At 78 She Found Love Until She Discovered Why He Chose Her

The first time Arthur asked for a photograph of my face without makeup, I thought it was romantic.

By the fourth time, I’d started to wonder.

“Another picture?” I teased him over the phone. I was sitting in my kitchen with a cup of tea going cold beside me and my reading glasses pushed up on my head. “Arthur, you’ve already seen me three times this week.”

“Please, Holly,” he said. His voice was warm and a little rough, the voice of a man who’d smoked a pipe once and quit a long time ago. “I love seeing you as you are.”

I laughed.

“You’ve seen me as I am at our coffee date. And at the botanical garden. And in that awful photo by the rosebush where I’m squinting.”

“Not nearly enough,” he said.

I should have asked him why right then.

I didn’t. I was seventy-eight years old, and a man was telling me he wanted to see my face. I didn’t want to ask questions. I wanted to believe him.

I should explain about my face.

When I was a girl, I had a soft, thin little shadow on my upper lip, the kind lots of girls have. Nobody noticed. Then, somewhere in my late teens, it started to darken. By the time I was twenty-two, it was a mustache.

Not a faint one. A real one. Dark and noticeable, the kind people saw from across a room.

Doctors told me it was hormones. They gave me long words and pamphlets and pills that made me sick to my stomach. None of them made it go away.

I spent more than fifty years learning ways to hide it.

I bleached it. I waxed it until the skin bled. I tried electrolysis three times, and each time it hurt so badly I cried in the parking lot. I shaved it every morning in the bathroom with the door locked, even after I was married, because I couldn’t stand for anyone to see me do it. I wore heavy powder. I learned to tilt my head down a little when I smiled. I learned to hold a coffee cup or a napkin near my mouth when I laughed.

Strangers stared. Some of them remembered their manners and looked away. Some of them didn’t. Once, in a grocery store, a little boy pointed at me and said loudly, “Mommy, why does that lady have a mustache like Grandpa?”

His mother pulled him away by the arm. She didn’t apologize. She just looked at me with this mix of pity and embarrassment, which was worse than if she’d laughed.

What hurt most, all those years, wasn’t the staring.

It was knowing that people noticed my mustache before they noticed me.

My husband, Walter, never once complained.

We met at a church picnic when I was twenty-six. He was a quiet, gangly man with big ears and a terrible singing voice. He worked as a pharmacist. He sat down next to me at the potato salad table and asked whether I thought the deviled eggs were safe to eat in that heat.

“I wouldn’t risk it,” I said. I had a napkin pressed against my mouth.

“Then I won’t,” he said. He looked at me. “You can put that down, you know. The napkin. I don’t mind.”

I’d been holding that napkin for two hours.

I put it down.

Walter kissed me good morning every single day for forty-three years. Whether I’d shaved or not. Whether I’d put on powder or not. He’d come into the kitchen in his bathrobe and kiss me right on the mouth, mustache and all, and say, “Good morning, Holly Jean.”

Once, years into our marriage, my cousin invited us to her daughter’s wedding. That morning, my upper lip looked particularly dark. I’d shaved it twice and it still showed through the powder. I sat on the edge of the bed in my good blue dress and told Walter I wasn’t going.

He didn’t argue.

He just went to the closet, got my coat, and held it out to me.

“Holly,” he said, “the bride invited you because she loves you. Nobody’s hiring you to model lipstick.”

I laughed in spite of myself.

I went to the wedding. I still checked my face in my compact six times during the ceremony. But I went.

Walter died nine years ago. A stroke, in his garden, among his tomato plants.

Afterward, I stopped thinking about romance completely. I was sixty-nine. I had my house, my roses, my church friends, and my granddaughter, Maddie, who came every Sunday. That was enough.

I could manage loneliness. I’d learned how.

What I couldn’t stand was the thought of another man studying my face and deciding whether I was acceptable.

I’d already had one man who didn’t care. I didn’t think I’d ever be lucky enough to find a second one.

Then my granddaughter signed me up for a dating app.

Maddie is twenty-eight. She’s a nurse, like her mother, and she has Walter’s ears and Walter’s stubbornness. She came over for Sunday dinner in March, sat down at my kitchen table, and held out her hand.

“Give me your phone, Grandma.”

“What for?”

“Just give it to me.”

I gave it to her. She tapped at it for ten minutes with her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.

“There,” she said. She turned the screen around. “You’re on SilverHearts. It’s for people over sixty-five.”

“Madeline Rose,” I said. “Take that off right now.”

“No.”

“I’m seventy-eight years old!”

“So?” Maddie said. “Grandpa’s been gone nine years. You deserve company. You deserve somebody to go to the movies with. You deserve somebody to argue with about crossword puzzles.”

“I don’t want a man looking at my face and…”

I stopped.

Maddie looked at me for a long moment. She knew. She’d always known. When she was six, she’d asked me why I shaved like Daddy, and I’d been so embarrassed I’d changed the subject.

“Grandma,” she said gently, “anybody who doesn’t like your face isn’t worth your time. Okay?”

She uploaded a photograph of me she’d taken at Easter. I was laughing at something her husband had said. No napkin. No hand over my mouth. My mustache was right there, plain as anything.

“Not that one,” I said. “Maddie, please. Not that one.”

“That one,” she said. She pressed the button.

Three days later, Arthur appeared.

He was eighty, a widower, a retired commercial photographer. His profile picture showed a tall, thin man with white hair, a neatly trimmed white beard, and kind gray eyes behind wire glasses. He was standing on a dock somewhere, squinting into the sun, holding a fishing rod.

His first message asked whether I preferred doing crossword puzzles in pen or pencil.

I stared at it for a long time. It wasn’t hello, beautiful. It wasn’t I like your smile. It wasn’t about my face at all.

I typed back: Pen. I’m old enough to live dangerously.

His reply came in four minutes.

Then we’d get along.

We messaged every evening after that.

At first just a few lines. Then whole paragraphs. He told me about his late wife, Margaret, who’d died two years earlier after a long illness. He told me about his garden, which he admitted was mostly weeds. He told me he’d worked as a photographer for fifty years, mostly catalogs and advertisements, “nothing anyone would hang on a wall.”

He remembered everything I told him. He remembered that I grew roses, and he asked about them by name. My Peace roses, my Mister Lincolns, the climbing Eden on the trellis by the back door. He remembered that Maddie had just started a new job in the cardiac unit at St. Luke’s, and he asked how her first week went.

Walter used to remember things like that.

After two weeks, I decided to tell him.

I sat at my kitchen table one evening with my phone in my hand for almost an hour. I typed it out and deleted it four times.

Finally, I just wrote it plainly.

Arthur, I should tell you something before this goes any further. I have facial hair. A mustache. I’ve had it since I was young. You may have noticed in my photograph. If that bothers you, I understand completely, and I won’t be hurt.

That last part was a lie. I’d be very hurt.

I pressed send. I put the phone face-down on the table. I made a cup of tea I didn’t drink. I held my breath.

Twenty minutes later, the phone buzzed.

Please don’t ever shave it, Arthur wrote. I think you’re beautiful exactly as you are.

I read those words three times.

Then I cried. Right there at my kitchen table, at seventy-eight years old.

Not because Walter had failed to love me. He never failed. Not once in forty-three years.

I cried because I’d spent all those years refusing to believe him.

Our first date was at a little coffee shop downtown called The Daily Grind.

I almost didn’t go. I stood in front of my bathroom mirror for forty-five minutes. I shaved. Then I wished I hadn’t. Then I put on powder. Then I wiped it off. Then I put it back on again.

In the end, I wore a light layer of powder and my good lavender cardigan, and I went.

Arthur was already there when I walked in, sitting at a corner table by the window. He stood up when he saw me. He was even taller than I’d expected. He had a small white bakery box on the table in front of him.

“Holly,” he said. He held out his hand. “I hope you don’t mind. I brought lemon cookies.”

I stared at the box.

“How did you know I like lemon cookies?”

“You told me,” he said. “Last Tuesday. You said the lemon cookies at Hoffman’s Bakery were the only reason you ever went downtown.”

I had said that. I’d forgotten.

He’d remembered.

We talked for almost three hours.

At some point, I realized he was looking at my face. Really looking. Studying it. My hand went up automatically and covered my upper lip. Fifty years of habit.

Arthur noticed.

“You don’t have to do that around me, Holly,” he said gently. “Darling.”

I lowered my hand slowly.

I left it in my lap for the rest of the afternoon.

On our second date, we went to the botanical garden.

It was April. The tulips were out, thousands of them, red and yellow and pink. We walked slowly along the paths, because Arthur’s knee was bad and mine wasn’t much better.

In the rose garden, which wasn’t blooming yet, just green leaves and thorns, he stopped.

“Stand there,” he said. “By that bush.”

“Arthur, it doesn’t even have flowers.”

“I don’t need the flowers,” he said. He took out his phone. “Just you.”

I stood there by a rosebush with no roses on it, squinting into the sun. He took four pictures.

That evening, he sent me a message.

Would you send me another picture? Without makeup? I’d love to see your face the way it really is.

I thought about it for a long time.

Then I went into the bathroom, washed off my powder, stood by the window where the light was good, and took a picture of myself with my phone.

It took me eleven tries. My hands were shaking.

I sent it.

On our third date, we had lunch at a little Italian place.

Arthur asked a lot of questions that day. About my life. Where I’d grown up. What my parents had been like.

“Have you always lived here?” he asked.

“Not always,” I said. “My family moved around when I was young. My father sold farm equipment. We lived in four states before I was eighteen.”

He seemed very interested in that.

Maybe a little too interested.

“Which states?” he asked.

“Oh, all over,” I said. “Iowa. Ohio. Illinois for a few years. Then here.”

He nodded slowly. He didn’t ask anything else about it. But I noticed him write something down on a napkin when he thought I wasn’t looking, and fold it into his shirt pocket.

A few days later, Arthur invited me to dinner at his house.

“Helen will cook,” he said on the phone. “My housekeeper. She makes the best roast chicken in the state. Saturday at six?”

“I’d love that.”

“Wonderful.” He paused. “And Holly? Would you send me one more picture before then?”

I laughed.

“Arthur, at this rate you’ll have enough photographs to open a museum!”

“Just your face, darling. No makeup.”

I didn’t laugh this time.

“Why are you so interested?” I said. “Truly?”

There was a short pause on the line.

“Because I love your natural beauty,” he said.

I wanted that answer to be enough.

So I sent the picture.

But that night, lying in bed, I noticed something odd.

Arthur had never asked for a photograph of my roses. He talked about them all the time. He asked about my Peace roses and my Mister Lincolns. But he’d never once asked to see them.

He’d never asked for a picture of my house. Or my kitchen. Or my garden. Or me holding Maddie’s new puppy, which I’d mentioned three times.

Only my face.

Always my face. Always without makeup. Always close up.

I lay there in the dark for a long time.

Then I told myself I was being a foolish, suspicious old woman, and I went to sleep.

Arthur’s house was a big old brick Colonial on a quiet street on the north side of town, with tall trees in front and a slate path leading to the door.

He greeted me at the door with a bouquet of pink roses.

“For the lady who grows better ones,” he said.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” I said.

He smiled. Then he looked at my face. He studied it for so long that I touched my upper lip without meaning to.

“Come in, Holly,” he said.

The house was beautiful and a little dusty. Old bookshelves lined the hallway, floor to ceiling, packed with books. There were photographs everywhere, on the walls, on the tables, on the mantel. Most of them were of a woman with short silver hair and a gentle face. Margaret, I assumed. Margaret on a beach. Margaret in a garden. Margaret laughing at a birthday party.

In every picture, Margaret was holding her hand near her face. Covering her cheek, or her chin. I noticed that right away. I know that gesture. I’ve made it a million times.

Arthur led me into the living room. There was a fire going in the fireplace.

A woman came in from the hallway carrying two crystal wine glasses on a little silver tray.

She was about sixty, short and round, with gray hair pulled back in a bun and a plain blue apron over her dress.

“Holly, this is Helen,” Arthur said. “Helen, this is Holly.”

Helen looked at me.

And she went completely white.

One glass slipped off the tray. Then the other.

They shattered on the hardwood floor.

“Oh, goodness!” I said.

I jumped back. There was broken crystal everywhere, glittering in the firelight.

Helen didn’t move. She didn’t even look down at the glass. She just stood there with the empty tray in her hands, staring at my face.

“Are you all right?” I asked her.

Her lips moved.

“Holly?” she said.

It came out like a gasp.

I blinked.

“Yes?”

Arthur stepped between us.

He moved faster than I’d seen him move all week.

“Helen,” he said. “Please take care of the glasses.”

Helen looked at him.

“Arthur…”

“Now, please.”

His voice was firmer than I’d ever heard it. Not loud. But hard.

Helen bent down slowly and began picking up the pieces of glass, one by one, and putting them on the silver tray.

I knelt down to help her.

“No, ma’am,” she said quickly. She wouldn’t look at me now. “Please don’t. You’ll cut yourself.”

Arthur put his hand on my elbow and guided me gently toward the dining room.

“She’s been having a difficult week,” he said quietly. “Her sister’s in the hospital.”

I glanced back over my shoulder.

Helen was still kneeling on the floor among the broken glass. And she was still watching me.

I had the uncomfortable feeling she’d just recognized somebody she wasn’t supposed to see.

The dining room was dark wood, with a long table set for two and candles in silver holders.

Helen brought out dinner a few minutes later. Roast chicken, potatoes, green beans with almonds. She set the plates down in front of us without saying a word. She didn’t look at me. Her hands were shaking.

It was the best roast chicken I’d ever eaten.

I barely tasted it.

Over dinner, Arthur started asking questions about my childhood.

Then my parents.

Then whether I’d ever had a sister.

“No,” I said. “I was an only child. Why?”

“Just curious,” Arthur said.

He cut his chicken into very small pieces. He wasn’t eating any of it.

I set down my water glass.

“You’re asking a lot of family questions tonight, Arthur.”

He smiled.

“I’m just getting to know you, darling.”

I tried to relax. I really tried.

Then he asked something that made my fork stop halfway to my mouth.

“Did your mother live in Chicago in 1965?”

I stared at him across the candles.

“How do you know that?”

Arthur reached for his wine glass. His hand wasn’t quite steady.

“Lucky guess,” he said.

“Arthur,” I said slowly, “that’s a very specific guess.”

He gave a small, uneasy laugh.

“You mentioned you lived in Illinois for a while.”

“I said Illinois,” I said. “I never said Chicago. And I never said 1965.”

His smile faded.

He put the wine glass down without drinking any of it.

For the first time, I wondered whether our meeting had been an accident.

Before I could ask him anything else, his phone rang.

He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen. Something moved across his face.

“Excuse me,” he said. He stood up. “I’m sorry. I need to take this.”

He walked out of the dining room. I heard his footsteps go down the long hallway. A door opened and closed somewhere at the far end of the house.

I sat there alone with my half-eaten dinner and the candles flickering.

The house was very quiet. I could hear the old grandfather clock ticking in the hallway.

Then I heard footsteps. Fast and light. Hurrying.

Helen appeared in the dining room doorway.

She wasn’t carrying anything. She’d taken off her apron.

“Ma’am,” she whispered. “You need to leave.”

I stared at her.

“What?”

“Please,” Helen said. She glanced back over her shoulder toward the hallway. “Before he comes back.”

“Helen, what’s going on?”

She came into the room. She stood very close to my chair. Her eyes were wet.

“There’s something you should know,” she said. “Something he should have told you a long time ago.”

She took my hand. Her fingers were cold.

She pulled me gently up out of my chair and led me toward the hallway.

“Arthur’s been looking for you,” she whispered. “For years.”

My heart started pounding.

“Looking for me? Why?”

Before she could answer, a voice came from the end of the hallway.

“Helen. What are you doing?”

Arthur was standing at the end of the long hallway, by the door of a room I hadn’t seen yet. His phone was still in his hand.

Helen didn’t let go of my hand.

“I’m telling her,” she said.

“Not like this,” Arthur said.

“Then how, Arthur?” Helen said. Her voice shook, but she didn’t back down. “You’ve had three dates. You’ve had an entire dinner. You’ve had weeks of phone calls. When were you going to tell her?”

I looked from one of them to the other.

“Somebody,” I said, “had better explain to me what’s happening. Right now.”

Arthur walked toward us slowly down the hallway. He stopped about six feet away.

“Holly,” he said. “Please don’t be frightened.”

“That,” I said, “is not a reassuring thing to say.”

He stopped.

Helen turned toward me. She was still holding my hand.

“There’s something in his study you need to see,” she said.

“Helen…” Arthur said. He sounded panicked.

“No,” I said. I pulled my hand gently out of Helen’s. I looked straight at Arthur. “Show me.”

His study was at the end of the hallway. It smelled like old paper and furniture polish and pipe tobacco, even though he told me he’d quit years ago.

There were filing cabinets along one wall. A big wooden desk. Framed photographs on the walls. Not of Margaret. Old black-and-white photographs. Advertisements. Women in pearls holding up bottles of face cream. A girl in a sundress smiling next to a box of hair removal cream. SMOOTH. FEMININE. FLAWLESS.

In the middle of the desk sat a small cardboard box.

Arthur looked at that box as if he’d been hoping I’d never notice it.

I looked at Arthur. Then at the box. Then at Helen.

Helen stepped forward and opened the lid.

Inside were yellowed envelopes, old newspaper clippings, and photographs.

On top of everything else, there were printouts. I recognized them right away. They were the pictures I’d sent Arthur. My face. Close up. Without makeup. Printed out on glossy photo paper.

All of them.

And next to them, in a clear plastic protective sleeve, was an old black-and-white photograph.

Helen lifted it out of the box very carefully, by the edges.

She handed it to me.

It showed a teenage girl sitting under a bright salon lamp.

Her hair was pinned back off her face with bobby pins. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap. She was wearing a dress with a little white collar. She was looking down at her hands. Not at the camera.

There was a dark shadow on her upper lip.

I knew her before I recognized the dress.

It was me.

Me, at seventeen. In Chicago.

I sat down in the leather chair next to the desk. My legs just gave out.

I ran my thumb along the photograph’s worn edge.

I remembered that day. I’d spent sixty-one years trying not to remember it.

It was the spring of 1965. We’d been living in Chicago for two years, in a little brick apartment on the North Side. My father was traveling all the time for work. It was just my mother and me most of the time.

My mother loved me. I want to say that. She loved me fiercely. But she was terrified for me. She’d grown up in a small town in Iowa where girls got married at nineteen, and she couldn’t imagine what would happen to a girl who looked the way I was starting to look.

One Saturday, she took me downtown to Marshall Field’s, the big department store on State Street. She said we were going shopping for a dress for my junior prom.

Instead, she took me up to the eighth floor, to the cosmetics department, where a company was holding what they called a beauty consultation.

There was a sign. I still remember it. LET US HELP YOUR DAUGHTER BLOSSOM.

A woman in a pink smock took me into a little room with a big mirror and a bright lamp.

She promised my mother they could make my face look more feminine.

She sat me in a chair under the lamp. She tilted my chin up with two fingers. She looked at my upper lip for a long time, like a doctor looking at a rash.

There were other adults in the room. Another woman with a clipboard, writing things down. My mother, sitting in a chair by the door, twisting her handkerchief.

And a young man with a camera. Skinny. Dark-haired. Barely older than me. He was standing by a tripod in the corner.

They talked about my face like I wasn’t there.

“That much hair will be difficult to conceal,” the woman in the pink smock said.

“She’ll need regular treatment,” the woman with the clipboard said. “Weekly, at first. Then perhaps twice a month.”

“Girls are terribly sensitive at this age,” the first woman told my mother, in a low voice, like I couldn’t hear her from three feet away. “We find it’s best to address these things early. Before boys start to notice.”

My mother nodded and twisted her handkerchief.

Then the woman in the pink smock nodded at the young man with the camera.

“Before photo,” she said.

He stepped up to the tripod. He looked at me through the lens.

I looked up at him. He was the only person in that room close to my age. The only one who wasn’t talking about me.

“Do I look terrible?” I asked him.

My voice came out very small.

He didn’t answer.

He just looked down at his camera. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. His face went red.

The woman in the pink smock laughed.

“Well,” she said, “that’s why we’re here, dear.”

The camera flashed.

I’d stared down at my hands until the appointment ended. They put cream on my lip that burned like fire. They sold my mother three jars of it and a booklet and a schedule of appointments.

Then I went into the ladies’ room on the eighth floor of Marshall Field’s, locked myself in a stall, and cried until my mother came looking for me.

I’d never gone back for the appointments. My mother never made me. I think she saw my face in the car on the way home and understood she’d made a mistake. She never brought it up again. Not once.

But I’d carried that afternoon around with me for sixty-one years.

That much hair will be difficult to conceal.

Well, that’s why we’re here, dear.

I’d never forgotten that boy’s silence.

I looked up from the photograph.

Arthur was standing by the desk. He looked very old suddenly. Older than eighty.

“Where did you get this?” I said.

My voice didn’t sound like mine.

Arthur sat down slowly in the chair across from me.

“I worked for the company that produced those consultation photographs,” he said. “Belle Visage Cosmetics. Out of Chicago. They did consultations at department stores all over the Midwest.”

I stared at him.

“You?”

“I was nineteen,” Arthur said. “It was one of my first jobs. I’d just gotten out of photography school. They paid me two dollars an hour to take before-and-after pictures.”

I looked down at the photograph again.

The bright lamp. The pinned-back hair. My hands in my lap.

And in my memory: the camera on the tripod in the corner. The young man behind it. A skinny boy with dark hair who wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I looked up at Arthur. At his kind gray eyes behind his wire glasses. At his white beard.

Sixty-one years.

“You were there,” I said.

He nodded.

“Yes.”

“I remember asking you,” I said slowly, “whether I looked terri…