Mrs. Teabody Remembers a Romance
To ask a
contemporary readership to imagine life in a women's dorm in the
1960's is asking almost the impossible but suffice to say that prior
to the sexual revolution, college officials took the term in
loco parentis VERY seriously and on-campus housing meant
girls had limited freedom and were expected to be safely locked
inside their dorms, house mother in attendance between the hours of
11:00 P.M. - - - make that 10:00 P.M. week nights! – and 7:00 A.M.
Furthermore, no woman left her dorm unaccompanied after 7:00 P.M. and
her destination for the evening had to be shared on her sign out
card. Yes, I could go to the library for the evening but not without
a friend accompanying me, and her sign out card had to say exactly
what my sign out card said. These cards were placed in the “out”
box and that was the house mother's index for our comings and goings.
We were expected to return to the dorm together at which time our
card was signed with our return time and placed back into the “in”
file.
Young people dated
then. Dating meant that a young man called at the young woman's dorm
and asked the receptionist on duty to page his date for the evening.
The page was heard via P.A. system all through the dorm and went
something like this, “Mary Smith, you have a visitor in the
lounge.” The “lounge” was the street level common room with
swinging doors that led to the hallways and the lounge in Horton Hall
was especially inviting. It was largish with four ancient leather
sofas placed strategically across from each other and back to back
with random chairs available for pulling into these conversational
areas. There was an open-to-the-public piano flanking the doors to
the north hallway. The desk containing the sign out cards was next to
the ONLY exit available and flanked by the receptionist's desk on one
side and the door to the house mother's apartment on the other. Bad
things might happen to a woman who resided in Horton Hall but they
wouldn't happen because she was out ALONE after dark. Lest this
system seem ridiculously regimented and tyrannical, I must inject
here that it worked well for the time period and I have vivid
recollections of friendships formed inside the dorm including
marathon pinochle games, mass watchings of “Dark Shadows”, line
dancing to “Farewell to the First Golden Era” tunes and vicarious
dating.
By vicarious
dating, I mean that any of the resident women could set up camp in
the lounge and just sit there eavesdropping and spying whilst other
more fortunate women were called for by their male escorts. You could
also entertain male friends in the lounge and God only knows I had
tons of male friends who never dreamed of dating me but had serious
crushes on one of my friends or on my roommate and hoped to
ingratiate themselves to these females through me. That was okay as
my heart belonged (sequentially) to a completely unattainable young
man in the Navy stationed halfway around the world, a completely
unattainable young man at a university three hundred miles away, a
completely unattainable young man with a girlfriend at Virginia Tech,
and a too-young young man at Mercersburg Academy. Often by myself or
with another dateless friend I took up my post in the lounge to check
out who was dating whom. Over the months I observed odd couples,
head-over-heels-in-love couples, best friends couples and my personal
favorite, ridiculously well-suited PERFECT couples, none more perfect
than my roommate that year and her boyfriend from three hours away at Temple University. My roommate junior year was Cindy
Crawford-beautiful, and she was NICE. Her name was Mary Smith and one
of the first things she told me when we moved in together was that
she had a serious boyfriend who went to school at Temple for pre-med.
She shoved a picture at me saying, “This is Teddy and I am going to
marry him.” My mouth dropped open when I saw “Teddy” for the
first time and when he made his first in-the-flesh visit to Horton
Hall three weeks later I learned that the photography of the time
simply could not capture beauty at that level. At least seven of
Mary's friends had gathered in the lounge to wait for his arrival
that first time, with Nancy taking her post by the main entrance to
watch for a “little green car.”
“He's here. He's
here!” and we scattered toward the door like an advancing army to
observe his arrival. I will never forget the sight of him unfolding
his tall personage out of that little green MGB and starting to walk
toward the steps leading to the lounge. Mary stood at the doorway her
arms outstretched as he walked toward her his arms similarly
outstretched and every one of us felt the power in that embrace and
the brief kiss that followed. This was the stuff of movies made
better by knowing the actors.
“Girls, this is
Teddy. . . my boyfriend,” she added unnecessarily. He took us all
in smiling a dazzling smile and about that time our house mother
emerged from her apartment and Mary introduced him.
Uncharacteristically she offered him the use of her “powder room”
so he could “freshen up” after his “long trip” and his
departure set off a storm of drooling glee among us with our house
mother taking only so much of it before firmly stating that Teddy had
not come all this way to see US and didn't we have work to do and
generally shooing us out of the way. We ran all the way up three
flights of stairs to my windows that looked down upon his little
sports car just in time to see him hold open the door for her and
then fold himself back inside, the little car 's tiny red lights
blinking as he braked going down the hill.
We were in HEAVEN!
Such perfection! No couple in the history of all mankind was as
perfect as our Mary and our Teddy. We waited in my room for her
return at exactly 11, watched them emerge and walk toward the stairs
then disappear. When she came upstairs, we were ready for any snippet
of information she was willing to share. “We had a very nice
evening,” she said smiling, her brown eyes glittering. “Goodnight,
Girls.” As her roommate, I expected a little more info but she was
fairly close-mouthed saying only that they had a wonderful time, that
he was staying next door as a guest in the men's dorm and they were
going to walk downtown for breakfast in the morning, that they would
be going to a dance on Saturday evening and he would be driving back
to Philly Sunday after church. “Can I go to church with you?” I
asked. “You're not Catholic,” she answered but I was ready with
my argument as I had been attending the Catholic church because it
was right off the campus and one of my best friends went there. I
showed her my lace mantilla. “Oh, all right, but you can't TALK
during the service.” I was IN.
Over the next
several months Teddy made half a dozen such visits and we were always
there to greet him and sometimes he could be persuaded to play the
piano for us as Mary was notoriously slow at getting ready. Any time
we asked questions that he deemed too personal, he would deflect them
by asking some very personal question-- “How much do you weigh?”
to get his point across that we had overstepped the line. We grew to
know and love him. They were OUR couple. Only good things happened to
OUR couple. Finals came and went and we all went home for Christmas
break. I would spend some time with the fellow from Mercersburg
Academy I'd been writing to all semester but more on that later. We
returned for the new semester and Mary arrived fairly late in the day
driven back to school not by Teddy but by her father. When we were
alone I asked after Teddy and she simply said that Christmas break
hadn't gone quite as she'd hoped, that Teddy and his family had gone
south for most of the two weeks of break. She was very sad. It was
heartrending to see her so despondent but she was never one to share
a lot. A week later she received a letter from Teddy and she was
ecstatic. She read the last paragraph to me: “I really wanted to
talk with you about something very important over Christmas but there
was never a time so I am going to make the time. I want to come to
see you the weekend of the 24th if that is okay with you.
All my love, Teddy.” Mary started smiling in her old way and
everyone was relieved that our romance was back on track.
On the evening of
Friday, January 24 we gathered in the lounge of Horton Hall to await
Teddy's arrival and at 7:01 he walked through the door more handsome
than ever in a long camels hair coat. He greeted each of us by name
and gave each of us a quick hug. He threw his coat across the sofa
and walked to the piano and pulled out the bench and I plopped myself
down beside him. “What'll it be, Hank?" he asked me and I said,
“There's a place for us”? and he immediately launched into the
song easily reaching the keys with his long slender fingers and
playing beautifully.
Something was
different. Very different. Teddy was not Teddy. He was there but he
wasn't there. I was just about to pry when Mary arrived in the
lounge, more beautiful than ever and she came over to Teddy and
hugged him from the back kissing his hair. He grabbed her hands which
rested on his chest and brought them up for a kiss. I jumped up from
my spot and Mary sat down next to him. She was bundled up in a long
charcoal gray coat, a blue wool scarf at her throat. “You ready,
Slick?” she asked affectionately, hand on his shoulder. In a minute
they were gone out the door.
I had a serious
amount of reading to do and I went up to our room and changed into
pajamas and crawled into bed with Edmund Spenser. It wasn't an hour
later that Mary came into our room wearing an expression on her face
that I could not bear to see. Whatever news she had was news I wasn't
ready to hear. She threw her coat across the bed and unwound the blue
scarf. Her face wore an expression of hurt and disbelief. She sat
down at the bottom of my bed. I swung my legs over the side of the
bed and sat down next to her and put my arm around her waist. She
laid her head on my shoulder and was silent. She sighed. We were
quiet a long time. Finally she spoke, “Teddy and I are NOT going to
get married, Hank. We're over.” With those words she began to cry
but it was not a “he-broke-up-with-me” cry. “What's going on,
Mary? Tell me.”
She looked at me eye
to eye and said without emotion, “Teddy is going to become a
priest. He loves God more than he loves me. How can I argue with
that?”
And with those words
my heart didn't know whether to break or fly. “A priest? Had you
any idea he ever felt that way?”
“I did. I do. He
wants to help people. Medical school is going to take too long. His
faith is so great and I really do respect his choice. But I love him
so. I wanted to share a life with him. What will I ever do without
him?”
I don't know how
long we sat like that, my arm around her waist, her head on my
shoulder, tears coming and quitting, coming and quitting as we both
pondered a life ahead without a Teddy in it, a life where Teddy's
dream had no room in it for someone as lovely as Mary.
Incomprehensible as it seemed, someone had turned his back on this
beauty, this goodness, this so much above average young woman. What
possible hope was there for the rest of us?
Wow! What a memory for details! Is this fiction or factual? Very well written!
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