"Then, at the end of the evening, we looked for the others and they were gone. So I told her that I'd give her a ride home. Which was all that I did. Got a stony glare from Mary Liz when I took her to the door, but since it was less than ten minutes after the dance closed down, she didn't have any real grounds for complaint. I told Mary Liz that she'd gotten separated from her friends.
"What happened to the others?"
"Pat found out later that they were ticked off because she was dancing more than any of the rest of them and deliberately went off and left her, sort of hoping she'd get in trouble. She was only fifteen. Didn't turn sixteen until the end of December. Kids that age do things like that. They were all supposed to be dancing with a bunch of boys from St. Vincent's, but the boys weren't that interested in dancing, yet, so the rest of them only got out on the floor a couple of times."
"And then you started dating her?" Noelle asked.
"By taking her home, I learned where she lived. I was twenty, then, in college. I was going on a combination of state scholarship and work study, commuting over to Fairmont. Not a frat boy, by any means. I finished two years of credits in December of '63 and then went into the army. Figured that I might as well. My grades were okay, but not outstanding. Better the second year than they had been the first, but not good enough to guarantee two more years of deferment. I'd have been willing to ask her out, fair and square, but she said that if I did, her parents would send her to a nunnery. Which, after I'd found out a bit about the Fitzgeralds, didn't seem as melodramatic as I thought when she said it the first time."
"It probably wasn't." Noelle picked up her toast and then put it down again, tucking one foot under her as she sat on the bench in the breakfast nook.
"So we sneaked around. There's really no other way to put it. The next summer, she'd go to the drive-in with friends, get out after she got there, and get in my car to cuddle up while the film ran. Things like that. The other kids knew, of course. And since we were sneaking, we spent more time in places that were private than in public. With about the results you would expect.
"I didn't push her into doing anything she didn't want to." He smiled. "Maybe I sometimes coaxed her into going ahead and doing something she did want to. Not before she wanted to, though. It was like that, between the two of us. I waited nearly a year for her to be ready enough that she would ignore her scruples. Not just about having sex outside of marriage, but about having sex outside of marriage with a Methodist who made it plain that he intended to use birth control. Those last two items bothered her a lot more than the first one."
Noelle pursed her lips. "Actually, I can see that. In a way."
"The easiest place for us to go was over to Ma's. It was only a few feet from the driveway to the kitchen door. Our pa was gone by then, so Ma was working two jobs. Tom and Julia had married in August of '62, so he was out of the house and I needed to be home to watch Joe as much as I could, to save Ma from having to pay a sitter. So we'd sit at the kitchen table and do homework, all three of us. Me for college, Pat for high school, and Joe for grade school. Which, I think, is why my grades went up the second year. Playing cards or monopoly with him, sometimes. We sure spent more time doing homework than we did making love. There usually wasn't much time between when we finally persuaded Joe to go to bed and when Pat had to meet curfew on week nights. Sometimes none. Lord, but he was a little night owl. She got to stay out later on Friday and Saturday, though."
"You're telling me that you…? Right there?"
"Yeah, that's what I'm telling you. A couple of times, Ma got home before we came back out of my room. The first time, Pat just froze. I don't know what she expected. I introduced them to each other. Ma said, 'pleased to meet you.' Pat barely managed to nod. When we got into the car, she was trembling like a leaf. And I thought that if she was that afraid of her own parents, it must be some house to live in.
"Once I went into the army, we wrote. That had to be sneaked, too. Our go-between was Jeannette Adducci, Tony's aunt. She was the next-to-the youngest of ten, so her parents didn't watch her so closely that she couldn't mail Pat's letters for her or pick up mine to deliver to Pat. I'd rented a box at the post office in my name, so I addressed the letters to myself. And the end of that year, '64, when she turned eighteen, Pat picked up her courage and caught the bus for Leavenworth."
Dennis got up. "I should have married her then, but I couldn't bring myself to sign those promises to have any kids we had brought up Catholic. I'm sorry if that bothers you, since she brought you up Catholic, but it's the truth. And she didn't think that being married except by a priest was different from not being married at all. You pretty much know the rest of it by now."
"I suppose so." Noelle put the lid back on the butter dish.
"Except, maybe, that I loved her so much that it hurt. After I'd gotten to know her a little, not just look at her, she was so sweet. She still is. She can't stand the thought of hurting her worst enemy. That's what Bernadette says. That her sins have almost all been of omission rather than of commission, the way the Catholics put it. Not being able to bring herself to do what she needed to."
"She tried," Noelle picked up the butter and put it back in the refrigerator. "Most of the time, anyway."
Dennis looked down. "Sometimes, they weren't her sins. I sinned against her, too, the way the Lord's Prayer says. Not the sex thing. I don't regret that for a minute. More important things. When she did try, not having the person listen who should have listened. That first time she came over to Clarksburg, after I got back from 'Nam, I should have kept her there. Or if not the first time she came, the second. Or third, or fourth, or fifth, or sixth. I'll never get over blaming myself that I didn't. She tried to tell me what was going on. I let her down bad. I should never have let her go back to Grantville that spring of '68. I knew in my heart how much she was afraid of them.
"But I thought it would play out the way she promised the last time she left. That on the morning she was supposed to marry Francis, she would get in her car and go over to her classes in Fairmont and call me to say that everything was all right."
"Okay. I got the testimony from the hearing at St. Mary's. I know what happened then." Noelle turned around and looked at him, her gray eyes measuring. Evaluating. Assessing. "Were you as single-minded about Mom as Joe seems to be about Aura Lee or Harlan about Eden?"
Dennis looked back. Not a child. He was meeting this daughter as an adult. A daughter who would have to decide if she wanted to claim him.
"I would have been if I'd had the chance. I was while I was over in 'Nam and she was waiting. The way things turned out… While she was married to Francis, there were seven or eight years when I regularly saw, and slept with, a divorcee over in Clarksburg. Eventually she met a guy who was interested in marrying her, which was the end of that. After Pat wouldn't divorce Francis even though she was expecting you, I was so disillusioned that I slept around for a while. A couple of years. Until I figured out that there was nothing in it for me, so I stopped."
Noelle nodded.
"Nobody Pat ever knew. Nobody she ever heard of, I hope. I tried to make sure of that. Then I dated a couple of other women. Didn't live with either of them. Never wanted to. One moved to Indiana with a job transfer after four years. The other lasted quite a while. The Ring of Fire left her in Clarksburg. That's the chronicle of my misspent years. Abbreviated version more than unexpurgated, but the truth. Not that I'm particularly proud of what I did, either. Of the way I handled things. But if I'd spent all those years thinking about the fact that I couldn't have Pat, it would have driven me crazy."