Ironically, had Dan had the time Cherry Hill was precisely the sort of old American settlement that he would have enjoyed exploring and researching. The proto-historian in him was tantalized by the knowledge that Quaker followers of William Penn had peacefully founded the community in a place they had called Colestown — now a local cemetery — alongside the native Lenni-Lenape tribe in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Colestown had eventually become the Delaware Township in 1844, and had in more modern times been incorporated into the Cherry Hill amalgamation of half-a-dozen other historic villages. Cherry Hill’s pre-1945 war population of around five thousand had doubled by 1950 and topped thirty thousand by 1960 as it suffered the fate of so many small suburbs of great, expanding cities. Nowadays, the nine-hole Merchantville Country Club and its surrounding grand houses, like McDermott’s Open, had long since become islands of old-fashioned decadence in an ever expanding urban sprawl.
McDermott’s Open — a mansion by any other name — was the father of the bride’s wedding present to the happy couple. It dated to the twenties when a minor steel mogul had decided to honor the most favorite son of the Merchantville Country Club; one John J. McDermott, the first native-born golfer to win the US Open.
It transpired that unknowingly, Daniel Brenckmann had married a frustrated ‘golf nut’. It seemed that one of the reasons Gretchen had not taken him very seriously until history decreed that they spent the night of the October War together — actually, there had been a host of other reasons she had not taken him seriously but they had got over those in the intervening months — was that he had never shown the remotest interest in golf.
In her teenage years Gretchen had spent her summers sailing in small boats, or riding out, and every other spare minute of the whole year whacking a golf ball around the New England countryside. The most recent version of her post-Battle of Washington ‘to do list’ was: one, get better (a work in progress); two, get married (achieved); three, resume her career and make up for lost time as soon as possible (again, a work in progress); and four, get back out on the golf course and regain her pre-injury handicap (which was next on the agenda and likely to be a real tester since she had been playing of a startlingly low handicap of two before the Cuban Missiles Crisis went wrong).
More than once Dan had caught his beloved gazing out of the window at the nearby sixth fairway. Gretchen’s injuries had mostly healed over but she was still unsteady on her feet some days, her movements stiff, sometimes excruciatingly painful and her right shoulder still refused to co-operate when she attempted to swing a golf club.
John J. McDermott was one of Gretchen’s heroes.
‘He’s still the youngest man to ever win the US open,’ she had informed Dan, scandalized that he could be so ignorant. ‘When he won in 1911 he was just nineteen. He won again in 1912. That year he was the first man to post a below par score in the Open!’
Being married to the beautiful, fascinating force of nature that was Gretchen Louisa Brenckmann nee Betancourt was an exhilarating rollercoaster ride, and something told her husband of barely a month that the ride was not about to slow down any time soon.
He had left his wife sleeping — she had not got back from DC until two that morning — while he went downstairs to the palatial kitchen to rustle up fresh coffee and toast. Returning upstairs he discovered his wife wide awake and hungrily digesting the inner pages of last night’s edition of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the temporary capital’s largest daily circulation paper.
Gretchen lowered the Bulletin momentarily to flash a smile at her husband.
“Coffee!” She murmured approvingly as he carefully placed the bed tray, with its supporting legs, across her lap. She briefly discarded the paper and offered her left cheek for a pecking kiss. “The bombing of the British Embassy sounds awful?” She observed rhetorically. “Somebody ought to be fired. The rest of the diplomatic community must think we are all perfect barbarians!”
Dan was not about to disagree with his wife.
He groaned.
“Oh, I meant to bring this morning’s Inquirer upstairs,” he apologized.
Gretchen giggled.
Dan tingled all over; God in Heaven that giggle always hit the spot.
“I’ll read it later,” she declared huskily. “After I’ve had my breakfast and you’ve had your wicked way with me!”
This latter was an unhurried, gently greedy thing notwithstanding the repeated loud ringing of the bedside telephone. After the third unwanted interruption Gretchen ordered a halt be called so that Dan could disconnect ‘the bloody thing’. They had had to start all over again from the beginning and blissfully, that took forever.
“For all you know that could have been the Vice President’s people ringing you?” Dan offered, plugging the bedside handset back into the wall socket. His father-in-law had had the house equipped with all ‘mod cons’. The plastic plate by the leg of the bed tidied away the room end of telephone cables strung all over the house and shrieked modernity at him, as did the appliance-filled kitchen and ‘utilities room’ downstairs, this latter being essentially a ‘wash room’ incorporating big washing machines and hot air ‘tumble’ dryers which vented steam and condensation to the outside world via a tangle of pipes and ducts. To his mind the whole house was hugely ‘over the top’ and must have cost Gretchen’s father a prince’s ransom. Not that money was any object to a man like Claude Betancourt.
“No, LBJ won’t come anywhere near me or father unless he wants something really badly,” Gretchen retorted mildly, lazily. She was lying on her right side in the tangled sheets, her bare, bullet-scarred back pale in the half-light of the room with the drapes closed.
Dan stared thoughtfully at the bullet wounds, the scar tissue still mottled and pink where surgeons had had to open her back to extract the two rounds. His wife’s scars had already become a part of her, a thing she treated as badges of honor and which reminded him every day how desperately close he had come to losing the love of his life last December.
When he had finally discovered her in one of the crowded emergency care wards at Bethesda she was comatose and nobody knew if she would live or die. Later nobody had known whether she would be blind or paralyzed or both; at every step he had feared the worst and to see her now so full of life, so happy and so profoundly herself very nearly convinced him that there had to be a loving merciful God overseeing them both.
Gretchen rolled onto her back, her lips twisting with a spasm of discomfort.
“Nothing,” she muttered instantly. “It’s just my back reminding me that a part of the State Department Building fell on it, sweetheart.”
McDermott’s Open came with a full time housekeeper, a severe middle-aged African American matron, a cook who was married to Gretchen’s driver — also a full-time Betancourt family retainer — and two gardener-handymen. Miscellaneous cleaners came in daily during the week and when required at the weekend. Dan had still not found out who wrote their pay cheques; the sudden opulence of his married lifestyle jarred against the careful waste not want not ethos of his upbringing. Likewise, the very idea of having ‘servants’. It was water off a duck’s back to Gretchen, or so he had assumed thus far.