the Army for almost two years by the time Nora and I moved to Holt. After graduation in June we were married in Boulder in the Episcopal church. Stewart Fliegelman stood up with me and Nora had a friend of hers as attendant. Then when it was time for Dr. Kramer to escort his daughter down the aisle toward the altar he did so without once looking at her—it was as though he just happened to be passing through the church on his way to work, or as if he were still deep in thought about Milton and Bunyan—and Nora looked lovely too, in her white veil and white dress and with her dark hair pulled away from her face like a young girl’s. Afterward, though, perhaps as an offering of consolation to her (for the old man certainly felt she deserved consolation, marrying me), he insisted that we take a week’s honeymoon in New York at his expense.
So we flew to New York, attended a play on Broadway, saw the sights, ate in restaurants with male waiters in white jackets standing over us, and we held hands under the table—all as you’re supposed to do—and it was in New York that we began those icy exchanges in bed which not only characterized that first week of our marriage but the next eighteen years as well. Then in the middle of that week Nora got sick with something, a summer cold or the flu, so we cut short the time in New York and flew home again. The change in air pressure in the plane caused her ears to pain seriously, I remember, and her face was chalk-white when we walked down the ramp. We stayed that night in Boulder with her father and the next day when Nora felt better we drove the three hours east to Holt. The day after that I went to work at the paper and Nora began to plant rosebushes behind our house in the dirt along the garage. It was not a pleasant beginning for either one of us.
But Jack Burdette seemed to be doing very well. He was home from the Army and it was obvious that he still thought of himself as having had a very good time for those two years while he had been in the service. That is, being a soldier, he had perfected his beer drinking and his poker playing and he had seen something of the nightlife in the towns near the bases he was sent to. Also, he had discovered that money, if he had enough of it, would buy many things that he hadn’t known before that it would buy, not excluding the temporary services of other human beings. He told us that he had developed a respectful view of the healing powers of penicillin. We heard all about it once he was home again. There was one story in particular that he told. It involved three German girls and two bottles of champagne and one hotel bed, the kind of arithmetic Jack said he understood. “Them German fräuleins won’t refuse you nothing,” he said. “You ought to try one yourself.”
Thus the Army had served as a kind of finishing school for Jack, a form of postgraduate work in the essential life skills. They had even given him a diploma in the guise of an honorable discharge to prove that he had passed, to show that he had learned their fundamental lessons.
Late in 1962 then, after spending his last paycheck in a final protracted binge, he had returned to Holt. He was heavier and stronger now, beginning to spread out and to take on mass, to develop a heavy gut which daily beer drinking had something to do with, and certainly he was more experienced than he was when he left, but he was probably not any wiser. That didn’t matter, though; Wanda Jo Evans was still here and so was his job at the Co-op Elevator. In short time he had taken up both.
In the meantime Wanda Jo Evans had undergone some changes herself. She had reached full bloom now. She had attained a kind of pinnacle of home-grown loveliness. I do not mean that she had become sophisticated in any way; it was not that at all; it was simply that she was even more beautiful than she had been before and that she was still warmhearted and utterly devoted to Jack. At twenty-one she had
So we flew to New York, attended a play on Broadway, saw the sights, ate in restaurants with male waiters in white jackets standing over us, and we held hands under the table—all as you’re supposed to do—and it was in New York that we began those icy exchanges in bed which not only characterized that first week of our marriage but the next eighteen years as well. Then in the middle of that week Nora got sick with something, a summer cold or the flu, so we cut short the time in New York and flew home again. The change in air pressure in the plane caused her ears to pain seriously, I remember, and her face was chalk-white when we walked down the ramp. We stayed that night in Boulder with her father and the next day when Nora felt better we drove the three hours east to Holt. The day after that I went to work at the paper and Nora began to plant rosebushes behind our house in the dirt along the garage. It was not a pleasant beginning for either one of us.
But Jack Burdette seemed to be doing very well. He was home from the Army and it was obvious that he still thought of himself as having had a very good time for those two years while he had been in the service. That is, being a soldier, he had perfected his beer drinking and his poker playing and he had seen something of the nightlife in the towns near the bases he was sent to. Also, he had discovered that money, if he had enough of it, would buy many things that he hadn’t known before that it would buy, not excluding the temporary services of other human beings. He told us that he had developed a respectful view of the healing powers of penicillin. We heard all about it once he was home again. There was one story in particular that he told. It involved three German girls and two bottles of champagne and one hotel bed, the kind of arithmetic Jack said he understood. “Them German fräuleins won’t refuse you nothing,” he said. “You ought to try one yourself.”
Thus the Army had served as a kind of finishing school for Jack, a form of postgraduate work in the essential life skills. They had even given him a diploma in the guise of an honorable discharge to prove that he had passed, to show that he had learned their fundamental lessons.
Late in 1962 then, after spending his last paycheck in a final protracted binge, he had returned to Holt. He was heavier and stronger now, beginning to spread out and to take on mass, to develop a heavy gut which daily beer drinking had something to do with, and certainly he was more experienced than he was when he left, but he was probably not any wiser. That didn’t matter, though; Wanda Jo Evans was still here and so was his job at the Co-op Elevator. In short time he had taken up both.
In the meantime Wanda Jo Evans had undergone some changes herself. She had reached full bloom now. She had attained a kind of pinnacle of home-grown loveliness. I do not mean that she had become sophisticated in any way; it was not that at all; it was simply that she was even more beautiful than she had been before and that she was still warmhearted and utterly devoted to Jack. At twenty-one she had
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