Lost Love

In yesterday’s mail, I got my semi-annual South Dakotan magazine, the alumni news magazine put out by my alma mater, SUSD, State University of South Dakota. They’ve upped the ante from past publications, with heavy slick paper and vivid color. A lovely issue. I looked at some of the articles, but it’s been almost sixty years since I graduated and almost nothing about the campus or the staff is familiar to me anymore. The school I knew in the fifties is now considerably different. But, as I always do, I turned to the section with news about graduates from past decades. Nobody there I recognized from the 1950 to 1960 section. Then I went through the In Memoriam list of those who had died in the past year. And a name from my past popped up. Patricia (Prostrollo) Schultz, ’57 B.S.Ed. Sioux Falls, SD, Alphi Phi. I was stunned. I felt more sorrow than I should have. Her death shouldn’t have surprised me so much or made me so sad. She had to be, after all, in her eighties. But the sight of that name filled me with such sorrow and regret. Patricia Prostrollo was a woman whom I had loved enough that I had wanted to marry her. “But that was in a different country, and besides, the wench is dead.” (Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta) The wench is dead, the wench is dead, and my sorrow was as much for my loss as for her passing.

          My sorrow was all about the life I have that will probably soon end. Sorrow for all the things I wanted to do and never did. Sorrow for what might have been. Sorrow for the passing of a woman I had thought about off and on for my entire life.

          I met her in 1955, after I’d gone back to college, gone back to my affiliation with Phi Delta Theta. The Phi Delts had agreed to team up with the Alph Phi sorority for our entry in the annual Strollers’ show, a musical competition among eight or nine combinations of fraternities and sororities. Patty and I were named directors, I because of my time in New York writing songs, her because she could wrap almost anyone around a finger to get what she wanted and she apparently wanted to be the director. I remember the first night we met to discuss what we might do for our act. One of my frat brothers was a huge Harry Belafonte fan and convinced us to do a calypso-themed story about building a house. And that’s what we agreed on. But at the end of that first evening, beers in hands, I sat in a chair in the Phi Delt livingroom and Patty sat on my lap, her face so close to mine I could hardly breathe. Here she was, this tiny, raven-haired girl/woman who knew exactly how to play me like a salmon. And I was hooked from that moment and for all the time we spent together getting our musical show ready and for several months after that. We performed the calypso act and won second place. We were all excited and I was in love.

          We were together quite often for those next several months. But I was a freshman and she was a junior. I remember in the spring asking her to go to a college dance with me. She told me an old boyfriend from her hometown was going to be there and that she was obligated to go with him. But she had really wanted to be with me, she insisted. And kept insisting. The hook was still set and she was still able to reel me in whenever she wanted. But when the college year ended and she went back to Watertown, our relationship also ended. She graduated the following year and I never saw her again. But I always felt the sting of that loss.

          In the years I taught American Literature, whenever we had a unit on Fitzgerald, I had my classes read his short story, “Winter Dreams.” The main character, Judy Jones, was a seductress who could lead on several male suitors at the same time, always bringing any who strayed back into the fold of her charms. I always told my classes that I had known a Judy Jones back when I was in college and knew exactly what the young men felt when she would switch from one suitor to another. Patricia Prostrollo was my Judy Jones. And now the wench is dead and I feel such sorrow.

          I wrote a song about her right after I lost her in 1955. It’s a slightly get-even song, youthfully romantic and a bit too sentimental, but it still sums up what I felt those sixty-two years ago.