A Promise Made By Children

A Promise Made By Children

I fell in love with John on an unseasonably warm March night in 1958. I was seventeen; he was eighteen; both of us were about to graduate from high school in the small border town of Baudette, Minnesota. It happened on a Saturday night at Jim Tobin’s, a classmate whose father was a fisherman and lived on the edge of Lake of the Woods. Word up and down Main Street that evening had been of a party brewing. Jim’s folks were out of town.

Secretly shy and overtly something of a Goody-Two-Shoes to cover up for it, I’d never attended parties such as this, and wouldn’t have shown up at this one had not my date for the evening, Gordon, teased me about being a wallflower. With my cover about to be blown, I summoned what scant resources of extroversion I possessed and left Gordon standing on a curb in the middle of town while I took my mother’s car, picked up my friend Margaret, and drove to the lake.

I remember the cigarette smoke and beer smell of the house, the murmurs and laughter of classmates I’d expected to be there and others I was surprised to see. Someone offered me coke laced with vodka. I refused. Laughing, flirting, I moved towards the back of the big living room where the lake boys were playing poker with some of the boys from town. Don’t be a wall-flower, I coached myself—the little voice inside the brain. Poker was a game I knew. My dad taught me its sleights of hand, the feints, the poker-face, as soon as I understood numbers. Poker, Gin Rummy, Canasta and Solitaire. I stood behind Tony Borgen until one of the town boys teased me into sitting down. Just what I’d intended, and I joined the game.

Tobin’s house was anything but elegant. It crouched low against the trees alongside a creek or small inlet where they docked the commercial fishing boat. It huddled as though to protect itself from the arctic chill and driving snow that blew in across Canada. Inside, that night, the girls crowded onto the benches around the long wooden table just inside the door. Senia’s navy blue pea-coat smelled of wet wool. They laughed. They gossiped. They slid on and off the benches to accompany boyfriends on walks along the frozen creek, perhaps to seek seclusion in the spruce islands closer to the woods. I laid down a winning hand just as I lifted my head to see Gordon coming in the door. Don’t be a wall-flower, I reminded myself again. I flirted with the boy across the card table from me. It didn’t matter who he was.

When someone hollered out, "Let’s have a wedding!" I was already high on my own adrenaline, so that when John Weber volunteered to marry me, I agreed. He was one of the lake boys, tall and seeming shy, whose desk was across from mine in Social Studies class. He possessed the most amazing eyes. He could drink me with those eyes.

That night we stood in the midst of our classmates, hand in hand, while Jim Tobin held the Bible and asked the traditional questions. We spoke the vows. I do. And then again, I do.

Was it a game? He took me outside afterwards, "the honeymoon," he told his friends, and he put his arms around me. I felt the cool March air on my face. He bent his head to kiss me and I turned away. He let me go. He didn’t know that I couldn’t let him do this because suddenly I wanted it too much, and I had a secret. Just three months after graduation I would be leaving home to enter a convent. I was convinced that God had called me to become a nun. I couldn’t fall in love with any boy. But it was too late. I already had.

The attraction became too strong to ignore, and John and I began the courtship dance that ought to end in marriage but seemed to me to be doomed right from the beginning to a heartrending end. At the Senior Prom I shared with him my convent plans, and he told me that he was leaving in mid-June to join the Air Force. We didn’t know that we could change our minds about the future. Instead we chose to compact our joined lives into a few months of pure love. In June he left. In August I entered the convent, still the virgin I had chosen to be.

We carried memories, though, that lasted through twenty-seven years apart. A song we shared. The sound of waves against the beach. The sunrise that morning after Prom. Laughter. His long eyelashes performing the kiss of a butterfly on my cheek. Confidences shared. Secrets we would never tell another soul. The sensation of one another’s arms, of tender kisses, of the tears the night before John went away. The phone call he made to me the morning in August that I left for the convent. "Don’t go! I want to marry you!" He said. "I’ll wait for you until you see this isn’t right. I’ll wait until you take your final vows, because only then will I know it is hopeless."

We carried memories. He carried my picture in his wallet until it was ragged, and afterwards even, until I took my final vows and he married someone else. Then he put it in a box with the dance card from the Prom. Mother Ann, the novice mistress at the convent, ordered me to burn his picture—"If you love the Lord and really want to become a nun," she said.

We carried memories that never faded but only grew in intensity as the years passed. I remember the day I stopped on the sidewalk outside a café where a song John and I shared was playing on the jukebox. Another nun walked with me because we went everywhere in twos. My veil, troubled by a breeze, moved against my face. Sister Phyllis asked me what was wrong, and in an uncharacteristic moment of candor I confided that the song reminded me of a young man I’d loved. "I’m sorry," she said, moving off so that I’d need to leave the sound of the music. "You’d better be careful about thinking of that young man," she said as the song faded into the sounds of traffic.

This is what I learned: God takes seriously the promises that children make. After fourteen years in the convent, after ten years married to another man, after twenty-seven years in all, John found me again. After his own marriage, when his son was almost grown, he found me again. Just after my first husband died, when both John and I were free, he found me. When we needed each other more than we ever could have imagined, he found me.

It hadn’t been a game. The wedding that night in March at Jim Tobin’s house had been a foreshadowing. We returned there, in March of 1985, to repeat our vows and fulfill our destiny.