PRIVATE PAPERS
Charles Van Doren came back from the Virgin Islands with his bride, Geraldine Ann Bernstein, and spoke as follows:
"We had decided a few weeks ago to marry this summer. But the sun was so warm, the trees so pretty, and the seas so beautiful that we decided: Why not now?"
Damned if it wasn't something like that in our first tumble so many June moons ago in the Bronx.  We remember it as if it was 1934...
She fetched us out of the pool room on Arthur Avenue and dragged us into a late-hours ice cream parlor around 176th Street and Clinton Avenue and got us giddy on 2-cents plain. Then she led us over the mud puddles to a borrowed bench in a mangy garden outside a friend's home. (The garden was deserted, by prearrangement, we learned later.)
Anyway, we started talking--probably about slave labor in Siberia and things like that--and one thing led to another and we turned to this warm little item and said, Why don't we get married?, and she came back like a flash, all aglow in the star-kissed Bronx night, and said something like, Do you really mean it, you wonderful brute? And...
Well, what else was a boy to do?
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