We Never Told Read online

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  All students at Connecticut College were required to go to chapel every Sunday morning. The church, next to the library, was one of those white clapboard structures with a steeple, so charming in New England town centers. If we skipped going in to hear a sermon about the power of Good, we were supposed to tattle on ourselves. If we decided not to sit in the pew and sing about saints marching in, it was our obligation to report ourselves to Honor Court. We were not to be policed by adult authorities but by our fellow students, the judges on Honor Court. We elected them mostly based on their academic achievement and their talent for being cordial to everyone. Admonish was a word I first heard when the Honor Code was explained to the freshman class. It meant that we were not only supposed to tattle on ourselves but we were supposed to remind others who might be doing wrong to report themselves. Did that apply to the girl across the hall who was sleeping with her English professor? We were especially supposed to admonish a girl we caught cheating on an exam. The first time I skipped chapel and did not report myself I lived in fear for several days. After that, I skipped chapel and didn’t worry about it.

  We had two ways of meeting boys. We could be fixed up or we could meet at mixers. The most important date of the year was the Harvard/Yale football game. If you didn’t have a date, you might as well kill yourself. You were pathetic. We all knew who had a date for the game and who did not. Those who had been invited took a train from New London to New Haven and slept in a motel. The boarding school girls had an advantage because they arrived knowing boys at the Ivy League schools. One of those girls fixed me up with a boy named Bob White. I thought it odd his parents would give him a bird’s name. He met me at the New Haven train station. I didn’t like his face. But there we were.

  We left my suitcase at the motel he’d booked for me then went to the Yale Bowl where spectators wore raccoon coats and drank beer and smoked cigars and shrieked when there was a touchdown. It was raw November, white sky, no leaves on the trees. Some of the people in the stadium had blankets over their legs but we didn’t. I was icy cold and couldn’t have cared less whether the Harvard Crimson or the Yale Bulldogs won. I understood football, had been going to professional games since grammar school because my friend Betsy’s father was Marty Glickman, the announcer for the New York Giants. Here I was watching college boys and, when one of them ran the wrong way and made a touchdown for the rival team and everyone was going crazy from anger, I thought it was funny.

  After the game, there was a dance at a fraternity house. It was awful to be there in my basic black sheath and string of pearls with someone I didn’t like and who didn’t like me. When the party ended, Bob White drove me to the motel and without asking came inside where he insisted that I sleep with him. I said no, he said yes, I said no and after a while I became afraid because even though he was short, he was beefy, a real Yale bulldog. The motel room was big enough for only a twin sized bed, a cheap room in a cheap place, but I didn’t blame him for this because he was just a student. Girls were not allowed to stay in the Yale dorms. “What do you mean no?” he said and he came at me and we wrestled as he tried to force his lips onto my neck and face. I said, “Stop it, get off me!” He shoved me onto the bed, and I twisted away from him and stood up. He said, “I’m not paying for this room for nothing,” and lunged at me. “Take that damn dress off.” I smacked him, shoved him, kicked him, and at last he left the room slamming the door behind him. I locked it and lay trembling in the motel bed my eyes wide open. I was full of beer that I didn’t want but drank just to be polite and to fit in. He was supposed to pick me up in the morning and drive me to the New Haven train station but he didn’t. I had never been to New Haven before, had no idea where I was in relation to the train station. Maybe it was around the corner and I could walk or maybe it was a fifty-dollar cab ride. I’d never called a taxi by myself. In Manhattan, my father just held up his hand and a cab pulled up and we got in. Never having stayed in a motel before I didn’t know there was an office where there was probably someone in charge. Added to the worry of the train station was the worry about finishing my term paper on the origins of the King Lear legend, which I was discovering had something to do with salt. I had assumed that I’d take a morning train from New Haven to New London and work on the paper for the rest of the afternoon and into the night. At last, I noticed yellow pages on the bedside table. I phoned a cab. It took about forty minutes for it to show up. When we got to the station, the meter read $15.82. I only had seven dollars with me. “I don’t have that much money,” I said.

  “Well, darling, you’re going to have to call somebody and get it.”

  “I don’t know anybody.”

  “Then why did you call a taxi?”

  “I didn’t know how much it would cost.”

  “So you’re saying you want me to pay for your taxi ride.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. That’s what you’re saying. I have to turn in as much money as the meter says.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t think of anything?”

  “No.”

  “You think all you gotta do is turn those big brown peepers on a guy. Can’t blame you. It works. Do I look like an old man to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  “Seventy?”

  He guffawed. “I’m forty-six.” He was talking to me in the rear view mirror. “What were you doing in that motel?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “All by your lonesome?”

  “Yes.”

  I took seven dollars out of my wallet. He grabbed it out of my hand and said, “Christ, I hate college girls.”

  I already had my return ticket but now didn’t have enough for a taxi back to campus. So I walked with my suitcase back to school under freezing November skies. I had achieved one of the great feats of freshman year. I’d had a date with a Yaley for the Harvard/Yale game.

  We ranked our dates according to their college. Best was Harvard, then Yale, then Brown. Wesleyan and Trinity were lumped together as merely okay. Coast Guard Academy cadets were the lowest. I saw them in their uniforms, walking around our campus with their girlfriends, and winced for the girl who couldn’t get anybody better. Nevertheless, with a bunch of other girls, as the weather was warming in late April, I walked across the street to the Coast Guard Academy for their spring mixer.

  In a ballroom decorated with swags of American flags, there was a sea of young men in white uniforms and a band made up of Coast Guard musicians in blue uniforms, and a table of tea sandwiches, cookies, and soda. I stood there waiting for someone to ask me to dance and was grateful when someone did. After a while, the music stopped and the officer in charge announced a Sadie Hawkins dance meaning the girls asked the boys. Usually I handled my shyness by asking whatever boy was standing next to me. What difference did it make? It was just a stupid dance. This time I decided to find the handsomest boy in the room and ask him. I took my time. I walked among the spotless white uniforms selecting, not him, not him, not him and, just as I was deciding I’d sit this one out if the music started up before I could find someone, I spotted the handsomest boy in the room. He looked like Paul Newman. He said, “I was hoping someone would ask me.” I was seventeen and had never before felt the power of chemistry. While I liked my high school boyfriend Pete, enjoyed his company and respected him, smelling him never made me feel like fainting.

  Dick Boyce took me in his arms and my knees buckled. I actually had to hold on to him while we danced or I would have fallen to the floor. He walked me back to my dorm and came to visit me every day. I helped him write his essays and term papers. He helped me with physics, taught me about momentum, vectors, inertia, and critical mass.

  It was during one of our frequent discussions about being virgins that I learned he believed in hell. “As a concept,” I said the first time he told me. “As
another way of describing being uncomfortable.”

  Sitting on our favorite boulder in the woods behind campus he said, “No. Not as a concept.”

  “You mean you really believe there’s a fiery place under the earth where you go if you’re bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “You’re telling me you believe there’s literally a place with flames and devils where you’ll go if you’re bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “So does that mean you believe there’s heaven some place above the clouds?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “But Dick. That’s so dumb.”

  “Not to me.”

  “But you believe it because you were taught that. If they didn’t teach it to you like they didn’t teach it to me, you wouldn’t believe it. I mean it’s not an actual fact.”

  “You could say that about everything.”

  “No you can’t. If they didn’t teach me about gravity it wouldn’t mean this pebble would float up instead dropping down.”

  “Have they proven there’s no hell?”

  “I think so. I mean wouldn’t they know by now?”

  “How deep do you think scientists can explore? How deep down do you think they can go? How do you know there aren’t souls suffering in the deepest magma?” He saw me shrug. “See? Don’t be so sure of yourself, Miss Big Brown Eyes. You don’t know everything, Miss Soft Skin, Miss Smell So Delicious.”

  I lived at my father’s that summer, got a job as a day camp counselor. Dick Boyce went home for the summer to a small town in Minnesota where he lived with his Lutheran parents. His junior year started a week before my sophomore year so he invited me to New London to visit.

  Girls were not allowed in the Academy dorms so Dick got a room for me at the Mohican Hotel. I think we both suspected what was going to happen. For me, having sex before marriage meant I’d ruin my reputation. I’d turn into a cheap girl. For him it meant he’d burn in hell, a consequence that should have seemed more dire than mine but instead seemed equal.

  Mother Nature prodded me, “What reputation are you protecting? You don’t have any reputation.” Just as I believed I had a record and the bad things I did would go on my record, I believed that I had a reputation. Mother Nature said, “You don’t live in a small town. No one’s standing around the pump talking about you. If you don’t tell, no one will know.”

  Mother Nature must have somehow made Dick Boyce wonder if hell might be a pretend place. We decided together that the time had come. It was a decision. We were both tired of being excluded from the In-The-Know club. I knew he would never tell, and he knew I wouldn’t either. We didn’t pretend that sex might lead to marriage. I had no intention of being the wife of a Coast Guard officer. I couldn’t imagine anything more confining. I never said that to him just as he never said to me that he couldn’t marry someone who didn’t celebrate Christmas or Easter.

  From the window in our room at the Mohican Hotel, we only saw the brick wall of the airshaft. No sunlight came in to brighten the faded upholstery or the dowdy bedspread. I liked the run-down quality of the place. It was just an old room and anyone, even us, could be comfortable in it. We were both modest. I made him turn around while I took off my clothes and hurried under the covers. He made me turn my head while he took off his clothes and got into the bed next to me. I pulled the covers up to my chin. We embraced and it began. I think we both thought the act just happened, that there was some magnetic force down there that would attach him to me. But he had to find the place. I didn’t exactly know where it was. Somewhere down there. Was I supposed to guide him to it? Was he supposed to find it himself? We rolled around and he did find it and then it was over and I thought, what was so great about that? Why does everyone go on and on about that? Dick said, “I think we have to practice.” When he got up to go to the bathroom he wrapped himself in a sheet so I wouldn’t see him naked.

  I floated back to the train station, floated onto the train, floated back to my father’s house and treated him with great tenderness because I was a woman at last and he, poor dear soul, didn’t know I had drifted into another realm.

  When I returned to college for sophomore year, Dick Boyce was waiting for me. One day when we were walking in the woods, the trees ablaze with color, we came upon a discarded refrigerator carton. This became our hideaway. We put pillows in there and blankets and made love over and over again then lay next to each other talking about God and our studies. The bright leaves fell off the trees and made a crunchy sound when we walked to our hideaway. Then the winds came and blew the last remaining leaves off the branches and high above us geese flew in a V to a warmer place. Then it rained. One day it snowed. Our hideaway collapsed, became a soggy mess of cardboard. Now we had no privacy at all. With snow on the ground and freezing temperatures there was no place where we could be alone together.

  There was an athletic facility across from my dorm that housed a small café, the college swimming pool, a bowling alley, and the gym teachers’ offices. At night, the only lights in the building came from the café. Dick and I had an ice cream soda then wandered upstairs where all the corridors were dark and empty. We kissed for a while then I absently tried the doorknob on one of the closed doors. It opened and we found ourselves in the office of one of the gym teachers. The streetlight outside illuminated a desk, bookshelves, and some trophies. We were alone at last. We fell to the floor, ripped off our clothes, madly embraced, began the rhythmic motions that would lead to ecstasy and the light flicked on and there was the gym teacher. We grabbed our underpants and tried to hide ourselves as the gym teacher, a woman in her fifties, stood there with her mouth open and her eyes wide. We scrambled for our clothes as she retreated and closed the door. “Oh my god. Oh my god,” was all I could say. I was torn between feeling embarrassed and feeling angry. Where were we supposed to go? We were young people. Sex happens to young people. Both his school and my school were set up in a way that pretended we were not normal eighteen-year-old people. Mortified, Dick walked back across the street to the Coast Guard Academy.

  Now I had to face reporting myself to the Honor Court. Were they kidding? Did they, girls my own age, really think I’d write a note detailing my infraction and asking their forgiveness? When I got a note in my mailbox from the dean asking to see me in her office, I realized there really was no such thing as an Honor Code. It didn’t matter if you reported yourself or not. You got in trouble anyway. Okay, I’d go to her office. But I wouldn’t say one word. She could heap scorn upon me for as long as she wanted. Not one word would I say.

  Hers was a large, sunny office with an impressive desk and bookshelves around all the walls. She was a tall, gracious, gray-haired lady with pink cheeks and a graceful manner. I entered, closed the door, took a few steps to the center of the room, and stood there looking down at the oriental carpet as she sat erect behind her desk. I said nothing, just waited for the lecture to begin. From outside came the sounds of snow plows clearing the paths between the gray stone buildings. I examined the design of triangles and squares on the carpet, how the design was repeated again and again, how harmonious the colors were, wine, blue, white, and orange. Then I examined the tassels on my loafers. Still she said nothing. Outside I could hear girls chatting as they passed by her window. At last I couldn’t stand it another minute. I looked up and saw she was blushing. She didn’t know what to say anymore than I did. I’d put this blameless woman in an awkward position. Because of me, through no fault of her own, she was uncomfortable. My actions had consequences beyond myself. “Well,” she said in a tender voice, “I guess you won’t do that again.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Before departing for Rome, Aunt Dovey Lee introduced my mother to some friends at the Highland Acres Country Club. Here was the beautiful daughter of Greenstone Enterprises in need of a husband. While Greenstone Enterprises meant nothi
ng to New Yorkers, it was famous in Chicago. Mother was invited to dinner parties where there was sure to be a divorced man or a widower.

  We spoke once a month. Sitting at the phone in my dorm hall, I reversed the charges. For the first time in her life, Mother had friends. One was an artist, did oil paintings in her studio on the grounds of her large house in Glencoe. She and my mother visited the Art Institute in Chicago and had lunch at a nearby café. Another had a subscription to the Chicago symphony and invited my mother to concerts. Another loved to bake and invited her to sign up for cooking classes.

  When the house in Evanston sold, Grandpa Greenstone bought my mother an apartment in Chicago a block from Lake Michigan. He felt renewed optimism about her future, as I did. Surely with all these good-hearted women on the hunt, a match would be made.

  Marv Bernstein was a widower who lived on Lake Shore Drive. “He has an excellent Dunn and Bradstreet rating,” Mother told me on the phone.

  “Well that’s good, I guess.”

  “Yes, that is very good.”

  “So he’s rich?”

  “Don’t say rich. He’s wealthy.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Imports baskets.” I imagined wicker hampers filled with treats and wrapped in a big red bow at Christmas time. “Sells them at all the finest stores, Neiman Marcus, Marshall Fields.”

  On Spring break, I flew to Chicago and stayed for the first time at the apartment Grandpa bought for my mother. It was odd seeing our modern Scarsdale furniture bravely trying to fit in to this new home in an older building. It was a sunless apartment with a kitchen so narrow a table couldn’t fit, so we ate at a counter that separated the kitchen from the small living room. Across the street was Huge Hefner’s Playboy mansion, a brick structure that took up almost one city block. I had to pass it walking to Old Town. Usually there were no people visible either outside or inside. One day the sidewalk was enlivened by a group of centerfold hopefuls clustered near the front gate. They were gorgeous in spike heels and tight skirts. When I got half way down the block, I realized they were men and when I whirled around for another look they curtseyed to me in a sassy way. That was the first time I ever saw men dressed as women and it confused me because I wasn’t sure I agreed with what they thought represented women. Were spike heels shorthand for women? Did gobs of lipstick, fluorescent eye shadow, and tight skirts, a woman make? Why did they broadcast maleness despite themselves? Did I broadcast femaleness? How far out did my female emanations project?