My Summer With George (27 page)

I left Bert a note, propped up against a tuna casserole. I wrote that if he wanted to see Lettice, he could call Jerry and I’d set up a visit. I wished him a happier future. He did call Jerry that night, yelling about the fact that I’d deceived him, “put one over” on him. He didn’t seem disturbed by the fact that I’d left him, and he never asked to see Lettice. In fact, he didn’t call again for two years, when he told Jerry he wanted a divorce because he wanted to remarry. I was happy about that—it annulled any residual guilt I felt toward him. I fervently hoped his second marriage was more satisfying than his first. I never saw him again. My summer with Bert had lasted rather longer than I would have wished. I wonder what would have happened if my summer with George had endured into the fall.

After all my daydreams of living in New York, I was frightened and lonely the first year I was there. My sisters saved me: on weekends, we tried to give one day over entirely to pleasure. We sought out every free event in town—and there were lots: walking tours, concerts, readings, even theater. When nothing else appealed, we went to Central Park, which was always a circus on Sundays.

Merry’s boyfriend—a graduate student she’d met in the park—made blind dates for me; we’d go together, as a double date. The boys he chose were college boys around my age; they were Jewish, and like him, went to NYU. Most of them had grown up poor, like me. They had strong New York accents, and they dressed horribly. I thought their backgrounds would enable me to empathize with them in a way I couldn’t with the tea dance boys. But they were amazingly like the boys from Harvard, Yale, and Brown: they, too, acted as if their experience was something they owned, the purpose of which was to provide a weapon against others. Unlike the boys I’d met at Holyoke, their experience was not of skiing or sailing or riding or voyages to Europe on ocean liners; what they had was knowledge, which they held up for your inspection, so far above your head, you couldn’t reach up and touch it. You were supposed to just admire it.

They knew about music and books and politics; a couple even knew about art. They dropped names that left me speechless: Mahler, Hindemith, Newman, Morris Louis, Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Malraux, and other names so foreign to me then I can’t remember them now. Of the writers they mentioned, the only one I’d read was Faulkner. They were given to pronouncements like “No serious music has been written since Brahms!” or “African art? You call that art? Art didn’t begin until Giotto!” or “Western art has been one long deviation from the true path of art, which in no other culture has taken the form of realism.” They said such things in tones so supercilious, with facial expressions so haughty, that not only contradiction but even discussion was impossible. I shriveled, feeling stupid and uncultivated, listening in intimidated silence. These boys didn’t mind my silence; they seemed to like it—and me. Most of them asked to see me again. And again. But I minded. I minded feeling stupid and ignorant and inexperienced about things that mattered to me; I minded feeling unknowledgeable.

So while I tended not to go out with any one of them more than a few times, these boys inspired me to form educational projects on my own. I took night courses in art and music history. In the afternoons, after a morning of writing, I went to museums. I pushed Lettice through so many, I was sure she would grow up to be an artist. I had to wait until she was a bit older to take her to concerts, but we listened religiously to the classical music on WNYC and WQXR. I took courses in French, German, and Italian; I read Proust, Goethe, and Dante; I read philosophy and history. I wanted to prove to myself that the Millington High School teachers had been right about me. And the first year I was really ahead, I wrote them a thank-you note and enclosed a thousand-dollar check for them to use as they chose. I told them I hoped they would spend it on the library, or another student, like me but less foolish. They wrote back—the ones who were still there; they were really happy for my success and didn’t say a single derogatory word about my writing romances.

I pulled into my driveway, smiling about those early years in New York. Although I was often wretched with fear; worried about money and whether the latest book I was working on would be acceptable, would earn anything beyond its advance—and how I would feed Lettice if it didn’t—and sad with loneliness, my memories of my first years in New York are dominated by great excitement and pleasure. It was a time of vivid life and emotion, of tremendous learning and deep feeling. It was the beginning of a new life I was creating for myself. I was building it on the ruins of my youth, on top of the ruins of the beliefs and practices that most people held when I was in my twenties. Few people still believe in them. Even Delia is no longer so mean and narrow: she’s had to accept one son divorcing, another leaving the church…

I decided that it was in those past events that the notion of Prince Charming was rooted. I’d probably never get rid of it; it was the last vestige of my reptile brain.

My sisters managed to create their own lives too, although it took them a long time. A few years after I moved to New York, Susan and Eldon moved to Long Island, to one of those flat barren towns with identical small flat gray houses and ugly names like Levittown, Hicksville, Amityville. Susan had a couple of adorable kids, a girl and a boy, and devoted herself to them entirely when they were little. But once they were grown, she opened her own advertising agency out on Long Island. She said no one knows more about a business than a good secretary, and that she’d known more about her agency’s workings than any of the guys she’d worked for, even the president. She must have been right, because her own agency was very successful.

When she founded it, she wanted two words to name her agency—one that conjured an image of an honest, moral, healthy America and one suggesting enormous wealth and prestige. After much discussion—and giggling among Susan and Eldon, Merry and me—she chose Kellogg, after the cereals, and Astor, after the millionaire immortalized in the Waldorf-Astoria. To hear the bank manager roll the name Astor Kellogg around in his mouth as if it were something grand and important was pure delight, especially since at first the company consisted of two desks and a set of telephones in a front room! Eventually, Susan moved into commercial offices in Manhasset, and when Eldon lost his job (“inevitable in the advertising business,” Susan said), he became her art director. They not only lived happily ever after but are still doing so, with five grandchildren, a plump financial portfolio, and a retirement home in Maine.

Tina, too, had success. For her first few years in Hollywood, she worked as an extra. But someone gave her a part with two lines, and soon afterward, she got a bit part in a film with George Raft. That got her noticed, and she became quite well known; she was featured in eight or ten films under the name Tina Twining. Unfortunately, her popularity didn’t last. But she foresaw that, she said in her letters. She knew that actresses become obsolete at thirty-five, and she made sure that before she lost her looks, she married a rich insurance executive. She wanted to be absolutely certain, she wrote, that she would never never never have to work in a bakery again. She doesn’t write often, and we rarely see her. It’s as if she feels not part of our family, as if we excluded her. Maybe we did; or maybe working all those silent years in the bakery, never getting anything she wanted, not even being allowed to join the Drama Club—maybe all that damaged her somehow.

Merry got married too—well, of course, everyone got married in those days—but her marriage didn’t work out too well. Her husband turned out to be a secret gambler, and she was never sure how much money they had or whether their monthly mortgage check would bounce. So she finally left him and raised her two girls alone on a secretary’s pay. They lived in some hardship, but Susan, Jerry, and I all helped her. I often think that was our mother’s training, the way we always pulled together as a family—except Tina, come to think of it. Merry’s girls are grown, and she’s retired now, quite content, I think. She lives with a woman, a retired schoolteacher. I suspect they’re lovers, although she doesn’t let on. So it took her until she was fifty to make the life she wanted, but she did it. And she
still
reads romances! She’s my best critic.

Only Jerry, of all of us, didn’t take command of his life. He had too much of Mother’s self-sacrificing tendency, I guess. He tried to be good for Delia, good in Delia’s way. It worked for her, but not for him. They had three boys. Delia stayed young-looking and healthy, guiding her sons toward religion: one of them became a priest, for a few years, anyway. (It nearly killed Delia when he went over the fence, as they say.) But Jerry turned slowly gray over the years, gray and old, and two years ago, he died of angina—just like Mother. I’ll never stop missing him.

Over the years, I became successful too. Eda Doyle retired in 1961 and went to live in the south of France. I heard she died sometime in the seventies. Swan Books is long extinct too; Heartbreak House publishes me now. I get a great deal of money for my novels these days, and Molly sells them in England and in other European countries. At least twenty of them have been sold to the movies; eight have made it through production. Of course, by then they were unrecognizable. I don’t take that seriously; I don’t take what I do very seriously, either. But it has provided me with a wonderful life. I raised Lettice and my other three children, all on my writing.

A few years after I left Bert, I fell in love with a man I was crazy about, sexually—although I didn’t reach the peak of sexual desire until I was nearly thirty. In 1954, when I was twenty-three, I met a man at a party, Charles Murano, a freelance artist. We married within a few months and in 1955 had twin sons, James and Girard. Charles did beautiful work and often made high commissions, but there were lean times too. So we lived on my income and reserved his for special treats, like trips to Mexico and Italy or renovations to our house. When I met Charles, I owned the two bottom floors of a brownstone on West Twelfth Street. Charles got a huge commission from
Vogue
in 1956, and we bought the third floor and fixed it up as the children’s floor—just in time for Stephanie, who was born in 1957. When he got another windfall in 1960, we fixed up the garden behind the kitchen. We made a patio of huge terra-cotta stones and surrounded it with shrubs and trees and an herb garden. We had a wonderful life. But in 1961, Charles died of a heart attack. He was only thirty-six. I was thirty.

It is dismaying how quickly hearts mend. In 1963, I fell in love with and married Andrew Lindsey, an investment banker who knew everything about money and how to sweep a girl off her feet. (We still called ourselves girls back then, even at thirty-two.) He took me dancing at discos and riding at Montauk. He took me and the children out on his sailboat for weekends. I was swept away by him, really. It was with Andrew that I finally understood what it meant to be sexually vanquished. We married, but Andrew proved that sex was not a good ground for marriage. I adored and trusted him, and by the time he left me for a younger woman, in 1968, he had his own company, most of my money, and my brownstone. I had to start over again, almost from scratch, this time with four kids. It was a bitter experience.

I shut my mouth and forgot about having fun—and I worked, come to think of it, exactly the way my mother had in the bakery, literally day and night, turning out novels under three different names. Three years later, I was able to buy the apartment on Fifth Avenue. I hired the architect Mark Goldman to redesign and decorate it. The job got a six-page, full-color spread in
Architectural Digest;
it made his reputation, and along the way, we fell in love. Neither of us wanted more children: Mark was divorced, with a grown daughter. He was very social—we traveled and went to lots of parties. We had almost eight great years together before he fell ill with pancreatic cancer. He died in months, terribly. His death—the way he died, not the fact of his death—made me feel I didn’t want to marry again, didn’t want to be close to anyone again.

And by the time Mark died, I had had too many losses, too many sorrows. I worked at shutting off my feelings, just soldiering through. My goal was
not
to feel. I’ve been alone ever since. That was 1979, this is 1991: a shockingly long time. Maybe I needed to fall in love.

No, Molly was wrong. My feelings for George were unique, an experience I’d never had before, one I was unprepared for. It was as if I was finally reaping the punishment for my bad character, or paying the price for having had such a lucky life. Maybe I’d finally let myself feel something I’d denied throughout my life. Maybe I’ve deceived myself about my emotions all these years. Maybe the punishment for that is being thrust back into adolescence, forced into the humiliating experience of love and longing, here on the edge of the grave.

Friday morning, the phone rang. It was Molly. She was at her country house, upstate, in Garrison.

“I miss you,” she said.

“Me too.”

“And I’m way up here and you’re way down there.”

“We both have cars.”

“Is that an invitation? Okay, I’ll come for the weekend. I’ll leave in an hour or so. See you tonight.”

“Bring your suit!” I yelled, but she’d already hung up. I knew my bathing suits would not fit Molly, she was so small. But maybe there was a spare left behind by some tiny person. Not worth calling her back for. If she didn’t have a suit, she’d skinny dip.

I dressed quickly—I was still in my bathing suit—and drove to the fish market and bought some fresh swordfish. I’d marinate it in soy sauce, hot sesame oil, and mustard, and broil it. I’d serve it with pasta. I wouldn’t cook a sauce, just toss the hot pasta into chopped tomato, garlic, basil, and olive oil. Molly would like that—it was her recipe.

I was humming as I prepared the marinade. I was happy Molly was coming. Maybe, I thought, I’d been a bit lonely.

It was dark by the time she arrived, and I served dinner almost right away. We ate heartily, chatted, sipped wine. We were always easy together. I told her about my lunch with Nina Brumbach and her strange story. She told me about a split between two close friends of ours.