Jonah began seriously dating her when they were still in high school — boat rides up the Connecticut River, and long drives to New Haven where they went to see out-of-town tryouts of incoming Broadway plays, and into New York to see the stage shows at Radio City and the Roxy, or the big-name bands at the Paramount and Strand. He once waited in line with her for three hours outside the Paramount on a freezing day in February, to see Frank Sinatra, whom he hated the moment Christie began shrieking; he thought she would faint dead away right there in the balcony, many of the girls actually did. Or just being together, walking home together from school on a bright spring day, or sitting on the lawn at night, fingers barely touching, a farewell kiss behind the shed where Lucas had tried to take off her pants, the sight of her as she walked between the forsythia bushes that separated the two properties a curious walk, so unlike her mother's almost as though she were gliding, a model's walk, with pelvis thrust forward and head erect.
She wore a blue gown to his high school prom, she had taken to wearing her hair like her mother's by then, sharp bangs across the forehead, blue eyes twinkling beneath them in secret amusement (secret contempt, he later came to realize), the pale blue of the gown emphasizing her eyes and clinging to her childish body. She was almost seventeen, but her figure seemed to resist all womanly transformation. Narrow-hipped and small-breasted, slender and slouched, she achieved a look that only years later woud become fashionably chic. Her face was undeniably beautiful, though, her eyes sometimes flashed at older men who stopped dead in their tracks and then quickly surveyed the slender body and shook their heads in wonder, dazed by their obvious mistake. When he danced with her, he could feel every inch of her body pressed against him, the small budding breasts that would never really develop into an abundant bosom, the protruding bones of her hips, the mound of her pubis, the curve of her back where his hand rested, his fingers sometimes spread to touch the tight firm buttocks, he had seen her almost naked once, white and dappled with maple-shadow as she twisted away from his brother's hands, the blue eyes angry and not at all amused that day.
He asked her to marry him on that graduation night, resplendent in his white dinner jacket, holding her cool and slender in his arms. The senior class had rented the country club and hired the best young band in the area, a fourteen-piece orchestra with monogramed stands and identical blue jackets, white shirts, blue bow ties. The trumpet section rose to take their chorus of "Summertime," straight mutes protruding from the golden glowing bells of their horns, ceiling lights glistening with blues and reds and greens that shimmered in brass-bound reflection, he danced with Christine Dunseath and asked her to be his wife. He was eighteen years old, and a languid June breeze blew in fresh over the dew-misted golf course and through the open French doors of the ballroom. She nodded when he asked her, and he said, "You will?" in surprise, and when she answered, "Of course," he whispered a kiss into her hair.
He had thought at the time, being eighteen, the United States involved in another great war for democracy, that he would naturally be called into the Army, that he would naturally serve his country, become a hero perhaps, though not a dead one. When he registered for the draft, however, he was afraid he might be rejected because of his eyesight, and even debated memorizing an eyechart before going down for his physical. But he decided against it, sweated through the examination instead, and immediately afterwards asked the doctor how he had done. The doctor told him his eyes were okay as far as the Army was concerned, proving once again the old military adage about healthy seeing-eye dogs. The military, however, did not yet possess either an adage or a deterrent for poison gas seeping into a man's system through a hole in his eardrum. Jonah was surprised to discover that he possessed just such a punctured eardrum and that the Army did not want him, better luck next war, Mac. Poison gas at the time was the ultimate weapon, the dread weapon each nation hoped would never be used again. In later years, Jonah would come to appreciate the irony of having been rejected because of the fear of poison gas, only to have the war finally decided by the use of a weapon a million times more heinous. He would also come to appreciate (and this only very much later) the supreme irony of fighting wars under the guise of preventing them, and would come to the conclusion (never admitted to a soul) that all men, including Americans, were warlike and that the invention and use of "The Bomb" was restraining them from doing what they really loved doing most: killing each other. ("I like physical contact," Lucas had said, "I like knocking guys around.") Lucas himself had enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was just eighteen, against Zachary's wishes, but what could the old man do? He was a hero, his captain later wrote, who managed to kill sixteen Japanese soldiers before being killed himself by a mortar explosion. "I am sending you a small carton of his effects, please know that we respected your son highly and share your loss deeply," kind captain sitting out there in the Pacific with jungle rot on his balls and dead youngsters on his hands. The small carton of effects included the maroon-and-white letter Lucas had received in high school for being the team's star halfback, a hero even then. Jonah's keenest memories of his brother would always be of those crisp October days, the sky above the high school field, the handoff to Lucas and the plunge, God, how he could run! Even at Yale years later, even as a law student there (his father and grandfather had of course studied law at Yale) he would experience a strange, odd sensation whenever the team came out onto the field, a shudder would run up his spine, and he would once again see Lucas charging into the opposing line, would remember once when Lucas got up and limped away from a pile-on and then waved to Jonah where he was sitting in the stands, his grin cracking white and sharp across his mud-stained face. I like physical contact, I like knocking guys around. He had knocked around sixteen of them before they'd brought him down, you do not get up and wipe mud from your jersey after a mortar explosion, you do not smile into the stands at your kid brother.
He married Christine Dunseath in the First Presbyterian Church on Stamford's Bedford Street in the summer of 1952, after he received his law degree from Yale. The reception was held at her parents' home on Shippan Point, outdoors in the garden. The forsythias were still in bloom, spilling their petals onto the ground, he remembered fleetingly the image of a younger Christie threading her way through those bushes on too many nights too long ago. She had not changed that much perhaps, there was still the look of a very young and vulnerable creature about her, except for the snapping eyes that flicked as surely as a riding crop against a jodhpured thigh. At twenty-four, she was still wearing her hair in bangs, continued to wear it that way even to the time of the divorce when she was thirty-four and a mother, and when her eyes betrayed the fact that she was no longer a high school girl. Across the lawn, moving from guest to guest, her champagne glass in one delicately poised hand, while Jonah's mother sat unsmiling with a fan spread on her lap, dark eyes solemn as she watched her son's bride — did she ever think of Lucas in his jungle grave, or had there even been a grave? Christie Dunseath, radiant in white, black shoulder-length hair, swooping black brows over blue eyes, laughing. And water commissioner Dunseath, almost entirely bald now, ruddy-faced and a trifle drunk, embracing her as she came across the lawn, Mrs. Dunseath uncomfortable in a yellow diaphanous gown, no riding crop in her hand, no horse between her legs, older now, but her face still clinging to its girlish mold, the way Christie's would for years to come, except for the eyes.