The Story of Us

by Susan Wiggs

  However, by then I was starting to get a picture in my mind’s eye, and Steve Bennett was the main focus of that picture.

  Chapter Ten

  After Steve left Texas to go back to Pensacola, I spent every waking moment thinking about him, and I dreamed about him when I slept. I lived for his calls and would lie on my bed late at night, whispering into the phone and picturing him in my mind’s eye. That summer, I worked at a transport company in San Marcos, and I was good at my job, though everything seemed inconsequential.

  My parents, of course, advised me to forget him. They saw no future for me with a man in the service, a man whose fate was controlled by the dictates of duty. He was a passing fancy, they said, not a sound plan for the future.

  I was sitting on the porch one evening in late June when I heard a faint rumbling sound and felt a subtle change in the atmosphere, like the tinge of rain in a coming storm. I jumped up and rushed to the porch railing. In the street, hazy with the colors of sunset, he rode toward me on his motorcycle and suddenly my world came back into focus.

  I rushed out to meet him and flung my arms around him, feeling the heat of the day in his shoulders, and our kiss was filled with yearning, passion and promise. He’d ridden all day to see me, nearly five hundred miles with only stops for gas. I’d never been that important to anyone before.

  After he got cleaned up, I brought him a glass of iced tea. Since my parents were gone for the day, taking Gran to Austin for new bifocals and tea at the Driskill, we had the house to ourselves. We took full advantage, kissing long and hard, working ourselves into quite a state.

  “I came to talk to you about something,” he said, and he seemed nervous. “I’m being transferred to Naples.”

  “Naples,” I said, thinking of a golf resort in Florida. Then my mind, sluggish from kissing him, grasped what he was saying. Naples, Italy. What did I know about Naples? Pizza and vaporetti, lemon groves and traffic and antiquities. It was half a world away. “Italy. You’re going to Italy. For how long?”

  “A few months, and then I’ll be transferred somewhere else, probably Virginia.”

  “Well,” I said. “Well. Send me a postcard.”

  “That’s not going to work for me,” he said.

  It wasn’t going to work for me either, but who was I to stand in the way of such an opportunity. “I wish you weren’t going away,” I said, my heart on the ground. “We’ve only just met.”

  “That’s why this is so crazy. I’m in love with you, Gracie. I swear I am.”

  Those words lifted my heart up to the stars. “Really?”

  “Yeah. You took me by surprise. I never thought—never expected I’d find someone again.”

  For some reason, the “again” didn’t register. All I heard was “I’m in love with you.” Maybe I should have probed deeper, asked him about the word “again.” But I was flying high and this feeling felt so new and fragile that I didn’t want to disturb it. I said, “The day I met you, I told my grandmother I was falling in love with you. She didn’t think it was so crazy.”

  He smiled at me, and there was such joy and relief in his face that I hugged him. Then he said, “I want you to come with me, Grace.”

  “To Naples?” It was surreal, a concept beyond my grasp.

  “To Naples. And everywhere else I go.” He was awkward as he went down on one knee and took a small velvet box from his pocket. “Grace McAllen, I want to marry you.”

  I forgot how to breathe for a moment. Then I cried, with relief and trepidation and with the absolute certainty that this was exactly what I was supposed to do. I collapsed against him, and he sheltered me in his arms, and a great warm wave of calmness came over me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to marry you, too.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Most people would consider it a coup to marry an officer in the U.S. Navy, but the McAllens counted it a failure on my part. Some fathers would even thank their daughters for eloping, but that was not the case for me. I heard nothing but displeasure and bitterness. Dropping out of college for a man I barely know, gallivanting off to a foreign country to live among strangers. Where had they gone wrong?

  They didn’t want to hear about my happiness, my excitement about our future. They didn’t believe me when I said I’d finish my degree. They didn’t trust Steve when he said he’d take care of me.

  I was mortified that he had to face my parents’ stiff disapproval and their dour predictions that we were making a disastrous mistake. I admired him for facing their skepticism with calm fortitude. In private, he told me, “If this is going to drive a wedge between you and your family, we’ll find another way. Maybe we should wait—”

  “We could wait until doomsday and they’d never come around. I don’t want to wait.”

  Only my grandmother gave her blessing, wishing us joy and reminding us to be good to each other.

  I considered the possibility that my parents’ extreme reaction was caused by fear of losing me. Unfortunately, I never really believed that. Their disappointment was so deep and bitter that we never recovered from it or breached the rift. In a way, that was their gift to me. Now I was free to devote all my energy to loving Steve and making a life with him.

  As for my parents, they seemed willing to write me off. It was their loss, I told myself. They never had the chance to know Steve. I promised to keep them in the loop, sending photos and cheerful letters, but only Gran seemed to appreciate my efforts.

  It hurt to be forced into making a choice between the man I love and what my parents wanted for me. My heart paid a toll when I became estranged from them in this way.

  “I feel like an orphan,” I said to Steve.

  “Welcome to the club,” he said, and pulled me into his arms. Then he told me about his own mother, a drug addict living in a crummy apartment on Telephone Road in Houston. She had simply drifted away one day when he was little, and the neighbors turned him in to child welfare. I was horrified by that. I couldn’t imagine a mother who would turn away from her child for any reason.

  My parents threw me away because I refused to live the life they wanted for me. That wasn’t my job, but that’s what they raised me to do. Steve was abandoned by a mother who couldn’t help herself. Mine was completely rational when she turned her back on me. In our own ways, we each paid a toll. Sometimes we felt like two shipwreck survivors, adrift in the world.

  My heart was heavy, but as the miles sped back on the journey to the Naval Station at Pensacola, I counted my blessings and my anticipation soared.

  Like all girls, I pictured myself as the bride in a grand wedding. Was I let down by the private ceremony conducted by a Navy chaplain, attended only by Steve’s friend and fellow officer Whitey Love, who stood up as witness? Honestly, I was not. The marriage ceremony was merely a formality to be dispensed with as soon as possible so we could start our life together.

  My wedding night, spent in a room at the Navy Lodge overlooking Parking Lot B-19, more than made up for the low-key ceremony, the lack of pomp and circumstance. That night, there were fireworks and comets and whirlwinds, and I found such joy in the arms of my bridegroom that I was overwhelmed with emotion.

  When I admitted my inexperience, he seemed startled and perhaps even moved. He kissed me tenderly and said, “I didn’t know you’d saved yourself for marriage.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I saved myself for you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Steve and I had no honeymoon, but that hardly mattered. Every day with him was a honeymoon. No luxurious resort could have made me feel more pampered, more special, more in love with my new husband.

  Since we knew we’d be going to Italy soon, we lived in a tiny furnished apartment. Quickly realizing that the garage sale was a huge part of Navy life, I learned to shop for the sort of household items you don’t really want to spend much money on, but that you know you’ll like having around—that extra radio, an unopened box of candles, the odds and ends that might sit around
a civilian household for years. In a Navy household, a possession had to earn its right to be there, to be wrapped, moved and unwrapped over and over again.

  Sometimes I couldn’t resist a whimsical item. I found a thick ceramic pitcher in the shape of a chicken, its mouth open to form a spout. However, when the time came to pack our belongings and move overseas, the pitcher just didn’t make the cut. I sold it in a multifamily garage sale a week before we left.

  Naples was a revelation. People had warned me about the dangers of thieves and scam artists who haunted its medieval stepped alleys and crooked streets, but I never felt vulnerable there. We explored the entire hill of humanity together, wandering hand in hand through the Spanish Quarter and Spaccanapoli, or along the seafront area called Lungomare. We handed coins to accordion players in the Funiculare, fended off hustlers and explored the breathtaking antiquities of Pompeii and Pozzuoli. At a candlelit chapel, a sculpture of the Veiled Christ moved me to tears, and at a cameo factory in the Sulfatara, he bought me a pair of earrings. I swore I would treasure them always.

  The Italians are a demonstrative people, and around every curve in the hilly streets, we found embracing couples lost in each other. Our new marriage and the wonder of discovering each other made us fit right in with these postcard lovers.

  I learned enough Italian to go from shop to shop each day, preferring this to the commissary. I bought milk and butter at the cremeria, bread at the panetteria, vegetables fresh from the earth, sold by a farmer in a three-wheeled flatbed truck. As the weeks flowed by, I grew bold enough to brave the pesceria, where mounds of gleaming fish, shells and octopus lay in big tubs. Buckets of silvery sardines, tanks of clams and whole swordfish inspired me to try my hand at cooking, with decidedly mixed results.

  Steve seemed proud that I’d learned Italian. He devoured plates of spaghetti alle vongole and melanzane parmesan. We celebrated the successful attempts and weathered the failures with humor and a soothing glass of vino di tavolo, and each night we made love for hours. With no television and spotty phone service, there was little else to occupy us.

  I developed a passion for taking photographs. I took snapshots of the old men outside the tabacchi. They were immaculately dressed in pressed trousers and freshly shined shoes, hands resting atop their canes. I made shot after shot of the swags of laundry strung across narrow alleys, women bringing up their groceries with buckets on ropes. I also pursued darker subjects, things that troubled and frustrated me. I disliked the preponderance of litter on the streets, and it hurt to see the tiny children forced to beg for coins. The stray dogs, rummaging in garbage and dodging taxis were a heartbreaking fact of life.

  And I phoned home, for what it was worth. In Italy, the phone system was so poor that our home phone was all but useless and I’d make a weekly quest out into the city to find a pay phone that worked better. My parents gave me nothing but warnings about traipsing around the globe like a gypsy, but Gran, bless her, got it right. “Such an adventure,” she would say. “You’re making memories for a lifetime.” I hope she knew how much that meant to me as I stood in the rain at the waterfront, hunched against the wind, shouting my greetings to her into the cold steel receiver of a pay phone.

  One day I tried to rescue a dog that followed me home. It was a little lop-eared mutt, typical of the street-smart dogs of Naples. And, in the way of dogs, it never lost its innate happy-go-lucky trust in humankind. Over the weeks, I’d learned not to encourage dogs by petting or talking nonsense to them, but this particular dog followed me anyway. At a busy piazza, a delivery truck nearly ran over him, so I snatched him out of harm’s way.

  That night, Steve came home to find us both waiting for him. The dog had been freshly bathed and given its shots at the vet, and I was excited to show him our new addition. All day long, I’d imagined the companionship a dog would give me. By the time he walked through the door, I’d almost settled on a name for him.

  His reaction was less than delighted. “Ah, honey. Dogs aren’t allowed on base. There’s no grass for them.”

  “He’s just a little thing. He doesn’t need much.”

  “I didn’t make the rules.”

  “Then let’s move off base.”

  “We can’t do that, either. I don’t want you alone in the city when I’m away.”

  “But you’re here with me. You’re not away.”

  “Gracie. Sometimes I have to go. It’s my job.”

  “If I keep the dog, I won’t be alone,” I pointed out.

  The logic didn’t work on Steve. “We can’t keep it. You’ll have to give it up or you’ll get hurt,” he said. “I don’t ever want to see you hurt, Grace.”

  We took the dog to his friend Whitey, who had a wife and two kids in the little town of Bacoli. When I saw the dog in the tiny walled yard with two happy boys, I couldn’t deny that it was the best situation all around. Still, I wanted that dog. I wish I’d fought harder to keep him.

  I wouldn’t call that our first quarrel. But it was…something. Like a hairline fissure in a ceramic piece, harmless unless brought under pressure.

  Steve worked long, hard hours at the base at Agnano, and I came to realize that pursuing his dream carried a huge price tag—for both of us. He described his workweek as six Mondays in a row, but he never complained, and neither did I. If I felt any prickle of discontent when he left our bed before dawn and often came home after dinner had grown cold, I pressed it down and shoved it into a corner of myself, leaving it unacknowledged.

  Most of the time, we found a rare, heart-soaring bliss as we discovered each other. Steve was funny and sexy and strong, and he was devoted to the Navy and to me.

  We were in a lot of ways two strangers bound by a wedding ring, getting to know each other. I experienced doubts, excitement and lord knows, passion. Sometimes in a quiet moment, I’d wonder how this could possibly last a lifetime. My love for Steve felt as beautiful and fragile as a soap bubble, and I had to treat it with caution. I felt as though I was peeling away his layers, finding more to love as each new facet was revealed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On a warm September weekend, Steve surprised me with a three-day leave. In our tiny yellow Fiat 600 we drove away from the city with the windows rolled down and opera music playing on the tinny radio. The winding, impossibly narrow road along the sheer edge of the Sorrentine Peninsula was treacherous and exhilarating, the oncoming traffic a challenge around every curve. Scooters, pedestrians and the occasional herd of goats crammed the motorway. The lumbering local buses had scratches along the sides from cars trying to squeeze past them.

  Tiny towns clung to the rocky hillsides, the houses and shops stacked like sugar cubes in white and pastel hues. Each town had its duomo with bells that rang every hour. In Ravello, where we stayed, the duomo contained a vial of blood from St. Pantaleon in a vessel amid the stonework of the altar. Although the vessel was never touched, the blood was said to liquefy on the saint’s feast day in June. The locals swore that this was so, and who were we to argue with their sturdy faith?

  We found a place of magic there, in an ancient town perched like an eagle’s nest atop craggy mountains. The sea was a deep and dazzling azure. The hills were banded by terraced groves of lemon and olive trees. It seemed that every square inch that wasn’t rock had been cultivated. The stone halls and splendid gardens of the ancient hilltop villas seemed to whisper to me, and I sensed the presence of ghosts. Steve smiled at me when I told him that, but he never laughed.

  The Villa Ilina, where we stayed, was a tiny house done in the Moorish style, with white plaster arches and floors tiled in blue and green painted ceramic. We wandered the winding streets and stone staircases, pausing often to look out in wonder at the scenery. Somehow, these stops always ended with a kiss, and in Italy, that was normal behavior.

  We drank wine with dinner each night and when the stars came out, we sat on the patio, sipping ice-cold limoncello from tiny glasses. Then we made love, of course, late into the night and ag
ain in the morning with the sun falling across the bed. These are the moments that define us, not the grand gestures or anniversaries, but the small things we hold in our hearts. I knew I’d always cherish memories of the kindness of Steve’s smile and the way he held me as though I were precious and breakable.

  When we drove back to Naples, replete with great sex, good food and sunshine, I didn’t think anything could mar the perfection of our life together.

  I was wrong, of course.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When we returned home from our time on the Amalfi Coast, Steve showed me a thick folder stuffed with documents.

  “We’ve got orders,” he said.

  Just like that, our time in Italy was done.

  Over the next two decades, I would hear “We’ve got orders” nearly a dozen times, often without warning.

  Sometimes it happened like that. Plans changed, orders came quickly. It was an adventure, I told myself, and tried not to feel overwhelmed and frustrated as we settled in Norfolk. This was my way of life now. It was strange and mostly wonderful for a small-town Texas girl. Like diving into the cold, clear water of Eagle Lake back home, I plunged into the unfamiliar culture of military life. I tried not to dwell on the uncertainties and usually succeeded.

  That’s what love did for me. Come what may, I knew I was blessed because I had a husband who was my lover, my best friend, my whole world. I learned to read his moods, to know whether the lines in his face appeared there from laughter or fatigue.

  Then one day, I sensed a difference in him. A strange tension hung in the air of our small apartment, and that night I discovered the reason.

  He held me and kissed me, and then spoke the word that would make all the difference in the years to come.