Four Seasons of Romance

by Rachel Remington

  “Yes, that’s true.” Instead of looking at him, she rearranged the dessert fork, putting it by the other forks. Even though she, too, was raised by wealthy parents, Catherine never understood why rich people needed so many forks.

  “I’d rather have a summer wedding,” she said, keeping her voice cool and nonchalant. “The weather will be much better, and more people will be able to come. Or maybe a September wedding, so I’m not drenched with sweat in my wedding gown. Or even an October wedding, when the leaves are changing. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  Walter smoothed the napkin in his lap. “So, what you’re saying is that you want to postpone the wedding to an undetermined date in the future.”

  Catherine swallowed. “Yes.”

  Walter shrugged. “Very well.”

  That’s it? Catherine wanted to scream. That’s all? He didn’t seem affected in the slightest by her change of plans. Maybe Leo’s right, and he’ll get over me, she thought. Then, she realized that, true to his character, Walter was simply deferring to his fiancée’s wishes, without the slightest suspicion that she was seeing someone else.

  *

  It was February, the snow was heavy on the ground, and Catherine’s original wedding date came and went. Leo was drinking heavily, the liquor needed only to regain feeling in his fingers if you asked him. How else would he make his art?

  Then, he noticed Catherine change. She rarely drank with him, and when he bought her a drink, she rarely took more than a sip, and although Catherine had never mentioned it directly, the more he drank in her presence, the more cautious she became.

  “What is it, Cat?” he asked after one too many bourbons at a local club one night. “You don’t like it when I drink?”

  “I’ve never said that,” she said, looking away. The truth was she didn’t like him when he drank—a loud, brazen, sloppy man loose with his swearing and his hands. She preferred the sweet, gentle Leo she had come to know and love.

  “Catherine,” he said, “look.” He took the glass of bourbon, still full, and dumped the entire thing on the barroom floor. “I’ll stop,” Leo said. “If you don’t want me to drink, I won’t drink. Promise.”

  He swore off drinking after that night and began to frequent Langhorne Speedway, the track in the suburbs just north of Philadelphia instead. Because of his track record in Europe, he quickly received a warm welcome from a team that raced stock cars, midgets, and sprint cars.

  For a bad boy like Leo, it was a dream to drive at Langhorne, one of the most dangerous tracks in America in 1954 and one known for a rough surface and many explosive wrecks.

  Catherine knew enough of the track’s history to be worried and refused to watch him race, begging him to reconsider.

  “Please,” she said, “I lost you once. I couldn’t bear to lose you again.”

  “I’m doing this for us,” he told her. “The more I race, the less I drink. I just need to get it out of my system, and then we can be together.”

  Off alcohol and needing a new thrill, Leo was unstoppable—the new wunderkind of Langhorne. The quest for victory kept him going back to the track against Catherine’s wishes, but drinking started to slip back into his life as many of his track friends invited him out and Catherine, of course, didn’t have to know.

  By May, Leo and Catherine had been seeing each other in secret for nine months. One sunny Sunday afternoon, he asked her to meet him in Tacony Creek Park outside the city, where he prepared a picnic lunch for them: a pitcher of lemonade, Waldorf fruit salad, and cucumber sandwiches—Leo didn’t know how to make much else. Everything was spread on a red-checkered blanket that made Catherine nostalgic for a life she’d never had... a life of lazy picnics on soft rolling hills with children frolicking beside them.

  She kissed him, and they didn’t say much as they dug into the feast. The warmth of the sun on their bodies induced a contemplative mood as Catherine leaned back on the blanket, closing her eyes and drinking in the light.

  “You’re never going to leave him, are you?”

  Leo’s question cut her like the knife Leo used to cut cucumbers minutes earlier. The sunlight that, moments before, had seemed so soft and gentle now felt like an asphyxiating flame. “I don’t know,” she said, surprised at her answer. She hadn’t necessarily meant to speak the truth—at least not so plainly. “I still haven’t set a new wedding date,” she said, hoping that would assuage the hurt she saw in Leo’s eyes.

  He shook his head and like a man half-crazed began to tear the crust off his cucumber sandwich and squeeze the bread with his fist. “I don’t know whether I can keep seeing you like this.”

  Catherine nodded. “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I just mean... it isn’t fair to you. I know that.”

  The sunlight made Catherine’s green eyes glow like emeralds just like ten years ago, and it filled Leo with emotion.

  “No,” he whispered intensely as Catherine looked away, both of then silent for a moment.

  “Leave Walter,” Leo said. “Marry me. I’ll take care of you. We’ll have a home and a family... if that’s what you want. Besides, you just can’t do this to me.”

  Catherine thought of the life he’d made for himself in Philadelphia thus far. The odd jobs, the racecar driving, the drinking. As much as it hurt, none of it spelled “home and family” to her.

  “Leo, I know you’re trying,” she said. “But it just isn’t who you are, and it’s hard but… maybe I need to set you free.”

  “No!” Leo leaped to his feet, flinging the crushed bread from his hands, frightening Catherine, his teeth gritted, face flushed, and neck pulsing with rage. “I won’t let you do it!” he yelled. “You can’t decide what’s right for me. I don’t need to be ‘free.’ I need you, Catherine!” He kicked at the pitcher of lemonade, spilling the sweet juice out on the grass.

  “Please, just calm down,” she said.

  Leo unclenched his fist, the anger fading from his face when he saw Catherine’s fear. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Let’s just... go back to how things were. You don’t have to leave Walter. Let’s just spend as much time together as we can.” She nodded, but said nothing for the rest of the afternoon.

  They continued to see each other in secret over the next month, but they both wondered how much longer they could sustain this affair, an affair colored with passion but fraught with tension and uncertainty. Several times, Walter nearly discovered them together, including once when Leo was in Catherine’s apartment and had to hide in the closet for hours and hours while Walter serenaded her with boredom. Meanwhile, they went through a pregnancy scare and many arguments, but the essence of the relationship did not change—Leo still struggled with his lifestyle while Catherine was torn.

  As for Walter, he might not have been the most observant when it came to emotions, but even he sensed that something was off with Catherine being gone often and her standard circuit of excuses—charity work, political meetings, meals with friends—wearing thin.

  “I feel as if I hardly see you anymore,” he told her over dinner one night. Catherine had to call off meetings with Leo for a few weeks, afraid that Walter would learn everything.

  Leo, meanwhile, couldn’t understand what Catherine saw in Walter and struggled with his emotions when Catherine was away, even resorting to drugs several times to let the pain go.

  Catherine found out, and the result was more distance between them. Furthermore, Catherine suspected that Leo romanced a few women at the track several times; Walter would never smoke marijuana or as much as look at another woman. Why would she give him up for someone who had a track record of doing both?

  In July, her eleventh month of seeing Leo in secret, Walter drew a line in the sand. “My mother will die any day now,” he told her. “I want her to see me marry, and I want her to see me marry you.”

  Catherine thought of the frail and suffering Mrs. Murray, and she was ashamed of her indiscretions. “Of course,” she said, “I want that too.”<
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  “We’ll marry in October, then. The leaves will be changing, as you said.”

  “That sounds fine,” Catherine said, even as the knot in her stomach tightened; the time was running out.

  *

  She was at the office typing a report a few days later when the receptionist came to her desk. “I just had a phone call,” she said. “There’s been an accident.” The girl’s expression was part sympathy, part delight.

  Catherine’s first thought was of Leo. Something’s happened at the track.

  “My fiancé?” she asked, the words feeling strange and unnatural in her mouth.

  “No, the call was from Langhorne. Seems there was an incident with your... friend.”

  “Did he leave any more information?”

  “No.”

  Catherine reached for her purse. “I have to go.”

  When she got to Langhorne, she jumped out of her car and ran across the parking lot with her heart in her throat. This was what she’d feared—losing Leo in a fiery car crash, this time for real, this time forever.

  She was met by one of Leo’s teammates, the man who probably had called the office and asked the receptionist to deliver the message.

  “Where is he?” Catherine cried. “Is he gone?”

  “He’s all right,” the man said. “Amazingly, he walked away with hardly a scratch.”

  When she found him, Leo was sitting on the ground, talking to the paramedics, one shining a light in Leo’s right eye, another treating the bright-red abrasions on Leo’s face and arms. Catherine rushed toward him, threw her arms around him, and sobbed.

  “It’s nothing,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “I’m okay.”

  He had veered off the racecourse, his car flipping several times before stopping upright in the dirt shoulder. Chunks of metal were torn away from the car as it rolled over and over in a thick cloud of dust, stopping about five hundred feet from where it left the track.

  “I could hardly breathe from all the dust,” Leo told her. “If the car had landed wheels up, I’d have been a goner.”

  This only made Catherine cry harder as she looked out on the track and saw the mangled carcass of the car Leo had driven only an hour before.

  “Ow, oww,” Leo said, clenching his teeth.

  “What? What is it?”

  He pointed proudly at his torso. “Doc says I bruised my ribs,” he grinned. “I’ve got a concussion too.”

  Catherine shook her head angrily. “I don’t know why you’re acting as if you just lassoed a steer at the rodeo. It’s a miracle you’re alive!”

  “I don’t know why you’re angry,” he said. “If it’s a miracle, we should be celebrating!”

  But there wasn’t much time to celebrate. The car was totaled, and the team owners blamed Leo’s recklessness for the accident, cutting their relationship with him by the end of the week.

  On Friday night, Leo was inconsolable as he and Catherine sat at The Betsy Ross Tavern, a bar a few blocks off Franklin Square. She watched as he ordered drink after drink, with no sign of stopping, Catherine’s frustration growing with every minute.

  “I can’t make you stop drinking,” she said, pointing to the glass in front of him. “Obviously. But please, please stop racing. I’m begging you. I love you too much to see you lying out in a field as mangled as that car.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Funny enough,” he said, “that mangled car’s worth a lot more than my mangled body.”

  “Don’t say things like that. I’m worried about you, Leo. I’m asking you to stop.”

  Leo shot back the rest of his liquor and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, swiveling around on the barstool until he was looking at her.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll stop racing. If you go away with me.” He kept talking before she had a chance to reply. “I’ve been in touch with an old friend. An Army buddy. His family owns a chain of antique furniture shops in the suburbs of DC. He asked me if I’d manage one of the stores for him.”

  “But... you don’t want to be a store manager.”

  “Not forever, no. But it’s a good job with a steady income. You could find work as an accountant. We could raise the family you always wanted.” He looked her in the eyes. “I’m telling you, Cat. I won’t let you down.”

  Catherine smiled but she was still plagued with doubt—doubt about his drinking, drug use, womanizing, and general instability. On top of it all, she still didn’t believe Leo truly wanted a family.

  But as she looked at him, the bruises and cuts still fresh on his cheeks, she thought of all the good he had brought to her life. As an adult, she learned to proceed through all things with caution and doubt, yet, she, too, could act out of passion. After all, the decision never to return to her father was made out of passion, and hadn’t that been the best decision she made recently?

  As Leo sat on the barstool, his eyes spoke to her, and she knew what he was trying to say.

  “Give me a chance,” he finally said, confirming what she saw in his eyes. “At least give me a chance to fail. Or maybe, just maybe... a chance to succeed.”

  Then, she knew that Leo was right. Catherine loved him and wanted to be with him more than anyone else. If there were the slightest chance of success, she’d take it.

  *

  The following day, Catherine met Walter for brunch. A true gentleman, he stood as she approached the table.

  “Hello, dear,” he said, pulling her chair back.

  “Hello, Walter.” Catherine knew what she had to do and already felt sick to her stomach, strangely unresponsive when the waiter took their order, so Walter ordered for her. A glass of orange juice and French toast. In other words—what he was having.

  “You’re quiet this morning,” Walter said, carefully cutting his toast into squares, the method he used with all foods that required cutting and some that didn’t.

  The sight of this strange idiosyncrasy and Walter’s diligence about it nearly broke Catherine’s heart. “We can’t marry,” she blurted. “I’m sorry.”

  Calm, Walter laid his fork and knife down on opposing sides of the plate. “And why is that?”

  Catherine’s eyes flooded with tears. “I don’t ever want to hurt you, Walter. Please understand that. But I just... can’t.”

  “Are you seeing someone else?”

  His words surprised her; she was used to assuming Walter didn’t have the faintest suspicion of her affair with Leo. But maybe he was more observant than she thought. And honestly, much like she’d felt with her father when she was a teenager, Catherine was just plain sick of lying. “Yes,” she said, “I am.”

  She glanced at Walter; he didn’t look happy, but he didn’t look outraged, either.

  “He’s an old boyfriend,” she told him. “I thought it was done and over, but then, he was passing through town a few weeks ago.” The lie sounded off-pitch to her ears, but she decided it best not to mention that Leo had “passed through” town a whole year before... and stayed.

  “Someone you knew in high school?”

  “That’s right.” She swallowed. “My first love.”

  Calm as ever, Walter took a sip of orange juice. He was, after all, a practical man. “Wasn’t that Leo? The one who died in the war?”

  Catherine was surprised that he’d remembered this detail about her high school sweetheart. “I thought he was dead. I really did. But it was all an elaborate lie my father concocted.”

  “Well, then, why don’t you tell me about him?”

  She paused. “You really want to know?”

  “Yes,” Walter replied. “I really do.”

  With this admission came a sense of exhilaration that washed over Catherine like a wave. Finally, she would be honest with him.

  For the next hour, she told him everything, recounting the story of her relationship with Leo—their young love, the nefarious way her father stymied it, and the second chance they’d been given. “I loved him,” she said. “When he died... I mean, when I thoug
ht he died... I had to bury that love with him and never in a million years thought it would find me again.”

  Walter nodded, his lips pursed but eyes clear, managing to remain collected, as was his way. He heard the story of her love less like an outraged fiancé and more like a focused accountant, gathering data and facts.

  When she had finished, he leaned back in his chair. “Catherine, I want you to do something for me.”

  “Of course,” she said, flush with the giddy sense of liberation she felt from talking about Leo.

  “I want you to describe Leo’s virtues and faults, his profession and his goals.”

  This seemed a strange question to Catherine, but she figured maybe this was what Walter needed to heal and move on. She told him about Leo’s spontaneity and his charisma, his loyalty to her, his artistic dreams and also gave him the abbreviated version of Leo’s not-so-stellar qualities: his drinking and his instability, his torrid love affair with cars and women.

  “But he’s working on it,” she said, “and I believe he’s trying. Nobody’s perfect.”

  Walter stroked his chin, absorbing everything she’d said, getting the distinct impression that she had been seeing Leo for much longer than two weeks but saying nothing, content to let her keep her fiction.

  “Do you hate me?” Catherine said. “I feel horrible about it, Walter; I really do. You are a good person and a great partner, and I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. If you hate me and think I’m a terrible person, I understand.”

  “In my opinion,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “what you are going through is normal.”

  Catherine cocked her head, surprised at Walter’s assessment. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you are simply having cold feet. You want to recapture your youth and be wild with Leo before settling down with me. I’m not thrilled about it, but that desire itself is natural, so I don’t see anything wrong with you wanting it for a few weeks.”

  The detached way Walter talked about her love life made Catherine uneasy. This was the man she thought she would spend the rest of her life with, and he didn’t care that she was in love with someone else? Walter’s behavior seemed too strange for words.