Parked at a polished library table in a large open room, earphones on my head, I worked hard to keep a poker face around an impossible lump in my throat. You can’t dissolve here, Ann.
Delayed grief, I discovered, is not a sudden deluge on a summer day that’s over in a few hours, giving way to sunny thoughts. Rather, it builds up and sloshes around inside its sturdy canvas pouch until one day it’s exposed to the air. After that, it dribbles its cargo at inopportune moments, too heavy to carry, too precious to abandon.
I have sometimes wondered, What if I had married Jack?
I would have been a widow at the age of twenty-three. Or would I? Had we married, would he still have gone to Vietnam? Yes, I assured myself—it was his duty.
But then I rediscovered a line in a letter he wrote in the fall of 1963. I had asked him about Vietnam. He wrote, “If my real hopes are answered, I’ll no more want to go to Vietnam than to the South Pole. But if ‘we’ fail to become ‘us,’ it would be a deathblow to my soul. And I would most likely volunteer for Vietnam. It would be a release to get away from it all for a while.”
Apparently, by the time he left Landshut for the US after our summer together, he’d concluded that the “deathblow” had been delivered. He never asked me to marry him, not directly.
Or did I not hear him?
I’ll never know.
Epilogue: Dare We Relive History?
Ann
Friday, May 2, 2014, en route to Germany. I’m on my way to Munich again, this time with Terry. The pilot begins his descent. No knots in my stomach, but oh, the butterflies! What forgotten delights will I remember from the summer of ’64—and be reluctant to share with Terry? What dark memories will I dredge up as we travel the route I blazed with Jack?
Terry squeezes my thigh. “See anything familiar?” His hand calms the butterflies.
I take in every detail. Subdivisions encroach on a crazy quilt of small farms. Green plots give way to urban sprawl. A city appears, thick with leviathan red-roofed buildings, cathedral spires, gleaming office towers, broad squares and parks, multilane highways, a massive convergence of rail lines. Nothing’s familiar. Frankly, I barely noticed Munich that first trip, my mind on the guy waiting for me in the airport—Jack Sigg, splendid in army greens, so clean-shaven his skin glowed, with a smile that nearly swallowed his face.
I remember also that jolt of guilt at my parting view of Terry, slumped on my dorm steps, sweaty and disheveled, with his Fu Manchu mustache, lamb-chop sideburns, and hair scruffing over his collar. He still has a mustache, but it’s white now and more or less tamed.
I cover Terry’s hand with mine. “Don’t recognize a thing. Have we been here before?”
His reply is immediate and deadpan: “One of us has. But it wasn’t me. Remember?”
He betrays no regret, merely stating a fact. He’s long past his persistent probing to wring from me every detail of each moment I spent with Jack, especially on our grand tour.
That’s history. I zero in on the adventure before us. We’re descending into Munich—Terry and I—fifty years after I made this flight to be with Jack. We’re about to replay my summer of 1964, though I know it will be different. Times have changed. Europe has changed. My companion is my husband. But I have longed to etch a new set of European adventures into my shared life with Terry. Do I have qualms about retracing with my husband a trip I took with my boyfriend fifty years ago? Of course. That summer was an amazing adventure, but ghosts of heart pain still lurk.
We don’t speak German, though that isn’t new for us. Some decades ago in faraway Taiwan, Terry and I arrived in the late afternoon in the city of Taichung, with no hotel reservations or guide book, no knowledge of Chinese. We wanted a local hotel, not a Hilton. We wandered the streets until we were exhausted, our backpacks weighing heavier and heavier. At last, we found a small, nondescript place that seemed to fit the bill. We asked for a room for the night.
The clerk’s response: a blank stare.
We asked again. We pantomimed. We gestured.
The clerk unleashed a flood of Chinese. He pantomimed. He gestured. Finally, we got his message: “Our rooms rent only by the hour.”
Oh! We wanted a night’s rest, not a quickie. Red-faced, we shook our heads and slipped out the door.
We survived, found a room, and spent a memorable week in Taiwan—the third leg of a monthlong journey full of similar miscues and discoveries in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan, on our way home from two years as Peace Corps volunteers in the Philippines.
We settled in Madison, Wisconsin. I worked as an editor for the American Society of Agronomy while Terry went to grad school. When he finished, we moved to his hometown of Center and lived for four years in the Chicano barrio—Terry as Head Start director and I as a community organizer and later as deputy director of a new clinic we helped establish. Our daughter, Leslie, spent her infancy in a basket at farm worker rallies and community meetings in Center.
But even after another stint in grad school, this time for both of us, and two more years in Center, we never lost our Peace Corps dream. In 1977, we plunged again into the Peace Corps, this time as country co-directors of programs in the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu. We lived for three years on Guadalcanal, where our son, Shawn, was born on July 4 and Leslie spent her elementary years running barefoot through the jungle. From the South Pacific, we settled in Washington, DC, and Terry worked for two years at Peace Corps headquarters.
The Peace Corps implanted service and international travel into our DNA. As country co-directors, we stayed many a night in Fiji, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Nauru, with multiple excursions in the Pacific—the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia—plus, believe it or not, Morocco. During our ten years in Denver and seven in Carlsbad, New Mexico, we explored Southeast Asia; Italy, France, and Spain; Puerto Rico, Cuba, Antigua, and Central and South America.
Throughout those later years, I worked as a consultant to the US Environmental Protection Agency and later the Energy Department—at several Superfund sites in Colorado, Montana, and Utah; and at nuclear waste sites near Carlsbad, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Terry turned to writing, publishing several books, a major sociological study, and numerous short stories, essays, and articles. Since 2000, he and I have called Las Vegas home.
Now, in 2014, we’re arriving for the first time together in Germany.
We can do this.
“We’re here, old buddy,” Terry says. “Let the fond memories flow.”
Monday, May 5, 2014, Landshut, Germany. These, I remember: the Isar River at city’s edge; the arch in the twelve-foot-thick red brick wall, guarded by dual parapets, a reminder that Landshut started as a fortress in 1204; and downtown storefronts in a rainbow of soft pastels.
On this hushed afternoon, the only sound is the tap-tap echo of my flats on the hard tile of the former US Army Bachelor Officers Quarters, where Jack and Bonner lived, now vacant. We talked a man in a hard hat into unlocking a chained door for us. It’s about to be remodeled into a college dorm.
I peek into the open doorways of officers’ former suites. Barren rooms all. No furniture. No posters. No hint of previous occupants. Rows of open doorways gape blankly from both sides of the empty hallway. The vacant rooms dissolve into history. Jack and I cuddle in his cozy sitting area, listening to Miles Davis. His desk, stereo, and speakers artfully shield his tidy bunk, a bath connects to another suite, and a shared kitchen is down the hall. Jack rails about BOQ-mates who don’t clean up after they’ve cooked.
Like Monopoly hotels, two identical rows of these dusty-yellow, three-story structures have withstood the ravages of World War II, the Cold War, and the ensuing fifty years. Today, no lieutenant is on hand to welcome me. It’s as spooky as a graveyard on a gloomy afternoon.
Later, we find the former officers’ club. No MPs on duty, rifles at the ready. A brass plaque identifies the building as Städtische Musikschule Landshut, the Landshut Music
School. Below that, another brass plaque verifies that it was indeed the officers’ club.
The front door is unlocked. We creep in. No receptionist. No soldiers in dress greens. From far down the hall, a single flute plays—not a German Jean-Pierre Rampal, assuredly, but not a rank beginner, a simple melody, not one we recognize. It stops. Starts again, same passage. This isn’t the free-flowing club I remember. The interior of this military facility has been sliced and partitioned; rows of doors lead, apparently, to tiny practice rooms, all locked.
What am I looking for? A whiff of reminiscence, perhaps? The thrill of a recaptured memory that I can wrap in a tissue paper of words and safely stow for the future? Or is this an inquiry into the fragility of human institutions? Where now are those hale warriors who guarded the borders of human freedom? Long since gone . . . every one.
We find no bar. No dining room. No pool or Ping-Pong tables. In the hour we explore, we hear only our footsteps, our whispers, and that flute. An army officers’ club, this quiet? In some ways, it fits. As Terry says, “They’ve beaten swords into ploughshares—and tanks into flutes.”
Terry
Wednesday, 7 May 2014, Frauenau, Germany. Through the rain, we drive the Crystal Road, a two-lane highway that shadows the Czech Republic border from the south at Passau to Neustadt an der Waldnaab in the north. This is the heart of Bavaria’s handblown glass industry. We’ve cruised small towns and scoured crystal shops, showing them our eight-by-ten photos of the blue vase Jack had bestowed on Annie that year—and the matching bowls he gave us as our wedding present. Fifty years ago, Annie visited the studio where they were made, but none of these small towns or crystal outlets look familiar to her.
“Where did these pieces come from? Who made them?” we’ve asked. No one knows.
In Zwiesel, we stop at an information center.
“They don’t make those anymore,” the attendant tells us. “They’re out of style.”
No, we don’t want to buy one, we explain, but merely find out where they came from. We try a few circumlocutions but can’t get the idea across. Clearly exasperated, the agent sends us to Frauenau, a small town down the road. You’ll find a glass museum there, she grunts. Ask them.
It’s only seven kilometers to Frauenau, but it’s 4:00—can we make it before closing? It’s still raining, and the road is a lane-and-a-half-wide twisted and looped ribbon through the hills. We pull up to the Glasmuseum at 4:30.
Inside, the receptionist is intrigued by our photos. “Wait!” She picks up the phone. Moments later, the museum director descends a broad staircase from a block of glass-enclosed offices on the second floor. She ushers us through the entry stile, waives the fee, and leads us to an exhibit with several Palatinate-blue crystal pieces. Same brilliant blue, but different style. “I can’t be sure about your vase. We have nothing like it. Maybe it is from near here, Bavarian Zwiesel, or further south, toward Passau,” she says.
By now it’s 5:15, past museum closing time. She asks, “Where are you staying tonight?”
We have no idea. An hour ago we’d never heard of Frauenau, let alone thought about where to stay. We tell her we prefer small family-owned guest houses, not fancy hotels.
“I know the perfect place. The senior chef was a master glassblower. If anyone knows the vase, it would be him.” She calls Pension WaldKristall, reserves a room, and directs us there.
At WaldKristall, we show our photos to the owner, Michael Kapfhammer. He is fluent in English and has spent time in Las Vegas. “Leave the photos with me,” he says. “I’ll ask my father.”
The next morning, Michael greets us, “My father asks if you would like to look at his work. He’s waiting in his showroom.”
We dash a half block in the rain to Michael’s personal residence, where he leads us to the basement and into a sixty-foot-long rectangular storeroom, shelves four high on every windowless wall, every shelf filled with gleaming crystal—a bedazzling array of vases, bowls, stemware, decanters, flacons, tumblers, and goblets in a rainbow of color—all handblown and cut by master artisan Sigfrid Kapfhammer, Michael’s father.
The guy is built like a fullback and still looks in good enough shape to play Division I ball, though we know his choice would be soccer, not football. He’s strong, with hands of seasoned leather, and next to him, I look like the water boy.
Sigfrid studies our photos and delivers a monologue. Michael translates: “He says your vase probably came from Nachtmann Riedel in Weiden.”
I look at Annie and she looks at me. We are both thinking: Where the hell is Weiden, and how do we get there?
Michael continues, “But he’s not sure of the artist. No one makes these anymore. People want machine-made pieces. They’re cheaper.”
Sigfrid shrugs. What can we say? It’s true everywhere, about so many things. We look at Sigfrid and nod in empathy.
He sweeps his hand around the room, gesturing at the full shelves. “This is my life’s work,” Michael translates. “You are welcome to look.”
This basement is a fine arts gallery. We go shelf by shelf, piece by piece. Each has a small silver sticker with tiny red print, “Das Glas mit,” and to the right of those words is a red heart labeled “Herz”—“Glass with Heart.” In the center is “Echt Waldkristall”—“Authentic Forest Crystal,” Sigfrid’s brand.
The shelves hold only a few blue pieces, but Annie spots a pair of slender Palatinate-blue vases with vertical rows of the same transparent silvery ovals as on Jack’s vase, topped by filigree designs in the flared rim, delicate as spider webs. “Will he sell these?” she asks.
“Ja,” Sigfrid says, nodding. “Ja!”
We select a matched pair of banana-boat bowls, replete with silvery ovals and swirls, as heavy as . . . well, as heavy as lead crystal. And a tall, cylindrical vase, artful as a totem pole. We assemble them on Sigfrid’s worktable. He examines each and totals them on a slip of paper. Writes, “Euros 250.” He steps back, goes to the shelves, selects a teardrop-shaped vase, same Palatinate blue, same swirls and ovals, and sets it with the others. Says something to Michael.
“That one is his gift to you,” Michael translates. “He is honored that you value his work.”
Annie holds the vase in one hand and caresses it with the other, running her fingers, dare I say, sensuously over the ovals and swirls. Then with eyes sparkling, she pings the edge with her fingernail. “Listen. Its peal is as crisp as a morning in the forest. Of course. Waldkristall!” She nestles it in my hands. It fits perfectly. The feel is exotic and, yes, sensuous. Also familiar—a first cousin to the vase and bowls we have used almost weekly at home for fifty years.
We take photos all around: Sigfrid with our purchases; Annie and Sigfrid; Sigfrid and me; Sigfrid, Michael, and me. We thank Sigfrid and offer a hearty goodbye.
As he clasps my hand, he slaps his other hand on my shoulder. He’s teary-eyed. So am I.
Outside in the car, Annie and I realize that our quest is over, no need to find Weiden. Sigfrid is a surrogate connecting us to a time and place that no longer exists. He has given us an indelible memory of how much his art—so much of it now languishing in a dark basement—means to an artist of his talent.
Moreover, he has drawn me into that intimate circle that links Jack to Annie and her summer of ’64. That summer is now my summer as well as theirs.
Ann
Sunday, May 11, 2014, Badenweiler, Germany. After graduating from law school in Buenos Aires, our Argentinian “daughter”—a Rotary exchange student who lived with us her senior year of high school—spent two years as a nanny in Germany and Switzerland. She went so she could learn German. She also gained another “favorite mother”: Antje Marcantonio. Like a newfound sister, Antje welcomes Terry and me into her home in Badenweiler.
Over several wine pairings, we feast on scrumptious pasta—handmade by her husband, Rocco. And drink. And talk. And drink. Antje and I share love stories: Antje tells me about vacationing as a coed in Italy, about meeting a suave It
alian lifeguard, and their whirlwind romance—pursued in languages the other didn’t understand; of his dream to open his own espresso shop. I tell her about flying to Germany to rendezvous with my dashing warrior—no, not Terry, I tell her—and about my torment as I wrestled with the anguish of loving two men.
“And the soldier, when did you fall out of love with him?” Antje asks.
For a moment, I’m speechless, just staring at her. Then these words spew unbidden from some previously locked vault in my heart: “I didn’t. I still love him, even today, fifty years later.”
Antje’s jaw drops. Mine, too. We exchange glances, my mind racing.
In the living room, Terry and Rocco carry on like diehard fans as they watch a soccer match on TV, hands flying, voices animated, stuttering along in Spanish, the only language they have in common, neither of them fluent. They’re fully engaged. Neither heard me.
“So it’s no wonder,” I stammer, “that I had such a hard time deciding what to do.”
“But how?” Antje is more puzzled than I am.
Yes . . . I remember now. That’s what I told Jack fifty years ago—that I would always love him, but I couldn’t marry him and become an army wife. My breath is coming in small puffs. I want to explain it to her, but the memories are at full flood.
It would take me another ten months to explain it to myself: That I locked it away in my heart for five decades. That it doesn’t mean I’ve loved Terry any less, but rather that I loved them both deeply.
________________________
Thank you for reading A Rendezvous to Remember. As an independent press, Sandra Jonas Publishing relies heavily on word of mouth to gain exposure, so if you enjoyed the book, please tell your friends. And we would be very grateful if you could post a rating and short review on Amazon and Goodreads. We look forward to your comments.
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 40
