Ruth Doan MacDougall

Essays, Journal Entries, Reflections & Short Stories

Happy Valentine's Day
"The Love Affair"
by Daniel Doan                                                              

Publication date: February 14, 2013
Ruth Doan MacDougall's Introduction to "The Love Affair" is HERE.

Daniel Doan          Driving north one afternoon in early June a few years ago, I stopped for supper at a country inn near the New Hampshire–Maine line. It was a remodeled farmhouse whose owner specialized in steaks and rural atmosphere. Except for a young couple at a table in the corner, the dining room was deserted. I drank a bottle of beer and looked out the windows at the green of the mountains while I waited for my steak. I heard the door open as another customer came in. At first I could not see his face. He stood with his back to me, settling his heavy shoulders into his suit coat with a motion that was vaguely familiar. He turned and looked at me for a moment before he came toward my table.         
          “Harry Hatch,” he said, “by God, it’s been a long time! You’ve lost your hair.”
          “You’ve gotten fat.”
          He laughed, and the laugh carried me back more than twenty years into the past, as though its boyish tone, closing some remote circuit between my ear and brain, had turned back time.
          Bob Richmond and I had grown up in the same Massachusetts town and had been in the same class at Dartmouth.
          “Sit down,” I said, as we shook hands. “We’ll have a drink.”
          He pulled out a chair. “I wish I could. I’d like to stay and talk with you all night. See here, where are you going?”
          “Trout fishing north of Moosehead.”
          “Great! You can drive along after me to our summer camp and spend the night. It’s right on your way, only another fifty miles into Maine.”
          “What’s the hurry?”
          He hesitated and I thought he almost blushed. “Well, I’ve been west on business and haven’t seen Mary for two weeks. I suppose you remember her?”
          “Of course. So you did marry her?”         
          “Naturally,” he said, and smiled—probably because he realized that I would remember how she had pursued him. He repeated, “It’s been two weeks.”
          Picturing to myself a mature affection between them, I said, “You’re a lucky man.”
         “Yes—yes, I suppose I am.” He looked down at his hands, saying nothing while I wondered what he was thinking. His eyes returned to mine and he asked, “Married?”
          “I tried it.”
          “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “It doesn’t always work out.”
          “No.”
          The pink-cheeked waitress brought my steak. Bob ordered coffee and a sandwich. He rearranged the silver in front of him.
          “I see your stories in the magazines occasionally,” he said. “Damn good.”
          “Thanks.”
          “I hope you’ll come along with me. Mary will be awfully pleased. What say?”
          “I’d like to very much.”
          Although I never cared for digging into the past with casual acquaintances, I didn’t feel that way about Bob. I liked him. I had known him quite well. And I wanted to see Mary. I wanted to see if her eyes still brightened when he came into the room.
          I thought of her again as we drove on into Maine, while the long twilight of early June settled over the hills, and the lights of Bob’s Lincoln flashed on ahead of me.
          I remembered her first as a plain and chubby little girl, two or three years younger than we were, perhaps a fourth grader when we were in the sixth. I think she must have been in love with Bob then. She lived on the same street he did, in the best section of Westmoor, and I used to see her when I stopped on my way home from school to play scrub baseball or football on the big lawn beside Bob’s house. Although she often got in the way, Bob was always nice to her, as he was to all the younger kids—he was a very kind person. He used to give her nickels to go buy root beer so she wouldn’t bother him.
          During the middle twenties, Westmoor was a pleasant place in which to grow up. Not far from Boston, it was still mostly country, and Bob and I had only a short walk to reach the woods and fields. He liked hiking and I was intensely interested in birds and animals. When we were in junior high, we took many long walks with my dog Stuffer (he had a tremendous appetite) and a knapsack for the sandwiches and a canteen. In the fall and spring we went hunting and fishing in the marshes. During the winter there was coasting with the gang we’d known ever since we could remember.
          Ours had been that kind of boyhood, and Mary seemed always around. She was never a pretty girl, tending to plumpness and a round face above a strong jaw, but she had lovely green eyes and taffy colored hair and she always looked neat and scrubbed.
          One day during high school, Bob and I were walking home together. We both lived in the same direction from school, but my house was several streets beyond his, across Woodlawn Parkway which was the equivalent of “across the tracks.” As we took the short cut between Hawthorn Avenue and the big Windsor place, keeping an eye out for the irritable caretaker, Bob told me that Mary had asked him to the Freshman Prom. We were juniors.
          “Can you beat it?” he asked, as he pushed ahead of me through the hedge. “What am I going to do?”
          “Tell her to go fry an egg.”
          “Golly, I’d like to, but I hate to hurt her feelings, and then her folks and mine—you know how it is.” He kicked at a dandelion. “Besides, when I told her I couldn’t, I thought she was going to cry—right there on the sidewalk in front of her house.”
          “I suppose you said you’d go.”
          “What else could I do? Heck, she’s been like a kid sister.”
          “Well, I guess you’re in for it.”
          “I guess I am.”
          That was Bob’s way. He was just too decent for his own good. He took her to the prom and he good-naturedly endured a lot of jokes about robbing the cradle. He let it drift along, taking her to another dance and sometimes to the movies, until the rest of us no longer thought it strange. And then he went away to prep school.
          She missed him that year. She used to come into the drug store where I jerked sodas after school and weekends, to perch on a stool and talk about him. Once she told me that she had hoped to go to a dance at Exeter. She’d talked him into asking her, but her folks wouldn’t let her go because she was too young. I suppose she must have been sixteen.
          “I’d counted awfully on going,” she said. “I didn’t think my folks would be so mid-Vic about it.”
          “Good thing,” I told her. “It’ll give Bob a chance to ask someone else. Why don’t you leave him alone?”
          “None of your damn business!” She whirled and strode out, leaving her soda unfinished.
          I learned later that he took another girl, a pretty little brunette whom I’d asked to dances without success. I won’t say I begrudged him the privilege of going to Exeter, or his money and his car, but I questioned the justice of the world’s arrangements a little. I consoled myself with the thought that I didn’t have to worry about getting into Dartmouth and was almost certain of the scholarship I needed. And I liked Bob. He was a very likeable sort. Beneath my other feelings, I was sure he deserved his good fortune more than some other people.
          Those must have been lonely years for Mary, while she was growing up and Bob had moved beyond her life in Westmoor. She saw him only during a few weekends and for a while in the summer when he wasn’t away at a boys’ camp as a counselor. He gave that up, the summer of his freshman year at Dartmouth, to work on a surveying crew in the Rockies. Of course, he didn’t have to work, like I did, but it was something you might have expected of him. Handsome and rugged, a football player, he just naturally seemed to get along in the world and to take delight in practical things. He wanted to do more than while away his summer in Westmoor playing golf and tennis and sailing at the yacht club like most of the fellows in his group.
          Somehow Mary found enough patience to endure the separations. She couldn’t have felt sure of him, or even hopeful, yet she never went around with anyone else much. I remember when she finally began to catch up with us, so to speak, in age. I took her to the Harvard-Dartmouth game the fall of our sophomore year.
          It came about in an almost accidental way. Bob and I didn’t see a great deal of each other at Hanover. Aside from classes, we moved in different spheres, living in dorms on either side of the campus and having different interests—sports with him, the Outing Club for me—but we always got along, and sometimes ate together at Saia’s. When I wanted a ride to Boston, I didn’t hesitate to ask him: that’s the kind of a guy he was. He had a Ford touring car, a phaeton I believe it was called, the latest thing. He let me borrow it on the condition I’d take Mary to the game. He said she had written that she wanted very much to go. It would please his folks and relieve him of the obligation he felt to be kind to her.
          “Perhaps,” he said, laughing, “she’ll switch her interest to you.”
          “Not much chance of that.”
          “Well, I can hope, can’t I?”
          It was a slim hope. Mary brought field glasses just so she could watch Bob play. She was quite grown up, with her taffy hair in a roll at the back of her head and a little green hat and feather perched on top, a green dress which flattered her full figure, a fur coat and silk-clad legs. She just missed being pretty. Alive with laughter and enthusiasm, she loved the crowd and the color and the bands. I thought she could pay me some attention, but she was too busy watching Bob. I allowed myself to assume the big brother role. Bob made a touchdown and covered himself with glory, while Mary cheered herself hoarse and turned and wept on my shoulder. She was a high school senior then.
          A year later she came to the Winter Carnival. She had entered Smith. I never knew how she arranged the invitation. Left to himself, I don’t think Bob would have considered asking her. But there she was, in a powder-blue ski outfit. I didn’t get a chance to talk to them until the last day of the weekend, being occupied with the Outing Club and the carnival events.
          I met them on Sunday morning as I was coming out of the Wigwam after breakfast. Bob looked in good shape—he was training with the hockey team—and Mary was gay as a snow bird. She said Bob was going to take her driving in a sleigh.
          “And I never drove a horse in my life,” he protested, “but she insists on living dangerously.”
          I felt that she was so much in love with him she wanted desperately to keep him amused and happy.
          Perhaps she tried too hard, because later that year Bob broke away and asked another girl to Spring Houseparty. For a time I thought Mary’s perseverance had failed or Bob had learned that it’s not necessary to be nice to people just because they want you to, and you feel you should. I underestimated the cumulative effect of Mary’s devotion on Bob’s kind nature. The next winter she was back at Carnival with him, and in June she came to Commencement with his folks, but this was not final.
          I have forgotten how, after the exercises, I happened to be alone with Mary outside Bob’s fraternity house. I suppose I’d stopped to say goodby, and he was packing or tending to some last minute business. At any rate, I remember there were shadows of the elms on the white columns of the porch and across the red brick walls. Students and their parents, both looking uncomfortable in the presence of each other, hurried past. Cars whirled by with a flash of laughing or sober faces among the piled luggage. There was a feeling of going away over the whole town, a sense of departure and new things. The chimes of Baker Library sounded clear on the June air. I recall thinking it would be strange not to time my life by those bells. Mary sat in the chair beside me. She was holding Bob’s senior cane.
          “Well, Harry, what are you going to do?”
          “Live the simple life for a while.” I felt that she wouldn’t really care about my plans for learning to write and wanted only to talk.
          “Bob’s going out to Montana,” she said.
          “Yes, I know.” Of course I knew—he’d been planning it for three months. His father had mining interests there.
          “That’s far away,” she said thoughtfully.
          I nodded. “And you aren’t going. When you asked him to marry you, he didn’t say yes.”
          She poked at me with his cane. “You think you’re awfully smart. Well, you’re right, if you want to know.”
          I started to remark that he’d probably marry a rancher’s daughter, but she looked so sad I couldn’t. “Cheer up,” I said, “he can’t resist you forever.”
          “I wonder.” She turned her head away and her voice became almost a whisper. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t love him so.”
          There seemed to be nothing I could say and we sat there silently until Bob came out.
          I didn’t see him again for over twenty years, until we met at that New Hampshire inn. We never had any reason to write letters and we lost touch entirely. After my father died and my mother left Westmoor, I went back only once, found friends changed or gone, and I didn’t linger. Bob and I had traveled our separate ways, but as I drove along behind his car through the Maine woods I looked forward to the completion of the unfinished pattern of memories which filled my mind.
          Ahead of me, I saw Bob signal with his hand while the car’s direction light began to wink. He slowed and turned off the highway on a side road and the trees closed in. Before long I could see a lake on the left. We followed a winding drive to a big garage. Beyond it, the porch lights of the house gleamed on the black lake. There was a smell of balsam in the cool night air as I got out of the car.
          “This is it,” Bob called. “Leave your bags and come along. Old Jake will tend to them.”
          Walking toward the house, I said, “You’ve got a swell place, Bob.”
          He squared his shoulders with that characteristic motion. “I spend as much time here as I can. Watch the steps.”
          We climbed broad flagstones. Bob began to talk rapidly, with an undertone of nervous excitement in his voice. I was puzzled by the tension evidently building up inside him until I realized he must be terribly anxious to see Mary again. The thought came to me that he was at last in love with her. I felt pleased and glad for them, and particularly for Mary whose love had at one time aroused in him only a tolerant affection.
          Bob was saying, “I never feel at home out west. I miss the greenery. Got used to it when we hiked around Westmoor probably. Everything is so dried up out there. I fly back as soon as I can, to see the green trees—well, and Mary.”
          He went eagerly ahead of me across the porch and held the door open as though impatient for me to move past him. I stepped into the hall and he hurried toward the paneled living room.
          “Mary,” he shouted. “Hey, Mary!”
          I expected him to call out something about his surprise visitor, but he seemed to have forgotten me. Mary got up from a chair beyond the fireplace. He took her in his arms. He might have been away two years instead of two weeks.
          Feeling somewhat of an intruder, I remained by the hall door, yet even across the room I could see that Mary had grown older gracefully. Her figure, too heavy when she was younger, now had a pleasant maturity. Her complexion was clear and soft to match her fine blond hair. She appeared to me much more attractive than I remembered her.
          She pushed Bob away from her. “Oh, Bob,” she said, patting his shoulder as if he were a small boy, “stop your nonsense.”
          With a shock, I saw the eagerness of hope vanish from his face and instead a shadow of hurt resignation fit itself to his features as though it had been there before. I had the strange feeling that I had come back to the final act of a play and found the characters reversed in their roles. It gave me a pang of confused unbelief, and I had scarcely collected my thoughts when Mary moved into the middle of the room and saw me.
          For an instant her face was blank. Then she smiled.
          “Why, it’s—it’s Harry Hatch! Bob, you didn’t tell me you were bringing him. This is wonderful.”
          She walked forward and took my hand. Bob followed her, saying, “I ran into him at the Oxbow. Persuaded him to come along with me.”
          “I’m awfully glad,” she said. “I was always fond of him, ever since he took me to that Harvard-Dartmouth football game. Harry, you’re looking well. That high forehead becomes you.”
          “Thanks. The years leave their mark, don’t they?”
          “Inside, too, I guess.” She made a little gesture dismissing the sad effects of time. “Sit down. Bob will mix us all a drink.” She gently touched his arm. “If Clara’s been defrosting, Bob, you’ll find cubes in the ice bucket in the pantry.”
          “All right, Mary.” He squared his shoulders and left the room.
          Mary sat on a couch by the fireplace. “Would you like a fire, Harry? It’s all laid. The room seems cool and I do like a little warmth in the evenings.” She started to get up.
          “Let me.” I knelt before the logs and held a match under the paper and kindling. We watched the flames creep up. There was a moment of awkward silence before I said, “I suppose you and Bob have children?”
          “Why, yes. I expect them here next week. Bobby’s seventeen. He’s at Exeter. Sheila’s nineteen. At Smith.”
          “Following in their parents’ footsteps, I see. It seems impossible they could be that old. You and Bob must have gotten married soon after he graduated.”
          “Yes, I gave up college and went out to Montana.”
          I couldn’t help smiling at her as I returned to my chair. “That’s not surprising.” And then I added, “I think it’s wonderful. He seems very much in love.”
          Nodding, she said, “I supposed you had noticed. Yes, he’s quite devoted.” She looked at me and slowly turned her face back to the fire. “Didn’t I chase him shamefully? Perhaps that was the trouble. Pursuit is an unrewarding way to love, don’t you think? It seems at last to make you give up. I gave up quite a while ago.” She shrugged. “Well, and now he’s in love with me. Funny how some things happen too late, isn’t it?”
          “Not funny, but I guess they do.”
          She gave a brief sigh before she tossed her head and forced a turned-down smile. “You always seem to make me sentimental. Let’s not talk any more foolishness. Tell me about your writing.”
          So we talked writing until Bob came back and passed around the drinks.

 

                                                The End

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© 2013 by Ruth Doan Macdougall; all rights reserved.

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RDM


Table of Contents

Introduction

Short Story: Boot Saddle,  to Horse and Away!

Travelogue: Girl Scout Trip

Travelogue: The Doan Sisters Go to England

Essay: The Silent Generation

Essay: Introduction to "The Diary Man"

Essay: Writing A Born Maniac

Essay: Legendary Locals

Reflection: Sequel Reader

Reflection: Paul <sigh> Newman

Reflection: More Frugalities

Reflection: A First!

Reflection: More About Ironing

Reflections: Sides to Middle/Barbara Pym

Reflection: Where That Barn Used to Be

Reflection: Work

Milestone: Laughing with Leonard

Reflection: Three-Ring Circus

Reflection: One Minus One—Twice

Reflection: A Correspondence with Elisabeth

Reflection: A Hometown, Real and Fictional

Essay: Introduction to
The Love Affair by Daniel Doan