Any Woman's Blues (5 page)

The first time I encountered Dart’s father in the flesh was Thanksgiving of the first year Dart and I lived together. We were invited—nay, summoned—to the elder Donegals’ manse in Philadelphia to partake of their
echt
American feast. I must admit that my Dyckman Street Jewish childhood had left me with a lifelong fascination for old WASP ways. I was not just fucking a man when I fucked Dart; I was fucking American history, the
May-flower
myth, the colonial past. While my ancestors were tearing their pumpernickel apart in the Ukraine, Dart’s were choosing amongst a plethora of silver forks and taking tea at the Colonial Dames of America. The table analogy was apt, for though Dart’s family was downwardly mobile (as only Social Register WASPs can be), they still had enough sets of silver and bone china to serve presidents and kings—in the unlikely event that presidents and kings should come to call.

No presidents and kings came to call these days; only their twenty-five-year-old son and his thirty-nine-year-old inamorata. Dart was titillated by his father’s jealousy over me (for Dart’s father knew and admired my work). To be twenty-five and to bring home a mistress closer to one’s parents’ generation than to one’s own is a sort of triumph, a flourish of oedipal one-upmanship that was not lost on me.

I could see Dart’s delight when he brought me home for dinner, and I could tell that his father was bested in the struggle, because he kept dropping things—cold silver, hot hors d’oeuvres, and lastly a Baccarat crystal wine goblet, whose glistening shards he was then obliged to sweep up with elaborate courtliness.

Dart’s parents’ house was cluttered and catworn. The Collyer brothers came to mind. Torn Naugahyde chairs stood beneath oval portraits of family progenitors. Chippendale antiques stood cheek by jowl with folding chairs from Kmart. The fabric on the upholstered furniture hung in tatters from the ministrations of the four family cats—Catullus, Petronius, Brutus, and Julius Caesar (called respectively Cat, Pet, Brute, and Julie).

When we came into the living room, Dart’s father was on his knees before the fire, poking it into flames (something the males in that family were good at).

He sprang to his feet, and one saw at once that the elder Darton was taller than his already rather tall son.

“Well, my lad,” he said, shaking his son’s hand briskly. “Introduce us.”

“Leila Sand,” said Dart, proud to be fucking a household name.

“Well, well, well,” said the elder Darton. “What an honor.”

I was seated near the fire in a red Naugahyde chair (whose stuffing seemed to want to view the light of day), and the two Dartons—father and son—went off to the kitchen to fetch the drinks and hors d’oeuvres. I sat and took in the scene, as exotic to me, given my background, as the twin palaces of the sultan of Brunei.

The formality between Darton III and Darton IV, the catworn furniture, the Chippendale antiques, the pervasive smell of mothballs and cat litter . . . all this spelled WASPdom for me—and its essence was as aphrodisiac as, probably, my Jewishness was to Dart.

The sitting room of the town house looked out on a little garden with a fountain, atop which a smallish statue of Eros stood shivering in the cold. The light was wintry, but within the room it was warm. I missed Dart. Our physical connection was such that I felt cut off if he was out of the room for a moment. When we were together we were always holding hands, touching hipbones, stroking each other. When we touched each other we seemed to go into a primal place where nothing mattered but our touching. It was the most powerful feeling I had ever known, and it obliterated all discrimination, all judgment, all sense of time.

Dart’s mother appeared.

Although Dart had told me she was obese, I was not quite prepared for the sight of her. She was a broad-shouldered woman who weighed perhaps three hundred pounds, and her small, pallid, little girl’s face was lost in chins. She wore her fine silvery-blond hair as she must have when she was seven—held back on each side of her face by a tortoiseshell barrette—and there was about her the unmistakable look of a child who has got into the cookie jar. She wore a shapeless black crepe dress with a row of jets at the U-shaped neck, and on her feet she wore white sheepskin baby booties. When she sat down on the couch—which she promptly did—she was too fat either to cross her legs or to bring them together, so she sat with her knees wide apart, enabling me to see her old-fashioned bloomers and part of her fleshy thighs.

“Well, hello!” she said, in her dulcet, fat-choked voice. At sixty, she seemed more childlike than my own six-year-old daughters—as if something in her had been arrested and the body had aged while the mind blithely, indeed obstinately, remained in infancy. “I will
not
grow up,” her blue eyes seemed to say. I immediately saw the resemblance between her and her son, the determination to cram oneself with goodies—to the point of nausea if necessary—simply to prove one could do as one pleased.

“Well, where is my drink?” Mrs. Donegal asked petulantly. “And where are my hors d’oeuvres?”

She looked at me. I felt I ought to apologize.

“Oh, Ven! Ven!” she called on a mellifluous ascending scale. “Oh, Ven!”—that being Dart’s father’s nickname. (Mrs. Donegal was called Muffie—for Martha—and Dart was, to his family, Trick, owing to some baby-talk etymology I hadn’t quite got straight. Jewish families didn’t have these problems of nomenclature. At the time, I found all this terrifically quaint. “Ven,” “Muffie,” “Trick”: these were not names one often came across in Washington Heights.)

Mr. Donegal arrived with the hors d’oeuvres, which were arrayed on little aluminum tins apparently left over from TV dinners, and these in turn were set out on a very grand English silver tray in the rococo style. There were hot tidbits of various descriptions and also caviar, pâté de foie gras, and smoked salmon. The spread would easily have fed a dozen people.

Mrs. Donegal presided over the hors d’oeuvres. One was clearly not at liberty to help oneself.

“Would you like some caviar, dear?” Mrs. Donegal asked. And without waiting for a reply, she prepared me some, with the following commentary: “I’ve been eating caviar since I was three, which was when Mummy first gave it to me. Finished a whole pot of Beluga with a baby spoon. You can imagine how cross my nanny was. But Mummy said, ‘Don’t punish her, Nurse Frith’—she was my first nanny. ‘It’s never too soon for a girl to learn to love Beluga.’ ”

I laughed with some strain. The story seemed so manifestly canned—as if it had been told many times in these circumstances for the same reason. It was a sort of code, and I had cracked it early. “I was born rich, eccentric, and spoiled,” it said, “and I hope you find this charming, for it’s my only gambit. I ate caviar as a baby, and I still eat caviar and am still a baby.”

“Ha ha,” I laughed. “Ha ha.”

Mrs. Donegal did not appear to detect the hollowness of my laughter. Glad to have a new audience for old stories, she went on and on about Mummy’s taste in caviar and her own debutante days at the Stork Club, her wedding trip to Europe with Ven (the Delahaye broke down in the Alps), and how darling Trick was as a baby. All the while she chain-smoked Pall Malls, downed martinis, and popped one hors d’oeuvre after another into her mouth.

Dart had told me that his mother slept till five each day, virtually never left the house, and was terrified of what she might find in the outside world, from which she had retreated shortly after his birth. I had expected to find her strange, but her strangeness surpassed even my expectations. It was not that she wasn’t pleasant; she was. It was that she seemed to talk in set pieces, each of which seemed rehearsed.

“The cards!” said Mr. Donegal. “We have forgotten the cards!” Whereupon he retreated to the nearly impassable sun room (filled with newspapers, cartons, never-unpacked appliances, and clothes) to obtain a series of envelopes of assorted sizes and two waxy boxes from the florist’s shop.

“Oh, Ven! How
sweet
of you,” Mrs. Donegal said.

“One for you! And one for you!” Mr. Donegal said, giving each of the ladies a florists’ box.

I opened mine with trepidation, for not only do I hate corsages, but I was wearing a very thin chamois dress, which would be ruined by a pin. In the box was a corsage of somewhat wilted Tropicana roses, festooned with orange and gold ribbons.

“Oh, thank you,” I lied. Mrs. Donegal had an identical corsage, which seemed to delight her. She put it on immediately, pointing the tail crookedly at her jiggling bosom.

“Oh, goody!” she said. “Now let’s see the cards.”

I fiddled with my corsage, hoping no one would notice I wasn’t wearing it. No such luck. Mr. Donegal came over and pinned it on my bosom, ruining my suede dress and copping a quick but unmistakable feel.

“‘Happy Thanksgiving to my beloved wife,’” Mrs. Donegal read aloud. “ ‘At this most special time of year, / My dearest wife, I bring you cheer. / For you make every holiday a cause for being bright and gay. / Without you life would be no fun, / so I salute you, dearest one. Happy Thanksgiving from your adoring Ven.’ ”

At his cue, Mr. Donegal bent down and kissed his immobilized wife.

“Oh, Ven,” she said. “How sweet.”

“Not as sweet as you, m’dear,” said Ven, as if by rote.

“What a loving family we are!” said Mrs. Donegal.

You could tell from the expressions of the two men that this charade had been played many a time.

Mrs. Donegal proceeded to read out the other cards from her husband, all of them equally saccharine and self-serving. She seemed genuinely delighted with the sentiments expressed. Never before having met people who took greeting cards seriously, I was astonished. I had grown up in a world where such sentiments were occasions for wild hilarity. At
my
family dinner table—such as it was—wicked humor and satirical kvetching were the rule. I had always wondered who bought such greeting cards—and now I knew.

At some point before dinner, Dart disappeared into the upper reaches of the town house and was gone for some time.

I was left struggling for conversation with Muffie and Ven.

What was oddest about them both was that all their conversation seemed to be about things that had happened before 1947. She loved to talk about Miss Porter’s School, her coming out party, and her honeymoon—a two-year spending spree in Europe—and
he
loved to talk about Princeton days, his eating club, and his classmates’ merry pranks, and how he almost made
Review
at Harvard Law. This was the house where time stood still. Miss Havisham could have moved right in, not to mention Mr. Micawber. No wonder their only son had disappeared to the bathroom, seemingly never to return.

My heart went out to Dart, who had had to make a life out of such unpromising parental material. Really, he was an orphan, for nobody was home to raise him. Both his parents were trapped in the past.

“We have many artists in our family,” Mr. Donegal said. “I’m not at
all
surprised that you and Trick get on so well. Besides Trick, there was Uncle Wesley—wasn’t there, Muffie?—who was a noted landscape painter in Vermont.” Ven pointed to a tortured little study of a covered bridge that hung above the fireplace. “And then there was Aunt Millicent, who did nudes.”

“And that’s not all,” said Muffie, in eyeball-rolling disapproval. “She also did
other
things.”

“Mrs. Donegal is referring to her lesbianic period, I presume, in which she depicted ladies in various, shall we say, compromising positions,” Mr. Donegal informed me.

“I’ll say,” said Mrs. Donegal.

“Mrs. Donegal believes that oral sex is a passing fad,” said Mr. Donegal, leering at me. “What do you think?”

I blushed. (For some reason, Mrs. Donegal made me think of Enid Bagnold’s line: “In
my
day, only Negresses had orgasms.”)

“Well, er, it
has
had its adherents throughout history. The ancient Greeks actually—”

“She’s
perrr
fect for Trick,” said Mrs. Donegal. “He’s the only other person who would talk about ancient Greeks and oral sex in the same breath.”

Just then Trick (or Dart) reappeared, looking as glazed as a Christmas ham. Whatever he had done in the bathroom, it wasn’t purchased over the counter.

“Is dinner ready, Ven?” asked Mrs. Donegal.

“Not quite, m’dear,” said Mr. Donegal. “The girls are still fussing about.”

Conversation lagged. When in doubt, say nothing, I admonished myself. Normally ready with repartee, I could think of not a damn thing to say. Perhaps it was the pervasive odor of WASPdom, the cats, the conversation, or the straight vodka I had been consuming with the caviar, but all that came to mind were homilies like: “A stitch in time saves nine,” or “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” or “Penny wise, pound foolish.” What was it about the Donegals that made me feel I was in
Poor Richard’s Almanack?
(Even though I had been married to a WASP heir at one point during my hegira, that was in the sixties, when everyone was busy kicking over all traces of Heritage. Now, in the Reagan years, this stuff was
serious
again. Oddly enough, I responded.)

The maid appeared, to announce dinner. She was a sullen-looking brunette of about eighteen, wearing a white polyester minidress with a crooked hem. On her feet were white plastic cowboy boots, and there was a big white bow in her long, tangled hair. She looked as if she had been procured through the placement office of the local reform school.

“Dinner is served,” she said between chews on her mouthful of gum.

Mr. Donegal stood up (he had been sitting on the sagging couch next to his wife), and when he did, a packet of condoms fell out of his green velvet smoking jacket. “Excita,” they were called, in shocking-pink letters. I saw them. He saw that I saw them. And he looked me in the eye, challengingly, as he pocketed them. It was a moment, as they say in the theater. What aphorism in
Poor Richard’s Almanack
applied to this?