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

by Terry Marshall

  “Fair enough,” I said. “I’ll see if I can find a skirt to wear. Or my prom dress.”

  Late Thursday afternoon, April 16, I trudged into the dorm after a long stint in the library. A symphony of fragrances perfumed the lobby. Julie rushed up: “My God, Ann, what have you done? Promise that German guy the first three days in bed?”

  What now? Julie’s mouth could be as smutty as her weekend trysts. “Maybe later, huh?”

  She marched me to the reception desk. “Look at these flowers. It’s the flashiest let’s-get-it-on offer I’ve ever seen. I’d go down with a guy for a week if he sent me that.” She pointed to a huge bouquet of spring flowers in a sapphire blue crystal vase as stunning as a museum piece. The envelope read, “To my dearest Ann. From Jack.” Wow, they were for me. No, not possible. Not from Germany.

  “So open the card,” Julie said. “How’d he send live flowers from Europe anyway?”

  This had to be a joke, something the girls in the dorm dreamed up. I hit Julie with the stink eye, but she was too busy ripping open the envelope to notice. I snatched it away, pulled out the card, and started to read aloud, but my voice choked off. “I’ve got to go.”

  Closeting myself in my room, I had that card memorized by dinner-time. I’m not a crier, but tears fell.

  My dearest Ann: The vase in which these flowers arrived (unless the florist in Boulder double-crossed me) is the only one of its kind in the world. I had it designed and hand blown especially for you by a master German artisan. I hope you like it—because I also had him create two matching bowls, which should not be separated from the vase. So should I not be successful in my quest, you already know what your wedding present will be.

  —All my love, Jack

  I wrote to him that night. “I’ve never been more pleased, delighted, happy, ecstatic, thrilled. I can’t imagine a luckier girl on earth. The flowers and vase are so beautiful I’m having a hard time keeping my eyes on this letter, even though I’m afire to share my joy with you. How can anyone be so wonderful?”

  I was gushing out my love for Jack when Terry steamrolled into my mind, his eagerness for our “real date” Sunday, the way he glowed. I froze. Two guys, two irresistible guys, so distinct from one another, yet so alike, pulling me inexorably in opposite directions.

  Only the night before, after a coffee date, I had embraced Terry like we were lovers. We kissed, a movie kiss, in the shadow cast by my dorm. Now I was writing this effusive letter to Jack. Worse, I meant every word, as I meant every word with Terry. But in my tight-knit family, the basic building block was one man, one woman, faithful to each other for life. Two men plus one woman? Never!

  I couldn’t resolve my quandary without hurting someone I deeply loved. And without forever losing one of them from my life. I ached for all of us. I had to focus on one person at a time, at least for the moment, and speak from my heart.

  But I couldn’t tell Jack about this development with Terry, not by letter. He would take it as a “Dear John.” I had to tell him face-to-face. Somehow, I finished the letter to Jack. Somehow, I survived the night.

  On my birthday, I wore my red sundress, sleeveless and scoop neck, a favorite from high school. For good measure, I dabbed a bit of perfume behind my ears, and took the dorm elevator to the lobby, instead of my normal clattering down the stairs. When the elevator opened and I waltzed into the foyer like a debutante, Terry stammered, “Wow, you . . . you’re beautiful!” I don’t think he had ever seen me in a dress.

  And that was the first time I had ever seen him in a tie and sport coat. “Hey, mister. You look a lot like a good friend of mine, Terry Marshall. Only much spiffier.”

  “I’m standing in for him. Chances are, he’d blow it, jab you with the pin.” He produced a crimson and white corsage and pinned it to my dress with shaky hands.

  “Can’t fool me, even with the haircut. And what’s this? You trimmed your mustache.” I ran my fingers over his freshly shaved chin, laid both hands on his shoulders, focused squarely on his eyes. They sparkled. “I see a Marshall prowling around in there.”

  In his scrubbed and buffed fire engine red Ford Falcon, he squired me to a three-course dinner at a first-class Italian restaurant in Denver—with waiters and cloth napkins. I told him, “I feel like Cinderella in Never Never Land. What happened to us, Ter . . . at the doughnut shop?”

  “Simple. I discovered the best thing in life. You! You make everything smell better, taste better, look better. You make me want to be the best person I know how to be.”

  This wasn’t the Terry I had grown so comfortable with, a friendship built on one-liners and wisecracks. He’d become downright charming, and as he drove to the theater, I slid over, shoulder to shoulder, my thigh lightly touching his, my hands clasped like a choir girl in my lap.

  We got right to our seats—no wasting our money on greasy popcorn, soda pop, or M&Ms—and Becket quickly drew us in: medieval England, the debauched Henry II (Peter O’Toole) on the throne, and his lord chancellor and best friend Thomas Becket (Richard Burton) constantly at his side.

  Early in the story, Becket and his Gwendolen are in their bedchamber. Gwendolen tells Becket how much she loves him, that she would follow him anywhere. Henry intrudes and flops down beside Gwendolen on the bed and caresses her breasts. Henry reminds Becket that some months earlier, he had “given” Becket a peasant girl with the condition that Becket return the favor upon demand. Becket had agreed.

  I tense up. And yes indeed, Henry claims Gwendolen as payment . . . that very night. Becket steams silently, but he consents.

  In obvious agony, Gwendolen dutifully leaves Becket’s bedchamber for King Henry’s. The scene shifts. Henry, grinning lasciviously, pulls open the opulent draperies of the royal bed. Gwendolen is stretched out in his bed, fully clothed. Blood pools around a dagger plunged into her chest. She has killed herself.

  I grabbed Terry’s arm and bowed my head against his shoulder. He leaned his head against mine. “You okay?”

  “Whew, I saw it coming, but I still can’t bear it,” I whispered.

  He stroked my arm, then held on, finally relaxing his grip as the plot thickened. But I was still with Gwendolen, holding her hand as life drained away. Grandiose music promised conflict ahead, but I couldn’t focus. Terry’s hand, now on my knee, squeezed rhythmically, in time with the music, and inched slowly up my thigh. Halfway up, I captured his hand and held it there for the rest of the movie.

  The next day, before the glow of my date with Terry had worn off, I got a note from Jack, dated April 16. “Last night, I was seized, like never before, with this thought: ‘Ann, I love you!’ I want to write another letter with this single sentence, nothing else, because it is everything.”

  Terry

  Monday, 4 May 1964, Boulder. A Western Union telegram from the Peace Corps: “The Venezuela Urban Community Action Program has been rescheduled for mid-August. We hope this will not disrupt your plans. Clennie H. Murphy, CHM Division of Selection.”

  Great. I had an extra two months to wait. How in the hell was I supposed to concentrate on my studies enough to graduate? And with Annie in Europe, what was I going to do all summer?

  Saturday, 16 May 1964. Heat wave! The radio said it could hit ninety today—a record high for this date.

  Not a day for studies, so I called Annie, and midmorning, we drove up Boulder Canyon beyond the marked trails and hiked the creek. We were Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle expedition, scrambling over boulders and logs, searching for new species of flora and fauna. We picnicked in a hidden glen and struck out on a deer path that led into thick brush. Drenched in sweat, we fought through and rounded a bend back to the creek. A flat-topped, pickup-size boulder rose from a broad, languid pool like a sacrificial altar in a moat-encircled Aztec temple. We worked our way to the pool’s edge, paused like stone pillars, too awestruck to speak. I dropped my pack onto the rocky shore. I looked at Annie. She shrugged, as if to say, Why not?

  In a flash, we stripped and pl
unged in. The water was glacial. We flailed across to the rock, clambered up, and claimed the altar as our own.

  “Next time let’s test the water before we jump in,” I said.

  “No kidding. But now what? We’re totally exposed here.”

  Naked, Annie was a mermaid bathed in glistening droplets, the sun casting a golden sheen to her hair. She caught me leering, slapped her arms across her breasts, hunkered down, and buried her head against her knees, as if to make herself invisible. “Oh!” she cried out.

  I was obviously turned on, but I didn’t even try to cover up. “You are beautiful, you know that?”

  She looked up. “All I know is there’s nowhere to hide. And we don’t have towels . . . or clothes. We’ll have to bake dry.” She stretched out on her stomach, resting her head on her arms.

  I couldn’t move. My mind took photo after photo. I beat back a host of salacious desires. I didn’t know what to say.

  “So join me,” she said. “It’s toasty warm down here.”

  I stretched out beside her. Eventually, we rolled onto our backs and then onto our sides, thrilled at our boldness. We gazed into each other’s eyes. We kissed.

  A twig snapped. I bolted upright. Annie flattened herself into the rock. “What if it’s one of my students?” She was student teaching at Boulder High, but we were over an hour’s drive from town and a hefty hike off the trail.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re alone.” As if I knew.

  We scrutinized the creek bank and woods and saw no one. We listened. Nothing but the babble of the creek. We braved the stream and dried off with our shirts, our eyes alert for intruders, but we were indeed alone. “Lucky us,” she said.

  Lucky me. I’d seen Botticelli’s Birth of Venus come to life.

  Ann

  Late May 1964, Boulder. My life was a treadmill on overdrive. I had been student teaching part time, producing daily lesson plans, and trying to read a novel a week for my lit class. Now, term papers loomed. Finals threatened. Visiting Gretchen and writing letters to her continued to consume hours.

  Amid all that, Terry and I celebrated spring on pure adrenalin, free and uninhibited by our former fare of politics and world events. We replaced coffee breaks with romantic dinners. We went on late night strolls and to a Joan Baez concert in Denver.

  One Friday afternoon we took off early because Terry wanted me to get to know Silverton, where he’d worked the previous summer—a 435mile drive from Boulder over four mountain passes. We stayed up half the night with a new buddy, sipping wine, debating solutions for Cuba, Iran, and the Iron Curtain, and belting out folk songs, and then crashed on his living room floor.

  The next day, we hiked partway up Sultan Mountain, puffing and wheezing before we made it to ten thousand feet. We munched Braunschweiger and cheese on sourdough, napped in the sun, and hiked along El Rio de las Animas Perdidas—River of Lost Souls—stopping to skip stones across the snow-fed water. Glassy-eyed, we dragged ourselves back to Boulder in time for our classes Monday morning.

  In the final heady week before I left for Europe, both of us dared to whisper, “I love you.”

  Meanwhile, Jack’s letters hit a feverish pace, each one another plaintive cry, couched in wit or silliness, but always guilt-inducing and gut-wrenching—leaving me fearful I’d lose him:

  Just took a lethal dose of poison guaranteed to end my misery by Monday afternoon. But to demonstrate human weakness, I’ve kept an antidote to prevent untimely demise in the glorious event a timely epistle arrives from you.

  Still no mail. Efficiency has dropped to zero. Three sergeants had to hold me back from choking the mail clerk. Tomorrow I’ll fool them all.

  Will have a pistol ready with two bullets—one for the mail clerk and the other for me. And I don’t miss. What I do miss is mail from you.

  By the first of June, I was caught between an amazing young officer enticing me to join him in Germany as a prelude to a life together and my closest friend tugging me toward challenging, new horizons.

  What to do? Jack had leaped all my mental hurdles and now proposed a once-in-a-lifetime grand tour of Europe. We owed it to each other to follow the silken threads we’d spun over the previous two years. The exhilarating new feelings for Terry hadn’t changed how I felt about Jack. Rather, it made the long-anticipated trip with Jack more imperative as a foil for deciding what was important to me in my life partner. I told Terry I simply had to carry through with the European trip.

  Besides, the plane tickets were nonrefundable.

  By June 4, I felt like a lion tamer in the ring with two hungry lions, warily circling.

  3

  Castles in the Air

  Ann

  Tuesday, June 9, 1964, en route to Europe. Under the command of “Drill Sergeant Mom,” my three days at home were a postgraduate girl’s boot camp. Speed-shop at one mandated mall after another. Stow away four years of academic life. Pack for Europe. Pay obligatory visits to family friends. Absorb military protocols for dress and behavior. I had no time for my final must-do task: Make a pitch to Gretchen Schumacher to give her baby up for adoption.

  The day before Mom arrived to fetch me in Boulder, Terry and I had made a quick trip to Denver to see Gretchen and her new daughter, born less than twenty-four hours earlier. Gretchen hadn’t decided whether to keep the child, but regardless, she said she would leave Colorado. Maybe go home to Germany. More likely to California, where her brother lived.

  Even in the face of these momentous decisions, she was the same cheerful, beautiful young woman I had first met in January. I devoted full attention to her, resisting the urge to peek at the baby in the nursery. An article I’d read warned that a mother planning to give up a child for adoption shouldn’t hold or even see her baby. It made the separation too difficult. I assumed the same applied to aunts. How draconian.

  As soon as my plane lifted off from Albuquerque, I pulled stationery from my overnight bag. Scrawled a few words. Crossed them out. Started again. Got stuck again. Texas and Missouri and Ohio slipped by below as I tried to find the right words—me of all people, weighing in on the future of my brother’s illegitimate child and her mother, after I told myself throughout the spring not to do it.

  My letter was rooted in the fifties, when girls like Gretchen had to face societal condemnation for premarital pregnancy. Too often, the man sauntered off unscathed. Even when the guy stood by the girl, the burden of humiliation fell on mother and child. I cringed at the hypocrisy!

  Nevertheless, society’s prejudices were real, and my letter encouraged Gretchen to think of her and her daughter’s future. Both of them would be stigmatized for life. What would the daughter say when friends asked about her father? For a woman who kept her baby, the lifelong responsibility of raising a child alone was even more troubling. “I remain convinced that adoption is the best solution—both for you, and for your daughter,” I wrote.

  Just before we landed in New York, I offered a vapid apology for suggesting she do what I might not have been able to do. I sealed my letter and dropped it in a mailbox in the airport.

  Terry

  Tuesday, 9 June 1964, Center, Colorado. Home from school, a college graduate at last. For the first time since I was fourteen, I had a summer free. I had hired on at my hometown newspaper after my freshman year of high school and worked there every day after school, every Saturday, and every summer through graduation. Two weeks out of high school, I moved to Boulder before enrolling at CU and spent the summer working at the University of Colorado Printing Services.

  During college, I’d worked every summer as a reporter, one at the Center Post-Dispatch, two at the Valley Courier in Alamosa, and the summer of 1963 at the Silverton Standard.

  It had taken me five years to graduate. After my dad was killed in the spring of 1961, Annie convinced me to return to CU that fall. I did, but my heart wasn’t in it. My grades fell from As and Bs to mostly Cs. I dropped out for a semester and worked full time as a printer at the Boulder
Daily Camera, a welcome break from school. I was also paying my own way through college. I needed the money.

  This summer I had no stories to write. No deadlines to meet. My Peace Corps training for Venezuela wouldn’t begin until August 10. After five years of college, I was free.

  But at what cost? Annie was spending her summer traipsing around Europe with the dashing lieutenant and wouldn’t get back to the States until a week after I left for the Peace Corps. It would be more than two years before I’d see her again.

  I couldn’t turn down the Peace Crops a second time. They’d blackball me forever.

  But before Annie left for Europe, I told her I loved her. She said she loved me too. We even flirted with the idea of marriage. Now she was off gallivanting with Jack the Stud. If she didn’t come home with an engagement ring, what were the chances she’d be there for me after my two years in Venezuela? Slim to minus ten. But what if I said no to the Peace Corps and she came home engaged to Lieutenant Sigg? I would lose both her and the Peace Corps.

  The what-ifs were stalking me like a pack of wolves.

  I had two months to fill before I left for the Peace Corps, and they would crawl by in slow motion if I spent every day pining for Annie. So I devoted my first day to building a bookcase. The second day, I dismantled an old floor lamp and attached it to my bedstead. I rounded up my two brothers—Greg, fourteen; Randy, twelve—and we raked and burned last fall’s dried weeds and yard trash. After dinner, I took them to Lawrence of Arabia.

  Day three: That night, Annie would be staying in Paris, en route to Germany. I mounted my photos of her in her nightie to my headboard and pretended I was with her in a swanky Parisian hotel room. That thought kept me panting half the night.

  Ann

  Wednesday, June 10, 1964, Munich, Germany. Thud! The wheels connected with the runway while I was digging for breath mints. Surely he wouldn’t try to kiss me, but just in case. I gathered up my overnight bag, finger-combed my hair, and filed into the aisle. How should I greet him? What if I didn’t recognize him? Where would we begin our in-person romance? As we inched toward the door, I realized I was hyperventilating. I took several deep breaths, stepped from the plane onto the stairs, and ordered my knees to stop quaking.