Marie Taylor, Ink

My cousin Hazel was eleven years older than I. In my teenage eyes, she was the epitome of chic sophistication, a secretary who for a few short years had left our small western Pennsylvania town to work in Washington D.C. It was there she learned how to smoke Parliament cigarettes with élan, walk confidently in high heels, and wear White Shoulders perfume, her signature scent.

I can still picture her walking into my parent’s neighborhood store after Sunday Mass, her stilettos clicking on the tiles, her dark hair in an Audrey Hepburn pixie cut capped by a beret, and her working girl hands demurely gloved in white.

She was petite and pretty and always smiling. To my mind she was irresistible in her femininity, and I could not understand why she was still unmarried – for at 26 she was a spinster by our Italian measurement of seasons.

That memory of her was 60 years ago and during the intervening time we walked our different paths: she to stay in that small Pennsylvania town surrounded by generations of Italian relatives, and I to emigrate to distant California with its anonymity and possibilities. We kept in touch, more in the later years than in the earlier ones, and every time I came home to visit, I would see her.

When Hazel was in her late-70’s she called one evening to tell me she had broken her leg falling from a step stool. Like a tourist listening to a travel agent, for she had always preceded me on our mortal journey, I learned about future adventures such as home health care, pill dispensers, doctor visits and physical therapy.

Just as we were saying our goodbyes, she suddenly added that the local radio station had begun playing ballads from the 40’s and the 50’s. She listened all of the old Italian crooners like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennet, Dean Martin and Perry Como.

She cried when she heard those songs because they reminded her of a young man she loved named Bill. They had met in their mid-20’s when they both worked at Westinghouse, one of the factories in the area. They dated for four years until he got a job transfer to California.

Bill continued to see her when he came home on summer vacation and at Christmastime, but the rest of the year he was silent. There were no late-night phone calls or occasional letters, no birthday cards or promises.

Finally, at 33, Hazel met the man she was to marry, who would, little by little, make her life a misery until he eventually died in another woman’s bed. She was getting old, she said, she wanted children. A letter was sent to Bill informing him of her coming marriage with an unspoken hope enclosed. There was no response from this distant man and so the step from which there is no turning back was taken.

A few years later, Hazel ran into Bill’s sister, a woman she knew slightly, at the grocery store. After the courtesies were completed, the sister added as she turned to go, “You know, Bill was going to give you an engagement ring on his next visit.”

It is this sentence that now ran through her head as she sat alone listening to old love songs in her apartment. If only she had had a little more faith in him, if only she had waited just a little longer, if only he had let her know, if only ….

She said she had never told anyone this story of her secret love, and I felt honored by her midnight confession. After we hung up, I wondered: Had Bill really planned to marry her? Should she have waited just a few more months? Or would she still be waiting for him to visit on his next vacation? Why did the sister not speak sooner?

I wished Hazel had been braver that day when she learned he was leaving. I wish she had thrown herself into his arms and wept, declared her love and risked rejection. Or, before taking that final step into marriage, I wished she had gone to California to see him and demand he declare his intentions. But Hazel, like so many of her generation, was raised to be demure, not bold; to wait until asked, not to initiate.

After that conversation I did not hear from Hazel for many months and when I called her, the line was disconnected. I no longer had ties to other members of her family, so following my intuition, I went online and checked the archives of the local newspaper. It was there I found her obituary … “after a short illness … preceded in death … survived by a son and daughter ….”

RIP, Hazel. May choirs of angels sing you to sleep.

When we look back over our lives, it seems a straight line from where we were then, to where we are now, an inevitability of chance and choice. But all lives have their what-if’s and might-have-been’s that visit our imaginations when we are all alone. If only, we say, we knew then what we know now, how different our lives would be – or would they?