Five Days in Paris(2)

Peter didn't want to marry Kate Donovan. He didn't even know who she was when they met, when she was nineteen and he was twenty, at the University of Michigan. At first, she was just a pretty blonde sophomore he met at a mixer, but after two dates, he was crazy about her. They'd been going out for five months before someone made a crack, and suggested that he was a hell of a smart guy for going out with pretty little Katie. And then he'd explained it. She was the sole heiress to the Wilson-Donovan fortune, the biggest pharmaceutical firm in the country. Peter had been incensed, and he had raged at Katie for not telling him, with all the furor and naïveté of a boy of twenty.

“How could you? Why didn't you tell me?” He stormed at her.

“Tell you what? Was I supposed to warn you who my father was? I didn't think you'd care,” She'd been desperately hurt by his attack, and more than a little frightened he'd leave her. She knew how proud he was, and how poor his parents were. He had told her that only that year they'd finally bought the dairy farm where his father had worked all his life. It was mortgaged to the hilt, and Peter was constantly worried that the business would fail, and he'd have to give up school and go home to Wisconsin to help them.

“You knew perfectly well I'd 'care.' What am I supposed to do now?” He knew better than anyone that he couldn't compete in her world, that he didn't belong there, and never would, and Katie could never live on a farm in Wisconsin. She had seen too much of the world, and she was far too sophisticated even if she didn't seem to know it. The real trouble was that he felt he didn't belong in his own world most of the time either. No matter how hard he tried to be “one of them” back home, there was always something different and much more big city about him. He had hated living on a farm when he was a kid, and dreamed of going to Chicago or New York, and being part of the business world. He hated milking cows, and stacking bales of hay, and endlessly cleaning manure out of the stables. For years, after school, he had helped his father at the dairy farm he ran, and now his father owned it. And Peter knew what that would mean. Eventually, he would have to go home, when he finished college, and help them. He dreaded it, but he wasn't looking for an easy out. He believed in doing what you were supposed to do, in living up to your responsibilities, and not trying to take any shortcuts. He had always been a good boy, his mother said, even if it meant doing things the hard way. He was willing to work for everything he wanted.

But once Peter knew who Katie was, being involved with her seemed wrong to him. No matter how sincere he was, it looked like an easy way out, a quick trip to the top, a shortcut. No matter how pretty she was, or how in love with her he thought he might have been, he knew he couldn't do anything about it. He was so adamant about not taking advantage of her that they broke up about two weeks after he found out who she was, and nothing she said to him changed that. She was distraught, and he was far more upset over losing her than he ever told her. It was his junior year, and in June he went home to help his father in Wisconsin. And by the end of the summer, he decided to take a year off to help him get the business off the ground. They'd had a hard winter the year before, and Peter thought he could turn it around, with some new ideas and new plans he'd learned in college.

He could have too, except that he got drafted and sent to Vietnam. He spent a year close to Da Nang, and when he re-upped for a second tour, they sent him to work for Intelligence in Saigon. It was a confusing time for him. He was twenty-two years old when he left Vietnam, and he had found none of the answers he wanted. He didn't know what to do with the rest of his life, he didn't want to go back to work on his father's farm, but he thought he should. His mother had died while he was in Vietnam, and he knew how hard that had been for his father.

He had another year of college left to do, but he didn't want to go back to the University of Michigan again, he somehow felt he had outgrown it. And he was confused about Vietnam too. The country he had wanted to hate, that had so tormented him, he had come to love instead, and he was actually sorry when he left it. He had a couple of minor romances there, mostly with American military personnel, and one very beautiful young Vietnamese girl, but everything was so complicated, and relationships were inevitably affected by the fact that no one expected to live much past tomorrow. He had never contacted Katie Donovan again, though he'd had a Christmas card from her that had been forwarded to him from Wisconsin. He had thought about her a lot at first in Da Nang, but it just seemed simpler not to write her. What could he possibly say to her? Sorry you're so rich and I'm so poor …have a great life in Connecticut, I'm going to be shoveling manure in a dairy farm for the rest of my life …see ya….