Twenty years later, after they were both married to others, and she had moved with her husband to Arizona, Gerald on impulse would sometimes leave the motel and drive alone eighty miles to his hometown. He would tell his wife that he was visiting his mother, Natalie, but he was really visiting the house where Barbara White used to live, and where during late winter afternoons she would smile down at him and, with an outstretched finger, print his name on the misty pane of her bedroom window.
She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, and also the nicest, because everyone liked her. I had first met her on a blind date arranged by one of her girlfriends, and I forgot about my apprehensions because I always wanted to date Barbara. Her smile greeted me cheerily, and the movie was fine, although I can’t remember what we saw. What I do remember is during the movie I got my arm around her sheepishly, and that we kissed coming home in the car.
From that first time onward, we went steady for the next two years. We never did anything except hugging and kissing—which in those days, in the early 1950s, was one of the greatest things that ever occurred. Some of the young people who just have sex nowadays don’t know what that feeling is, the feeling of having someone you really love and care about and the only thing you ever do is kiss them. I never had any intention of having sex with Barbara. The only thing I ever did, which broke us up, was the one time I wanted to see her feet.
We were parked behind the pump that pumps the water for the city of Ault. In those days many of the girls in school wore shoes that had the colors of the football team, which were black and red, and on this night Barbara’s shoes were red and were illuminated from the light coming down from the pump house. As I looked at her shoes I think I was having a transfixed flow back to the toes of my aunt Katheryn, and, almost without thinking, I just reached down—schump!—and took off her shoe!
She said: “Gerald, what did you do that for?”
“Oh, I just wanted to see it, and wanted to do it.”
“Don’t do that again,” she said.
So I lay the shoe down under her, on the floor of the truck, and we went back to kissing and necking. It was about midnight, or past. And then I saw her stocking foot, and I just thought I wanted to see her entire foot—and just went down and—scoop!—I took the stocking off as quick as I could.
Oh, she came apart on that! She was angry, and upset, and felt violated. And I had, of course, violated her trust, because I had never before touched any other part of her body except her back, and a shoulder, or arms. I never touched her legs, any place like that, because that was a taboo area, you just didn’t do that, at least from my perspective, in the way I felt in those days. And so, consequently, Barbara immediately jumped out of the truck, stood there, and, while turning around, she pulled off the chain around her neck that had my ring, and she just threw it at the seat.
“I don’t like it, Gerald,” she said, and then she walked away, limping on one foot.
So I backed the truck out and pulled it over beside her, and I called out to her: “Hey, Barb, get in here. Quit acting like a dummy,” or something like that. “These people out here will see us and think we’re fighting.”
“Don’t you think we’re fighting?”
“Oh come on, Barb, get in the truck. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, okay? You’re my girl . . . just get in the truck, and let’s talk about it.”
She just kept on walking. Her house was only a block away. And so she limped all the way home.
Even many years later, years after I’d last seen her, if anyone mentioned her name, I’d fall to pieces. And whenever I drove past the house where she used to live—even if my car radio wasn’t on—I’d hear the voice of Ray Charles singing:
I can’t stop loving you
I’ve made up my mind
To live in memory
Of the lonesome times . . .
SIXTEEN
GERALD FOOS’S years in the Navy produced few insights or observations in his writing because, as he later explained to me, his most interesting experiences during this period were “top secret.” After basic training and a tour in Hawaii—a photograph of Foos on the Waikiki Beach shows a spectacularly muscled young man posing bare chested in a bathing suit—he was selected to serve with underwater demolition teams, forerunners of the SEALs. While the Korean War had ended in 1953, he and his fellow crewmen maintained around-the-clock vigilance throughout the next four years while attached to a cruiser named the USS Worcester.