Dennis Stull spread some apple butter on his pancake. "If Pat won't give you answers, I will. At least to the best of my ability. Where did I meet her? It was a square dance. The fall of 1962. She was there with a bunch of girls her own age from St. Vincent's. Maureen and Theresa O'Meara, I remember. Pat Scanlon, the other Pat, who married Joe Bonnaro. Jeannette Adducci. Two or three more. I cut her out of the herd, so to speak, and asked her to dance. She was so cute. Just unbelievably cute. About five-two. Blonde ponytail. Blue eyes. Tiny little waist. Every now and then, I'd return her to the bunch, with good intentions of leaving her there, but pretty soon I'd ask her to dance again.
"Then, at the end of the evening, we looked for the others and they were gone. So I told her that I'd give her a ride home. Which was all that I did. Got a stony glare from Mary Liz when I took her to the door, but since it was less than ten minutes after the dance closed down, she didn't have any real grounds for complaint. I told Mary Liz that she'd gotten separated from her friends.
"What happened to the others?"
"Pat found out later that they were ticked off because she was dancing more than any of the rest of them and deliberately went off and left her, sort of hoping she'd get in trouble. She was only fifteen. Didn't turn sixteen until the end of December. Kids that age do things like that. They were all supposed to be dancing with a bunch of boys from St. Vincent's, but the boys weren't that interested in dancing, yet, so the rest of them only got out on the floor a couple of times."
"And then you started dating her?" Noelle asked.
"By taking her home, I learned where she lived. I was twenty, then, in college. I was going on a combination of state scholarship and work study, commuting over to Fairmont. Not a frat boy, by any means. I finished two years of credits in December of '63 and then went into the army. Figured that I might as well. My grades were okay, but not outstanding. Better the second year than they had been the first, but not good enough to guarantee two more years of deferment. I'd have been willing to ask her out, fair and square, but she said that if I did, her parents would send her to a nunnery. Which, after I'd found out a bit about the Fitzgeralds, didn't seem as melodramatic as I thought when she said it the first time."
"It probably wasn't." Noelle picked up her toast and then put it down again, tucking one foot under her as she sat on the bench in the breakfast nook.
"So we sneaked around. There's really no other way to put it. The next summer, she'd go to the drive-in with friends, get out after she got there, and get in my car to cuddle up while the film ran. Things like that. The other kids knew, of course. And since we were sneaking, we spent more time in places that were private than in public. With about the results you would expect.
"I didn't push her into doing anything she didn't want to." He smiled. "Maybe I sometimes coaxed her into going ahead and doing something she did want to. Not before she wanted to, though. It was like that, between the two of us. I waited nearly a year for her to be ready enough that she would ignore her scruples. Not just about having sex outside of marriage, but about having sex outside of marriage with a Methodist who made it plain that he intended to use birth control. Those last two items bothered her a lot more than the first one."
Noelle pursed her lips. "Actually, I can see that. In a way."
"The easiest place for us to go was over to Ma's. It was only a few feet from the driveway to the kitchen door. Our pa was gone by then, so Ma was working two jobs. Tom and Julia had married in August of '62, so he was out of the house and I needed to be home to watch Joe as much as I could, to save Ma from having to pay a sitter. So we'd sit at the kitchen table and do homework, all three of us. Me for college, Pat for high school, and Joe for grade school. Which, I think, is why my grades went up the second year. Playing cards or monopoly with him, sometimes. We sure spent more time doing homework than we did making love. There usually wasn't much time between when we finally persuaded Joe to go to bed and when Pat had to meet curfew on week nights. Sometimes none. Lord, but he was a little night owl. She got to stay out later on Friday and Saturday, though."
"You're telling me that you . . . ? Right there?"
"Yeah, that's what I'm telling you. A couple of times, Ma got home before we came back out of my room. The first time, Pat just froze. I don't know what she expected. I introduced them to each other. Ma said, 'pleased to meet you.' Pat barely managed to nod. When we got into the car, she was trembling like a leaf. And I thought that if she was that afraid of her own parents, it must be some house to live in.