“You don’t have to drop out of school. I’d want you to keep on. I’ll pay your tuition, and when I get back and you graduate, you can work while I go to school. I’ve got it all figured out.” He grinned as he added, “Children can wait.”
Children! Susan’s eyes widened. They’d never talked about children. For all she knew, he wanted a dozen.
“We can elope and keep everything secret until you’re ready to tell.”
She shook her head. “It’s too sudden. We shouldn’t think about getting married until you’re back. You might change your mind or meet somebody else. What’s the hurry?” She thought she should just tell him no. But what if he did find someone else? What if, later on, Joe found somebody else, too, and she really did fall in love with Peter?
He reached across the table and took away Susan’s spoon so that he could hold her hands. “If I get killed, I want something of me to live on, a wife, maybe a kid. All my life, there’s been just me, no family, nothing. I want more than that, even if I don’t come back.”
They sat at the table for a long time, looking at each other. The waitress came over and asked if they wanted something to eat—chili, hamburg steak, ham and eggs, pie. She had apple and cherry. And there were cinnamon rolls, baked that morning. But they said no. Susan was glad for the interruption, because she’d grown uncomfortable. It was as if they’d used up the air in the café. So she put her arms into the sleeves of her coat, which had been resting on her shoulders, and the two of them stood up. As they reached the door, Peter stopped and pulled Susan to him, holding her tight. “You’ll think about it anyway?”
Susan nodded, and she would.
“There’s not anybody else, is there?” Peter knew she dated others. He’d said he was too old to go steady, so he’d never asked her to date him exclusively.
“No. There’s nobody,” she told him. But there was, of course. And that was the reason she wouldn’t marry Peter Fanshaw.
* * *
Susan didn’t go home to Chicago that summer of 1951. Instead, at the end of the school year, she met her mother at the airport, and the two drove to Georgetown earlier than usual. Ruth Joy had opened the house and put a vase of daffodils on the parlor table, since it was too soon for the lilacs to bloom. The women were still unloading the car when Joe stopped by. Susan hadn’t seen him coming, and she caught her breath when he was suddenly beside her. She clasped and unclasped her hands, then wiped them on her skirt because they felt wet. They hadn’t been together since he’d rushed out of the house at New Year’s, and she couldn’t think what to say, so she stood there awkwardly, her hands wrapped in her skirt, wishing that first moment was past them. She’d thought about their meeting that summer, of course. She’d say something sophisticated, maybe condescending, so Joe would know that what had happened on New Year’s was of no importance to her. But she hadn’t come up with the words yet, and all she could mumble was, “Hi.” She sounded tentative.
Joe was at ease, as if he’d forgotten all about New Year’s. His smile was warm when he looked at her, leaned toward her and said he was glad to see her, that it would be a good summer now that she was there. “You want to hike up Guanella Pass in the morning?” he asked.
Just like that, Susan thought. New Year’s had meant nothing to him. He wasn’t even embarrassed. And then she thought, Of course, he would say something the next day when he wasn’t standing in front of the Bride’s House where her mother could hear. He would wait until they were alone, explain himself, maybe apologize, ask her to forgive him. Or maybe tell her he’d found someone else. The thoughts collided in her head.
“I’ll get that luggage, Mrs. Curry,” Joe said, although he was looking at Susan, waiting for her to answer.
The girl still didn’t speak, but Pearl thanked him and said she and Susan appreciated it. He reached for the suitcase that Susan had taken out of the trunk of the car, and their hands touched, but Joe didn’t seem to notice it. She had hoped this might be the best summer ever, but maybe it would be the worst.
“What about Guanella?” he asked, as he picked up the last suitcase.
“Sure.”
* * *
Joe and Susan walked quietly up Guanella Pass the next day. The first of the wildflowers lined the road, and the sun was in her face, and Susan felt content. Joe helped her climb over a rock embankment, his hand warm against her back, and when she slipped on damp leaf mold, he caught her, steadying her with his arms, which were tan and a little freckled. They came to a grove of aspen trees, their leaves a pale green, and sat down on a granite outcrop.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said.
Susan pushed her elbows into her sides and closed her eyes, thinking, At last. He was going to explain himself. Maybe more.
“I’ve been waiting for you to get here.”
She searched his eyes, her anger gone now.
“I’ve decided I’m going into politics,” Joe said.
Susan stiffened. Politics! He’d brought her up there to talk about politics! Peter proposed when she didn’t want him to, while Joe talked politics instead of asking her to marry him. The irony of it actually made her laugh.
Joe thought she was laughing at him. “I know. I know. You think I’m crazy.”
“No I don’t,” Susan said, thrusting aside her disappointment. “You’d be terrific at it.”
“Really? Do you think so?”
“Of course. You care about people. And the mountains.” Susan’s voice was a little high, and she tried to control it so that Joe wouldn’t get the idea that she had expected a different conversation. “You’d be very effective. My father thinks so, too.”
“He does?” Susan had her back to the sun, and Joe shaded his eyes so that he could see her face.
“He’d rather you’d go to work for the molybdenum company, of course, but he did say once that there was something about you that reminded him of Governor Stevenson when he was younger.”
“Adlai Stevenson?”
Susan nodded.
“You know Adlai Stevenson?”
“Sure, we live in Chicago.”
“He’s going to be the next President.”
Susan picked up a rock and examined it, then threw it into the trees. She shook her head to think how far this conversation was from what she’d wanted. “You believe he can beat Ike?”
“I hope so. I want to be just like him.” Joe grinned and added, “But with hair.” He selected his own rock and sent it skimming down the mountainside.
“Would you stay here?”
Joe leaned back, his hands behind his head, his T-shirt tight over his chest. “Yeah. That’s the real reason I went to school in California. I think it’s important to have experience outside Colorado. I’m too narrow. I ought to learn somebody else’s point of view. But I’m coming back here.”
“It sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.” Susan smashed a mosquito that had bitten her arm, then wet the tip of her finger and placed it on the bite.
Joe nodded. He picked a blue columbine and threaded the stem through the top buttonhole of Susan’s shirt.
“How does Peggy feel about it?” Susan looked off across the mountain range, at once sorry she had asked that. She really didn’t want to know how Peggy felt.
“Peggy?” Joe frowned. “We don’t talk much about politics.”
“Oh,” was all Susan could say, although she wanted to ask if he was dating Peggy. She’d worried all spring that Peggy was the reason Joe had left her so abruptly at New Year’s.
They were quiet as they descended the mountain, and when they reached the Bride’s House, Joe said, “I promised I’d take a basket of stuff to a family down by where Red Elephant used to be. The man was hurt in a logging accident, and of course, he doesn’t have any insurance. They’ve got kids. Do you have any old clothes you could donate?”
“Sure.” Susan led him inside the house, where she explained to her mother that Joe was collecting things for a needy fami
ly. Pearl offered canned goods, some jars of rhubarb jam she’d made the summer before, while Susan went upstairs to sort through her clothes. She returned with half a dozen garments that she hadn’t worn since the previous year, and handed them to Joe.
“Do you want to go along?” he asked.
Susan didn’t want to play Lady Bountiful, but she wouldn’t turn down a chance to be with Joe. “I can drive,” she said, but Joe shook his head, telling her they’d take the old pickup that he’d bought the summer before from Bert Joy. “I’ve named her Asthma,” he said.
The two of them turned off the highway onto a dirt road that led up the mountain to a log cabin. The roof was covered with tarpaper, held in place by battens, but the roofing had come loose in places and was flapping in the wind. An outhouse stood in back of the cabin. Joe knocked at the door and told the woman who opened it, “We’ve brought a few things from the church. We hope you can make room for them.”
The woman invited them inside. Susan did not want to go, but she followed Joe into a room that smelled stale, although it was neat, the linoleum floor mopped. Two children sat on a daybed, and Susan spotted a girl she knew from town half hidden in a doorway to the second of the cabin’s two rooms. Susan thought she must be mortified at being given a charity basket by someone she knew.
The two stayed for only a few moments, Joe talking easily, inquiring about the man’s health, when he’d return to the job, asking if there was work around the place that needed doing. Susan was silent, admiring Joe’s easy way with the woman. He fit into that ugly shack as effortlessly as if it had been the Bride’s House. But Susan was awkward. She didn’t know whether to say hello to the girl or pretend she didn’t recognize her. She couldn’t help frowning at the mean cabin, at the sagging shelf over the cookstove that held only half a dozen cans of food, at the water bucket perched on the sink, the slop jar just visible in the next room. She shivered at the idea of living in such a foul place, without running water.
Back in the truck, Susan said, “That was awful. I’ve seen that girl in Georgetown. She must be humiliated, accepting charity from someone she knows. Why doesn’t she get a job?”
“She has one. She tends kids for twenty-five cents an hour.”
“If that’s all she makes, couldn’t she take care of the kids at home and let her mother work?”
“Doing what?”
Susan shrugged with embarrassment. She had no idea.
“The mines and the construction companies don’t hire women. The kind of work she could do, I doubt she could make any more than her daughter.”
“There has to be a better way.”
They had reached the highway, and Joe stopped the truck and turned to Susan. “There is. The government has to take care of people like that. It’s why I want to run for office. You understand, don’t you?”
Susan nodded. She thought of the poor family she had just left and did understand. “I do,” she told him.
“I know,” he said. “Peggy wouldn’t.”
* * *
Susan spent time alone with Peggy, too, that summer. They hiked in the mountains, exploring the deserted mine shacks, looking for miners’ candlesticks, but most of the structures had been picked over by generations of children before them or by tourists, who were exploring the ghost towns in their army-surplus Jeeps. They played badminton and croquet in the side yard of the Bride’s House, shielded by the lilac hedge. Or the girls sunbathed, drinking Coca-Cola from the small green bottles that Pearl ordered by the case from the grocery.
“How long are you staying this time?” Peggy asked, as the two lay on beach towels on the lawn of the Bride’s House. Peggy raised herself up on one elbow to look at Susan, who was stretched out on her stomach.
“Probably till sometime in September, since Father has to go to Europe to look at some mines. Then he’ll drive out. He just bought a Chrysler Town and Country.” Susan was sorry she’d let that slip out, because Peggy’s father didn’t even own a car. Joe wouldn’t have made such a gaffe, she thought.
“Can you drive it?”
“I guess.”
“Will you let me drive it?”
“You’ll have to ask my father.”
“Yeah, right.” Miffed, Peggy reached for Susan’s suntan oil and knocked it over, letting some of the liquid run into the grass before she righted the bottle. “Joe’s still got Bert Joy’s old truck. He calls it Asthma. Did you know that?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“Well, aren’t you Miss Know-it-all?” Peggy smiled to take the sting out of her words. “I bet you haven’t ridden in it.”
Susan knew better than to answer.
“He took me down to Idaho Springs in it right after he got back from California. We got swacked. He couldn’t even … well, you know.”
“He couldn’t what?”
“Don’t be naïve.”
“What?”
Peggy studied Susan a moment. “You really don’t know, do you?” She laughed. “You’ve probably never even done it.”
Susan stared at her friend as she realized exactly what Peggy meant. Joe and Peggy, she thought. That was why Joe had left her that night. He could go all the way with Peggy but not with her. He’d softened her up with talk of marriage, but then he’d decided she wasn’t worth it. Peggy was, however. Devastated, Susan put her head on her arms.
“Am I right?” Peggy asked. “Oh, come on. You can tell me.”
But Susan didn’t want to talk about it, and she wouldn’t answer.
* * *
The week after Pearl and Susan returned to Georgetown, they invited Joe to dinner at the Bride’s House. Susan hadn’t seen him since Peggy’s confession, and she was uneasy. But he was the same as always, friendly, good-natured. Of course, he wasn’t aware that Susan knew what had gone on between the two of them.
“Susan says you know Governor Stevenson,” Joe told Pearl, who nodded. “I know he’ll be elected.”
Pearl wasn’t so sure. “Don’t get your hopes up. You’re too young to remember how people looked up to General Eisenhower during the war. Now, they’re hoping he’ll fight the communists the way he did the Nazis.”
“Your mom’s really up on things,” Joe told Susan later. “You wouldn’t know it from what she writes, but she’s shrewd about politics.”
“You read my mother?”
“Sure, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she replied, although she didn’t know anyone else her age who did.
Pearl had gone into the study and turned on the radio, and Joe and Susan went outside to sit on the porch in the dark. Suddenly, he took her hand and said, “That’s what I really want to do.”
Susan rubbed her thumb over the back of Joe’s hand, feeling its warmth. “Write inspirational columns for a newspaper?”
“No, be the President of the United States. I don’t just want to be in politics. I want to go all the way to the top.”
Susan was quiet, looking at the lilac bushes because she knew Joe was staring at her, waiting for her to respond. It had been an odd thing for him to admit, for heaven’s sake. Of course, most boys wanted to be President at some time in their lives, but they outgrew it. Joe was serious. He could be President, she thought. He was smart and compassionate and good to people. She tried to think of something meaningful to reply, something that would show she believed in him.
“What are you thinking?” Joe asked after a time.
Susan shook her head in the darkness. Then because Joe couldn’t see her, she said, “I think you could do it, Joe. I think you can do anything.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Of course I mean it,” she replied, and she caught a glimmer of light in his eyes when he looked up at her.
“Thank you.” Joe let go of her hand and stood up, leaning against the porch pillar and looking out at Sunrise Peak in the moonlight. “I told Peggy once that I wanted to run for the U.S. Senate—I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I actually wanted
to go higher than that—and she said it would be great to be rich and famous. But that’s not it. I want to do things, like, you know, help those people down by Red Elephant. There’s such a gulf between rich and poor. Around here, there were always the wealthy mine owners and the poor miners.”
“You mean mine owners like my father and grandfather?”
He thought a moment. “Yeah, I guess so.” Then Joe asked, a little defensively, “Do you think it’s fair that they had so much money when their workers made so little?”
She’d never thought about it, but because Joe asked, she pondered the question. “If you talk like that, people will call you a communist.”
“People like Joe McCarthy, I suppose. You know, there are some good things about communism.” Susan didn’t reply, and Joe said, “I’ve offended you.”
“No, I’m still thinking about what you said.”
“That’s the nicest compliment I’ve ever had.” Joe sat down again and took Susan’s hand, interlacing his fingers through hers. Then he leaned over and kissed her. It was a light kiss, more a kiss of friendship than of passion, not like the kisses at New Year’s, and she longed for more.
He started to kiss her again, but they heard Pearl switch off the radio in the middle of the Dragnet theme, and they pulled apart, Joe whispering, “Damn!”
In a moment Pearl joined them on the porch. Joe stood so that she could take his place, but Pearl seated herself on the porch steps, and Joe leaned on the post beside her. Pearl didn’t seem to feel the awkward silence caused by her interruption, because she looked up at the stars and said, “You ought to go into politics yourself, Joe. The country could use smart boys like you.”
“Gee, that’s nice of you, Mrs. Curry.”
“Joe and I were talking about his doing just that,” Susan said. “I think he’d be wonderful, don’t you, Mother?”
“It’s only a thought.” Joe sounded embarrassed. So Susan said no more, and in a minute, Joe took his leave, and Susan watched him walk down Taos Street, watched the way he held his head up and his shoulders moved under the tight shirt.
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