A memory laid to rest; Lost love returns to haunt man after 44-year marriage to another

By Pamela Ferdinand, Boston Globe.

Brookline, Mass.

Edwin Barker, 76, happily married for 44 years, had a vivid dream one night about an old flame.

They were together again back in the 1940s, listening to Arthur dexadrene on the Esplanade in Boston, watching Jimmy Stewart films at the Brookline Theater, walking arm-in-arm as couples do.

It got Barker to wondering. Tugged at his conscience a bit: Whatever happened to Mary Catherine MacKay? Was she sending him some kind of message? And did she find happiness after he left her brokenhearted?

She was the girl who never spoke ill of anyone and for whom apologies came too little, too late. And when Barker reached back into the past for her, his message in an April 20 newspaper ad resonated in the hearts and imaginations of anyone who ever wondered about an old love or failed romance.

"A letter for Mary Catherine MacKay," the ad read. "We were in love with each other at the time. You were relying on me, and I let you down. I am truly sorry for what happened, and I lost you forever . . . I don't have many years left, and it would do my heart good to know that she has had a happy life. Please someone let me know."

Barker didn't even want to see her. He needed to find out what happened to her. And he did. But a reunion was not to be.

"Usually when I dream something, I forget it," Barker said from his home in Clearwater, Fla. "But this one was so real that I thought, 'I wonder how she made out?' because I still cared."

Which did not please Mildred, his wife: "How would you feel after 40-some years if your husband was trying to find someone else?"

Mary Catherine MacKay was virtually the girl next door. She lived with her parents and sister two houses away from the Barker home on Thorndike Street.

They met at choir rehearsal. Eddie was 20, tall and dark-haired, a grocery store clerk. Mary was 23, with brown hair and a reedy frame. She worked at the Woolworth 5&10 in Newton Centre and won him over with kindness.

They fell in love in 1940. As they courted, debates raged in local newspapers over Roosevelt's foreign policy and local schools considered opening machine shops for defense workers. They went to concerts on the Esplanade and sometimes the movies when he could afford it. Her parents found no reason not to approve.

Suddenly, without warning, Eddie ended it one February day in 1941. They stood outside her house, and he told her he was moving to Philadelphia for a railroad job. She pleaded, said she had counted on him. He gave no further explanation.

There was no way she could have known what was going on in his adolescent mind. He was still reeling from the deaths of two previous girlfriends and worried, foolishly yet sincerely, that his love for Mary put her at risk of dying young too.

His first girlfriend, a 17-year-old named Nona, whom his uncle adopted as a young girl, was murdered in Vermont in 1937 by a jealous farmhand, Barker said. The 14-year-old boy stole their love letters, read them and tore them up. Then he shot Nona in the head as she read a Sears & Roebuck catalog before dinner.

Eddie's second attempt at romance, a friend of Nona's named Rosemary, died minutes before their first date. Famished after church and nervous about seeing him, she ate a hasty lunch. Acute indigestion brought on heart failure. A priest was giving her last rites when Eddie came to pick her up for a Sunday matinee.

"I had this crazy notion at the time that I was never going to get involved with a woman again because every time I do she dies," Barker said. "I didn't want anything to happen to Mary."

In 1941 he moved to Philadelphia. Two years later, Eddie came to his senses and tried to win Mary back. But it was too late. When he visited on furlough, she shook his hand coolly and said it was nice to see him.

Later she wrote him that she was engaged to another man. She may only have been trying to let him down gently.

A decade after the 1945 death of her father, a supermarket manager, Mary moved to Dedham, Mass., with her younger sister and mother.

Mary stayed at Woolworth's for the rest of her life, becoming the chain's first female manager in the Northeast.

The three were private and inseparable, hunting for antiques, attending church, traveling to the Maine coast on weekends and wearing matching sheared beaver coats in winter.

There was no time for romance, and Mary never mentioned her breakup with Eddie to her family.

Mary died on Dec. 13, 1969, at age 53 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

She never married. By all accounts, she was happy. And she never knew Eddie broke her heart to spare her life.

"I have no regrets," Barker said. "She was really too good for me. She deserved the best."