A Complicated Marriage (5 page)

I said I could come but I couldn't stay long, an hour at most. I had someplace to be. A home of my own (well, not quite, but almost), a man who waited for me (delectable thought), and two fancy parties to go to, I didn't say. I was too nice a girl.

 

The door is opened by my perfumed and taffeta-ed aunt, with my mother behind her, a shadowy second. Elfrida is tall and very fleshy. Always too-too, she dresses to stun—too flouncy, too tight, too low cut, skirts too short, heels too high. Alternately boisterous and coy, she drinks too much. She writes songs and doggerel poetry, and volunteers at a hospital as a nurses' aide. She has an appetite for life that approaches gluttony and is never sated. I always liked that about her. Unless it spilled over into empty promises made to me about sweet-sixteen parties at the Plaza, or a trip
to Europe . . . someday. She carried herself away on her own promises, and until I eventually knew better, she carried me away, too.

Elfrida kisses me noisily, hugs me fiercely, and bustles me into the den, a room rarely used except as a repository for coats and such. I once spent a squeamish night there on the daybed tucked into its dimmest corner. Shrouded and be-pillowed for decades in heavy rugs and tapestries that spoke of Africa and Turkey and Persia—when Persia was Persia—that bed, and the room in general, would be forever redolent with decades of dust and mildew, mixed with the exotic musk of Eastern bazaars and camel dung.

The room is also the repository of all things foreign. Nothing is functional. Everything is decorative. From tiny carved jade and ivory doodads to the leopard-skin rug, its mouth a travesty of mortal ferocity that now could frighten only small children, its cracked teeth yellow and cobwebbed. Curio cabinets crammed with trinkets of beads and shells and ivory, and mother-of-pearl fans, and boxes of filigree and cloisonné smelling of ambergris and musk and cedar, and necklaces and bracelets and amulets of animal teeth and horn and topaz and shells and tiger-eyes. The walls are lined with elephant tusks, and prayer rugs of velvet and silk, fading and shredding day by day, and staffs carved with totems, and weapons of all kinds—spears, machetes, and daggers—and a world of masks, painted and beaded and feathered to fend off bad spirits, enemies within and without, and to put the fear of God in me.

Also sprinkled on the walls and on every surface are the faded photos of the man responsible for all the contraband and trophies of the hunt, my maternal grandfather, Hermann Norden, the long-dead adventurer, trust fund provider—for my brother, not me, I hadn't been born when he died—and the progenitor of the Plattdeutsch genes that Clem had bulls-eyed the night we met.

That Christmas Eve, I never make it out of the den. I never make it to a chair. I am never offered a drink, though I do think I take my coat off. While my aunt, with murmurs of something we need to talk about, scurries off to get the others, my mother and I stand waiting in that den, lit only by a few small lamps jerry-rigged out of bronzed animals and snakes and ivory cupids with faces eroded and veined, all shaded with red moiré.

My uncle Rolf enters. Rolf, with the mouth that only knows how to turn down. Pomaded black hair slicked back. With overpoweringly bad breath. My mother always said it was because, as a child in Germany after the Great War, he had had nothing to eat but turnips. Clem would always say bad breath was a sign of bad character. Either way, Rolf is stuck with it. He clicks his heels through life as he orders his dominion at home and in a travel agency—an occupation neither vaunted nor bruited about by the family. With his heavy brass ruler always prominent on his desk, always at the ready, always an intimidation. How many times had it cracked down on his children's hands or backsides? I never wanted to know.

I did know that during World War II he had hung a map of Europe over his desk and moved pins of different colors to track the Nazi offensives. And it was whispered that at that time he had attended Bund meetings around the corner. This area was New York's Germantown, after all. No conversation had ever occurred between us, but two remarks from Christmas Eves past still stung.

I was a young teen in my prized red velvet dress, daringly scoop-necked and with a flared, scalloped skirt. For a rare moment, as I had looked in the mirror, I had dared to drink in my dazzling beauty. Soon after we arrived, Rolf said to my mother, “Isn't it time she lost her baby fat?” Followed by, “At the rate she's growing, she'll be too tall for a girl.” He had skewered me where I hurt most.

For years I had slept in a tight ball, lest I grow in the night, when my guard was down, and I had never ever dared stretch in the morning. All to no avail. I grew and grew. I had perfected the art of compression by sticking out my pelvis, standing with my weight on one leg, and jutting my head forward. As for shoes, by wearing ballet shoes—fortunately, “in” at the time—and ripping the heels off my penny loafers, I could reduce my problem by half an inch. Now, in a flash, Rolf had turned “dazzling” into fat and gawky.

The following year, once again in my red velvet dress, I wore my ballet shoes. This time Rolf pronounced to my mother, “Those bedroom slippers make her legs look fat. Proper girls wear proper shoes with proper heels.” I couldn't win. I wasn't meant to. The message was: Our
lives were a mess, while their lives ran like the clocks Rolf collected that ticked and gonged in unison.

This Christmas Eve, there is still no conversation. Rolf speaks. I listen. His communication, delivered in a guttural accent, still thick after decades in America, is to the point: “I hear you are planning to marry someone by the name of Greenberg.” There follows a list of reasons why that cannot happen: the shame I would bring upon my family and my self; I would not be accepted in respectable homes, or clubs, or resorts or . . . He is on a roll. At some point Fred enters the room and stands at attention beside his father.

As a boy, Fred had socked me and broken my nose. I was four and had beaten him to the front seat of our car. When I was five, he proposed to me while we were fooling around on my bed. That pretty much ended our conviviality. He soon joined my brother, Norden—yes, named after the aforementioned White Hunter—in tormenting me, whenever and wherever. Fred and tears, that became the drill.

However, he sank to his nadir when I was in college and he asked me to set him up with my friends. The first turned out to be a feckless mischief-maker who, after he dumped her and moved on to number two, wrote him that he ought to know I was a lesbian. Fred told his mother, who, naturally, rushed the news to Poor Lolly, no doubt ending with, “What do you expect when you send your daughter to Bennington?” My brother, designated as the preserver of family virtue, dutifully confronted me during his next visit home and told me that such behavior would irredeemably destroy my reputation and chances for the future. He was terse and performed his task well. In shock, I stammered my innocence. No more was said.

Now, two years later, Fred socks it to me once again, this time for heterosexual waywardness. Like a good foot soldier, he echoes his father in detailing the life of estrangement and shame I can look forward to, not to mention the shame I will bring to the family. Lesbian or marrying a Jew, the verbiage is pretty much the same as Norden's, differing only in its vehemence.

The blood is awash in my head. I want air. I want out. I want to kill them. Smash their heads. Spill blood. At the least, wreak havoc on that
killing field of a room. My mother droops beside me, silent and stricken. Elfrida begins to play the contrapuntal good cop. “Jenny won't do anything foolish. She would never do anything to hurt Poor Lolly and her Darling Betty.” Then, as the scene reaches its denouement, an off-stage chorus of one is heard. The Bund has fully convened.

Marlene, perhaps fearing contagion, never enters the den. From the living room she screams hysterically about the sin I am committing. She uncages the proverbial elephant by introducing sex and a smattering of Christ into the mix.

Since I had moved to New York that fall, Marlene and I had spent our first “grown-up” time together. I had shown her around the Village, new territory for the cloistered uptown Spence girl. She had bought a pair of sandals like mine that her father forbade her to wear. We had talked about boys and dating—the blind leading the blind. At eighteen, having never hung out with boys, she had gotten a vicarious thrill out of my virginal tales. But tonight, no doubt fueled by her family, our girlie talks have taken on a new reality: marriage plus sex plus Jew. Images she can't handle. She has gone over the edge and can't come back.

I rush for the door. How long have I been in that den? Fifteen minutes? More? The elevator takes years to come. I am imprisoned in that small hallway between two apartment doors. The Nazi—my name for him then, and forevermore—stands guard at his gate, white with rage, still ranting about my obscenity. My grandmother, who has arrived only moments before, stands in the foyer, bewildered, in her fur jacket and feathered hat, supported by my mother's arm. Behind them, Marlene, violently pushing her mother away, fires another volley: “Our grandfather is turning in his grave!”

That is my last look at my family as a group. But the Nazi has the last word. As the elevator door finally slides open and I step into its sanctum, haunted by someone's
arpège
, his voice thunders down the airshaft. “If you dare use our name in a wedding announcement, we will sue you.”

 

The blur of Christmas lights ushered me down Park Avenue. I was a victim. I was a raging warrior. I was a martyr. I was omnipotent. I was powerless. I was all-knowing. I knew nothing.

Only a year earlier, there had been another taxi ride down Park from 1155. A senior at Bennington, I was going to meet my mentor, Stanley Hyman, for drinks at the Algonquin, the Mecca of the literati. I no longer needed a red velvet dress. I was beautiful, radiating with the power of being me. I spread myself across the backseat, arms outstretched, my feet propped up on the jump seats across from me. I told the driver I was going to a party, that I was a poet and had just published my first book and the party was for me. He said that was swell. And I said, “I know.” I soared down the avenue. None of it was true, but what did that matter?

Tonight there would be no chat, no soaring. I wrapped my wounds with vitriol. Why wasn't my mother with me in the taxi? She who had said nothing. What was she thinking about? Was the Nazi reenacting the annual charade of Santa's arrival—thump! thump!—before sliding open the dining-room doors to reveal the ceiling-high tree ablaze with real candles, in the German way, a bucket of sand at the ready, just in case. Were they singing a rousing chorus of “Tannenbaum” as they entered? I could see the table sagging under the weight of silver: candelabra, bells, birds, reindeer, and cornucopias. Oversize glockenspiels spinning their chimes. Dishes of red cabbage, heaps of mashed potatoes, applesauce, gravy boats thick with innards, and chestnut stuffing, and lord knows what else. And there, set before the Nazi honing his knife, the carcass of the goose, who had laid its last egg.

Later, they would surely ooh and ahh over the blue flames of the plum pudding, and smack their lips over the
schlag
and crack their teeth on the marzipan and unforgiving German cookies. And then the presents, opened one at a time, with disparaging smirks at those not up to par. And Elfrida, would she cap off the ceremony with a spirited rendering of her annual family poem, which highlighted our doings in dum-de-dum rhymed couplets? My stanza excised.

At long last the candles would be snuffed and the glockenspiel angels halted mid-flight. Was it a Christmas like any other? Or would Betty shed a tear, then take a tiny compact from her tiny purse and powder her tiny nose until it was caked with powder and her lovely
blauen augen
were cloudier than usual? Would my aunt get more “tipsy” than usual
and slur and sashay to the kitchen and back, too gay and laughing too much? After dinner, would she sit at the piano and croon an after-dinner song, her face moist with feeling? And Marlene, was she stewing in sullenness, her father-mouth turned down more than usual? Was Manfred shadowing his father, keeping the troops in line?

And my mother, what did she do? I liked to imagine that five minutes after I left she drew herself up, squared her shoulders, said, “Enough is enough,” and marched herself out. Or at least before the plum pudding. Whenever she left, she would take a taxi to 125th Street, then a train to the Manor Inn, where she would join her husband Harry, who had always known better than to set foot in 1155 on Christmas Eve. But no solace would await her there. He, a Jew hater, would say, no doubt had already said, “I never want to meet that man. She made her bed . . . ” And she would shed more tears, silently in the bathroom, before crawling into the bed she had made to wonder how such a thing could have ever happened to her. What had she done wrong? And then she would do what she always had done when life went sour. She would sugar it up. They hadn't really meant all those nasty things. Surely tomorrow was another day and things would be better. And I hoped her dreams were of Tara.

Those were my thoughts as I headed downtown to Bank Street. Yes, I had someplace to be. Yes, a man waited for me. The catalyst of all those people's rage. The man none of them had ever met. But when I arrived, truth was, the man wasn't waiting for me. Oh, Clem was there, reading at his desk under his treasured green-glass lamp, but had he even noticed my absence or remembered where I had been going? I sat in the armchair and cried out my story, and he did put his book down and he did listen. Then he made me a drink, his panacea for all things distressing, and, before I had time to blow my nose, made it clear how relieved he was. Having severed connections with much of his family over the years, he now would be spared having to deal with mine. “Besides,” he said, “those people are obviously barbarians. You're well rid of them.”