the difference.”
After dinner, he and I strolled under a lopsided moon and chatted about his next assignment. First, a debriefing at Fort Belvoir of his stint in Germany. “Then, not sure. Probably stateside.”
Normally, he said, the army didn’t send men directly from one theater to another—from the German-Czech border to Vietnam, for example. “My thinking has been to volunteer for Vietnam one of these days. As an adviser. It’s safer and the best route to promotions. And maybe I can have a positive impact before the firebrands spin it all out of control. But this news about my rival throws a wrench into the works. I need to rethink everything.”
I listened, only listened. Was he agonizing over proposing himself? Lamenting that Terry had beaten him to the draw? Expecting a signal from me, thinking he had made his case plainly enough? As he rambled on, I gasped inwardly at the thought of Vietnam. We paused near the BOQ in the shadow of a tree. “So you’re not volunteering to go to Vietnam?”
“Not yet, but probably sometime.” A simple statement, neither apprehensive nor eager, merely a fact of life. With Jack, the specter of war would be a lifelong resident in the household.
He pulled me to him and tucked my head under his chin. No matter what happened between us, I didn’t want him to go to Vietnam. Everything I had heard made me doubt whether the United States should be there, from last year’s horrifying self-immolation by the Buddhist monk to the CIA-backed assassination of President Diem. Jack’s very presence in Vietnam would put his life at risk. But I couldn’t tell him what to do any more than I could prevent rams from crashing headlong into each other.
PDA be damned, I kissed him a kiss to remember. He kissed me back, a full-body hug that left me pained because we couldn’t spend our last private night together.
Terry
Saturday, 18 July 1964, Los Gatos, California. We Marshalls—Mom, Pam, Randy, and I—took off early for Eureka in Northern California to see Mom’s younger sister, Clarice, an aunt I’d never met. After high school, Aunt Clarice had joined the Women’s Army Corps and got to see a bit of the world. She married, settled down, and somehow never got reunited with the rest of Mom’s family. Mom said there was no animosity, just distance and separate lives. At long last we’d get to meet the mysterious Aunt Clarice, soldier, world traveler, and family anomaly—apparently she was six feet tall.
We started out in the wrong direction—south. Uncle Bob had insisted. “You absolutely have to see Carmel. It’s picturesque perfect.” Uncle Bob didn’t give advice—he issued orders—so we circled around the bay to Monterrey and then drove on to Carmel. We window-shopped, and Mom even let the ki
ds get ice cream cones . . . before lunch! While they were indulging in that rare treat, I started a letter to Annie.
I pretended that California was as exotic as Europe—to bring her thoughts back to the States. “You would love Carmel,” I wrote. “A wonderful little town—no neon, no garish signs or billboards, quaint little shops with quality goods instead of schlock. Even the service stations blend in architecturally.”
That afternoon, at the Humboldt Redwoods, we cruised the thirty-two-mile Avenue of Giants as if we were on a Sunday drive, oohing and aahing at one towering sentinel after another. We hiked into the shadowy forest and tried to measure one of those monsters by linking our hands. The four of us couldn’t stretch even halfway around it.
Earlier, we had maneuvered the car through Chandelier, a drive-through tree with its own name. Pam jumped out and snapped a photo. Randy asked why people would carve the heart out of a tree so we could drive a car through it, “Why didn’t they just make a road around it?” No answer from any of us.
In Eureka, we spent the evening chatting with a passel of cousins every bit as delightful as the Kocher gang. Aunt Clarice was at least six feet tall, and Uncle Al at least six-four. I had never met anyone so tall. Despite hitting it off with the Keister kids, by the time we finally trundled off to bed, I was missing Annie more than ever, and wrote to her with a new confession:
I’ve been hit again with a desire to have children. One of my Eureka cousins has a ten-month-old boy; the other, a two-year-old girl. I can’t think of anything greater than giving you a child we could raise and love and share—in a couple of years after you’ve taught for a while and I’ve gotten my MA. (I hesitated to mention this for fear I’d send you running, but I’m so far out on the limb now that this can’t make much difference.)
Last week, in Chinatown, I saw some beautiful silk shifts with splits up both sides that I wanted to get for you. Since then I’ve been noticing women’s clothes. I want to marry you, buy you a fancy wardrobe, and just sit around the house admiring you. We’d spend all our money on books and sexy clothing for you (and maybe a pair of socks for me once in a while).
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 26
