Mrs. Teabody Remembers a Romance

Mary and Teddy 1968

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 24^th 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?