"A Lutheran minister, actually."
She took another look at him, tall, strong, and handsome, owning a face that should have been in movies and a self-assurance that she knew had probably broken many hearts. She stepped away from him one pace and in her incredulity began to laugh.
"A minister!" she exclaimed. "You're joking!"
"No," he said, standing before her as those who waltzed past them watched the intrigue. "I'm not joking." And he wasn't smiling now, either. So she knew. He was serious. He held his hand out to lead her back into the waltz.
"You don't act much like a minister," she said.
"You don't act much like a woman shattered by a broken engagement," he answered.
"Who said I was 'shattered'?"
"Barbara."
"Barbara doesn't know."
"Then you're
not
shattered?" They picked up the cadence of the waltz again.
“No. I most certainly am not.”
"Then come down to Princeton this weekend. I have the nicest Nash convertible you've ever seen. We can have lunch at my club and if you want we can spend Sunday at the shore."
"What shore?"
"My family has an oceanfront home in Sea Girt, New Jersey," he said.
This all sounded terribly familiar. "And your aunt is normally there, but she may be away this weekend, right?"
"Wrong," he said. She waited.
"My parents are normally there. But they'll definitely be away this weekend."
The music stopped and Stephen applauded the band, who rose, bowed, acknowledged the ovation, and began to lay down their instruments for a break. Laura stood with her arms akimbo, assessing Stephen Fowler.
"Well," he said, looking back at her. "It's only an invitation. No one's forcing you. And you can think about it."
"I'd love to go," is what Laura surprised both of them by saying.
"You're sure?"
"I'm very sure," she said.
They walked back to the table holding hands and even Barbara Worthington looked askance.
"See, Barbara," said Stephen. "Back within ten minutes. No damage done and we never left the room."
"Uh-huh," said Barbara, who was scrutinizing her cousin carefully now, as if searching for paw prints.
Stephen Fowler held a chair for Laura and seated her. Then he drew a long sigh and exhaled with too much drama. "I think I'm in love," he announced.
"Oh, no-o-o. .." Laura, Barbara, and Victor said in unison, and turned their heads away from him in harmlessly overdone contempt. But when Laura turned back to him, it suddenly struck her that, once again, he was not joking. Laura pinched herself and discovered that, yes, this was really happening.
The final touch: the Fowler family of Bala Cynwyd, particularly Stephen, was on Peter Whiteside's far-flung list. Then again, wasn't everyone she met these days? All right, Peter, she thought to herself. This time I will give you a highly detailed report.
*
It was later that evening, when Barbara and Laura returned to their family's cabin, that Barbara filled in a few of the initial biographical notes on Stephen Fowler.
He had been third in his class at Princeton, a spring track star, not football, as Laura had erringly guessed, an extraordinarily gifted captain of the swimming team, treasurer of the Class of 1928, president of the Debating Society, editor of
The Princeton Literary Quarterly
--- "He writes well enough to become a professional novelist or essayist," Barbara insisted as she undressed completely and stepped into the shower --- and had in fact been accepted for theological study at Yale.
"Him?" Laura asked again, watching Barbara through the open door to the bathroom. Laura lay on her bed, wearing only her slip and bra, one shoe off, the other dangling perilously from a toe as she held her leg out straight.
"Him," confirmed Barbara. "He's unusual."
"I know."
Barbara added the final detail as she washed her hair. The Fowler family was old money from the Main Line. Someone named Amos Fowler, two generations back, had owned the tracks upon which the Reading Railroad had carried its freight. The Fowlers were millionaires more times over than anyone could count.
"And with all his fortune," Laura asked, "he's chosen to become a minister?"
"Honey," answered Barbara, rinsing off, "with his money, he can afford to become a minister."
Laura grew very quiet. Barbara finished her shower, draped a robe over her shoulders, and toweled off. Then, sensing Laura's mood, Barbara continued in cautious tones.
"I should tell you, I suppose. Stephen's had quite a few girlfriends in his time. Girls from good families, I mean. Girls who don't normally go to bed with men."
"I'm sure," Laura said.
"So you like him?"
Laura returned Barbara's knowing gaze. "He asked me to go away with him next weekend. To Princeton and then to Sea Girt. Can you imagine that? I barely know him."
"And?"
Laura mused upon it. "I might need a new dress or two," she said. "And I definitely need a new bathing suit."
At twenty-three, Laura Worthington was daring, and wise enough to know exactly how to conduct the whirlwind love affair that she now sensed before her. Only, it became more than a whirlwind. Soon after the weekend in Princeton and Sea Girt, Laura knew she was onto the real thing. She was indeed, as she liked to phrase it, “a goner.”
*
Laura wrote a final letter to Edward Shawcross. She felt she owed him that much. In it, she actually said little, only that she would always recall him with kindness no matter how he felt about her. She mentioned that she had met someone new but she spared him the details. She was certain, she wrote, that he would soon find a younger, prettier, altogether better girl than she had been. In no time they would be operating his dreamed-of inn in Bath, complete with household "staff of five." When she sealed the letter, she felt both saddened and relieved.
Then Laura drew another piece of stationery. For the first time, she wrote to Peter Whiteside and revealed the depth of her involvement with Stephen. Always before, she had discreetly mingled word about him into the news of other people she knew at Contontic. And yet Whiteside must have sensed something.
"More about this wonderful young man," he had written back once. "What about the divinity student?" Whiteside had asked on another occasion after Laura had purged any mention of her romance from her correspondence.
What did Whiteside know about love between a young man and a younger woman?
Laura thought huffily. This is none of his business.
"What about the young Fowler fellow?" Peter had written a third time.
So now she told him everything. If he did not like it, she concluded, he could bloody well find another pen pal. She mailed this letter at the same time as the note to Edward and enjoyed a robust sense of accomplishment.
A response from Peter Whiteside came back like a yo-yo.
"Laura," he wrote. "You are very young and very impressionable. I daresay you've had only one other serious romance. Are you certain that this is in your best interests?”
She read the letter twice and took it to be smug and condescending. She crumpled and burned it. Then Laura burned the rest of Peter Whiteside's letters. She felt free of him. Emancipated. But she continued to simmer.
At length, she penned one final correspondence to him, complete with a tone which she took to be the match of his.
"In response to your question," she wrote, "am I certain this is in my best interests?
My response, sir, is yes. Very definitely. Laura."
Then she cut off communication with Peter Whiteside. Completely.
Laura Worthington and Stephen Dobbs Fowler were married on August 28, 1937, by the Reverend Adrian McFarlane at the Lawrenceville chapel. Dr. Nigel Worthington came from England for the occasion, was a houseguest of the Fowlers in Bala Cynwyd, and was more than suitably impressed with both Stephen and his family. For their part, Stephen's parents were absolutely enraptured by the noble English physician and his mild eccentricities.
The wedding was small upon the insistence of Stephen and Laura. Only the immediate families. Stephen's younger brother was the best man and Barbara Worthington was the maid of honor. There were only thirty guests, but Laura was not spared the usual inane remarks which make any wedding complete.
Stephen's brother, in an odd moment to Laura: "You don't have a younger sister back home, do you?"
One of Stephen's aunts: "There's nothing wrong with having a romance with a religious man. I'm sure he didn't make the physical demands upon you before marriage that most men make."
And, of course, from Barbara, with a twinkle in her eye: "Some summer romance! You pick off the most eligible bachelor at Lakeside, then marry him so no other girl can borrow him next summer!"
"Sorry," answered Laura. They exchanged a hug.
"Who says I can't be borrowed?" asked Stephen, overhearing their chatter. He embraced his wife from the back, kissed her on the side of the neck, and, when no one was looking, brushed his hand across her backside.
"I thought you were a gentleman," she chided
sotto voce
.
"Only before marriage," he answered. "An animal ever after." There was champagne on his breath.
"Fabulous," she replied.
"By the way," he asked, "who is Peter Whiteside?"
The name came to her as a surprise, particularly from her husband's lips. For a second she had no response. "Who's Peter Whiteside?" he repeated. "I want to know."
"Why do you want to know?"
"Ah, ah," he chided. "Husband's rights! And I asked you first." His voice was teasing, but she recognized its insistence.
"Peter Whiteside," she said, recovering carefully, "is a divinely charming man with radiant gray eyes who is urbane, handsome, talented, bears a frightfully stunning resemblance to a tall, athletic Noel Coward . . . and who also happens to be my father's age, and an old, old friend of the family."
"Oh," Stephen said. Half a grin crept across his face. "I see. Church, army, and club establishment, right?"
Laura let him easily off the hook. "He served with my father in the war. They've been like this"—two delicate fingers crossed, two polished pink fingernails meeting—"for years."
"I understand," he said.
"Why?"
"He sent flowers," Stephen told his bride of one hour. "And this note."
He handed her a small unopened envelope. Laura slid her finger into it and tore. From it, she drew Peter Whiteside's personal calling card, engraved only with his name. Upon it, in the handwriting Laura knew so well, Whiteside had neatly penned in blue ink:
To Lovely Laura,
With all my affection and sincere wishes for your lasting happiness,
Peter
Laura felt a sensation of warmth toward Peter, something she had never known she had entertained for him. She smiled. She looked up to show her husband the kind note from her father's oldest friend. But Stephen had discreetly disappeared to allow her to read the contents in privacy. Then she smiled again. Her husband, it occurred to her, had been jealous. Jealous of fey, middle-aged Peter! The thought greatly amused her and she tucked the card into her wedding gown. Later in the afternoon, she found the greatest, most gorgeous bouquet of flowers—four dozen magnificent long-stemmed red roses—that she had ever seen in her life. It had been confected in New York, upon wired directions from London. Naturally, it was Peter's.
After the ceremony, they left for Quebec in Stephen's red Nash convertible. They spent their first honeymoon night in a small white guesthouse two miles north of Brattleboro, Vermont, and were served breakfast the next morning by a blushing landlady at the inn's table of honor.
So that's what it would have been like to run an inn, Laura thought idly. Serving breakfast to obvious lovers, both married and illicit.
In Quebec City, they stayed in a suite in a west tower of the Chateau Frontenac and spent time walking the Plains of Abraham. Stephen was fascinated by military operations from other centuries and wanted to inspect the precise location where the French had lost North America.
They stood on the ramparts overlooking the St. Lawrence River and the vastness of the province, which spread northward. "The French lost because they underestimated the enemy," Stephen said. "They never believed that the English could attack by ship up a secure river, then successfully scale these cliffs and invade Quebec."
Laura nodded.
"Conclusion?" Stephen demanded, assuming a scholarly tone.
"Never underestimate the British Navy," she said. "The British Navy hasn't lost a decisive sea battle since 1453 at Castillon."
He raised his eyebrows and allowed her point. "A better conclusion," he demanded.
"With modern implications."
"I give up."
"The French are terrible military strategists," he said. "Always planning for the last war, not the next one. Like this Maginot Line they have now. All their fortifications stretched from Luxembourg to Switzerland. Know how you cross it?" he asked.
"How?"
"The same way you now get to England," he said, "You use airplanes."
They lunched and laughed at a splendid little country restaurant in Levis, a ferry ride across the St. Lawrence from Quebec, and toward dessert Laura felt an inexplicable pang of sadness.
Stephen had caused it inadvertently. As she examined her feelings she realized how smug one could be in America over the politics of Europe. Hitler, the hoarse fanatical little tyrant of the MGM newsreels, and his pals Mussolini and Franco, were all firmly in power and flagrantly rearming themselves. Central Europe seemed destined to be carved into pieces and the two major democracies of western Europe, France and England, seemed fragile and indecisive. Meanwhile, America slumbered.