The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS I was whisked back to Reno and moved to a lovely old shingled house high on a bluff overlooking the Truckee River. The house belonged to a woman named, believe it or not, Reno Thatcher. She was the widow of Judge George Thatcher. He’d been one of the most respected legal minds in Nevada. He and my father had conferred on various cases over the years.

  Reno was a warm, good-natured lady who liked to wear silk print dresses and jangly bracelets. After setting me up in my bedroom, she took me out onto a breezy porch, where we drank iced tea and she attempted to comfort me.

  “You’re awful tired, aren’t you, sweetheart?” I nodded, unable to get my words out. “Take a nice cool bath and then go to sleep.”

  I did. For the next couple of days I slept and slept. When I woke up, Reno would bring me a sandwich and a glass of milk on a tray. I’d eat as much as I could and then fall back on the pillows again.

  I hadn’t realized how exhausted I was from being on the go the past fifteen months—to classes and modeling work and taking care of Jason and being petrified of Jason (which was extremely tiring in and of itself).

  My body relaxed when Reno took me swimming at Lake Tahoe five days later. As I splashed around in the cool, crystal-clear waters, the Sierra Nevadas surrounding the blue pool that was the lake, I thought of a time long ago when Mama had thrown Bart and me into Lake Tahoe when we were on vacation as kids. We’d learned to swim before we could read; we swam like fish throughout our childhoods.

  After a week of sleeping and swimming I felt ready to face life again. Then Reno sat me down on that breezy porch and told me, “You have close to six weeks here. You should do something constructive. Take typing lessons and a course in Spanish at the University of Nevada.” I registered for classes at the university, a short walk from Reno’s house.

  Those classes kept me busy; I tried not to think about myself, but I did think about Jason. For a while I missed him terribly. I had an almost physical ache in my body. “Was it just about sex?” I wrote in my journal. I knew sex was an expression of love, a part of love. What I hadn’t realized was that sex could transform a relationship. It had created a bond between Jason and me as well as an actual craving on my part. Physical intimacy creates huge needs. I hadn’t been aware that sex could deepen love and love could deepen sex, even when love was on the way out. But what was it in me that also needed to get hurt and punished? Did it have to do with low self-esteem? I didn’t understand.

  It wasn’t until decades later that I came to terms with the fact that I’d been in an abusive marriage; then I wondered whether I’d married Jason because I’d had this powerful urge to leave home, leave my parents, and strike out on my own. This urge had been more powerful than the sense I had inside myself that Jason was scary.

  I remember seeking out a friend from Chapin who’d also had “abuse issues,” as she put it. She had married young, as I had; for years she’d endured whips and chains—much more violence than I’d ever experienced. She gave the man three children before she finally had the courage to divorce him.

  “It goes on like that with so many women, especially of our generation,” she said. “Nobody ever gave us any information about what we were doing to ourselves. We did not speak of such things; we simply went along with the abuse.”

  While I was in Reno I tried in vain to figure myself out. “Will I continue to stumble through life?” I scribbled in my journal. “Make lousy decisions? Love the wrong men? I have disappointed and angered my parents. My brother thinks I’m a fool. I want to change. I want to keep my independence. But I long for romantic love and I’m determined to have it.”

  TIME PASSED WITH agonizing slowness. The Nevada heat was punctuated by thunderstorms and fires—fires in the hills, houses going up in flames. The air often smelled of smoke and burning wood. I would rise before seven, put on a sleeveless dress and sandals, and run down to class by eight a.m. In those six weeks I learned how to type and mastered the rudiments of Spanish, but I spoke to none of the other students, all of whom were kids. They didn’t speak to me either. Near the end of the term I discovered that most of them were from various parts of the country; many of them were getting divorced and, like me, too ashamed to admit it.

  The university had no air-conditioning. By early afternoon the buildings shut down. I’d wander through the deserted campus, cheap sunglasses from the drugstore hiding my face. I’d usually have a hamburger and a Coke, and then I’d escape into a movie theatre. I’d sit in the blessedly cool darkness watching the latest hits of that summer.

  One film stands out for me: Roman Holiday, a delicious fairy tale of a movie that introduced the radiant Audrey Hepburn to the world. What a beguiling, captivating presence she was. Elegant, gentle, gamine—half tomboy, half regal lady—she was perfection playing Ann, a Central European princess on an official tour of Rome. She’s so bored being a princess that she escapes from her palace one night and has her first experiences of freedom with a cynical American reporter played by craggy Gregory Peck. It was a real Cinderella-style romantic comedy and I sat through it twice.

  My favorite sequence: Audrey, perched behind Gregory Peck on his Vespa, arms tight about his waist as they zoom around the Eternal City. She’s just impulsively had her long hair cut off (what a liberating gesture), and she is reveling in it. Mama had always overseen my hairdos, often accompanying me to the beauty parlor, sitting next to me, bugging me. Audrey’s enjoyment with her new image and her just-found independence was infectious. I was ready to cut my hair off too.

  I’D LEAVE THE movies feeling lonely. Some nights I’d go to Mapes Hotel and Casino to play the slot machines. The Mapes was one of the most popular tourist attractions in Reno, open twenty-four hours a day and packed with gamblers, miners, call girls, and gangsters. If a circus was in town there were transvestites and midgets at the casino too.

  One evening a muscular sandy-haired marine joined me at the slot machines. We fell into a conversation. He was polite and soft-spoken, with a wariness that attracted me. We went for coffee. His name was Lou. He was thirty-two and divorced. His ex-wife was a showgirl—she and their two kids lived in a trailer outside Las Vegas. At first I didn’t want to tell him why I was in Reno, but he kept pressing me. He couldn’t believe I was twenty. “You look about thirteen,” he joked. He said he’d been stationed in Tokyo for a couple of years and now he was working as an engineer at the nuclear testing site in Yucca Flats deep in the Nevada desert. He was one of twenty thousand people on the site—soldiers, scientists, researchers, a few journalists.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer was overseeing the routine test explosions, and Lou said they were frightening to behold. There would be brighter-than-the-sun flashes of light through the desert air and the earth would tremble and shake, and then the fallout from the explosions would drift into southern Utah. Yucca Flats was the ideal area—flat, not very populated, good weather conditions—meaning that the wind would blow the fallout away from concentrated areas of people.

  I recalled my father talking worriedly about the intensity of the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Ultimately there would be hundreds of tests done at Yucca Flats, many underground. It was the height of the Cold War.

  Daddy came to Reno once—something about Rita Hayworth’s divorce proceedings—and after he’d finished his business, we had dinner at the Mapes Hotel and I told him about the atomic bomb testing at Yucca Flats. And about Lou. “Are you behaving yourself, baby?” That was all he wanted to know. I assured him I was.

  I FANTASIZED ABOUT making love with Lou; I imagined he knew much more about sex than I did. He sometimes looked at me as if he could see what I was wearing under my sundress. And then he kissed me—the first man to kiss me since Jason—and it had been one of the most passionate, heartfelt kisses I’d ever experienced. I tried to kiss him back, but he drew away.

  “You’re a greedy little thing, aren’t you?” he murmured, chuckling. “You’re spoiled too. You aren’t used
to being turned down. Am I right?”

  I nodded, fighting back tears. I’d always been the most popular girl in spin the bottle at Ecolint. I was used to being fawned over and desired.

  “You want everything too fast. Slow down.” He cupped my face in his hands. “It might have been different if you were staying here. If you were staying here, I’d do more than kiss you. We both know that.”

  I was aroused. For a couple of minutes I tried to figure out ways of staying longer in Reno, but I decided against it. I did not see Lou again after that night of the single kiss. But I often thought about him.

  I SPENT ALL of August in Garrison with Mama and Bart, but he was in the woods most of the time shooting at those tin cans. He’d return to the house in the evenings sullen and preoccupied. Mama would ply him with corn soufflé and all his other favorite dishes. But he’d leave most of his food on his plate.

  “What’s the matter, Boofie?” she’d ask him. (Boofie was her nickname for him, short for beautiful.)

  “Nothing, Mother,” he’d answer in the weary ironic tone he’d picked up from his best friend, Tobias. Tobias visited us once, only for a day—such a dark, creepy presence. But Bart seemed fascinated by him. He took Tobias to see the castle. They were gone for what seemed like hours.

  Mama was worried. “I can’t reach him—I don’t know what to do!” she’d say. As usual, Daddy wasn’t around, so she talked long distance to him about Bart. They realized he was chronically depressed, but neither one of them had a clue as to how to help him.

  Mama distracted herself, either by exercising or by lying under a sun lamp until she turned nut brown. She’d appear in my room and demand, “Don’t I still have the body of a young girl?” I’d look at her thighs and stomach, flat as a teenager’s, and I’d say, “Yes, Mama, you do.” She’d drag me out into the hall and have me stand next to her in front of a full-length mirror, where we would study our reflections in the glass: Mama sleek and tanned, wrapped in an emerald-green towel; me disheveled in cutoff jeans and T-shirt. She’d cry, “Oh God! Why do you insist on looking like a slob when you could be really beautiful? Hiding behind your dirty hair and freckles is an image of my own lost perfection!”

  She’d leave me to contemplate my face. How often did I return to that mirror? Constantly. Because I couldn’t figure out who I was. Only weeks before, I’d been a wife and a workingwoman, sleeping every night with an unpredictable man; now I was back home with my parents, feeling like a beautiful spoiled child who didn’t have a serious thought in her head.

  My brother was the only person who could make sense of me. We had one of our last conversations in Garrison lying on the grassy hill overlooking the sweep of the Hudson River. I was being especially silly, describing an inane rendezvous I planned to keep with some nameless Yalie at the Biltmore Hotel. “He is so outrageous,” I was telling my brother. “I barely know him. He’s pockmarked, he likes to make scenes, and I am wildly attracted to him.”

  “Shut up,” Bart ordered. “Shut up. Shut up. Why don’t you think slowly and carefully about something for a change? You’re too impulsive; you’re giving yourself away. But . . .” He stopped and gazed at me with his huge, sorrowful eyes. “You may be saved by your imagination and your conscience, I pray to God.”

  He paused and grinned slightly. “If I believed in God.”

  I WOULD SPEND only one more afternoon with my brother in early September just before he left for college in Oregon. He said he was looking forward to going to Reed because his friend Tobias was going to be there. Bart was skinnier than ever and very tan. He said he’d been playing a lot of tennis. He’d just had his photograph taken for his first passport and he gave me a copy, a mournful close-up of his face.

  “Are you planning to take a trip?” I teased him.

  “Never can tell,” he murmured.

  Chapter Ten

  DADDY RETURNED FROM Bart’s funeral gray-faced. He told us a Mass of the Angels had been said in downtown Sacramento at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament. All the relatives had been standing with him next to the coffin dressed in black—Aunts Rosie, Maggie, and Kate, and Daddy’s mother, Mo. He added that everyone wondered why we weren’t there and he’d tried to explain we were too prostrate with grief. I winced when he said that. Bart was buried in the family plot in the Sacramento Historic City Cemetery.

  After the ceremony, Daddy flew to Portland and spoke with the president of Reed, who expressed his deep regrets. “Your son was a fine student and a decent, good boy. We have no explanation.”

  Bart’s landlady had said essentially the same thing. Apparently he’d done his laundry just before he shot himself. His khakis and T-shirts were folded neatly on the bed next to his slumped bloody body.

  After recounting this, my father broke down, and Gene and Marcia, who’d dropped by, ran to him. Gene poured him a stiff drink. We were all in a state of shock. Mama stood off by herself, arms folded, face impassive. Then she announced in a clear, cold voice, “Bart was murdered. I am certain of it. He would never take his life.” She insisted that Daddy call in the FBI to investigate, an ironic request given the fact they were pressuring my father night and day to name names.

  I slipped out of the living room while they were still talking and ran up to Bart’s room. I lay down on his bed, moaning, “Why, why, why?” in our private language. I soon hated that question because so many people asked me the same question about Bart. I’d think back on our last conversations—usually so brief—about how he was feeling, what he was planning to do at Reed, what excited him, interested him. He’d always refer to Tobias this, Tobias that. How could this strange, depressing friend give him so much? What was his secret?

  The next time Tobias was in New York, I begged to see him. He was reluctant. He kept arguing, “I don’t have anything to say.” “You are the only person in the world Bart liked to be with,” I pleaded, to which Tobias replied, “He always said you exaggerated, and you’re exaggerating now.”

  We met at Schrafft’s, the one on Fifth Avenue near Lord & Taylor, where the light was dim on the paneled walls. I could smell the fragrance of cinnamon toast. I ordered Bart’s favorite dessert, angel food cake with caramel sauce (then was unable to eat it). Tobias ordered tea. He hadn’t changed since the Stockbridge school. Same thin, sharp face, pasty blemished skin with blackheads on one cheek. His clothes were rumpled.

  We did not bother with small talk but got straight to the point.

  “Did you see him the last day of his life?” I asked.

  No, Tobias had not seen him on the last day of his life. He’d seen him the day before.

  And had he said anything?

  “Yes. He told me he thought he was worthless.”

  “Did you try to make him feel better?” I asked him. “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t know what to say,” Tobias replied. He added that my brother had been depressed ever since the terrible incident at Deerfield.

  Had he ever spoken about it? I asked tensely.

  Tobias nodded. Apparently the morning of the tragedy Bart had wakened at dawn, sensing something was not quite right. He’d dressed quickly, then tiptoed into Clark Steuer’s room; Clark’s bed hadn’t been slept in. Clothes were strewn about; the windows were open. Bart had run out into the large green field near his dorm. He often did that in the early morning so he could watch the trains; the engineer usually waved at him, he said. Not that morning. After the train chugged by, Bart saw Clark hanging from a tree. He tried to get him down, but the body was too heavy, so he ran back to the school.

  As soon as Bart reported the incident to some passing teachers in the hall, everybody got hysterical. There was a huddled conference between Headmaster Boynton and some of the senior faculty, and then, without any explanation, Bart was driven to the station and sent home. The next thing he knew, he was standing at the front door of our house at 236 East Sixty-Eighth Street, ringing the bell. He was in a state of shock and couldn’t even speak. Tobias added griml
y, “Bart never recovered from the way he’d been treated at Deerfield; it was as if he had caused Clark’s death.”

  “Did he ever tell you anything about Clark Steuer?” I wondered. “Did he ever speculate as to why Clark had killed himself?”

  For once Tobias didn’t have an answer. He hung his head.

  “Did he ever speak about Clark?” I pressed.

  “No,” Tobias answered finally in an irritable tone of voice. Then he blurted, “I didn’t know his name until you said it. Clark Steuer . . .”

  We stared at each other. Bart had been secretive about many things.

  After a long pause Tobias exploded, “In the end, your parents were to blame for what happened to Bart. They always paid more attention to you. You were the favorite.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” I insisted. “My parents loved him so much. They were worried about him.”

  “They were easier on you, admit it.”

  “Bart was the brilliant one. He used to help me with my homework.”

  “He hated doing that,” Tobias told me. “You were always praised. He never was.”

  “I was a lousy student.”

  “Bart said you were lazy and boy crazy. He didn’t like that husband of yours. Nobody did.” Tobias smirked. “Bart said your father would make you sing for guests and Bart said you sang off-key, but your father was always praising you. Your brother felt unloved. He once told me, ‘I was an unwanted child.’”

  “That’s not true either,” I argued. “Mama adored Bart—she doted on him. She wanted more children, but she couldn’t have them. But oh, she loved Bart.”

  “Bart said she had temper tantrums, usually directed at him.”

  “Not true!” I cried. “They were directed at both of us, at all of us—Daddy too, but Daddy was always away. Mama had unfocused rage.”

  Tobias railed on. “Bart was disappointed in your father. He was never there for him. He didn’t pay attention. Bart wanted a car. Needed a car at Reed to get around. He was living in a room miles off campus. He’d have to thumb rides to get to a class. Your father visited Bart two days before he shot himself. Bart asked him to please buy him a car. Your father said no. That was the last straw.”