Yeah, that could be the outcome, but I owed them a heads-up.
I finished my letter, edited it, retyped it, and got it to the mailbox as Mr. Carter pulled away from Coffman’s farmhouse a quarter of a mile down the road. I waited and handed it to him personally, hoping he would reward me with a thunderous YES! from Annie.
He didn’t.
15
Last Act in London
Terry
Wednesday, 5 August 1964, Center. Two days later, I was leaning on a shovel at the ditch bank, pretending to irrigate the spuds, when Mr. Carter slid to a stop at our mailbox. He rooted among the letters in the passenger seat, pulled together a bundle, and handed it through the window. “Sorry, son—bills and a newspaper. Nary a peep from Europe.”
I tapped my hat brim. No words needed. He pulled away, stopped, and stuck his head out. “Don’t need to guard that beat-up old mailbox, son. No one’s gonna steal it.” He roared off.
Eleven days since I got Annie’s postcard and letters. Nothing since. Zilch. In eight days I’d fly to Berkeley. I wanted to call and get a definite yes or no, but I had no idea where she was.
I had replayed my options a thousand times. It was simple. If she said yes, I’d cancel Berkeley, marry her, and move to Arizona. If she said no, I’d bid a teary farewell and take off for Venezuela. But I had no option for protracted silence.
After lunch, I tried to read. I couldn’t focus. Plus, the boys were at me like horseflies: “Take us to town. Take us swimming. Take us, take us . . .” Mom said I was acting gooney. “Why don’t you help out at the Post-Dispatch until you leave?” she said. “They’d love to have you.”
I had worked there two summers before. Now, though, my mind had flown Center for good. The town council and school board, with their endless bickering over minutiae, were irrelevant, as were the Jaycees, the VFW, the annual PEO flower show, and projections for this fall’s potato crop.
But Mom was right. I couldn’t spend the next eight days draped over the mailbox. “I’ll think about it,” I told her.
What I was really thinking about was Annie. No letters was a bad sign. On the other hand, she was in Europe. She’d be up at five, racing until midnight. That was Annie: always trying to do more than humanly possible, always behind. She didn’t have a minute to sit, let alone write.
Finally, I was clearheaded. She was going to say yes, I felt it. I didn’t have time to help the Post-Dispatch or sit around and mope. If I wanted to marry the girl, I had to get a job—in Arizona—so I could be close to her. I slammed my book shut. Ten minutes later, I was doing sixty-five on graveled County Line Road, bound for Alamosa.
At the college library, I dug into Ayer’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals, the catalog of every newspaper in America. It listed two weeklies in Glendale—the Herald and the News. I’d write to them both, as well as to the nine other papers in the Phoenix area. Annie expected a husband with a future. I wouldn’t disappoint. I’d get a job before she got home. I copied the names and addresses and on the way home sketched out an application letter in my head.
By late Thursday morning, I had typed all eleven letters, each error-free, each with an individually typed copy of my resume. I was slouched against the mailbox when the familiar grimy Dodge Dart showed up at six minutes before noon. “Sorry, son, no mail for—”
“Morning, Mr. Carter. You can save me a trip to town. Would you mind?” I handed him the bundle of letters. Not even reading the envelopes, he reached over the seat and dropped them into his box of outgoing letters. “I’m hopin’ you’ll have better luck tomorrow,” he said.
Ann
Wednesday–Sunday, August 5–9, 1964, London. I was back in the English-speaking world where I could understand and be understood. Sort of. In the airport, I had asked another passenger the time. His four-syllable answer: “Ba ha pah eh.”
I stared at him: “Huh?”
“Ba ha pah eh.”
I mouthed each sound, rolling them around my tongue. At last I got it—“about half past eight”—though I wasn’t sure until I saw the huge wall clock across the corridor. I made my way to the London Underground station—the Tube—and got off at Sussex Gardens, where I found my hotel. Thank goodness the signs were in English!
Yet in some ways this country was more foreign than Germany or France. Though everything seemed familiar, some things were life-and-death different. Like crossing the street. When I got off the Tube, I spied my hotel across the road. I looked left. A break in the traffic, so I stepped out. A horn blared. Brakes squealed. I whipped my head around. A Jaguar was barreling toward me on the wrong side of the road. He swerved, roared past, and shouted, “Watch where ye’ goin’, Yank!” Yank? How’d he know? After that, I came to a dead standstill at every crossing, reminding myself the Brits drive on the wrong side of the road.
But I embraced the quirky accents and traffic and soon was navigating the super-clean, super-streamlined Tube and bright red double-decker buses. The price for my small hotel included “porridge” for breakfast—better than paste, though not much. Midday, I picked up fish and chips for lunch—on par with fish-on-Fridays in the grade-school lunchroom, but the “chips” turned out to be chunky fried potatoes. Not bad.
A frenzy of sightseeing took me to Buckingham Square, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the Tower of London, and Hampton Court, all with my mind transported to my coming persona, Miss Garretson, English teacher. This month we’re studying Shakespeare, kiddos. Come with me. Imagine you’re wearing your Sunday go-to-church duds. We sweep into the grand Aldwych Theatre like princes and princesses. We’re right there, front row, when Lady Macbeth wails, “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” She can’t erase what she’s done. We feel and see her pain.
I did see a Shakespeare play at the Aldwych, but it was Merchant of Venice, not Macbeth. Instantly, I was in Venice again—with Jack, my hand in the crook of his elbow.
At Hyde Park, the main attraction was a plaza where anyone with an opinion was free to hold forth. People brought actual soapboxes, jumped on top, and raged about religion, politics, and the price of liver. I moseyed from one public rant to the next. They shouted at hecklers, and hecklers screeched back. For all our talk about free speech in the United States, I couldn’t imagine Americans opening themselves to public potshots that way. Something else to share with my students.
The torture display at the Tower of London left me queasy. Religious dissidents had been hung from manacles, stretched on the rack, and crunched like walnuts. I squirmed equally on the Tower Green, where Anne Boleyn, queen of England, had been beheaded. Horrifying. I kept moving, faster, faster to escape the grisly specters.
Actually, the real reason I was running like a mad woman was avoidance. I knew I should call Terry, but I couldn’t say the one word he wanted to hear.
Terry
10 August 1964, 5:58 a.m., Monday, Center. I was in dreamland, and somewhere in the fog, the damn phone was ringing off the hook. Then clomp, clomp, louder and louder, footsteps tromping up the stairs into my brain.
“Terry, Terry. It’s for you. Long distance,” Mom hollered. “Overseas!”
I stumbled downstairs. “Hello, hello?”
“I have a reverse-charges call for Terry Marshall from”—the woman on the phone had the same stuffy British accent the queen had, and it was six o’clock in the morning, for crying out loud—“Ann Garretson. Will you accept the charges?”
“Annie? Is that you?”
“This is a collect call, sir. Will you accept the charges?”
Her again, the Brit. “Collect?”
“Yes, sir. Will you accept—”
“Sure. Yes. Of course. Put her on. Annie?”
“Hi, guy. How are you?”
“Annie? Can you hear me? I—damn, it’s good to hear your voice. Where are you?”
“Yes, but you have to speak up, Ter.”
“It’s good to hear your voice. Where are you?” The phone line echoed my every word, as if I were in a wi
nd tunnel and the words were blowing back into my face. I was shouting over my own voice. Mom and the kids were staring at me like witnesses to the Hindenburg. I backed into Mom’s bedroom, stretching the phone cord to its limit.
“London, and I’ve—”
“Can you hear me, I—”
“I’m in London, I—”
Our voices lagged behind our thoughts. Her voice came, and I interrupted her, waited, tried again, interrupted her again, then got stuck in an awkward silence. “When are you—”
“Yes, I can hear you. I’m leaving . . .”
Finally, I figured it out. I had to wait for my words to reach the other end of the line—after all, it was five thousand miles—and for her to respond and for her words to make it all the way back.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Lonely. Dying to see you.”
Exactly what I needed to hear! “Me too. You’re in London already?”
Yes, and she’d seen Merchant of Venice, one of our favorites, and by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was neither the Globe Theatre nor Stratford-upon-Avon, but she had been there too, and the play was “wonderful, so British. You would have loved it. And this fabulous bookstore—Foyles—just marvelous and huge and oozing so much history I expected to run into Dickens or Percy Bysshe Shelley around every corner, and . . .”
Take a breath, Annie, take a breath.
But she didn’t. She told me she’d hiked across the London Bridge and witnessed the changing of guards at Buckingham Palace and rubbed elbows with the rich at Harrods and the British Museum, and . . . “I’m dog tired. I can’t walk another step.”
I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, that I could hardly wait to see her, but the boys were leering in, bouncing past, popping into sight again. Mom shouted, “Boys! Git!” Footsteps thumped into the kitchen. The boys tittered and raced past again. I could barely make out what Annie was saying. I couldn’t hold off any longer. I had to ask her, despite all the nosey little ears: “About my letter. My proposal. Will you? I’ve got to know.”
A sigh. Silence.
“You still there?”
“I don’t know, Ter, I don’t know yet. I—”
“But you love me, that’s what you said.”
“I do, I do, but . . . well, it’s complicated.”
“I’ve got to leave for Berkeley Thursday. That’s three days. I’ve got to know, I—”
“I need time. I can’t decide here, like this. I need to spend time with you. Am I still welcome in Center? Could I come?”
“Why don’t you move in? I’ll show you how welcome you are.”
“Terrrrryyy!”
“Just kidding. You are, you know. But when? Your mom said you were going to spend some time on the East Coast.”
“I leave for New York on Wednesday. A couple of days there. By the weekend.”
“No, that’s too late. I’ll be in Berkeley on Friday.” Silence again. “You still there?”
“I can’t make it before the weekend, Ter. I really can’t. I promised Jack’s mom in May I’d visit them in Johnstown on the way back. I told you. Remember? I’ve got a ticket to Denver Saturday, then on to Albuquerque on Sunday. I could change it and fly to Alamosa Sunday. That’s the earliest. Can you call the Peace Corps and go late? Next week sometime?”
Go late? Tell the Peace Corps I’d waltz in next week? Jesus! “I—damn! I guess, but—”
“You’ll work it out. I know you can. I’ll call from Denver. I will. I have to see you. I love you, you know. I’ve really missed you. I’m missing you right now.”
“I . . .” My voice tightened up. I couldn’t breathe. She did that to me: She said I love you and my mind went to mush. God, what a relief to hear her voice. “I love you too,” I croaked. I did love her. I simply wasn’t good at saying it, not out loud. With witnesses.
“I’ve got to run. I’m on my way to the airport. I’ll call. I love you. Bye.”
“Bye,” I said. “I love you, I miss you, I—”
The phone clicked. She had hung up.
I must have hung up the phone, but all I could remember was standing in the hallway like a dunce. Four sets of eyes peered at me from the kitchen doorway.
“What’d she say? What’d she say?” Greg said. Or Randy—they were both jabbering.
“She wants to come to Center as soon as she gets back. That’s it. Let’s eat.”
“Come on, you were on the phone for twenty minutes,” Pam said. “And long distance. From Europe. Collect! Boy, that’s going to cost us.”
“Well?” Mom said.
“She’s fine. Having a great time. She’s in London and dying to come see you guys ’cause you’re so cute, all of you—and me, if I’m still here. That’s it.”
“Nuh-uh!” one of the boys said. “I bet she said ‘I love you, sweetie puss’ or something yucky like that.”
“Kissy kissy,” the other said, smacking his lips.
“All right, knock it off, you two,” Mom said.
“Would you mind making waffles this morning?” I asked Mom, hoping that would quiet the peanut gallery.
“It’s not Sunday,” Randy said.
Greg pointed to the wall calendar. “Yeah, see. It’s Monday.”
We made it through breakfast, despite their objections that we never had waffles on Monday. In fact, the boys scarfed down more than their normal fare—as Pam duly pointed out.
By seven-thirty, the boys had used up their supply of banter on Annie’s call and took off to hunt rabbits. Mom left for work. Starting time was at eight, but she made it a point to be at least fifteen minutes early every morning. Pam did the dishes and then turned on the vacuum cleaner in the living room—she’d taken over housecleaning when Mom went to work full time. I closeted myself in my bedroom to record as much of our call as I could remember. “I don’t know. I need more time,” she’d said, but her tone was upbeat. She did love me. Said it straight out. She wanted to marry me, but she couldn’t get the words out.
And if she’d told me about visiting Jack’s parents, I’d forgotten. Damn. I needed a secluded spot to figure out what to do. I grabbed my reporter’s notebook and hiked off for the haystack in the southwest forty.
An hour later, I ended up two miles from home at the abandoned cattle-loading chutes behind Marshall Produce. In high school, the cattle chutes had been my Walden Pond. And my lovers’ lane. Beyond an old shack that marked the end of the property, a one-lane rut of a road snaked through a thicket of tall bushes roughly paralleling the railroad tracks. I’d parked there many a night with Angela Archuleta after ball games and school dances. The bushes swallowed up my old red ’48 Ford as if it were a Tonka toy. At night, lights off, we were invisible.
While my mind whirled, I hiked the tracks a bit, tossed rocks at a beat-up old beer can, and herded a few make-believe calves into the loading chute before I settled into a tiny pocket in the bushes to think. In this Brer Rabbit thicket, I could focus. Despite what she said, maybe Annie was going to Johnstown to plan their wedding. Maybe I’d already lost her.
Nearby, a meadowlark gave me hope with its cheery greeting, chuppchupp, wheedle-e. I responded. She sang for me and fell silent. I never did see her. For a while, a magpie perched on a fence post and scolded me for invading his territory—no sympathy from him. A jackrabbit appeared in the rutted roadway, stared, then bounded into the weeds. None of the other thicket dwellers cared about my dilemma—not the busy ants, the stink bug, or the grasshoppers. Or maybe they did, maybe their mere presence helped me realize what I had to do.
I trudged home too late for lunch, made a cheese sandwich, went upstairs, and typed a short letter—a telegram actually—drove to the Western Union office in Monte Vista, and sent a missive to Mr. Clennie H. Murphy Jr., Division of Selection, Peace Corps, Washington, DC:
10 August 1964. Re: my letter of 3 August. Am turning down invitation to Venezuelan project. Will not report 14 August for training in Berkeley. Airline tickets being mailed today to Washington. A
pologize for last-minute decision and any inconvenience to you, but feel entering training now would be mistake.
16
Bombshell in Johnstown
Ann
Wednesday, August 12, 1964, Amsterdam. My last day in Europe. In an hour, I’d be flying to the States, and tonight I’d be in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, with Jack, at his parents’ home. After that, I’d see Terry in Center—if he could postpone his Peace Corps training. In May, when I had accepted Jack’s mom’s invitation to visit on my way home, I thought he would be in Germany. And Terry in the Peace Corps.
How was this new “plan” supposed to work out? Two days in Johnstown to scrutinize Jack’s family and maybe two days in Center to negotiate Terry’s proposal? Then choose the “best offer”? How brazen.
Equally troubling was the distinct possibility it would be one visit, not two. I promised Terry I’d call from Denver. What if the call brought only a sad, brief update from his mom: He’s gone, dear. I took him to the airport in Denver on Thursday. Didn’t he tell you?
I couldn’t do a thing about that now. When I stopped at American Express to change money, I didn’t change my Denver–Albuquerque plane ticket to go see Terry. Too risky until I knew whether he would still be there on Sunday. Even if he were, he’d be leaving the next day for the Peace Corps. What then? Ricochet from double jeopardy to double loneliness—put on my mourning cap and go teach high school in Glendale while Terry made peace in Venezuela and Jack made war?
A pox o’ both your houses—I had a plane to catch.
Wednesday afternoon, August 12, 1964, New York City. Jack swept me up at the LaGuardia gate in a bear hug so powerful I couldn’t breathe. “At last, at long last. How was your trip? As endless as it was for me? Three months? A year?” Question after question. He didn’t pause.
He tucked me into the Sting Ray, and on the way to Johnstown, I introduced him to my Swedish friend, Agneta, and took him with me on that madcap drive through Germany with the butcher brothers. He roared with laughter over the deodorant caper. “I love your independence, your self-confidence—to set off without being able to speak German.”
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