A Complicated Marriage (43 page)

At the magazine I had watched the momentum effect change as national
advertisers, like Rip Van Winkle, slowly awakened to the alien notion that women bought cars as well as detergents. In our first issue, I had run an article about the stewardesses' protests against Eastern Airlines' sexually suggestive “Fly me” campaign. Their union was also demanding that their designation be changed to
flight attendant
.

I had interviewed Pat Carbine, publisher and cofounder, with Steinem, of
Ms.
Stepping over toddlers and toys in that magazine's homey office, I wondered what Charlie would make of a playpen at
Madison Avenue
. Carbine was homespun and motherly, my projection. Fact was, she was a pioneering, smart businesswoman who had the guts to publish the first women's magazine that wasn't about fashion. She was a singular figure in the man's world of publishing. At Madison Avenue I had been accepted because I supplied publicity, a service men could use. But I had never met a fellow woman editor in chief, except a few, again at the women's magazines. Nor a Pat Carbine, a woman publisher I could hug and who hugged me back.

And then there had been the conference-room incident. At the beginning of my first review board panel, Charlie, after greeting everyone, put his hand on my shoulder as he left. Later, the only agency woman on the panel—women creative stars were in short supply—drew me aside to alert me to what she described as Charlie's “condescending behavior in the workplace.”
Harassment
had yet to become a buzzword; my first thought was that she had sniffed out our incipient affair. My second was relief that she was referring only to his apparent lack of respect for my position. I assured her Charlie and I had an equitable working relationship and made a note to invite her again, but not too soon.

While still at the magazine, I had had another close encounter with feminism. This time with Ti-Grace Sharpless, a core member of the movement and a woman I knew socially as part of the art-world circuit. One of those has-everything women: beauty, brains, ease in the world, and money. On a late afternoon, she and I were in the living room at 275. Clem was expected soon, and we were having our first and only tête-à-tête. She spoke at length about the National Organization for Women, and the consciousness-raising groups that I might be interested in. Ashamed by my ignorance about the movement, my mind clapped
shut. I felt judged, defensive. My life was perfect, thank you very much. Besides, wasn't she having a casual, now-and-then fling with Clem? Yes, for all the openness of our marriage, my proprietary bells still jangled on occasion, especially when the femme was “too good to be true” and had a mischievous streak to boot. The message may have been fine, but she sure as hell was the wrong messenger.

All to say, that while I had grasped the import of the women's movement, I had failed to see its relevance to my own life. But everything in its own time. Soon after leaving the magazine, I did find my way to NOW and became part of one of its small, satellite, consciousness-raising groups. Provided with a briefing by a moderator and an agenda of issues for discussions, we spun off on our own. Pledged to sisterhood and no bullshit, we met once a month for two years and probed and challenged everything from our most intimate secrets to our role in improving women's equality. And when we completed the agenda, we devised a new one. Those friendships would be lasting.

Norden called in late 1980 to tell me that our father had colon cancer. The surgery had not stemmed its course, and the prognosis was bad.
Here I go again
, I thought, but I knew this journey would be very different. Though I had rejected my mother, well before her death I had begun to heal the wounds with her. But way beyond that, I
knew
my mother. No matter what, she was in me, part of my heart and bones; her eyes looked back at me in the mirror. But who was this father, this stranger I resembled: Nordic, tall as I was, to whom I felt no kinship? Unforthcoming, unaffectionate, preternaturally passive, he had never invited me in, and then without a blink he had disowned me because he hated Jews. That he felt strongly about anything had been a surprise. That he was a bigot was less so, being, as he was, a conservative whose national hero in the fifties had been Joe McCarthy. All so long ago. Twenty-five years had elapsed with no overtures, no acknowledgment of Sarah's birth, nothing. I had never considered making the first move. It had taken so little to tear the fabric that tied us, and once torn, it was far too fragile to be mended.

But dying. Dying says,
Now or never
. I didn't think hard or long. I decided to have a look at this eighty-year-old cipher of a father. At my
request, Norden agreed to join me, and we set a time to meet in Tampa, where David and Marge had lived since he retired. I set off with curiosity and a cold heart.

He was straight and tall, backlit by the tropical sun, his silver hair abundant, arrayed in apricot slacks and yellow polo shirt, for all the world as if he were headed for the first tee. Marge, the Nurse, was at his side, thick, stolid, arms crossed. I still saw her as the woman who had plucked my father from his marital nest. Her purple fetish had run amok with age. From mauve to deep plum, from toilet paper to carpets, not an inch had been spared her decorating palette.

We sat stiffly in the glass-enclosed terrace, or “Florida room,” as Marge called it, looking out at palm trees, plastic flamingos, and a man-made pond. He puffed oxygen; he had advanced emphysema. She smoked. We all drank martinis. So much was the same. So much had changed. His pallor was ashen, the eyes cloudy. He was so thin I saw his bones, his skin so translucent I could see the map of his blood. It was as if he were turning inside out. The Nurse now had a full-time job; her patient was losing ground. He made small whistling sounds as he breathed. He spoke little. When he did, it was an effort. The rest of us compensated with chatter. No one except me looked into the twenty-five-year abyss between us.

Amazingly, we went to a restaurant that night. That was when, toward the end of the meal, I lost it. Anger poured out of me: “Is anyone going to ask me about my life, where I live, what I do? Is anyone going to ask me about Sarah, what she's like, what she's interested in? Here, here's a picture. This is Sarah, your granddaughter. She's seventeen
;
she's beautiful and smart and happy.” Silence.

I may have unburdened my heart, but I felt defeated. I had been impelled by an urgency to shake them out of their complacency:
Look at me. I exist
. But to what end? No one did look at me. No one said anything. I had only made the abyss deeper. Marge complained of palpitations, and we fled the restaurant. At the condo she had to be helped up the stairs. The next morning the prickly barricades were back in place, and I soon left for the airport.

But I was undeterred. Over the next months I went back three times.
The next visit was coordinated with Norden and Pieter, my sweet boy of a half-brother whom I had known and loved so briefly before the abyss. That visit was more about rediscovering my thirty-nine-year-old brother than about saying good-bye to the father we shared. It culminated when Norden, Pieter, and I took off for a few hours in our father's big boat of a Buick. He had always prized his Buicks. We were like teenagers ready for a Tampa adventure. Three oversize Van Hornes in the front seat, me in the middle. A sister and her two brothers. Pieter put his arm across my shoulder. I put my hand on Norden's knee. Skin to skin. Everything was funny; we laughed until we hurt. I was in heaven. This was the way it should have always been.

Another month passed before I returned, this time with Sarah. She didn't want to come, but I appealed to her curiosity about the grandfather she had never met. Though just a quick overnight, the visit was a mistake. David was even frailer. Even in his prime, he had had nothing to say to me. Why did I imagine that now, when he was a shell of a shell, he would have any interest in her? She took away nothing from that desultory, sad day. Much later, when I asked her about it, she said, “I don't remember him. Are you sure I went with you?”

 

And then the last call. “If you want to see him again . . . ” This time it was just me. This time I wanted a moment alone with him. In the late afternoon, I asked the Gorgon at the Gate if she would leave us alone, just for a few minutes. With dark eyes, she retreated.

He and I sit across from each other in the Florida room. I am soft and gentle. I ask him, “Did you ever think about me in all those years?” And then a few other questions like that, short questions, short answers, all very simple. He says all the right things. Even “I'm sorry.” I tell him, “What a terrible waste.” He nods. And I am in his lap. Then I ask him the question in the hearts of all abandoned children.

“Did you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Did you love my mother?”

“Vera was my first love. I have always loved her.”

They haven't seen each other for forty years. Is he just responding
to the plea in his daughter's blue eyes, so like Vera's, as she sits in his cancer-ridden lap? “Such a waste,” I say again, thinking how easily those two threw people away. I tell him that before she died, Vera said she was “dancing with my dear David.” He holds me tight. He is so strong. I am so little. I call him Daddy for the first time. And why not? It is the first father-daughter conversation we have ever had.

Later, Marge asks if I want to say goodnight to him. He lies so flat in his tight envelope of sheets. Drained, he fades into the whiteness of them. His lips are cold and dry. I kiss them good-bye.

What a pair they were, my parents. For my mother, the theme of her marriage with my father had always been the victim of true love, betrayed. And for him? I don't know. I suspect that he did not often think of the past. Conditioned to inertia, he preferred to live in the sway of others. I never thought of him as either happy or unhappy, presenting, as he did, an emotional blank slate. Their deathbed messages to each other and the actions they had taken so long ago did not mesh. They had casually slipped those lovelorn messages into a bottle to be delivered in Never Never Land, with me as the messenger.

Over the years, my mother had perfected her romantic illusion of true love. While at one time I had sniggered at her romanticism, I had by no means escaped unscathed. I too had my illusion, that my father would someday come through for me. Of course, he couldn't and didn't. And I had also succumbed to another abandoned-child syndrome: the myth of reunion. Over time, the myth lingered, like sludge in my arteries, as I pondered their last words about each other, so blithe, so innocently open to the “what might have beens.”

 

One early summer day in 1981, Clem suggested I come back and live with him. Sarah would be leaving in the fall for Vassar, and I was coming to grips with the degree to which my life would be emptying out. Since I had left the magazine, there had been a bit of drama, a few sexual skirmishes, workshops, a few trips. All fillers. And there had been loss. Now I also faced the degree to which Sarah had been insulating me from the aimlessness of the last two years. That hit me hard. I knew better; that shouldn't have been her job. Here was Clem, suggesting a plan. Sarah's
going away would be a big transition for all of us, and consolidation made sense. It would be a bridge. I wondered why the thought had never occurred to me. I took it to heart, pleased and comforted.

“Come live with me.” Somewhere in that line—beyond “and be my love”—I heard, “as long as everything stays the same.” The last five years we had been living two blocks from each other, talking almost daily, seeing each other often. I still ran the household, paid the bills, cut his hair, all the usual tasks I had assumed when I had moved into 90 Bank Street twenty-five years before. Well and good. But Clem was still awash with women. Though none were particularly long term, and those whom I'd met I rather liked, still . . .

For the first time since our “openness” had become a reality, I felt that I would need more from Clem. Unsettled as I was, returning home to set up day-to-day housekeeping for the long haul while everything stayed the same was something I couldn't picture myself doing. Though Clem had made the suggestion at the right time, the timing was off for me.

I knew well the power of choices, and I considered them. I could stay where I was, I could move home with Clem, and, before the summer was over, there was a third choice: I could move to Los Angeles to live with someone I had met there, and liked, the previous year. And that is what I decided to do. As had been the case with our other life changes, little was said between Clem and me. It was simply understood that we would continue as before—separate yet together.

I EXITED LAX, blasted by the yellow light, the heat that carried the memory of desert and the air I could taste. Russ stowed me and my stuff in his '67 green MGB. We drove up La Cienega, past the oil derricks, the wind in my hair. I thought of Lena Horne's “Lady Is a Tramp,” except I hated the wind in my hair. Whether I was a tramp or not, I wasn't so sure. If moving across the country to live with a man I barely know . . . well, maybe I was. I wrapped a scarf around my head and hoped I didn't look frumpy.

I had always had a good time in L.A.—from my first trip with Clem, in 1960, to the whirl with Charlie to all the subsequent trips for business and fun. A good-time town, as far from New York as one could get and yet still feel in the mainstream. A heterogeneous soup of colors and languages. The only city I had ever imagined living in other than New York, and this was the time for some imagination. Besides, in the summer of 1980, through my old theater buddy Beverly Magid, I had met a man I could imagine living with here.

I was upstairs in the bedroom I would share with Russ, in his white colonial house with a picket fence that looked more like Rye than Hollywood. It was a house that teetered on the edge of a long, drawn-out divorce. Its future was the contentious centerpiece of a marriage that had died years before. I couldn't breathe. Dizzy, I sat on the yellow comforter. I felt cosseted, a word I'd never used. Sounded so similar to
closeted
—closeted in coupledom. It was a strange new feeling, dizzying but nice.