With Nancy at Cantigny

Nancy defined perpetual motion. She taught in a nursery school, sang in a church choir and in a women’s barbershop chorus. She looked for more things to do. She joined Parents Without Partners. She yearned for a man to date, but when she could not find one, she sought female companionship.

After my divorce, I also wanted to go out to dinner and to plays and concerts. Our friendship started with the two of us getting together on weekends.

We went out to dinner, to movies, and to plays. I tend to be critical, saying, “I enjoyed it, but . . . ." For Nancy every performance was wonderful. She was a fun companion who always lifted my spirits.

I always paid for my own tickets. My income came from selling real estate. It never occurred to Nancy that the market crashed and I had little money to spend on anything. Lucky for me, Nancy also was eager to go to any event listed as “free” in the local newspaper.

Both of us enjoyed Sundays at Cantigny. Col. McCormick, the famous publisher of the Chicago Tribune, named his mansion and the surrounding grounds in Wheaton after a French village, site of a World War I battle. When he died, he left his estate to be open free to the public.

The park-like grounds looked like a staging area for battle with tanks and artillery on the lawn. (My boys loved to go there to play soldier.) A white marble building housed a museum dedicated to the Army’s First Division, where the colonel served in World War I.

Nancy and I preferred walking the gravel paths in flower gardens and going into the mansion for Sunday afternoon concerts. We listened to string quartets and Russian choruses in the elegant library with its concealed bar where Winston Churchill once got trapped behind the secret doors when he went searching for whiskey in the middle of the night.

One weekend Nancy said, “The roses in the Cantigny gardens are so beautiful. Let’s go early and stroll in the rose garden before the concert.” I tried to tell her we had done that several months ago. She insisted. So we went early. It was November. Nancy was surprised and disappointed to find not a bloom on dry, brown, leafless stalks on all the rose bushes. Her reaction: “I wonder what happened to the roses.”

At times I wondered if I was simply a person Nancy chose to see when she did not have a boy friend to take her out. I moved to Albuquerque. Then I returned to Downers Grove to sue Wally for support. I had no money to rent an apartment. Martha and Don did not want me and told me so. That’s when I learned Nancy was my best and truest friend in Downers Grove. For the next three years, whenever I needed her, Nancy invited me to stay with her on weekends.

She had a beautiful, two-bedroom condo. The little bedroom was full of costumes Nancy wore in the chorus’s performances. In the big bedroom I lay in the twin bed wishing I had a place like hers, while in the other bed Nancy, her face creamed and her hair wrapped in netting over big rollers, talked until 4 a.m.

I was penniless, crazy, and depressed. Nancy did not notice. I was a friend who needed help, and she took me in.