Back Then (4 page)

And still, we lived an Edith Wharton kind of life, though somewhat scaled down from the plush way of life her characters enjoyed—we never had footmen. My father, an eccentric shopper, bought the mummy of an Egyptian princess at an auction; it lay inside its glass case, a thick X-ray film, lying over its chest like a shield, and disclosing the shadow of a pistachio-size scarab under the bandages. I enjoyed having it there in my living room and viewed it not as a corpse so much as a royal personage. But my mother hated it, would not look at it, and badgered my father until he had it removed and installed in his office, where it lay for years atop a table in his conference room.

My East Side smelled like money. Money to buy things, beautiful clothes, antiques. Money to eat at expensive restaurants and eat berries out of season. To have repairs made as soon as something was torn, broken, or leaking. To hire people to pick up after you, to cook meals and wash up after them. That's how we spent our money, and still there was more. But money was not the whole story, as there were plenty of high-priced places to live on the far side of Central Park, like the Dakota and the Apthorp.

From the time I was about ten, it was obvious to me that the Bernays family had more money by far than most people in the United States. This gap increased my determination to look like everyone else my age; the impulse to blend was an imperative stronger than the one instructing you to “be yourself.” I had but a dim notion of who “myself “ was, and besides, I hated it when people looked at me, certain they could see something embarrassing that I couldn't. Was my slip showing, were my stocking seams meandering? Was a dog turd stuck to my shoe? My hope was to be a generic young lady, smartly turned out but never, never eye-catching.

However irrational a notion, it seems to be true that people who don't have much money find the lives and disorders of the rich more piquant than their own. The fact of being rich makes a person automatically interesting even if they have a boring personality. I was ashamed of being rich, of living in a hotel and of being driven to the City and Country School, where we went until 1939, by Jack, the Bernays' uniformed chauffeur. My sister and I made Jack stop the car several blocks from the school building, where, mortified by the possibility of being recognized for what we were—extremely rich kids, far more so than the other rich kids who attended this private school—we would get out and walk the rest of the way. Jack motored members of the Bernays family around the city in a Cadillac for many years until the war and gas rationing made a private car impossible—unless you wanted to trade on the black market, something my parents refused to do. Jack was released from his job. I never knew his last name.

Jack, the Bernays' driver, late 1940s.

My parents had no reluctance or even mixed feelings about having money. They never apologized, denied, or even tried to disguise their riches. Whenever my mother needed something made of leather—handbag, wallet, passport case—she headed for Mark Cross on Fifth Avenue. A dress? Bergdorf Goodman, where the saleslady knew her name and size. A tie for my father? Countess Mara's shop on Park Avenue, where every tie had impressed on it a medieval tiara. Shoes? Ferragamo. She bought fish at a place on Madison she called “Tiffany-by-the-sea” but was actually Wynn and Treanor. A jewel or two? Cartier, a store both more posh and more personal than Tiffany, where you were apt to bump into tourists and arrivistes. And on and on, always top of the line, the most exclusive, cleanest, quietest, perfume-smelling swishy, and above all designed to make the customer feel desirous and desired.

When my sister and I were very young our mother bought our shoes at Indian Walk on Madison Avenue. They X-rayed your feet to make sure shoes and feet were a match. They gave you a paper Indian chief's headdress or a balloon when you left the store

Before heading to a party young girls inserted themselves into party dresses with stiff buckram to make the skirt stick out like a tutu. Before the war, these were light-colored silk or Egyptian cotton with puffed sleeves and a wide belt. During the war you were in danger of growing out of your clothes and not being able to buy replacements as pretty. In any case, a girl's delicate party dress underscored the prevailing assumption that we were expected to behave like angels-in-training. “Sugar and spice and all things nice—that's what little girls are made of”—we heard this with nauseating regularity.

Little boys wore short wool pants, gray or dark blue, a cutoff version of men's trousers. When they reached a certain age—around ten—they graduated to long pants. This passage was so significant—the sartorial equivalent of rites of puberty or a bar mitzvah—that the phrase “he's still in short pants” indicated a stage of emotional growth rather than mere age. Some boys wore woolen knickerbockers, called knickers, a kind of trouser that ended just below the knee in a tight cuff and were also known as “plus fours.”

From the time a girl's breasts materialized out of tissue that had looked remarkably unpromising for twelve or thirteen years, her waistline took on a superimportance. You belted yourself as tightly as you could without actual pain; I considered the so-called hourglass figure of the 1890s a silly revival. It was especially hard on fat girls, who looked like sausages. If the 1930s were cool and understated, with women's dresses beltless and sinewy, often cut on the bias and enclosing their wearers in their own aloof concerns, the 1940s and 1950s required women to flaunt it—breast, waist, hip, leg—as if men needed that extra visual jolt. In most postwar closets there hung a medley of clothes to meet a medley of social requirements, for each of which there were rules, explicit and otherwise. If you didn't abide, you were stared at. My mother added rules of her own: Always wear a slip under a skirt. Never wear black and brown next to each other, or, for that matter, blue and green or red and orange. Why? “They clash.” Never leave the house without at least one pair of white gloves.

I owned a lot of sweaters and a couple of sweater sets, a short-sleeved pullover to be worn under a cardigan of the same shade. If you were fortunate enough to own one, you added a subtle string of cultured pearls to your ensemble. Some of my sweaters were cashmere, a kind of supple wool that made me perspire and itch; I never wore them. I knew nothing about Jewish holidays; they were as invisible as our many cousins in Austria and Germany who did not survive the war. Thoroughly assimilated, we marked Christmas with a tree and presents; my mother gave me a cashmere sweater every Christmas for years.

During the day a young lady wore a woolen skirt and tailored blouse and either a cardigan sweater or a jacket cut like a man's. Sensible shoes: low-heeled pumps or polished penny loafers. If you were going to meet someone at an office or restaurant you wore a dark-colored wool or silk dress. And tan stockings held up either by a garter belt that cut into your hips' flesh or a panty girdle, depending on whether you thought you were thin or fat. Before the war, women wore silk stockings of a gossamer thinness. During the war silk disappeared into parachute factories; stockings were made of thick, orange rayon. Brassieres were cone shaped and made you stick out in front. If a man could unhook a bra without fumbling you figured he was promiscuous.

For going out or entertaining after dusk you had a separate wardrobe comprised of “party dresses” and “party shoes.” You transferred your stuff from a daytime handbag into a smaller, fancier evening bag. Dresses hit you just below the knee until the “New Look” in 1948, when they abruptly dipped to midcalf, rendering your old dresses and skirts obsolete. Party dresses were generally made of silk or taffeta that shimmered and made a swishing sound. Shoes had high heels, and often were open somewhere, to show off naked toes or heels. (On our honeymoon in 1954, I bought a custom-made pair of blue suede pumps in Rome with four-inch heels; they squeezed my toes so hard tears came to my eyes and I wore them only once.) Even when you were invited to a friend's house for an informal dinner—”it's going to be just us”—you changed from your daytime clothes into a nighttime outfit. You put on more casual clothes—slacks and sneakers or Top-Siders—for strenuous outdoor activity. Only beatniks and hipsters, artists and writers, jazz musicians, actors and hard-core Village inhabitants defied the Uptown dress code and wore whatever they felt comfortable in. I knew a couple of Ivy League men who considered themselves cool enough to be seen almost anywhere in a torn oxford shirt, a pair of chinos, and blue sneakers, the more beat-up the better.

A man who worked in an office was supposed to show up every morning with a clean shirt—white, blue, or pale yellow—a tie and a jacket. After work, at home, he might remove the tie and jacket. A hat, usually a “fedora,” made of felt with a snap brim, was so standard that if you saw a man without one, you wondered what was the matter with him—was he trying to tell you that he was a rebel? Convention had a firm grip on most of us—at least on the surface.

For any woman a hat was considered as essential an element of her city costume as a pair of shoes, although of course it wasn't, it merely said of its wearer, “Here is a lady.” After the war my mother, who thought she was ugly but wasn't, had her hats custom-made by Mr. John, whose atelier was on East Fifty-seventh Street. Mr. John (I didn't know whether this was his last name or his first) looked like Napoleon Bonaparte and made the most of the resemblance, brushing his hair down low over his forehead and to one side. The creative procedure involved in making one of his hats was long and painstaking and largely a matter of theater, starting with an initial visit to develop a concept and consult on design and fabric. A week or so later, Mother returned to his workroom to try it on—her first “fitting.” Mr. John pinched and tweaked, tilted one way then the other, consulted again with his customer, took it off gingerly, and instructed her to return in two weeks when the confection would be ready. To me, all her Mr. John hats were nearly identical, a small pancake of buckram with some decorative item sewn onto it, a flower or ribbon with a veil like a black spiderweb to be drawn down over the chin, where it fit snugly against the nose. Mr. John's hats were wildly expensive.

A.B. (
right
) and Mary Myers, Brearley graduation day, 1948.

My mother asked him to design and make my wedding veil, and dutifully, I went for at least two fittings before he was satisfied. It was a lace mantilla with delicate lace leaves sewn into it. I heard later from a mutual friend that Mr. John was terribly hurt at not being invited to the wedding. This would have distressed but surprised my mother. Because Mr. John had sold her something, she viewed him as “in trade,” and no matter how much you liked them or how gratifying they were to be with, you did not invite such people to weddings or to any other social occasion. The postwar period was fluid enough for old ways—my mother's—to persist even as new ones—Mr. John's—were standing in line to displace them. The resulting collision produced plenty of hurt feelings. No change without conflict.

While
my sister and I were away at Camp Kuwiyan by the shore of a crystal lake in New Hampshire's White Mountains—this was early in the war; I was about eleven years old—my father bought a double house on Sixty-third Street between Lexington and Third Avenues. He had all our stuff moved from our apartment on Fifth Avenue to the house without telling us. I never had a chance to say good-bye to my room or the doorman.

The house at 163–165 was faux Gothic, with lots of gray stone and ancient wood panels imported from England on the dining room walls. The downstairs hall—which had six doors, not including the front door, giving onto six different spaces—was large enough to hold a chamber music ensemble and a small audience. The house had three storeys and, up a short flight of stairs, a row of maids' rooms and storage closets. Over one end of the thirty-foot living room hung a balcony you reached via a narrow staircase. One wall of this room was made up of mullioned windows. In the downstairs library was a soft couch where I and my boyfriends repaired to kiss, hug, and, occasionally, pet. No one ever bothered us there.