Four Seasons of Romance (12 page)

Then, he noticed Catherine change. She rarely drank with
him, and when he bought her a drink, she rarely took more than a sip, and
although Catherine had never mentioned it directly, the more he drank in her
presence, the more cautious she became.

“What is it, Cat?” he asked after one too many
bourbons
at a local club one night. “You don’t like it when
I drink?”

“I’ve never said that,” she said, looking away. The truth
was she didn’t like
him
when he drank—a loud, brazen, sloppy man loose
with his swearing and his hands. She preferred the sweet, gentle Leo she had
come to know and love.

“Catherine,” he said, “
look
.” He
took the glass of bourbon, still full, and dumped the entire thing on the
barroom floor. “I’ll stop,” Leo said. “If you don’t want me to drink, I won’t
drink.
Promise.”

He swore off drinking after that night and began to frequent
Langhorne Speedway, the track in the suburbs just north of Philadelphia
instead. Because of his track record in Europe, he quickly received a warm
welcome from a team that raced stock cars, midgets, and sprint cars.

For a bad boy like Leo, it was a dream to drive at
Langhorne, one of the most dangerous tracks in America in 1954 and one known
for a rough surface and many explosive wrecks.

Catherine knew enough of the track’s history to be worried
and refused to watch him race, begging him to reconsider.

“Please,” she said, “I lost you once. I couldn’t bear to
lose you again.”

“I’m doing this for us,” he told her. “The more I race, the
less I drink. I just need to get it out of my system, and then we can be
together.”

Off alcohol and needing a new thrill, Leo was
unstoppable—the new wunderkind of Langhorne. The quest for victory kept him
going back to the track against Catherine’s wishes, but drinking started to
slip back into his life as many of his track friends invited him out and
Catherine, of course, didn’t have to know.

By May, Leo and Catherine had been seeing each other in
secret for nine months. One sunny Sunday afternoon, he asked her to meet him in
Tacony
Creek Park outside the city, where he prepared
a picnic lunch for them: a pitcher of lemonade, Waldorf fruit salad, and
cucumber sandwiches—Leo didn’t know how to make much else. Everything was
spread on a red-checkered blanket that made Catherine nostalgic for a life
she’d never had... a life of lazy picnics on soft rolling hills with children
frolicking beside them.

She kissed him, and they didn’t say much as they dug into
the feast. The warmth of the sun on their bodies induced a contemplative mood
as Catherine leaned back on the blanket, closing her eyes and drinking in the
light.

“You’re never going to leave him, are you?”

Leo’s question cut her like the knife Leo used to cut
cucumbers minutes earlier. The sunlight that, moments before, had seemed so
soft and gentle now felt like an asphyxiating flame. “I don’t know,” she said,
surprised at her answer. She hadn’t necessarily meant to speak the truth—at
least not so plainly. “I still haven’t set a new wedding date,” she said,
hoping that would assuage the hurt she saw in Leo’s eyes.

He shook his head and like a man half-crazed began to tear
the crust off his cucumber sandwich and squeeze the bread with his fist. “I
don’t know whether I can keep seeing you like this.”

Catherine nodded. “I know.”

“You do?”

“I just mean... it isn’t fair to you. I know that.”

The sunlight made Catherine’s green eyes glow like emeralds
just like ten years ago, and it filled Leo with emotion.

“No,” he whispered intensely as Catherine looked away, both
of then silent for a moment.

“Leave Walter,” Leo said. “Marry me. I’ll take care of you.
We’ll have a home and a family... if that’s what you want. Besides, you just
can’t do this to me.”

Catherine thought of the life he’d made for himself in
Philadelphia thus far.
The odd jobs, the racecar driving, the
drinking.
As much as it hurt, none of it spelled “home and family” to
her.

“Leo, I know you’re trying,” she said. “But it just isn’t
who you are, and it’s hard but… maybe I need to set you free.”

“No!” Leo leaped to his feet, flinging the crushed bread
from his hands, frightening Catherine, his teeth gritted, face flushed, and
neck pulsing with rage. “I won’t let you do it!” he yelled. “You can’t decide
what’s right for me. I don’t need to be ‘free.’ I need
you
, Catherine!”
He kicked at the pitcher of lemonade, spilling the sweet juice out on the
grass.

“Please, just calm down,” she said.

Leo unclenched his fist, the anger fading from his face when
he saw Catherine’s fear. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Let’s just... go back to how things
were. You don’t have to leave Walter. Let’s just spend as much time together as
we can.” She nodded, but said nothing for the rest of the afternoon.

They continued to see each other in secret over the next
month, but they both wondered how much longer they could sustain this affair,
an affair colored with passion but fraught with tension and uncertainty.
Several times, Walter nearly discovered them together, including once when Leo
was in Catherine’s apartment and had to hide in the closet for hours and hours
while Walter serenaded her with boredom. Meanwhile, they went through a
pregnancy scare and many arguments, but the essence of the relationship did not
change—Leo still struggled with his lifestyle while Catherine was torn.

As for Walter, he might not have been the most observant
when it came to emotions, but even he sensed that something was off with
Catherine being gone often and her standard circuit of excuses—charity work,
political meetings, meals with friends—wearing thin.

“I feel as if I hardly see you anymore,” he told her over
dinner one night. Catherine had to call off meetings with Leo for a few weeks,
afraid that Walter would learn everything.

Leo, meanwhile, couldn’t understand what Catherine saw in
Walter and struggled with his emotions when Catherine was away, even resorting
to drugs several times to let the pain go.

Catherine found out, and the result was more distance
between them. Furthermore, Catherine suspected that Leo romanced a few women at
the track several times; Walter would never smoke marijuana or as much as
look
at another woman. Why would she give him up for someone who had a track record
of doing both?

In July, her eleventh month of seeing Leo in secret, Walter
drew a line in the sand. “My mother will die any day now,” he told her. “I want
her to see me marry, and I want her to see me marry you.”

Catherine thought of the frail and suffering Mrs. Murray,
and she was ashamed of her indiscretions. “Of course,” she said, “I want that
too.”

“We’ll marry in October, then. The leaves will be changing,
as you said.”

 “That sounds fine,” Catherine said, even as the knot
in her stomach tightened; the time was running out.

*

She was at the office typing a report a few days later when
the receptionist came to her desk. “I just had a phone call,” she said.
“There’s been an accident.” The girl’s expression was part sympathy, part
delight.

Catherine’s first thought was of Leo
. Something’s
happened at the track
.

“My fiancé?” she asked, the words feeling strange and
unnatural in her mouth. 

“No, the call was from Langhorne.
Seems
there was an incident with your... friend.”

“Did he leave any more information?”

“No.”

Catherine reached for her purse. “I have to go.”

When she got to Langhorne, she jumped out of her car and ran
across the parking lot with her heart in her throat. This was what she’d
feared—losing Leo in a fiery car crash, this time for real, this time forever.

She was met by one of Leo’s teammates, the man who probably
had called the office and asked the receptionist to deliver the message.

“Where is he?” Catherine cried. “Is he gone?”

“He’s all right,” the man said. “Amazingly, he walked away
with hardly a scratch.”

When she found him, Leo was sitting on the ground, talking
to the paramedics, one shining a light in Leo’s right eye, another treating the
bright-red abrasions on Leo’s face and arms. Catherine rushed toward him, threw
her arms around him, and sobbed.

“It’s nothing,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “I’m okay.”

He had veered off the racecourse, his car flipping several
times before stopping upright in the dirt shoulder. Chunks of metal were torn
away from the car as it rolled over and over in a thick cloud of dust, stopping
about five hundred feet from where it left the track.

“I could hardly breathe from all the dust,” Leo told her.
“If the car had landed wheels up, I’d have been a goner.”

This only made Catherine cry harder as she looked out on the
track and saw the mangled carcass of the car Leo had driven only an hour
before.

“
Ow
,
oww
,”
Leo said, clenching his teeth.

“What? What is it?”

He pointed proudly at his torso. “Doc says I bruised my
ribs,” he grinned. “I’ve got a concussion too.”

Catherine shook her head angrily. “I don’t know why you’re
acting as if you just lassoed a steer at the rodeo. It’s a miracle you’re
alive!”

“I don’t know why you’re angry,” he said. “If it’s a
miracle, we should be celebrating!”

But there wasn’t much time to celebrate. The car was
totaled, and the team owners blamed Leo’s recklessness for the accident, cutting
their relationship with him by the end of the week.

On Friday night, Leo was inconsolable as he and Catherine
sat at The Betsy Ross Tavern, a bar a few blocks off Franklin Square. She
watched as he ordered drink after drink, with no sign of stopping, Catherine’s
frustration growing with every minute.

“I can’t make you stop drinking,” she said, pointing to the
glass in front of him.
“Obviously.
But please, please
stop racing. I’m begging you. I love you too much to see you lying out in a
field as mangled as that car.”

He laughed bitterly. “Funny enough,” he said, “that mangled
car’s worth a lot more than my mangled body.”

“Don’t say things like that. I’m worried about you, Leo. I’m
asking you to stop.”

Leo shot back the rest of his liquor and wiped his mouth on
his sleeve, swiveling around on the barstool until he was looking at her.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll stop racing.
If
you go away with me.”
He kept talking before she had a chance to reply.
“I’ve been in touch with an old friend. An Army buddy. His family owns a chain
of antique furniture shops in the suburbs of DC. He asked me if I’d manage one
of the stores for him.”

“But... you don’t want to be a store manager.”

“Not forever, no. But it’s a good job with a steady income.
You could find work as an accountant. We could raise the family you always
wanted.” He looked her in the eyes. “I’m telling you, Cat. I won’t let you
down.”

Catherine smiled but she was still plagued with doubt—doubt
about his drinking, drug use, womanizing, and general instability. On top of it
all, she still didn’t believe Leo truly wanted a family.

But as she looked at him, the bruises and cuts still fresh
on his cheeks, she thought of all the good he had brought to her life. As an
adult, she learned to proceed through all things with caution and doubt, yet,
she, too, could act out of passion. After all, the decision never to return to
her father was made out of passion, and hadn’t that been the best decision she
made recently?

As Leo sat on the barstool, his eyes spoke to her, and she
knew what he was trying to say.

“Give me a chance,” he finally said, confirming what she saw
in his eyes. “At least give me a chance to fail.
Or maybe,
just maybe... a chance to succeed.”

Then, she knew that Leo was right. Catherine loved him and
wanted to be with him more than anyone else. If there were the slightest chance
of success, she’d take it.

*

The following day, Catherine met Walter for brunch. A true
gentleman, he stood as she approached the table.

“Hello, dear,” he said, pulling her chair back.

“Hello, Walter.” Catherine knew what she had to do and
already felt sick to her stomach, strangely unresponsive when the waiter took
their order, so Walter ordered for her.
A glass of orange
juice and French toast.
In other words—what
he
was having.

“You’re quiet this morning,” Walter said, carefully cutting
his toast into squares, the method he used with all foods that required cutting
and some that didn’t.

 The sight of this strange idiosyncrasy and Walter’s
diligence about it nearly broke Catherine’s heart. “We can’t marry,” she
blurted. “I’m sorry.”

Calm, Walter laid his fork and knife down on opposing sides
of the plate. “And why is that?”

Catherine’s eyes flooded with tears. “I don’t ever want to hurt
you, Walter. Please understand that. But I just... can’t.”

“Are you seeing someone else?”

His words surprised her; she was used to assuming Walter
didn’t have the faintest suspicion of her affair with Leo. But maybe he was
more observant than she thought. And honestly, much like she’d felt with her
father when she was a teenager, Catherine was just plain sick of lying. “Yes,”
she said, “I am.”

She glanced at Walter; he didn’t look happy, but he didn’t
look outraged, either.

“He’s an old boyfriend,” she told him. “I thought it was
done and over, but then, he was passing through town a few weeks ago.” The lie
sounded off-pitch to her ears, but she decided it best not to mention that Leo
had “passed through” town a whole year before... and stayed.