They finally seemed to buy it. “We believe you, dear,” Mom said as Dad nodded silently in agreement, “but it was very fool-ish of you to put yourself in such a situation of temptation. Your guardian angel can only do so much. You were just asking for trouble.”
“I can see that now,” I said and promised them I would not make the same mistake again. Silently I told myself that, at least when it came to my parents, the truth was not always the best course. From that day forward, I simply told them what I knew they wanted to hear—or at least refrained from telling them what they did not. The decision was a simple one that allowed me to continue down the path of least resistance with them. The only trade-off was with my pride and integrity. It was a swap I was willing to make.
I became one of those underclassmen with a girlfriend back home, and I would see Becky whenever I returned for holidays or long weekends, during which we slinked around behind the backs
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of my parents, who were still hoping against all circumstantial evidence that their youngest son’s virginity was intact and would remain so until marriage. Fortunately, we had allies in Becky’s permissive parents, who understood our need to have alone time in Becky’s bedroom with the door locked.
After graduating from high school, Becky followed me to Central, even though I had not encouraged her. It was the only college she applied to. By then I was living off campus in a coed house, and she was in a dormitory. My journalism classes were on the other side of campus from her music courses. We saw each other when we could, and I enjoyed having her there, but I continued to treat her like a part-time girlfriend. Becky, always the accommodating one, allowed me to.
Then I got out of college and moved halfway across the state, and our relationship returned to long-distance status, with weekend visits a couple of times a month. By 1982 she was out of college, too—and looking to begin a life together. She pushed to move in with me, and I resisted. I liked Becky and cared about her; we had natural chemistry and many good times together. But I could not imagine spending my life with her. The joke among my male friends was that my idea of commitment would be to invite Becky to move to Grand Rapids, sixty miles to the north, so she’d be only an hour’s drive away, not three. That wasn’t far from the mark.
The truth was, the status quo suited me fine. I got to have a fun-loving girlfriend and lover without all the baggage of a full-time relationship. Our twice-monthly visits together, most of which were spent in bed, were just about the right amount of Becky for me. She hung on, hoping for more, even as my lackluster commitment became increasingly impossible to ignore. The relationship lapsed into a tired stasis, becoming more and more strained.
Every Sunday afternoon like clockwork my parents called to catch up, and every Sunday I perpetuated a freewheeling fiction about the life I was leading. Actually, just two aspects of it: church and Becky. In our weekly chat, one of the first questions
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always out of their mouths was “How was Mass this morning?” I had grown adept at hiding from them the fact that, except during visits home, I had not gone to church since the day I left for college six years earlier. “Oh, pretty good,” I would say, and I’m sure it had been for those in attendance. Mom and Dad knew better than to ask too many questions, and I knew better than to offer too many details. Over the years I had perfected the art of obfuscating without exactly lying outright. I would drop little nug-gets of hope into our weekly phone conversations like a sailor might drop life preservers to men overboard. I wanted to give them something to cling to. I would say things like “Saint Bart’s just put a beautiful addition onto the back of the church.” I was careful not to say I had actually set foot inside Saint Bart’s, but that’s the impression I hoped to leave.
Sometimes my efforts returned to haunt me. I prepared for my parents’ first weekend visit to my new apartment by looking up the nearest Catholic church in the phone book. I found the intersection on a map and memorized the route. I called ahead and got the Mass times so I could breezily let drop, as if I did this every Sunday, “Should we shoot for the nine-fifteen, the eleven o’clock, or the twelve-thirty?” I thought I had covered all my bases. But when we arrived at the intersection where the church was located, there wasn’t one church but three. I had no idea which one was for Catholics and knew I had only a few seconds to figure it out. My eyes searched for any sign of Catholicism: a statue of the Virgin Mary, a crucifix, anything. Finally I spotted a plain cross, swallowed hard, and pulled into the parking lot—of a Lutheran church. “I think we want to be over there,” Dad said, pointing across the street. Then from the backseat, more playful than scolding, Mom chimed in: “Oh, Johnny boy.”
When it came to Becky, my duplicity was even more creative.
Each phone call they would inquire, “So, have you seen Becky lately?” They would ask it in a breezy, chatty way, just like they asked about Mass. But as with Mass, I knew they were probing
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for information. I was careful to give away no usable intelligence.
As far as my parents knew, Becky had never once stayed at my apartment. When I visited her at the university, my tale went, I stayed with male friends, and when she visited me in Saint Joseph, I arranged to have her stay with a married couple I knew from work, who were gracious enough to open their spare bedroom to her. I gave my parents the same things my siblings had learned to give them: plausible deniability and enough leeway to allow them to believe they were succeeding in their lifelong mission to raise their children as devout and chaste practicing Catholics. None of us wanted to disappoint them.
My paper was called the Herald-Palladium and it served the racially divided cities of Saint Joseph and Benton Harbor, though not equally, with daily doses of crime news, ribbon cuttings, and small-town gossip. Crimes committed by blacks against whites received especially sensational play. A favorite feature was the weekly photo gallery of deadbeat dads who had not paid their child support. It was truly an awful newspaper and an awful place to work, run by a former World War II submarine commander who barked orders and threats like he was still operating under martial law. With the exception of four grandmotherly ladies who ran the women’s page, the staff consisted entirely of white men, nearly all of whom smoked. An inky cloud of cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke clung to the ceiling of the newsroom at all hours of the day.
Into this morass one snowy winter’s day marched a young woman. I noticed her right away. How could I not? She arrived fresh out of Michigan State University to begin her journalism career as the Herald-Palladium’s first-ever woman news reporter.
The whole staff had anticipated the arrival of “the girl reporter”
for weeks. And now here she was, standing in the newsroom, tall and slender, with a refined bearing and sandy blond hair that
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fell to her shoulders. Instantly, I was smitten. When I finally got a chance to introduce myself, she cut me off and insisted she had already met me during an earlier whirlwind of introductions.
“Um, no, you didn’t,” I corrected her.
“Yes I did.”
“Nope. You’re confusing me with someone else,” I said and wanted to add, You’re the first woman under fifty to set foot in this newsroom and easily the most beautiful. Believe me, if I’d met you, I’d remember.
“I’m sure I met you.”
“Not me. Wrong guy.”
We continued back and forth like this until it became so awkward that the only course left was to walk away. I never did get the chance to properly introduce myself. Was I really that forget-table? To me and every other man on staff, she was the biggest event to hit the paper in years: a young, pretty, single woman breaking the gender barrier. To her, I was just one of the many faceless males, married and unmarried, who hovered around her, fawning and jockeying for her attention. Before walking off, she
cheerfully dropped into the conversation what she had told all the rest, that she had taken the job primarily to be near her steady boyfriend, who was a graduate student at Notre Dame University, a half hour down the road.
“That’s great,” I said. “Makes perfect sense.”
I had just met this woman and already I was experiencing a piercing pang of heartsickness the likes of which I had seldom felt during seven years of dating Becky. Maybe it was because Becky tried so hard and this new woman, Jenny, showed no interest in trying at all. She was already taken and, even if she had not been, could not have cared less about me. She couldn’t even tell me apart from the next guy in line. Her indifference made me want her all the more.
As winter stretched into spring, Jenny and I gradually became pals. We shot messages back and forth on our computers
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and gossiped in the lunchroom. We began going out after work for pizza and beer and took weekend hikes in the wooded dunes along Lake Michigan. She told me all about her boyfriend; I told her about my girlfriend, making the relationship sound stronger than it was. I didn’t want to sound too eager.
That spring I bought an aging but seaworthy twenty-eight-foot sailboat with a cabin that slept four, and she volunteered to meet me down at the marina to help work on it. Together, we scrubbed and painted the bottom, sanded and oiled the teak trim, waxed the decks, monkeyed with the engine. We often worked until dusk and then found ourselves in the cockpit as the sun set over the water, drinking wine or splitting carryouts. Jenny had become my closest friend, and although I steadfastly pretended otherwise, so much more. At long last I had a view of what love really was, and I was falling headfirst into it at a dizzying speed.
I felt like a spider cascading over Niagara Falls, powerless to do anything but be swept away. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Jenny felt that way, too. Over Memorial Day weekend we had dinner together, at which we both confessed how hollow our respective relationships had grown. At the end of the evening, back at her apartment, I leaned over and kissed her. It was a kiss that would forever change our lives. The next weekend Jenny summoned the Notre Dame boyfriend to a restaurant and broke up with him. Shortly after that, I did the same with Becky. She acted almost relieved to at last get a clear decision from me.
The relationship advanced at a breathless pace, a pace I had never dreamed possible. Every day Jenny and I seemed to fall more in love. I found everything about her intriguing, including her sharp tongue and stinging wit. Even when we had fights I swooned over her. She called me Yogi Grogie, and I called her Jen-Jen. She was always doing things to steal my heart. After buying her first microwave oven, she invited me over for an all-microwave dinner, and the pork chops came out so thoroughly over-done they had turned translucent, as hard and brittle as petrified
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wood. “I’m so humiliated!” she wailed, but I found her disastrous cooking skills, so unlike my mother’s, irresistibly endearing. One autumn night she slept over at my apartment. The next morning when we walked outside, I saw she had camouflaged her bright orange Chevy Vega with a thick layer of fallen leaves to disguise its presence in front of my place. She was concerned for her reputation, and I found it adorable beyond words.
In phone calls home, I gushed to Mom and Dad about this new girl in my life. They sounded elated, truly thrilled. I suspect the real reason was that Becky was finally out of the picture.
“Is she a Catholic?” Mom and Dad asked in chorus.
“Um, no,” I said. “She’s Presbyterian.” From the silence on the line, I could hear their disappointment. I knew just how Mom would break the news to the church ladies when she announced John’s new girlfriend: “Well, she’s not a Catholic, but if they’re really in love, I suppose that’s what matters most.”
“Yep, Presbyterian,” I repeated. But even that was a stretch.
Jenny was raised marginally Presbyterian, but no one in her family was religious, least of all her. “We’re a bunch of heathens,”
she liked to quip, and I prayed silently she would never use the line in front of my parents. It was bad enough for them to know that Jenny was not Catholic; to know she was nothing at all would be heresy.
“Presbyterians are actually quite a bit like Catholics,” I offered. “Lots of similarities.”
“Some major differences, too,” Dad shot back. “The Protestants won’t even acknowledge our Blessed Virgin Mother or the Immaculate Conception. They deny the core tenets of Catholicism.” Then he recited, as he had so many times before, why Catholicism was the one true faith. I didn’t even try to argue.
“She can convert!” Mom exclaimed with a eureka-moment brightness in her voice. “Lots of people convert before marrying a Catholic.”
“Ma, stop it!” I said. “Let’s not get carried away. We just
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started dating.” What I could have said, though, with absolute certainty, was that Jenny would never, ever convert. Not for me, not for any man. Not for all the love or money in the world. If I wanted her, I would have to take her just the way she was, and that was fine with me.
“It’s just something to think about as you two get more serious,” Mom said.
When they finally met her, during a weekend visit to my apartment, Mom and Dad seemed nearly as smitten by Jenny as I was. She was elegant and charming and clearly crazy about their son. She impressed Dad with her homemade apple pie and Mom with her spotless apartment. Mostly, she impressed them by not being Becky. In fact, she was nearly the antithesis of Becky. She had no mountainous missiles to scramble men’s minds. She radiated girl-next-door wholesomeness and clearly looked forward to marriage and motherhood. Jenny seemed to like my parents a lot, too. Their budding relationship, I noted, was off to a very promising start.
Chapter 19
o
Asmall-town newspaper like the Herald-Palladium
was a career destination for only two kinds of journalists: those with ties to the area who were willing to make professional sacrifices to put down roots, and those without the talent or ambition to move on. For everyone else it was a humble first career rung until something better came along. My break came about a year after meeting Jenny when I was hired by the Kalamazoo Gazette to write about politics. Kalamazoo was a college town an hour’s drive due east of Saint Joseph, and Jenny helped me move into my new apartment. Several months later Jenny got her break, too, moving to the Muskegon Chronicle to cover education. With her move, we were now more than two hours apart, driving to see each other every weekend and occasionally midweek, as well. The long-distance commute was far from ideal, but it was bearable, and our shared hope was that the next career jump would bring us into the same city again.
Then I received a letter that was like winning the lottery, only better. I had been accepted into a midcareer fellowship pro-
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gram at Ohio State University. The opportunity was amazing, a full ride covering tuition and living expenses for a year of study, culminating in a master’s degree in journalism. The program accepted only ten journalists a year from dozens of applications nationwide. I knew it could be my ticket out of small-town newspaper jobs. I couldn’t pass it up. But Columbus was nine hours from Muskegon, and I knew Jenny would be crushed. This was a part of the dream she had not counted on, a part that did not include her. I thought about it overnight, then accepted without telling her.
It was cowardly of me and in bad form. When I finally broke the news to her, what made her angriest of all was that I had not included her in the decision. We were a couple planning a future together, and I had thrust a unilateral edict upon her. I think she just wanted to be asked, even if she knew the only answer she could give was “Yes, go.”
We survived the year but not without some calluses to our souls. Even though we spoke every night on the phone, it was impossible not to grow apart with the d
istance. Jenny was working undercover in the local high school, posing as a student for a series of investigative articles. I was deep into my graduate studies. We were on separate planets whose orbits no longer quite aligned. Then it got worse.
From Ohio State, I was accepted into a second journalism fellowship program, this one in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Jenny and I were now twenty-six hours apart. And when the three-month program ended, I was hired as a reporter at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, across the state in Fort Lauderdale. My dream of landing at a metropolitan paper had been realized, but at the expense of reuniting with Jenny. Our future looked bleak.
How long could a couple go on like this, barely seeing each other, getting by with phone calls and letters? We were both ready to give up.
Always the good girlfriend, Jenny offered to help me move
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my belongings to Florida and set up my new apartment—a fact I kept hidden from my parents because I could think of no plausible way to explain where she might sleep other than with me.
While in town, she walked unannounced into the newsroom of the Palm Beach Post and handed her résumé and writing samples to the editors. They were especially impressed with her undercover high-school work. Two weeks later she had the job, and a month after that I helped her move into an apartment just a fifteen-minute drive from my own. Our dream had taken a few major detours but ultimately landed us where we had always hoped. Mom and Dad congratulated us heartily—especially after I made clear we had separate apartments.
Six months into Jenny’s one-year lease, I said, “This is crazy.
I love you. You love me. We spend all our time together anyway.
Why don’t we just move in together?”
Jenny blinked hard, and I thought she was going to cry. Then she threw her arms around my neck and said, “I accept.”