Through the winter of his first year in high school, Eddie Leonard didn’t see much of Dotty Haddam. He was trying to translate Caesar’s
Across the thick, ripe summer, he explained Latin to her; warned her about algebra; taught her some Irish songs. She told him she wanted to be a poet, although her father objected; she showed him her poems, shyly at first, then with greater confidence. She had discovered Keats and Byron, and made him read them out loud to her in Prospect Park. She showed him where Syria was, too, pointing to maps that showed Damascus and Beirut. She had a postcard from her cousin Frankie, who lived in Beirut; it showed a lovely city on green hills, spread in a semicircle, facing the sea. Eddie Leonard pointed out that the map called the place Lebanon. She said it was really all Syria. Her father said so. The French had decided the borders, but it was all really Syria, although her father said that Damascus was an ugly city.
That summer, the war broke out in Korea, but they didn’t talk about the war; it was in a remote place; it had nothing to do with them. But they were aware that the world was changing around them. People were locking doors that had never before been locked. A boy from 17th Street was found dead in the park, and for the first time Eddie Leonard heard the word “overdose.” The word “they” began to appear in the common narrative of the neighborhood. “I hear they stuck up Barney Quigley’s last night.” Or: “They stabbed a kid outside the Y this afternoon.” Or: “They robbed the Greek’s.” Another new word was “heroin.”
Late in August, after a Saturday night movie, Eddie Leonard and Dotty Haddam climbed the hill above the Swan Lake in Prospect Park, and when they came down, they were no longer virgins. The rest of the summer was a blur; joy, fear, and amazement were combined with a sense of intimate conspiracy and, of course, the heart-stopping knowledge of sin. Moving among the others, on the beach at Coney or at the dances in the park, they felt special, certain of their shared love and damnation, guarding their dark secret.
But as the nights became chilly, Eddie Leonard started to dread the coming of winter. In that neighborhood in those years, no young people had cars or apartments or the price of a hotel room. They had the park and the beach. Nothing else. Eddie began to talk to Dotty Haddam about running away to Florida, about how amazing it must be to sleep between sheets in a bed, and wake up together in the morning. She resisted, retreated into silence, or told him that such ideas were foolish. They were too young. They would end up in jail.
And then one night, such talk became academic. Eddie Leonard and Dotty Haddam went to their hill. They murmured, kissed, collapsed on the grass. And then from the shadows, screaming in his language and flailing at them both with a broom handle, came Mr. Haddam. His eyes were wide with anger, and when he tried to strike his daughter with the broom handle, Eddie Leonard stepped in and knocked him down. That was the end of it. Two days later, Dotty Haddam was taken from the neighborhood to live with an aunt in New Jersey. Eddie Leonard never went into the store again.
He heard from her while he was in the army in Germany. The letter was brief, almost businesslike, and it told him that she was marrying a Syrian guy whose family came from Beirut. But she thought of Eddie often and would always remember him. When he looked at the date, he realized she was already married, and he crumpled the letter, threw it in a corner, and went into Wiesbaden to get drunk.
