Rebels in White Gloves (48 page)

While Thomas was away, Nancy developed a close relationship with an “out” lesbian on the faculty. They organized a film festival and ran together every day. “What I had with her went deep. I had no desire for anything physical, but our friendship nurtured me in a way I’d never been nurtured in my marriage. Thomas started to have a problem with it. When he came home from Washington, he wanted the relationship curtailed and insisted I run with him instead. For a while I ran with both of them, about six miles a day. I learned later he went to a lawyer at that point to talk about divorce. I think it felt adulterous to him that I preferred to spend time with her; I did find myself not telling him when I was seeing her. In fact, it was like adultery—though it wasn’t sex but time and emotion, which may be worth more for some people. He could feel my enthusiasm being channeled elsewhere. He could see I might have passions that had nothing to do with him. I had always had them—for my kids, my mother, other friends—but he hadn’t noticed. I’d always had intense emotional relationships with women, but this was the first time I was having one in front of him.”

Though Nancy had fulfilled her mother’s dream by marrying up in
the world, she had come to feel alienated by Thomas’s ambition. “Success in the world got very important to him. He had a high position in the administration and wanted a college presidency and started hobnobbing with dignitaries and trustees. I’d never wanted to be part of ‘the establishment,’ and hadn’t thought that when I married Thomas that’s what I was getting into. I wanted to be natural, not putting on airs. I always wanted to be my own person in these scenarios, and it never seemed like that’s what anyone wanted me to be. I was supposed to behave myself. Thomas didn’t tell me this, but I felt there was an expectation of me to be polite, to not be argumentative. For instance, when the trustees would say, ‘I never hire women salespersons because my customers would never find them credible,’ I was supposed to be gracious and say, ‘Oh yeah, I can really understand that.’ Instead, I was getting in fights with these people, and doing small subversive things like coming to these dinners after I’d run with my friend and showered and my hair was still wet. I never felt like a wife. I tried to be a faculty wife, to be a graduate student wife, and I just never felt comfortable with it.”

A year after Thomas’s sabbatical, at a conference on women’s wellness, Nancy met Susan, a recently divorced high school guidance counselor from a nearby blue-collar town. “We were immediately drawn to each other, and stayed in touch, and after eight or nine months began to realize what it was meaning; I felt something breaking open in my life. I brought those feelings to Thomas. That’s what I’d always done. It was part of my impulse to honesty. I thought it was something I’d just work through. Then by chance Susan and I had three days when everyone in both our lives was elsewhere and we could spend all of our time together. We didn’t become lovers physically, but we realized what it felt like to be together, a peace and contentment and energy and excitement I’d never felt before. It touched a deep place, more spiritual than sexual. Those three days shoved us a million miles toward knowing we didn’t want to lose this. I knew I couldn’t go back to my life as it had been. You know something you didn’t know before; you have to do something different. Still, I couldn’t imagine not being married to Thomas, not after all we’d come through—Vietnam, our baby dying. We had so much history. I felt loyal and grateful. Everything about being with him made sense. And I loved him. It wasn’t the kind of passion I feel now, but I had become passionate about wanting it and about our life with the kids. I was married for life.

“I remember one stormy night, about a month after I met Susan, I went running and Thomas caught up with me and we were out in this wild storm with wind and rain and everything and he just looked at me and said, ‘What is wrong with you?’ At that moment I realized there
was
something wrong.

“Over the course of the next year, Susan and I grew increasingly close. I decided we could be small-
l
lovers, which meant no sex. It was like my decision in junior high about intercourse: It was too dangerous, so I was going to make a deliberate choice to refuse it completely. I never questioned that I could be happy being sexual with a woman. I never thought there was something bad about it. Susan was divorced, and I had been trying to persuade her that being a lesbian was the best thing in the world. I pictured Lakey in
The Group:
Candice Bergen was my idea of what a lesbian looked like. I thought it would be great, and I thought that Susan would get to be one because she was free.

“In August of ’87 we decided to have a letting-go ceremony, to let go of the hope and fear we’d become lovers. We had candles and flowers and music. We drank passion-fruit juice before the ceremony and sparkling apple juice after, to symbolize the transition. Thomas wasn’t there, but he was involved in the planning. I asked if he would allow one kiss. He said okay. That kiss lasted twenty minutes. Then we went home and had a gourmet dinner Thomas had fixed for us. During this spell I was more attracted to Thomas than I’d been in years. He was being vulnerable in a way he’d never been. He cried for the first time in our first ever real conversation about our baby dying. In a way, it seemed the best thing that could have happened to our marriage. He was writing letters to Susan, saying he had never been happier, felt himself opening up and growing.”

In the midst of all this, Nancy decided, eighteen years after putting her ambitions aside to get married, to apply to law school. Her kids, she felt, were now self-reliant enough to manage without her during the week. Accepted to the University of Maine Law School, she took an apartment in Portland and at age thirty-eight began her first year.

Nancy loved being back in school and finished fourth in her class that year, despite the mounting tumult at home. She went home to her family on weekends, and Susan made frequent visits to Portland. On one such occasion, a month after the letting-go ceremony, the two women
“sort of accidentally” came frighteningly close to having sex. “I of course had to tell Thomas, who at the time was flat out with a back problem. He told us to go ahead and be lovers. He spent two days persuading us it was okay. He thought himself a big enough person to deal with it and that the suspense was building an energy and life of its own. We knew it wasn’t going to be reversible, but we all had a strong feeling that we could transcend petty jealousies and possessiveness. Thomas and I were closer than we’d ever been, because we were sharing all these feelings. He convinced us both that we were going to do something nobody had ever done before. We’d all read
The Harrad Experiment
. He was going to be a new kind of man. He was going to have a loving relationship with Susan and her kids. It might be the experience of his life. He gave Susan a beautiful gift for her birthday. And we bought a huge new house, with thirteen rooms, because Thomas thought we should all live together. He insisted on showing it to Susan before he would buy it.”

Susan was uneasy. “I wasn’t jealous of Thomas. I knew Nancy’s passion was for me. But I’d just exited a thirteen-year marriage and was in no hurry to give up my new freedom, and here Thomas was coming to my house to lay out the whole plan for my life. When Nancy and I did become lovers, I was mortified. I’d never had a sexual relationship with a woman. I’d had sexual feelings for Nancy, but she was unavailable, so it had been safe. Until 1983, I had been in the Fundamental Church of Christ: Homosexuality was Sodom and Gomorrah; women had to be silent in church. Just once, before I met Nancy, a woman in my church had kissed me on the mouth. I had my two babies with me. It was an earthquake in my life.”

Nancy was giddy. “I saw it as a way to have everything. Even after I knew I loved Susan, I worked on the principle that Thomas wasn’t going to lose by this. If anyone had to go, it would be her. I still couldn’t imagine myself without my husband. The struggling we’d had at the outset felt like it had forged a relationship with steel-like strength—though of course, steel is also a trap, strong but not terribly flexible. By September of ’87 I was sleeping with Thomas but also with Susan whenever I could. I was ecstatically happy. For a week it seemed I’d have everything; my family and a full life with Thomas and with Susan. But by that weekend, Thomas was a mess. Until Christmas we went back and forth. I was having a lot of sex with everybody, to convince Thomas it wouldn’t take
anything away from him, to prove to him I was more attracted than ever. I was terrified it would all fall apart and I’d end up back with him pretending it had never happened. Someone had said to Susan: ‘These women, I’ve seen it a million times. They get involved with a lesbian relationship but can’t give up their privilege.’ I was terrified that might be true. But it’s like trying to put gas back into a bottle. Still, I had no idea what we were heading toward. I’d call Susan and say the marriage was over, then he’d call her and say, ‘Let’s all do something together.’

“Buying the house was the last unified moment. By the spring of ’88 it was all downs. Thomas wanted Susan and me to quit being lovers. I kept buying time. He made me come out to the kids about my relationship, say, ‘I’m in love with Susan, and it’s a sexual relationship.’ Andrew said, ‘Oh, you can’t be a lesbian; you’ve been with Dad all these years.’ I couldn’t go back, but I threw myself into working on that house, even though the relationship with Thomas had completely broken down. There was no pleasure between us. He was like my keeper, permitting me two mornings with Susan, monitoring how many minutes I spent on the phone with her. I had no positive feelings for him, but he kept wanting to make love right up to the last day, which was torture for me. By the fall of ’88 I was close to a breakdown, but I still didn’t know if I could do what I needed to do. Part of it was wondering if I deserved to have what I wanted. That was the worst three months of my life. I lost all sense of possibility, began to fantasize about moving to another town, where no one would know me, about changing my name and disappearing, which I realized were suicidal fantasies.”

At Susan’s insistence, the two women quit being lovers. At the same moment, Thomas told Nancy that he had called her mother and told her everything and that Marge Wanderer was coming to Maine. Then, two days before Marge arrived, Thomas told Nancy it was over. “I’d talked him out of ending it before. I could just never bring myself to face really leaving. Finally he said, ‘You’ve got to go.’ I’m actually very grateful to him that he was wise enough to know when the end had come.

“I was shocked and scared; I was terribly worried for Peter and knew it would kill my mother. Thomas’s mother wrote me and said, ‘How can you leave your kids?’ But I began to feel better instantly, ashamed I hadn’t been able to make a decision but relieved that someone had. When my mother arrived, I told her what Susan meant to me, that the
marriage had broken down aside from Susan, that Thomas was not communicating or emotionally available. She helped me, though I learned later that I had completely misunderstood her, but she said this thing that was key. She said, ‘Look deep inside and I know you’ll do the right thing.’ I did do the right thing, which was to go; later she said, ‘What I meant was you would do the right thing and stay.’ But it was the permission I needed. I also had lunch with my classmate Christine Howe Badgley, who said how excited she was for me, that she could see a woman giving birth to herself. That made me feel like I would still be part of the Wellesley family, which mattered to me enormously.”

By November, Nancy had moved into a run-down little apartment in a shabby part of town. “I had no money and felt incredibly vulnerable, but it was the only place I ever had that was my own, and I loved it. I didn’t go back to the house; we’d planned for me to have dinner there once a week, but as soon as I left, the door slammed. Then my parents came to Thomas’s for Christmas and I had to go act like I lived there. I couldn’t bring myself to sleep there. My mother got upset each night when I left. She wouldn’t even come into my apartment. She said it was a slum.”

At the beginning of that year, Nancy’s father had been diagnosed with cancer and had undergone a major operation; that calamity and the breakdown of her daughter’s marriage were almost more than Marge Wanderer could bear. “For a time my mom and I talked angrily, with her trying to persuade me to go back. She said she would rather have had me murder someone in an alley than do what I did. For her, my coming out was all mixed up with throwing out my luxury life. She wanted me to be what I’d been—the storybook bride with a successful, nice-looking husband, two great kids, a big house, the picture of a happy family. My mother was ready to sacrifice me to that storybook picture. Her identity was entirely caught up in how her children turned out. I feel my sons’ destinies are their own; she saw my divorce as her failure. But I never really thought she’d write me off. I was sure she’d get with this too. It felt so right.” To
Frontline
, Nancy said: “As painful as it was, I knew that even if she never came around, I had to do it. Losing my mother is an almost unthinkable thing to me. She is the person I’ve modeled my life on in all the important ways. I couldn’t imagine not having her, but I also couldn’t imagine not being who I was. It was an impossible choice, and ultimately I had to choose life for myself.

“For two years I kept calling and trying to talk to her. She, meanwhile, was writing letters to Andrew about not letting me spend the money she’d sent him on my ‘friend’ and saying how sorry she was that ‘you’ve lost your mother.’ Finally in the spring of 1990, my father said, ‘Let’s just not be in contact for a while.’ I ran into them when I went back to my hometown for my twenty-fifth high school reunion. My mother couldn’t look at me or say a single word. I told them not to come to my law school graduation if they were going to snub Susan. I won an achievement award; it would have been a great day for them.”

At the time of the divorce, Andrew was nineteen and a freshman at Columbia; Peter was fourteen and in the eighth grade. “It would have been much easier if both kids were grown. I kept returning in my mind to the summer when Peter was three, when we were at my folks’ place at Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland and I got stung by a bee and nearly died. I had what I can only describe as an out-of-body experience. I was sort of floating above the earth feeling incredibly calm, watching them carry my lifeless body away. Then I saw Peter, and I thought, But he’s so young, and it was as if I was suddenly sucked back into my body and resumed fighting for my life. Peter was the one who came after baby David, and I didn’t want to lose him, too. And I didn’t know if, like my mother, my sons would say, ‘To heck with you.’ Thomas made it clear that I shouldn’t even consider they’d be anywhere but with him. It was a way of punishing me; he did it with the kids and with money. I acquiesced. I felt as if he had the right, and that in some ways it was best: Thomas was home more than me, though he was in his study and had to be formally visited. I also believed my bond with my kids was strong enough that the amount of time we spent together wouldn’t affect it. It was strong enough, but it was still painful not to have them in my life all the time. It was heartbreaking to lose that time with Peter. Even now, he probably has no idea how I feel.