Back Then (24 page)

Harry was even less qualified than I to write this sort of fluff, and I think he put a low value on all prose except for direct-mail and advertising copy. Having once hoped to be a painter he was now a collector of sorts, starting with the work of an immigrant Russian artist whose men and women all looked like freshly dug baking potatoes. Harry moved on from him to minor and affordable works by major contemporary painters. Subsequently, obedient to trends of the late 1950s, he traded everything in for pop art.

He once called me into his office to translate for him a letter he had just received from Paris. The writer identified himself as an artist who years earlier, destitute then as now, had painted a number of pictures that he signed and sold as the work of the French expressionist Chaim Soutine. At this point, seeing the expression of growing consternation on Harry's face and remembering what traditionally happens to bearers of bad news, I was tempted to fudge the rest of the letter, but it was too late. The writer went on to say he understood that one of these so-called Soutines occupied a place of honor in Monsieur Abrams's collection. He wished now to inform Monsieur Abrams of his willingness, for a price and with his travel expenses covered, to come to New York, sign his name to the work in question, and in doing so free the distinguished collector from the embarrassment of harboring, and in a sense abetting, a forgery.

Poor Harry! Instead of raging he looked as if he was going to cry. In the jargon of dealers and collectors, his “Soutine” had been “attributed down,” way down, lower even than the Russian potato master, whose work was at least authentic. I felt sorry for him then and another time, when the battery fell out of his rust-eaten Buick as we were driving along Tenth Avenue in heavy truck traffic. It was hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for a bully who was accustomed to winning, but even this had limits. My work space was a rickety table that looked out on a dark air shaft; mounds of pigeon droppings covered the outer windowsill. Harry ignored my appeals for improvement in these conditions, and one day I simply walked off the job and said I could be reached downstairs at a local bar, the Gamecock, on East Forty-fourth Street. I had a couple of beers, watched some soap opera television, and waited until the office manager came down to tell me Harry had caved and a contractor finally called in. Harry remained distant from me for several days, as if I had betrayed him by extracting such a concession.

But
even with this token victory it was clear to me that working for Harry and ghosting prose for his “sumptuous” (the obligatory advertising adjective) picture books was a dead end. Maybe I ought to get out of publishing altogether, I thought, and go into social work, where I could do some good by alleviating misery and want. I consulted my friend and adviser, Herbert Alexander, who told me the way to flush such goofy career ideas from my system was to sign up for the vocational testing program at Stevens Institute of Technology, across the river in Hoboken. I worked my way through a month of six-hour Saturday sessions—written tests, spatial puzzles, and interviews that probed and supposedly measured every imaginable aptitude and interest. The results, presented to me in my final session at Stevens Institute, showed that my helping-other-people impulses barely registered while my verbal-interest scores went off the chart. For better or worse, that was that, as far as service to humanity was concerned. I later learned that Jack Goodman, a top editor at Simon and Schuster, had gone through the same testing program only to be told he was cut out to be a civil engineer.

PART III

CHAPTER 9

Soon after Annie and I became engaged,
a psychologist we met at a party told us we were the worst imaginable marital risk. Each of us was the younger sibling in a family of two same-sex offspring, and younger siblings, he said, being as a rule demanding, dependent, and self-centered from infancy on, proved unable to meet the needs of similarly disadvantaged partners in marriage. We had heard that more than one of every three American marriages ended in divorce, and that was bad enough. But this prognosis, supported, the psychologist said, by statistical evidence gathered in his researches at Brandeis, appeared to be as dire as if
he had identified in us a rare blood disease. The 1950s was “the age of psychology,” according to a series of articles in
Life
, a time when the mind and behavioral sciences, as popularly understood, had an almost scriptural weight. We listened politely and even respectfully as he handed down his verdict, accepted his sardonic, slightly Vienna-accented good wishes, and went on our way to what he believed was certain disaster.

We had met in the fall of 1953, saw each other almost exclusively during the winter, became engaged in the spring, and married in July; in September we went to Italy and England on our honeymoon. It had all happened much faster than most of the marriages we knew of among our friends. Early on, maybe after our third or fourth date, I had invited Annie to dinner at my apartment on Thirty-seventh Street. I wanted the evening to be just right. Georgia Edwards, the West Indian woman who had brought me up from infancy, agreed to cook the dinner, shrimp creole with rice. The day before I bought six place settings of white Arzberg chinaware along with proper wineglasses and linen napkins. The other guests—Fielder Cook, a television director, and his actress wife, Sally; an art historian, Sam Hunter; and his fiancée, Edys Merrill, a painter—supplied a plausible setting for an evening that might otherwise look like a prelude to attempted seduction. (I had in mind, as suggesting a precedent to be avoided, a cartoon that showed a leering host greeting his date at the door of his apartment: “
We're
the party!”) A few nights later Annie came over alone and, as we talked, picked up from the coffee table a little bronze horse figure, supposedly Etruscan, that I had bought a few years earlier from an antiquarian in Rome. She asked me for some metal polish and a cloth, applied herself to the horse and, as I looked on, went about removing perhaps two thousand years of verdigris. What she was doing was so intimate, spontaneous, and innocently abstracted that I couldn't say “Stop!” I even felt a sort of somber delight as I ran my fingers over my denuded horse.

Annie still lived with her parents. In February we went away for a ski weekend in New Hampshire. Caught in a snowstorm on the way, we spent our first night as a couple in a Manchester commercial hotel after decorously registering for separate rooms. Soon after, we were together almost every evening and often on our lunch hours. On Sunday mornings she would come over with a bag of croissants from a French bakery around the corner from her parents' house. One evening she announced that her analyst had told her it was all right for her to think of getting married. It had all happened so naturally.

We were caught up with each other, with overcoming our shyness, discovering our capacity for play and humor, and with being young, healthy, and at home in the city. We went to the New York City Ballet, to Ralph Kirkpatrick's harpsichord recitals at Town Hall, to the movies (rarely to “films”) as often as we could—
Shane, From Here to Eternity, Rear Window, On the Waterfront, Stalag 17, Roman Holiday
. We didn't have much time for reading. We didn't think a great deal about the future or about careers (we both had editorial jobs in publishing), never discussed money or (except jokingly) the old status tussle between German Jews (her people) and Russian Jews (mine). Even after we decided to marry we gave no conscious thought at all to the prospect of children. Children were so remote from my own experience—I had never touched or held an infant much less ministered to one—that for me they weren't even conceivable.

Annie had a core of sweetness, shrewdness, and merriment. She was my idea of the fully realized 1950s Girl of the City (and of no other): immensely attractive, a proto-feminist, self-assured, easily amused, wary of anything pretentious, street-smart, privileged without ostentation or snobbery, comfortable with luxury but unspoiled by it, and professional minded: she had been Barnard campus correspondent for the
New York Times
and was now managing editor of
discovery
, a quarterly of new writing published by Pocket Books. I thought she was near perfect except for her initial reluctance (quickly eroded) to joke about “serious” things; her objection (also transitory) to “bad” language; and her looking askance at my drinking martinis before dinner (her previous boyfriend, a writer for television, had been a lush). My record of promiscuity, if she was at all aware of it, didn't seem to bother her.

Of more concern to her, although briefly, were my male friends, many of them homosexual or sexually indeterminate, relatively dissolute, or, as was the case with my college friend Bernard Winebaum, all of the foregoing in addition to being preoccupied with giving and going to parties. She and Bernie adored each other at first sight. She minded that I couldn't dance, was a Yankee fan, did not admire Adlai Stevenson (I thought he was a snob and a born loser), and was mostly silent instead of casually communicative when we looked at pictures in museums and galleries. We had made up our minds to marry with little recognition of the demands of living with another person: patience, humor, and flexibility tempered by resignation and inertia. Maybe it was not love alone that defied normal prudence and caution but the psychic climate we lived in. Our outlook had been formed by a collision of forces: the postwar, almost utopian exuberance that made all good things appear possible, and the nuclear arms race, pursued to the brink, that transformed the city's subways and basements into one big fallout shelter. We seized the day, hoped for the best, and took short views.

Annie's parents had no patience with short views: for them a life not planned ahead in at least five- or ten-year units was a life abandoned to chaos and irresponsibility. As a prospective son-in-law, when Annie first told them about me, her parents probably would have preferred a (high-caste) Hindu to a Russian Jew, Harvard apart, from the other side of Central Park. Their first response to a potential wrenching of their social order was plain disbelief. “You must be joking!” Annie's mother told her. Over a few weeks their incredulity declined into wariness, cautious acceptance, and even a degree of warmth. But they were formidable and exacting, and I broke into a sweat whenever I entered the Gothic mahogany-paneled foyer of their double house on East Sixty-third Street. At dinner with them one night, placed with my back to an active fireplace, I could as well have been a planked shad ready to be deboned. Whether placing me close to a pile of burning logs, to roast there like a heretic, was mischief or accident I couldn't tell.

Although polite, Edward and Doris Bernays voiced powerful opinions that combined moralism and hair-trigger disapproval with a fiercely practical view of how the world should work. According to Annie they had recently expunged from their guest list a lawyer who had got tipsy at one of their dinner parties as well as a doctor and a
Newsweek
editor suspected of carrying on an adulterous relationship. Edward and Doris exerted force in tandem, like a span of matched horses, and were used to being in command and equally unused to being challenged. Eventually I
devised sly and oblique strategies for putting them off balance—by answering their questions with questions, for example, or dealing in deliberate non sequiturs. In Doris, but not her husband, I found a congenial element of irony. When apart from him she eased up on their collective rectitude and allowed herself cigarettes and more than one cocktail. She took Annie and me out to a festive lunch at Carlton House on Madison Avenue and congratulated me on winning the hand of “the last remaining virgin in New York City.” We all drank to that.

A.B., New Hampshire skiing weekend, winter 1954.

When Annie and I first met I knew nothing about her father, Edward L. Bernays, except his name, which I had often noticed in the credit line—“Courtesy of Edward L. Bernays”—whenever the
New York Times Book Review
ran a picture of Sigmund Freud holding a cigar. I learned right away that Edward was not simply the proprietor of rights to the official portrait that scowled down at patients from the walls of nearly every orthodox psychoanalyst's office. He was also Freud's double nephew, a genealogical knot that took a deep breath and slow-motion untying whenever it was explained to me: brother and sister from one Viennese family had married sister and brother of another, an arrangement that sounded unholy but was 100 percent kosher once you understood it. Sometimes mocked as “a professional nephew,” Edward was justifiably proprietary about his uncle: as a young man he had arranged for the first translations of Freud's work to be published in America. He regarded Freudian theory as a historically important intellectual commodity that offered valuable insights into mass behavior, but he had no use at all for it in his own life and could barely tolerate the fact that he had permitted his daughter to see a psychoanalyst. He himself would as soon consult a gypsy palm reader to find out which way the wind blew. His unconscious was nobody's business, not even his own.