Story of Us (3 page)

People toss around the term “whirlwind courtship,” but I don’t think anyone really understands what it means unless they’ve experienced it. Surely that’s what happened to me, right at a moment in my life when I didn’t think anything interesting would ever come along.

Whirlwind. It’s one of those words you take for granted, assuming you know what it is. Well, I certainly found out first hand the weekend I met Steve Bennett. I had the sensation of stepping out into a storm during hurricane season, swept up into a dizzying rush of tingling emotions.

Falling in love with him was easy. Too easy, perhaps. I was incautious, willfully so. I wanted everything he was and all that he stood for and never paused to consider if a headlong rush was the best way to shape my future.

That night, we went to Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. Townes Van Zandt was playing. His mournful, thin-voiced rendition of “Pancho and Lefty” brought tears to my eyes, and when I looked over at Steve, I saw a faraway expression on his face and wondered what he was thinking. Then, as if he felt my stare, he reached over and squeezed my hand.

That was it. That was the moment I started to love him. It felt so real to me. I’ll always keep that moment folded away in my heart, like the pressed flowers of a homecoming corsage. I remember perfectly the twang of the guitar and the notes of the sad song, and gazing into a face that was new to me, yet that I felt I’d always known.

My hormones raged. There was such a sense of wanting in me that I could hardly catch my breath. I wondered if it was as magical for him as it was for me. I suppose men think differently. Maybe they don’t count the moments the way a woman does.

We held hands for a time and then went to the beer garden annex to share a pitcher of Lone Star, clinking our frosty mugs together. Then he asked me to dance, and that was a surprise. The men I’d met at college didn’t dance. He did, though. He gave me that spectacular grin and said, “I learned in officer training school.”

Social graces were only one of the many small ways the Navy shaped him. As we got to know each other, I learned more about all the things that came his way through the Navy—a life, a home, a purpose, a sense of belonging. Lacking all of that in his early life, he found it in the service of his country.

I admired his ambition so much. It was one of the first things I loved about him. I never stopped to consider that one person’s ambition might create tensions when there were two people to consider.

But on our first night together, all of that was far from my mind. I was lost in him, and in the dreams that were igniting fireworks in my heart.

At the end of our date, Steve drove me home and walked me to the door. We stood together on the front porch, holding hands and facing each other, making small talk in order to put off saying goodbye. I was grateful that my parents no longer waited up for me, and had no fear that they’d be hovering on the other side of the door when I walked inside. That, thank goodness, ended with high school.

I wanted him to kiss me but was too shy to say so. Four years older than me and more experienced than I could possibly know, he wasn’t shy at all. With exquisite delicacy, his hands cupped my face, and a soft darkness fell between us as he leaned down and touched his lips to mine, lightly, with a restrained passion that turned to fire. I forgot to breathe, and grew light-headed with the heat that surged through me.

“I’d better go,” I said, never wanting to leave his arms.

“I’ll call you.”

“Yes,” I said.

When I went inside, there was a light on in the parlor. I was surprised to see that my grandmother was still up, sitting in her chintz-covered chair and watching Johnny Carson on TV.

Gran came to live with us when I was in high school, after Granddaddy died. She had a suite of rooms at the back of the house, and they were cluttered with mementos of her sixty-year marriage. There was a shelf of sepia-toned photographs of her as a young bride, and a series of pictures of my mother and Uncle Kyle, growing up in Edenville. Gran had a collection of thimbles from all the places she’d been—New York City, Hollywood, Miami, Mexico City, Niagara Falls. She had a passion for knitting and the soap opera
As the World Turns,
and it was no secret that the money in our family came from her. She was the daughter of an oil field roughneck who struck it rich, married a genteel Daughter of the Republic of Texas and became genteel himself. It wasn’t a huge fortune, but enough to allow the next generation to live well in the slow-paced small town world of Edenville.

Despite her old-fashioned ways, my grandmother possessed a deep and subtle wisdom about life. She rarely gave advice or even offered her opinion, but when she did, she was always right.

“Are you okay?” I asked her. “Couldn’t you sleep?”

“I’m fine, Grace,” she said, turning down the TV. “How was your date?”

“Perfect,” I said. “I think I’m already falling for him.”

“Then,” she said with a sparkle in her eye, “what are you waiting for?”

I took my grandmother’s advice to heart and flung myself headlong into this relationship. Was I naively premature to call it a relationship?

Steve and I spent nearly every waking moment together for the rest of the weekend. We went swimming in Eagle Lake and then lay together in the shade of a cypress tree, looking up at the sky through the branches. Later we sat on the wicker divan on my parents’ front porch with Asleep At The Wheel playing on the radio. On Sunday, we went to a pancake breakfast at the firehouse, and my sorority sisters gave him the third degree. Trudy Long, even before she entered law school, had a way of prying information from people.

Thanks to her, I learned that the Navy paid for him to attend Texas A&M, the best school in the state. I learned that he was in training to fly carrier-based aircraft.

At the time, I didn’t know how dangerous it was to launch a jet from the deck of a moving ship, and, even more dangerous, to land on the four-hundred-foot runway, praying the tailhook would catch a wire and stop the plane. It all sounded terrifically romantic to me, and I loved his dream so much that it seemed like my own.

Everything about that weekend was precious to me, every moment sharp-edged and distinct.

He asked me what I planned to do after college.

“Interview for a job, I suppose,” I said. “What I’d really like to do is go into business for myself.”

“What sort of business?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out.” I leaned my head on his shoulder—I was comfortable with him already, my body learning how to fit into the space of his. “I just want a life that I love, but I’m not really sure what that means.”

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.

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.”

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.”