She thought to herself as she undressed and got into bed that she had behaved like a child. He must think that no one had ever suggested going home with her before. She should have been funny and casual and made a clever remark. The problem was he unnerved her so much that she
still
couldn’t think of a clever remark. She thought of the feel of his body against hers and of her reaction. The problem was, she thought, he scared her to death.
He called the next day and asked her out. She said she was busy.
He named another time and she said she was busy then too.
“Doing what?” he asked.
She thought he was being rude and answered repressively, “I’m working on a paper.” She would have liked to tell him that what she did was none of his business. She didn’t, however, because she was almost constitutionally incapable of being rude herself. Her parents, she thought regretfully, had brought her up too well.
“When is the paper due?” he asked relentlessly.
“The day before Christmas recess. Then I go home.” That should give him enough of a hint, she thought.
“I’ll call you after the vacation then,” said the beautiful voice in her ear and she stared at the phone in astonishment.
“I’ll probably be busy preparing for finals,” she got out.
“I’ll call you,” he said firmly and hung up.
She went home for Christmas and tried not to think about Christopher Douglas. She went out with a boy she had known since high school who was also home on holiday and she found the dates strangely depressing.
“You don’t look very happy, honey,” her father said to her as she came into the living room one night after saying good-bye to her escort in the car.
“I don’t know. Daddy,” she replied with a sigh.
“It’s
just that I’m so
sick
of mediocre boys.”
“Mediocre?” he queried with a grin.
“Well, they’re nice enough, I guess.
It’s just that they don’t interest me much. And lately it seems everyone I go out with starts to talk about marriage.
Why
do men always want to get married?”
He laughed. “Does Dan want to marry you?”
“I think so,” she answered gloomily.
“I always thought you liked Dan.”
“Oh, I like him. But he’s so—so conventional. His talk, his ideas, his clothes, his car. I don’t think in all the years I’ve known him that he’s ever once surprised me.”
“Well, then,” her father said gravely, “clearly you oughtn’t to marry him.”
“No.” She sighed. “I don’t think I’ll ever marry. I think I’ll devote my life to scholarship. It’s much more satisfying than going out on all these boring dates.” She trailed gracefully upstairs, leaving her father with his head buried in the newspaper, his shoulders shaking.
She got back to college on Monday and by Friday he still hadn’t called. She was unreasonably annoyed. If people said they were going to do a thing, then they ought to do it, she thought. She refused two dates for Saturday night and was sitting in her room reading
Tamburlaine the Great
by Christopher Marlowe when she was called to the phone. He was down in the lobby. Would she care to go out with him for a bite to eat?
“All right,” she heard herself saying. “I'll be down in five minutes.” She brushed her long hair, dusted some blusher on her cheeks and put on lipstick. She changed her jeans for a pair of corduroys, picked up her pea jacket and went downstairs to the lobby.
They had a wonderful time. She had thought they could have nothing in common, but by the end of the evening she felt she had known him forever. She didn’t quite know what she had expected—a “film star” type personality, she supposed, to go with his looks. But he wasn’t like that at all. He was, in fact, the nicest boy she had ever met. The nicest man, she corrected herself, as she said good night to him sedately in the lobby of her dorm. He was twenty-five, four years older than she, and centuries older in experience she was sure. She did not invite him up to her room.
Mary shivered a little; the Nantucket rain was turning colder and she got up and began to walk slowly down the beach. It was painful, looking back like this; painful to look honestly and see how cocksure and how foolish and how young she had been. And yet she knew, as she reflected on the self-absorbed adolescent she had been, that she could not have handled things any differently from the way she had. Her only alternative had been to simply say good-bye and refuse to see him. And that was something she had not been able to do.
They had reached the crisis point in their relationship rather quickly. He wanted to go to bed with her and she would not. He was very persuasive, and every sense she owned was screaming for her to give in to him, but there was a hidden core of iron in Mary’s character and on this issue he came up against it.
“But, Mary, why?” he asked, his lips moving tantalizingly along her throat. They were both in the front seat of a car he had borrowed and the car was parked
in front of her dorm.
He wanted to come up to her room.
“No, Kit,” she said, and his mouth moved to find hers once again. She closed her eyes; nothing she had ever experienced had prepared her for the way she felt when Kit kissed her. His hand slid inside her open coat and began to caress her breast
“I want you,” he said. “I want you so much. Mary—let me come upstairs.”
“No,” she said again.
“God damn it, why not?” Frustrated passion was making him lose his temper.
She gave him the same answer she had given all the other boys, the answer that had stood her in such good stead for four years. “Because it’s a sin,” she said and stared resolutely out the front window.
“What?”
That was the answer she usually got. “You heard me. It’s a sin. Against the sixth commandment—you know, the one that says, ‘Thou shall not...’”
“I know what the sixth commandment says,” he replied irritably.
He looked at her, trying to make out her expression in the dark. “Are you serious?”
And in fact she was. Then, as now, she was as oddly simple in some ways as she was bafflingly complex in others. Sex before marriage was a sin and she wouldn’t do it.
He had tried to change her mind. By God, he had tried. He would have succeeded too, she thought, if she hadn’t been so careful about where she would go with him. He was as hampered by lack of opportunity as he was by her own resistance. You can’t make passionate love in the middle of a crowded student party—or at least not if you are as private a person as Kit was. You could do quite a few things at a movie, but certainly not what you ultimately wanted to do. He didn’t own a car, and on the few occasions when he suggested borrowing one, she had said she had other things to do.
He stopped calling her and for a month she didn’t see him. It was pure hell and it was then that she came to the reluctant realization that she loved him. It was a terribly upsetting recognition. They were of two different worlds, really, and she feared and mistrusted his. Those worlds had touched briefly here at college but in June they both would graduate, and like two meteors on opposite courses, they would grow farther and farther apart as the years passed, never to touch each other again. She would continue her studies and, with luck, land a teaching job in a decent university. He would make it big in acting; she had no doubt at all about that. He had the looks, the talent, and the drive. Most of the boys she knew traveled through life in a pleasant cloud; they did things because they seemed like good things to do at the moment. Not Kit. He knew exactly what he was doing and exactly where he was going. And he was going to the top. There was no place for her in the future he envisioned for himself.
In March she learned she had been awarded a fellowship for graduate study. Kit was offered a job with the Long Stage, a regional theater based in New Haven that often sent productions on to Broadway. He called her up to tell her the good news and to congratulate her on her award. Her heart almost jolted out of her body when she heard his voice and she agreed to go out with him for a drink to celebrate.
They went to Guide’s, the place where they had first met. Kit ordered a pizza and—as a special treat—a bottle of wine instead of the inevitable beer.
“I’ve located a small apartment in a decent area of New Haven,” he told her, his strong white teeth making quick work of the pizza. “It’s in a two-family house. Not very elaborate, but it’s clean. And cheap. And I have yard privileges.” He looked at her out of brooding dark eyes. “You could move in with me while you’re working on your degree.”
“No,” she said.
“Christ, sometimes I think that’s
the
only word you know.”
She put her wineglass down. “You shouldn’t have called me up. I shouldn’t have come with you.” There were tears in her eyes. “I’ll get a cab back to my dorm.”
“No.” His long fingers shot out and closed over her wrist. “No, sit down, Mary.”
Slowly she obeyed him and while she fished around in her purse for a tissue he began to talk. “I’m bound and determined to stick to acting. You know that. It’s what I want to do most in life. It’s what I think I can be
good
at. I have a job at present but the money stinks. I have no family to fall back on if I lose it. I’ve gone through school on scholarships and loans and my net worth is a debit account.”
He looked at her and his flexible mouth was taut and grim. “You don’t know what it means to need money. You come from a comfortable New England home. Your father is a doctor and your mother belongs to all the right clubs and committees. Your sisters and brothers are pillars of the community. You have brains and beauty and integrity. You’re probably right to run like hell from me. You ought to marry a lawyer or an engineer. Someone like your brothers, who can give you a big house in a nice New England town where you can teach in the local college and raise your kids to play on the local little league team.”
She sniffled into her tissue. “You seem to have my life all planned out for me.”
He paid no attention to her interruption but went on, his face dark and intense. “My own future is uncertain, to say the least. I have no business asking any girl to tie herself to me—and especially not you.” She was looking at him now, her face as somber as his. “But I love you,” he said. “This last month has been hell.”
“I know.” Her words were barely a whisper. “I love you too.” She looked down at his lean hard hand, which was clasped tensely about his wineglass. “Why especially not me?” she asked.
“Because of all the things I’ve just said. You aren’t cut out to be an actor’s wife. And for you, marriage would be a serious business.”
She kept her eyes on his hand. “Yes.” A strand of long black hair had fallen forward across her cheek and she pushed it back behind her ear with a slow, unconsciously seductive gesture.
“So, given all that,” he said harshly, “will you marry me?”
With almost palpable effort she dragged her eyes away from his hand and looked up at his face. She moistened her lips with her tongue. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”
Kit burst upon her quiet, conservative, academically oriented New England family rather like a bombshell. Her mother, obviously worried about the proposed marriage between her youngest daughter and this extraordinary boy, spent a good deal of time during the long weekend they stayed with her family trying to probe Mary’s feelings. Mary was certain she was regretting the nice woman’s college she had wanted her daughter to attend. Kit would not have come into her orbit if she had been safely cloistered at Mount Saint Mary’s.
“You are so
unalike,
darling,” she said cautiously to Mary. “You are so intelligent. Learning has always mattered so much to you.”
“Kit isn’t exactly stupid, mother,” Mary replied patiently. “He has a B.S. in mathematics from Penn State, you know.”
“Mathematics?” Her mother looked astonished.
“Yes. He got into acting when he joined a student production at Penn for a lark and he ended up deciding he liked it better than math. But he finished his degree. It took him six years to do it, because he had to work, but he finished. He
does
finish what he starts, and he is a very good actor. He’ll make it.”
“Suppose he does, darling.” Her mother’s voice was troubled. “Will you like that sort of life? The publicity is ghastly. And I’m sure most of those people in Hollywood take drugs. And the divorce rate . ..”
“I know all that. Mother, and believe me I’ve
thought about it.” Mary smiled a little ruefully. “But I love him. What else can I do?”
Her mother’s face relaxed a little. “Your father seems to like him,” she said hopefully.
Mary grinned. “You know. Mother,
I’ve decided the worst thing you can do is to decide on the sort of man you
don’t
want to marry and the sort of life you
don’t
want to lead. The minute you do that, God looks down on your smug little plans and says, ‘Ah-ha, I’ll fix her.’ And he did just that. He sent me Kit.”
“He is—rather awesome.” For the first time there was the hint of laughter in her mother’s voice.
“I don’t know what he is. I only know that there he is and I’ve got to be with him.”
“Well, then, darling,” said her mother briskly, “shall we plan for a wedding in June?”
Kit was rather startled to find that his nuptials were to be celebrated with as much pomp as Mrs. O’Connor clearly envisioned. But it wasn’t the trimmings he objected to so much as the delay.
“June!” He groaned. “Are you going to make me wait until June?”
Mary’s eyes always seemed to get at least two shades bluer whenever she looked at him. “Yes, I’m afraid I am.”
“But what does it matter, since we’re going to be married anyway.” His voice had dropped to the husky note that always made her heart begin to race, “What difference can a wedding ring make?” he coaxed.
“It isn’t the ring. It’s the sacrament,” she said patiently. “Oh, Kit, I’ve explained and explained...”
“I know.” He had glowered at her dauntingly. “I can’t think clearly anymore. And it’s all your fault.”
She had bit her lip and then giggled. “Darling, you look so funny . . .” And he had stalked off in high dudgeon.