My Latest Grievance (6 page)

"But they're scholars! They aren't downtrodden textile workers slaving away in some hot Carolina factory. The administration looks at the two of them and all they see is
union.
And you know what? I think they're proud of that; they think they're Norma Rae and her Jewish boyfriend from up north, the agitator."

Loyalty to the Dewing Society of Professors and to Jewish agitators everywhere made me drop the subject of which friend she'd be recruiting for the job of Ada Tibbets housemother.

It was just as well. If I had heard the truth, I might have become complicit in her plot, out of some perverse parental backlash. Four months later, when successful candidate Laura Lee French arrived to begin resident-head orientation, I was as astonished as anyone else.

Grandma continued to hold her head up high despite occupancy in the doghouse. Her conscience was clear, she informed my father. Yes, she
had
borrowed the job posting with Laura Lee in mind, but common sense had prevailed. She was not a fool or a foe. She had asked herself how both wives of David Hatch could reside in the same community, especially within the sights of an impressionable daughter—a daughter who spent a lot of time unsupervised—and had very quickly relegated the flyer to her recycling bin.

She conceded that it was a mistake to confide her near-folly to the Schenectady cousin who happened to be Laura Lee's mother:
I'd had an idea
—
passing on to Laura Lee a job listing at the small women's college where David teaches
—
but quickly thought better of it. How is she doing? Has she found anything yet?

It wasn't her fault that the elder Mrs. French was prone to the wishful thinking of a child from a broken home:
Maybe they'll get back together. Maybe the second wife will die or decide it was all a regrettable mistake.

Later, after we'd met, Laura Lee called it coincidence, attributable to the small world of personnel: She could swear it all started with an appealing blind ad in the Sunday
Times,
which, by definition, did not name the college, and certainly did not footnote its faculty. She had had no idea, or perhaps had forgotten, that Dewing College employed her ex and his wife. If only the cousins had stayed in closer touch. If only Cousin Jane had added a few newsy, occupational lines to her Christmas card, Laura Lee might have known which opportunities to avoid. She had been looking for work for ages, and this position seemed so easy, practically like no job at all: sleep, eat in the dining hall, learn CPR, set a good moral example, answer knocks on the door day or night, be nice to parents and trustees, make cookies before dorm council meetings, kowtow to benefactress Ada Tibbets, who was still alive.

Shallower professors might have gone to Personnel, arguing that the hire of the ex–Mrs. Hatch would prove awkward. Selfish and smaller people might have characterized candidate French as irresponsible or unfit. But of course my parents didn't. As champions of due process and fair play, they would sooner retire their gavels than put their personal discomfort ahead of an individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of take-home pay. Besides, they assured each other, how often did they socialize with any incumbent housemothers now?

Maybe Laura Lee had finally grown up, they theorized, and was thinking of Frederica and her undernourished college fund.

"What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.

"I think it's time we told her," said my father.

My mother said, "We live in a litigious culture. People need to exact a fee for pain and suffering, no matter how long ago or how fleeting or how big their trust fund."

"So?" I said.

Here was the fact of life they were saving for the precise moment that my psyche could absorb it: David paid alimony. Now, under their separation agreement, his monthly payments could be reduced one dollar for every two Laura Lee earned—an unfortunate disincentive that had kept her dabbling in dance since 1950.

"How much?" I asked.

My mother hesitated before answering carefully, "Several hundred dollars a month, plus cost-of-living adjustments, plus health insurance premiums."

"Dental?" I asked.

My father shook his head.

"Do you understand what we're telling you?" asked my mother. "That for decades we've practically been supporting her?"

I understood perfectly: books from the library, piano lessons bartered with the music department in exchange for babysitting, bikes from yard sales, haircuts from a school of cosmetology, every meal on the meal plan. What I had or didn't have was due less to political philosophy and anticonsumerism, and more to a skimpy bank account.

"Now can we buy a car?" I asked.

A
COLLEGE PORTER PICKED
Laura Lee up at the airport, failing to recognize her at the baggage carousel because—my guess—she bore so little resemblance to any previous physical embodiment of a housemother. Her red-gold hair was long and be-ribboned in Alice-in-Wonderland style. She wore sunglasses despite the dim lighting and was dressed in a leotard and matching wraparound skirt. Rumors of glamourdom were further fueled by her luggage, two steamer trunks, which left the impression that she had been on the stage. Finally, when only the porter and Laura Lee were left at baggage claim, he asked, "You're not Miss French, are you?"

Laura Lee hugged him, sagging against his dark green janitorial uniform with relief. "I'd given up hope," she said. "I thought there might have been a misunderstanding and I'd have to get back on a plane."

I had answered the phone when someone called earlier, sounding overwrought. "Is David there? Tell him it's Laura Lee." I stood by his elbow, on the one hand thrilled and on the other mildly disappointed that she hadn't greeted me, her pen pal, in chummier fashion. My father advised her to get a taxi. Someone would reimburse her. Or just sit tight. The porter was probably having trouble parking. Was there a balding man wearing a green uniform in her sights? "Dewing College" would be embroidered above his left pocket. After hanging up, he told me this call was an example of Laura Lee hysteria. "Not 'I was about to get into a taxi.' Not 'I was about to call the school,'" he relayed at dinner. "A grown woman panics when her ride doesn't show up on the dot! I hope we've raised you to handle things better than that."

I said, "She did call the school. She thinks
you're
the school."

"Our daughter is anything but helpless," offered my mother. "I think, if you landed in a strange airport, you'd not only get where you were going, but save the taxi fare and get there by public transportation."

"I don't know how I'd feel if I got to my new job and there was no one there to meet me."

"You're a teenager. She's a grown woman," said my mother. "All Daddy is saying is that this behavior isn't new to us. She can be needlessly helpless."

"Which has its own appeal," said my father.

My mother and I looked at him. He said, "I'm not talking about myself. I'm talking about the world in general. Chivalry is not dead. People always tended to rush to her aid."

"Daddy's saying that it was hard being married to someone so childlike. That's why, ultimately, he was drawn to someone who was competent and independent."

"You?"

"Yes, me."

"Go on," I said.

My mother took a breath. "Women who play up their so-called feminine wiles or, worse, feign incompetence—"

"Not that," I said. "I meant that I want to hear more about Dad's being drawn to you."

She looked to my father. They said nothing.

"Did he sweep you off your feet? Was it love at first sight? Or did it begin as a friendship but slowly grow into something deeper that you finally couldn't deny?"

"That's Hollywood love," said my mother, "imbued with an added layer of teenage romanticism."

"Why is talking about love called romanticism? You left your wife for Mom. She wasn't pregnant with me. I know that. Was there some other big reason besides love that I'm not getting?"

"Let's be frank," said my father. "You're a young, impressionable girl. We engaged in some behaviors that we wouldn't want you to emulate. We want you to see marriage as inviolable."

"He means for life," said my mother. "Like Canada geese."

I craved the low-down. David and Aviva were so deliberately plain, so earnest and interchangeable, that I needed to imagine them as two separate people radiating animal magnetism at detectable levels. "You've always been honest with me," I tried. "And I think I need to hear your whole story. As a cautionary tale."

When they continued to sit there, exchanging silent signals, I added, "Is it the sex part? Because you don't have to be specific. I'm just trying to get an idea of your history: You met in class. You met at a party. You met at the malt shop. You met on a picket line."

My mother smiled first. "It's almost a cliché how we met."

I said, "I love clichés."

"David?" she prompted.

"There was a blackout," he began.

"And you were stuck in an elevator together?" I asked eagerly.

"Almost," said my mother.

"We were in a lab when the lights went out. We waited for a while, assuming someone had blown a fuse, or, if it were the real thing, then a generator would kick in. After a while—"

"Maybe a half hour—"

"We groped our way along the corridor to the stairwell—"

"Were you lab partners?"

My mother smiled and said no, not lab partners. This was a neuroscience lab, so not the kind with Bunsen burners. Nonetheless, they were there at night because they both had experiments in progress.

"Did you know each other at all before this?"

"Only by sight," said my father.

"Which of course is so ironic," my mother continued.

"Why?"

"Because—and I just recognized this for the first time—we
knew each other only by sight. So it took a blackout to bring us together. In other words, sight didn't bring us together. Which we think says so much about our relationship and the depth of it."

I didn't say aloud what I was thinking: Yes, because sight brought people together when they were attractive. "So you made it to the stairwell...," I prompted.

"And I fell down the stairs!" my father exclaimed.

"Slight exaggeration," said my mother. "He was going ahead of me to be gallant. Almost immediately he slipped—they were old, worn stone steps—and I caught him by the back of the shirt."

"I still fell. Not any distance, but I landed on my coccyx. And I wasn't very stoic about it."

"Please don't tell me you cried."

My mother answered like the good note-taker that her field required her to be, "No crying. Just a little hysterical paralysis for a few minutes."

"Now
she's
exaggerating. I just sat where I'd landed. But for a very sound reason—"

"He didn't want to move in case it was a spinal injury."

"Because," my father rushed to explain, "we had just finished experiments on animals with spinal cord injuries. So that was me being my sensible self."

"He did stand up eventually, but he didn't want to risk going down the stairs. We walked back up to where we were so he could explore his various sore spots."

"I sustained bruises and abrasions through my clothes. It wasn't just a little nothing. It was even bleeding a little bit. I didn't think it was safe to—"

I said, "Dad! People climb up mountains and rappel down them! Couldn't you hold on to the railing and keep going?"

"Six flights," he said solemnly. "I made a rational decision. It wasn't as if the building was on fire. We'd stay put until someone fixed the problem."

"Was it romantic?" I asked.

"It could have been," my mother answered.

"Except I was a married man."

I was deeply disappointed in their romantic genesis. It didn't dramatize anything I didn't already know about my father: that
there had never been a younger David reckless enough to walk down six innocent flights of stairs in the dark.

They were smiling at me expectantly. I said, "I'm missing something."

They looked surprised.

"The
affair.
What happened between the blackout and Dad's divorce."

"We fell in love," said my father.

"Were you a scandal?"

"Very much so," said my mother. "Some of my classmates thought I should lose my fellowship for moral turpitude."

I liked that. I asked if she'd been a virgin before David.

"This is where the privacy line gets crossed," she said.

I pointed out that they loved the topic of sex. Hadn't they brought it up light-years ahead of when anyone else's parents even thought of passing on pamphlets? Like in fifth grade?"

"We talk about human sexual response when it's educational," said my father. "Not to satisfy a prurient interest"

I said, "I think I have a fair question that's somewhat educational and not that personal."

Okay, they said. Go on.

"How did you tell Laura Lee? I mean, was it 'I'm in love with someone else, so I'm moving out and divorcing you'? Or was it 'I think we should take a marital sabbatical. Nothing personal'?"

"To the best of my recollection, I took the coward's way out. I was never good at confrontation."

I pointed out that he was president of the Dewing Society of Professors and therefore
extremely
good at confrontation.

"That's different," said my mother. "That's professional and political. He means he's not good at confrontation when it's personal. Can you imagine what it takes to sit down opposite your spouse and say, 'I don't think this marriage is right for either of us'?"

"And 'P.S. I love someone else'?" I asked.

My father turned to my mother, "Why does she need me to reconstruct, word for word, such a terribly difficult and painful period in my life?"

My mother turned to me. "Frederica? Can you answer David's question?"

"Not until he answers mine."

My father took a deep, tragic breath. "I don't remember word for word, but I put it in a letter."

"Tell me you didn't," I said.