The Spirit Of Old West Point, 1858-1862 (1907)

Pius and several weeks later departed for the hellish rigors of West Point. Donna was now two thousand miles away and nowhere in my mind. I was fighting to survive. Upperclassmen were taking numbers to get in line to scream in my face. Even after putting plebe year and its hazing behind me, the pressure did not diminish. The academic workload was overwhelming. I couldnБЂ™t imagine any other nineteen-year-old in America having it worse than I did. I was wrong. In faraway Albuquerque, Donna was ill, suffering periodic bouts of nausea and vomiting. Since she had previously experienced a kidney infection, her mother assumed a reoccurrence and took her to the doctor. The blood test results came. With her mom sitting primly at her side the doctor delivered the diagnosisБЂ¦pregnancy. The father was another teenager. DonnaБЂ™s parents were destroyed. This was 1964 and it was a minor scandal for even a Hollywood starlet to be pregnant and unwed. For a traditional Italian-Catholic family to have a pregnant, unwed daughter was worse than a diagnosis of a terminal disease ...»