From This Day Forward Read Free Page B

But that summer Steve dated somebody else, which I found out about and didn’t like a bit.
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    SR: I was still struggling with the whole commitment thing, and there were a lot of girls around who thought that the editors of the Harvard Crimson were pretty neat. At the end of that summer we went to another student political meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. I was flat-out mean to Cokie; that’s the closest we ever came to breaking up.
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    CR: When we went back to school, it was tense.
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    SR: Slowly we started seeing each other again and we rediscovered there was something special between us. But it took a while to get over the resentments of the summer, and at one point she agreed to go to the Harvard–Yale game with somebody else.
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    CR: But I broke that date, and then the day before the game Jack Kennedy was killed. Steve and I decided to go away for that weekend because I was too upset to stay in the dorm with everybody watching TV and crying. We stayed at a friend’s house in New Hampshire and I remember driving to church that Sunday. By this time Steve’s parents had given him a car for senior year, so that made a big difference, but it was a miserable car which did not have a heater. This was Boston. Trying to get to church that Sunday was terrifying because the weather was bad and the car didn’t have a defroster. This little tiny church in this little town in New Hampshire had a catafalque in the middle of the aisle to represent Kennedy. It was so strange.
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    SR: But that was an important weekend. We decided that we wanted to be together. Our college careers were defined by Kennedy’s presidency—he was elected in the fall of our freshman year—and killed in the fall of our senior year. He gave young people a sense that we could participate and makea difference, and we fully shared that belief. It was one of the things that attracted us to each other.
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    CR: In some ways we missed a huge American pageant that weekend because we didn’t have a TV. All of America was experiencing the same thing and we weren’t.
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    SR: We were learning a lot about each other. But I was starting to write a senior thesis and working very hard and continuing to act out these silly male attitudes toward dates.
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    CR: He would call me on Saturday morning and break a date for that night, saying he had to work too hard. So I finally caught on and started going in to Cambridge early on Saturdays and studying in the stacks at the Harvard library so he couldn’t reach me to break the date. I would just show up at the appointed hour.
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    SR: Many of our dates followed the same pattern. I was working for The New York Times as their campus correspondent. It was a great job because I got a chance to write stories for the paper and establish a relationship with them and make a few dollars as well. My typical Saturday assignment was to cover some Harvard sporting event, like a track meet, then write a brief story. I would have to send it to New York and I had two choices. One was a really old-fashioned Western Union office, where I would peck out a cable on a totally dilapidated typewriter. Or I would call a recording room at the Times and dictate the story and spell all the names, to make sure there were no mistakes. To this day Cokie remembers the spelling of the star sprinter, Chris Ohiri, who was Nigerian. I repeated his name so often because I was convinced the desk would put in an apostrophe and try to make him Irish. I would make a swift $5.00 for this effort, but there was a restaurant in Harvard Square named Cronin’s that had a dinner special for $1.98, so the $5.00 covered dinner for two, plus tip. After dinner, Cokie often sang with her a cappella group, the Wellesley Widows. On many Saturday evenings they would perform around Boston, at different clubs or events, and I would sit in the audience with the other groupies. As the head of the group, Cokie was the