He smiled. Now it was my turn to take a long sip of my martini.
“I only bought it today.”
“Obviously. Was it expensive?”
“Twenty dollars.”
“That’s not cheap.”
“It’s a good bicycle. You want me to be riding something safe, don’t you?”
“That’s not the issue.”
“So what is the issue?”
“The fact that you bought it without consulting me.”
I looked at him with something approaching shock. “You’re kidding me?” I said.
His smile remained fixed. “All I’m saying is, if you’re going to go out and make a major household purchase like a bicycle, I’d like to be told . . .”
“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I saw the bicycle in Flannery’s Garage, the price was right, so I bought it. Anyway, I need a bicycle to get around town . . .”
“I’m not disputing that.”
“Then what are you disputing?”
“Twenty dollars of household money was spent by you without . . .”
I cut him off. “Do you hear what you are saying?”
“There’s no need for that tone, Sara.”
“Yes, there is. Because you are being absurd. Listen to yourself. You sound so generous, so benevolent, such a loving husband . . .”
His face fell. “I didn’t know you had such a cruel streak,” he said.
“Cruel streak! All I’m doing is responding to you saying dumb things like I need to have your written approval before I dare bankrupt us by spending an extravagant twenty dollars on a bicycle . . .”
Silence. Finally, he said, “I never asked for written approval.”
That’s when I threw back the rest of my drink and stormed off to the bedroom, slamming the door behind me, and falling face down on the bed. After a minute there was a tentative knock on the door.
“You’re not crying, are you?” he asked, sounding anxious.
“Of course I’m not crying. I’m too angry.”
“Can I come in?”
“It’s your room too.”
The door opened. He tentatively came over to the bed. He had my martini glass in his right hand. It had been refilled.
“A peace offering,” he said, holding it out to me. I sat up and took it. He crouched down next to me, and touched his glass against mine. “Everyone says the first decade of marriage is always the worst.”
I tried to smile.
“That was meant as a joke,” he said.
“I know.”
“We’re not getting off to a very good start, are we?”
“No, we’re not.”
“How can I make things better?”
“Stop treating me like your housekeeper, for a start. Yes, I am at home, which means I will take care of things like the shopping and the overall management of the house. But just because I am now financially dependent on you doesn’t automatically mean that it is my duty to serve you.”
“I’d never treat you like a servant.”
“Believe me, you were. And I want it to stop now.”
“Fine,” he said, looking away like a child who’d just been reprimanded.
“And as regards the issue of money . . . you will discover that, when it comes to spending, I am true to my New England roots, in that I’m not interested in furs, diamonds, staterooms on the Queen Mary, or keeping up with the Joneses. And I don’t think a bicycle exactly qualifies as a frivolous luxury, especially as I’ll be using it to get groceries.”
He took my hand. “You’re right. I’m wrong. And I’m sorry.”
“You really mean that?”
“Of course I do. I’m just not used to living with a wife.”
“I’m not a wife. I am Sara Smythe. There is a difference. Work it out.”
“Sure, sure,” he said.
We both sipped our martinis.
“I want this to work, Sara.”
I touched my midsection. “It has to work. For obvious reasons.”
“We’ll make it work. I promise.”
He kissed me lightly on the lips, and stroked my hair.
“Good,” I said, caressing his cheek with my hand.
“I’m glad we had this talk.”
“Me too.”
He pulled me toward him, and held me tight. Then he said, “So, is the meat loaf just about done?”
It was. We went downstairs and ate. He approved of my meat loaf. He was pleased with the seven-layer cake, and laughed when I informed him of Bea’s comments about his sweet tooth. We went to bed. We made love. This time he managed to hold on for almost two minutes. He seemed genuinely pleased about this. Then he kissed me fully on the lips, got up, and bumped against the bedside table that separated our two beds. As he slipped beneath his blankets, he said, “I must move that damn thing sometime.”
I slept well that night. But early the next morning, George shook me awake. As I came to, I could see he looked deeply upset about something.
“What’s happened, darling?” I asked.
“My suits . . .”
“What?”
“My suits. Where have you put my suits?”
“I took them to the cleaner’s.”
“You what?”
I was now awake. “You asked me to get them pressed, so I took them to the cleaner’s . . .”
“I asked you to press them yourself.”
“I don’t know how to press suits.”
“You don’t? Really?”
“Sorry—they didn’t teach me such fundamental things at Bryn Mawr.”
“There you go again, with that nasty tongue of yours.”
“I’m only being nasty because you are being so incredibly thoughtless.”
“Thoughtless? What the hell am I going to wear today to the office?”
“What about the suit you were wearing yesterday?”
“It’s wrinkled.”
“Then press it yourself.”
He went to the closet and angrily pulled it off the rail. “All right then, I will,” he said. “Because, at least, I know how to press a suit.”
“Well, it’s great to discover that a Princeton education taught you something.”
I fell back on my pillow, pulling the blankets over my head. I stayed in that position for nearly half an hour—until I heard the front door slam, as George went off to work. As I lay there, my stomach did somersaults. I felt sick. But it wasn’t morning sickness from which I was suffering. It was despair.
Naturally, George was guilty as hell about this early morning exchange—and a large bouquet of flowers arrived by messenger early that afternoon, accompanied by a card:
I am a well-pressed fool.
And I love you.
At least it was moderately witty.
When George came home that night, he acted as if he had gone through a Pauline conversion. Naturally he brought another peace offering of flowers, augmented by a big box of chocolates . . . indicating just how guilty he was feeling.
“Two bouquets in one day?” I said, nodding toward the twelve long-stemmed roses which had arrived that morning. “It’s starting looking like a mob funeral around here.”
His face fell. “You don’t like the flowers?”
“I was just trying to be funny.”
“Of course, of course,” he said. “I was just checking.”
“Thank you.”
“No—thank you.”
“For what?”
“For putting up with me. I know it can’t be easy.”
“All I want is a degree of equitableness between us.”
“You’ve got it. I promise.”
“Honestly?”
He took me in his arms.
“I’ve gotten this all wrong. And I’m going to change that.”
“Good,” I said, and kissed his forehead.
“I love you.”
“You too,” I said quickly, hoping I didn’t sound unconvincing. But George had his
mind on other things, as he asked, “Is that meat loaf I smell?”
I nodded.
“You are wonderful.”
For the next few weeks, George really did make an effort to establish an entente cordiale between us. He excised all domestic demands from his conversation. He didn’t ask Bea to call me with more of his favorite recipes. He accepted the fact that I couldn’t iron a suit. He agreed when I suggested we start spending five dollars twice a week for a cleaning woman. He tried to be attentive—especially as my pregnancy had now become visible, and I was starting to tire easily. He tried to be loving and considerate.
In short, he tried. And I tried too. I tried to adjust to a life at home; a life away from the edgy rhythms and manic diversity of a great city. I tried to adjust to the business of running a house; to being that creature I always secretly vowed never to become: a homemaker in the suburbs.
Most of all, I tried to adjust to marriage—to that sense of shared space, shared preoccupations, shared purpose and destiny. Only I knew deep down that there was no real sense of shared anything. Had it not been for our little biological accident, our engagement would have collapsed within months (especially after I’d gotten a whiff of just how controlling his mother could be). But now, here we were, playing house, trying to pretend that we were happy newlyweds, yet also secretly knowing that all this was fraudulent. Because there was no real basis between us—no solid foundation of camaraderie or true rapport. Let alone love.
I sensed that George knew this too. Within a month of our wedding, we started to run out of things to say to each other. Yes, we made conversation, but it was forced, labored, prone to longueurs. We didn’t share each other’s interests. His Connecticut friends were country club types. The men all seemed to talk about golf, the Dow Jones average, and the ongoing horror that was Harry S. Truman. The women traded recipes and maternity tips, and planned coffee mornings, and looked upon me with great suspicion. Not that I was flashing my former Greenwich Village credentials in their face. I went to three coffee mornings, and tried to join in the conversations about the perils of stretch marks and the impossibility of making a really moist Angel Food cake. But I know that they smelled my disinterest. I wasn’t “one of them.” I struck them as bookish, and reserved, and not at all enthralled by my newfound status as a kept woman. I really did work hard at “fitting in,” but ambivalence is always sniffed out. Especially when it’s a clique that’s doing the sniffing.
Eric insisted on paying me a visit once a week. He’d catch a late-morning train up from Grand Central, and spend the entire day with me, grabbing the 6:08 that night back to the city . . . just in time to avoid having to deal with George. I’d make us lunch. Then, if the weather was good, I’d arrange for him to have use of a bicycle from Flannery’s Garage (the owner, Joe Flannery, and I had become friends), and we’d head off to Todd’s Point, squandering the entire afternoon at the beach.
“I’ll tell you something, S,” he said one balmy Thursday afternoon in mid-May, while we were sprawled on the blanket, staring up at an early summer sun. “Old Greenwich may be the most white-bread place on earth . . . but I sure as hell could get used to the beach.”
“This beach is my sanity,” I said.
“It’s that bad, is it?”
“Well, he’s not beating me with a lead pipe or chaining me to a radiator . . .”
“At least that would be colorful . . .”
I laughed loudly. “You have a serious sick streak, Eric.”
“You’ve only figured that out now?”
“No—but maybe when I was in the Sodom and Gomorrah of Manhattan, your wit didn’t seem so extreme.”
“Whereas here, in WASP Central . . . ”
“Oh, if you lived here, you’d be considered the Antichrist. They’d probably have you in the stocks on the village green.”
“How do you stand it?”
“I come to this beach a lot.”
“Do you miss the city?”
“Only five times an hour.”
“Then tell him you want to move back.”
“I might as well say that I want to move to Moscow. Anyway, his mother wouldn’t hear of it. And if Julia Grey won’t hear of something, then the matter is closed.”
“I bet she’s subtly meddlesome.”
“Not subtly. Unapologetically. For the first two weeks or so, she left us alone. But now that the honeymoon is well and truly over, she calls me up at least once a day.”
“Lucky you.”
“I’ve never said this about somebody before . . . but I actually hate her.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Yes—it’s really that bad.”
From all indications, it was going to get worse. Because now that I was legally ensconced with her son, Mrs. Grey felt it her right to direct all aspects of my life. She also made it very clear that her only real interest in me was in my role as the Grey Family Breeder.
The daily phone call would come promptly every morning at nine AM.
“Hello, dear,” she’d say briskly. Then, without any of the usual pleasantries, she’d immediately launch into her agenda du jour.
“I’ve made an appointment for you with an excellent obstetrician in Greenwich.”
“But I like the doctor I’ve been seeing locally.”
“You mean Dr. Reid?”
“Yes, I mean Peter Reid. His office is a five-minute walk from my house—and, more to the point, I’m really comfortable with him.”
“I’m sure he’s very nice. But do you know where he went to medical school? McGill in Montreal.”
“McGill is an excellent university. And, to the best of my knowledge, babies are born in Canada. So I’m certain Dr. Reid . . .”
She cut me off.
“My dear, McGill may be a good university, but it is not an American university. Whereas the specialist I’m sending you to—Dr. Eisenberg—went to Harvard. You have heard of Harvard, haven’t you, dear?”
I said nothing.
“He also happens to be chief of obstetrics at Doctors Hospital, with practices both in Manhattan and Greenwich. And he’s Jewish.”
“Why should that matter?”
“Jews always make the best doctors. It’s something about their innate sense of social inferiority: it makes them far more conscientious and rigorous. Because, of course, they always feel the need to try harder and prove a point. Especially in the case of Dr. Eisenberg—who’s still trying to gain membership of the Greenwich Country Club. You don’t have any objections about being attended to by a Jew, do you, dear?”
“Of course not. What I object to is being told which doctor I will be attending.”
“But, dear, we are paying for your care . . .”
“It’s my husband who’s paying . . .”
“No, dear. George’s salary at the bank might stretch to cover the services of Dr. Reid, but it certainly wouldn’t pay for an eminent man like Milton Eisenberg.”
“Then I won’t go to Dr. Eisenberg.”
“Yes you will, dear. Because it is our grandchild. And we must have the best for him.”
“Let me be the judge of which doctor is the best for . . .”
“The matter is closed, dear. The appointment with Dr. Eisenberg is at ten thirty tomorrow morning. I will send a taxi to collect you at ten.”
Then she put down the phone without saying goodbye. When I vented my anger that night at George, he just shrugged and said, “But she means well.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“She wants you to be seen by the best doctor imaginable.”
“She wants to manipulate everything.”
“That’s unfair . . .”
“Unfair? Unfair! Don’t you dare talk to me about unfair.”
“Humor her, please. It will make everyone’s life easier.”
So I found myself transferred over to Dr. Eisenberg—a curt, gruff man in his early sixties, devoid of any warmth, yet brimming with his own self-importance. No w
onder Mrs. Grey approved of him.
Every day there was a phone call. Every day there was some new matter that Mrs. Grey needed to discuss with me. Most of the time, the subject of the call was meaningless.
“Hello, dear. I want you to go to Cuff’s on Sound Beach Avenue and buy your husband this morning’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. There’s a story about a Princeton classmate of his, Prescott Lawrence, who is doing marvelous things on Wall Street.”
“I know George gets the Wall Street Journal at the bank.”
“But maybe he won’t get it today. So be a good girl and pop round to Cuff’s, and get the paper.”
“Fine, fine,” I said, then completely ignored the directive. Later that afternoon, there was a knock on the door. It was a paperboy, with a copy of the Wall Street Journal in his hand.
“Here’s the paper you ordered,” he said.
“I didn’t order it.”
“Well, someone did.”
An hour later, the phone call came. “Dear—did you get the paper?”
I held my tongue.
“Do make certain George reads that piece about Prescott Lawrence. And please don’t make a fuss about such a simple little request in the future.”
Day in, day out the calls came. Eventually, around four months into my pregnancy, I snapped. It was a hot day in July—the temperature inching toward ninety, the humidity touching similar figures. The house was stifling. I was feeling top-heavy and bloated. Our bedroom had become a sweat box. I hadn’t slept well for days.
Then the morning phone call came from Mrs. Grey.
“Morning, dear . . .”
Before she had time to launch into this morning’s demand, I hung up. The phone rang again a few seconds later. I ignored it. Five minutes later, it rang again—but I didn’t pick it up. In fact, I didn’t answer it for the balance of the day—even though it continued to clang into life every twenty minutes or so.
Around three that afternoon, the constant ringing finally stopped. I felt enormous relief. I had won a small victory. She’d finally got the point. From now on, she wouldn’t badger me.
Around six twenty that night, the phone clanged back into life. Thinking it might be George, calling to say he was delayed at the office, I answered it. That was a mistake.
“Hello, dear.”
Her voice was as composed as ever.
“Would you mind explaining to me why you hung up on me this morning?”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 25
