Love Story (6 page)

You bet your ass he would.

This may serve to explain why, on
that Sunday afternoon in May, I was obeying all posted speed limits,
as we headed southward on Route 95. Jenny, who had come to enjoy the
pace at which I drove, complained at one point that I was going forty
in a forty-five-mile-an-hour zone. I told her the car needed tuning,
which she believed not at all.

‘Tell it to me again, Jen.’

Patience was not one of Jenny’s
virtues, and she refused to bolster my confidence by repeating the
answers to all the stupid questions I had asked.

‘Just one more time, Jenny,
please.’

‘I called him. I told him. He said
okay. In English, because, as I told you and you don’t seem to want
to believe, he doesn’t know a goddamn word of Italian except a few
curses.’

‘But what does ‘okay’ mean?’

‘Are you implying that Harvard Law
School has accepted a man who can’t even define ‘okay’?’

‘It’s not a legal term, Jenny.’

She touched my arm. Thank God, I
understood that. I still needed clarification, though. I had to know
what I was in for.

‘ ‘Okay’ could also mean I’ll
suffer through it.”

She found the charity in her heart to
repeat for the nth time the details of her conversation with her
father. He was happy. He was. He had never expected, when he sent her
off to Radcliffe, that she would return to Cranston to marry the boy
next door (who by the way had asked her just before she left). He was
at first incredulous that her intended’s name was really Oliver
Barrett IV. He had then warned his daughter not to violate the
Eleventh Commandment.

‘Which one is that?’ I asked her.

‘Do not bullshit thy father,’ she
said.

‘Oh.’

‘And that’s all, Oliver. Truly.’

‘He knows I’m poor?’

‘Yes.’

‘He doesn’t mind?’

‘At least you and he have something
in common.’

‘But he’d be happier if I had a
few bucks, right?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

I shut up for the rest of the ride.

Jenny lived on a street called
Hamilton Avenue, a long line of wooden houses with many children in
front of them, and a few scraggly trees. Merely driving down it,
looking for a parking space, I felt like in another country. To begin
with, there were so many people. Besides the children playing, there
were entire families sitting on their porches with apparently nothing
better to do this Sunday afternoon than to watch me park my MG.

Jenny leaped out first. She had
incredible reflexes in Cranston, like some quick little grasshopper.
There was all but an organized cheer when the porch watchers saw who
my passenger was. No less than the great Cavilleri! When I heard all
the greetings for her, I was almost ashamed to get out. I mean, I
could not remotely for a moment pass for the hypothetical Olivero
Barretto.

‘Hey, Jenny!’ I heard one
matronly type shout with great gusto.

‘Hey, Mrs. Capodilupo,’ I heard
Jenny bellow back. I climbed out of the car. I could feel the eyes on
me.

‘Hey - who’s the boy?’ shouted
Mrs. Capodilupo. Not too subtle around here, are they?

‘He’s nothing!’ Jenny called
back. Which did wonders for my confidence.

‘Maybe,’ shouted Mrs. Capodilupo
in my direction, ‘but the girl he’s with is really something!’

‘He knows,’ Jenny replied.

She then turned to satisfy neighbors
on the other side.

‘He knows,’ she told a whole new
group of her fans.

She took my hand (I was a stranger in
paradise), and led me up the stairs to 189A Hamilton Avenue.

It was an awkward moment.

I just stood there as Jenny said,
‘This is my father.’

And Phil Cavilleri, a roughhewn (say
5‘9”, 165-pound) Rhode Island type in his late forties, held out
his hand.

We shook and he had a strong grip.

‘How do you do, sir?’

‘Phil,’ he corrected me, ‘I’m
Phil.’

‘Phil, sir,’ I replied,
continuing to shake his hand.

It was also a scary moment. Because
then, just as he let go of my hand, Mr. Cavilleri turned to his
daughter and gave this incredible shout: ‘Jennifer!’

For a split second nothing happened.
And then they were hugging. Tight. Very tight. Rocking to and fro.
All Mr.

Cavilleri could offer by way of
further comment was the (now very soft) repetition of his daughter’s
name: ‘Jennifer.’ And all his graduating-Radcliffe-with-honors
daughter could offer by way of reply was: ‘Phil.’

I was definitely the odd man out.

One thing about my couth upbringing
helped me out that afternoon. I had always been lectured about not
talking with my mouth full. Since Phil and his daughter kept
conspiring to fill that orifice, I didn’t have to speak. I must
have eaten a record quantity of Italian pastries. Afterward I
discoursed at some length on which ones I had liked best (I ate no
less than two of each kind, for fear of giving offense), to the
delight of the two Cavilleris.

‘He’s okay,’ said Phil
Cavilleri to his daughter.

What did that mean?

I didn’t need to have ‘okay’
defined; I merely wished to know what of my few and circumspect
actions had earned for me that cherished epithet.

Did I like the right cookies? Was my
handshake strong enough? What?

‘I told you he was okay, Phil,’
said Mr. Cavilleri’s daughter.

‘Well, okay,’ said her father, ‘I
still had to see for myself. Now I saw. Oliver?’

He was now addressing me.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Phil.’

‘Yes, Phil, sir?’

‘You’re okay.’

‘Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.
Really I do. And you know how I feel about your daughter, sir. And
you, sir.’

‘Oliver,’ Jenny interrupted,
‘will you stop babbling like a stupid goddamn preppie, and - ‘

‘Jennifer,’ Mr. Cavilleri
interrupted, ‘can you avoid the profanity? The sonovabitch is a
guest!’

At dinner (the pastries turned out to
be merely a snack) Phil tried to have a serious talk with me about
you-can-guess-what. For some crazy reason he thought he could effect
a rapprochement between Olivers III and IV.

‘Let me speak to him on the phone,
father to father,’ he pleaded.

‘Please, Phil, it’s a waste of
time.’

‘I can’t sit here and allow a
parent to reject a child. I can’t.’

‘Yeah. But I reject him too, Phil.’

‘Don’t ever let me hear you talk
like that,’ he said, getting genuinely angry. ‘A father’s love
is to be cherished and respected. It’s rare.’

‘Especially in my family,’ I
said.

Jenny was getting up and down to
serve, so she was not involved with most of this.

‘Get him on the phone,’ Phil
repeated. ‘I’ll take care of this.’

‘No, Phil. My father and I have
installed a cold line.’

‘Aw, listen, Oliver, he’ll thaw.
Believe me when I tell you he’ll thaw. When it’s time to go to
church - ‘

At this moment Jenny, who was handing
out dessert plates, directed at her father a portentous monosyllable.

‘Phil … ?’

‘Yeah, Jen?’

‘About the church bit …’

‘Yeah?’

‘Uh - kind of negative on it,
Phil.’

‘Oh?’ asked Mr. Cavilleri. Then,
leaping instantly to the wrong conclusion, he turned apologetically
toward me.

‘I - uh - didn’t mean necessarily
Catholic Church, Oliver. I mean, as Jennifer has no doubt told you,
we are of the Catholic faith. But, I mean, your church, Oliver.

God will bless this union in any
church, I swear.’

I looked at Jenny, who had obviously
failed to cover this crucial topic in her phone conversation.

‘Oliver,’ she explained, ‘it
was just too goddamn much to hit him with at once.’

‘What’s this?’ asked the ever
affable Mr. Cavilleri.

‘Hit me, hit me, children. I want
to be hit with everything on your minds.’

Why is it that at this precise moment
my eyes hit upon the porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary on a shelf
in the Cavilleris’ dining room?

‘It’s about the God-blessing bit,
Phil,’ said Jenny, averting her gaze from him.

‘Yeah, Jen, yeah?’ asked Phil,
fearing the worst.

‘Uh - kind of negative on it,
Phil,’ she said, now glancing at me for support - which my eyes
tried to give her.

‘On God? On anybody’s God?’

Jenny nodded yes.

‘May I explain, Phil?’ I asked.

‘Please.’

‘We neither of us believe, Phil.
And we won’t be hypocrites.’

I think he took it because it came
from me. He might maybe have hit Jenny. But now he was the odd man
out, the foreigner. He couldn’t look at either of us.

‘That’s fine,’ he said after a
very long time. ‘Could I just be informed as to who performs the
ceremony?’

‘We do,’ I said.

He looked at his daughter for
verification. She nodded. My statement was correct.

After another long silence, he again
said, ‘That’s fine.’ And then he inquired of me, inasmuch as I
was planning a career in law, whether such a kind of marriage is -
what’s the word? - legal?

Jenny explained that the ceremony we
had in mind would have the college Unitarian chaplain preside (‘Ah,
chaplain,’ murmured Phil) while the man and
woman address each other.

‘The bride speaks too?’ he asked,
almost as if this -

of all things - might be the coup de
grace.

‘Philip,’ said his daughter,
‘could you imagine any situation in which I would shut up?’

‘No, baby,’ he replied, working
up a tiny smile. ‘I guess you would have to talk.’

As we drove back to Cambridge, I
asked Jenny how she thought it all went.

‘Okay,’ she said.

Mr. William F. Thompson, Associate Dean of the Harvard Law School,
could not believe his ears.

‘Did I hear you right, Mr.
Barrett?’

‘Yes, sir, Dean Thompson.’

It had not been easy to say the first
time. It was no easier repeating it.

‘I’ll need a scholarship for next
year, sir.’

‘Really?’

‘That’s why I’m here, sir. You
are in charge of Financial Aid, aren’t you, Dean Thompson?’

‘Yes, but it’s rather curious.
Your father - ‘

‘He’s no longer involved, sir.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Dean
Thompson took off his glasses and began to polish them with his tie.

‘He and I have had a sort of
disagreement.’

The Dean put his glasses back on, and
looked at me with that kind of expressionless expression you have to
be a dean to master.

‘This is very unfortunate, Mr.
Barrett,’ he said. For whom? I wanted to say. This guy was
beginning to piss me off.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Very
unfortunate. But that’s why I’ve come to you, sir. I’m getting
married next month. We’ll both be working over the summer. Then
Jenny - that’s my wife - will be teaching in a private school.
That’s a living, but it’s still not tuition. Your tuition is
pretty steep, Dean Thompson.’

‘Uh - yes,’ he replied. But
that’s all. Didn’t this guy get the drift of my conversation? Why
in hell did he think I was there, anyway?

‘Dean Thompson, I would like a
scholarship.’ I said it straight out. A third time. ‘I have
absolutely zilch in the bank, and I’m already accepted.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr. Thompson,
hitting upon the technicality. ‘The final date for financial - aid
applications is long overdue.’

What would satisfy this bastard? The
gory details, maybe? Was it scandal he wanted? What?

‘Dean Thompson, when I applied I
didn’t know this would come up.’

‘That’s quite right, Mr. Barrett,
and I must tell you that I really don’t think this office should
enter into a family quarrel. A rather distressing one, at that.’

‘Okay, Dean,’ I said, standing
up. ‘I can see what you’re driving at. But I’m still not gonna
kiss my father’s ass so you can get a Barrett Hall for the Law
School.’

As I turned to leave, I heard Dean
Thompson mutter,

‘That’s unfair.’

I couldn’t have agreed more.

Jennifer was awarded her degree on Wednesday. All sorts of relatives
from Cranston, Fall River - and even an aunt from Cleveland - flocked
to Cambridge to attend the ceremony. By prior arrangement, I was not
introduced as her fiancé, and Jenny wore no ring: this so that none
would be offended (too soon) about missing our wedding.

‘Aunt Clara, this is my boyfriend
Oliver,’ Jenny would say, always adding, ‘He isn’t a college
graduate.’

There was plenty of rib poking,
whispering and even overt speculation, but the relatives could pry no
specific information from either of us - or from Phil, who I guess
was happy to avoid a discussion of love among the atheists.

On Thursday, I became Jenny’s
academic equal, receiving my degree from Harvard - like her own,
magna cum laude. Moreover, I was Class Marshal, and in this capacity
got to lead the graduating seniors to their seats. This meant walking
ahead of even the summas, the super-superbrains. I was almost moved
to tell these types that my presence as their leader decisively
proved my theory that an hour in Dillon Field House is worth two in
Widener Library. But I refrained. Let the joy be universal.

I have no idea whether Oliver Barrett
III was present.

More than seventeen thousand people
jam into Harvard Yard on Commencement morning, and I certainly was
not scanning the rows with binoculars. Obviously, I had used my
allotted parent tickets for Phil and Jenny. Of course, as an alumnus,
Old Stonyface could enter and sit with the Class of ‘26. But then
why should he want to? I mean, - weren’t the banks open?

The wedding was that Sunday. Our
reason for excluding Jenny’s relatives was out of genuine concern
that our omission of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost would make the
occasion far too trying for unlapsed Catholics. It was in Phillips
Brooks House, an old building in the north of Harvard Yard. Timothy
Blauvelt, the college Unitarian chaplain, presided. Naturally, Ray
Stratton was there, and I also invited Jeremy Nahum, a good friend
from the Exeter days, who had taken Amherst over Harvard. Jenny asked
a girl friend from Briggs Hall and - maybe for sentimental reasons her tall, gawky colleague at the
reserve book desk. And of course Phil.