Some Regrets

That is the title of the next short short story from my father. When I was very young, I was leafing through the many books in our tiny Bronx apartment on Townsend Avenue when I found a photograph of a long haired, young, blonde girl wearing a bathing suit top and a grass skirt. She looked at the camera, or perhaps it was the young, but slightly older than she, man behind it, with affection. I asked my father who it was. He told me her name. Louise. She was someone he had briefly known, long before my mother was introduced to him, during the War, while he was waiting for assignment out of Spartanburg, South Carolina. He spoke of her with a fond tone. I did not ask much more. It seems he wrote about her when he returned to writing back in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a story in progress, still being edited, with cross outs. He wrote on it, "Edited copy--somewhat". Perhaps it would have been developed more. But here it is. With my idea of his edits.

SOME REGRETS

After the war, I made several trips to the south on military business.  Each time I neared Spartanburg, South Carolina, I got that urge to call.  I wondered what she looked like; whether time had been kind to her extraordinary beauty; whether life had thickened the loveliness of her youthful perfection; whether her long blood hair, luxuriant and golden, that shimmered in the light of a friendly sun, was now tied into the obscuring sadness of domesticity.

We spent several months of week-ends together, in the early part of 1943.  Se lived in a little village, some fourteen miles by bus, out of Spartanburg.  Her name was Louise. She was barely 18.

Each week was a kind of repetition of the last one.  She paraded me before the block long Main Street, usually to the ice-cream parlor, where the town youth gathered.  Everyone knew I was her "gentleman caller", her shiny, new second lieutenant.  Sometimes we walked on the thick, soft, browning pine needles in a quiet oasis of sli shedding trees.  We held hands, sometimes necked in the fashion of the day.  There were no serpents in this forest, and I sought no further knowledge.  It is kind of an idyllic memory partly enhanced by time, essentially true.  She was a kind of elf innocent in a long ago era of innocence.

When my orders came to leave, I asked her not to come to the bus station, but she insisted  She clung to my hand.  We sat in the Spartanburg depot. She sobbed continuously, her blue eyes reddened by the salt of her tears.  I am embarrassed, ashamed now, of this feeling.  These were the tears of Niobe. There was nothing, I felt, that entitled me to this sorrow.  There had been no great part of her that I could take and little I was free to give.

We did not embrace or kiss.  She held on to my hands up to the time I mounted the bus.  I watched her small disconsolate figure from the window of the departing bus, an empty ache gnawing at my breast.

She wrote to me for four years while I was overseas--treasuries of charmingly misspelled sentences that described her worlds of expectations and her need to see me again, accentuated by rows of X marks to indicate the kisses she could not deliver herself.

For these precious memories I am grateful.  But I do wish I made one more stop in that little village, just fourteen miles by bus out of Spartanburg, South Carolina.