This Time Love Will Last Forever

The Boston Herald

Some lives you have to imagine. Billions of moments lived, a million experiences are often reduced to a few words:

"I met her when she was 19 and I was 23." The eyes shine, old eyes, but bright, still, when he talks about her. He doesn't say she was the prettiest girl he'd ever seen. He doesn't say how he was smitten by Rita. He doesn't have to. His life has said it, and his eyes, kindled now just by her memory.

Fill in the blanks. Do some math. Mac met Rita in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the year Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as president of the United States, the year Prohibition finally came to an end.

I imagine he hardly noticed these things. I imagine he was so completely absorbed with her, that the world was reduced to only her: the red of her hair, the softness of her lips, the way she felt small, like a child, in his arms.

He wanted to get married. He'd been on his own since he was 11 and he wanted a home and a family. But something happened. Someone else came along and the young girl he loved looked at that someone else and like a princess under a spell, forgot about Mac and everything else.

She walked down the aisle under that spell and had a child under that spell and then another and another and another.

Mac moved away, joined the Army, married, had children, made a life. He went to war, and returned from the war to pick up the threads of that life.

Rita by then was fighting her own battle. Her husband left her once, twice, but came back and fathered another child, only to leave her permanently with six children to raise.

Mac's marriage failed. He drifted for a while, then came back home.

"How's Rita?" he asked his friend, Johnny. Johnny told him, and I imagine that Mac's heart broke a little when he heard how she was.

He stopped by to visit her one day. She opened the door, and she was older and her hair was darker, more plum than rose, but it was the same for him. The years hadn't changed a thing. He loved her, plain and simple. But it wasn't simple anymore. She had six children and they were her life and her responsibility. Their father was alive if not present. She couldn't bring another man into the house who would act like their father. It was a different time, a different world and these things were not done.

So Mac left again and married again and that seemed to be the end of the story, and it was for a long, long time. Rita's children grew up and married, even the youngest. Years passed and grandchildren were born, his and hers, in different towns, in different worlds, and if Mac and Rita thought about each other now and then, only they knew it. In the physical world, time and space separated them.

If Mac's wife hadn't died, time and space might have severed them forever. But in 1969, Mac was alone again. Did he call his friend Johnny and ask about Rita or did Rita ask Johnny about him? How did they get back together? Someone remembers a dance. Someone else remembers they dated secretly.

I like to imagine them older, surer, this time, blissful but comfortable in their love.

They married in 1972 and had 13 good years together. He drove her to Bingo and took her to Las Vegas and worked two jobs so she would have a nest egg when he died. All he ever wanted to do was love her and take care of her.

After work, when he was finally home, he played his banjo and his viola and his mandolin. He had his health, his music, and he had Rita. He was a happy and contented man.

Then Rita died. It was sudden and unexpected. She was at bingo and she had chest pains. Then she was at the hospital. And he was there, holding her hand, telling her again, as he had told her all of his life, how much he loved her, how much he needed her.

She left him anyway. At the funeral he stood surrounded by her children and grandchildren, children, grandchildren. Because they were Rita's they were his, his family, because she had been his life.

Now Mac is sick and the family has rallied to his side; but it is Rita's youngest daughter, Jill, who is there the most, who has taken him to doctors and cooked his meals and cleaned his house and sat with him. She who has her mother's red hair, her mother's quick wit, now also embodies her mother's deep, enduring love for this man.

I imagine that sometimes when he looks up at her he sees Rita again. And I imagine that sometimes when she is talking to him, she sees her mother reflected in his eyes.

Neither says what they both know: that this time when Mac finds Rita, it will finally be forever.