The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  There was no peril in the time I spent with Farrell. Our days were filled with laughter. Our nights were filled with a strange hilarity and goodness. He looked like me. He had blond hair and a big, soft, generous body like my body would have been if I had ever let it go. His hands were wide and freckled and his intelligence was full of humor. These are the people I love in the world. People who know the world is funny.

  He came into my life at a Demolay dance in the basement of the Seymour, Indiana, library. The Demolays were a club of young men whose mothers aspired to have them grow up to be gentlemen. Four times a year these same mothers cleaned up the library basement and made lemonade and cookies and brought in flowers and invited the young women of the town to come and dance with their sons. The record player was playing “Deep Purple.” “When the deep purple falls. Over sleepy garden walls. And the stars begin to flicker in the sky.”

  That’s when I think of you, sweet Farrell, tall and smiling, not afraid to glide across the floor and dance with me. Not afraid to put your hand around my soft waist and pull my pretty soft bosoms into your blue suit and two-step me around as though you were Fred Astaire, or at least a grown man. Which you were not. You were eighteen years old and I was sixteen years old and you had heard about me, way over in Taylorsville, Indiana, where you lived.

  “I heard you were writing for the newspaper. I heard you got a day off from school to help put out the paper every week.”

  “I do.”

  “How did you arrange that?”

  “I don’t know. They asked me to write them a column and I did. I wrote about my niece being born and everybody liked it so they let me have a job. I have a Social Security number. So you heard about that?”

  “My mom showed it to me. She thought it would inspire me to do the same.” He pulled me closer to him. It was hot in the basement of the Seymour Public Library. We were sweating and our bodies were pressed against each other in heat and terror. This was an age of innocence. Everyone was innocent. No modern sixteen-year-old can imagine the world in which we lived. Sex was never discussed, never written about, it was taboo. If you did it, you got pregnant and your life was ruined. That was that. The entire message we received, and we believed it. Only girls who had bad mothers who did not believe the message when they delivered it had sex despite the taboo and suffered the consequences. I was lucky, as luck went back then. My mother believed it when she said it.

  “Will you go to a movie with me?” Farrell asked. “Or I could take you to this place on the river, Carlo’s, everyone goes there to drink beer. It’s great. It’s real rustic, built out over the water. Will you go?”

  “When do you want to go?”

  “Saturday night. I’ll come get you at seven.”

  “You don’t know where I live.”

  “Yes, I do. You live in the old Trane mansion on Elm Street. I heard your dad had it restored.”

  “He always buys old houses and rebuilds them. It drives my mother crazy. She’s always in a building project.”

  “Will they let you go?”

  “They don’t tell me what to do. I do anything I want to do.” I laughed my most sophisticated laugh. It was so hot on the dance floor. He was so intense, he was a darling boy, a tall, blond dancing boy who looked like me.

  My father immediately began to make fun of Farrell. “How’s your old country boy?” he would ask me. “Your big old country boy.” It was himself he was describing. Of all the boys I ever dated, the one who resembled my father most was Farrell. My father’s hair had faded and his freckles had faded too and he wore glasses now and worried all the time about making money. So he had lost the thing that would have allowed me to see the resemblance. In just this way he had come into my mother’s richer world and whisked her off to be his companion on his lifetime search for riches. Farrell was not the last one of my boyfriends whom he would ridicule and belittle, but there was a special gaiety to his taunts about Farrell. How clear it all seems to me now. Farrell looked like him and Farrell looked like me and it was ourselves we were rejecting. You think that’s simplistic? You think we have learned that lesson, that we don’t need to know that, here, in the last years of the millennium, in the United States of America, in our rich and fertile land, with our constant food supply and time on our hands?

  Farrell came to get me on that Saturday night and put me in his mother’s Oldsmobile and we drove out of Seymour, Indiana, and took the highway to a country road. We bumped over the ruts and got to Carlo’s just as it was getting dark. I think we talked on our way, but I’m not sure. I think we told each other the stories of our lives and all our plans and who we were and what we knew. It was still light while we were driving. When we got to Carlo’s it was almost dark and we walked up the wooden steps to the dance floor and bought a beer and sat at a table trying to look like people on a date and then we put some money in a jukebox and began to dance. “Give me a kiss to build a dream on, and my imagination will thrive upon that kiss.” This was the man my father should have wept on his knees to dream of finding for me. This was a young man who would never be mean, never fail at anything, never be cruel, never stop knowing life was funny. This was a man who knew how to love. A man from a safe, loving, secure nest who wanted only to love a woman and make a nest for her and love and protect her until the day he died. I could have had that. That was offered to me that summer, in Seymour, Indiana, in 1953, by a boy who looked like me.

  I must have fed twenty quarters into that jukebox. That was a lot of money back then. Some of the quarters were Farrell’s. Some of them were mine. We played love songs and slow-danced to them and the river ran beneath the dance floor and the tables were damp and the foliage on the trees above the place was as thick as a jungle. The air was so clean back then. No one can imagine how clean and sweet the world used to seem to be. This is not an exaggeration or some sort of nostalgia. This is the truth of what you missed if you are the children and grandchildren of that time. Perhaps somewhere in the genes is the memory of that time of innocence. Perhaps you can smell its freshness in your dreams.

  Like our aquatic memories when we are in water. Farrell and I went swimming in the river later that evening. We swam in our underpants without looking at each other. I don’t believe we let our bodies touch in the soft, brown water of the river. I don’t think we did that on that night. But we did it later. At Calhoun Lake, on the Fourth of July. That night I allowed him to bring his body so close to mine that the next day I decided I was pregnant. He did not penetrate me. I don’t think I took off my underpants. But the next day I decided I was pregnant and he was so innocent, because I believed it, he believed it too.

  For three days and nights we believed it and talked about it. “I was supposed to start menstruating and I didn’t start.” That’s what we told his younger sister when we went to see her to tell her our terrible and thrilling secret. “It’s been four days,” I added. “I’m sure I’m pregnant.”

  “You’ll have to get married.” She was thrilled and excited too. It was the most exciting thing that had happened all summer. She was my age and I had not met her until we took our secret to her. “I’ll go with you. We’ll run away and find a justice of the peace.”

  “Yes,” Farrell said. A man of eighteen, a man who accepted his responsibilities without question. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “I can’t go tomorrow,” I said. “My mother’s taking me to Evansville with Sue Smythe to buy some clothes. I have to go. She’ll be suspicious. You get us a marriage license while I’m gone. Where do you get them?”

  “I’ll ask my uncle. He’s a lawyer. He won’t tell. He’ll help us, won’t he, Sally? Don’t you think he’ll help me get a license?”

  “I don’t know,” Sally said. “That’s dangerous. Telling Uncle Bill. He might think he has to tell our mother.”

  “He’s a lawyer. He’s sworn to secrecy.”

  “I don’t know.”

  We were on the rug in their den in their house in Taylorsv
ille. It was a lovely house, old and painted white and full of things that had been there for fifty years. It was the sort of house where my grandmothers lived, a house where people had been for a long time. It was not filled with carpenters and new sofas and newly bought antiques like the houses my mother kept creating. It was not a house to impress the neighbors. It was where they lived.

  The old green rug on which we were lying on our stomachs with the oscillating fan blowing from Sally to Farrell to me, the wicker rockers, the radio on its table, the open windows with their white organza curtains; it could have been either of my grandmothers’ houses. I was lying on the floor with two people who could have been my siblings or my cousins, in a room that was comfortable and sweet, in a home where people loved each other, thinking I was pregnant, in the presence of a boy with an imagination as wild as my own who was ready to marry me and work for me until the day he died, and the fear my father had put into my head would not let me accept it.

  “I love her with all my heart,” Farrell said, and reached over and took my hand in his and held it strong and tight and looked deep and straight into my eyes and pledged himself to me.

  “I love you too,” I said. “We’ll get married Wednesday.”

  Tuesday afternoon, in Evansville, Indiana, which is the nearest large city to Seymour, Indiana, in a dressing room in a department store, with my mother sitting primly on a chair and my best friend, Sue Smythe, trying on winter suits, I reached down to pull a dirndl skirt up around my waist and felt and then saw the blood begin to run down my legs. The salesladies scurried off and returned with sanitary napkins and I pinned them to my underpants and dressed and went into the bathroom to wash my body. My mother stood guard outside the ladies’ room so no one would come in and catch me in my shame.

  Later, I got Sue Smythe alone and told her the whole story. “I knew something was going on,” she said. “You looked terrible this morning when we picked you up.”

  “I think I had a miscarriage,” I whispered. “I don’t know what I’ll tell Farrell. I bet it will break his heart. He wanted me to have his baby.”

  I told him that night. I rushed in the house at five that afternoon and called Taylorsville and told his sister to find him and tell him to come over as quickly as he could. I hung up the phone and went into my room and took my new blouses and skirts out of their boxes and hung them in my closet. I put my new underpants and bras into my underwear drawer. I put my new socks in the hamper to be washed. I got into the bathtub and took a long hot bath, washing my body with lots of soap and bubble bath, examining my navel, lost in thought of the time I had been hooked up inside my mother and the little girl or boy I had lost while bleeding. I was almost in tears at the thought. My mother came into the bathroom and stood watching me. How must I have looked to her? So young and perfect, so strong of will and limb, so powerful and like my daddy. My thick, short hair curling around my head, my legs sticking out of the bubbles in the water, my crazy ideas and energy and talents. “What is wrong with you?” she asked. “You’ve been acting funny all day.”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I love the stuff we got. Why do you think something’s wrong?”

  “You aren’t worrying about, well, what happened, are you?”

  “Menstruating? Of course not. Who cares. You better get out of here, Mother. I’m getting out. Farrell’s coming over to see me.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “We’re going to listen to records. He brought back some new ones when he went to Chicago to see where he’ll live next fall. I have to give them back to him. Well, I’m getting out.” I stood up in the water, bubbles dripping from my thick, sixteen-year-old skin, my miscarriage tragedy forgotten as I was trying to decide what to wear. “I might wear that new blue skirt tonight,” I said. “And that off-the-shoulder blouse. I love that blouse, Momma. You were so sweet to give it to me.” She handed me a towel. I used it to cover my nakedness and laughed and went with wet feet into my room.

  I dressed in my new clothes and put on white patent leather sandals and went back into the bathroom and covered my skin with Revlon pancake makeup and covered my lips with Revlon Firehouse Red lipstick and put on some of my mother’s perfume. Then I went downstairs and ate two crackers and drank a Coke and went out onto the porch to wait for Farrell.

  “Aren’t you going to eat dinner?” my mother asked me several times.

  “Please don’t make me eat,” I answered. “I don’t want to eat anything. It’s too hot and I can barely button this skirt as it is.”

  “Leave her alone,” my father put in. “Let her do anything she wants to do. Old bigfoot is coming over from Taylorsville. How could she eat?”

  Then he was there, wearing a fresh blue shirt and freshly shaved and with his hair combed down tight and his strength and energy and goodness at my service. I waited for him on the porch. He got out of the car and ran up the steps to me. I took his hand. “I lost the baby,” I said. “It’s so sad and they’re just in there eating dinner. Let’s get out of here.” He took me in his arms and I think he cried. I am almost sure he cried, but I made him stop and we got into his car and drove out of town to a lovers’ lane and held hands and kissed and basked in the light of our drama. “Now we’ll get married correctly in a church,” he said to me. “As soon as we can. I won’t take a chance on this happening again. I love you too much for this to happen.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m changed of course, but not hurt by this. ‘I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex, Go forth at midnight crying like a cat, Leaving the lofty tower I labored at For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex with tittering chalk . . .’ That’s Edna Millay. I’m memorizing the book.”

  I should have been quoting: “If in the years to come you should recall. When faint at heart or fallen on hungry days. Or full of griefs and little if at all from them distracted by delights or praise. . . . How of all men I honored you the most. . . . Indeed I think this memory, even then, must raise you high among the run of men.”

  Because that is what the memory does for me. The knowledge that Farrell considered me worthy of his love, that he threw his love down before me like a gallant’s cloak.

  He came running across his sister’s lawn, as lanky and smiling and full of goodness as he had been forty years before. In no way a disappointment, and the three of us went into the kitchen and talked for an hour and told the story of when we thought I was pregnant when I hadn’t even been penetrated. We said no one now would believe such a story and we sat close to each other and loved each other for not growing old, not yet.

  Some other lucky woman got to have this man for a husband and I do not regret that. My destiny was someplace else. Another man, sons, grandchildren. Rivers run in one direction. Never look back except to praise. May goodness and mercy follow us all the days of our lives. Amen.

  Paradise

  When the sweetest stockbroker in Harrisburg married his childhood sweetheart and moved into his dream house it cheered us up. Everyone in town was excited about it. His first wife had gone crazy and started screwing the carpenters. Then she divorced him and took his home and half his money. Then he drank for a year. Then he went up to Chicago and brought back the girl he should have married thirty years before. The one he took to the prom. The one he laughed with when he was young.

  They bought an old house out on lovers’ lane. We all thought it must be where they necked when they were young. Anyway, they tore it to pieces and built a dream house on top of the shell. They planted roses everywhere. They put up a flagpole and flew a different flag every day. The American flag, the state flag of Illinois, the flag of the United Nations, the Australian flag, the Betsy Ross flag, the flag of the forty-eight states before we added Hawaii and Alaska. When the town stopped talking about them getting married, it started talking about the flags. Some people thought it was unpatriotic to fly other flags. Others thought it was “cute.”

  I live a mile from the dream house. I pass by there every day taki
ng the cocker spaniels for a walk. Suzanne Smith was the bride’s name before she became Suzanne Mayfield. She was a tall blonde who had been the drum majorette, always twirling, twirling, twirling, wearing her boots, carrying her baton. She had gone to Chicago when she finished high school and had not come back. There was rumor she was involved in some sort of problem at a savings and loan up there but none of us pushed that rumor. We were glad to see something good happen in the world. This isn’t a mean town. We were pulling for them. I’d be pulling for them still if I thought it would do any good. I don’t blame other people for things I do. If I ended up at an orgy right here in Harrisburg, it’s my own fault. No one made me go to that party. No one made me stay. It’s not the first time I have strayed from my decision to live an orderly life and only serve Athena.

  I first learned about the marriage of Davis and Suzanne when the sound of machinery woke me at dawn. By the time I had gathered the dogs and gone out on the road it sounded like the whole woods was being razed. As I drew near the house I could see it was two bulldozers tearing off the porch and clearing the back lot. “What’s going on here?” I asked the dozer driver. “You’ve woken the whole neighborhood.”