I thought of how I’d told Bill on our first date, in the gallery courtyard, that my father was an asshole. I hadn’t realized at the time that I was issuing a warning.
* * *
—
My father had gone up to bed, Tony had also disappeared to his room, and Bill was getting settled in the basement, where he’d be sleeping on a pull-out couch. In the downstairs den, my mother and I half watched a TV show about a private investigator. I was curled up against her, and she was running her hand over my hair, just as she had on countless nights in my girlhood when she’d tucked me in.
“I’m sorry Dad decided to be so silly at dinner,” she said, and I said, “It’s certainly not your fault.”
“Bill is nice,” she said. “I think you’ll have a good time in California.”
Because of the tilted angle of my head, I couldn’t see her as, a little sheepishly, I said, “Us renting an apartment together—does it bother you?” The fact that in an hour or so I’d be sleeping on the second floor while Bill slept in the basement, an arrangement I hadn’t protested, indicated as much.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “You’re a grown-up now. And society is so different than it used to be.” We both were quiet—rather incongruously, the private investigator onscreen was being punched in the face by a gangster—then my mother said, “A new community college opened in Morton Grove, and I’ve signed up to take some classes in the fall.”
“In what?”
“One in ancient Roman history and one in philosophy. Just for fun. Rosemary Munroe did it, and she said it was very stimulating.”
“How’s the soup kitchen?” This was affiliated with my family’s church, and for as long as I could remember, my mother had volunteered there on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
She said, “Busy.” We were quiet again, for longer this time. The reality was that I didn’t often pour out my heart to my mother and that I experienced her support more in deed than in word—in the form of her spending hours playing cards with me when I was young, teaching me to type, buying a fake ponytail for me at the Ben Franklin five-and-dime after, as a high school freshman, I was distraught about a drastic and unflattering haircut. But then, softly, she said, “I’m glad you’ve found someone who appreciates you.”
* * *
—
After midnight, I went down to the basement, where Bill lay under a sheet on the pull-out couch, reading Newsweek. Immediately, he set the magazine down and whispered, “Baby, I was hoping you’d come visit.” He scooted toward the center of the mattress and patted the space next to him. When I lay beside him, he turned onto his side and wrapped his arms around me. “I was reading the obituary of a woman who survived the sinking of both the Titanic and the Britannic. Can you imagine? She just died of heart failure at the age of eighty-three. She also was aboard an ocean liner that collided with a British warship even before she was on the Titanic.”
“Does all that make her lucky or unlucky?”
He pondered the question. “Both?” Our faces were at the same level, and he kissed my forehead then said, “I’m not surprised your dad gave me a hard time. I’m his daughter’s boyfriend, so it’s almost a requirement. But I couldn’t believe the way he treated you.”
“How so?”
“The relentlessness of his nasty comments. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a father talk to his daughter that way.”
I was genuinely perplexed. “Like what?”
He adjusted his voice to what I understood was an approximation of my father’s, though the mimicry wasn’t particularly adept. “ ‘That’s an impressive insight for someone of your limited intellect.’ ‘You look good since you’ve put on all that weight.’ ‘Maybe you’re not as awful as everyone says.’ ”
“Oh.” I laughed. “He’s said those exact same things hundreds of times. They’re like his personal proverbs.”
We still were making eye contact, and Bill said, “Hillary, that stuff is awful. He’s your father.”
“He’s joking,” I said.
“It’s not funny.”
“Well, I agree with that. But it’s how he’s always been. I assume you noticed he did it to Tony, too, and he does it to Hughie. The thing he always says to Hughie is, ‘Does your face hurt? Because it’s killing me.’ It’s not personal, though.”
“How on earth is it not personal? Does he say things like that to people other than his children?”
“Presumably, he realizes he can’t get away with it.”
“That illustrates my point. Daddy—my stepfather—was no prize. Once when I was four, he and Mother were arguing, and he pulled a gun on her and shot it into a wall. I was in the room. She and I ran over to the neighbors, and they called the police. He had to spend the night in jail. Another time, when I was a lot older, Daddy was beating up on Mother so much that I went after him with a golf club to get him to stop. Now, is your father like that? No. He’s not. But there’s something very ugly in the way he is with you.”
I found Bill’s stories of his family and his observations of mine both interesting and disturbing. I said, “Why did your mother stay with your stepfather?”
“Well, she didn’t always. She got all the way through a divorce once, before they reconciled. When he wasn’t drinking, she loved him. They had a life together.”
“Remember when you asked about my fearlessness?” I said. “Maybe it is my dad who made me—not fearless, but less fearful than a lot of women. When a man is a jerk, or tries to insult me, whether it’s a professor or another student who doesn’t think women should speak at a protest, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. I hardly pay attention.”
“I think you’re giving your father too much credit.”
“I’m not being a Pollyanna,” I said. “I agree with almost everything you’re saying.” We both were quiet, and then I said, “I’m sorry your stepfather shot a gun while you were in the room, and I’m sorry you had to use a golf club to get him to stop hitting your mom.”
Bill didn’t say anything, but his eyes filled. I had never seen him cry.
“I love you very much,” I said.
He blinked, and no tears slid out. He still didn’t speak.
I said, “Seeing you with my family makes me feel so lucky.”
* * *
—
The landscape in California was different—the green and tan mountains, the glittering water, the Bay Bridge—and the sky was different and the light was different and the way the air smelled was different. I felt right away how having arrived with Bill made this an adventure, and how if I’d come by myself, I’d have been fine—earnestly fine, responsibly fine, the way I always was—but probably lonely, at least at first.
The apartment Gwen had helped find—her friend’s nephew’s—consisted of a bedroom, a bathroom, a galley kitchen, and a space off the kitchen with a round table and two chairs. If it wasn’t technically a studio, it was close. The unit was on the first floor of a four-story white stucco building with yew trees on either side of the front entrance and bars over the windows, and the building was located on a hill, with the east side of the foundation built to accommodate the hill’s slope.
We arrived on a Wednesday evening, and the next morning, when we went grocery shopping together for the first time, we bought bananas and yogurt and hot dogs. Then we went for a hike in Muir Woods. In the shade of the massive, spectacular redwoods, I asked Bill, “Are you sure you won’t be bored not working?”
“Bored?” He laughed. “I’ll be in heaven.”
* * *
—
That weekend, we’d been invited for dinner at the home of Phil Howard, the friend of Gwen and Richard’s who’d hired me for the summer. This dinner was when I’d meet the firm’s partners and my fellow summer associates, and I decided that Bill and I should take a peach pie, using a recipe I’d
found in an issue of Reader’s Digest in the Berkeley apartment. The pie was fresh out of the oven as we drove through the hills of Berkeley to the Elmwood neighborhood, the dish still so warm that I had to sit with a tea towel covering my lap. I had never before baked a pie, never before been a summer associate at a law firm, and never shown up to an adult dinner party with a boyfriend.
The Howards’ house was modern—rectangular, big windowed, minimalist—and set high enough up that it resembled a tree house. The person who answered the door was their daughter, Margaret, who said she was a sophomore at Stanford. Bill and I followed her into the living room, where we met all three partners, their wives, Margaret’s younger brother Bob, and their dog, Apollo. I followed Irene Howard, Phil’s wife, into the kitchen and set the pie on a burner of the stove, and she peeled back the foil and said, “Oh, it looks fabulous.”
I drank a gin and tonic and made a point, during the cocktail hour, of speaking to each of the three partners. Phil Howard asked me about Gwen and Richard, and Mark Guion and I discussed new special education laws pending in Massachusetts, and Dan Schau and I discussed the Giants and the Oakland A’s. Place cards around the dining room table told us where to sit, and at dinner I was between Mark and an associate named Rick who’d just finished his second year at Berkeley’s law school and who informed me that, locally, people referred to Berkeley as Cal.
As I cut into my piece of chicken Kiev, Mark said, “If your boyfriend is also at Yale, you won’t need to practice law for long.”
I was taken aback and said, “Well, Bill is very interested in public service, and it’s no secret that that doesn’t pay a lot.” It felt strange—to say the least—to imply to a man I’d met a half hour earlier not only that I’d marry Bill but that I’d be the breadwinner when I did. Other than circling the topic of marriage with Bill himself, I’d discussed it with no one.
Mark laughed. “Just don’t become a litigator, because then there won’t be anyone to iron the clothes or go to the market.”
Was he kidding or not kidding? I tried to sound upbeat, to accommodate either possibility, by saying, “Isn’t that what weekends are for?”
“Trust me, trial lawyers don’t have a free minute to themselves. They need wives. Even when you’re home, even on the weekend, you’re poring over files.”
I was almost certain he wasn’t kidding. And I didn’t want to appear defiant to a superior before I’d started, but I also felt uneasy pretending that I agreed. Noncommittally, I said, “That’s an interesting point of view.”
He snorted. “It’s not interesting at all,” he said. “It’s a statement of fact.”
* * *
—
In the mornings, I’d leave the apartment at ten after eight, board a bus on College Avenue, and ride south on Highway 24 to downtown Oakland. Howard, Schau and Guion specialized in civil liberties cases, and Phil Howard assigned me to work on a case defending a woman in her thirties named Mary Buck, who was raising the seven-year-old son of former neighbors killed in a car accident four years prior. Initially, it had seemed the arrangement would be temporary, but the child, whose name was Teddy, had lived with Mary ever since his parents’ death. Then, six months earlier, Teddy’s maternal grandparents, who lived in Reno, had petitioned for guardianship. Mary, with our support, was filing her own petition for guardianship. In order to write briefs and legal motions, I often went to the Berkeley Law Library to research similar cases.
Sometimes during the day, I’d think about Bill reading at the apartment or in a park, or exploring the Bay Area, and I’d again feel disbelief that I got both—I got to work in a way that mattered, and I got to go home, talk to the most interesting person I knew, and kiss the most attractive person I knew. Did I deserve such abundance? Did anyone? I’d leave the office at five-forty, take the bus back up 24, and when it turned onto College Avenue, I’d feel myself smiling with anticipation.
Once, on a weekend, Bill and I climbed up and down the steps on Lombard Street then walked along the Golden Gate Promenade. On another weekend, we ate afternoon ice cream in Ghirardelli Square and dinner in Chinatown, and in between we stopped by City Lights bookstore, where I bought North Toward Home, which was a book about the South that Bill loved but hadn’t brought with him for the summer, and Bill bought a biography of Robert Frost. On yet another weekend we went for a hike in Joaquin Miller Park, which was a fifteen-minute drive from the apartment, and on a trail thirty yards in from the parking lot, Bill kissed me and we kept kissing and soon both were sufficiently far gone that we decided to skip the hike, go back to the apartment, and get in bed.
Once, on a weekday, when I got home, he was listening to a George Harrison record and making chicken curry, and instead of saying hello to me, he sang, “I really wanna know you / Hallelujah / I really wanna go with you / Hallelujah / I really wanna show you, Lord / That it won’t take long, my Lord.”
I laughed and said, “I didn’t know you knew how to make chicken curry,” and he said, “It’s not clear that I do.”
* * *
—
It was around this time that I sent a postcard to Phyllis, my Wellesley friend. The card featured the Golden Gate Bridge, and I sent it to her in Baltimore, where she’d just finished her second year of medical school at Johns Hopkins.
Dear P,
I have found a man who loves my brain. Stop the presses!
Love, H
P.S. His name is Bill.
* * *
—
On our drive to the West Coast, Bill had said we should live together in the fall, back in New Haven, and I’d said we might as well test the idea for a few weeks in California before deciding. On the first day of July, when I returned to the bedroom to get dressed after a morning shower, still wrapped in a towel, he said from the bed, “Has it been a few weeks? Have I earned the right to be your permanent roommate?”
I said, “No offense to Katherine, but you’re much more fun to snuggle with.”
He raised the sheet, and his erection was visible inside his white underwear. “Come back to bed,” he said.
“That’s not something she was ever able to offer me. Unfortunately, I need to catch the bus.” I opened the top drawer of the bureau and pulled out a bra.
“Eddie Shinske is moving out of a place on Edgewood Avenue that I always liked. It has a fireplace in the living room. I’ll call and see if he knows if anyone has rented it.”
“Can you wait until the weekend to call? Or at least until after seven tonight?” This was when the rates were cheaper.
“Is that a confirmation that we get to live in sin?”
I fastened the bra then walked over to him, leaned down, and kissed his lips. “I guess it is.”
He slipped his hand underneath the bra’s left cup and squeezed my nipple. He said, “It’s such a shame to cover these up.”
* * *
—
On a morning in late July, Mark Guion appeared in front of my desk and said, “You can’t really be planning to move to Arkansas.”
He said this as though we’d been discussing the pros and cons of such a decision, but in fact I’d spoken to him little in the eight weeks since he’d warned me against becoming a trial lawyer.
I said, “Pardon me?”
“Phil told me it’s where your boyfriend wants to run for office. Do you know what a backwater that state is?”
Did Mark intend for this unsolicited advice to dovetail with his previous unsolicited advice—I ought not to live in Arkansas while not going into trial law—or was it entirely separate?
I said, “Oh, I didn’t—I haven’t—” I paused and said, “I didn’t realize you’d spent time in Arkansas.”
Mark’s expression was disdainful. “I wouldn’t set foot there if you paid me. What happened in Little Rock is a blight on our nation’s history.”
“We
ll, it was a very dark moment,” I said. “But racial injustice isn’t unique to Arkansas.”
He was practically sneering. “They’d still lynch people down there if they thought they could get away with it.”
* * *
—
Bill and I had decided to meet at six-thirty at a noodle restaurant on Fourth Street in Berkeley, a place where Bill previously had eaten lunch on his own and had thought I’d like. I ended up spending the afternoon at the library, which was closer to our apartment than to the restaurant, so at quarter to six I began to walk home. It was about seventy degrees out, a breezy summer evening, and I thought that over dinner we ought to make a list of the things we wanted to do and see before we left the Bay Area. Impossibly, our time there was almost finished—it was mid-August, just over a week before we were to drive back east.
Half Moon Bay, I thought as I walked north on Piedmont Avenue, my satchel hooked over my right shoulder. And what about Sausalito? And we still hadn’t even made it to the Botanical Garden on the Cal campus. On our final remaining weekend, we were planning to see friends of Bill’s, another Rhodes scholar and his wife who were driving up from Los Angeles.
A few seconds after I’d turned from Hearst Avenue onto Leroy Avenue, I saw a man and woman outside the stucco apartment building, kissing in an open-mouthed, passionate way. The man was tall and sandy-haired and leaning down, and the woman was dark-haired and leaning up. The sight of them would have been notable on the street I’d grown up on, but in Berkeley, in 1971, it was less so. It was less so, except that, as I realized with a start, the man wore Bill’s white T-shirt and jeans; the man’s wavy hair was cut just like Bill’s. I was ten feet away when I knew for certain that the man was Bill.
Later, when I described the moment in a letter to Maureen, she wrote back that she’d have turned around and bolted in the other direction. This didn’t occur to me. I blurted out, “What are you doing?” and when Bill raised his head and saw me, his expression turned from one of casual pleasure to one of horror.
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