“Maybe if you behaved like Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth,” Leo suggested. “You know. Lively laughter and all that.”
I tried lively laughter. I sat in the living room chattering. B. sucked on his pipe. But sometimes he, too, tried lively laughter. “There are all kinds of people you could marry if you got rid of me,” he said.
“Name one.”
He named a few bachelors. We laughed immoderately. Such fun!
…
In June the guest editors arrived at Mademoiselle, eager to work on the August issue, which in truth was already close to complete, and after a few weeks of hanging around the office, even more eager to speak of being “exploited.” Part of their month in New York now involved a week in a foreign country. For years I had hankered for a free trip with what we called the g.e.’s. Israel was not what I had in mind.
I hated Tel Aviv, of which I recall little but stucco apartment houses built on stilts, with balconies closed by corrugated aluminum doors. The women’s army camp we toured was similar to the Girl Scout camp I had gone to when I was twelve, and struck me as about as serious. Israeli men, I decided, would kill rather than queue, and the food left me seven pounds lighter. But everything—the heat, the dryness, the militarism, the chauvinism that had a guide claiming that even the stars were brighter over Israel—receded in the face of my realization that I was in the Holy Land.
I became a pilgrim, returned to Sunday school, returned to stations of the cross and purple-wrapped crucifixes on Good Friday and quick childish prayers to Jesus to “please help me be a good person.” We stayed in a kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee, and one evening before dinner I went out to the dock, took off my sneakers, and stuck my feet in the water for a kind of inverted baptism.
For three days I walked through the old quarter of Jerusalem, which is sixteenth century, Turkish, built on ruins, and probably unmappable, through sudden spills of light and fly-covered fruit and taunting, stone-throwing Arab children and rug sellers and Arab men with blue eyes (Crusader remnants, I told myself) who wore gilt-edged burnooses over their striped robes and kept their hands cupped over their crotches.
Walking along the Via Dolorosa, I touched my fingers to its walls, and when a man excavating a trench near the Temple of Solomon tossed up a pot handle he had just uncovered, I wrapped it in my underpants and hid it in my suitcase for the journey home.
A guest editor and I went to the Wailing Wall and, shy and scared, stood well back from the chanting women. Finally I said, “Let’s go to the wall. It’s ours, too,” and we moved forward to face the stones. Tearing a page from my pocket diary, I scribbled a prayer that our family be kept together, and watching to see how the murmurous, davening women did it, I shoved it in a crack.
That night I wandered into a park near the hotel and could find no exit. It was very dark and the trees had no foliage, only white bones of branches. Panicking, I ran along what seemed miles of wire fence until a gate loomed and freed me.
I bought small wooden camels for the children and a Bedouin’s embroidered caftan for myself and a blue-and-white-striped robe like those I had seen on the Arab men for B. He smiled awkwardly and, even before he tried it on, said it did not fit. But it did fit, I knew. It would fit anyone short of a dwarf. So I gave it to Leo, who said he would wear it for his at-homes. And I pinned my future on the paper stuck in the Wailing Wall.
A month later. A Saturday afternoon in a little house, no more than one room, really, in Provincetown. The children are in Rhode Island with my mother for a month and I am spending the weekend with a friend from the office. I have just put down the telephone. My sister is expecting a baby at any minute, so I keep checking on her. Using my impending aunthood as an excuse, I keep checking on my husband, too. I need to hear his voice, to know that he is still at 44 Jane Street and that life is proceeding as usual.
My hostess is weeping. She has been twice married, but she has no children. Doesn’t like them. Doesn’t want them. She has, though, been a mother to men, over and over again.
The first of her men that I remember was very young, with red hair and a shiftiness so apparent one could sniff it. Properly nurtured, she claimed, he would turn into the most adventurous of entrepreneurs, which he did. In a sense. He lifted her credit cards.
The second, who was very handsome, had had a rotten childhood, for which she, in return for companionship (and sex), was prepared to compensate. That rotten childhood, however, had left him with a child’s instinct for the jugular, and the more she built him up, the more he tore her down.
My friend is weeping because her boyfriend, a homosexual she was determined to straighten out, has left her for a man. “Why?” she is asking me. “Wasn’t I enough?”
The next evening, near midnight. A bedroom in a house in Greenwich Village. The phone rings, waking me, who has returned from Provincetown a few hours earlier. It is my brother-in-law, announcing the birth of my first and only niece. I go to the kitchen, pour a cognac, and toast her alone. My children are, of course, in Bristol. And my husband? I do not know. The front door of 44 Jane Street opened on an empty house. Even so, I, like my friend with the little house on Cape Cod, still believe that there is nothing in a man that a hug and a kiss cannot heal.
With the children away I hoped we could talk, but what about? The few times I mentioned his secretary, he made me feel ashamed of my tortuous, tentative sentences.
“But why did she stay at the house while I was in Israel?” I asked. (A friend of his had told me.)
“I needed help with the children,” he said, and shut me up.
I tried sex, hoping that my body, which he had loved so much, could serve as a bridge. He always responded, or rather, his penis did, but his disgust with his ever-ready self made ours a sickbed.
It was hot that August, so hot the kitchen was unbearable, so I would suggest little dinners in Little Italy. Out into the steamy streets we would go and hail a cab to downtown and the perilous flight of steps that led to the Grotta Azzurra. The stuffed artichokes and spaghetti were no better at the Grotta Azzurra than at anyplace else in Little Italy, but during the years when, like babies, we were testing the world with our tongues, the restaurant seemed to us the most “authentic,” the most evocative of a southern Italy about which, in truth, we knew nothing whatsoever.
The Grotta Azzurra was invariably noisy, but the only sound I recall is that of my voice, reasonable, charming, skating over hysteria, ashamed to plead when he spoke of moving out. In bed after one of those dinners, I said, “But I could never forget the way your skin smells.”
“I have ambivalent feelings about you, too.”
That was not what I meant at all.
At Dr. Franklin’s I cried until I retched, stuttering about how I had brought my whole life tumbling about me, just like my mother had said I would.
“You should get out of the house,” Dr. Franklin said. “You should go to a hospital for a few days and rest.”
“No, I can’t,” I said, nose streaming. “He’ll say you put me in a hospital because I’m insane, and he’ll take the children away from me.”
Dr. Franklin thought I was being paranoid, but time proved me right. A long time later, when words like “separation agreement” and “alimony” and “Mexican judge” flew, batlike, through our home, “custody” was accompanied by a threat to question my sanity in court—“unless you sign.” Unless you sign, unless you sign, unless you sign. So many heads, accused of so many crimes, have bowed to “unless you sign.”
In the end there was a September night when I sat, legs crossed under me, in the big blue wing chair in the dining room and cried until it seemed my intestines would spill from my mouth, afraid to put my bare feet to the floor, afraid the chill would be irreversible. My husband stayed upstairs. He would not leave until I gave him permission.
How can you hear this? I could never stand to let you cry like this, I thought, and huddled in the wing chair until morning.
When I went upstair
s, B. said, “You’re killing me,” and I, finally guilty of the murder I was always afraid I would commit, said, “Then I guess you’d better leave.”
It is always a soap opera. The backgrounds, because I was peripatetic, were more exotic than most, but the dialogue and the situations were the usual. No matter who you are or what has gone into your life, the end of a marriage becomes, when meted out in words, the same old story.
Once in a while one surfaces to courage, one makes a stand. But most of the time one is talking and living the banal. You listen for footsteps coming down the street, but you don’t hear the ones you recognize. You wait for the key to turn in the lock, and it does not. The bed seems a prairie and the sheets still smell of him, and in the supermarket you stick your hand in the meat bin for a roast and withdraw it when you realize that a chop is enough. Your married friends avert their eyes if they run into you and do not invite you for dinner, because they figure losing is contagious. Besides, you might cry. You will not, but never mind. It is always the same.
I did not believe in divorce, at least not for people with two young children. I believed in marriage counselors and psychiatrists and will and, above all, responsibility. When B. telephoned and said, “I want a new life and a new wife,” I was incredulous.
Blind to his transgressions, I proceeded, with the logic I used to block hysteria, to define my own. The definition was rigidly, exasperatingly Catholic. “There is a difference,” I said to Dr. Franklin, “between sins of omission and sins of commission. The first are negative acts, the second positive. You see, it’s not what I did do, it’s what I didn’t do, so I am guilty of the first.”
“Get mad, Mary, get mad,” friends said when I reported on midnight phone calls from my husband—exhortations to see a lawyer, pleas—no, orders—to release him to the bliss promised by a life with his secretary. “I can’t,” I would whimper. “I drove him to this. It’s my fault. I. . .,” and then I’d stop, unwilling to speak of the nights I got into bed and turned my back, of the day in Bristol many years before when, faced with my mother’s unspoken but unyielding opposition to my marrying a Jew, he stood in my old playroom and cried, “What’s wrong with me, Mary Lee? What’s wrong?”
I remembered too much: his tears when he saw me in the pale blue nightgown a friend had given me for our wedding night; the day when I was in a cab stopped at a traffic light and he, coincidentally crossing on the same light, walked up to the cab and slid a book he had just bought me through the half-open window; the boy in the Puerto Rican revolutionary suit carrying peanut-butter sandwiches to Central Park.
“He’s behaving like a monster,” the same friends said.
“If he is, it’s because I made him one,” I said, knowing myself for a sinner. The only kind of absolution I understood or could accept now came with the clap! of the confessional window.
There is a church on West Fourteenth Street, Irish-immigrant Gothic, with a parochial school, Saturday night bingo, and electric vigil lights that snap on when you put a dime in the slot. I went there one October night when the children were away.
It was raining very hard and I was wearing a trenchcoat and a scarf, conscious of the fact that being tear-stained and black Irish, I probably looked like an IRA widow. It is that self-consciousness, not courage or religious convictions, that keeps people like me alive. How can we watch our own high dramas if we are not around to see them? We are always two people, the star and the spectator, and it is the latter that keeps the former working.
It was the usual rectory office—cheap lace curtains, a desk, old plush chairs, the smell of disinfectant and floor wax—and he seemed the usual priest—in his forties, plump, one leg struggling to cross the other at the thigh. But he was not the usual priest. He was a psychology professor on leave from a midwestern university to do fieldwork among the urban poor.
He did not scold me for my apostasy or for the civil ceremony that was my wedding or for my not sending Katherine and Margaret to Sunday school. He said instead that he regretted what the Catholic Church, his Church, had done to me. When I said that I wanted to die, he did not tell me that I had to live for the children’s sake. He said, “Jesus would be kinder to you than you are to yourself.” When I told him I thought myself an adulterer because I had lusted for Philippe, he said, “You are confusing the wish for the deed. Did we teach you to do that? If so, I am sorry.” He was a nice man, but he did not give me four Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and some rules to live by, so I left with my sins intact.
Somewhere in this world there was an Irish priest with a face like Samuel Beckett’s and a mind like St. Paul’s. He was laying down the law, confirming the verities, and scaring his parishioners. That was the kind of priest I had known as a child and the kind I looked for and did not find on Fourteenth Street. Raised in a church that manufactured crutches for its communicants, I had thrown mine away. Now I needed them again. But during the years that I was out courting damnation, the church, it appeared, had gone out of the business.
A few months later I went to Europe to work with a photographer for three weeks. For years I had kept travel diaries—notes on where we had been and what we had eaten and what things had cost—and now they were filling up with prayers and pleas and fragmented memories of dreams. “Dreamed I was walking through the Sahara. . . . Dreamed I saw B. kissing a tall, thin, pretty girl. . . . Dreamed about Papa. He was wearing a brown suit and a felt hat.” During the day I interviewed fashionable young women about their lives in London and Paris, and at night I would scribble in the diaries, crying, then turn to the detective stories that since childhood had lulled me to sleep. “To bed with Michael Innes,” I would write. “To bed with Nicholas Blake.”
After twelve days, the photographer and I went to Amsterdam. I hate Amsterdam. I hate cold ham and cheese at breakfast and the car-clogged streets and the damp that rises from the canals, and I have memories of the ladies’ room in the Rijksmuseum that put the lie to the legend of old Dutch cleansers. I had been in Amsterdam once before. This time and then, the rain was constant.
One evening when it was dark but too early for dinner and my room was getting colder and grayer and quieter and I had nothing more to add to those half-hysterical travel notes, I felt I had to move or die.
I called New York and spoke to Ann, who said my husband had taken the children out for supper and told her that he would never live at home again. The kind of woman who would be in the front row at a hanging, she bustled about, a self-appointed emissary between my husband and myself, dispensing poison. She bore me no malice, but her allegiance was to the male heads of households, and she loved theater. “I knew something was up, Mrs. L. . . . You’re too innocent, Mrs. L. . . . You’d better hurry up and marry again, Mrs. L., ‘cause once those children grow, ain’t no man comes to this house gonna look at you.”
Then I spoke to the children. Kate said she missed me, and Margaret, who was reading Winnie-the-Pooh, said nothing but “Tiddly pom pom pom, tiddly pom pom pom.” I sat on the edge of the bed, crying as always, wanting to die, wishing the decision would be taken from me, and, also as always, mocking myself. How like you, Mary Lee, I thought, to have made sure you were cracking up in Amsterdam rather than in Westport, Connecticut.
Oh yes, move or die. When in doubt, walk. I went to the hotel lobby, asked for the nearest Catholic church, and went outside to cross an enormous cobblestone square. The church was several hundred yards up a neon-lit street.
Once I would have been able to fantasize myself into a romantic figure moving, lonely and mysterious, through a foreign city. This time the magic didn’t work. I was just a woman in her thirties whose husband didn’t want her, looking for a priest who would take her out of the pain and put her back in a world where a good act of contrition equaled morphine.
A man and a woman were praying at the back of the church (married! kneeling together!), and when they rose to leave, I asked how I could find the priest. I was crying again, obviously not a person one would
want to be around, so they pointed to a bellpull and fled.
The sexton was old and lame, and when he saw the tears asked if I wanted to make a confession. No, I mumbled, I just want to see a priest. When he limped back a few minutes later and said, “The father will see you now,” I felt a weight sliding off my body, a kind of thumb-sucking, milk-glutted peace. The father. To me, as I followed the sexton to a door near the altar, the word meant God, the priest, and, above all, Papa.
The father was a small blond man in a pale gray flannel suit and a necktie. He lit a gas fire, then sat silent while I spoke incoherently of the husband to whom I had been a bad wife and the children to whom I did not believe I could be a good mother. I told him that I had been married by a judge and that I had not taken Communion since I was twenty-one, and that I would like to come back to the Church but that if I thought there was the slightest chance my husband would come home, I knew I would reject Catholicism all over again.
His English was thickly accented and hesitant, and he stared at me all the time he spoke—his eyebrows and lashes were, I remember, white—trying to make his eyes help his clumsy tongue. He said he would pray that I would have the strength I needed for my children. He said strength was what I should pray for as well. He said I must be more merciful to myself. And he said that I was honest, and that he would rather have me honest and outside the Church than dishonest and within it. I left, both frightened that I could not find my way back to the nest and giddy because a priest, a priest, had given me permission to fly. It was an absolution, of sorts.
5
TWO AND THREE and even four times a week (it took two years to pay the bill), I emerged from the IRT at Seventy-second Street to walk to West End Avenue and Dr. Franklin. The elderly people who had sat on the benches on the scruffy grass median that ran along Broadway were companioned now by junkies; the pastry shops that had sold strudel and hamentaschen and those little butter cookies that, judging by the bakeries, Jewish families eat by the thousands were starting to disappear; the lights were off behind the big window in the shop of the tailor who had made my green tweed suit. Seventy-second Street was going down, down, down, and living on the Upper West Side had begun to take a certain bravado.
Manhattan, When I Was Young Page 18
