Rebels in White Gloves (45 page)

By her twenty-fifth reunion, Nonna, an economist who has worked at the Federal Reserve and the Congressional Research Service on public finance and health care, found herself wanting to get together the fifty women in the class who had never married, “to see if we just never met the right guy or if maybe we were somehow predisposed to stay single. I used to think that I was just one of the unlucky ones who never met the right guy, but then you get old and weird and think, well maybe.… Everybody has their regrets. But you have to take the package net, and I think I probably chose the package I most wanted.

“My mother persuaded me not to marry young; then I got to be thirty, and she worried she’d done too good a job. Most guys I met when I was young weren’t really ready to cope with a wife who wanted a Ph.D. and serious work. I myself don’t think it’s ideal for kids to have two working parents. But for a woman to have to give up contact with the adult world for twenty years, and then get left by her husband.… In truth, I didn’t try very hard to make the necessary compromises. I’ve
had lots of nice boyfriends who wanted to get married, but it wouldn’t have worked. I don’t spend any time now looking. As an economist, I don’t like to put energy into something where the odds of success are so low. The odds of finding a great match—well, I’m not in an optimistic mood.

“Sometimes it would be nice to have help, but I look around and think: There’s a commandment not to covet other people’s spouses, but I wish I saw spouses I did covet. It might give me some sense of possibility. I just spent the weekend with friends, a couple who bickered all the time. I couldn’t put up with that crap. I was an only child. Most people are so terrified of being alone that they will put up with a lot just not to be alone. I’m probably at the other end of that spectrum. And since I turned forty-five, somehow the pressure is off.

“Old age does worry me. I’ll have financial security; I haven’t had to put kids through college. But I’m responsible for three octogenarians—my two parents and my eighty-seven-year-old aunt. When I’m visiting them, I’m thinking, Who’s going to visit me? I should probably start making friends now with someone about forty years younger than me, but they’re just starting elementary school. On the other hand, I know people who raised kids and still no one comes to visit. They just fight over their money. There are no sure bets.”

For the past several years, Nonna has, like Alison Swain, been overwhelmed by elder-care responsibilities. Her father has Alzheimer’s. Until 1993, her mother cared for him. Then one weekend, they came to visit Nonna and never went home. Her mother had a septic shock attack in the car, and Nonna had to suddenly take them in. For fifteen months they lived with her in her apartment. She tried sending them to day care, but to get them ready for a 9
A.M
. bus required battling with her mother for two hours. “I’m not a morning person. That was really tough.” Every so often, her father would bolt from the house and Nonna would get calls saying, “We found this man with your name and phone number in his pocket.” Her mother then broke her hip, and went into a quick downhill slide, losing her ability to walk or talk. Nonna took three months off and nearly lost her job. She had to empty her parents’ house to sell it, which proved painful: “I’m not good at getting rid of things.” Then her aunt, who’d never married or had children, broke her hip, and Nonna took on her care as well. The aunt’s apartment also had to be
emptied and sold, and in the space of three months, she had to be moved six times to different care facilities, with Nonna overseeing each transition.

Eventually, Nonna moved all three into nursing homes. When her father realized that his independent life had come to an end, he looked at her and said, “I guess the ball game’s over, huh?,” which left Nonna unspeakably sad. She still faces mountains of mail each day: their medical bills and financial affairs. She shops for their clothes and diapers. She hasn’t had a vacation in five years; to go away for two weeks isn’t possible. On weekends she cooks “vegetables and stuff” to take to them and spends a day visiting them. Sometimes, she takes her father out with her to the store or the park and listens to his ceaseless, senseless talk.

Nonna has been for the most part alone with her responsibilities. When her mother collapsed, the man she was involved with helped her through the worst; his mother had a stroke at the same time, so they helped each other. Her closest friends have been gay men who know what it’s like to watch people they love waste away. As her other friends had children, those friendships faded away: “They’re so wrapped up; they don’t have time to hang around.” When her parents both fell ill, she found her support network still more broken down. “People who haven’t been through it don’t understand. They’d ask, ‘Does your father drive?’ Does he drive? He doesn’t know where he is or how to get from here to the bathroom. And people get squeamish, or spooked. They’ll entertain you, and a few real gems will help with responsibilities. But not many people will visit an old folks’ home. My greatest source of renewal has been church, but I’m a liberal Catholic and most churches leave me muttering angrily in the back row. I like to go to the black Catholic church and hear the gospel choir, but it takes three hours to go to mass, which now I don’t very often have.”

If there is any bitterness in Nonna, it is well concealed. “This is what I do every weekend. I feel like I have my caseload. These things drain you. But I had a charmed life for twenty-five years. I was carefree. I traveled the world. My parents were good to me when I was a child. So I don’t resent it. It’s shocking to watch sometimes, unbelievable really, and I often wonder which is harder—to lose somebody suddenly or to watch them slip away and lose their personality. It’s probably easier when it happens fast, but I’m glad to have them around, grateful for this chance to nurture
them a bit. This is the closest experience to parenting I’ll ever have. They are my children.” Here is another of these women who, though they have never had a child, have experienced loyalties and loves as consuming and irrevocable as maternity. They have made homes worthy of Robert Frost’s description—that place that when you have to go there, they have to let you in.

CHAPTER NINE
 
 
Spiritual Journeys

I
n discussions of ethics and faith, a common metaphor is concentric circles. Each larger circle represents a higher level of moral development. The smallest circle is the self; those caught within that circle, concerned only with the self, are the most stunted of spirit. The next-larger circle is the family, then community, and finally—the highest good, embodied in such beings as the Bodhisattva and Christ—a universal love and concern. The metaphor is complicated. One can advance toward the largest circle by gradually enlarging one’s commitments: moving from the personal to the political. But one can also reach the largest circle by traveling inward, finding through meditative and spiritual practices an essential unity of the self with all things, a sense that any need or suffering or joy in the world is one’s own. Both paths have been traversed by the women of Wellesley ’69.

For many in the class, the spiritual search began in childhood: Nancy Young yearned to be a Catholic nun; Chris Osborne secretly rendezvoused with Alan Watts and Zen. Many more began their quest for the transcendental in the sixties: Matilda Williams’s ordination as a Thai Buddhist nun and Alison Campbell Swain’s sojourn among the sprites at Findhorn were only slightly more dramatic than the Himalayan treks and sustained meditations in Zen monasteries undertaken by numerous of their classmates. Some sought their spiritual home in the established church, though almost never without difficulty; others have preferred the “New Age.” For an increasing proportion of the class, the search is at the center of their lives.

After graduating from Wellesley, Susan Alexander, ’69, did brilliantly at Princeton Theological Seminary and swept easily through her ordination exams. But then Susan couldn’t get a job. To become a minister, she had to get “a call” from a congregation, which in the Presbyterian church demonstrates God’s approval of a new shepherd for His flock. No matter how many doors she knocked on, her call to service failed to come. “Most congregations were not into the idea of a woman minister. I got more than one letter from a church telling me that it was clear to them that it was not God’s will that a woman should serve in that role. After a while, I began to think they were on to something. I certainly found it difficult to convince God to change His mind.”

Instead, in the midst of the 1973 recession, Susan found herself dismally unemployed. Her lowest moment came when she was turned down for a part-time Christmas sales position at Saks Fifth Avenue, New York. She ended up a temp at an engineering firm sending out Christmas cards. “An appropriate job, I thought, for a graduate of divinity school.”

Despairing of her prospects in the ministry, Susan began working on a doctorate in psychotherapy and training as a pastoral counselor. Through her work with alcoholics and the recently deinstitutionalized mentally ill at a Bowery mission in New York City, she managed finally to be ordained. At thirty-one, it appeared her life was at last secure. She married a “handsome, charming, romantic” man, a chef ten years her senior, from a big Boston Irish Catholic family, who had been a minor league baseball player and a sailor and a cowboy. They settled on Long Island. In their suburban congregation, she even got a call.

Eighteen months later, Susan was pregnant, which turned out to be more than her new congregation could bear. “The women, who were largely homemakers, had problems with the idea that their minister would be a mother who worked.” They asked Susan to resign. Though the Presbyterians had been one of the more progressive denominations—ordaining women earlier than most and championing the exercise of individual conscience in interpreting scripture—“no church always lives up to its own ideals,” says Susan. “The institution gets involved in keeping itself going, and sabotages its own higher purposes.
And people in churches are like people everywhere. You can’t blame it on God.”

Though only a handful of women in the class of ’69 have become clergy, the church is the institution class members most often name as the most important in their lives; they are as a group both religious and churchgoing. Fifteen percent describe themselves as “strictly” observant; another 30 percent describe religion as “very important.” So though few would have to contend, like Susan, directly with the “stained-glass ceiling,” many would endure discordances between the demands of their faith and their politics and professional lives.

With the possible exception of science, the church has been for much of its history the most rigid of all authorities on the question of woman’s nature and role. Though Jesus and his earliest followers seem to have espoused a radical egalitarianism, from the time the church became aligned with the politically powerful, that early equality was set aside. Augustine described woman as sinful and “naturally subject” to man’s higher reason. Aquinas anticipated Freud in naming her a “misbegotten male,” who benefits when she performs the role to which her lower capacities are suited. Nineteenth-century clergymen met feminism’s first wave with exhortations to pious men to contain their unruly wives and daughters, quoting a passage of the Gospels lately resurrected by the evangelical men’s group the Promise Keepers: “Even as Christ is head of the church, the husband is the head of the wife.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton responded with a denunciation of the church’s patriarchal structure and of its teachings that women brought sin and death into the world. She created her own “woman’s Bible,” for which she was excoriated even by her feminist sisters. As Susan Alexander would discover a century later, the patrolling of woman’s place in the religious community has often been led not by the male clergy but by the female congregation.

Indeed, little had changed by the time Susan and her classmates were finding their way into the church. While Susan was in college, the Vatican pronounced Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
a forbidden text; after the publication of
The Church and the Second Sex
(1968), feminist theologian Mary Daly was fired (briefly) from the faculty of Boston College: She had questioned the notion of God the Father and challenged the usurpation of the sacred feminine power embodied in “the hag, the crone, the amazon and goddess.” Radical politics were infiltrating the
church from the left, with clergy leading civil rights marches and third world liberation movements and burning draft board files, but also from the right, with evangelical ministers preaching against the Equal Rights Amendment as a “satanic attack” upon the home and warning that wife beating would continue as long as women refused to submit to men. (In 1998, the denomination to which Hillary Rodham Clinton’s husband belongs—the Southern Baptist Convention—would officially declare that a woman should “graciously submit” to her husband.)

The day after Susan gave birth to her son, her family was evicted. Her husband was, as usual, out of work. And the family was broke: What little money Susan was able to bring in, he spent on drink, which made him turn miserable and mean. Four months from completing a doctorate on which she had already spent four years, Susan had to quit her graduate program. “I was an emotional basket case and in terrible financial trouble. And then it got worse. I’d get up at five in the morning on weekends to go to New Jersey to preach, and my mom would take care of my son. One Sunday, my husband beat her up. Another time he came in with a gun at 4
A.M
. and was going to shoot us all. For a while I tried going to AA meetings for help, but I couldn’t afford a baby-sitter. And the situation was clearly dangerous. I may make bad choices for relationships, but my child didn’t make this choice. I finally had to tell my husband he couldn’t be in the house any longer. It was a horrible thing to have to do. I loved him, but I had to fight this terrible battle to get him to go, and still he hung around the neighborhood. He died within a year after leaving, before our son was two years old.”