Only a fool would write about love. And so, boldly, I will.

The strobe of young love pulsed through the halls of Texas City High School and led to matrimony many times, yet when I made up my mind to write through this rich material, I discovered that beyond gossip and speculation, I know nothing except the titles.

At the top of a chronology would be The Story of Joe and Diane, The Story of  Tommy and Kathleen, and The Story of Virginia and Felix. Joe and Diane’s story continues, as does Tommy and Kathleen’s. Virginia and Felix ended long ago. The story I know best would be Gene and Jeannie. Still together, still happy.

Infatuation should be enjoyed or endured and never taken seriously. It feels awful except when it feels wonderful. This kind of catastrophe can change and become love, and that’s lucky. You have something then. There’s a quote heard frequently from Hollywood starlets who mistake cliché for wisdom. I still love him, but I’m not “in love” with him anymore. They move on to another infatuation and never know they walked away from love.

Dolores and Jimmy didn’t last, but I remember them together, tall and beautiful, both of them, beyond the bloom of youth which belongs to us all for a short time. I’ve been told about Ray and Jeanie, on again/off again, then on again and off for good. Much later came the The Jeanie and Tommy Story. Sandy and Dennis over time became Sandy and Eddie.

Elegant Julia married adorable Charlie, but The Julia and Charlie Story didn’t last. That’s all I know about it. In asking about romance in the class of 64, I turned up a few titles I didn’t know about. Johnny and Lavinia, still together. Dennis and Becky ended.

My favorite love story of a Texas City girl, a story I know from beginning to end, might be called The Painter, The Pilot, and the Texas Boy. The “Painter” would be my mother’s sister Dorothy Benskin, TC Central High (later TC High School), Class of 1942. Never fond of Dorothy, she would be called Duffy as a child, Jinx as a grown-up.

Her talent for art surfaced early. She loved to draw, and she was good at it. Here’s the cover of the Central High newspaper from December 1941. You’ll recognize the school in the background. See the tiny writing down by the bag? It says D. F. Benskin. See the familiar names on the masthead? LeGendre. Thibodeaux. Bell. Montegut.

The Benskin sisters were wild and free in their dreams, and Jinx loved two men in her life, and she dared to love them both forever. Why should it not be so? We commit to one person and consign the others to memory, but the heart is a big place and true love lasts. So spoke Jinx, long ago.

Just out of her teens, Jinx fell in love with John, a Texas boy from San Saba County. She met him at a church social, and she described him as the handsomest man she ever saw. His passionate reaction to her perceived inconstancy makes me believe he loved her as she loved him.

Came World War II, and John was to travel through Houston on his way overseas, just to spend a few final hours with Jinx, who was living and working there. He could be killed, but for sure he would be gone for a long time. He couldn’t tell her when he would be there, not the hour, anyway, but the day, at least. He would call, and they would arrange to meet.

She waited by the phone at work, but she had a task that would take her away from her desk, just for moments. When she could put it off no longer, she left, glancing anxiously at the clock. When she returned, she noted she had been gone for seven minutes. He couldn’t have called. But he had.

She waited the rest of the day for a call that had come and gone forever. The next word from John came in a letter. He had asked her to wait, and she hadn’t. How could he trust her for an entire war? Deeply angry, he wrote words so harsh she couldn’t repeat them. He left for Europe and married an English girl within two months. Dusty, her name was.

“Dusty Dean,” Jinx said. “I was supposed to be Duffy Dean.” She used her old nickname, the one my mother gave her as a child.

So she moved to Florida with my mother and their cousins, but she stayed out of “trouble,” and she met Lt Mahlon (Lynn) Steiner, a promising young pilot, an officer.

When Lynn proposed marriage, she accepted him. He loved flying airplanes, and he decided to stay in the military. When he was sent to Colorado for additional training, Jinx went home to Texas and prepared for the wedding. She received the attentions of a bride-to-be, showers, gifts, and fare-thee-wells as she boarded a bus headed west. They would become man and wife in a military chapel.

Lynn arranged for a hotel, and Jinx walked there from the bus station. He couldn’t come by until after his training session, and when he did, she threw herself into his arms. He embraced her tentatively, holding back. He had something to say.

“I can’t go through with it. I can’t marry you. Forgive me.”

Did Jinx’s heart break? Did she cry or scream? No. She wondered how she would explain this to her mother. What will mother think informs a woman’s life, intentions, behavior.

“OK, then,” she said. “I’ll be on a bus back to Texas as soon as I can.”

He left, and she hardly noticed. She was already rehearsing her explanations. She would have time to think on the bus, so she thumbed through the telephone book. Greyhound. Tires screeched in the parking lot and a car door slammed. She put down the phone at the pounding on the stairs. The door to her dingy room slammed opened, and there stood Lynn.

“I don’t see how I could NOT marry a girl who could take that kind of news with such sangfroid,” he said.

She waited until later to look up sangfroid, and she never told him his loss was way down on her list of problems that day. All she could think of was the humiliation of going home with her veil between her legs.

Jinx adored Lynn, married him, bore his children, embraced his church, lived his life, and wanted him to love her as intensely as she loved him. Yet the memory of John rested quietly, just in case a change in circumstance might make it blossom again, as young romances do, and often, because of death or divorce, sometimes just because.

Twenty minutes after the wedding, she became pregnant. Lynn, a good Catholic, would hear of no birth control except the ones that didn’t work – rhythm and abstinence, abstinence being particularly ineffective in the case of young newlyweds.

She didn’t recognize the early signs of pregnancy, then one morning she got all soaped up in the shower and suddenly felt faint.  She whispered Lynn, and he heard her from two rooms away with the radio on. When a loved one calls for help, you hear it.

He got to the shower, and she was slippery as a Texas con artist, naked as an egg, and swooning. Lynn, his khaki uniform turning dark brown and soggy, clutched at her, got enough grip to keep her from getting hurt, then dragged her onto the bathroom rug as she came around.

“What the hell, Lynn?” she said. “I weigh 100 pounds. Can’t you just pick me up?”

They stared at each other, a soapy naked pregnant lady and a wet military officer with his dignity askew. She laughed. He didn’t.

So they had their first child, my cousin Mary Lynne. Jinx got pregnant again at once, but when he was born, baby Tony was sick. Lynn was soon on his way to his new assignment in occupied Japan. Jinx stayed behind with the children, but not for long. She left the baby boy and joined her husband with her daughter in tow.

Your man uber alles was the order of things, plus Jinx thought Lynn was playing around. Why did she think that, I asked? He was a man, she said, alone and far away. He was handsome and charming. If he wasn’t playing around already, he soon would be.

The baby was left in the care of Lynn’s mother, and long after all the principals were dead, I found a letter to my grandmother (Jinx’s mother) dated December 12, 1949, from Los Angeles. It was from Lynn’s mother.

I have sad news for you. Little Tony passed away last night at the Children’s Hospital at 8:30.

It goes into detail, but the baby wasn’t sick. He was hydrocephalic, almost certain to die in infancy. When he did, neither Jinx nor Lynn returned from Japan. In 1949 it would have taken days, maybe weeks.

As for John, Jinx’s first love, my mother sent her an article from a San Saba newspaper. John had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Beyond that, Jinx knew nothing of him for the next 30 years, yet, in spite of her love for Lynn, she thought of John every day.

My aunt had a comfortable life, but restlessness defined her. She wanted the elusive more that haunted a generation of women, even though being the wife of a military officer was supposed to be enough. She revisited her gift for drawing and painting. Her work gave her some of the satisfaction she sought, and some recognition and success as a portrait painter. She painted almost everyone in the Benskin family, and all of us were thrilled to be given gifts of her work on special occasions.

To be a better military wife, she went to charm school and learned the tricks of modeling and make-up. She learned to entertain graciously, as was expected of her.

Jinx and her family lived in far-away places, and when they came through Texas City, fresh from being stationed in Hawaii, all colorful muumuus and suntans, I glimpsed a life entirely unknown to me. My aunt, whom I adored, lived a glamorous life, she had style and taste. Her sons were darling, her daughter was gorgeous.

Jinx had wit, too, and a world view I found entertaining and astonishing. I have a mental image of her perched on a bar stool at a beach dive in Galveston, holding court, wielding a wine glass. “Benskins either go crazy or become artists,” she pronounced. “And some become crazy artists. Or must you be crazy to be an artist?”

All the while, Lynn remained aloof, never giving Jinx the attention and affection she craved. Once when they were living in New Mexico, Lynn went out on a training flight, and as she prepared dinner, she casually hoped he would crash.

He came home safe, and she didn’t truly want him to crash except in that secret way we dream of a simpler life, a life without the other. In that moment, though, Jinx understood the yearning to be close to Lynn, so long unfulfilled, was gone for good. Did he sense the sea change? Know his decades-long upper hand had vanished? Jinx said he didn’t. Nothing changed for him.

So years passed. I was 21 years old and living Wiesbaden, Germany, working for U.S. Air Force Headquarters in Europe. My mother made plans to visit, and Jinx decided to come with her. My friend and classmate Gloria had joined me on this adventure, and their visit coincided with her wedding plans. After the ceremony in Switzerland, on the way back to Wiesbaden, Jinx dropped a bomb.

She didn’t come to see me. She came to see John. Texas ties never die, so someone told my grandmother, who told my mother, who told Jinx, that John lived in nearby Frankfurt with his wife. Jinx wrote him; he wrote back. I was shocked. I had never heard his name. She told me about him then, the war, the missed phone call, the acid letter, his hasty marriage, the fractures in her own union.

So John showed up, still tall and good-looking, and with his own driver. He and Jinx went off for the afternoon. I don’t know what he told his wife, but this happened several times. Jinx swore all they did was talk. I believed her, because I couldn’t imagine anything else. After all, they were in their early 40s – well past all that, right?

Mostly I believed her because John’s leg was in a cast from ankle to groin, and he was on crutches. That’s why he needed a driver. Two months before his reunion with Jinx, he fell off a camel in Egypt and broke his leg in two places (no one could make this stuff up).

Meanwhile, retired and working in Newport News, Lynn eagerly awaited Jinx’s return. He had a shock coming. She asked for a divorce. Her daughter Mary Lynne was by then on her own, but Jinx packed up her teenage boys and went home to Texas. Did she assume John would leave Dusty? That she and John would live happily ever after? He did not; they did not. Were promises made? She never clarified this detail. If so, they weren’t kept, at least not by John.

As for Lynn, he realized at last Jinx was the great passion of his life, and he wanted her back, right now, and badly. In a fairly short time, Jinx understood she had made a mistake. She missed her comfortable life, and she missed Lynn. She was used to him. She called him to say she was coming back, but he told her his news first. He had met a nice lady named Sarah, and they were to be wed. That’s love for you.

My aunt was lonely and married phlegmatic Virgil, but left him in a few years. The CDC in Atlanta sent me to Austin on business, so I rented a car and drove to the coast to visit my mother and Jinx. Sitting around Jinx’s place, drinking wine, laughing it up, I asked when her divorce would be final. She said never. She had no reason to divorce Virgil, and if he died, she would inherit certain benefits. They had considered it, and he was OK with the arrangement (he had no other family). Virgil died that night. It’s likely he died while we were discussing the matter.

Lynn and Sarah were married longer than Lynn and Jinx, who died before either of them. I met Sarah at Lynn’s interment in Arlington National Cemetery, and a few years later I ran into her in Williamsburg. My husband and I were visiting friends, who invited several others to join us at a restaurant. One of them was Sarah. What are the odds? She seemed uncomfortable. I honestly don’t know why.

As for John, I imagine he’s dead by now. Dusty died first, but he still didn’t seek out the arms of Jinx, even though she was single, having lost her chance at a reunion with Lynn and buried Virgil. Maybe too much water goes under too many bridges after a while, either in love or infatuation.

So here’s to the love stories of the TCHS Class of 64, the ones that lasted, like Gail and Pat, and the ones that didn’t, sad or radiant, enduring or short, productive or a waste, sometimes as byzantine as Jinx’s saga. Whatever the outcome, all I can tell you is the titles, and anyway, only a fool would write about love.

P. S.

Here are a few other titles, the ones I remember, some who made it, some who didn’t:

Alice and Eugene, Armelia and Bobby, Barbara and Joe, Barbara and Mike, Carol Sue and Mike B, Dennis B and Becky V, Elizabeth and Mike P, Fred and Sharon, Janie and Stephen, Jim and Linda, Margaret and Joe, Mike P and Karen, Rick and Rita, Sue and Troy, Vickie and King.

Are there couples I’ve left out? I hope not — eveyone loves to remember a love story.

P.P.S. Texas City Central Highschool Yearbook, 1942 version, courtesy of Al Mitchell, Class of 1963.

NEXT (December 1): First Love