Summer's End
Authors: Kathleen Gilles Seidel
Kathleen Gilles Seidel
The first time we spoke on the phone, Nancy Fallone
thought, “I'm either going to really like this person,
or she's going to drive me nuts.” How lucky she wasâ
both came true. So in memory of countless carpools, a
million sit-ups, and one red quilt,
Nancy, this one is for you
.
Â
“You won't remember me,” he said. “We barely spoke.”
The voice on the other end of the phone was correct. Gwen Wells did not know who Hal Legend was. Apparently they had been at the same community dinner the evening before. He had gotten her phone number and was now calling to ask her to dinner.
He was asking her on a date.
Gwen had been on dates before, but the last one had been with a young midshipman who had subsequently made her a wife, mother, and now a widow. Surely the rules that had applied to dating in those days no longer applied.
But Gwen had a thirty-year-old daughter, Holly, who was a single lawyer in New York City, and Gwen knew enough about Holly's life to know how one went about dating a stranger.
Yes, she would love to get together with Hal Legend. (Holly always accepted first dates.) But it needed to be lunch. (
Keep it short
was Holly's rule.) No, no, he didn't need directions to her house. She would drive herself, she would meet him there. (
Have your own escape route
.)
“You're making this too easy for me,” he said. “I was prepared to go to a great deal of trouble to see you.”
And there was something in the way he said “you,” something quiet and deep, that Gwen had not heard from a man in a very long time.
Â
Three days later Gwen admitted to herself that she was nervous about this date. She, usually well-focused, clear-sighted, and self-directed, was nervous.
She couldn't believe it. She was never nervous. She worried about her kids, of course, but who didn't? That wasn't the same as being nervous. Why was she even going? She was fifty-eight years old, for heaven's sake. All those rules about dating that she had picked up from Hollyâit wasn't as if Holly had sat down and taught them to her. It had never occurred to either one of them that she would need them.
So why was she going?
I'm old enough to be a grandmother. Grandmothers do not go out on dates
.
In point of fact, she was not a grandmother, something which she forced herself to remember.
But that's only because neither Holly nor Jack are married. I'm old enough and that's what counts
.
She looked at her neat gold-banded watch. She was ready, and there were twenty minutes before she needed to leave. What should she do in those twenty minutes?
This was not like her. She did not fluster easily. She was Mrs. Poised and Reliable, Mrs. Organized and Predictable, the lady with the tidy closets and neat drawers. The Queen of the Unchipped Manicures. The commanding officer's wife, the one responsible for all the other wives when the boat was out at sea. Can't understand the notice from the bank? Don't know if you should
get the car repaired? Too many wine bottles in your friend's weekly trash? You called Mrs. Wells. She could be counted on to sort out everything.
In those days an officer's fitness report always included an evaluation of his wife because the wives had had responsibilities too. Being an officer's wife was a job, and Gwen had been good at hers. Very good. Her husband would have never become admiral if she hadn't been.
But that was over now. Her manicures were still unchipped, her closets were still neat, she was still trim and blonde, but she wasn't Mrs. C.O. anymore. Mrs. Admiral Wells was Gwen, out on her own, actually going on a date. She wished Holly or Jack were here. This would all be easier if one of her kids were coming with her. They were great. Everyone always liked them.
She stopped herself. She was not dependent on her children. She was not going to hide behind them. In fact, she was going to make a rule for herself. If she actually made it to this date, she was not going to talk about her children, and if she got a set of grandchildren between now and then, she wouldn't talk about them either.
She forced herself to wait another ten of the remaining twenty minutes and then drove to the restaurant. It was in the suburbs, across from Tysons Corner, one of the biggest malls in the Washington, D.C., area. Parking was easy. Too easy. Now she was twelve minutes early.
Some people were always falling further and further behind in life. She was getting further and further ahead. It would be nice if that were a cosmic metaphor, but it probably wasn't. She was just twelve minutes early for her first date in more than three decades.
This was stupid; this fretting was not like her. She pulled her keys out of the ignition and swept up her
purse. She was going inside. So what if she was early?
The winter sunlight was thin, but it glittered off the low mounds of ice-crusted snow at the edges of the parking lot. Gwen pulled the restaurant door open. It was dark inside, and for a moment she could see only shapes. A man was rising, moving toward her. Apparently heâif this was indeed the correct âhe'âhad arrived even earlier. She pulled off her gloves and slipped them into her purse. Her eyes were adjusting to the light. She could see colors, now details.
He was a tall man with a full head of silvering hair and alert grayish eyes. The bones of his face were good, the slight squareness of his jaw balanced by the high cheekbones. He was a handsome man, but there was nothing overly arranged about his hair or dress. She liked that. She didn't like vain men.
She put out her hand. “You should have told me that you were the one who knew all the songs.”
She had noticed him the other evening. How could she not have?
The dinner had been held at a historic mill, a high, round wooden building with exposed joists and stone floors. Someone had brought song sheets, and a small groupâa nice mix of all agesâhad enjoyed singing. But there were only four songs on the sheet, and they wanted to sing more. Someone suggested “Clementine” and “On Top of Old Smoky” after that. Then there was a pause; no one could think of another song. People started to stir as if they were going to leave the circle. Gwen was disappointed. She would have liked to sing more.
Then a manâthis manâspoke. “Why don't we see if we can make it through âShine on, Harvest Moon'?”
Gwen knew only the chorus, or at least that's what she
thought, but with this man prompting, she remembered more of the verses than she thought she did.
Each time the group finished a song, they looked at him, and he always had a suggestion for another: cowboy songs, Broadway tunes, Scout camp songs, good songs, songs that were fun to sing. And whenever the group started to flounder, everyone singing lines from different verses, he got them back on track; he knew the right words.
“It really made the evening wonderful,” she said to him now. “Singing can be such fun even if you aren't very good at it.”
“We had time to sing only because you got the buffet line moving.”
It took her a moment to remember. Oh, that business with the extension cord.
The dinner at the mill had been a buffet, and the line had quickly grown quite long. It was easy to see why. The buffet tables had been pushed against the wall so that people could serve themselves only from one side. If they were moved out, the line could split in two.
But there was an extension cord, the caterers said. If the tables were pulled away from the wall, people might trip on the extension cord. “I'll stand on it,” Gwen had proposed. This was the sort of problem admirals' wives were expected to solve. “That will keep people from getting themselves tangled up.”
So Gwen had spent the first part of the evening planted on a heavy safety-orange extension cord. No wonder Hal Legend had noticed her. She had been a human traffic cone.
“It was so silly,” she said to him now, “to have anything on a buffet table that needed electricity. Or at least
they should have brought have a roll of duct tape to tape down the cord.”
Her son, Jack, would have had a roll of duct tape in his truck. Jack never went anywhere without duct tape. But she was, she reminded herself, not going to talk about her children.
Hal nodded, agreeing with her either about the duct tape or the electricity or both, but he didn't say which. Clearly he had the sense to know that there was nothing more to be said on this topic. “They have a coat check. May I take yours?”
He was raising his hands, obviously planning on helping her with her coat. So she turned slightly and let him lift it off her shoulders.
He was tall. She wasn't used to tall men. Her husband, John, had been five-foot-nine, and many of his fellow submariners barely met the military's minimum-height requirements. A tall man spent too much of his tour on a sub ducking his head and twisting his shoulders. As a submariner's wife, Gwen had grown to admire short men. Many of them, teased through their childhoods, had grown up with steady courage and a fierce sense of service. They seemed denser, tighter, tougher than less efficiently built men.
But Hal Legend was tall. She knew nothing about tall men.
He checked her coat, and a minute later they were seated, the business of taking menus and refusing drinks occupying them for a few moments. Gwen had already decided she would get a Caesar salad. She glanced at the menu, making sure that one was listed. Then she set it aside and leaned forward.
“I didn't let myself call Barbara Hutchens”âthe
Hutchenses had been the ones, he had told her, who had brought him to the dinnerâ“to find out about you. So I am ignorant. Does knowing a lot of songs sum you up completely, or is there more?”
“No, the songs pretty much cover it. I am a music professor, and I specialize in folk songs of all different cultures.”
A professor? She was a navy wife. What different worlds. “So you could have had us singing in Sanskrit?”
“Perhaps not Sanskrit, but certainly Serbo-Croatian.”
She asked him about his work. Why folk songs?
“I like the energy of popular culture,” he said. “I like learning about a society through the words its people sing.”
That sounded good, but Gwen wasn't sure she really understood. “For example?”
He gave several. Political assumptions, religious practices, economic principles, everything about a society he was able to connect with the songs. She mentioned some of the songs she herself loved, and he had something to say about each of them, things so interesting that she knew that she would never again hear or sing the song without thinking those thoughts.
Her unease, her nervousness, was gone. She enjoyed listening to him talk. It was interesting. No, it was more than interesting. She could feel herself leaning forward, ignoring her salad. It was exhilarating. He had such insight into large issues. It was as if he were an eagle, soaring over the earth, seeing all, the trees, the lakes, the mountains, and understanding all.
A submarine speeds through dark waters, beneath everything, seeing nothing.
There was a lightness about Hal that her husband had not had. John had been an intense man, keenly focused,
hungry to act. His admiral's stars had forced him to become wise, had forced him out of single-mindedness and into reflection, but the discipline had not come naturally or easily to him. Hal was different. He wore his wisdom lightly, the rightful crown to his years.
And suddenly all of this seemed right, this meeting a man when you were fifty-eight. At fifty-eight you no longer met the midshipmen and the graduate students; you met the admirals, the professors, the men who had become the Arthurs and the Merlins and the Solomons. Those men, the ones who were truly confident and kingly, they were no more interested in pretty lassies than you were in bright-faced lads.
Gwen let the conversation drift toward more personal matters. Hal was a widower. He lived in Iowa, teaching at a small college there, but he was spending the spring semester in Washington teaching at Georgetown University. “I needed to get away for a while. I was living exactly as I had when Eleanor was alive. I had changed nothing. I couldn't think what to change. Everything seemed right, but empty.”
His wife had died suddenly from a drug-resistant infection, a sore throat that had become pneumonia. “It was very surprising for us all,” he said.
Gwen knew about that kind of “surprise.” Her husband had also died suddenly. He had been driving home and had stopped to help a young mother with a flat tire. A drunk driver had careened off the road, killing John but not the woman or her two small children.
Hal winced at the story.
It had been four years. Gwen had done her mourning. She was as at peace as a person could be. “John was in the
service. He had always expected that he might have to die for othersâ¦although admirals sitting behind desks usually aren't the ones who have to do it.”
“I don't imagine they are,” Hal agreed.
It would be easy, Gwen suspected, for the conversation to drift back to the general; they could talk about the military, about ideals of service, and so on. “Do you have children?” she asked.
He had three. His older daughter was a lawyer. She ran a legal-aid clinic. His son was a linguistic professor in California, specializing in dying Indian languages. “Some of these languages are down to their last two or three speakers, and those people are pretty old. Ian and his students are frantically trying to learn what they can.”
Both his son and daughter were married with children. Phoebe, the daughter, had four children, and Ian, the son, had three.
“You said you had three children,” Gwen said. “Your other daughterâis she married?”
“Amy? No, she's not.”
Something pricked at Gwen. “Amy? Is that her name? Amy Legend? That's funny. She must have the same name as that figure skater then.”
“Actually, she is that figure skater.”
Gwen had been lifting her fork. She stopped, staring at him. Then she laid her fork back down.
Amy Legend? His daughter was Amy Legend?
Amy Legend had won an Olympic gold medal. She had been on the cover of
People
magazine. America loved her. She was a star, a celebrity. “Amy Legend is your daughter?”