I suppose I should have suspected something then, but I didn't, so that on that crazy cold night the following December when he suddenly showed up after a basketball game against Madison I was so stunned I didn't know what to say. He caught me right outside Erasmus, under the arch on the Bedford Avenue side, and when I saw him carrying a suitcase I got scared. But then this pair of hands was around my eyes from the back, saying “Guess who?” and when she'd laughed and given me a hug and a kiss and the two of them started explaining what was going on, I think I was almost as happy as they were. I didn't feel uncomfortable at all.
I called my folks from Grand Central station and told them I was staying over a friend's house, and then we were on the train heading for Maryland and they were explaining to me how Elkton was the closest place where they weren't under age and where they didn't have to have consent. They kept laughing at me because of the way I would shake my head in disbelief, and Sarah Jean kept saying to me didn't I remember what she'd said about when she was sixteen, and about how her mother and Corky's father would have heart attacks when they found out.
“If
they find outâ” Corky said, and he started telling me how they were going to get a place somewhere in New York and how Sarah Jean would work while Corky finished high school and then he'd either go to college on a baseball scholarship or play in the Minors. Sarah Jean laughed a lot, and she seemed very beautiful and happy. “You think my mother'll think this is worse than biting a preacher's hand?” she asked Corky once, and her eyes were shining when she said it. “I guess we're just gonna roast in hell, huh, Howie?” she said to me, cuddling up to Corky and beginning to hum. We kidded around like that until the train got to the town early in the morning and then we ate breakfast together in a diner and reminisced about the other time we'd stayed up all night.
That night I telephoned my parents and told them the truthâit didn't matter by thenâand by the time I got back to New York the next dayâwe all kissed goodbye at Grand Central and said we'd be seeing each otherâI was half dead. When I arrived home it all seemed like a dream and my parents thought the whole thing was silly and immatureâif I'd had the strength I would have argued with them, but it didn't seem to matter. I felt tired and happy.
When I got back to school on Monday and told the story to the guys, I felt even better. The part they liked best was about where the clerk had read their application and had made a sour face and said “I see you're cousins,”âand how Corky had put him in his place by saying “So were Franklin and Eleanorâain't you got patriotism?” I'll never forget the way he winked at Sarah Jean and me then, and the other thing I remember most was the story he and Sarah Jean told me on the train back to New York, about how, the year before, Rhoda had driven down to the farm with her new husband and the lousy way Corky's father and mother had treated her. Sarah Jean was very proud of the way Corky had told everybody off afterwardsâand of what he'd said to Rhoda to make her feel better. The whole thing seemed weird to me, though, especially when Corky was leaning forward across from me in the train, describing all of them sitting around this farmhouse living room together, not saying anything.