After 20 Years Apart, Lovers Find Happiness

This is a story for anybody who has ever stared off in the distance, thought of a long-lost love and wondered, “Whatever happened to. . . ?”

This is the saga of a blind college wrestler who fell for a nursing student, and of the 20 years they spent apart while never quite forgetting each other.

Start with a disapproving mother, toss in an undelivered note and mix in marriages to other people. It seemed as if Gene and Mary Ann Manfrini were not fated to be together.

But something had happened when Gene met the shy nursing student in 1953, something about her voice, something about her he cannot define and could never forget. And so, all those years later, he tracked her down.

In many ways, the Manfrinis’ story is echoed in a recent study of people who have loved, lost and then, after many years, reconnected with their old heartthrobs. Hundreds of study participants said that love can endure parental objections, moving away, the passage of time and other marriages. Reunitings happen at all ages, says psychologist Nancy Kalish of Cal State Sacramento.

And it’s usually the man who takes the first step.

Gene Manfrini, now 67, bounds from room to room in his New Jersey home with such authority you’d think he’d leave a wake. Blind since age 2, he needs only a quick touch on the kitchen counter as he passes to get his bearings.

“Wrestling did a lot for me,” says Manfrini, who excelled at it at Columbia University in New York. “It gave me the confidence to do anything I wanted.”

*

Mary Ann Manfrini, 64, a tall and slender former nurse with short salt-and-pepper hair and a direct manner, is more reserved than her ebullient husband. “He’s the one with all the romance,” she says.

The story started when Gene, then 25, auditioned Mary Ann, then 21, to read college textbooks aloud and found not an employee but a girlfriend.

It started with that something in her voice. And later, he says, “when I finally got my arms around her, that felt nice too.”

Mary Ann was quickly drawn to the handsome, muscular athlete who played piano, got around town without even a white cane and “just took control of everything.”

“When we decided to go out, all the arrangements were made. He would tell me when he would pick me up. Wherever we went, he took me and brought me home [by bus and subway]. . . . To me, this was quite a feat.”

For three months, they dated. Gene couldn’t afford anything fancy. So they walked through city parks. They went to Columbia football games. He got student tickets to the opera, way up in the top tier.

And for the first time in their lives, each began to think about marriage.

One night, after a performance of “Madama Butterfly,” Gene took Mary Ann home to the Bronx and kissed her good night, as usual.

It was the last time he’d be with her for years.

Suddenly, she started refusing all his calls. Gene was devastated. What was going on?

It was her mother, “a very dominating force in my life,” Mary Ann says. Gene was not what she wanted for Mary Ann. Breaking off the romance was “easier than fighting with my mother.”

Once, about a year later, Mary Ann sent him a note suggesting they get together--but by then, he was living with a woman, who, he says, saw Mary Ann’s note and didn’t tell him about it.

When Mary Ann realized that no reply was coming, “I felt he just didn’t want to be bothered with me.”

*

Gene married the woman in 1954, and Mary Ann went to the wedding, sitting in back of the church and saying nothing to anybody. She left before it was over. “It was sort of like that was the final thing,” she says.

Three years later, she married a classmate.

By then, Gene Manfrini had found that colleges weren’t interested in hiring a blind man to teach music. He turned to piano tuning, which combined his musical ear with his wrestler-strong hands. This career took off, and he eventually handled instruments for the likes of Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubenstein and Irving Berlin.

But his marriage, which included two daughters, was not going well. He thought about Mary Ann quite a bit.

“I just wondered how she was,” he says, “how she was doing. . . . I never forgot her. She was just engraved on my mind.”

In the late 1960s, he finally called Mary Ann’s mother to satisfy his curiosity, and she later mentioned the call to Mary Ann.

But once again, Mary Ann didn’t want to see Gene. Not now. She had enough complications. Her husband had walked out on her, leaving her with a 4-year-old daughter.

Yes, she had thought of Gene over the years, especially during the bad times in her marriage. “I said, if I had just made up my mind to marry Gene Manfrini, I wouldn’t be in this mess I was in.”

Too late now, she told herself. “You don’t fool around with somebody else’s husband.”

And so it remained until 1974. Gene, divorced and unable to locate Mary Ann, happened to meet a friend who ran a detective agency. Could he find a long-lost friend?

Soon a private eye went up to the Bronx neighborhood where Gene had kissed Mary Ann good night so long ago. Her parents had moved away, but he found a neighbor who knew how to reach them.

It’s urgent, the detective said: An old patient of Mary Ann’s had died and wanted to leave her a pile of money. Much later, the detective would explain the whopper this way: “It was a good story. Someone would respond to it.”

And indeed it worked. Curious about who this benefactor could be, Mary Ann told her mother she’d take a phone call.

“Do you know a Gene Manfrini?” the private eye asked.

“Oh, my God, did he die?”

“No. He’s very much alive. And he’d like to see you.”

Soon after, on a cold January day, Gene took a long bus ride to Glens Falls, N.Y., where Mary Ann was living.

She spotted him at the bus station.

“Hello, Gene,” she said.

He put his arms around her and kissed her. And he was shocked.

“I thought, ‘I have the wrong person’. . . . My whole world is feel and hearing. She sounded the same, but I was stunned. . . . I said to myself, ‘What happened to her?’ ” By his arms’ reckoning, she had lost maybe 50 pounds.

But, of course, she was still Mary Ann. And before long, they were running up $300 phone bills.

In March, the normally reserved Mary Ann asked him over the phone, “Are you going to marry me or what?”

He was so surprised he couldn’t answer at first. But he recovered enough to say, “Of course, I will.”

They wed on April 19, 1975.

Now, they live a short stroll from an Atlantic Ocean beach. At their anniversary this year, they’ll be able to savor the triumph of being married for as long as they were kept apart.

“If somebody has made an impression on you, you always wonder,” Mary Ann says. “You don’t forget about it: Where are they? What are they doing?”

“If you’re in a position to go find that person,” she says, “I’d say go.”