Love and Glory

Chapter Eleven

We were together almost all the time. When we parted at night I sometimes stood on the sill of her first-floor window and talked with her until the campus police chased me away... between classes we drank coffee together in the spa... after class we went to the library, or sat in her dorm living room and read aloud to each other, homework, newspapers, popular novels. Evenings there were parties with kegs of beer and three-piece bands, chaperons ill-at-ease, caught between embarrassment and the demands of the college, kissing and the press of bodies, boisterous affection among the men cloaked by insult, and always I moved in the miasma of her splendor, contained in her radiant presence like a saint in a halo. To everyone but me the romance was sudden. One week and we spoke of marriage. I knew it wasn’t sudden and perhaps she did, too, knew it in the inarticulate way she knew things, knew it without knowing it, in the way she had of ignoring what didn’t apply at the moment. I had loved her since I saw her. Loved her, or the imagined her, before I’d met her. Loved her before I was able to understand what love meant, before I knew of sex, loved her since I could feel and had spent my life waiting to meet her and then waiting to have her love me.

Her mother’s couch was rough tweed and made friction burns on exposed skin as we struggled joyfully on it.

“Would you take off your clothes?”

“Take them off for me.”

She lay still as I unbuttoned her cashmere sweater and slipped it back over her unresisting shoulders and pulled her arms from the sleeves. Her skirt zipped at the side and I unzipped it and edged it down her thighs. She arched her body compliantly and lifted her butt at the right time. She wore a white bra and white nylon underpants. She raised up slightly so I could unhook the bra. “It has little hooks,” she murmured. I undid the hooks and she put her arms up so I could slide the bra off forward. The lights were out in the living room but the streetlight spilled through the front window and everything was clear and bright. She lay back and raised her pelvis again and I slipped the nylon underpants down along her thighs and off. She lay back perfectly still and smiled at me. I’d never seen a live woman naked before. Shark’s sister, Barb, had been up-with-the-dress-in-with-the-member. I stood and looked at her. She didn’t seem embarrassed. She seemed tranquil. I took off my own clothes and lay back down beside her on the couch. She opened her arm for me and I pressed against her in the curve of it. I kissed her; she opened her mouth. I touched her. I ran my hands over her. She touched me. The passion rushed through me; I hugged her to me in thundering darkness. Both of us were damp with sweat. She put her hands on either side of my face and raised my face from hers.

“We shouldn’t,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“I might get pregnant.”

Our voices were hoarse.

“It would spoil it for the honeymoon,” I said. “For us it wouldn’t be right.” We pressed still hard against one another.

“I wouldn’t trust a safe,” she said.

Shivering with the effort I lay still beside her. “We’ll wait,” I said. “When we get married I want it all just right.”

The sun was bright and the snow, four feet deep over most of the campus, was beginning to melt. The runoff, channeled through the shoveled paths, turned the bare ground to mud. I held Jennifer’s hand as we squished through the mud toward her dorm.

“I wouldn’t want my children brought up Catholic,” Jennifer said. I felt the flutter of fear in my chest.

Before I spoke again I knew that my religion had ended. It was as simple as that, and I was startled by it. It conflicted with Jennifer and so it was gone. Twenty years of often impassioned belief, of dark confessionals and cool churches, of Latin prayers and Gregorian chants, of complexity, and mystery, and time, washed away in casual conversation in a muddy Maine spring.

“I’m not really Catholic anymore,” I said.

The ocean rolled in among the rocks at Christmas Cove. The sun baked the rocks hot and the spray cooled them. In small depressions among the rocks were tiny pools; the remnants of high tide lay still and warm. Jennifer dipped a naked big toe in one and stirred it absently. Her toenails were painted red. “Why are you so mad,” she said.

I squatted beside her in a bathing suit and T-shirt. My nose was peeling. “We love each other,” I said. “We are supposed to stay together.”

Jennifer’s bathing suit was blue and strapless with white piping. “Oh, come on, Boonie,” she said. “You were having a nice time over there, and I couldn’t stand Billy’s date so I went over with Bobbi and John and those people. It’s not like I ran off with someone.”

I still squatted, shaking my head a little. “Then tell me and I’ll go with you, but don’t leave me. We’re supposed to be together.”

Jennifer’s face showed that hint of fine puzzlement that I’d seen before. “But Billy’s your friend. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

I sat down on the rough rock beside her and put my arms around her and pulled her against me and we went over and lay on our sides, facing. “Doesn’t matter, friends, hurt, not hurt, mother, father, anything. Only you and I matter. You have to understand that. Only you and I. Nothing else. Nothing.” And I kissed her and she kissed me back in the baking sun at the edge of the Atlantic.

The letter was on Colby stationery, Office of the Dean. It said: “Dear Mr. Adams, I regret to inform you that your academic record is unsatisfactory. Your personal conduct has been disruptive, and thus can hardly mitigate in your favor. I am therefore compelled to inform you that we cannot accept you as a student here at Colby for the fall semester. If you have questions about this decision, or need help in pursuing a course of study and conduct whereby you might be reconsidered in the spring semester, please call my secretary, or come to my office and make an appointment to see me. I regret this decision, as you must, but your scholarship and citizenship, or more accurately lack of both, leave me no other choice. Sincerely, Casper A. Brady, Dean.”... They drafted me in August.

The bus took ten hours to go from the Boston army base to Fort Dix Induction Center. We got to bed at 3:45 and were up at five standing, still in civilian clothes, in ragged rank in the company street.... Each time the M1 fired, its recoil jammed my right thumb against my right cheekbone. After three days on the range the cheek was puffy and sore with a faint purple tinge to it. “Lock and load,” one of the range cadre yelled. “One round ball ammunition.” We were sprawled in the prone position on the cold gravel. Next to me a kid from Brooklyn named Garfi murmured, “Lock and load your fucking ass.” I fired on command and the thumb banged against my puffy cheek and the bright brass casings looped sequentially out to the right.

Long, partitioned desks painted OD, the burble of dits and dahs in my earphones meant nothing. “Use some word tricks, asshole,” the instructor said. “What’s S sound like?” All fifty of us responded in derisive, bored, and hostile unison. “Chickenshit, sir.” With his hands on his hips and his fatigues starched and his blue combat infantryman’s badge pinned over his pocket, the instructor said, “Right, assholes. You better fucking remember it when you go to frozen Chosan, ’cause it’s two-thirds of SOS. What’s Q sound like?” Again the unison response. “Here comes the bride.” The instructor smiled widely. “Very good, fuckballs, listen to it.” He pressed his key and the sound came through my earphones, dah, dah, dit, dah.

We sat together on her mother’s couch. I had a diamond ring in my pocket. “I’m going to Fort Lewis, Washington,” I said, “to a repple-depple.”

Jennifer’s head was on my shoulder. “A what?”

I squeezed her. “All us GIs talk that way. A replacement depot. Means I’m going to the Far East.”

Outside, the late fall rain rushed down and the wind that was with it made the bare tree branches toss. The streetlight that lit the room threw heaving shadows across it.

“Does that mean Korea?”

I shrugged, struggling to be manly. “Probably, that’s where the war is. But it could be Japan, or Okinawa.”

Jennifer’s voice was small. “I don’t want you to go.”

I didn’t say anything. The shadows tossed about the room and the rain sheeted against the windows.

“I know you don’t want to get married till I come back,” I said. I could barely talk. It would be a year or more without her. If I didn’t get killed. I wouldn’t get killed. “But” — I took the ring out of my pocket — “how about you wear this while I’m gone?”

She looked at the ring that I held out and didn’t take it. She said, “Oh, Boonie.”

I held it out in front of her. She stared.

“You’re not going to call up Nick Taylor and ask him to come get you, are you?” I said.

Her face shifted from the ring to me. It was more serious than I’d ever seen it.

“Try it on,” I said.

She did, slowly, and then held it out and admired it on her hand. “Oh, Boonie,” she said. The ring was too big, but I knew it could be fixed. It had belonged to my grandmother.

“We can have it reset if you want.”

She looked at the ring and again at me. “Boonie,” she said, “I can’t.”

Outside, the wind drove the rain persistently against the windows. From the kitchen I heard the refrigerator cycle on. “Do you love me?” I said.

She nodded. “Yes. But you have to trust that, just trust it without trying to tie me to you.”

In the far corner of the living room was a baby grand piano. Jennifer’s high school graduation picture stood on it in a gold-trimmed leather frame. Very glamorous, long hair, head tilted back, gazing upward in profile. The clock on the mantel said ten of nine. But it wasn’t. The clock wasn’t wound. It always said ten of nine.

“Will you marry me when I come back?” I said.

“I will love you while you’re gone, and love you when you come back,” she said.

I put out my hand and she took off the ring and put it on my upturned palm. I folded my hand slowly over it and put the ring in my pocket. My eyes burned.

“I gotta walk,” I said.

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

We put on raincoats and she put a kerchief over her head and we walked in the rushing downpour for an hour in near perfect silence. The rain on my face helped hide the fact that I was crying. I kissed her good-bye at her door.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you understand?” she said.

“No.”