Part Two: Beer Party Bride Held in Torso Slaying

The plot thickens...

This is the conclusion of our courtship saga, which began last week. Here is a link to Part One, in case you missed it.

A word about Barbara’s job at The News. The high school tabloid was only the tip of a big smelly iceberg. She was put in the paper’s Women’s Department because, she was told, the city editor didn’t think women belonged in the actual newsroom.

I will pause here, to let you mull that. Take all the time you need.

Here's how it worked. Newspapers had a whole section, called the Women’s Pages, just for fashion, recipes, weddings, parties and the comics. The stuff the ladies could wrap their little brains around, the editors figured.

This was the pit of despair into which this smart, talented woman had been hurled.

It gets worse. Every Saturday evening, she had to ride along with our society photographer, watching her shoot photos at parties and taking down information for captions. This demeaning task was known as the “bourbon beat.”

For the next couple of weeks, we practiced the art of new friendship and continued to surprise each other.

We began spending some time off together, often watching “Dragnet” and “Adam 12” on a small black and white television. We made rude comments and supplied our own dialog. We cracked ourselves up.

One Sunday, I told her I was driving to Louisville to see my family, and then driving back. I jokingly asked if she wanted to come along.

Surprisingly, she said yes. Near the end of our two-hour visit, my stepfather told Barbara it was a shame it was so cold, because otherwise he would take us out in his boat on the Ohio River.

Barbara plucked a hand grenade from her purse, pulled the pin, and rolled it over to my side of the living room. “My dad has a sailboat,” she said. “We go cruising on Long Island Sound every summer.”

Gesturing in my direction she added, “We’ll have to get you out there this summer.”

Either I had misheard, or she had just invited me into her life. I worked it around in my mind, wondering if there could be some other way to interpret her words. I had hit on this woman 20 minutes after I first saw her, and now, two weeks later, she seemed to be returning the favor.

We found ourselves at the trailhead of one of those ill-advised office romances, the ones that always end in tears, blame, regret and embarrassment.

Except, ours didn’t do that. Two months later we were engaged, and four months after that, we were married.

We spent our wedding night at the Plaza Hotel, and our second night on the sailboat, gently bobbing at anchor in Long Island Sound. The halyard flapped against the mast, a soothing honeymoon song if ever there was one.

In the morning there was the aroma of coffee and bacon in the galley, and the harsh sounds of seagulls and foghorns.

If you find this story sweetly romantic but wonder how we covered so much emotional ground so quickly, I will connect the dots.

On Friday evening, May 7, just 39 days after our awkward first meeting, we were driving through a torrential rainstorm on our way to a seafood restaurant when a car ran a stop sign, t-boned us and spun my ’69 Chevy Nova around.

I climbed out unscathed, but Barbara had three injured vertebrae. An ambulance took her to the emergency room. When I got to the hospital, I learned that with a few months of wearing a back brace and undergoing physical therapy she would be fine.

She bore me no blame. Indeed, she was thankful that I had made her wear her seatbelt. Had she not been buckled in she would likely have gone through the windshield, the police told her.

I went home and wondered what would happen when I visited her at the hospital the next day. I decided I would bring some board games and magazines to pass the time, and we would make the best of it.

At work early the next morning I got distracted by a juicy police report about a barmaid who had dismembered her husband and strewn his body parts around Central Indiana.

The icing on the cake was that the factory where they had been married had been my employer before I joined The News. The place made walk-in freezers for institutions. I was able to call my former coworkers at home, to get quotes and color for an already great story.

It ran on page one, above the fold. There is no better place for a story to be.

I walked into Barbara’s hospital room carrying the board games, the magazines and my Beer Party Bride Held in Torso Slaying clipping. It was easily the best headline ever on a story over my byline. It still is.

It was high noon. A very long day stretched ahead of us. We started talking, and then we talked some more, and we just never stopped. You could cut the intensity in the room with, you know,  whatever that beer party bride had used to dismember her husband.

At 8 p.m. the floor nurse told me visiting hours were over, but she said I could stay. At 10 p.m. the nurse said doctors were beginning their night rounds and I really needed to leave.

When I got home the phone was ringing – it was Barbara, and we talked for two more hours until the hospital turned off the phone system for the night.

The next day, exactly the same thing. Another twelve hours of deep secrets and high hopes. Confessions and dreams. Periodically, we would pause briefly while we shuddered in disbelief over where our words seemed to be carrying us.

None of this should have been happening.

She was Episcopalian, I was agnostic. She loved animals, I hadn’t thought about them much. She liked Fitzgerald and Hemingway, I read Steinbeck and Conan Doyle.

I listened to folk music, Barbara liked Motown. She liked curry, I had never tasted it. She adored great poetry, and I wrote pretentious rhyming drivel. She had a passion for Broadway, and I had never seen live theater.

Barbara conversationally used words like proselytize and prehensile and déclassé, which she gifted to me because she thought a writer should know them.

She had stayed awake in college, and I had slept. So, what were the two of us doing in this antiseptic hospital room, throwing around the “L” word as if we owned the copyright?

Two people, one of them immobile, for three weeks. We never got around to playing the board games. Those magazines never got read. By the time she was discharged, our lives were changed.

If you are in a hurry, here is a more compact version of this story, from a journal Barbara kept at the time. In her own words:

“Wearing a wild tie and weird black glasses, smoking a pipe and slumping badly, Robert came into the Women’s Department and had the fashion editor introduce us. It was my first day at the Indianapolis News. March 29, 1971.

April 12^th, he came to my apartment for the first time.

May 7^th, auto accident. During the next two weeks we began to talk about marriage.

He proposed on the campus of Butler University, afternoon, June 12. Beautiful day, but hot and sticky and I had my back brace on.

He wore jeans and a striped t-shirt.

**********

Let me fast-forward 49 years, to the year 2020. We’re back in Indianapolis after wandering the world for a razzle-dazzle lifetime. We have just bought a home in the midst of a pandemic. Sitting on a front lawn at a neighbor’s house, several couples having drinks.

It is a crisp October evening. The sweaters have come out of storage and sycamore leaves are piling up on the ground. There are pumpkins on porches. Frost is on its way.

I have known some of the people present here since my own teenage years, so this is something of a small reunion. They ask how Barbara and I first met, and I tell the story I’ve just shared with you.

When I mention that our courtship lasted a mere two months, jaws drop.

“Is this all true?” an old high school classmate of mine leans in and asks Barbara, tuning out the rest of us.

“Of course,” she smiles. It is the same confident smile I first saw half a century ago.

My friend squints at her, suspicious and skeptical. He isn’t buying any of this.

“So, what did you see in Basler?”

Barbara puts a hand on my arm and gently squeezes. “He made me laugh.”