Play On!

Generational gambit

(Original short story)

Cranston and I were roommates all through Harvard. From the first day, we had taken to each other famously.

Cran asked me one afternoon if I would like to go to a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert that evening with him and his mother, Kristine. I jumped at the chance.

Kristine lived in a fine old house close to Harvard Square, and she had another place with a tennis court by the ocean on the North Shore.

Kristine Marsh was strikingly good-looking. She appeared so young that I couldn’t imagine she had given birth 18 years earlier to a guy now my age.

Cran’s doctor father had died when Cran was 14.

Kristine and I were both good tennis players, and we soon began playing on the Harvard courts. She was good enough to take plenty of sets from me without my help. She was competitive, fit as a fiddle — and looked it.

She came down to Eliot House often to dine with Cran and me. When she walked through the dining hall, the masculine conversational hum dropped several decibels.

Kristine was in every way classic — her simply cut tailored clothes emphasized the youthful line of her lithe body. Her dark brown hair had no gray. Her beautifully kept nails wore a thin coat of clear polish.

She seemed to me to be a person who had already done everything that was rewarding and exciting in life, and she had no notion of giving any of it up.

She geared her conversation comfortably to fit two college-age boys. I realized more and more the Epicurean slant of her thinking. She was a woman of the world who was enamored with the world.

I was aware that Kristine enjoyed my company, but I had never dared to imagine just how much more her friendly mannerisms might sanction.

One day at her beach house, we had all finished our luncheon salad, and Cran told me he was going into town to get a new set of tires on his car. I started to say I’d come along, when Kristine said quickly, “Let’s play some tennis….”

After Cran left, I went to my room to put on tennis clothes. I was pulling a T-shirt over my head when I felt Kristine’s arm slide around my waist from behind….

From that day on, whenever we three were together, Kristine managed to act as though nothing had changed.

As for myself, I was in a holding pattern, wondering how she might visualize me in her future.

After graduation, I was a gunnery officer on a destroyer escort for a year.

While I was in the South Pacific, Kristine and I corresponded often.

When my ship dry-docked in Boston, Kristine and I dined in a small inn near the Common. I was now 23, and she was… Kristine, her radiant self.

The next day, driving me back to my ship, she asked if I was going to return to Cambridge after the war.

“I’ve been thinking about a getting master’s here,” I said.

“Sounds like a good idea,” said Kristine, touching my knee, “the logical continuation of your education….”