Camp Hiawatha in Kezar Falls, Maine, redefined the word cold. Summer nights drop into the low fifties, sometimes forties.
Every moment of the day, crammed with activity, counted. The counselors—I was head tennis counselor—were as regimented as the kids, but we could sometimes go out at night if permission was granted.
Jerry, a tennis counselor at Camp Wigwam, forty miles away, borrowed a car on a mutual day off. We would drive to Portland, a lovely city, home of Longfellow. I dragged Jer through the poet’s home, we ate lobsters by Penobscot Bay and we window-shopped.
He would return to Gainesville for his senior year, then apply to other schools for graduate work in chemistry. We talked about an upcoming tennis tournament in Fryeburg, Maine, where we’d be playing mixed doubles. Then after the sunset we drove back to camp.
The windows open, the smell of the pines drifting into the car, we laughed about our campers, other counselors, each other. We both gave as good as we got.
“I’ll miss you when I’m gone.”
“Won’t be for another year,” I answered, unromantic per usual.
“You could transfer to the University of North Carolina, that’s really where I want to go. Chapel Hill is a great place.”
“Anything’s bound to be better than Gainesville, the bedpan of the South.”
He laughed. “Do you still want to go to graduate school?”
“Yep.”
“Can’t you sit down and write without it?”
“Sure I can, but if I can go, I ought to do it. I’m not going to keep up my Latin once I leave school, and I need it.”
Jerry had studied four years of Latin at Fort Lauderdale High. He knew the importance of Latin. If you don’t know Latin, you don’t know English. I needed Greek also, but I was delaying that as long as possible.
‘If we got married, we could live together,” he said. “I’ll get a good job as soon as I graduate and I’ll put you through graduate school.”
“I don’t want to get married.”
“You love me, don’t you?”
“Yes. I always will.”
“Well?”
“Your parents are Catholic, we’re Lutheran. I’ve lived with that fight all my life and I will not raise my children Catholic.”
“That’ll kill Mom,” he mumbled.
“See what I mean?”
“She wouldn’t have to know until we had children.”
“And I won’t get married in the Catholic Church. We marry in my church.”
“Oh, God,” he moaned.
“Exactly.”
We drove back to Camp Hiawatha in silence. I kissed him and walked back to my bunk.
The next afternoon, he showed up again; he’d snuck off work.
“We could be atheists,” he greeted me.
My cherubs were hitting crosscourt forehands to one another.
I walked over to him. “Jerry, what are you doing here?”
“Asking for your hand in marriage.” He looked as solemn as a heart attack.
“How about my foot?” I joked.
“I love you. I don’t want to spend my life with any woman but you.”
Much as I loved him, I didn’t feel in a nesting mood. All around me engagement rings sparkled as college seniors panicked.
“Now or never.”
“No.”
“Then I’m dating other women,” he threatened.
Threats don’t work with me. “Go ahead.”
“Goddamn it.” His face reddened.
I laughed at him, which made him madder.
He left, and I returned to my kids.
Jerry made a show of dating other girls. I didn’t budge.
The green of the leaves darkened, the sun set a tad earlier. Camp would soon be over. The kids overflowed with tears, they kissed and hugged one another at campfire, at color war, wherever. Today someone would read lesbianism or male homosexuality into their actions. But children from age eight up to sixteen express themselves. They knew they wouldn’t be able to drive to see one another. They could phone one another since they were all rich enough, but still, they had no control over their lives. A camp goodbye was worth a few tears and kisses until next year.
The ceremony that brought these emotions to a fever pitch was the fire-lighting ceremony.
A big pile of firewood sat in the center of four smaller piles, east, south, north, west.
A child chosen from each group would go over to one of the small piles.
“I light the fire of friendship.” They’d boohoo before she finished the line.
Then the west girl would light her fire, which stood for courage or whatever.
As the four fires burned, a counselor or camp director would make a short speech about stellar personal qualities, then put the torch to the big pile.
The bonfire blazing, Tondelayo, in Indian deerskin, would beat her tom-tom, dancing and singing. The joke was, of course, that Tondelayo was the name of the native girl improbably played by Hedy Lamarr, in White Cargo, a movie set in Africa. Our Tondelayo, bedecked in fringed and beaded deerskin, may well have had Indian blood in her veins, but she didn’t melt into the forest at ceremony’s end. She hopped in her car and buzzed off.
As the bonfire crackled, the kids sobbed their little hearts out.
The last day of camp some parents picked up their children. Other kids boarded buses to Newton, Massachusetts, where their parents would fetch them amid cries of how much they’d grown and how tanned they’d become. More tears and kisses as the children said goodbye to one another and goodbye to freedom from Mom and Dad. Sometimes they’d grab on to a counselor, vowing eternal devotion. Mom and Dad would have to pry the child away.
Jerry and I also disembarked at Newton, hopped the MTA to Boston’s main train station and caught a train to New York. Once at Grand Central we had half a day before going over to Penn Station to board a train for Florida.
Grand Central exudes energy and warmth. The ceilings draw your attention upward to the constellations painted on them. The staircase at the western end seems fantastic the first time you see it. It’s a wonderful example of public architecture.
I wore tennis shoes, the old white kind, and a shift dress. He had on a pair of khakis and an ironed shirt. We walked over to the old Penn Station, without doubt the most beautiful train station I have ever seen. Vaults of glass curved overhead, and the light streamed down on you even as crowds of people hurried by. A breathtaking structure, it had to have been as extraordinary as the Crystal Palace was in its day. Unfortunately, Penn Station was later destroyed by the wrecker’s ball to make way for a building notable for its ugliness.
We walked, winding up in the theater district. A well-dressed woman standing in front of the theater where How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was playing noticed us. She couldn’t use her tickets. She gave them to us. We hadn’t any money to spare, which she recognized. She heard our accents, smiled and wished us well. It was our first Broadway show. The minute the orchestra struck up the overture I was in heaven.
That was my introduction to the kindness of New Yorkers. I could barely understand a word they were saying. They tended to shout and rush about. No one said hello to anyone else. Definitely no passing and repassing for these Yankees. And yet, it was love at first sight for me—a continuing love affair, although we’ve suffered rocky moments.
During the long shuffle back to Florida I thought about the city. I was going to study there. Aqueduct was there. (A place without horses was inconceivable.) No hounds, though. That bothered me, but I figured I’d drink up everything I could for as long as I could, then go back home and find hounds aplenty.
I told Jerry. He didn’t say anything for a while. He knew I wasn’t given to idle statements. If I tell you I’ll be at your house at six in the morning to shoot you, I’ll be there at six in the morning with a gun—as we say down home.
“I can’t go to school in New York,” he finally answered me.
“Well, I can’t go now. I meant for graduate school.”
“That’s not so bad.” He exhaled. “I can live in New York for a while. I’m not raising children in the city, though.”
“I’m not giving birth to Yankees, so don’t worry about it.”
“You were born seven miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.”
This fact delighted him since he could throw it in my face whenever I became too grand and too southern.
“Eat shit and die.”
He murmured, “I love you,” laughed and fell asleep until Washington.
He did love me, too. He’d known me since I was eleven. I didn’t have to explain myself, not that I was inclined to do so. If he’d wanted a sweet, sugar-pie, you’re-my-big-man kind of girl, he would have easily found one. He was becoming a hunk. Not that he had a handsome face, he didn’t, but his body was prime beef and his sense of humor prime-time.
He wanted a partner who’d stand by him and stand up to him. In that sense, I was perfect. And I was loyal.
Since I wouldn’t sleep with him until we were married, he’d find a tart and go to bed with her. That was okay. I thought then (and I think now) that our country is silly about sex.
In America sex is an obsession. In Europe it’s a fact of life.
I fall into the fact-of-life school of thought. People do what they do and it’s none of my business. To base the most important decision of your life, or one of them, on sexual attraction alone is pure-D foolishness. Marry in haste and repent at leisure.
He could do whatever he wanted to do as long as he didn’t rub my nose in it.
Monogamy is necessary for the greater social good but contrary to nature. We each struggle with the conflict.
Jerry didn’t struggle. He indulged himself thoroughly. But he was about to shock himself and I was the cause.
If we’d both known what was going to happen to us that year, I wonder if we’d have gone back to Florida.