Back Then (26 page)

“How about dinner next weekend?”

“I'll have to ask Eddie,” she said, but I could tell it would happen.

When he arrived at our house for dinner, wearing his best suit, he began to perspire like a runner at full throttle. My parents were polite but wary, house cats to whom a new dog has been introduced. For his part, Joe wasn't used to being examined so finely and the sweat flowed on, his discomfort not improved by the fact that my father had seated him at the dining room table with his back to the fireplace, where a wood fire burned merrily. Later, he told me he felt like a planked shad being slowly immolated. And what did he think of my parents? “Formidable.”

A couple of weeks went by during which I kept rubbing the magic bottle while the genie remained stubbornly inside. How to get him to fly out? I figured that since he worked for an art book publisher, he must like or at least know a lot about painting. “Where would you like to go on Saturday?” Joe said over the phone. “How about the Met?” I said.

He picked me up at my house on Sixty-third Street and we walked up Fifth Avenue in silence to the museum, where we left our coats in the cloakroom and climbed the wide marble staircase—in silence—to the second floor. There we began to tour halls containing some of the world's most celebrated art. Silence surrounded us. Every so often, I would say, “Look at that.” Joe would look at that. At last, feeling as if I too were sealed inside a bottle, I said, “What are your enthusiasms?”

I had never before asked a question remotely like this one, and as soon as it left my tongue it rang stupidly in my ears, a donkey braying. Embarrassed, I said, “What do you like?”

“I like that,” he said, pointing to a landscape by Cézanne. He seemed to be as embarrassed as I was. Why was he so shy? Why did he turn his eyes from my face when talking to me? Was I willing to work hard enough to pull out the stopper?

Well, I was, for I had already formed a strong idea of who this person was, and he was unlike anyone I had known. He had the brains of Anatole but not his vanity; the style of Ian but neither his chill nor his social imperatives. Joe wasn't cut from the same bolt of cloth as the men my parents wanted me to go out with—lawyers, businessmen, doctors, people not about to question their own certainties. Joe wasn't buying the line that leads inevitably to a “successful career.” How I knew this is part of the story of the two of us, a continual revelation, some secrets never disclosed at all, the sweet, musky scent of the mysterious. He certainly didn't say anything remotely like: “I set my own metronome, use my brain where and when and how I want; like what I like, reject what I don't—and make gentle—and sometimes fierce—fun of almost everything.” He would never have articulated any of this, but I heard him say it silently and I was very much drawn to it; I would soon became as iconoclastic as Cousin Joe, while maintaining the skin of a well-tempered middle-class wife and mother. I loved our disguise.

Cousin Joe and I were married in the house I had long considered a temporary residence, first, and obviously, because I hoped to move away as soon as I had a good reason to, but also because it was branded indelibly by my parents' taste and style, neither of which I wanted to duplicate. Not that I didn't appreciate money, but I wanted my life to be less grand and gaudy than my parents', quieter, more covert.

As if imitating Sergei Diaghilev, the Ballet Russe impresario he had worked for as a press agent in his youth, my father produced the entire wedding, relying on his assistant, my mother, to supply the less important props, like menu, flowers, tablecloths, and hors d'oeuvres. Together they worked out how the drama was to be played, failing to consult me on a single detail, except to make sure I wasn't going to be menstruating on Thursday, July 29. The day they picked turned out to be the hottest day of the summer
of 1954; the humidity almost matched the temperature, both in the high nineties. The living room was plastered with banks of white flowers tied up with wide satin ribbon, enough for the funeral of a minor movie star. I wore my sister's fitted satin dress with a score of tiny, satin-covered buttons up the back and a long slippery train. Joe rented a formal outfit with striped pants, its black tailcoat cut from the sort of heavy-gauge wool used for cold-weather overcoats. Rivers of perspiration, inspired by heat and terror, coursed down his face and soaked the rented suit. My mother's cousin's husband, Erich Leinsdorf, conductor of the Metropolitan Opera Company's orchestra, sat down at our Steinway Baby Grand and played the traditional wedding march. This startled me as my father and I entered the cavernous living room. Folding chairs held sweating guests bathed by warm air circulating in front of two huge standing fans. This musical flourish was a last-minute touch that no one had told me about; so was the plan to have Erich's red-haired five-year-old daughter, Hester, carry my train. She followed me, clutching it like a life preserver, to the far end of the room, only tripping once and nearly pulling me over backward. My father had asked a municipal judge named Irving Ben Cooper, a dapper self-important person with a salt-and-pepper Errol Flynn–type mustache, to perform the ceremony. It never occurred to me or Joe to question my father's selection of Judge Cooper, or any other arrangement. To do so would have meant a loud, accusatory argument, which my father would win anyway. I figured his money and pride trumped my own misgivings about having a complete stranger marry us, and unable to come up with an alternate—certainly not a clergyman—I kept my mouth shut. Joe, I found out later, didn't want to make trouble, nor did he think it important enough to object—though given the opportunity he said he would have preferred almost anyone else so long as he had talked to at least one of us before our wedding day.

After the ceremony.
From left to right:
Richard Held (Doris Bernays' husband), Doris, Justin, Anne, Edward Bernays, Doris Fleischman, Howard Kaplan (Justin's brother).

Judge Cooper stood with his back to the fireplace and married us, using a secular text. He glowed, he expanded in this minuscule limelight, reminding Joe that “you love Shakespeare,” and evoking yet more drops of embarrassment. When the ceremony, such as it was, was over at last, the judge kissed my hand. Then the new couple, their families and guests went downstairs to the wood-paneled dining room, where a buffet of crabmeat and chicken salad, asparagus and individual ice cream bombes catered and served by Sherry's was awaiting us. Tables had been set up in the backyard. The party lasted all afternoon.

The new couple spent the night in the bridal suite of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, where the Bernays family had lived for two years and whose manager, a White Russian emigré named Serge Obolensky, was a tight friend of my father's. A basket of flowers and fruit was waiting for us in the suite. We went to Martha's Vineyard for the weekend and were back at our respective jobs the following Monday.

For us, 1954 and 1955 were the years of the honeymoon. My parents had given us a trip to Europe as a wedding present, and in early September we boarded the U.S.S.
Constitution
and sailed to Italy. We had a room in a small hotel on Capri near the sea with a balcony where we gazed at the water and had our morning espresso and croissants. One night Joe went for a solo walk after I'd gone to bed. Instead of falling sleep, I was gripped by a breathtaking spasm of anxiety, absolutely certain he would never come back—a fear irrational enough to be terrifying. This had not happened to me since I was nine when, over a period of a couple of months, I was obsessed with the idea that my parents were planning to put me in an orphan asylum in upstate New York. When Joe walked into the room an hour later I was too scared and relieved to talk. From that moment, the long buried fear of being taken to a strange place and there forsaken came out of its hole and ate into my pleasure whenever we went somewhere new and I was left alone for more than a few minutes.

We made our way up the Italian boot, stopping for a few days in Rome (my first exposure to the sound of the Vespa, a small motorized two-wheel vehicle that thrummed through the streets like a giant bee night and day), where we gaped at the Coliseum. We stopped at the usual tourist places, traveling in relative luxury, thanks to my parents—Florence, where we spent hours in the Uffizi and picked up a rented Fiat (whose pedals were too close together for Joe's feet), in which we drove, hair-raisingly, over the Apennines, visiting the medieval hill town of San Gimignano, where we took soulful pictures of each other sitting on a stone slab next to a stone tower hundreds of years old. In Bologna we ate a gourmet lunch in a restaurant someone back home had recommended, telling us that if we failed to eat there we would miss the meal of a lifetime. I ordered half a chicken disguised as poulet Margaret-Rose. It was pretty good. Following an imaginary tourist's primer, we were oared up and down canals in a Venetian gondola and fed the pigeons in St. Mark's Square. Milan was our
last Italian stopping place. Here we read in the
International Herald Tribune
about the pope's worrisome hiccups which had lasted more than a week, and the latest municipal scandal: the architect of the brand-new Milan airport had forgotten to put a staircase between the first and second floors. From Milan we flew frighteningly over the Alps to London, where some of the Freud family lived. My father had armed me with a small book of telephone numbers, among which was that of Ernst Freud, Sigmund's oldest son, an architect. Over the phone, his wife, Lucy, a naturally affectionate woman invited us to dinner with their son, Lucien, whom she said was a painter. Lucien, a thin and pale man a few years older than me, had darting eyes. He was handsome and offhand, in a haunted-artist kind of way. I hadn't been aware of it, but breakneck traveling to places where you don't know the geography or the language, with a shy man you have never lived with, draws heavily on reserves of nerve and stamina that need some respite. Once inside the large Freud house in Hampstead, I fell into Lucy's arms as if she were a mother and was reminding myself that my mother was neither warm nor affectionate, even as I knew, from the way her eyes had always followed me, that she wanted desperately to be both and simply didn't know how.

J.K. and A.B. on honeymoon, Rome, 1954.

We stayed in England for about a week, visiting Oxford on a chill and gray day. The university, where we knew no one, seemed merely an ungiving, rain-streaked cluster of gray stone. I was anxious to get home. On the trip back, the
Île de France
, the French equivalent of the British
Queen Elizabeth
, hit rough North Atlantic weather. The ship rolled, pitched, and yawed, clearing the dining rooms and promenade decks; no one could walk without holding on to something; unsecured items crashed to the floor, young men in white uniforms scurried around battening down every loose item. As I left the game room to go down to our cabin, where I intended to die of seasickness, I had to sidestep a stewardess throwing up on the staircase carpet. In the habit of reading signs and portents into ordinary events, it was hard for me not to view this sickening voyage as ominous. But it turned out to be just another ordinary crossing for that time of year. My parents met us at the dock, and after a short visit with them, I entered 303 East Thirty-seventh Street, relieved to be home.

A second honeymoon, in April of 1955, sent us to Santa Fe. For ten days we stayed at the Rancho del Monte, a dude ranch run by a couple from the East, the Hootens. Bill Hooten was a former New York advertising executive, a self-declared fugitive from Madison Avenue. Barbara did the cooking. We were there over the Easter holiday, during which I demonstrated a recurrent spasm of idiocy by coming down to breakfast and, seeing vases of lilies all over the place, asking, “who died?” Joe was speechless with laughter. The day we arrived in Santa Fe, Joe had telephoned Mabel Dodge Luhan, the self-promoting hostess of a New York “salon” where, shortly before World War l, men of intellectual voltage—along with a scattering of women—gathered to discuss the world's most pressing matters—people like Lincoln Steffens, Walter Lippmann, John Reed. When Dodge tired of New York and its stresses, she moved to the Southwest, where she met Tony Luhan, a beautiful, craggy-looking, non-English-speaking American Indian. She also made friends there with D. H. Lawrence and his fat German wife, Frieda, who had a house down the road. By the time Joe telephoned, Luhan was in her eighties. Could we pay her a visit? She was oh so sorry, she told him, but she was going to Texas to visit her grandchildren for a few days. That was okay, Joe said, “We'll be here for ten days.”