But one day, she met Gregory, a widower who moved into the neighborhood in the early 1970s. He was a few years older than Catherine was, though he had dashing eyes and distinguished streaks of gray in his deep brown hair. She always felt envious of how well men aged, as opposed to women, who seemed to regress into a patchwork of wrinkles and sunspots.
When he moved into the house next door, she brought over a pot roast to welcome him, as she often did with new neighbors. He thanked her heartily for it, and when he moved to take the iron pot out of her hands, his fingers brushed hers, and a fire went through her body that she hadn’t felt in years.
As the months went on, she got to know Gregory better. He was an architect who enjoyed traveling and fine wine, had no kids, and had been widowed for years from his wife who died of ovarian cancer.
Meanwhile, Catherine was preparing to send her firstborn to college, a sad but hopeful day when she and Walter filled the family car to the brim and drove Leo through Cheltenham and Hunting Park to his college dorm. Leo had enrolled at Temple University to study art, eliciting victorious pride from Catherine and reserved admiration from Walter.
With Leo out of the house and the girls involved in their teenage social activities, Catherine found herself with more spare time on her hands, seeing Gregory out in his yard more often, reading a book or drawing sketches on his ever-present notepad. Gregory, semiretired and working mostly out of his home office, had done well in architecture, earning himself a flexible schedule and ample time to pursue any hobby that interested him; the hobby that captured his fancy these days just happened to be his married neighbor.
It started when he invited her over for a drink. “Hey there,” he called to Catherine from his front porch as she was pruning her rosebush. “Why don’t you give the bush a break and come have a glass of wine?”
Catherine felt a slight flush in her cheeks at the invitation. “It’s only two in the afternoon!” she said.
“It’s never too early when the wine is right.”
“I... I’m not much of a drinker, I’m afraid.”
“Are you a drinker of tea, then?”
“Yes,” she stammered, “I suppose I am.”
In Gregory’s kitchen, he poured her a tall glass of homemade mint tea as the ice cubes popped and crackled, which seemed somehow forbidden in his large, empty house.
“It’s a beautiful place,” she said, looking around her. “Did you design it?”
“Some of it, yes. Let’s just say there were significant renovations after I moved in.” He smiled. “Would you like to see?”
Sipping her mint tea like a coquettish schoolgirl, Catherine nodded, attracted by his energy as they moved through his home. He pointed out the spiral staircase, the skylights—all the little touches he’d added, Catherine thinking she’d never seen a man take more pride in his living space. After nearly twenty years of cohabiting with Walter, she’d assumed that a man could be happy living in a shoebox.
As he took her into the hallway, Gregory reached out and took hold of her wrist. His finger slipped down her soft skin until it rested on her pulse, a small but intimate gesture.
“I do say, Miss Catherine,” he said, his voice low and musical in her ears. “Your heart is racing.”
She pulled her hand away. “Architecture always intrigued me,” she said, a little breathless.
It was weeks before he touched her again. Gregory invited her over several times, always during the day when her husband and children were out of the house, but she always had an excuse. She had her bridge club, or a gardening party, or “dirty dishes stacked a mile high”—Catherine prided herself on taking care of many household chores even though they could afford to hire help for everything.
But the truth was Gregory had rekindled something deep inside her—something that had lain dormant for many years—and the thought of reawakening it terrified her. Having an affair with Gregory could destroy her marriage, rip apart her family, and jeopardize everything she’d worked for, and it was all she could think about, day and night.
Though Catherine barely knew it, her resistance to Gregory’s charm was gradually wearing down; though she hadn’t stepped across his yard since the day he offered her wine, the mere fact that she fantasized about it made it seem possible. The idea of an affair crept steadily from the realm of impossibility to reality’s domain.
Then, one sunny morning, Catherine was startled by a knock at the front door. She’d been dusting, so she peeled off her cleaning gloves and apron and went to answer it. Walter had full staff cleaning the house, but Catherine found that it gave her something to do during the day and did it anyway.
Gregory looked handsome as ever, the sun shining off his salt-and-pepper hair. “Hello,” he said, “hope I didn’t disturb you.”
“Not at all.” She was grateful she’d taken off her gloves and apron; Catherine didn’t want him to think she was cooped up inside cleaning, not the most glamorous of impressions.
“I was wondering whether you could help me with something,” he said.
“Of course, what do you need?”
“You might want to grab your pruning shears. It seems a problem of foliage.”
“I’ll meet you over there in two,” Catherine said, her heart pounding in her chest as she closed the door.
As she padded back through the house, she stopped to look at her reflection in the hall mirror. Even at forty-eight, her figure stayed slim. Though her hair had taken something of a beating during the sixties—she experimented with both a beehive and bouffant and even trimmed it short once—it was still remarkably full and glossy. Catherine cupped her breasts with her hands; though perhaps not as firm as they once were, they were still beautiful, especially for a woman pushing fifty. She applied a touch of makeup before grabbing the garden shears from their place in the garage and making her way next door.
Over the white picket fence, Gregory was standing in his backyard and looking up as he motioned her over. “It seems my oak has begun a love affair with the power lines,” he said, his voice tinged with sarcasm.
Catherine shielded her eyes against the sun. The branches of the large oak shading his backyard intertwined with the wires shooting out from the telephone pole.
“Those dreadful power lines,” she said. “It’s the same in our yard—they hang awfully low around here.”
“But now, we have the right weapons to fight our battles.” He gestured toward her clipping shears. “Do you mind?”
“Be my guest,” she said, handing him the shears. “But please, be careful!”
Gregory scaled the small ladder he’d brought outside while Catherine noticed the spry way he carried his lithe body, despite being in his fifties.
“Careful,” she said. “Don’t get shocked!” While she was genuinely concerned for him, she couldn’t deny the electricity she felt coursing through her body.
With finesse, Gregory clipped away the branches until the telephone wire was standing bare, hoisted himself down the ladder and handed her the shears. Then, he lightly touched her elbow, just for a moment but long enough that Catherine was sure there’d been a spark when his skin touched hers.
“Please,” he said. “Come in for a drink.” This time, she didn’t object.
They had hardly made it to the kitchen counter when Gregory trailed his hand down her neck. Catherine didn’t dare turn around; she didn’t walk away, either though, as his fingers combed through her hair gently and caressed her nape the way Leo used to do. Then, his fingers dipped beneath the fabric of her dress as he tugged on the zipper.
“I hope I’m not being too forward,” he whispered into her ear.
“Don’t stop,” she breathed as he slid the zipper down her back, and her dress pooled around her ankles.
*
It was easy for Catherine to carry on the affair without the knowledge of her husband who was gone during the day and many evenings. Her son Leo only came home from college on the occasional weekend he didn’t
have a party to attend, and the girls were swept up in drill team, 4-H Club, and the high school science fair. Catherine was a mother with an empty nest, which made her even more susceptible to being swept off her feet by a clandestine relationship with her charismatic neighbor.
The sex felt sublime for her, even though in reality, it was short of that. Gregory was a selfish lover, and even though he had a smooth, lean body and knew just what to do, Catherine sensed that his own pleasure was his main objective; but at least she felt wanted again, even if he only wanted her to satisfy himself.
But before long, the trysts lost their initial spark. Gregory, who at first had seemed interesting, became more monotonous and absent-minded, the main difference between him and Walter being that he droned on and on about architecture, whereas Walter harped about the stock market. Gregory’s taste in wine turned out to be little more than a symptom of longtime alcohol addiction. In short, Gregory had Walter’s dullness and Leo’s substance abuse.
After a few months, she broke off the affair. The relationship was far less fulfilling than she had hoped, but the guilt gnawed at her daily. Gregory put his house up for sale just days after and was gone by the end of the month.
She chided herself for expecting something long lasting from the fleeting dalliance. I’m just being silly, she told herself. I’m fifty, too old for romance! Besides, I have my children to think of.
By the summer of 1977, her son had graduated from Temple with a degree in art history. Leo decided to remain in the city to work on his master’s while Catherine’s daughter Lily, a burgeoning writer and poet, was a junior at Rutgers, and Sarah was entering her freshman year at Brown. Catherine was alone in a big house with a man she liked, but not loved—a man who was her friend but rarely did so much as kiss her.
So, she threw herself into the rose garden and her ladies-only bridge group, staying up late reading spicy novels that provided an escape late into the night. Plenty was missing from her life, but she managed to dull the ache somewhat. It was the life she’d chosen, after all.
*
The day Catherine rejected him in 1954, Leo went straight to the bus station, his grief creating a haze so dense he could hardly see his hand in front of his face. “Give me a ticket to the first bus,” he barked at the woman behind the counter, not even bothering to look at the Greyhound callboard of departures and arrivals.
“Where’s your destination, sir?”
“Anywhere.”
She gave him a look that made it clear she thought he had been drinking. If only I had, Leo thought.
“There’s a bus for Chicago that leaves in twenty minutes.”
“Fine,” he said. “Chicago it is.”
“Round trip?”
“One way.”
And that was how Leo ended up in Chicago for the next twenty years. The bus trip dragged on forever, but he spent time staring out the window, watching the world fly by, shedding tears, and trying to forget, which was challenging, as Catherine saturated his every thought and memory.
He transferred once in Pittsburgh, just long enough to buy a bottle of Ram’s Head Ale, downing it before he’d even walked out the store. Leo was falling back into the pattern that cost him Catherine but didn’t care anymore.
He arrived in Chicago as planned and there, began another journey to reinvent himself.
Chicago in 1954 had large populations of African Americans, Jews, Italian Americans, Poles, Germans, Greeks, and even Czechs tucked in various pockets of the city, a place of constant clashes and contradictions—the perfect city for Leo.
Leo found excellent jazz—and plentiful liquor wells—at the Blue Note Jazz Club, where he had the privilege of hearing the likes of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He loved a slice of deep-dish pizza on one street, and then walked two blocks over for a steamy plate of potato pierogi. With no structure, no plan, and no expectations, Leo was living the only life he knew how to live.
The postwar art scene in Chicago differed from Philadelphia or Paris; artists in the Windy City rejected the abstract aesthetics of their counterparts and embraced political satire and poignant social criticism, which spoke to Leo’s rebellious nature. Eventually, he found work assisting sculptors with large projects and had no trouble translating his considerable talent into the Chicago aesthetic.
Before long, he’d settled comfortably into the lifestyle of the Beat Generation, which suited him. He spent time with artists, poets, and writers, who embraced and extended his values, sneering at oppressive estates and emotional constipations of the establishment and embracing drugs, alcohol, and free love. For a while, Leo lived in a downtown loft just off S. Federal Street with three beautiful female artists. Catherine would never have let me do any of this, he told himself. Unfortunately, the mere thought of her name was often enough to send him spiraling into a weeklong depression.
Two of the beautiful artists moved out after a while—theirs was a transient society—but one stayed. She was, for all extents and purposes, Leo’s girlfriend, but none of the Beats was much for labels, so they kept it casual.
She encouraged Leo to pursue his art further, and after a few years of wallowing in self-pity and much pot smoke, he took her advice and applied to the Chicago Institute of Art. Even though he claimed to oppose “The Man,” Leo attended the institute for several years and had his sculptures featured at Chicago’s most progressive galleries by the time he graduated. It wasn’t much in financial success, but it was something, and Leo’s spending habits did not lend themselves to saving, anyway. Besides, he’d accomplished what he’d always wanted to. Yet, some heaviness from the past always made the taste of success bittersweet.
As the fifties eased into the sixties, Leo wholeheartedly adopted the hippie lifestyle, wearing his hair long and trading his jeans for bell-bottoms like everyone in his social circle. He participated in the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention and was among those arrested. The Chicago Tribune featured a story with Leo’s photograph on the front page, as two police officers escorted him to the patrol wagon. Proud of the picture, Leo made a dozen copies of it, papier-mâchéd them all over his naked body with thick paste, and headed for a stroll down Lincoln Avenue. He called it “Living Sculpture,” his first foray into performance art. It led to his second arrest, causing him to spend another night in the holding tank before one of his independently wealthy hippie friends posted bail.
For Leo, the sixties were consumed with sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and the sporadic and haphazard creation of art. When conflict in Vietnam escalated, he and his friends did everything to topple the military-industrial complex. They made art, love—and trouble. But Leo never felt whole once he left Catherine, and nothing he did could change that.
By 1972, Leo was broke, burned out, and serving a two-year sentence for destruction of property, with much time to think about his life as he found himself flashing back to the early days with Catherine, back when life was simple, and they thought they’d spend the rest of their lives together, naïve as it seemed now.
Whenever he looked at himself in the cracked jailhouse mirror—made of well-shined stainless steel so inmates wouldn’t injure themselves—he knew he had regrets. The man staring back at him from the polished steel realized the best years of his life were ending, and the future had little in store for him.
After his release in 1974, Leo decided to leave Chicago, selling most of what he owned, including his remaining sculptures, with just enough money to move back East. He settled in Baltimore where one of his former Chicago friends owned a head shop, spending the next three years working for him. Leo still thought of Catherine, but most of the time, he purged those painful memories by smoking pot, drinking whiskey, and waiting to die.
Part Three: Fall
It was fall of 1977 in Philadelphia, and the oaks, hickories, and sugar maples lit up like fireflies. Disco might have ruled the city’s club scene, but the trees stood tall and majestic, untouched by the shifting world beneath them. The leaves sprou
ting from their limbs painted Philly with a dazzling palette—bronze and vermilion, crimson and rust, gold and scarlet.
Catherine had always loved the fall, the crispness in the air that whispered of beginnings, the velvet carpet of leaves underfoot, and the faint whiff of smoked hickory she drew in with every breath. In the mornings, she rose early, sometimes even before Walter, to go for long, meandering walks through Fairmount Park. Wandering across the banks of the Schuylkill River, she was reminded of the Connecticut and the Ammonoosuc from her childhood as the coursing water carried her away on a steady flood of fond memories.
On one of these walks, Catherine found herself walking down Broad Street toward Independence Hall, the first time she had come there in years. She stared up at the grandiose buildings and was filled with the same mixture of awe and wonder. Without even thinking, Catherine found her old footpath and, in a matter of minutes, found the façade of the Morton-Folsom Insurance Company where she used to work.
She was in her twenties, working as an accountant on the second floor, the days at the desk, balancing numbers and making order out of chaos… and the fond memories of the day Leo surprised her in the foyer...
Catherine couldn’t let her feelings go, and then she thought, if she couldn’t bring Leo back, she could at least try to fill her life with other things to keep herself occupied, like getting a job. So, in September of 1977, at fifty-two, Catherine went back to work as a bookkeeper in the city of Philadelphia’s commerce department after completing a few special courses, which she did with ease. She did not need the money or the job, but it gave her something to do other than think. Her kids were in college, and her husband’s presence was sporadic at best. As the leaves on the ground turned from soft velvet to stiff paper, Catherine thought that she, too, was running out of time to make something of her life outside motherhood.
Four Seasons of Romance Page 12
