nice guy. How come we’ve overlooked him before this?”
I said, “I don’t know.” I was wondering the same thing.
I wondered it even more as we walked home afterward, talking about the party and school and what we were going to do after we graduated, comfortable talk as if we’d known each other forever. I told Ted I was going to secretarial school, and he told me he was working toward a scholarship to Tulane where he wanted to study medicine. I learned that his mother was a widow, as mine was, and that he had three sisters, and that he played the guitar. The moonlight slanted down through the branches of the trees that lined the street, making splotches of light and shadow along the sidewalk, and the air was crisp with autumn, and I was very conscious of my hand, small and empty, swinging along beside me. His hand was swinging too, and after a while they sort of bumped into each other. We walked the rest of the way without saying much, just holding hands and walking through the patches of moonlight.
The next morning Nancy phoned to ask if Ted had invited me to Homecoming.
“To Homecoming? Why, no,” I said. And to my amazement I realized that I had completely forgotten about Homecoming—that, now, somehow, it didn’t matter very much.
When the time came, of course, we did go, but, now that I think back on it, I don’t think Ted ever did actually ask me. We just went, quite naturally, because by then we went everywhere together.
When did I realize that he was The One? I’m trying hard to remember. I guess there was no special time that the realization came. It just grew, a quiet knowledge deep inside me. It grew out of our walks together, long hikes through the autumn woods with the trees blowing wild and red and gold against the deep blue of the sky, and the winter picnics with The Crowd, sitting on blankets around a fire with snow piled behind us and Ted’s arm around my shoulders. He brought his guitar sometimes to those, and we all sang.
“Why didn’t you tell us you played the guitar?” somebody asked him, and Ted grinned sheepishly and said, “I didn’t know that anybody would be interested.”
It grew, the realization, through the long lovely spring days and easy talk and laughter and a feeling of companionship I had never known before with any boy or, for that matter, with any girl, even Nancy. One Sunday evening (we had been to church together that morning and to the beach all afternoon and to an early movie after dinner), Ted said, “We fit so well together, you and I,” and I said, “Yes,” and Ted said, “It’s as if it were meant to be that way.”
“You mean,” I said, and the words came haltingly to my tongue because I had never said them aloud to him before and I was afraid they would sound silly, “You mean, as though it were written in the stars?”
Ted was silent a moment and then he said, “Yes, I guess that’s what I mean.”
It was the night of the Senior Prom that Ted saw the locket. As I said before, I didn’t wear it often, it was too precious, but somehow the night of the Senior Prom seemed right. I wore my rose evening dress and my rose slippers and no jewelry except the locket on its slender gold chain.
Ted noticed it right away.
“Nice,” he commented. “Makes you look sort of sweet and old-fashioned. Is it a family heirloom?”
“You could say that,” I said. “Daddy gave it to Mother, and Mother gave it to me.” I touched it fondly.
Ted was interested. “Does it open?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Let’s see.” He reached over and took the locket in his hands, the gentle, capable hands I had grown to know so well, and fiddled with it for a moment, and it fell open on his palm, disclosing a tiny lock of hair.
“So!” he said, smiling. “I didn’t know your father had red hair.”
“I guess he must have when he was young. He got gray very early.” I smiled too. “Put it back, Ted. It belongs there.”
He did so, closing the locket gently as though anything that had meaning for me had meaning for him also.
I’d tell you about the summer, but it is too hard to describe. I think you must already know what it’s like to be in love. You get up in the morning and shower and dress and eat breakfast just as you always have, but ever motion, every ordinary thing, is flavored with excitement. “I’m going to see him today—in two hours—one hour—ten minutes—and now he is here!”—there’s a radiance, a silent singing inside you that seems to expand to fill your life. That was the summer—and then, so terribly soon, it was autumn again.
Ted got his scholarship. His face, when he told me, was shining with excitement.
“How do you like the sound of it—Doctor Bennington!”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Marvelous! But I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too.” He sobered. “I’ll be home on vacations.”
“Sure,” I said. The summer lay golden and glorious behind us; there would be other summers.
“I wish—” His voice trembled slightly. “I wish you were going to Tulane too.”
“I’ll be here for you to come back to,” I said. “I’ll be a secretary in a year, you know. Maybe I can come there and get a job that has some connection with the college.”
“That would be great.” Still he did not smile. “I’m afraid,” he said suddenly.
“Afraid of what?”
“Of going. Of leaving you here. I’m afraid something will happen, that you’ll meet somebody else or something. What we’ve got—it’s so right—so perfect! We can’t lose it!”
“We won’t,” I said with confidence. You don’t lose something that is written in the stars.
And so my prince rode away on his snow-white horse, and that was the beginning of the end. We did not marry. If we had, I wouldn’t bother telling this story. Ted went to college and I to secretarial school, and we wrote letters at first constantly, and then not quite so often. Ted couldn’t afford to come home at Thanksgiving, and when he did come at Christmas I had the measles, (horrible thing to have when you’re practically grown), and we did not really get to see each other until spring vacation. By then we had been so long apart that we spent the whole vacation getting re-acquainted, and then it was time for Ted to go back again. He was as sweet and wonderful as ever, you understand; we just felt as though we didn’t know each other quite so well.
“Don’t forget me,” he said a little desperately as he left.
And I said, “Of course not,” but this time I did not sound so certain.
As it turned out, it was Ted who met somebody else; he who had been so worried, when I had been so sure! But in the end it was Ted who wrote the letter. The girl, he said, was a premed student just as he was. Her name—well, I’ve forgotten her name—but she was small, he said, and had hazel eyes and was smart and fun and easy to talk to. I would like her, he said. We were alike in many ways. He said he was sorry.
It was raining the day the letter came. I read it in the living room and then gave it to Mother to read and went
