“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.
“I only have tonight,” Nate was saying several minutes later as we walked toward the pub where we’d first met. I’d brought my books inside, told my roommates not to expect me until curfew and hurried back to him without even changing out of my plaid jumper and white blouse. At least I’d grabbed my navy sweater for when the sun went down.
He was holding my hand—hadn’t let go since I’d come back out from the convent—and