Authors: Lynn Austin
“He won’t be here tonight.” Jeff opened a scarred door off the kitchen and gestured inside. “Here’s the bathroom. It’s free at the moment if you want to
wash up or brush your teeth or something.”
We had stopped to eat a pizza after the museum closed, then walked around Greenwich Village for a few hours, people-watching. Now it was nearly midnight, and we were both tired. I dug my toothbrush out of my cosmetic bag and went inside. The bathroom made me gag. The toilet had no seat and the sink dribbled a continuous stream of rusty water. I saw a cockroach slither into the shower drain and retreated to the living room.
“Jeff, I can afford a hotel, you know.”
“I can’t.”
“Are you too stubborn and old-fashioned to let a woman pay for your room?”
“Not at all,” he said with a shrug. “I’ll drive you to a hotel if you want, but don’t waste money on a room for me. This place is fine. I’ve stayed here before and lived to tell about it.” He began hopping from one foot to the other and scratching himself as if he’d contracted a bad case of fleas or scabies. I laughed.
“Do you think I’m being spoiled and squeamish?” I asked.
He rested his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t ever apologize for who you are or the way you were raised. Your father is a doctor—that’s great. I don’t think any less of you because you haven’t experienced poverty before. Everyone’s different. That’s what makes life so much fun.” We looked at each other for a long moment. I loved looking at him. I didn’t want him out of my sight. And I still wondered what his beard would feel like when we finally kissed.
“So where do I sleep?” I asked with a sigh of resignation.
“You staying?”
“Why not.”
“Good. You get the couch, I get the floor.” He had brought two sleeping bags with him from the car. I watched him unroll one on the sofa, then spread the other one on the floor right below it. The thought of sleeping so close to Jeff made my heart hammer.
“Okay?” he asked when he was finished.
I gave him two thumbs up. “First-class.”
Jeff switched off the living room lamp. The sparkling lights of the city shone through the bare windows like stars. I kicked off my shoes and bent to unzip the bag.
“Wait. Don’t get in yet,” he said.
I turned and Jeff pulled me toward him, all the way into his arms. He held me tightly against his chest for the first time. I pressed my face against the
hard muscles of his shoulder. He had to be able to feel my heart pounding against his ribs. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath, but Jeff gave a slow, contented sigh.
Then we separated and he held my face in his hands, drinking me in with his eyes. At last he slowly bent to kiss me. He was tender at first, but his kiss slowly built in passion until I couldn’t seem to think straight. When our lips parted again we were both breathless. He rested his cheek against mine, and I felt the brush of his beard—soft and silky, not wiry.
“See?” he whispered. “The icing always tastes sweeter when you wait for it.”
With that, he flopped down on the floor and crawled into his sleeping bag. I was left standing beside the couch, wobbly kneed, stunned.
I heard his voice below me a few moments later. “Wow! That’s really far out! I never knew that Irish girls sleep standing up like horses.”
I collapsed onto the sofa, laughing. “You crazy hippie! I’ve told you a thousand times I’m not Irish!”
“Sorry, I keep forgetting. Good night, Irish.”
By the time the school year ended eight months later, Jeff and I were deeply in love. “I don’t know how I can live all summer without your kisses,” he said, “I’m addicted to them.” We sat on the roof of the art building beneath a pale quarter moon, saying good-bye for the next three months. Jeff was covering my face with kisses as if trying to kiss each individual freckle. Tomorrow I would go home, and he would return to his usual summer job in Pittsburgh, framing houses for his uncle’s construction company.
“That explains where your Greek-god muscles came from,” I said when he told me about his job.
“Let me drive you home, and we can be together one day longer,” he pleaded.
“Trust me, you don’t want to meet my father.”
Jeff stopped kissing to gaze at me. I saw the hurt in his eyes as he asked, “Are you ashamed of me?”
“No! Oh no, Jeff, not in the least! I’m trying to spare you! Daddy will skewer you alive. He hates hippies. Bradley Wallace was his idea of a perfect boyfriend . . . get the picture?” I twined my fingers in his long wavy hair and pulled him close for another kiss.
“I don’t care what your father thinks of me,” Jeff said when we came up
for air. “But if I’m going to spend the rest of my life with you, I need to meet him someday.”
For a moment, my heart felt as though it had stopped beating. “What did you say?”
“I said, if I’m going to spend—”
“Jeff Pulaski! Are you proposing to me?”
“It’s not a proposal, it’s a matter of life and death. I can’t live without you. I never felt this way about anyone before, and I pray to God that I never do again. It hurts. I love you so much it hurts.”
“You wonderful, crazy hippie! Why do you always say things that make me cry?” I clung to him, my tears soaking his T-shirt.
“I don’t have a fraternity pin, and I can’t afford an engagement ring, but I’ll give you my peace necklace, if you want it . . . to seal our engagement.”
“I love you, Jeff Pulaski.” I kissed him. “I don’t need an engagement ring.” I kissed him again. “Fraternity pins draw blood . . .” I kissed him a third time. “. . . and your necklace looks much better on you than it would on me.”
“So does that mean you’ll let me drive you home and meet your family?”
“You’ll be sorry!” I said, laughing. “And you’ll also see that there’s not an Irishman in the bunch!”
I tried to warn my parents as well as Jeff on what to expect, but after that, all I could do was sit back and wait. It was like watching a storm cloud approach, knowing there would be thunder and lightning and hail, but I was helpless to do anything about it except hunker down and wait.
My father’s first words when he opened the front door and saw Jeff were, “Oh, good grief!” Daddy turned and strode into the house, but the expression on his face had said it all—disgust, disapproval, disdain.
“Daddy! How can you be so rude!” I said, storming into the house behind him.
“I’m not rude, he’s rude. If a young man is going to meet a girl’s parents for the first time, he should have the decency to dress up a little, out of respect for her, if not for her parents.”
“Actually, I did dress up,” Jeff said cheerfully. He had followed Daddy and me through the entrance hall and into the living room. “This is the nicest set of clothes I own, Dr. Bradford. The cleanest too. You see, my parents can’t afford to outfit me at Saks Fifth Avenue like you folks, but lucky for me, the hippie look is in style.”
“I suppose you can’t afford a haircut, either?” Daddy said scornfully.
“No, sir. I can’t.”
Daddy pulled his wallet out of his pocket. “If I give you twenty bucks, would you go get a shave and a haircut?”
“Sure!” Jeff plucked the twenty-dollar bill out of Daddy’s hand, folding it neatly. “Thanks. But I should warn you, sir . . . my hair will only grow back again.”
I pulled the money away from him and stuffed it into the pocket of my father’s blazer. “Don’t listen to him, Jeff. I like your hair the way it is.”
“So do I!” Grandma Emma strolled in from the kitchen. “I think he’s a very handsome young fellow. Sort of a psychedelic Samson, wouldn’t you say?” Jeff took her hand and bent to kiss it.
“Thank you, ma’am. I can see where Suzanne gets her beauty from—and her good taste.”
Grandma was still laughing when my mother joined us. Mom was polite throughout the introductions, but I caught the look of dismay that crossed her face when she first saw Jeff. Unlike Daddy, who would try to intimidate Jeff into breaking up with me, Mom’s solution to every crisis was to pray. I could already imagine her fervent, silent pleas to the Almighty that I would come to my senses quickly.
Jeff’s final ordeal was meeting my brother, Bobby, who was home for the summer from his first year of medical school. Bobby and Jeff got along about as well as Jeff and my old boyfriend Bradley Wallace had—Jeff was mocking, Bobby scornful.
When Daddy announced that he was taking us all to dinner at the country club that evening, I was furious. “You’re deliberately trying to embarrass Jeff! You know he’s not allowed to eat there without a jacket!”
Jeff rested his hand on my shoulder to soothe me. “It’s okay. I have a jacket in the car.” He wore such a mischievous grin on his face that I knew he was up to something. I watched helplessly as the storm clouds built in strength. When Jeff finally emerged from my brother’s room, dressed for dinner, he looked like one of the Beatles on the cover of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. Grandma applauded.
“Well done, young man!” she said. “You remind me of the bandleader at the Chautauqua when I was a little girl. He wore a white jacket with gold braid and epaulets, just like that one.”
“It probably is his jacket,” Jeff said, laughing. “I bought it at a second-hand store.”
Mom said nothing, but her smile was tense and strained. Daddy shook his head and muttered, “Good grief!”
“If you’re embarrassed, Daddy, you get what you deserve for trying to embarrass Jeff,” I said. I saw his angry, tight-lipped frown and added to myself that it would also serve him right if his blood pressure soared right off the Richter scale.
Robert looked around at all of us and said, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll skip the family circus and go out with my own friends tonight.”
“We’ll follow you in Jeff’s car,” I said as everyone else slid into Daddy’s Cadillac. I wanted a few moments alone with him. “I’m so sorry for putting you through this, Jeff,” I said as I huddled beside him in the Volkswagen. “This is even worse than I imagined it would be. I never knew my family could be so . . . so rude!”
“It’s because they love you very much,” he said patiently, “and they’re doing their best to get you to see me the way they see me. I’m a rebel, a good-for-nothing hippie, and a dangerous threat to their way of life. They didn’t raise you to marry someone like me.”
“You know what terrifies me, Jeff? That you’ll start seeing me as a reflection of them and you’ll bolt for home like a greyhound.”
He shook his head, smiling. “That won’t happen. I know the real you. I know your heart. The woman I love grew up with them, but she isn’t them.”
“I apologize for my father—”
“Don’t. He can’t help who he is. If you had grown up in his shoes, you might be him too. By the way, I love your grandmother.”
“Arrgh! I feel like I’m walking a tightrope! Is it going to be this horrible when I meet your parents?”
“Oh no. Of course not. It will be much worse.”
“I hope you’re kidding.”
His grin faded. “I wish I were. You want to know what will happen with my family? Before they ever meet you, they’ll build a wall a mile high that you’ll never get past. They’ll think you’re putting on airs because you have a big vocabulary, and they’ll think you’re snobbish because you have manners, and they’ll think that
you
think you’re better than them because you’re a rich doctor’s daughter and they’re uneducated Polacks. They’ll never let you get close to them. They’ll never consider you part of the family, because no matter how hard you try, you won’t ever be like them. That’s not your fault or theirs. It’s just the way it is.” He wrestled with the Volkswagen’s stubborn stick shift as we pulled into the parking lot behind Daddy.
“I wish we could go back to college and forget we have families,” I said.
“No, this is good for us. If we can survive this, we can survive anything.”
I looked up at the glittering country club. It seemed symbolic of Daddy’s life—and everything that Jeff and his fellow hippies renounced. “I’m really sorry about this country club ordeal, Jeff. I never imagined . . .”
“Sorry? Are you kidding? I’m having the time of my life! I’ve never been inside a country club before—much less dined in one with a beautiful, rich woman. I hope your father brought his wallet because I’m going to order prime rib. Maybe lobster too. This is going to be fun.”
I walked into the country club on Jeff’s arm and watched heads turn. If he hadn’t been with my parents, the manager probably would have tossed Jeff out. When the menus came, I watched him order the most expensive item in each category, from shrimp cocktail and French onion soup to baked Alaska. He was right, it was fun—until Daddy mentioned Vietnam, that is.
“I suppose you’re one of those radicals who go around protesting the Vietnam conflict?” he said as he cut into his medium-rare T-bone steak.
“Yes, sir. In fact, I took part in the demonstration at the Pentagon last year.”
“You young people have had everything handed to you all your life, and now you want your rights as Americans without any of the responsibilities,” Daddy said, waving his steak knife. “When your country asks you to do your duty in Vietnam you say, ‘Make Love, Not War.’ I never heard that attitude during World War II. I lost friends in that war, but my generation cared enough about democracy to fight for it.”
“There are dozens of differences between Vietnam and the Second World War, Dr. Bradford.” Jeff’s tone was serious, yet polite. I held my breath as if watching him skate across thin ice. “For one thing, the average age of our fighting men in the Second World War was twenty-six; the boys dying in ’Nam are nineteen—too young to vote, but old enough to die in a rice paddy. There are no clear combat zones in Vietnam, no objectives, no fronts. Your generation knew what you were fighting for—or against. This war is none of America’s business.”
“You probably would have thought it was none of America’s business to stop Hitler because he was across the ocean invading Poland and Czecho-slovakia!” When Daddy raised his voice a notch, Jeff raised his to match it.
“The United States voted to declare war after Japan invaded us. That was clear aggression on Japan’s part. America is the aggressor in this case. Besides, Congress never voted to declare war in Vietnam, and that makes it unconstitutional. Your ancestors during the American Revolution protested taxation
without representation—boys are being drafted to fight an immoral war with-out representation!”