We Are Still Married (9 page)

You all know Donna Reed. Well, she was like that, except more so—the World's Most Nearly Perfect Wife and Mother. She set her clock by her son, Rex, and after he ran away with Vanessa Williams, Ted and Esther's girl, Donna grieved openly. Her pain hung around her like an old black bathrobe.

Ted's uncle, William Carlos Williams, could sense Donna's need to be loved, but he was in town to adapt his epic
Paterson
for Twentieth Century-Fox, and was writing a large body of water into the script so that Esther, a swimming actress, could be featured. The poet was crazy about his ballplayer nephew's gorgeous wife. He hung his cap for her. The sun rose and set on her. Whenever Ted was in Boston, W.C. flew to L.A. Esther liked him as a close confidant, but he wanted to be more, much more, to her, so his sudden boyish desire for Donna confused him.

“I'm bad news for any woman I touch,” he told Jeanette and Dwight Macdonald. The former Trotskyite, author of
The Root of Man,
tugged at his beard as the famous poet stood poised on the tip of the diving board. Burt and Debbie Reynolds looked up at him and so did Carlos and Carroll Baker. Williams held his arms over his gray head, his knees slightly bent. He didn't notice Lassie and Malcolm Cowley, who had just returned from a walk and stood half shielded by a clump of sumac. “Blouaghhhhh!” W.C. cried as he dove, splitting the water like a fork.

It troubled Mark that Mamie couldn't swim an inch. He watched gloomily as Esther Williams plowed up and down the length of the pool, just as she did in Williams' poem “The Singing Swimmer” (“the row of maidens/beside the cool water/and the splashing fountains when/suddenly you/sing in your democratic American voice and plunge/deep below the surface, your white mermaid arms held out to me”).

“Esther swims, why not you?” Mark whispered, but Mamie only laughed. Bertrand Russell glanced up from his chaise longue. “Jane swims circles around Esther,” said the tanned white-haired philosopher in his clipped English accent. The author of
Principia Mathematica,
from which
Peyton Place
was adapted by Edmund Wilson's brother Earl (both of whom made a play for
Peyton
star Lana Turner after Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian, took a shine to Shelley Winters, Yvor's ex), laughed harshly as he stood and stripped off his light-blue terry-cloth robe. “And I can take any son of a bitch in the joint,” he snarled, his icy eyes fixed on John and Ford Madox Ford, whose wives, Betty and Eileen, had vanished into the white stucco bathhouse with Danny and Dylan Thomas. “Anytime you like, gentlemen,” he added.

The silence hung in the pale-yellow air like a concrete block. From far away came the mournful hum of rubber tires on the burning highway, a viscous sound like liquids splashing on the grass, and also there was an odor like raisin bread burning in a toaster, except worse. It was a Wednesday. John Ford squinted against the hard light. He cleared his throat, like buckshot rolling down a black rubber mat. But it was Williams who spoke.

He stood, water dripping from his white swimming trunks. “Look at us. Fighting each other like starving rats, while the people we ought to be fighting sit in their air-conditioned offices and laugh their heads off,” he said. “I'm talking about the bosses, the big boys, the playboy producers, the fat-cat choreographers, the directors, the dream-killers. Those are the bastards we ought to be battling, Bert.”

“You sound just like John.”

It was Donna. Dylan stood behind her, blinking, with D. H. and Sophia Loren. And Andy Williams. “Hi, Dad,” Andy said softly. Doris Day, C. Day-Lewis, Jerry Lewis, Lewis Mumford, Neil Simon, Simone de Beauvoir, Patti Page—everyone was there: the whole Rat Pack, except Bogart. Before Bacall, the wiry little guy had been with Bardot, Garbo, the Gabors, Candy Bergen, Bergman, Clara Bow, Teri Garr, but none of them were quite right. They were too different.

“You're right, Bill.” Mark let go of Mamie's hand, and she sank like a wet sponge as the trim critic climbed out of the pool. “We're writers, artists, literary men, not messenger boys,” he said, lighting a pipe. “And just look at us. Look at us.”

“You look like writers,” said Ted Williams, squinting and spitting in that special way of his that his brother Tennessee had tried to copy until his mouth was dry and torn. “You can't help but look like writers. Because that's what you are. Writers.”

“I'm as bad as any of the rest of you,” said Dylan sadly. Everyone knew his story, how the sweet voice of the poet was swallowed up in the silent, violent world of gray suits and men with blank empty faces and the watercoolers and the flat beige walls and the uncaring woman behind the desk at the dentist's who looks up with that empty vinyl expression and says, “Next.” She doesn't know about your pain. How can she?

“Let's walk,” said Mark.

Mamie whispered, “Wait. Please.”

“No,” he replied, and the writers left, marching down the long driveway into the dark, the lovely dark, and across town to the airport and back east to teach in college, all of them, and somehow they knew in their hearts and nobody had to say it that when they left, the women they loved would find new men and Hollywood would forget them and never mention their names again, and they did and it has and it doesn't, and that is the plain honest truth, you dirty bastards.

T
HE MAN THEY ONCE CALLED The Mayor of South Roxy was Jabbo O'Brien, who ran a news shop in a storefront on Eleanor Avenue, which the O'Briens had run since back when T. B. (Sweet Tommy) O'Brien stepped off the boat from Tooralooraloora in 1892. But then
Coronet
magazine died and
Collier's
and
Look,
and all the great columnists, like Hector Timmy, and Jabbo lost interest in journalism. One day in 1982 he missed winning a million dollars in the lottery by one numeral, a six instead of a seven. He sold the storefront to his nephew Butch for $75,000, and he and Maggie split for Parma, Florida—a studio apartment only two miles from the beach—to collect shells and sharks' teeth.

The next year Butch sold the building to a developer named Rob Niles for $630,000. Jabbo's younger brother Francis called him up at 11:00 P.M. and told him. “Franny,” Jabbo replied, “you're drunk. Go to bed. That whole street isn't worth the powder to blow it to hell. It's nothing but heartache. We got out in the nick of time.”

The false-aluminum front of O'Brien News was ripped off and the underlying brick was tuck-pointed and natural wood window frames installed. The downstairs became a yarn shop called The Yarn-ery. Upstairs were The Candlery, The Bookery, and The Pottery-Wottery. B&B Plumbing Supply next door in the Trischka Building was bought by the law firm of Payne, Batten & Noyes, and Mickey's Last Call Lounge, on the other side, became the office of Robert Niles Ltd.

Together with Payne, Batten & Noyes, Rob Niles formed the Market Square Corporation. The neighborhood had always been known as South Roxy, or Luigitown, and there was no square anywhere in it, but six months later St. Jude's Church was designated a National Architectural Wonder, and Market Square was named a National Living Cultural Resource Neighborhood and a Genuine Treat. Within weeks, old dark apartment houses with purple acrylic carpeting in the halls were selling for fabulous sums of money. The carpeting was ripped up and the floors sanded and lightly varnished, walls were painted white. Boxes of bright-red crockery were brought in, and pale pastel drapery, Hockney prints, steel-tube chairs, and slender cats.

Rob Niles and his wife, Nancy, a therapist at a center for men in life-change situations, and their children Randy, fifteen, and Sue, fourteen, moved into a gorgeous three-bedroom loft with white walls and gray carpeting and new Swedish furniture, on the fourth floor of what used to be South High School, approximately where the home-ec classrooms had been. The building, on Eleanor at Willow Street, had been restored to its early-1920s neo-Castilian splendor; the parking lot became a cooperative garden. The new high school was located off to the east, somewhere beyond the Interstate.

The handsome old South High was named Market Square South, with twelve shops on the ground floor (The Cat's Pajamas, Wines'n Stuff, Big Boy's Toys, Liz Johnson, Frank's Fruit Pudding, The Shirtery, The Phonery, The Fudgery, The Wrappery, The Toolery, The Suitery, The Computery) and sixteen spacious condominiums above.

Randy and Sue complained that there was nobody their age in the building or anywhere around the neighborhood, and they were right—the old South gymnasium, now the Market South Athletic Club, rang with the voices of men and women in their late twenties and early thirties, who jogged counterclockwise around the gym and conversed without panting about the rapid upward fluctuations of the real-estate market in the Market Square area. It was going gangbusters:

Virg 'n Rollie's Meats, $1,125,000.

The Beauty Spot, $900,000.

The Bijou, $2,450,000, converted to the South Market Racquetball Club.

Trischka Bowlerama, $3,110,000, now The Greenery.

Marilyn's Cozy Cafe, $600,000, renamed The Eatery.

And many more.

“I hate you,” Sue Niles told her parents one evening at the dinner table. “I absolutely hate both of you, you're the most boring odious disgusting people I ever saw. You think you're cool, but you're not, you're just ridiculous.”

Randy looked up from his plate. “She's right, you know, you are,” he said.

Nancy smiled at both of them and set down her fork. “Rob and I have something we want to share with you,” she said softly.

“It's taken us a long time to face up to this, but you two are just not the right children for us. It's not your fault, any more than it is ours. Please try to understand. You're a constant source of aggravation—the mess, the endless clutter and noise and confusion and hostility. It makes for a stifling atmosphere for mine and Rob's relationship. We're all the time being parents, we don't have time to grow. I choose not to accept that.”

Rob took Nancy's hand. “I don't know if our marriage can survive your adolescence,” he said. “We've come to a decision. We have to do what's best for us. We're going to sell you.”

They decided to work out this change in the family through The Family Place, a private agency upstairs from Wings 'n Things. “Our society still attaches some guilt to the idea of selling kids, but not so much as in the past,” said Bart, the counselor at TFP. “There's been this gradual demystification of blood relationships, which is allowing people to admit openly what was known all along, that some work and some don't.”

“That's interesting. How does it affect the kids?” Rob asked.

“We're finding more and more that an outright cash sale actually boosts a child's self-esteem. I mean, for a lot of kids, this is exactly what they need—we handled a fat boy last week who went for almost $300,000. Eight years old. That really changed that kid's whole . . .”

“Three hundred? For one little fatty?” Nancy was stunned.

TFP placed the children with a younger couple named Scott and Lainie for $185,000. (Randy and Sue were a little older than what the market wanted, and Randy had bad skin.) Scott was the heir to an insect-repellent fortune, and he and Lainie owned a big ranch, La Bamba, in the Crisco Mountains a hundred miles from the city, where the kids would have horses, a Porsche, their own bunkhouse.

Saying goodbye wasn't easy. Sue asked, “Can we come and visit on weekends?” as the cab honked, and Rob and Nancy cried and promised to feed Gipper the guppy, and Randy said, “Take care of yourselves, you two. Have a good life.” Rob and Nancy both felt an incredible emptiness for days afterward.

But slowly they rediscovered some basic values from earlier in their marriage, such as self-expression and having fun. The childless lifestyle made them feel youthful, even giddy, and soon they were spending their evenings at the Amalgamated Trucking and Storage Company, the new bar that opened up where Pripicsh Bros. Transfer used to be, mingling freely with persons half their age.

One spring they went to a little resort in Biafra which nobody had ever been to or heard of, a gorgeous deserted peninsula where they spent three weeks in pure silence eating only bok choy and something like rutabagas, and they came back deeply emerged in selfhood in ways they couldn't explain. Nancy, tired of listening to weeping men, quit her job at the life-change center, and Rob sold his business to two architects named Sharon and Karen, and Rob and Nancy went into partnership as resource persons.

Their first client was St. Jude's Church. Father Quinn had retired (he was deaf and stayed in the rectory and was unaware of changes in the parish) and Father Todd, a tall, angular man who dressed in blue jeans, a white shirt, and a tweed jacket, wanted to get a dialogue started between the church and what he called “the development community.”