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Nate reached for my hand and gently tugged me onto the other side. “You aren’t what you do, Eliza,” he said while I was busy experiencing something like butterflies at the very first touch of his warm skin against mine. “You’re already who you are. Whether you add the role of sister or wife or even mother to that, you are still the sweet, gentle spirit you were when you came to this earth.”
Mother. My heart raced. I’d been so consumed by what I was leaving behind, and contemplating with nervous excitement the idea of lying in Nate’s arms, I hadn’t considered the possible outcome of that act. This was all happening so fast….
“Do you want to have children?” I asked.
“I’d like to, yes. But if you don’t—”
“I do.” I cut him off, suddenly so embarrassed I could hardly stay there with him. A week ago I was planning to go to my grave chaste and here I was standing on the sidewalk talking about having sex with a man. And while I knew the physical basics, that was all I knew on that particular subject. Not much point in teaching intricate details—or having “the talk”—with a girl who’s going to be a nun.
I looked down, afraid he’d seen the sudden redness on my cheeks.
“Hey.” With one finger beneath my chin, he lifted my gaze to his. “Your plans to enter the convent rushed our courtship, but the rest of it we’ll take as slowly as you need to,” he said, embarrassing me further. “Do you understand?”
I tried to act nonchalant. “You’re a grown man, Nate. You’ve been married before. You’re used to—” I couldn’t do it. “You know…”
The convent was looming on my left, filling my peripheral vision.
“I’m a man, not an animal.” His words were soft with an understanding of something I didn’t understand at all. I wondered if he guessed just how little experience I had.
And worried that, once he found out, he’d regret this rash impulse.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Eliza,” he continued, and I was relieved when he started to walk. “But that’s not why I wrote to you. I want to spend the rest of my life with the person I met last weekend. I want to feel the way I felt when I was with you. And while I’m looking forward to our physical relationship, I intend to give you all the time you need to adjust to that aspect of our life together. Okay?”
“Yes,” I whispered, wondering how long that would be. A year? Maybe two?
He was walking beside me as he had the weekend before, not touching me at all. I kind of wanted to feel my hand inside his again—and thought maybe I’d like him to keep it there.
“I’ve only got a few hours before I have to go back—can’t be gone two weekends in a row during the busy season—but I came as soon as I got your letter. To make plans. Have you told your parents yet?”
“No.”
“Have you told anyone?”
I hadn’t known what to do. I’d answered a letter, but I had no idea what Nate’s intentions were. Or if he would’ve changed his mind by the time he got my reply.
“I spoke to the Mistress of Postulants. I didn’t tell her about…us…only that I didn’t feel I could enter the convent anymore.”
Even if I’d never heard from Nate again, that much had become clear.
We walked to the park and then inside, passing a woman dressed in jeans and a purple sweater holding the hand of a curly-haired blond toddler dressed the same. A young black woman pushed a baby carriage past us. An elderly man wearing an unzipped beige windbreaker sat on the bench just inside the entrance. I noticed them all. And the vividness of the green grass, the trees that were still bare now, the velvety magnolia blossoms.
“How long do you have before you need to be out of your room?”
“I’m at college on full scholarship, so I’m free to stay in the dorm until I graduate in June. You don’t have to be committed to the convent to live there, you just have to be willing to follow the rules.”
The sky was bluer today than it had been in a while. The sun brighter. Yet nothing seemed familiar. Because I’d changed?
“That gives us a few months.”
“I have to graduate.” I clung to that goal as though it was all that was left of me. Certainly it was the only part of myself I recognized at the moment.
“Of course you do,” Nate said, and I think that’s when I fell completely, irrevocably in love with him. Until then, my heart had ached to be with him, to bless his life in any way I could, but it had felt like a big risk to take. A perilous thing to do.
Now it felt safe.
Contrary to what my head might have been telling me, the words I’d written to Nate Grady the week before were not retractable.
On January 22 of that year, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In premiered on NBC. And I had a letter from Nate. He wanted to know if July 20th would be an acceptable date for the wedding. Camp would be between sessions the following week and would be closed, giving us time for a brief honeymoon and to get me settled in.
I visited my parents that evening. Nate had offered to go with me when he was in town, but I hadn’t wanted to share my brief time with him.
Late that night, I wrote him and said that July 20th would be fine. And that I’d like to get married in Colorado.
I didn’t tell him then that my parents had just disowned me.
On February 8th state police officers killed three black students engaged in an antiwar demonstration at South Carolina State. Nate called me three times that week. We talked about the Orangeburg massacre, as the attack was being called. About his brother. And he had some good news. He’d found a house he wanted to buy for us. I told him that if he liked it, it was fine with me. In truth, anywhere with Nate was going to be heaven as far as I was concerned.
Once I got past the initial wifely duty, that is. Nate and I still had not kissed. But I’d been doing some reading about the mating process and while I was trying to keep an open mind, I was pretty well scared out of my wits.
Charlotte Brontë had skipped the intimate details with Jane and Mr. Rochester.
March 1st was the day Johnny Cash married June Carter. I wanted the marriage to work, but I didn’t think it would. He was such a rebel, probably even did drugs, and everyone knew June was just a darling.
Nate called the next day. I wasn’t in a good frame of mind, missing him, and feeling so alone, since I no longer had either my family or the sisters to turn to.
I tried to explain my feelings but knew I’d failed miserably when he asked, “Are you having second thoughts?”
“No. Not at all.” Surprisingly, I wasn’t. “The one thing that seems to be a constant in my life these days is my certainty about marrying you.”
“You’re sure of that?”
I couldn’t tell if he was feeling insecure, or just trying to make certain I was all right.
“Absolutely.”
“Because if you’re having second thoughts, we need to talk about them, Eliza.”
“I’m not!” I was beginning to get irritated with his unwillingness to believe me. Which was testament to how out of sorts I felt. Generally I was a very patient person.
“It’s to be expected,” he said. “You’re young and I rushed you.”
I got cold then. “Nate, are you trying to tell me you’ve changed your mind?”
“No.” It was a good thing his response was so unequivocal, otherwise I might’ve become completely unraveled. “But I’ve had a few more years to find out exactly what I want, which enables me to recognize it when I find it.”
“And you think I don’t know my own mind?” Did he have as little faith in me as my parents?
“Oh, Eliza, I’m sorry.” His sigh was long and deep.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing’s wrong. I’ve been thinking too much and knotted myself up, that’s all. I just needed to hear your voice.”
“Well, I’d like to hear what you were thinking about,” I said.
“It’s late and you have class tomorrow. It wasn’t important. Can’t we leave it at that?”
“No.” I had an instinct about this.
“I’d rather not get into it. At least not now, on the phone.”
I’d figured as much. “That’s why I’m pretty sure I should hear about it.”
He sighed again. I leaned against the wall, holding the pay phone so tightly my hand was starting to cramp. That phone in the dark hallway of our dorm was the only one on which we could receive calls.
“It’s not a big deal, Eliza.”
“So you keep saying.”
“I don’t want you upset or jumping to conclusions.”
My skin was clammy and I was half-afraid I might throw up. “Tell me.”
“I wasn’t married just once.”
My only coherent thought was that he’d said his news wasn’t important. Whether I was incredulous that he could think that, or hoping I’d misunderstood, I couldn’t say.
“We were young,” Nate said a few seconds later. “Too young. It didn’t last long. A couple of months. Her parents were moving to New Jersey and we figured if we didn’t get married, we’d never see each other again.”
“How…young?” I could hardly speak.
“Eighteen.”
Wow. I had no idea how to react to this.
“Say something.”
“I’m not…I don’t—” Helpless, I just stood there clutching the phone, letting the wall support me.
“Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“Deflated. Like I’m not sure I know you as well as I thought.”
“I’ve lived thirty-two years, Eliza,” he said, his voice taking on a weary note. “There are many facts about me, things I’ve experienced, that you don’t know yet. But none of them change who I am. They’re things that happened—”
“A marriage is more than something that just happened.”
“This one wasn’t. We never had a life together, never even set up house. We lived with my mother for the couple of months it lasted.”
I was tired. Needed a good night’s rest. “You said you got twisted up in thought.” I returned to our earlier conversation. “Were you afraid you were making the same mistake twice? Getting married before you were ready?”
“No.” He actually chuckled. “I was afraid you were.”
Considering what he’d told me, I supposed I could understand that. Maybe. “I’m not a child living at home with my parents.” Quite the opposite, in fact.
“I know that.”
“Then please don’t treat me like one.”
“I love you, Eliza Crowley.”
“I love you, too.”
I just wished love didn’t have to be so hard.
As timing would have it, my oldest sister, Alice, had me paged in the dorm one evening the next week. She’d been sent by my parents to talk me out of my madness and spent a full hour telling me everything wrong with a man she’d never even met.
“He’s divorced, Liza!”
I certainly couldn’t argue with that.
“You’ll have to leave the Church!”
I couldn’t argue with that, either.
And when she told me that if I went through with the wedding she and my other two sisters, like my parents, would be unable to participate in my life, I didn’t debate the issue.
I cried myself to sleep instead.
Two weeks later, Robert Kennedy announced his campaign for president of the United States and Rome indicated that while it deplored the concept of rock and roll Masses, it wouldn’t prohibit them. I read the news with an almost clinical detachment. Once I married Nate, I would no longer be attending Mass of any kind. I’d be married to a divorced man—a union the Church refused to recognize. And like Nate, I saw no point in worshipping within a society to which I could not belong.
I would miss attending mass.
But my God I’d take with me.
Putting down the newspaper, I went out to the hall, dropped a dime into the phone and dialed my brother, William, at his apartment in Los Angeles. I asked if he’d give me away at my wedding.
He agreed!
North Vietnam agreed to meet with the United States for preliminary peace talks during the first days of April—something I paid careful attention to now that I loved Nate and knew about Keith. And on the fourth day of that month, Martin Luther King was shot in the neck with a single bullet while standing on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Crying, not understanding the injustice of a good man’s life ending in such a senseless way, I called Nate. He couldn’t make sense of the tragedy any more than I could, but talking to him helped just the same. I mentioned that my brother would be giving me away at our wedding and finally told him that my parents and sister would not be attending. It seemed like such a small thing at that point.
On April 18th Great Britain sold the London Bridge to a United States oil company that would be erecting it in Arizona. I wasn’t sure why Arizonans wanted a British bridge, but I liked the idea of bridges being raised far from their homes. I hoped that symbolism would apply to me, too.
The next day, walking back from class, I turned onto the block of the convent gate and saw Nate standing there, his face at once welcoming and somewhat grim.
I flew to him, almost dropping my books, and my whole being felt as though it was soaring as he grabbed me up, books and all, into a full-bodied hug. Glancing up, tears in my eyes and a smile on my lips, I meant to ask him why he was there, how long he could stay, why he hadn’t told me he was coming. I kissed him instead.
Just like that. With no thought. No worries about how to do it. My mouth went straight to his. In that moment, it no longer mattered that I’d lost most of my family, my church, all sense of security. I’d found the home I wanted for the rest of my life.
