Read Daring for Free Online Page B

pins padlocked over their bras. They seemed to be time traveling straight into middle age.
    I made an ironclad pact with myself: I would not marry anyone, not even Prince Charming, for at least two years after college. I wasn’t going to be trapped like my mother. I just made it to age twenty-three. My suitor was a charming imposter who found me at Manhattan’s White Horse Tavern on a Sunday afternoon. My roommate and I were waiting for the paint to dry in our one-room bachelorette pad a block away.
    â€œSquadron Leader Greville Bell, RAF.” He introduced himself in an impeccable British accent. “Fair lady, would you be so kind as to help out a stranger to your city?” I was a pushover for men in uniform, although now that I recall, this man was wearing a raincoat. But he was good-looking and so very polite and obviously helpless. He needed assistance in counting out change for a tip. “This is the pub made famous by Dylan Thomas, is it not?” he asked.
    â€œThe very one.”
    â€œâ€˜If I were tickled by the rub of love, I would not fear the apple nor the flood,’” he recited.
    â€œâ€˜Nor the bad blood of spring,’” I chimed in. It wasn’t every day that a man recited poetry to me. I could be smitten by this Englishman. Squadron Leader Greville Bell was adorably sincere and worth another chance. Over the next few weeks, he called several times for dates but I was always busy. In a final attempt, he trotted out his true identity. The accent flattened suddenly to the nasality of a nice Irish Catholic boy from Connecticut.
    â€œMy real name is Albert Francis Sheehy.” He confessed that he was the son of a police captain and presently living in “reduced circumstances” while pursuing the noble aspiration of becoming a physician. I wound up laughing. Albert said if I could find it in my heart to forgive him, he would really like to take me out on a date. He courted me for a year, mostly long distance, since he was a first-year medical student at the University of Rochester.
    I was happy being single and free to travel in my white-gloved job, but Albert was nothing if not persistent. He wrote to me in poetry. He could talk to me about Dostoyevsky and laugh with me over Portnoy’s Complaint . He was five years older and horny. But even when he came to New York over vacations, I held fast to my pledge of revirgination. I must have driven him to a frenzy of frustration. He had done four years in the air force as an officer attached to the RAF and he was impatient to get on with his life. He wanted a wife.
    I loved him. And I admired his noble aspiration. He was sincerely committed to serving mankind, despite a lack of family money and loading himself with debt. My desire to be a writer paled into selfishness. No, worse, it smacked of ambition, and in a woman, ambition was abhorrent.
    COPS NAB POET IN COFFEE HOUSE was the headline on the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle the day in 1960 we returned to Rochester as a married couple. We laughed. In Rochester, poets were the enemy. It was only 350 miles from Manhattan, but I could have sworn it was an iceberg broken off from somewhere in the upper Midwest that floated through the Great Lakes and grounded itself in the snowbelt of western New York State. It was always cold. The other medical school wives were even colder. Most had money somewhere in their families and were rehearsing to run Junior Leagues and silent auctions to benefit the halt and the lame. They wore cashmere sweater sets and often played bridge and drank in the afternoon. I didn’t. I worked. My career aspirations were perceived as unbecoming for the wife of a future physician, even subversive.
    I applied for my first newspaper job at the Democrat & Chronicle , a decent Gannett paper. The editor of the women’s page, George Jewell, ignored the samples of my writing and went after my age and gender.
    â€œHow old are