I know a story they left out of her obituary.

In the late 1970s and early 80s I worked in the Development Department at The Franklin Institute, the Philadelphia science & industry museum. Stanley Pearson worked in the same department. We were an odd pair. I was in my twenties, liberal, struggling to support my wife and me while she was in grad school; for fun, I spent my free time programming an early CP/M microcomputer. Stan was in his sixties, conservative, a part of the network of Princeton alumni who ran Philadelphia business and society; he had been an athlete in college, both baseball and squash, and still played squash and golfed regularly. But Stan was a charmer, a genuinely nice man, and it was largely because of his open-heartedness that the two of us got along so well together.

My job was to type up fundraising material on the new word processing system and to program the membership computer.

Stan’s job was to bag pigeons.

“I’m going pigeon hunting,” he would announce, heading out for lunch with one of his Princeton buddies. “I’ll be back with five thousand dollars.” Or it might be ten or fifteen; he was seldom wrong in his estimates.

Stanley was a great talker and I enjoyed listening. He told me about his days in the Army Air Force during the Second World War. His family had enough pull to get him a relatively safe posting as a flight instructor, stationed in Los Angeles. And there he fell in love.

She was an actress. She liked to do sweet and silly things like have him appear in a walk-on, or name a minor character “Pearson.”

Stan went to her house for a New Year’s Eve party of mixed Hollywood and military types. She was a B-lister, but she was working her way up, a beautiful, rising Hollywood star, and had a big house with room to entertain.

I imagine the party in a high-ceilinged room with a chandelier and a baby grand. Tonight there’s a trio, piano, bass and drums, and a busy dance floor. Twenty or thirty people fill the room. Half the men are in uniform. Perhaps Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, comes by. Perhaps Jimmy Stewart, too. Stewart was a Princeton man, and he and Stanley commissioned in the Air Force at about the same time; Stan told me they occasionally partied together.

Stanley saw the wife of an Air Force buddy of his standing alone as midnight approached. Her husband was deployed. In that group at that time, for a woman to go without a New Year’s kiss was not just lonely but embarrassing and, with her husband overseas, miserable. Stan knew that his girlfriend would not lack for attention, so at midnight he stayed with his friend’s wife and kissed her good and proper. Immediately afterward, he went over to his girlfriend, to give her a New Year’s kiss.

She slugged him.

And from then on, according to Stanley, her nickname in the Industry was “Slugger.”

Stanley never told me her name, but today I googled “1940s actress slugger.”

Marguerite Chapman got her start during World War II in B movies, and earned her way up into A movies like The Seven Year Itch. She was known in the Industry as “Slugger.” Her obituaries all attribute the nickname to her brothers, given “in her tomboy childhood.”

Stanley and Slugger remained close throughout the War, but when Stanley left the military in 1945 his family insisted that he come back east, take over the family business, and marry into Philadelphia society. This he did, wedding a member of the prestigious Disston clan in 1947. Marguerite Chapman married and divorced a couple of times. They kept in touch. Stan once showed me a flier she sent him for a Beverly Hills realtor that had endorsements (with photographs) from various older actors and actresses, including Slugger. I do not remember the printed name or the fuzzy headshot.

I do remember his story of that New Year’s Eve party. It always brings me a sense of joy—as it seemed to bring Stanley, also.

I think I know why.

Being lovers is improv. It can be sophisticated: when I behave selfishly you draw yourself up like Margaret Dumont in a Marx brothers film, after which I apologize by whistling the buffoon Papageno’s tune from Magic Flute and you forgive me with Princess Leia’s theme in over-dramatic solfège.

It can be gentle: I touch your hair and you touch my heart.

It can be physical comedy, too, and when Slugger slugged Stanley she was playing a brilliant bit in their romantic theater. To Stanley at the time, and still when he told me about it more than thirty years later, it was all about love.

The nickname stayed with her until her death in 1999. For almost sixty years, then, she was reminded daily of how much and how happily she and Stanley had been in love.

Walter Lawn writes poetry and short fiction. His work has been published at On the Run Press, Heartwood Literary Magazine, Every Day Fiction, and Lily Poetry Review. Walter is a disaster recovery planner, and lives outside of Philadelphia.