The fraternity down the street from our sorority house had a “welcome back to school” party the night of my arrival. I went with some girlfriends who were anxious to meet some of the Rutgers boys, even if most of them were “4-Fers,” but my heart wasn’t in it. I was standing in a doorway, missing Ross and already writing a letter to him in my mind, when a young man approached me. He walked with a pronounced limp, and something about his eyes reminded me of Ross. That was the only reason I could think of for the instant, feverish attraction I felt toward him. He introduced himself to me as Charles Bauer.
“A lovely girl like you shouldn’t be standing here alone,” he said. “Would you like to dance?”
“Sure,” I said. I moved easily into his arms. He was an awkward dancer because of his limp, but he didn’t seem at all selfconscious about it and I didn’t care a bit, because he felt like Ross in my arms. He was the same height, his shoulders the same slender width, and he used Canoe aftershave, the same as Ross. I inhaled as I rested my head in the crook of his neck, near tears with missing my lover.
After a few minutes, he leaned his head away from mine. “Is something the matter?” he asked.
I started to cry. He let go of me, took my hand and led me outside. We sat on the front steps, the sounds of the party behind us.
“What does a beautiful girl like you have to cry about?”he asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said, then lied because it was the only way I could possibly explain my sorrow. “I recently broke up with someone.”
“And you still care about him,” Charles said.
I nodded.
“That happened to me, too,” he said, pulling his handkerchief from his pocket and handing it to me.
“Recently?” I asked, pressing the handkerchief to the corners of my eyes. He was very attractive. A gas lamp burned in the front of the yard and I could see that he did not really resemble Ross one bit. He was brown-haired, for pity’s sake, while Ross was fair. His eyes were also brown, while Ross’s were a smoky gray. But he was handsome, all the same, and sitting there, I still felt drawn to him.
“We broke up a while ago,” he said. “When I was stationed in Hawaii.”
“Hawaii?” I asked. I thought of his limp. “Were you at Pearl Harbor when…?”
He nodded. “That’s where I got this bum leg,” he said, patting his right thigh with his palm.
“That must have been terrible,” I said.
“Much worse for a lot of other people than it was for me,” he said. “I wanted to go back, but they wouldn’t let me. I hate feeling useless here at home.”
“But you’re in school now,” I said, admiring his patriotism. “That’s not being useless. What are you studying?”
“Medicine,” he said.
“Oh!” I was impressed. “You want to be a doctor.”
“I always have,” he said. “I thought it would have to wait until the war ends—if it ever does—but I guess that was the one bonus of getting injured. Now, my dream’s within reach. And how about you?”
“This is my senior year,” I said. “I’m going to teach.”
“That’s wonderful!” he said, as if I’d said that I, too, planned to become a doctor. “Did you always want to be a teacher?”
“Well—” I smiled “—I’ve actually always wanted to have a family, but I think it’s important for a woman to be able to support herself.”
He nodded. “You’re a very smart girl,” he said. “I want to raise a family myself, but I also want to be sure I can provide well for them.”
What a remarkable man, I thought. I liked that he didn’t denigrate my choice of career. Ross had made light of my studies as though they were inconsequential.
I smoothed my skirt over my legs and wrapped my arms around my knees. “What kind of doctor do you want to be?” I asked.
“A pediatrician,” he said. “I was sick when I was a boy and that’s when I decided.”
“So,” I said, “we’ve both chosen careers that will let us help children.”
He looked suddenly excited and turned toward me, reaching for my hand. “Maria,” he said, “you need to tell me something right now.”
“What?”
“Please tell me you’re Catholic.”
I laughed. “I am, but why?”
“Because in the thirty minutes since I first spotted you across the living room, I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said. “And you being Catholic will make it so much easier. Is there a chance you might like to go to mass with me tomorrow? Then maybe we could have lunch together afterward.”
I liked his impulsiveness. It excited me, and I had to admit that I’d become a girl in need of excitement. A strange little tugof-war was going on inside me, though. Only two days before, I’d been secretly making love to a man. Now I was being invited to mass as a date. My family was Catholic, that was no lie, but we were holiday Catholics, attending church on Christmas and Easter and only occasionally in between. I felt as though God was intervening in my life at that very moment. He was giving me an opportunity to turn myself around and put an end to my deceitful and immoral behavior. I felt the sorrow over leaving Ross turn into a sort of relief and gratitude. This lovely man, Charles Bauer, who had fought for his country and longed to be a physician and raise a family, might be able to save me from myself.
“I would like that so much,” I said.
“Oh, wonderful!” he said, with an enthusiasm I would come to appreciate in him. “Was your boyfriend Catholic?” he asked.
“Yes, but not devout,” I said. An understatement if ever there was one.
“It was doomed from the start, then,” he said. “The gal I broke up with last year was a Methodist. My parents wouldn’t even talk to her. I should have known it wouldn’t work. The values are just too different, you know?”
I nodded, although I didn’t really know at all.
“She was…fast, if you know what I mean,” he said. “I found out she’d had…you know, relations, with the boy she’d dated before me, and I felt sick thinking about it.”
I knew right then that I would be starting this relationship off with a lie. I would never let Charles know the truth about Ross and me. Only a few of my girlfriends knew about Ross, so it would be a relatively easy secret to keep. I thought, though, that I’d better bring my ancestry out in the open before things went any further.
“I’m half Italian,” I said.
“I thought so.” He touched my hair. “You have that rich Italian hair and those big, dark eyes.” It didn’t seem to bother him at all.
Charles and I attended mass the following day and I saw my religion in a new light. I felt the peace that came over him inside the church. The smell of incense, the ritualistic standing and kneeling, the haunting Latin chanting, and the taste of the host on my tongue struck me like never before. I thanked God for giving me what felt like a second chance.
When we left the church and were back in my car, Charles turned to me. “Are you all right?” he asked.
I nodded, wondering how he had known the impact that service had had on me. “I’ve never been to mass with a…” I started to say boyfriend, but it seemed too soon to give him that label. “With a date before,” I finished.
“You never went with your last boyfriend?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I understand,” he said with a smile. “That’s why it would never have worked out with my old girlfriend and with your old boyfriend. They would have been twiddling their thumbs in there, anxious to get it over with.”
We fell in love quickly. I think I was in love with him that first night outside the fraternity house. My relationship with Ross was becoming clearer to me: It had been based on the physical and the illicit and little more. This was so different. Charles met my parents, who instantly adored him and even attended mass with us the first weekend he visited. Charles and my father were New York Yankee fans, and they occasionally attended games together at Yankee Stadium, whi
le my mother would marvel that I’d found such a wonderful man.
“I’ve been worried about you,” she said, her Italian accent flavoring the words.
“Why?” I’d asked her, surprised.
“You always flit from one boy to the other,” she said. “Never settled on any one of them. It worried me.”
“You didn’t have to worry,” I said to her with a smile. “I was waiting for the right one to come along.”
My relationship with Charles was entirely chaste. His kisses were passionate, but if his hands wandered toward my breasts or my thighs, he would pull back in apology. I craved more, and I found the craving exciting. I felt guilty for the lie of omission I was engaged in. He thought I was a virgin, and there was no reason to tell him anything different. The lie was so thorough that even I began to think of myself as virginal.
On Easter Sunday, 1943, Charles asked me to marry him. Of course, I accepted, but as summer grew near and my parents spoke of having him stay with us at the shore, I became increasingly nervous. The rule between Ross and I that we would be lovers during the summers was unwritten and even unspoken, but it existed nevertheless, and I feared his reaction when I showed up with Charles. I hoped it would be clear to him that I needed to put an end to our illicit relationship, and I prayed he did nothing that might arouse Charles’s suspicions. I was in for a surprise.
Charles and I followed my parents’ car as we drove down the shore, and when we pulled into the driveway of the bungalow, I could see that two cars were already present in front of the Chapmans’ house. My heart pounded as we unloaded the car and walked into our musty-smelling house. When I opened the French doors leading to the porch with its panoramic view of the canal, Charles gasped.
“It’s wonderful!” he said, walking across the porch and unlatching the screen door to step outside.
I could see people in the Chapmans’ yard, although I could not tell who they were, and I felt unprepared to walk into the yard with Charles if Ross was there. I’d wanted a chance to talk to Ross alone first. But with Charles already walking outside, I had little choice but to follow him.
“When will your father get the boat?” Charles asked, motioning at the dock as we walked toward the canal. The wooden bulkheads were in place by then, but it would be years before there would be a chain-link fence to mar our view.
“He’ll pick it up tomorrow, probably,” I said, my eyes on the Chapmans’ yard. Two figures stood in the far corner: Ross and a woman. I should have been pleased that he, too, would be preoccupied with a guest, but instead, a breath-stealing jealousy sprang up in my chest.
“Looks like you share your backyard.” Charles nodded toward the twosome.
Ross had his arm around the woman, but as he turned and saw us, his arm fell quickly from her shoulders. He was just as uncomfortable as I was, I thought.
“Hello, Maria!” he called. He put his hand on the woman’s elbow to turn her toward us. In his other hand, he held a cigar.
“Hi, Ross,” I said.
He said something I couldn’t hear to the woman, and they began walking in our direction. I felt Charles’s hand on my back, lightly pushing me forward until the four of us met in the middle of the yard.
Ross looked wonderful, a little trimmer than the year before. I had trouble meeting his eyes. The delicious, woody scent of his cigar surrounded us.
“This is Joan Rockefeller,” he said. “Joan, this is my neighbor, Maria Foley. And this is…?” He raised his eyebrows in Charles’s direction.
“Charles Bauer,” I volunteered. “This is Ross Chapman.”
The two men shook hands while I studied Joan. She was a blond stunner. Huge blue eyes, carefully coiffed hair, a dress that hugged a very slender frame.
“Any relation to the New York Rockefellers?” Charles asked the question I was thinking. How much was this girl worth?
“I’m about a fifty-first cousin, thrice removed.” Joan laughed. Then she turned to me. “Ross said that your family and his have been summertime neighbors since you were small.” Her highpitched voice was almost childlike.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Maria taught me how to dance,” Ross said.
“Oh, you did a wonderful job.” Joan nodded at me with a smile.
“And Ross taught me how to play tennis,” I said.
I thought of all the other things Ross had taught me that had nothing to do with tennis and felt myself blushing furiously. I couldn’t get a handle on my feelings. I loved Charles, of that I was certain, so it was ridiculous that my chest ached at seeing Ross with another woman. She would be the sort of girl his parents wanted for him. A Rockefeller, no less. I wondered if he felt jealous at seeing me with Charles. He didn’t seem to. He was smiling easily, touching Joan’s arm in an intimate way and I knew that she was the one receiving his fiery lovemaking these days.
We put Charles in the attic, which now contained two double beds and four twins, ready for the cousins and other company who would arrive during the summer. There was no privacy up there, which was not a problem as long as Charles was the only inhabitant, but the week before my cousins were due to arrive, he made a suggestion.
“What if I hung a system of wires up there,” he said over breakfast one morning. He pulled a fountain pen from his shirt pocket and drew on the back of a paper napkin. “Then we could hang curtains from the wires, so that there would be four cubbyholes around the beds, leaving this middle area open.”
“That’s a fine idea,” my father said.
“I can make the curtains,” my mother suggested, and I offered to help.
“And one other thing,” Charles said. He held his hands up in apology. “I hope I’m not overstepping my boundaries here, but what about adding a toilet and sink up there? I’d be happy to do it. My father taught me carpentry and plumbing.”
“Where would it go?” My mother stared at the napkin and its crisscrossed lines.
“I could build it right above the downstairs bathroom to make it easy to do the plumbing. It would be very small, of course, but then your guests wouldn’t have to climb down those stairs in the middle of the night. And we wouldn’t have to put a door on it. Just hang another curtain for privacy.”
I could tell my father was excited by the idea. “Let’s go to the hardware store as soon as we finish breakfast,” he said to Charles. “And I’ll pay you for your time and expertise.”
“Oh, my gosh, no,” Charles said quickly. “You’re giving me room and board all summer. It’s the least I can do to repay you.”
Both my parents were in love with Charles, as was I. He enjoyed fishing with my father in our motorboat, and in addition to building the upstairs bathroom, he reshingled parts of our roof and painted the trim on the house. He never saw my mother’s accent as something to be ashamed of, but rather as part of her heritage to be celebrated, in spite of the fact that he’d nearly lost his life in a war in which the Italians were our enemy. On her birthday in August, he shooed her out of the kitchen while we made her an authentic five-course Northern Italian meal. It was all his doing; I never would have thought of it. Mother cried when Charles presented the cannoli he’d made, completely by hand and with our carefully rationed sugar, for dessert.
We did not socialize with the Chapmans. Aside from Ross’s and my “friendship,” my family rarely had. We were the sort of neighbors who were there for each other if your car got stuck in the sand, but it was clear we were from different social classes, different worlds. Although our backyards were connected, they were divided by an invisible line drawn in the sand.
Ross and I did not have one single private conversation that entire summer. I was curious to know how he’d met Joan, but she was always standing or sitting right next to him and I never had the opportunity to ask. That was probably just as well.
A few weeks after our arrival at the bungalow, Charles and I were sitting in the backyard enjoying the evening when he suggested we talk to Ross and Joan about double dating
with them sometime.
“They’re around our age,” he said, although Charles was technically six years Ross’s senior. “They seem nice. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a couple right next door to do things with?” I hesitated as I tried to think of a response, the idea of getting together socially with Ross and his new love horrifying to me. I settled on telling him a partial truth.
“Charles,” I said, “when Ross and I were in high school, he asked me out, but when his parents found out, they told him he was not allowed to date me.”
“Why not?” Charles asked.
“Because I’m Italian.”
Charles looked stunned. “That’s certainly small-minded,” he said, making me love him all the more.
“He and his family have never been friendly with us,” I said. “So, I really would rather not—”
“Of course,” Charles said. He looked over his shoulder toward the Chapmans’ house. “Was Ross in the military?” he asked.
“He was 4-F,” I said. “A minor heart problem.”
“Ah,” Charles said, and I knew I had just planted an immutable wall between my boyfriend, recipient of the Purple Heart, and Ross Chapman. A man who didn’t serve his country, yet nevertheless appeared to be hale and hearty, was a coward in Charles’s eyes.
“If he would just stop smoking,” Charles said, “that heart problem would probably go away.”
I think Charles was a bit disappointed to discover that my parents were not regular churchgoers, but he said nothing about it. I went to mass with him at St. Peter’s every Sunday and we’d stop at Mueller’s Bakery afterward and bring home rolls and crumb cake for a late-morning breakfast with my parents. I enjoyed going to church with him, never ceasing to be touched by the way such a strong and intelligent man was able to find peace and comfort there. He also prayed the rosary every night before falling asleep. I prayed, too, although not the rosary. I prayed for my small, jealous feelings about Joan Rockefeller to disappear. I prayed to be able to look at the blueberry lot without longing. I prayed to forget the ways Ross had touched me—taken me, really, for he could be rough in a way I’d enjoyed. He’d never hurt me, but he could ride me like I was a bucking bronco. A heart problem, my eye.
The Bay at Midnight Page 24