A Complicated Marriage (6 page)

And with that, the lid slammed shut on my feelings. They fled into the cracks and crannies of me. Easy as that. My mother had taught me well. I washed my face, glued myself together, and off we went to the parties.
Dinner with the Whitmans at Chambord—no goose on the menu—then on to a Christmas party at the “Skinny” Iselins'. Very fancy.

What I hadn't foreseen was an attack of such virulence. No one screamed in my family; violence happened sideways and sotto voce. I had struck a mother lode of bigotry that had been mostly hidden but was startlingly close to the surface. Marriage! The gloves came off. Jews were perceived as “foreign,” “other,” and by association, I was tainted. Yet, even so, I hadn't foreseen that I mattered so little that they would throw me away. Bigotry vs. Jenny: I hadn't stood a chance. I could even understand how they would have been able to eat hearty and rest easy that night. They had disowned me, wiped their hands clean of me. The irony would surface a few years later, when a family tree revealed that the hallowed Plattdeutsch patriarch's mother was Jewish. From Bohemia, she had brought her fortune and her Biedermeier into the family. Her descendents had selective awareness and memories.

As for bigotry itself, of course I knew about that. I had grown up in a hotbed of anti-Semitism. In most of Westchester County's suburbs, and especially in Rye, schools, neighborhoods, country clubs, and social activities were “restricted.” The big, fancy house I grew up in until I was eight was in an area called Green Haven that prohibited owners from selling to Jews. My mother, on her descent into the marginal middle class after her disastrous second marriage, to the Con Man, was one of the first to break the covenant. Not out of principle, but out of need. My high school, Rye Country Day School, under financial pressure, had grudgingly opened its doors to a small quota of Jews. My best friend there was Jewish. My mother suggested that I not see so much of her, because I couldn't “reciprocate.” Reciprocate what, I didn't say. Even then, I knew the limits of my mother's imagination. My friend continued to be my best friend.

Whatever had gone before, I had been set up that Christmas Eve. Certainly by the Augustins, but by my mother? I suppose it was possible that she knew, to some extent. But, like me, she could not possibly have foreseen the brutal turn the “conversation with Jenny” would take. I had never learned how to defend myself, other than to duck and run. One aftermath was that, overnight, I became super-sensitive to anti-Semitism,
sniffing it out whenever I came within shooting distance. And I have done a lot of shooting. As for that Christmas Eve, the event was soon eclipsed by more compelling experiences.

On Christmas day I went to bed with Clem for the first time. Wounded from the family wars, I very much needed the closeness with him. But it wasn't easy. Though I hated to admit it, sex still carried a “bad girl” stigma. Having never been rebellious, my early exploration had been confined to a furtive kiss with my best friend Cissy when I was ten. But oh, how I wondered about it. I had wondered since David, the handsomest boy in my whole thirteen-year-old universe, had kissed me behind the garbage cans at my friend's country house and told me I had the most beautiful lips he had ever seen and set my stomach lurching for weeks. Thereafter, stomach lurching would be associated with love.

At least until the day of the “posture pictures.” The ninth-grade girls were taken one by one to a room in the basement of Rye County Day School, and I was told to take off my clothes. I stood on a platform under a bright light while a man took pictures, front and profile. I never saw the pictures, but the feelings lingered: Nakedness = shame = sex. A year later, I did what teenagers did and fell in love with my boyfriend Doug and made much ado about not “doing it.” We necked and petted in the backseat of his best friend's car until I had orgasms without knowing what they were—all, of course, without going “below the waist.”

I stood there in front of Clem. My nakedness made me feel ugly. Shame welled up in the depths of me. I wanted to hide.
A lover
?
How do I do it
? Here was a new, bad-girl role that I wasn't sure I wanted to play. But I touched his arm, the silk of his arm. This was Clem; this was the real thing. Then I was on the bed, giggly with nerves, wishing “it” would be over as soon as possible. No surprise, I experienced little pleasure and much pain. So much for my mother's “beautiful moment with the man you love.”

After the deed was done, I lay on the far side of Clem's sheets, now stained with lord knows what, but what I romantically thought of as “my girlhood.” My face to the air shaft, the thought that I would ever have to have sex again scared the hell out of me. But as I was learning, real life had a way of smoothing out the wrinkles of my mind, and gradually,
during the next month, that night was followed by another and another, until it wasn't frightening at all.

As a young girl with every reason to be wary of what each day might bring, I had found it comforting to think that if I could truly picture myself in some place, or with some person, then that would show me my path. In January 1956, I was confused. Although engaged to Clem, I still had no picture, none at all, of where I would be after Morton Street. But there were circumstances.

Debby had already started to move out some of her things to Norman's, in preparation for sailing to Greece with our friend Judy, and I couldn't afford to keep the place. Most of my other college friends—at least those who preferred men—had already married, or were engaged to up-and-coming banker- and lawyer-type guys who still had their hair. Growing up, I had always imagined he would be in my picture. In high school I'd married every boy I met, combining our initials, writing endless variations of our names, and doing numerology to see if we were compatible, as if compatibility mattered. We would go to country club dances on Saturday nights, live in a white colonial with a circular drive, have a station wagon, and make lots of babies. All the things that would make up for being a have-not in a town of haves.

It had been only four years since I had written in my Rye Country Day School yearbook that my life's ambition was “to be a model wife.” Lord! But there it was, among the other eleven girls' aspirations of journalist, doctor, teacher . . . Fortunately, the seeds that Bennington subsequently planted about finding and fulfilling an “original” life wiped out my years of suburban brainwashing.

Yet even in the few months since my entry into the real world, the empowerment of those college years often seemed like an aberration. Oh, I knew my confusion wasn't really about suburbs and country clubs. It was more about wanting to opt out of the hardscrabble workaday life. I knew
TV Guide
wasn't in my picture, $8 raise or not, yet I had lost any aspiration for something better. It didn't help that in Clem's world, surrounded by impassioned people, I felt increasingly out of my depth and passionless.

But to hell with aspirations and girlish pictures of my future. Here was
Clem, a real man, a man with his own world. The most interesting man I had ever met. He found me attractive. He focused on me, listened to me, seemed to enjoy what I said and how I saw the world. He lit up in my presence. A man I could trust, who I could give my love to and know it would be returned. Compelling stuff for the fatherless girl summarily dumped at age five. And all firsts. Our relationship had evolved as if on an assembly line: We met, we got to know each other, we got engaged, we had sex. Now I was on the cusp of moving in with him. Then the giant leap: marriage. That would solve everything. Wouldn't it?

But didn't Clem challenge all the norms? I would be marrying strange. Twice my age, not much money or much of a job, and no interest in either. Yes, Clem was interesting. But why did I foresee loss? Loss of the girl who wrote rivers of poems, had even published a few in obscure magazines, and who loved her army-navy-store clothes. If I lived in Clem's world I would always be at the bottom of a ladder I didn't want to climb, a know-nothing in a world of know-it-alls. And so the seesaw went on.

Then, as if on cue, the requisite deus ex machina cut through the dithering. In mid-February, Morton Street was robbed while we were at work. The take was paltry—a small stash of jewelry accumulated from my grandmother, and a few things of Debby's. I called Clem, who told me to call the police and that he would be right over. The underwhelming event, at least by police standards, was duly recorded and that was that. Debby was staying over at Norman's and, unwilling to spend the night alone, my move into Clem's place began that night. After all, what was a girl to do?

This justification that I had no choice was very important to me. I clung to it. And why not? I was painfully aware that my unmarried college friends were either living with roommates or with their parents. And here I was “shacking up” with a guy, “living in sin.” As titillating as the thought was, it didn't make me feel good. But then, as if to make sure I leaped off the cliff, the robber returned the next day and stripped us of whatever was left, including the chocolate cake in the mini-fridge.

A week later, feeling just fine and very grown-up about it, I moved into 90 Bank Street with my table, my typewriter—scorned by the discriminating thief—and my clothes. A few weeks later, with no ballyhoo
and no regrets, I quit my job. I would be a Mrs., a jobless Mrs. Wasn't that the way of the world?

From the outset, Clem's implicit acceptance of our living together surprised me. He could so easily have felt my presence as an intrusion. After all, he had never really set up housekeeping with anyone before. Even when, at twenty-five, when he had had the six-month marriage in California, they had lived in hotel rooms or with her mother. Yet here he was, taking it in stride.

As for me, more than surprised, I was astonished. Suddenly there was a man in my bed, there was a man sharing the small space, the bathroom, bureau drawers, all the day-in-day-out intimacies of life. And it was much easier than I had dreamed. Most astonishing of all, now that I was attached to someone, I felt free. It was that freedom that, at least for the moment, allowed me to indulge in floods of feeling: pleasure, misgivings, second-guessing, the delicious drama of it all. And I was the star. No longer a hostage to confusion, I now loved wallowing in all the reasons I shouldn't marry, while inside me, safe and snug, were all the reasons I most certainly would.

Floating on these delicious thoughts, two weeks later, right before my twenty-second birthday, I decided to visit my father in Chicago and my brother in Denver.

My father, David, stepmother, Marge, and their young son, Pieter—Dutch-ness will out—lived in an apartment on the Near North Side that was a testament to Marge's passion for all things purple. I didn't know any of them well. After the divorce, when I was five, I hadn't seen my father again for six years. Thereafter, I would make excruciating two-week visits each summer. As withdrawn and tongue-tied as I was with him, so he was with me. On the other hand, Marge was a loud, frightening force of nature housed in a large, bosomy body that she thrust into the world like the prow of a ship. I kept my distance. Pieter was a loving oasis, so proud to have a sister. Now, after almost ten years, I had reached a comfortable middle ground with the family. Or so I thought.

 

Cocktail hour, the evening ritual, begins soon after I arrive. As usual, there is the enormous platter (purple, of course), heaped with crackers
laden and soggy with braunschweiger and minced ham and cheddar, and celery stuffed with cream cheese and pimentos, and bowls of sugared pecans, and jumbo green olives. Restraint is not allowed in Marge's domain. Or in David's, at least in his delegated domains, the carving of roasts and the mixing of drinks. I had never called him Father or Dad. They were words that would never pass my lips; my brain just wouldn't wrap around them. Marge had often urged me to do so, saying how hurt he was that I called him David. Knowing I couldn't, I had done second best—I called him nothing.

He now holds sway over the large pitcher of iced gin. He deftly taps in a few drops of Noilly Prat, before he swirls the mixture briskly and fills to the brim the chilled martini glasses, each anchored with an olive. Do I on this occasion mention my preference for a twist? I like to think so, given my almost-married adult status.

Two martinis or more later, we move to the dinner table. Surely, that night there was a roast, with my father fulfilling his other manly function. And mountains of mashed potatoes and peas drowning in lakes of butter, and oceans of gravy, and Parker House rolls—this is Chicago, after all—crowned by a warm gushing pie. As always, there is a large cut-glass jar of hard sauce to ladle onto the pie. “I know how much you love hard sauce,” Marge would say, and I would dutifully dollop it on. That would be the last time I ever had hard sauce.

Later that evening—I trust Pieter had gone to bed—talk turns to my marriage plans. I don't know how far I get into my story. Probably not an inch. I know I am never asked the obvious questions, such as how Clem and I met, what he does for a living . . . Within minutes, my usually passive father, who never, to my knowledge, has had anything to say about anything in heaven or on earth, leans forward and starts to tell a joke about a Jew and a priest. And then another and another. No one laughs but him. His Scotch shivers in his glass. Soon he is talking about “Them.” “They're all alike.” He has to deal with them in business, but he has never had one of them in his house. As with the Augustins, that he has never met Clem matters not at all.

I sit on the lavender couch, wedged between Marge's oversized purple pillows, as a lifetime of anti-Semitism pours over me. He is now on his
feet. His mouth won't stop. Jews have ruined the country, now they're out to ruin his family. All punctuated with, “dirty Jew” this, and “goddamned kike” that.
Where am I? Why am I here? Who is this man who looks like me and is so vile
? Somehow I find my voice. “Stop! If you don't stop, I'll leave. And I'll never come back.” He doesn't stop. I escape to my room off the kitchen.