Four Seasons of Romance (2 page)

She had to admit the flower was good though. No crude clump
of clay, it showed the beginning of artistry, but as she knew from her father’s
teaching
,
art was little more than a waste of time.
Part of her was touched by the gesture, yet a boy who toyed with art couldn’t
possibly be serious about his studies. How would he ever mature into the kind
of man her father would want her to associate with? The kind of man she would
want to be associated with?

Catherine crushed the clay in her palm and threw it in the wastebasket.
To her surprise, it pained
her a
little, destroying
that flower, but she convinced herself it was the right thing.
Maybe he’ll
stop all this nonsense by tomorrow
, she thought.

But it wasn’t to be. Leo waited for her on the schoolhouse
steps the next day.

“Hey there,” he said, extending his hand, “we haven’t been
formally introduced. I’m Leo. Leo Taylor.”

Catherine nodded brusquely and tried to walk past him into
the school, but he wouldn’t budge.

“Don’t you at least want to tell me your name?”

She glanced at him, unblinking.

“Actually, I did a little homework,” he continued. “Not the
kind with books. I mean that I figured out your name. You’re Catherine Woods,
the judge’s daughter.”

“That’s right.” She nodded toward the door. “May I go in,
please?”

“Sure. I’ll let you inside.” As she walked through the door,
he snatched her satchel off her shoulder. “But you
gotta
let me carry your books.”

Furious, Catherine stomped to her chair and plopped in it,
then
Leo placed her bag gently on the desk and grinned.

*

As the week went by, Leo grew more desperate to talk to
Catherine, and she grew more desperate to ignore him. He tried to play with her
on the playground or offer her his apple at lunch, but she only turned up her
nose with a haughty air.

The more she ignored him, the angrier and more determined he
became to get her attention. His gestures turned slightly more devious as he
did everything to draw attention to him—he tapped his pencil loudly on his
desk, gave ridiculous answers when the teacher called on him, and drew
increasingly elaborate chalk drawings at recess. Once he got so exasperated, he
tugged on Catherine’s hair, the teacher catching him
midtug
,
and that day, Leo spent lunchtime alone in the corner wearing the dunce cap.

Catherine was resolute in her campaign of aloofness, full of
smiles for the other children—for Arthur, who treated her like a princess, and
for her girlfriends who hovered around her like worker bees around their queen,
but she had no smiles or kind words to spare for Leo. And the more she ignored
him, the more he wanted her to look.

So, they began. Leo was in love, but Catherine wanted
nothing to do with him. Every ridiculous gesture and every clay figurine he
gave her confirmed what she already knew—Leo Taylor was unlike her, someone
from a different kind of family, hence a different world.

And she was right. Catherine’s father was Josiah Woods, a
prominent circuit court judge and a direct descendant of one of Woodsville’s
founding fathers. Puritan to the core, he descended from a long line of
lawyers. Josiah ruled his household much as he ruled his counties—with a heavy
gavel and
  an
iron fist.

Leo’s father, Ellis Taylor, was the stark opposite, a manual
laborer with a drinking problem who had worked as an auto mechanic in Littleton
until he was accused of stealing from his employer. After that, he and his
family were forced out of town. Ellis had managed to find work at Acer Lumber,
one of Woodsville’s two large lumber mills, prompting the Taylors’ move.

Catherine didn’t know any of this yet, but she could tell
from the way Leo talked and the easy, carefree, almost indecent way he carried
himself that he came from an uneducated family. For the elitist Woods clan,
education was paramount—Catherine’s mother, Elaine, was an English teacher at
the brown brick high school. Both Elaine and Josiah were esteemed in the
community, and they had what was widely considered an enviable marriage.
Strangely, young Catherine could not remember a single time she had seen her
parents hold hands or kiss. She thought perhaps this is what
enviable
meant—the absence of all physical affection.

Over the weeks that followed, she watched Leo from afar with
one-part revulsion and one-part envy. Catherine realized they came from
distinct and opposite social classes—she from the privileged elite and he from
the working class. Deborah, Leo’s mother, worked part-time as a housemaid, and
the Taylors lived in a simple wood-plank home on Central Street, the wrong side
of town. The Woods, by contrast, lived in an elegant three-story Victorian
mansion on 147 N. Eagle Drive, high atop the bluff across the Connecticut
River.

Yet Catherine couldn’t help noticing that, despite his hair
that was a bit too long and his pants that were a bit too short, Leo was
deliciously carefree in a way foreign to her. She felt as if the whole town was
always watching her, and they probably were—she was, after all, the judge’s
daughter. Leo, on the other hand, was free to do as he pleased and took full
advantage of it even if it meant turning his freedom into teasing and,
eventually, into trouble.

*

That first spring, Leo played many practical jokes on
Catherine at school, just to attract her, but it never got him the kind of
attention he wanted.
As he was only ten and desperately in
love, Leo decided to up the ante.
Before he left for school that day,
his mother found a dead mouse floating in the milk pitcher.

“
Mamma
mia
!” she exclaimed.
Deborah was the daughter of an Italian immigrant, and she often burst into
spontaneous Italian when frightened or angry.

“What is it, Mama?” Leo asked.

“A rat.”
She fished it out and
dumped it in the trash bin.

More of a mouse
, Leo thought, as he fished it out of
the bin the moment she wasn’t looking, wrapped it in newspaper and slipped the
parcel into his book bag.

 By the time he got to school, Catherine sat at the
desk in her impeccably prim uniform. He loved it—the way she sat
pencil-straight mere inches from him, her hair like a shiny brown waterfall down
her back—and she wouldn’t give him the time of day, but today was the day that
would change, or so Leo thought.

He waited patiently until recess, though his fingers itched
to take out the parcel. As soon as the teacher dismissed them, Catherine
bounded out of her desk and joined her friends in the hall. Leo waited until
all the students had left the classroom, then he unwrapped the parcel and
thrust the little wet body into the hollow of Catherine’s desk.

She kept her desk tidy—every pencil, notepad, and eraser was
in its place, so, when she came back from recess, reached for her writing
tablet and pulled out a dead mouse instead, it was a shock she had never
experienced. Her scream could have curdled the milk left in that pitcher; it
was so shrill.

“What? What is it?” The teacher rushed over. “Catherine, are
you all right?”

Tears streamed down Catherine’s face. “No! I’m
not
all right.” She pointed at the dead mouse, now lying on the floor. “That was in
my desk!”

The horrified teacher clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, my
dear sweet Lord,” she exclaimed, and for a moment, the students thought she
might faint. Instead, she took Catherine by the arm (careful not to touch the
tainted area) and handed her a bar of soap and a water pail.

“Miss Woods, I want you to march straight to the pump and
fill the pail. Then, you wash your hands for a good four minutes!”

A sobbing Catherine nodded.

“Teacher?”
Leo’s hand shot up.
“I’ll carry the pail.”

The teacher was too overwhelmed by the crisis to argue.
“Very well.”

When they were outside, Leo dropped the pail and looked at
Catherine, trying like hell to make the words come out but he didn’t say, “I’m
sorry.” Instead, he said, “I thought it would be funny.”

She glared at him through her tears. “
You
did this?”

They were the first three words she had spoken to him in
weeks, and they were full of anger, hurt, and betrayal.

Leo looked as awful as he felt; from the moment Catherine
had started to cry, he’d felt like the sorriest boy on Earth.

“I did,” he said. “I thought it would be a good joke. I
didn’t mean to... I just wanted you to...” He trailed off, unable to express
his affection.

Furiously, she picked up the pail he had dropped. “Go back
inside,” she said through gritted teeth. “I don’t need your help, and I
certainly don’t want it.” She whirled around and left him standing there.

Leo felt rotten for the rest of the day; he did get her
attention but it wasn’t the kind he wanted and embarrassed her in front of the
class in the process. So, he did the only thing he knew how to do—make a clay
sculpture.

After school let out and all evidence of the mouse had been
cleared away and after
Leo’d
fessed
up to his crime and volunteered to clean the teacher’s chalkboard erasers for
the rest of the month as punishment, he ran after Catherine as she headed for
the door and handed her a clay sculpture he’d been working on.

“I want you to have it.”

She stared at him, then at the sculpture, then back at him,
not attempting to take it.

“Please,” he said. “At least look at it.”

Catherine was more stubborn than she was curious. She turned
around to leave.

Desperate, Leo tossed the sculpture, and it fell with a soft
thump on the green grass at her feet when, to Leo’s surprise, she bent and
picked it up. For a moment, she stared at it in silence.

“It’s ugly.” She finally
said,
her
voice devoid of emotion.

Of course, it wasn’t ugly. But Catherine recognized herself
immediately in the dark clay, despite Leo’s avant-garde style—the long, brown
hair, the wide eyes, the pronounced nape. She meant that she felt the sculpture
made her
look
ugly. Leo’s art was impressionistic, even at that young
age, but
she
was unimpressed.

“I don’t want it,” she said, and those words crushed Leo
worse than her judgment of his art. Yet, instead of throwing the sculpture, she
set it gently down on the ground, and he retrieved it moments later.

In a last-ditch attempt, he leaped forward and tucked it in
her satchel in one swift movement. She bristled, her shoulders tensing but
didn’t stop to remove it, walking toward her home on the bluff instead.

Leo stayed to bang erasers into each other, so angry with
himself for what he’d done that the violent banging suited him just fine.

Once she was safe in her lavish bedroom, Catherine pulled
out the sculpture and examined it more closely. Even if she didn’t like the
style, she couldn’t deny that the likeness was remarkable. He had captured her
lips, eyes, and cheekbones startlingly well—a remarkable feat, considering he
was working with a fist-sized lump of hard clay from the creek bed. But the
sculpture’s resemblance to Catherine only made her hate it more. Is this how
she looked? She felt like an ugly dark blob.

Still, something inside her wouldn’t let her throw it away,
so, she stuffed it in the back of the drawer and heaped piles of clothes on top
of it. The sting of the mouse prank was still sharp, the sculpture did little
to diminish it, and Catherine swore to herself she would never look at it
again.

*

By the end of the fourth-grade school year, Catherine’s
dislike of Leo had grown into contempt. She was not one to hate people; her
mother had taught her never to use that word and Catherine was a sensible girl.
She had known Leo Taylor for only two months, and most of that time, she hadn’t
said a word to him, yet, she had
an inkling
that this
was what it felt like to loathe someone.

On the last day of school in June of 1935, Leo made one last
attempt to win Catherine’s affections. This time, he would do nothing that
might scare her; he would commit a gesture that could only be interpreted as a
token of his true feelings, at least, this is what he hoped.

He rose early and took the long path to school, stopping to
pick a bouquet of black-eyed
Susans
along the way. He
arrived at the schoolhouse before his other classmates, giving him enough time
to work on his invention. He pulled the ball of twine from his back pocket and
the ruler from his school desk and began to fashion a kind of bouquet. He tied
the stems to the ruler so the flowers extended a good few inches beyond it, giving
him the extra length he needed to reach his love.

By the time Catherine arrived a few minutes later and
flashed him her usual cool stare, he had completed his project. The other
students trickled in, and both Catherine and Leo waited in silence for the
school day to begin.

The teacher embarked on a lesson in geography, and when she
got to the part about the Seven Wonders of the World, Leo took it as his cue.
He pulled the bouquet from his desk and slid it slowly forward until the wood
edge of the ruler was resting on Catherine’s shoulder and the flowers were
nestled against her ear.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. The unexpected feeling of petals on her
cheek took her by surprise, and she jumped, knocking the flowers
and
the
ruler to the ground with a clatter. The teacher looked up abruptly from the old
globe and focused on Catherine, who looked flustered. Her eyes followed the
students’ gaze to the clump of yellow flowers on the floor.