A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties

by Terry Marshall

  I borrowed Terry’s car, something I had never done. When I rolled up to her apartment, it was fifty degrees out. I spotted this petite blond perched on the porch, engrossed in a thick hardbound book. No coat. The moment I parked, she bounded over. “You’re Ann, ja? I would know you anywhere. I’ve always wanted to meet a saint!” She threw her arms around me. She stepped back and gave an impish grin. “Well, maybe half saint . . . and half all-American girl.”

  She ushered me inside, brewed tea, and laid out a plate of Springerle (a German cookie), showering me with tidbits from her trip. Racing for gates in Munich, New York, and Chicago. Chatting with a grandma from Iowa sitting next to her. The boy she taught to count from one to five in German on the flight to Denver. A half-dozen funny stories, but with enough pauses to ask about my day, my classes, about Jack and me. An hour stretched to two.

  This girl felt like a sister. And what a go-getter. In less than a week, she had found an apartment, moved in, made friends with a girl in the same fix, and started work at the neighborhood 7-Eleven.

  She was a far cry from the sobbing girl Jack had described. No tears, no woe is me.

  As for being pregnant, “Bad girls do this all the time, but not good girls. If they knew at home, it would be a scandal.” Her tone was pensive, neither morose nor self-pitying. And her first request wasn’t a plea for help, but “I want to hike your beautiful Rocky Mountains. Can you take me?”

  A week later, Terry and I took her hiking up James Creek above Boulder. Like a mountain goat, Gretchen outpaced us. The windchill that day was twenty-something degrees. Terry and I hunkered inside a grove of pine trees and, with icy fingers, ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and downed a thermos of coffee. Gretchen, by then four months pregnant, raced off to the creek and slurped up icy water as if it were a summer day.

  January–February, 1964, Boulder. The frozen days of winter melted in the tempo and intensity of letters zipping across the Atlantic. Jack’s raves about “us” and our yearning to be together far overshadowed any actual news. Tucked among his letters awaiting my return to school was this handwritten sentiment: “May this new year bring us together and to the beginnings of a shared journey through life.” That and so much more I could hardly keep pace:

  December 22, 1963. Do your folks know I aspire to be their son-in-law?

  December 24, 1963. Income tax time is coming again. If you’d only have let me buy your plane ticket over, there’d be another deduction.

  Maybe I’ll get luckier next year, and who knows, we might be filling out a joint return.

  January 3, 1964. If we [marry], we will live in unbounded joy, and could easily leave significant, respected contributions in whatever we choose to accomplish.

  We were on runaway trains hurtling toward each other. We had to meet. A trip to Germany no longer seemed indecorous. But when? Spring break? Not long enough. I’d have to wait until June, after graduation. Europe would be an ideal capstone to college and a tantalizing rendezvous. I didn’t have the money, though. My job as mail clerk in the dorm paid room and board, not cash. My scholarship covered tuition and fees—$232 a year—but I was relying on Mom and Dad for spending money. I pinched every penny so I wouldn’t be a burden.

  Jack offered—again—to pay my airfare, but that was an obligation I couldn’t accept. I screwed up my courage and wrote to Dad asking to borrow money for a cut-rate charter flight to Europe, pitching the trip as “educational” for Bonner, Jack, and me. We’d tour France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. I added that it would also “be enlightening for me to get acquainted with my correspondent of the past two years.”

  Not missing a beat, Dad wrote back, “In my day and time and your mother’s, girls didn’t go sashaying all over the world seeing their boyfriends. It was the other way around.” He asked for a budget and in late February offered to make the ticket my graduation gift. The trip was on.

  The flurry of letters between Jack and me continued, each one snapping another link into a golden chain that pulled us ever closer. He was in love. So was I, even if I was afraid to say it:

  January 26, me to Jack. I am enraptured with the magic of “us.” I agree our potential is unbounded to accomplishments of tremendous benefit to many.

  February 15, Jack to me. This morning I had a dreamlike awakening, thinking how it would be if you were here beside me. I tingled all over, shuddered in ecstasy. It wasn’t the first time, but the most vivid.

  March 4, Jack to me. My difficulty is avoiding endless repetition of how lonely I am for you, how much I want to be with you, my glorious dream of you and I becoming we and us. It can last and grow—and joyfully, I have a feeling it will.

  Through January and February, as Jack and I fired off love notes, Terry hyped my jaunt like a fast-talking tour guide. Drawing on his massive art history textbook, Janson’s The History of Art, he said I absolutely had to see Versailles, the Louvre, Venice’s Palazzo Ducale with its Tintorettos, Titians, and Guariento frescoes, and Albrecht Dürer’s Four Apostles in Munich’s Pinakothek. We fantasized over me seeing Hamlet at Stratfordon-Avon.

  Indeed, through mid-February, Terry almost seemed to be working in tandem with Jack to fan the flames of my long-distance romance.

  March 1964, Boulder. March roared in like a lion. I was student teaching at Boulder High half days, carrying a full load of classes, writing lesson plans, and studying far into the night. On the weekends, I’d trek to Denver, sometimes with Terry, but usually alone, to visit Gretchen. We never talked by phone—the long-distance charges would have eaten us alive.

  Together, she and I explored the zoo, the Botanic Gardens, and the art and history museums. On hikes and huddles over tea, and in a number of soul-searching letters, we agonized over the thorny dilemma she faced as an unmarried pregnant woman. We probed all the possibilities, though as her confidante-friend, I mostly listened and never pushed for any single choice. It had to be her decision.

  Abortion? “Never!” She was a devout Catholic. Marry the father? Not possible. My brother had made that clear. Still, she wished Bonner no ill will. She loved him.

  Keep the child and raise it as a single mom? That was a burden neither Jack nor I wished on anyone. We favored adoption, so my heart had leaped in early February when she wrote, “I DID IT!” She had talked to an adoption counselor and asked me to gather family background information she would need.

  But her effusive description of the counselor and the process took a right turn when she asked that I not tell Jack because “I want Jack and your brother to know about this only when I am completely sure. I can’t stop thinking about this, I can’t sleep, and I have these awful dreams. I must get all these doubts out of my head first.”

  Oh no. Not another secret to keep!

  It was around this time that Terry started acting weird—making flirty jokes and brushing against me, the way guys do when they think they’re being subtle.

  Actually, he’d been a different person since September, but I had been too consumed with my own challenges—and joys—to give it much thought. He had come back to school with stories of an old high school flame he’d lusted after and lost over the summer. Then over the weekend before classes began, he and a J-School classmate dove into bed like newlyweds. Not a one-night fling, but every weekend and half the weeknights. That lasted a couple of months, and another girl came along, someone he’d met in Silverton. While Jack and I were exchanging love letters that fall, Terry was jumping from one steamy relationship to the next.

  All he could talk about was sex, somehow seeing it as his duty to describe everything to me in explicit detail. I had no desire to hear how “marvelous” a vagina felt to a guy. I was speechless when he told me. Through the whole fall semester, Terry and I didn’t meet once for coffee or for Sunday night burgers at McDonald’s.

  One night in mid-March, though, he fetched me off to an all-night doughnut shop, a greasy little place out of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, as if we had been summoned to Potsdam by the
president. We scrunched up to a mottled black-and-gray Formica-topped table, so tiny our knees clunked together.

  I sipped at a cup of hot chocolate, water-based, with little globs of cocoa bubbling up and scattering sugary dust across the top. The cloying stench of deep-fried sugar nearly made me gag, but he insisted we had to talk. At this moment and in this place.

  “Look, I . . . I don’t know how to put this, I . . .” He stared into his empty Styrofoam cup, nervously breaking off tiny nodules from the rim, dismantling the cup until it was a half-inch high and full of confetti.

  I had to be on guard with Terry. I never knew what might pop out. He rambled on. He squirmed and started to take a sip—of what? Styrofoam BBs? He scooted the chair back. It squealed like a wounded pig. He saluted with his mangled cup. “More cocoa?”

  “Nah, one’s too many.”

  He fled to the counter and hustled back, plopping a new cup on the table.

  “Okay, look, I have to say this: You’ve changed. I mean, I’ve . . . we’ve . . . I know this sounds stupid, but, dammit, Annie, I’m falling for you. You’re . . .” He paused like a rabbit in the shadow of a diving hawk. “I’m crazy about you. Be my girlfriend?” He swallowed half the cup. He actually blushed.

  Girlfriend?

  After this stunning “proposal,” he got that silly, lopsided grin of his. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out a ring and laid it like the Hope Diamond on the table. “I’m not a frat boy, so I don’t have a pin. But this’ll work. You can wear it on a chain like a necklace.” The ring was wrapped with electrical tape, painted bubblegum pink by some long-ago girlfriend.

  I couldn’t stop laughing. This joke was better than those crazy “news” stories he used to spin when I worked at the Daily.

  I scrutinized the ring like a jeweler. “Your high school class ring? Good Lord.”

  “How about my DeMolay ring? Or better yet, my super-special Lone Ranger decoder ring that set me back ninety-five cents and four box tops?”

  “Nope. I’ve got to see diamonds, bud. At a minimum, rubies.”

  “Would you wear a locket? Or a broach? I’ve seen some nice ones at Kay Jewelers.”

  He was grinning like a doofus, but his tone had changed. No twinge of craziness. Jeez, he knew I was going to Germany in June to see Jack. “Uh, how about that refill? I’ve been broadsided by a Mack truck.”

  “Medic’s on the way.” Up instantly, he loped away. Back at our table, he said, “It’s me again. My weird twin had to split.” He was Mr. Cool, like nothing ever happened.

  “Yep, I knew it was one of your jokes.”

  Or was it? We were pals again, but I felt warm and tender, not at all shocked. He carved new ideas about “us” in the air. Time evaporated. I lifted my hand to counter a comment, and our fingers touched, as if drawn together by magnets. Electricity sizzled. Not as profound as God giving Adam the spark of life, but palpable enough to kindle a warm burn in the pit of my stomach. The air was too thick to breathe. The doughnut shop had become a sweat lodge.

  Maybe I could deal with this tomorrow or next week. Maybe. I jumped up. “We better skedaddle. I’ve got American lit at eight.”

  Terry as my boyfriend? Not possible. He was a great friend. I admired him. He could write. He could think. He stimulated my mind, challenged me, and pushed me to question the very foundations of my beliefs on religion, war and peace, and America’s role in the world. He knew current events and loved literature and art. We could talk about anything. He had this quirky sense of humor that cracked me up. Kept me forever on my toes.

  But romance? On that score, he wasn’t right for me. We had kissed once, spring of my sophomore year. One night, we’d gone for a hike around Boulder Reservoir—a break from studying, like meeting for coffee, but without the coffee. It got windy and bitter cold. We squeezed into a niche in the riprap, snuggling together for warmth, and he kissed me.

  Well, truth be told, I kissed him back.

  Afterward, we didn’t say a word, just jumped up and hiked out. A couple of days later, he brought it up. “Sorry, it was Puck and his fairy juice, not me at all.”

  I nodded. That was it. He remained my platonic friend. He wasn’t out to see how far he could go sexually.

  But now he expected me to follow that string of girls. No way would I do that.

  Still, his “proposal” caused me sleepless nights and generated hours of heart-rending, mind-torturing reevaluation of our history. Besides that, what about his obsession with sex? That was one of the main reasons I’d given up on dating and set my sights on Jack.

  Ultimately, I figured out that sex was an intoxicating, new adventure for Terry, like rafting or mountaineering. The previous summer, he and five friends had tackled the San Juan River in the badlands of Utah on three rubber rafts. He sent me his notes—twelve typewritten pages of vivid descriptions of swirling rapids, sheer cliffs towering overhead, emerald-green pools in barren rock, and the absolute joy of camping under the stars.

  He approached sex the same way, recounting each exploit with unbridled zeal. Sometimes with Terry, you had to overlook the topic and concentrate on the enthusiasm.

  What to do? My friend Julie lobbied for “the straight-arrow German guy.” Her dismissiveness pushed me toward Terry. Besides, I couldn’t walk away from him without exploring where we should go from here. For his sake, for Jack’s, and for mine.

  In the midst of my angst about Terry, student teaching, and supporting Gretchen, spring break swept in and gave me no respite at all. I had just a week to nail down a job for the fall before I left for Europe. But where? I’d endured too many frozen winters in Colorado. Albuquerque? Too close to home. California? Nah, I’d never be a “California girl” (whatever that was). Phoenix? Warm in winter. Halfway between Colorado and the coast. Rapid growth meant schools were hiring. Bingo.

  I flew to Albuquerque, and Mom and I drove to Phoenix. Four interviews in three days.

  Back in Boulder more than a week after Terry’s professed change of heart, I laid it out for him: “You remember I’m on track for the romantic trip of a lifetime with Jack, don’t you?”

  “It’s not too late to change your—”

  “And that you’ve been helping me plan this trip?”

  “I was a fool, I—”

  “No, you were, and still are, my best friend. And best friends don’t horn in on their friends’ romances.”

  “But this is different. I’ve changed.”

  “So? What about me? You expect me to change on a dime?”

  “Would you?” Terry’s eyes lit up like the first streaks of dawn.

  I backpedaled carefully. “I don’t see how. Jack and I have built more than a castle in the air. We’ve got blueprints for a whole kingdom.”

  “Think about all we have. Four years of the best friendship ever. At least for me.”

  “Yeah, friendship, not—”

  “Four years of working together. Of crazy adventures. Laughing and crying over the same things. Reading each other’s minds. We’re a great pair. We’re meant to be together.”

  “But what you’re suggesting feels, well, weird. It’s too great a change.”

  Was I wrong? I didn’t think so, but the question gnawed on me every waking hour in the days that followed. First, I had to admit that the intellectual exchange I’d hoped to share with a boyfriend had been there with Terry all along. And that friendship had laid a foundation of shared experiences and a let-our-hair-down knowledge of each other. We’d seen each other on both our best and our worst days. In the end, it was his incisive mind, quick wit, and passionate commitment to principles that I couldn’t dismiss.

  The next weekend, after burgers and shakes at McDonald’s, Terry pulled up to drop me at my dorm as usual. The “girlfriend” proposal had hung in the air for more than two weeks, but neither of us had dared go near it. He didn’t get out to open my door, as he always did. Nor did I make a move to leave. The lights from the dorm cast his face in full profile. We sat silent
ly.

  Finally he turned and reached for my hand. “It’s time.” He slid across the bench seat and kissed me—or me, him—our second “first” kiss.

  After all the agonizing contemplation, it turned out to be a small step from best friend to boyfriend.

  Terry

  Saturday, 21 March 1964, Boulder. Hot damn, a letter from the Peace Corps—from Sargent Shriver himself, offering me a position in Venezuela!

  I would live in a shanty in Caracas, fighting poverty, working side by side with the locals to improve health care, sanitation, housing, education . . . everything. Three months of training to begin in June. I’d be in Venezuela by fall, speaking Spanish like a native.

  I had waited so long for this and had thought it a pipe dream, even after the Peace Corps had written in November and said I’d been accepted for something the following summer. It was the first time I’d heard from them since turning them down, and the letter seemed generic—an “advance invitation”—no job description, no specific country, nothing to pin my hopes on. So, that invitation had been real after all.

  I read and reread the four-page flyer Sargent Shriver had enclosed with his letter: “Venezuela: Urban Community Action.” I would actually be a Peace Corps volunteer!

  Then it hit me: I’d leave in June. So would Annie. Me to South America for two years, her to Europe to rendezvous with the West Point stud. God, what now?

  Ann

  April 1964, Boulder. Good news: Two weeks after my compressed trip to Arizona, I had a job to teach English at Glendale Union Senior High School near Phoenix. One less thing to worry about.

  As my April 19 birthday neared, Terry let slip he had gotten me Turnbull’s The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a “must-read.” And he’d made reservations in Denver on Sunday, my birthday, for dinner and Becket, the hot, new Richard Burton–Peter O’Toole movie. He asked me to “dress up a bit.”

  Dress up? Us? “My goodness, is this a date? A real date?”

  “I got a corsage,” he whispered, as if he feared I’d discover he was a romantic after all.