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young men thinking about women 60 percent of the time instead of 80 percent—and girls were thought of as weekend dates, period. This never struck me as right, and I had been writing some articles in the Crimson, the student newspaper, about how women were not taken seriously enough in the community. Mary Bunting, the president of Radcliffe, was thrilled to discover this odd Harvard man who actually thought that women had brains. So she would trot me out at various events, and in my inebriated excitement, I told Cokie about my speech. And she said, “Well gee, I’d like to come hear it.”
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    CR: No dummy I!
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    SR: I started to say, “Great, come to the speech Saturday afternoon and we’ll go out that night.” Somewhere in my deepest male soul I knew that I was crossing a line that I had never crossed before. This was breaking my rule of only dating a girl twice. It was so traumatic.
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    CR: Terrifying.
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    SR: So terrifying that I choked on the words. I actually had trouble getting them out, but eventually did. So she came to that event and we did go out that night.
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    CR: And then we went out all that spring. It was one of those years where the weather was gorgeous during the week and poured every weekend and our dating was pretty much confined to weekends because there were all these college rules. I had to be in the dorm at ten o’clock on a weeknight. Despite the rain, we had a very nice spring. We knew our religious differences could block any long-term relationship, so we kept saying, “Well, this is just because it’s spring.”
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    SR: It later became something of a joke, as the seasons changed and we were still together, so we engraved “forever spring” into our wedding rings. But that spring did have a magic quality to it. I had always been uncomfortable and uptight on dates, but at some point I realized I could be at ease with this girl. That I could be myself with this girl. That I didn’t have to worry about going to exactly the right restaurant or making sure we had the right movie tickets. If one thing didn’t work out, something else would. It was the first time in my life I felt that way in the presence of a girl.
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    CR: On spring break we went to New York for the weekend. Steve was staying at home in New Jersey and I was staying at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan. We went for a walk through Central Park, then to a movie, then to the Russian Tea Room. We had apricots and plums and Steve said he liked those colors together, and from there on out I kept desperately trying to find apricot-and-plum combinations.
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    SR: I still plant flowerpots with those colors.
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    CR: And then we went back to my friend’s and sat up all night talking and reading poetry, if you can believe it! Early Sunday morning I went to church and Steve got on a bus and went back to Bayonne.
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    SR: I walked into the house and my grandfather, who lived with us, was up already. He looked at me sternly because I had been out all night. He didn’t say anything; he was a rather mild-mannered man. But I remember thinking, “Pop, if you knew the half of it. The girl I just left went straight to Mass.”
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    CR: We still told each other it was just a spring romance. And I certainly thought that was the safest thing to say. Anything more would have scared him off. But we were very happy and clearly in love. Then came summer and I went home to work for the government and Steve stayed in Cambridge to edit the student newspaper. But we did spend a few weekends in Washington together, and I went to visit Steve’s parents in Bayonne for the first time.
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    SR: That was important because my parents were very uneasy about this relationship and we knew instinctively that the best way to deal with it was for them to get to know Cokie in a way that the Boggses were getting to know me. As a real person, not just a stereotype.
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    CR: