“Oh what a shame! We’re going into Ica this morning to see the textiles in the museum.” Mrs. Schneider leans over confidentially to the three women. “I don’t think Otto is up to walking around in the sun at midday, especially if he starts sampling all the wine.”
Mr. Schneider suggests they all meet later in the day over cocktails and compare notes. Kate is relieved. She’s feeling uncomfortable posing as a Peace Corps worker and is reluctant to admit she is a nun. How can she explain being here at a resort with two freewheeling companions?
As their taxi pulls up in front of the hotel, Kate watches the couple from the front porch. The tall, stooped man takes his wife’s arm as they go down the steps of the veranda. Kate imagines them on their wedding day some forty years before, he engulfing her in his embrace and she small and shy in his arms. What blows have the years delivered, she wonders, and how have they managed to hang on to each other through them all? Kate thinks of her parents, whose marriage was hardly perfect. They’d had more than a few quarrels, usually over money or the children.
One of Kate’s earliest memories is of the night her mother had wept on the phone because her father was late. She and her brother and sister were all dressed up, waiting for their father to come home and take them to Grandma Sullivan’s house for dinner. Finally her mother gave up and put them all to bed. Much later Kate awakened to the voices of her parents, an angry, indistinct buzz coming from the lighted kitchen. She padded to the door, and stood watching as her father, his face flushed and happy, kept trying to grab her mother. “It’s done now. I’ve enlisted. I couldn’t stand it any longer.” Her mother was crying, pushing him away.
Kate found out later that it was the night her father had joined the Marine Corps. He had been gone for four years, and she was six when he came back. She thought she remembered the day he came home, but it could be that she heard the story so often that the memory had been created by the telling. She was alone in the living room on a Sunday afternoon. Her mother was out shopping, and her grandmother was taking a nap. Where was Dan? Kate had her Betty Grable paper dolls spread out on the rose carpet when the doorbell rang. She ran to the door and peeked between the curtains covering the panes of glass. A tall, dark-haired man in a dark-green uniform stood waiting, ominous amid the red begonias in clay pots and the green-and-white cushions of the porch swing. He had a mustache.
Kate backed up slowly and sat still on the sofa. The man rang again, insistently. She edged over to the door and peered through the muslin curtain. Startled, the man stooped down to her level, took off his hat, and yelled: “Katie, open the door. It’s me—Daddy.”
She opened the door and was swept up in his arms as he whirled her round and round the living room. Her face was crushed against his chest, his ribbons cutting into her cheek. He smelled of pipe smoke. By the time her mother came home she was perched on a big easy chair telling her father, who sat on the floor in front of her, about the trials of kindergarten. His eyes never left her face. Then her mother walked in. They stared at each other in silence. Then they were kissing, and Kate wondered why her mother was crying.
Kate saw now that her parents had gradually melded until they merged into something new. They came through all the arguments, the struggles with money, and were transformed into a faithful, tested, heart-scalded couple. Love grew like vines between them. They could not be separated without destroying each other.
Was that the kind of love she felt for Tom? She realizes that she’s never loved anyone like that. As a nun, she was supposed to love everyone. But she never got up in the middle of the night in response to a child’s terrified cry nor sat with a discouraged husband to reassure him that she was perfectly satisfied with his salary. She had only herself to worry about. Will she become a selfish, crabby old nun, whining because her toast was soggy, the room too hot? What could be worse than giving up marriage and children to be free to serve many, only to find herself at life’s end a shriveled, self-centered old woman who loved no one except herself?
Otto Schneider interrupts Kate’s thoughts, shouting at her from the road. “Here comes your bus! Hurry up or you’ll miss it.”
Kate runs to catch up with Sheila and Diane as a faded orange bus pulls up at the gates to the hotel. The three of them run down the lane, waving to the bus driver. They climb on, laughing and out of breath, to the obvious amusement of the few housewives and workers inside the bus.
Crowding into the long seat at the back of the bus, Sheila sits down with an exaggerated sigh. “Whew! That was a close call. I really wasn’t looking forward to spending the day with Otto Schneider. I have a feeling that we’d be lectured on the merits of the good old USA at every turn.”
“Oh, they aren’t so bad,” says Diane. “They kind of remind me of some of my aunts and uncles back home.” She looks slyly at Kate. “I
