Mary's Mosaic (30 page)

Schwartz made a move on Mary that evening and Mary let Tim know it was okay. The chemistry between Bob and Mary was instantaneous and mutual. As they began talking, fireworks exploded for both of them. From the bar, they went out for dinner and stayed up into the early hours of the morning, talking about almost everything. From the start, Schwartz recalled, Mary defined herself in terms of her pacifism and hatred of all wars, including the one before them in 1942. Wars and violence were anathema to her, and she wanted Bob to know that at the outset. “Mary wanted to do right by the world and there was no place for war,” said Schwartz. “She had impeccable standards, which for me made her demanding in the sense that I had to choose to meet her at those standards, because she wasn’t interested in trivia, at any level or any sort. She was far more special than I was.” Daunted, Bob still attempted to rise to Mary’s challenge. Never had he laid eyes on such an astoundingly beautiful, complex woman.

Schwartz recalled with great fondness how he walked Mary home that night, how she talked about the nature of the humorous in life. Her sophistication impressed and excited him, and he wanted to share his own sense of humor with her. As they walked past a bookstore window, Bob pointed out a book by an author that he considered very funny. A look came over Mary’s face, Schwartz remembered, and he read from it her aversion to his taste. He might have been projecting, but he began to feel that Mary was thinking she had made a colossal mistake by choosing to spend the evening with him.

After they said good-bye that Friday evening, Bob chastised himself for pointing out the book to such an extraordinary woman. “Almost in tears,” he recalled, he returned, despondent, to his residence at the Sheldon Hotel, convinced that he would never see Mary again. “I spent the entire weekend wondering if I would ever hear from her again, wondering if she would even answer, even if I called her on the phone,” said Schwartz, as though it were yesterday, some sixty-five years later. “Mary was so special, so very special. She was incredibly multidimensional. Of course she was beautiful beyond measure, but she also had a beautiful mind with a standard of interest that defied normal boundaries.”
³⁷

That Sunday at his hotel, he received a hand-delivered package. He opened it, only to find the very book he had pointed out to Mary. Inside, the inscription read: “Enjoy !” It was signed: “Mary.” Bob believed it to be a sign. Mary was telling him: “Don’t be put off by my bullshit. I want this relationship as much as you do.” He clasped the book to his heart, and broke down and cried.

Bob Schwartz and Mary Pinchot became nearly inseparable. Mary moved in with him at his residence at the Shelton Hotel. “It was pretty magical,” reminisced Schwartz. “As romances go, it was almost flawless. There was never a day less pleasant than the day before. We had a commitment to each other from the very beginning.” Mary’s intensity was both contagious and alluring. By nature, she required him to show up, and engage. Their connection deepened Schwartz’s sensitivity and prompted them both to explore life’s biggest questions. “She was very committed to her own truths, and they were of a very high order that involved a level of morality beyond normal comprehension,” Schwartz remembered. He and Mary would spend almost three years together.

In addition to revealing more about her pacifism, Mary allowed her spiritual sensibility and the seriousness with which she approached it to be known. “Why are we really here?” Mary once asked Bob. Unable to seize the enormity of what she was asking, he attempted a joke and said, “I don’t know, I’m from Ohio.” Mary didn’t like that. She demanded that he connect on a deeper level, and in time, he learned to meet her there.
³⁸

The two shared a passion for sailing. During the war, it was easy to charter big sailboats—yawls and ketches—for sailing on Long Island Sound. Often taking weeklong cruises, both alone and with friends, sometimes exploring the
Connecticut River, they found an idyllic peace during wartime on those the trips. When they weren’t sailing, they would spend time at Grey Towers, what Mary called “the country place” and what Bob called “a royal palace.” The pair swam naked in the estate’s waterfalls amid the property’s verdant idyllic acres.

“When I saw that place,” said the smiling Schwartz, “one had to be impressed. It was like meeting Mary. If you’re true royalty, you don’t have to flaunt it, and she never did. I mean, what else would Mary have, if not something like Grey Towers? She exuded royalty but never had to flaunt it.” Some Fridays, the two would ride the Wabash Railroad from Newark to Pennsylvania and Grey Towers. Excited to be together for the weekend, always enjoying a fast repartee, they played with childlike spontaneity. On one trip, they started a raucous pillow fight, chasing each other up and down the aisles. Laughing, feathers flying everywhere, they managed to draw other passengers into the fray.

But it wasn’t all pillow fights and laughter. Even as a young woman, Mary would challenge the status quo of their relationship if she perceived some inequality. Schwartz remembered one weekend at “the country place” when Mary challenged Bob on what he recalled as “a certain failure of citizenship” that bothered her. Alone one evening at Grey Towers, Mary brought up the fact that she was always left in the kitchen to do the dishes after they had dinner, while Bob would habitually retire to the living room to read the newspaper. It wasn’t right, Mary protested. At first, the issue completely eluded Schwartz, oblivious to any problem at all. After all, this was part of the culture of how men lived. “In less than a minute of reflection, I understood,” said Schwartz recalling the incident.

“Jesus, I never really thought about it,” Bob remembered saying to her at the time. “You’re absolutely right. It’s terrible!”

“It isn’t terrible,” he remembered Mary had quipped. “But it’s time you got past it.”

“I’ll get past it!” Schwartz quickly responded. The subject never came up again, because it didn’t need to.

Mary’s mother, Ruth, seemed to approve of Bob, though he often wondered whether Ruth felt that he was worthy of her daughter. Nonetheless, his relationship with Ruth, as Bob described it, was “arms-length but with affection.” In fact, it seems that Bob might have underestimated the esteem in which Ruth held him. Mrs. Pinchot confided to Bob that her daughter’s friendship with a young woman named Liz Wheeler worried her. Liz was the daughter of John (“Jack”) Wheeler, the head of the North American Newspaper Alliance and a
major force in the syndicate of independent journalism in New York City. At the time, Jack Wheeler’s stable of writers was impressive; it included Ernest Hemingway, Sheilah Graham, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Liz, along with several other women boarders, had lived for a time with the Pinchots on Park Avenue. She and Mary shared an exceptionally close, intense friendship. Too close, it seemed, and too intense, for Ruth’s taste. She worried that her daughter was having a lesbian relationship. When she confided her concern to Bob, he was stunned. The thought had never occurred to him. He assured Ruth it wasn’t possible; they were just very close friends. “There wasn’t any room for anybody else,” Schwartz remembered telling Ruth Pinchot. He let it be known that he and Mary had a “vigorous” and “fulfilling” attraction to one another. Ruth seemed reassured and the subject never came up again.
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What this anecdote may have demonstrated was that Mary was endowed with an unusual capacity for intimacy. As her life progressed, people often flocked toward her, desiring the possibility of connection she offered. As Bob Schwartz recalled, “Mary never did anything that didn’t have a sense of totality about it. If she made a commitment, she was right in your face with it. Her major dimension was the aesthetics about everything. You’d look at her and you’d see:
this is a special woman
.” The quality only deepened as Mary got older. Her friend Jim Truitt, who knew her well through the 1950s right up until her death, would recall, “Many of Mary’s women friends, including Cicely Angleton, regarded her as their best friend, as she was to so many.”
⁴⁰

During a transcontinental train trip to California, where Bob and Mary both had journalism assignments, they stopped in Salem, Ohio, to visit Bob’s mother. At one point during the visit, Bob asked his mother what she thought about Mary. Her reply was unabashed. She made it clear to her favorite son that it was obvious Mary wanted to marry him.

“Are you sure?” Bob remembered asking at the time.

“A mother knows,” she said, reassuring him.

Bob looked at his mother and smiled. “You’ve made me the happiest man in the world.”

But Bob Schwartz would never ask Mary to marry him. In fact, it was he who ended the relationship. “I was only an enlisted man in the Navy,” said Schwartz in 2008, considering a decision he had made so many years earlier. “Everything pointed to the fact that I was not socially, or in any way, equal to Mary. I didn’t feel comfortable with everyone always looking at her on the street, but not really noticing me. Mary was a complete head turner. I had credentials of my own, but they weren’t Mary credentials.”
⁴¹

There was also the formidable shadow of Mary’s mother. Schwartz didn’t believe that he would ever really get Ruth’s “benediction” to marry her daughter. “I began to hear her mother’s voice, not Mary’s voice,” Schwartz recalled. “Ruth Pinchot never said anything affronting about me, but made it clear in other ways that ‘a Cord Meyer would be a better choice,’ though no Cord Meyer had shown up yet.” All the while, however, Mary had been making it clear to Bob how much he meant to her. So had her sister, Tony.

Late one evening at Bob’s Seventy-Ninth Street apartment in New York, Tony Pinchot showed up unannounced at his door. Obviously aware of the impending breakup, Tony had maintained a friendship with Bob throughout the time he had a relationship with her sister. Tony confided to Bob that for years she and the rest of the family had “wearily” watched the endless parade of men that Mary kept dragging home for her parents and family to meet. Tony then emphatically, and in no uncertain terms, told Bob that it was he who was the true standout—the only one she
and
her mother ever wanted in their family. Even with that benediction, whether Schwartz believed he “needed to be out of his sailor’s suit and a full-fledged adult before he could get married,” something kept telling him his time with Mary had run its course, in spite of the fact that Mary had been so clear about wanting to be with him.

Many years later, Schwartz found himself conferring with a psychoanalyst with regard to his relationship with one of his children. His relationship with Mary, and the memory he had forged of
her leaving him
, kept coming up. After a bit of work, the analyst confronted him, not believing that it was Mary who ended it, but him. “For some reason you didn’t think it was going to work,” Bob recalled the analyst telling him. Pointing out he had repeatedly “pulled the rug out from under his relationship with Mary,” it became clear the only way to deal with the pain and grief of a breakup was for Bob himself to orchestrate the termination, in a sense saying “you’re not going to hurt me, I’m going to hurt you first.” The breakup was difficult, Schwartz said. “I mean, three years night and day and nobody else, and never being bored for a moment. It was astonishing, and very hard to let go of. It ended with a series of trial separations.”

Yet that was only one part of it. Somewhere within, Schwartz was adamant about the nature of fate and the destiny that accompanied it: “For whatever reason, a Cord Meyer was due to appear. When he did, we both accepted it, but not before we shaped each other’s future. She never could be with anyone who didn’t have some of the things I had, and I could never be with another woman after Mary who couldn’t understand what Mary had been for me. Mary
set the standard. She raised the bar for all of my future relationships. It ended with many tears on both our parts.”

Regarding Mary’s murder, Schwartz was shocked by the event. Even in 2008, he remained unsure what to make of it, though he didn’t want to entertain any conspiracy theories. He was adamant about one thing, however: “Her wrestling with her assailant was quintessential Mary. It would have outraged her sensibilities to go down without a fight.”
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Now in his eighties, a connoisseur and lover of ballet, Bob Schwartz ultimately compared Mary Meyer to what he called a p
rima ballerina assoluta
. The term was originally inspired by the Italian masters of the early Romantic ballet and was only bestowed on a ballerina who was considered exceptional, and above all others. The first recorded use of the title was by the renowned French ballet master Marius Petipa when he bestowed it on the Italian ballerina Pierina Legnani in 1894. In the Soviet Union, Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya were eventually honored as such. Others awarded the distinction included Alicia Alonso from Cuba, and Margot Fonteyn from England. To date, no American ballerina has ever held the rank, though Rudolf Nureyev considered Cynthia Gregory to be deserving of such a title.

“Mary was a prima
female
assoluta,” lamented Schwartz as he contemplated her murder, a tear rolling down his cheek. “She was what women were meant to be.”
⁴³

7

Cyclops

This young man has only one eye, but he sees more with one eye than most people see with two.

—President Rufus Jones
Haverford College

(introducing Cord Meyer in 1947)

Fathers, go back to your children, who are in need of you. Husbands, go back to your young wives, who cry in the night and count the anxious days. Farmers, return to your fields, where the grain rots and the house slides into ruin. The only certain fruit of this insanity will be the rotting bodies upon which the sun will impartially shine tomorrow. Let us throw down these guns that we hate. With the morning we shall go together and in charity and hope build a new life and a new world.