Their love was a lifetime in fruition
A misunderstanding separated June and Carlos from marrying in the 1950s, but they have been reunited and are catching up
SPRING 1952. June Caskey, making her way along the corridor of an army hospital in Battle Creek, Mich., heard a sound, a beguiling sound that drew her in to a room and ended up imposing a peculiar, storybook shape to the rest of her life.
The room was the hospital library, and there, as June puts it, in the curve of a grand piano stood a man singing beautifully, an aria from an opera. It was 64 years ago.
The man was Carlos Markyna, a soldier recovering from the second of three surgeries to mend horrific wounds he suffered in crossfire during the Korean War.
“We spent two hours together,” says June, almost 17 at the time — she’d been teaching piano in Hamilton since age 14. Love at first sound. His voice, the music. “His brown eyes.”
The man in the curve of the piano. He fell in love, too. How do people know? They just do. The world should stop when that happens, but it doesn’t. It goes on. And it rolled cruelly over their chance to be together.
The man in the curve of the piano somehow became the man getting out of his daughter’s car in June’s driveway in March of last year. Now he was 85, recently a widower. June was 79. They hadn’t seen each other since 1953.
“The brown eyes, his straight nose, those hadn’t changed,” says June. In
Carlos’s pocket was his wallet, with a picture of June he’d kept there since he’d first met her, kept there through a marriage to another woman and the growing up of his four children.
“My feet wouldn’t pay attention to me,” says June, of the moment she saw his presence develop out of the open car door. “I flew into his arms.” And he into hers. They kissed.
They’d waited their whole lives for this. On Aug. 8, June and Carlos, now 80 and 86, will celebrate their first anniversary of marriage.
Carlos shouldn’t have been at that hospital at all. He shouldn’t have been in the Korean War, 24 Division; he was Mexican, but Truman committed America with too few men, so the army was hungry to draft.
With no prospects in Mexico and at the urging of a relative, Carlos swam the Rio Grande, got on a truck and found work on a sheep farm in Montana. He went job to job, place to place. In California, he befriended a girl whose father mistakenly feared he was dating her, and so he put the draft board on to him.
“Now I was in the military,” Carlos remembers. “I couldn’t even speak English, just a few words. I failed my 17-week training; they still put me on a boat to Korea.”
He saw nine months of fierce fighting; many friends killed. One day a bullet went through his helmet, took out his cochlea, part of his jawbone, and another one tore through his shoulder. He spent three years recovering, including his stay in Battle Creek.
June Caskey has spent her whole life in Hamilton. She grew up on the central Mountain, consumed by music, for which she has a strong gift.
June has spent her life building up the renowned Caskey School of Music, with its innovative, holistic approach to playing and learning.
In the early ’50s, June, her mother and her cousin Virginia travelled to Battle Creek to hear June’s American uncle, a pianist, play at the hospital.
Perhaps because it was a military hospital (they can’t remember exactly why), admission was tightly controlled. June and her mother weren’t allowed into the performance area and got sent to the library instead. Otherwise, June and Carlos might not have met.
But then, one sadly misread letter unravelled it all.
After June and Carlos met, Carlos asked June’s mother, Verna, if he could write to her. Verna said yes. They exchanged letters. Soon after, Carlos moved to Texas to undergo his third operation; on leave, he visited June in Hamilton.
They kept writing. When June was 18, Carlos asked her, in a letter, to marry him, for he was being transferred to Germany and wanted her with him.
“I got cold feet,” says June. Not about marrying, but about Germany. She asked him to wait until his three-year posting was done. But Carlos, whose English still was not strong (it is now, exceptionally so), read her response as rejection.
Broken-hearted, he left for Europe and ended up marrying a German woman, who was also on the rebound.
And that was it. Months, years, decades passed as though in a cinematic fluttering of calendar pages. Carlos served 24 years in the army, including a posting in Vietnam and another 24 as a Veterans Affairs lab technician, ultimately in Georgia. His wife was an invalid the last 20 years of marriage.
For her part, June built up her school and never stopped loving the man in the curve of the piano, albeit hopelessly. Never wavering, in 64 years.
March 8, 2015, 10 p.m. “June Caskey speaking.” It’s how June always answers her phone.
“Are you really June Caskey?” said the voice on the other end. “Yes, I am,” said June. “Well, I’m Carlos Markyna. I’ve never forgotten you. I’ve always loved you. I’ve kept your picture in my wallet all these years.”
June, dumbstruck, allowed a long silence to pass.
“Oh,” continued Carlos, suddenly worried. “Are you married?” “No,” she said. “I’m not.” “I’m coming right there.” He was calling from his home, near Augusta, Ga.
April 2015, the kitchen of June Caskey’s house and teaching studio.
Carlos had come up from Georgia with his daughter Gigi, who went ahead to visit a friend in Rochester.
Carlos and June had five days alone together.
“You know,” Carlos said to June, “I could never ask you to come to Georgia.”
Silence. “But maybe you could invite me to live here.” “OK,” June said. “I invite you.” “Will you marry me, June?” “Yes, Carlos. Yes I will.” “Let’s not tell my kids just yet,” said Carlos. “OK,” said June.
On Day 5 Gigi picked up Carlos to catch their flight back to Georgia. She forgot her purse at June’s and was back in 20 minutes. Gigi was smiling her ears together. “You told her?” “I couldn’t keep it in,” said Carlos.
On Aug. 8, 2015, Carlos and June said they do and they did and they are and they will.
And after holding that note at the grand piano in Battle Creek, Mich., for 64 long, long years, they exhaled.
In her, um, their, home now, I talk to them.
They are happiness itself. She teaches him piano; he teaches her Spanish.
Carlos shows me his wallet. It’s a weathered, leathered old thing and at the fold of it, there she is — June, 17 years old — and my heart skips a bit at the sight of it.
Love is strong.