The Education of Sebastian by Jane Harvey-Berrick
Prologue
I’ve often wondered why brides-to-be speak with such excitement of their wedding day: the best day of their lives. Doesn’t that imply that it’s all downhill from there on?
My own wedding day was the culmination of the briefest of romances, if you could call it that. My husband was not a romantic man. He was not many things. Perhaps if he had been many, perhaps if he had been more, things might have turned out differently between us. Then again, perhaps it would have been exactly the same.
Despite what happened later, I can’t bring myself to regret the events of that summer.
I think it was the uniform. My husband dazzled me in his US Navy whites and with his flashy sports car that was so low to the ground, it seemed to skim along the road like a pebble on a lake.
David was a medical officer in the US Navy, newly promoted to Lieutenant Commander and assigned as a flight surgeon. He was 11 years older than me. He seemed urbane and sophisticated and to a girl from nowhere who had seen nothing, he was every wish fulfilled.
My mother smelled a good catch and my dear, sweet father was talked over and down by the two women in his life who vied for his attention.
Competition with my mother was relatively new. She had always been rather ashamed of her plain, gawky daughter, who seemed to have no breeding and no wish for it; but at the age of 17, I blossomed, quite literally, growing breasts almost overnight, and attracting the attention of young men who had formerly cast their glassy-eyed looks at my elegant and glossy mother. Suddenly I was the interesting one, the sexy one, and she loathed it. Of course, she couldn’t and wouldn’t admit to that, so we fought. My father hated it and would descend to the basement to listen to Puccini or Rossini, and wonder why his ‘two best girls’ were at each other’s throats.
So when David came along to sweep me off my feet, my mother couldn’t help a quick shove to speed the process and send me on my way.
She’d never thought of college as an option for me: consequently there was no college fund. She’d always told my father I wouldn’t last a single semester: ‘too weak’, apparently. Besides, marriage was supposed to save me from all that tedious studying.
“He’s too good for you, of course, Caroline,” she said, “but we’ll do the best we can”. Well, I shall do my best to make you attractive, although ‘pretty’ is too much to hope for you. “Oh, you look so much like your father.”
My father was short and dark and very Italian. I inherited his bright hazel eyes, thick, uncooperative hair that rippled in waves down my back, his olive skin and quick, passionate temper. I also inherited certain hirsute qualities that meant I was waxing my legs from the age of 10 and my armpits from the age of 12. But for all that, I blessed the deity who made me, that I had inherited little from my mother except her slender build, and height.
I used to wonder why she and my father had ever married because she undoubtedly despised his immigrant Italian ancestry and flaunted her own WASPishness at every opportunity. Her hair was blonde and coiffed, her eyes blue and sharp, her complexion strawberries and cream.
It didn’t surprise anyone, least of all me, when I jumped the moment I was pushed, and found myself a bride at the age of 19. The year was 1990.
What David saw in me is less easy to understand. A young wife with European aspirations perhaps, fluent in Italian and with an appreciation of wine that was unexpected and, later, unwelcome. I was different enough from the other naval wives to mark him out for distinction and myself for alienation and loneliness.