Any Woman's Blues (6 page)

And so to dinner. We repaired to the cluttered formal dining room, where the table was elaborately set with a forest of cut-crystal wine goblets, a dazzling variety of forks and spoons, twin silver candelabra festooned with little green and red Christmas balls.

“Let us say grace,” said Mr. Donegal, taking my hand and his son’s. My other hand clutched Muffie’s, and she in turn held Dart’s.

We bowed our heads.

“Heavenly Father, make us truly grateful for what we are about to receive and ever mindful of the needs of others. We thank Thee for all the blessings Thou hast bestowed upon us in the year past, and will bestow in the year to come. . . . Amen.”

I thought of the condoms. Mr. Donegal looked up and blazed his malevolent blue eyes into mine. He was confident that I wouldn’t say anything. This was not a house in which people bared their souls. An invisible gas pervaded the air, keeping one from communicating any disturbing truths. The conversation lurched forward over the melon balls, Christmas balls, bread and butter. Mr. Donegal returned to the subject of art, something in which he claimed to be knowledgeable. He asked me what I thought of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Rosa Bonheur. I allowed that I admired them greatly. He asked if women artists today were still discriminated against. And I said that the discrimination was still there but had taken new forms.

Dart looked at me with adoration and admiration. When I took on his father, his love knew no bounds. I had the feeling, as I often have in my life, that I was on stage, in some surrealistic play. Life often seems immensely strange to me, and the most ordinary acts—Thanksgiving dinners, for example—can be stranger than space voyages. I am a visitor from another planet, observing human ritual with amazement and disbelief.

“I love you,” Dart mouthed at me across the table.

“I love you,” I silently mouthed back.

“Well, lad, what have you been doing?” Mr. Donegal asked his son. “Other than keeping Leila happy?” It was said rather as an accusation. Mr. Donegal was accusing his son of being a gigolo, the pot calling the kettle black. Dart looked as discomfited and defensive as he was meant to do.

“I’ve been trying to put Leila’s business affairs in order,” he said. “We’re thinking of building a gallery on Greene Street.”

“What a splendid idea,” said Mr. Donegal. “Excellent, excellent. For an artist to have her own gallery is really to be in control.”

“I wasn’t thinking of it for
my
work,” I said. “I have a gallery that sells my work—the McCrae Gallery. But for Trick’s, and other young artists’—to get them started.”

“How splendid,” said Mr. Donegal. “You sound like a real businesswoman, Leila—an admirable quality, especially in an artist.” (Mr. Donegal often said things as if he were the final arbiter.) “What would you say if I told you I have a very interesting business proposition to make you?”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Donegal. But Mr. Donegal went blithely on.

“If you would entrust me with a mere fifty thousand between now and January, I believe I could triple your money.”

Dart groaned and looked at his mother. Mrs. Donegal now seemed even paler than usual.

“Another harebrained scheme to put us in the poor-house,” she said.

“Nonsense, m’dear. This is my way of preserving your capital. If you sincerely want to be rich, you have to take a chance every now and then. Mrs. Donegal believes that those stuffed shirts at the Morgan Bank know what to do with money. Why, they barely keep up with the rate of inflation.” (I loved the way Mr. Donegal pronounced the word “shirts”; he gave it an extra syllable, so it became “shhh-ehrts.” He had a voice full of money—the sort of voice Gatsby wanted and could never buy.)

“What would you do with the money?” I asked.

“Why, I could triple it in a mere three months by investing it in heating oil futures, as I am doing with my own money. . . .”

“Over my dead body,” whispered Mrs. Donegal just audibly. “You’ve lost enough of my money already.”

“Do we have to discuss money at Thanksgiving dinner?” Dart pleaded. “I, for one, think it’s in execrable taste.”

“Jews never got rich worrying about good taste,” said Mr. Donegal. He looked at me. “I mean,” he said, “Hebrews.”

“ ‘Jews’ is not a dirty word, Mr. Donegal,” I said, my dinner suddenly sticking in my craw like vomit about to come up. I wanted to tell Mr. Donegal that his immediate association of Jews with bad taste and moneygrubbing was not only anti-Semitic but a cliché unworthy of his intellect, but I simply could not get the words out. I felt dizzy and faint. I wished I were elsewhere. It was a familiar dilemma: when people made anti-Semitic cracks, I felt pompous correcting them and sick to my stomach if I failed to. What was the answer? I ran my toe along Dart’s leg under the table.

Mrs. Donegal picked up the crystal dinner bell and rang for Ms. Reform School. Thanksgiving dinner was off and running.

 

 

Following the melon balls, an enormous turkey was rolled out. The evening stretched before us like the vast Sahara. Mr. Donegal carved the turkey as if he were doing a live sex show. There was something pornographic about the way he manipulated the drumsticks, making them move at the joints and then severing them swiftly with a sharp knife.

Not happy with what was going on in the present tense, Mrs. Donegal dropped back in time to the forties, the last decade in which she had felt comfortable, and began telling us how she had been a poster girl for the USO during the war.

“Yes,” said Mr. Donegal, “while I was risking my life for our country in the Pacific theater, Mrs. Donegal was posing nude for lascivious artists.” The thought of Mrs. Donegal posing nude did not seem to accord with lasciviousness of any sort.

“He only
wanted
me to pose nude,” Mrs. Donegal said. “I didn’t actually
do
it.”

“Yes, yes, dear,” said Mr. Donegal, feigning the jealous mate—albeit rather unconvincingly.

Mrs. Donegal preened, tripled her chins, and smiled fetchingly. Mr. Donegal winked at her in a forties-movie parody of flirtation, and the previous discussion about heating oil futures was forgotten. The ritual dance of their marriage had been choreographed long before and was as unlikely to change as the routines in a tired but long-running musical. They were eating buddies, greeting card buddies, and partners in self-deception. Every good marriage is partly a folie à deux, but this one should have won a lifetime achievement award. It was as if Miss Havisham had mated with Mr. Micawber.

After dinner, Mr. Donegal insisted on taking me on a tour of the family heirlooms. While Dart communed with his mother, I trailed behind Mr. Donegal through rooms and rooms of packing boxes, cobwebby antiques, piled-up newspapers, sagging bookshelves crammed with dusty books, and armoires bursting with all sorts of unidentifiable stuff. Every object before which Mr. Donegal lingered was meant to reflect glory on the family. There was his father’s World War I helmet, his smiling Irish mother’s wedding portrait, the hood ornament from the famous Delahaye that gave up the ghost in the Alps, an aerial view of the family’s former brickworks in Philadelphia (long since liquidated to pay off inheritance taxes). Finally we ascended to the attic, a musty top-floor emporium filled with dusty racks of clothes. It was virtually a costume museum, devoted to all the disembodied clothes of the Donegal ancestors: flapper dresses, World War I uniforms, bridal gowns, frock coats. If the clothes could have magically filled with the vanished forms of all the vanished Venables, Donegals, and Dartons—what a danse macabre they would have made!

Mr. Donegal held up a moonbeamy flapper dress, glimmering with bugle beads.

“My mother’s,” said Mr. Donegal. “Would you like to try it on?”

“Oh, no, thank you,” I said.

“Please,” said Mr. Donegal. “It would give me such pleasure to see someone wear it.”

“I don’t think it will fit,” I said.

“Of course it will,” said Mr. Donegal. “She was small like you—and also titian-haired. A Venetian blond, she called herself. It would be my honor to pass it on to you.”

He was importune, and I was afraid of seeming rude, so I took the dress, disappeared behind a rack of clothes, took off my chamois dress (corsage and all), and carefully raised the dusty, shimmering sheath above my head. So intent was I on not tearing the heirloom that I did not see (or hear) Mr. Donegal slither up beside me. Before I knew it, one of his hands was on my breast and the other was fondling my crotch. He swiftly insinuated one index finger under the fastening of my cream-colored lace teddy and ran it teasingly along my clit. I let out a little shriek, but was immobilized both by my raised arms and by my care for the dress.

“Please!” I said through the fragile fabric, but Mr. Donegal ignored me. He was pressing himself against me now, and I could feel his erection, curiously crooked like his son’s. I dropped the dress, a pile of dusty moonbeams, and darted behind another clothes rack, where I stood immobilized, waiting for Mr. Donegal to come claim me. Images of fox hunts came to mind, and I the terrified fox waiting for the dogs to scent my fear. Forty seconds went by, but Mr. Donegal did not come. My breath was jagged and rapid: a mixture of fear and—dare I say it?—sexual excitement. I waited shivering in my lace teddy until finally I realized that I was alone in the room.

Trembling, humiliated, I found my way back to my suede dress, put it on, collected myself, and went downstairs.

In the sitting room, I met with a Hogarthian tableau of the Donegal family chatting cozily around the fire as if nothing at all were the matter.

Mr. Donegal was fondling his mother’s dress, which he held on his lap like a household pet. It occurred to me that this whole family was quite mad—dangerously so—and that I should escape at once. Alas, I did not heed my instinct.

As I descended into their midst, Mr. Donegal rose and handed me the glimmering dress.

“A little memento of our meeting,” he said, meeting my gaze.

“I couldn’t possibly . . .” I said.

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Donegal. “You must. It suits you perfectly.”

I took the dress, feeling I was dangerously out of my depth.

On the long drive back to Roxbury from Philadelphia, Dart was desolate and not a little contrite.

“I am mortified that he asked you for money,” Dart said.

“Not to worry,” I said. “I see what you mean about him. He’s quite an act to follow.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Dart. “First of all, he never fought in the Pacific theater—that’s a total fabrication. Furthermore, do you know he’s been to jail?”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” I said. But after I heard Dart’s story of his father’s malfeasances (he embezzled money from a client and was disbarred), I did not have the heart to tell him what had happened in the attic. I almost wondered if it
had
happened—or if I had imagined it all, conjured it out of the dust and moonbeams.

“I want to be a good man for you,” said Dart/Trick, tears running down his cheeks. “I don’t want to be like my father.” And I believe that was true in every respect. But between men and their fathers, intention is the last thing that matters.

—
Bessie Smith

 

 

I
wasn’t always the queen of SoHo and Litchfield County. I grew up poor, in Washington Heights, with a mother who had a habit of getting arrested in embarrassing places—the White House, the United Nations, the Russian consulate, demonstrations for the Rosenbergs—and a father who made silver jewelry on Eighth Street, was a beatnik and hippie before either of those terms was invented, and an alcoholic before anyone knew that drinking was more than good clean fun.

I came, in short, from a “dysfunctional family”—to use the lingo so in vogue nowadays. (Sometimes I wonder if there
is
any other kind of family. Certainly no one I know comes from a functional family, whatever that anomaly may be.)

My father had been a fixture in the Village and in Provincetown since the thirties: Dolph Zandberg, born 1900, died 1982—the year I met Dart. Dolph was a Marxist in the thirties, a war resister in the forties, a heavy user of weed, alcohol, mushrooms, in the fifties, and a Village legend in the psychedelic sixties. He knew everyone—from Edmund Wilson to Ken Kesey, from Henry Miller to Jackson Pollock. On the fringes of every fringe movement of the twentieth century, he could (like Mel Brooks’s two-thousand-year-old man) say of any counterculture heroine from Louise Nevelson to Margaret Mead: “Honey—I went with her.” He and my mother, Theda (named for Theda Bara, natch), had one of the first “open marriages.” Theirs didn’t work any better than the later ones did. It was patched together with the dubious glue of alcohol, Marxist theory, and me—the lonely only, born when my father was forty-four and my mother twenty-nine, almost an old maid for her generation.

Oh, I know that Dolph and Theda must have adored me, even as I adore my own twin girls, Edwina and Michaela, but that didn’t make them automatically know how to love me into health. In fact, I’m sure they didn’t even know what health was. Narcissists that they were, absorbed in the drama of their own stormy marriage, they alternately ignored me and treated me like the Wunderkind of the Western world.

From the time I was four, I was sketching, sketching, sketching; I almost don’t remember a time when I
didn’t
draw. I could always “get a likeness”—as my father called it. And from the start I picked up all his tricks: origami paper sculpture, bending silver wire as if it were saltwater taffy, making collages of cloth and paper, newsprint, plastic, and silk.