 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
She falls in love as a kid, grows up, and remains in love. Maybe she grows asymmetrically: a kid in love, while the rest matures and expands. The path is not straight – there are detours into years of anxiety, separation by war and other troubles, but finally – yes, there is an understanding, they will be married. No sooner does she achieve joy, than she is dropped into a void: he disappears without a word. No goodbye, no nothing. It is all over. Is this the way you dump a loved one? The Wall Street Journal gives advice about breaking up with your manicurist and other awkward dismissals. It even recommends a hug with the goodbye. But for her there is only silence. Like any healthy person, she survives, living with grief, but carrying on – working, marrying, making do. Many years later, he’s back, again with “love.” She tries to believe, and indeed it is “love, love” for decades while inside, the minutest of tectonic shifts proceeds at its own pace. One day, almost a lifetime later, she gets a letter from him, and now, so many years later, a huge flow of rage like molten lava bursts through a fissure, demanding expression. Control, control… It is no use. She finally writes what she thinks, knowing this is the end. He writes back just that, “I cannot write to you any more,” but still with “love, always.” The jerk. She has always been a “nice girl” – now she knows that there is an angry woman lurking below. She has changed, been growing and changing all along. He has not changed; he is amazingly very much what he was: good-natured, brilliant, lovable and… What he was has finally caused her to rise up and singe him. In expressing what has to be said, she has struck doubly – she has hurt him deeply, and discovered real pleasure in doing it. For a moment she is ashamed. But Eastern philosophy is all about wrapping yourself around contradictions; she can embrace her new cruelty. It’s ok. Where were they, back in 1939? Her father dying and then dead; her mother desperately looking for a job, they moving from an ugly apartment near the elevated train on Boston Road into an even cheaper and darker apartment in the already slummy south Bronx. The first Friday night, after she empties the moving-company barrels of the dishes she wrapped in newspaper a few days before; after she washes them and installs them in the freshly-painted wooden kitchen cabinets; after she helps to push the sparse furniture against the walls in all four rooms; helps to unroll the worn carpet under the fake mahogany dining room set, the doorbell rings. When doorbells ring unexpectedly in such a neighborhood, it is usually two people, Seventh Day Adventists, trying to sell their version of Christianity, offering a little booklet and speaking earnestly as soon as the door opens. It has been a long day: A morning subway ride in “rush hour” when people were compressed into the downtown Bronx local; then getting off at 96th street and walking to the derelict former elementary school that has, years after it was condemned as unfit for use, been assigned to her elite girls’ high school. Her mother accompanied the movers from their old apartment not far from Bronx Park to this sooty red brick tenement. In school, from 8:15 am, she attends classes in European history, chemistry, “problems of democracy,” and English. Lunch is a cheese sandwich and apple from a brown paper bag, eaten in the classroom because there is no other place. She uses the rest of her lunch hour to distribute The New York Times, for which she is the sales agent at school. This work earns one dollar a week. Then, two more classes: French for an hour with no English spoken at all and finally, intermediate algebra. The day in school is like any other, except for the school’s three times a week speech classes (to make sure the disadvantaged did not reveal themselves when they opened their mouths) and her weekly work as features editor of the school’s newspaper. Back to the subway and home, and the unpacking and other chores. (They move often out of economic necessity.) It takes only a few hours, because they have so little. For the move, the linens and clothes were folded into the capacious cases left over from her father’s pre-Depression career as a salesman. Now they are reinstalled into the empty drawers of dressers and cabinets, hung in closets, and it is all done. After almost ten years of the Depression, only a few people have things – most have virtually nothing. Dinner is a plain meal of pan-broiled shoulder lamb chops and potatoes boiled first, then mashed in the frying pan to pick up all the browned bits that stuck to the pan. With fresh, buttered string beans and a dessert of canned applesauce. Eaten in the kitchen, where they always eat. It is eight o’clock, and she is tired, ready to pick up a book and read for a while, and then go to bed. But, there is the doorbell, and polite as always, she goes to the door, expecting to nod and smile, and say, “Thank you. We’re not really interested. Good luck.” It is not two Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is a girl in her high school class at the door, one she sits near because their surnames have the same initial letter. Alphabetizing makes “order” easy for teachers who address the students as “Miss Whoever” and are in turn addressed as “Miss Blunt” or “Miss Verplanck.” With Shirley are five other girls from the same class who live in this awful neighborhood. “We’re so glad you live here now. We came to visit. We do this every Friday night,” Shirley says. They are inviting her to be one of them, a Friday night girls’ group. “Oh,” she stumbles. “We’re not really ready yet; just moved in today….” No one cares about the provisional arrangements. No refreshments are expected. They are happy to make her one of them, and she is overwhelmed with gratitude to Shirley, whose idea it is. It is the first time her entry into any “crowd” is not a mistake, but a genuine opening. It was not so long ago, when she was ten years old, in sixth grade, that a girl invited her to join a new club, the Neewollahs (Halloween backwards, when they had their first meeting). Then, she was promptly made aware, by the other members, the first girl had made a horrible mistake -- the rest of them did not want her. Too shy, too young, too solitary, too literary even at an early age, she has never learned how to be sociable. She is almost fifteen and has no friends. She has been an outsider in every previous neighborhood and school, thus it is beyond astonishing that a high school acquaintance should make a point of asking her into an existing group of girls who live nearby and visit each other on Friday night to talk. They do not eat, drink, go to the movies, bowl, shop, or listen to the radio. They talk. Later, they go to free concerts on Saturday night at the Metropolitan Museum, to summer concerts at Lewisohn Stadium (five cents and ten cents for students), but mostly they visit and talk, usually in a kitchen but sometimes in a dining room or living room. The others are already sixteen or seventeen, all seniors in an academic high school for girls, the best in the city. But none of them knows any boys, except for the two who have brothers and whose brothers have friends who appear and disappear on their mysterious errands. Most of the girls are very poor: three have mothers who are stay-at-home widows, supported by Aid to Dependent Children. Two have fathers in tenuous jobs; but there is one, Jean, whose father is a partner in a food shop on the prosperous upper east side of Manhattan. Her family lives in a large apartment in the only building with an elevator in their slum neighborhood. The other girls live in walk-up tenements. Jean’s family has real clothes, matched furniture, and an upright piano, all impressive signs of middle-class comfort. Even so, she is one of them, in the same high school class and inexplicably living in the same neighborhood. Jean lives closest to the new girl, Ruthie, so they ride the subway together, and after a while they become “best friends.” With that friendship, Ruthie enters a milieu that is familiar from The Ladies Home Journal, itself only familiar from waiting rooms. (Despite its title, the magazine is broader than you might suppose: the husband and wife who edit it are occasionally witty enough to write things like “Men are like street cars; if you miss one, you can always catch another.”) Mrs. Osofsky, Jean’s mother, has a paid subscription. Her living room furniture is “Chinese Chippendale,” she has porcelain jardinieres in which she keeps “Chinese evergreens.” Visiting there is a glimpse of the real middle class. At home for the rest of them, the living room is also someone’s bedroom with a “daybed” and a couple of chairs and tables—if indeed there is a living room. Ruth’s family still has the dining room furniture bought when her mother and father were married. There is not a single comfortable chair in the apartment; and they never eat in the dining room. But there is a fringed lamp on the dining room table, and they sometimes read by it. Otherwise, they sit in the kitchen, do homework at the kitchen table under a ceiling fixture, read there – the three of them, a younger sister, a mother and Ruth. Ruth’s father has been in a hospital for more than a year. But at the Osofsky’s, there are two brothers: Stewart, the eldest, who works in the garment industry, is clearly not the favored son; he has gone to work after high school and still lives at home, like all unmarried children no matter what their age. The other, Michael, a heart-stoppingly handsome fellow who plays the piano (Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata – in Ruthie’s first hearing of it), smiles with perfect teeth, is a student at City College. Ruth falls in love the first time she sees him. She, and virtually every other girl in the group. Knowing they are all in love with the same boy makes them very careful not to compete or express their yearnings. Or, in fact, to behave as if his sister Jean is anything but one of them – and to rotate their visits equitably even if they are all dying for more than occasional glimpses of Michael. Ruthie, especially, since she is so backward and shy and was “best friend” before she ever saw Michael, agonizes silently for a glimpse of him. Do you recognize the year? The war begins in Europe in late summer; Japan has long since pushed into China, committing atrocities only dimly understood elsewhere. The world is full of menace and dread. It is the year the boys begin to register for the draft – for military service. Boys are classified – 1A to 4F, a system from entirely eligible and not deferred, to a hopeless mess of bad eyes, flat feet or something else. Later, even bad eyes and flat feet are accepted for some kinds of duty. Michael graduates in 1941, volunteers for the Navy and is commissioned an ensign. The common wisdom is that the Navy is cleaner and less likely to be fatal than the Army. After graduating from their elite high school in 1940 (none of them knows a boy to ask to the prom, or has money for the necessary tickets and long dress — although there is a prom, and even pictures of the fortunate few later in the school paper), some too young even for working papers, most start at Hunter College in the fall, helping to support themselves with an array of part-time jobs. None of them, all brainy, has an inkling there are scholarships that can help them financially or provide entrée to out-of-town colleges. Ruth piles on part-time jobs in school and outside to work forty hours a week all through college. With work and her tiny stipend from the state’s Board of Regents – for her marks in high school – she can take on half the household costs while carrying a full program. There is NYA, National Youth Administration, that provides the best pay anywhere, a munificent fifty cents per hour for her work as physiology lab assistant. She loves taking care of the frogs housed in their big tanks with sprays of water and rocks for perching. But, their destiny is to be dissected, and it is also her job to pith them (destroy their spinal nerves with a needle) so that they cannot jump when scalpel and scissors cut them in labs. She chloroforms guinea pigs for more advanced dissection, and installs them in large glass jars. And, once a week, she goes to the butcher at a Fordham Road supermarket for two huge bags of animal organs that she carries back almost a mile to campus for other lab classes. There are brains, hearts with aortas, lungs with tracheas, kidneys – all vital organs from cattle and sheep – whose functions are best understood by examination of their anatomy. By the end of the week, despite refrigeration, some of the more vulnerable organs smell bad and the few students who can afford to douse them with cologne before dissection are envied. Ruth also washes the lab glassware and stirring rods after daily experimental work. It is rhythmic work, swabbing and rinsing, and lining them up in the drain rack and she does it absent-mindedly, until one day she is interrupted by one of the instructors. “This way,” the woman says, briskly shoving Ruth away from the sink and attacking the glassware quickly and efficiently. “I’m so sorry,” Ruth apologizes, ashamed of her failure to work faster and tries harder to focus. She has other jobs at the same time, clerking in the dean’s office and keeping track of the very few troublemakers who need official visits, selling in Macy’s Parkchester, and even working twelve hours on Saturday at the cash register and packing shoes and hosiery in a Miles shoe store in Harlem. None of them pays more than forty cents an hour, the minimum wage. She lies about her age to get those jobs. Her employers outside of school probably know and do not care. And since her mother now has a job, too, Ruth cooks and cleans at home. Her sister leaves for nurses’ training in a distant city. Ruthie’s sixteenth birthday is another Friday, more than a year after that memorable first visit, a few weeks after her father’s death. He has been buried in a tiny plot in an overcrowded cemetery in Queens, the whole ceremony sordid and poor, with only a few family members to witness it, and a cemetery attendant to deliver a prayer. Her father’s brothers and their families leave as fast as they can. They do not want to be asked for help by the widow. One of her father’s nephews, however, has an idea: Ruthie can model in his fur showroom. Her prosperous uncle says, “No.” Models are sexual prey and she is too young. Turning sixteen three weeks after her father’s death -- how could anyone have a “sweet sixteen” party so inappropriately? “You’ll have a party, a sweet sixteen party,” her mother says, determined. “You’re only sixteen once, and every girl has to have a party.” She does, with the Friday night girls’ group, a cake and candles, and even ice cream. There are rumors that parties with boys and decorations and “spin the bottle” games take place for sixteen year olds in other parts of the country, or even elsewhere in the city. In college, the girls continue their Friday night get-togethers. And talk: books, movies, politics, family, discoveries at museums. But mainly and most often, they confide their interior lives to each other, and find comfort in their common doubts and insecurities. Ruthie listens, mostly. It takes her years to find that she has feelings, too. Books – they read all the time. Pearl Buck, Sigrid Undset, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Thomas Wolfe, Somerset Maugham, even Fannie Hurst, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Farrell and F. Scott Fitzgerald, plus plenty of James M. Cain, Mazo de la Roche, Edna Ferber, E. Philips Oppenheim, Agatha Christie, H. Rider Haggard and Rafael Sabatini. Movies -- they go as often as they can, usually rushing to Times Square for low daytime prices, to the Paramount, where Frank Sinatra, not yet a headliner, appears onstage with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra between film showings, and admission is only twenty-five cents, or to the Astor or Criterion. In a year or two, they are smoking ostentatiously, thus required to sit in the balcony. Ruthie is still learning how, buying her cigarettes for a penny each from open packs in the school bookstore. The first time she inhales is in the Astor lounge after a showing of Lifeboat at which one of her friends screams so loudly in surprise when John Hodiak and Tallulah Bankhead kiss with their mouths open, that someone in the orchestra screams back to shut up. They try to meet boys, but they have gone from an all-girls high school to an all-girls college. Hunter in the Bronx invites students from (all-male and nearby) NYU Engineering and Fordham University to tea dances. In a plain black dress, her mother’s, Ruthie attracts no boys. She waits. Her mother says she is pretty; but nobody asks her to dance. She is clearly a wallflower. Once, given a tea dance ticket at the last minute, she comes as she is, in a sweater and skirt. She is mobbed, but too embarrassed ever to do it again. It seems to be taking advantage of the boys. Other girls are not so scrupulous. Ruthie’s high school crowd and a few other girls they know form a “house plan” and invite City College boys to “get-togethers” in small rooms on campus. It is hard to get conversations started – everyone is shy – but sometimes a date results. “We could go out Friday night or Saturday night. Live theater at the Davenport Free Theater – you know on 27th Street – and the old boy comes out in a toga between the acts and tells us how he started it… They do the classics. If you’re hungry afterward, we’ll have a hot dog and orange drink at Nedick’s.” That was a sumptuous evening out, a real date. One boy, who lives in the more affluent West Bronx, is careful to explain to Ruthie, “I only come over to this slummy neighborhood to pick you up because you’re so smart and pretty.” This same boy has a better idea. “My mother and father want to meet you and my mother said, ‘Bring her here to dinner.’” He calls for Ruthie, and they ride the trolley to the West Bronx. No one is in the apartment when they arrive. “Come to my room,” he says. He seats her on his bed, and opens a book she does not know. “Why don’t you read this? I think you’ll enjoy it,” and sits there watching while she reads. It is the long, explicit and randy last chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses for which Joyce has plundered his wife’s ruminations about her early encounters with boys. She reads intently, all forty-some pages in a style she later knows as “stream of consciousness.” She also learns, many years later, that Ulysses is part of the required English lit course at City College – an all-boys’ school – whereas no one at Hunter (all girls, therefore to be protected) has heard of it. “Thanks for letting me read this. It’s wonderful. I’ll get the book – James Joyce?” She gets up from the bed she’s been sitting on. “I want to read the whole thing.” Is he disappointed? Well, too bad. His mother and father return just then, and they all sit down to stuffed veal shoulder, a brand-new item in her knowledge of cuisine. It is an illuminating afternoon. She realizes years later he was hoping she’d find Molly’s monologue as stimulating as he does, and that something wonderful for him might happen, “Yes, yes, I will.” No, not with her. She has not even a clue. He disappears after a while. Later in the war when there is hardly any boy left, the girls sign up for USO service, dancing in armed services clubs on Saturday nights with guys who are shipping out in a short time. The girls are innocent, poorly dressed and unworldly, and these boys from elsewhere who think New York is so sophisticated and wicked, do not know that without cars for privacy and farm animals for models, New York girls do not know “from nothing.” But there is Michael, home frequently at first, wearing his well-fitted officers’ uniform, dazzlingly distant, smiling, hep, knowing about jazz, about art, about classical music, buying his sister a copy of the Modern Library edition of Ulysses for her birthday, unbelievably sophisticated. The girls rotate to Jean’s house as often as they can. Sometimes some of Michael’s friends visit on Friday nights, and bring shellac records. One of them always chooses Ruthie to dance the Lindy Hop to Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” Michael can see her exhilarated, flushed, bouncing through the steps with his friend Richie. He has to look at her, and he does, with a kind of speculative attentiveness to her knees, her shoes, the whirl of her skirt. At such moments, she can almost believe in happiness. Dancing… to popular music…? She does not understand any of it at first in high school. To make up for her deficiencies, she sits on the floor next to the second-hand radio finally purchased in her last year, listening to WNEW’S “make-believe ballroom,” and taking careful notes. It seems that knowing these things might be a key to popularity. The same records are played over and over, and gradually, she learns the styles of the orchestra leaders, their specialties, the names and words of the songs. She learns “the steps” to the Lindy Hop between rows of desks in homeroom in high school, taught by a trim girl who knows all of them, and is more than willing to help clumsy Ruthie. That same good-natured girl, as bright as anyone in the class, does not go to college at all, because her father expects her to help support the family. He breeds and raises canaries in cages in their living room, and that does not provide enough money. The girls whose families could not let them go to college are many – and no one ever hears from them again. Ruthie goes because she is too young to work; others drop out as soon as they can get working papers, and some finish at night. With her multiple jobs, Ruth pays half the household expenses. There is no question about her continuing. Even though the school doctor says, “You’re the tiredest girl I’ve ever seen. I’m telling the nurse to let you use the Infirmary for naps, and to wake you up when you say. Don’t worry about cutting classes.” Sunday mornings, while they clean, Ruthie talks to her mother about Michael. “Do you think he likes me?” “Of course he likes you. You’re very bright and nice and…” “No. Really likes me?” “How could he help it?” A circular conversation. It goes nowhere. Her mother wants to reassure her, but what does she know? Ruthie wants him to choose her, to pay attention to her. Her mother says, “You’re so pretty; he has to.” Her mother is never bored or annoyed by Ruthie’s constant preoccupation, always listens with the same interest and sympathy, always says comforting things. But Ruthie does not believe her. It is just mother love talking. The world is full of girls Michael could prefer. His mother considers him a prize, and he is. There is no reason for him to choose her – or any one of them. Handsome, outgoing, with a great future, why should he even look at the dowdy girls who are his sister’s friends? Gradually, almost imperceptibly, things change. Ruthie has occasional dates with brainy fellows she respects. But she does not love them, and even if she might, is so shy that most dates are embarrassments of silence. She has no conversation, has no idea what to talk about with a boy. And they? Equally shy, and with nothing to say to a girl. By the time she is eighteen or nineteen, she is startled when several boys in uniform, stationed nearby for advanced training, propose marriage after two or three dates and amiable goodnight kisses. “Why don’t we get married?” The nice, pudgy boy from St. Louis, his tuition in NYU dentistry school paid by the Navy in exchange for his promise to serve three years after graduation, asks, after taking her dancing to Central Park’s Tavern on the Green. It is summer and they dance outside, to a live orchestra, doing the samba, very sexy and glamorous like the movies. “We’ve only known each other a few weeks.” “That’s ok. I’ve met your mother, and I like her. And my family will like you. After the war, I think I’ll open a practice in Long Island, Nassau County. Everyone says that the suburbs will grow. We’ll buy a house, and …. ” He is delivering a desperate sales talk. She looks at him again. She does not know him, and cannot imagine being married to him. He has an incipient belly and a gentle manner. But he does not have Michael’s beautiful leanness, Michael’s interest in everything, Michael’s brilliance. She loves Michael, and worries about these guys. There are three or four that year, fearful of what is happening in the world, wanting to be settled into something predictable before being deployed. “I can’t jump into marriage with someone I hardly know.” Marriage is for life. Michael starts writing to her when he is overseas – from APO boxes that seem to originate in North Africa, Italy, Southern France, then England. Lovely letters about nothing in particular, a little about the local scenery, not too specific. He encloses snapshots of himself in uniform, sometimes with a fellow officer. She is thrilled. But then… Does he write because he can count on long interesting letters from her? She is too shy to talk, but yes, she can write. Every letter from him is cause for violent joy or pain. She reads and rereads every V-mail, the miniature photocopies; or the original scribbles on lightweight paper, saves them, ponders what they mean, unable to discuss him or these letters with her friends, or even to ask if he is writing to them, too. Does she mean anything to him? Anything? She reads them to her mother. “What do you think?” Her mother knows no more than she does. One letter drives her crazy, each paragraph imposing some kind of condition on her, ending with, “then I will love you.” What does he mean? Does he love her? He always signs, “Love, Michael.” But that means nothing. “Then I will love you.” Only then? Why only then? What does it mean? She drags around for days, in class, at work, at home… What does it mean? Why does he hurt her so? There is no evidence in his handwriting of drugs, alcohol or fatigue. Twenty paragraphs of strange impositions, each followed by “then I will love you.” Is he talking to himself? Well, surely no one who loves her would write such a letter. Ergo, he does not love her. And why should he anyway? He can have anyone he wants. How could he write such a horrible letter? She cannot ask him. It would mean she cares – that hers is not the casual letter writing of wartime, to pen pals she’d never meet. She can especially not ask him when it is clear he does not care. Girls are taught not to show feelings before boys show theirs. Only a very “forward” girl could say or show anything. Ruthie just agonizes quietly, confiding only in her mother. The war drags on. She writes about twenty letters a week… to Michael, to boys who are experiencing a horrible war in the south Pacific, to fellows she does not know who have posted a need for someone to write to, to some of the marriage-crazy guys (who as soon as they can, marry anyone who says yes, and stop writing, but then someone else begins.) And dates people who are in town for a while between assignments elsewhere, some of them considered ugly by her mother, or hopeless financially, or … When her mother finds a fellow attractive and rich, and thinks she should make something of it, Ruthie asks, “Who will I talk to for the rest of my life?” Her mother does not think that is important. Especially when her grandmother urges her to marry Ruthie off, before the bloom fades. No, as long as there is any hope, Ruthie is waiting for Michael. Michael comes back on leave for a few weeks. She begins to hope when he engages her in some idle chat while she waits for Jean one evening. Then, he drops in (he knows where she lives!) another evening to visit for a while in her family’s sad, sordid, slummy apartment, an even uglier place than the one Shirley had brought the girls to. She aches with humiliation, but that is all they can afford. Finally, he asks her out – a real date – for a movie, and then more dates, the formal evening-only activity prescribed for dating then when young men and women were too uneasy with each other for more casual activities. She and Michael even go to a night club once (Barbara Walters’ father’s), Ruthie in the only dress she owns, where they sit stiffly drinking (what?) – she does not even know what to order. Later, they spend hours in the living room kissing passionately – necking. (Her mother has finally found twenty-five dollars for someone’s used sofa and comfortable chairs.) Ruth watches incredulously as Michael’s eyelids droop and his ears redden during these prolonged sessions of kissing and hugging. They never go further, and if you were to ask her how she feels, she cannot say. Cautious and repressed – that’s how girls are. If her mother is worried that they might be tempted, she calls, “Ruthie, Ruthie.” “It’s ok, Mom.” Only a few weeks, and he’s gone again. In the early forties, Alfred Kinsey comes to Hunter to interview volunteers about their sex practices. Ruthie has nothing to tell him and does not volunteer. His later statistics say that about one-third of girls in their late teens are no longer virgins. On another of Michael’s leaves, Ruth’s mother invites him to dinner. His mother entertains often, family and friends. Ruth’s mother wants to reciprocate, although she never invites anyone for anything – not even her own family. The butcher is no help; she asks for a roasting chicken, and he, knowing she cannot tell the difference, sells her an old rooster. Unpracticed, she works hard on stuffing, vegetables, appetizer, all that. Too bad. No amount of roasting improves the rooster – it is so tough that it cannot be cut or carved, and as she struggles, the bird skids off the platter and onto the kitchen floor. Her mother picks it up and throws it, intact, into the garbage. “Well that’s that. I can’t carve that bird; the butcher must have made a mistake.” Ruth thinks she will die of humiliation. It is just like that awful scene in Alice Adams, the Booth Tarkington book. But Michael jokes and eats vegetables and store-bought pie, and does not seem to hold it against her. They go to a movie afterward, and then sit on the sofa for hours, kissing and hugging. Michael fondles her breasts, outside her blouse, and she pushes his hands away. These are routines for all dating couples in which nothing is said. On one of those leaves, Michael’s elder brother, Stewart, is married to a beautician he has been courting for years. Ruth is invited, as a family friend, to the wedding and to the reception, and her mother agrees she needs a dress. They go to the bargain hunter’s paradise, S. Klein at Union Square, and rummage till they find it. “Isn’t this beautiful! It fits you perfectly,” her mother exclaims in the crowded, unkempt mass dressing room. A thin, silk crepe dress of dusty pink, with covered buttons down the front, shirred at the hips, it cost three dollars and fifty cents, a lot for a dress. She wears black suede pumps with it, and knows at the wedding that she has never looked better. Stewart is watching her at the reception, understanding without her ever saying anything that she is crazy about Michael, and that she has only an underdog’s chance. He knows. He always knows, the only person in his family whose empathy, not just for Ruth, but also for everyone, is always clear. Michael plays around at the wedding, scarcely noticing her, and Stewart’s glance is full of pity, knowing she is hopeless again. Then come more letters, signed, “Love, Michael”, but what do they mean? She graduates from college in 1944, and goes to work. She is still agonizing, worrying, waiting, has been suffering for four years, reading letters signed “love” for three years, and is unable to conclude anything. Does he, really, does he? Her boss in the new job is leaving to work at a junior college upstate. Would Ruthie go with her as her assistant? “It’s so nice of you, Miss Loggins. I’d love to, but I can’t. I think I may be getting married when the war ends, and I can’t leave New York.” Michael’s letters hint that might happen, but she is never certain, still examining each letter for clues. D-Day comes and goes, the President dies, the war ends in Europe; Michael writes that he expects to be sent immediately to the South Pacific. She has a new job in a company with plenty of men, mostly married with children, over-age, not eligible for the draft. But a few are cute and single. She cannot look at any of them seriously. She dates, kisses people who smell nice, even yields but only occasionally, after she turns twenty, to aggressive lovemaking in a car, or at a resort... It means nothing. She is still waiting for Michael to come home and ask her to marry him, because he is the one she loves. Michael comes home late in 1945 after the end of the war. He registers for a Master’s degree and obtains a faculty assistantship as a favorite of his department head. “Now,” Ruthie thinks, “Now.” There are five or six dates – serious dates -- then …. Total silence. Total. Indescribable agony. What is it, what has happened? No answers anywhere. She has never learned to ask. Nice girls do not push. They wait. She cannot take any initiative, reach out…. For a while, Ruthie still sees Jean, her best friend. They lunch, go away for a weekend. But Jean starts inviting Lucy along to what have previously been twosomes. And Jean never mentions Michael. Jean talks about her aunts and uncles, her father and mother and Stewart and his wife… Lucy comes along, diluting their previous intimacy. Perhaps four months later, which for Ruth are unrelieved wretchedness, Jean says, “Michael is dating a girl named Jennifer, a tall girl who is a bookkeeper.” “A bookkeeper?” Ruth is shocked. “Who is she?” “He met her earlier, I don’t remember where. He calls her ‘the dog.’ She sends him flowers every week – my mother, too.” Ruth has never heard of a girl sending flowers to a boy – but there is so much she does not know. Would flowers win him? Why should an attractive man date a girl he calls a dog? She is in a miasma of ignorant misery, with no one to talk to but her mother, and she, from another time, a different culture essentially, has no answers. She and Jean are having lunch in Altman’s Charleston Gardens, the ladylike restaurant with lovely food and service in one of the city’s nicest stores. She has not seen Jean in a while, and has called to ask if they cannot have lunch there, halfway between where she works at 40th and Madison and where Jean works in the twenties at a small insurance company. Earlier, they met there almost weekly, eating chicken salad and pretty desserts, and then browsing the Oriental carpets, the antiques and the main floor accessories before heading back to their offices. Now it has been months. “I meant to tell you,” Jean says, as if it has somehow slipped her mind before, “Michael is engaged to his girlfriend, Jennifer. They’re getting married at a hotel on West End Avenue in the 70s, the Esplanade. In June. Her mother is alone now, but her brother is very rich, and he’s paying for it all.” “How nice,” Ruth says. “Wish them well for me.” Her stomach is in a knot, and every inch of heart, lungs, liver and gut feels contracted and sore. “Where will they live?” “In Queens, I think. They’re renting a nice apartment in Forest Hills so Michael can use the Independent Subway from school; he’s finishing his Master’s and faculty appointment at the end of May, but he’s been hired to run the whole college’s One Hundredth Anniversary festivities all during the next year, and his adviser is sure he’ll get a faculty appointment for the year after. His future is set. He’s so lucky.” Jean knows how lucky he is. She left college after two years and is still working on her degree a few courses at a time at night. The family’s focus is on Michael. He is the one with the future; Jean is just a girl with no great talent; she might as well go to work and pay for her room and board and clothes. She’ll get her degree in time, if she wants it. Ruth walks back to work – six blocks along Madison Avenue with its Morgan Library, residential hotel, big office buildings, bank branches and crowded sidewalks. Her life is over. What happened between them? She has never seen him after their few dates – not on the street or in the subway or anywhere. It is a mystery, a mystery of love, joy and inexplicable rejection. Nothing has ever been said to Ruth about why he disappeared from her life. Her mother cannot imagine why, cannot fathom it. Then, Jean, too, stops speaking to her. No more lunches, no more getaways to Goshen to play in rural snow or to Atlantic City for a weekend of swimming in a hotel’s opulent pool. Silence. Again with no explanation, and she with no way of asking, just suffering. Shirley, of the Friday night group so long ago, calls her at work from her job in a French antiques shop. “What happened between you and Jean? You’re never together any more. I see her once in a while with Lucy, but never you. Did you have a fight?” “No. I guess we don’t have as much in common as we used to. She and Lucy are both going to school at night to finish their degrees – they’re still at Hunter. I’ve been going at night to Columbia and NYU uptown because of my job…” They talk of the others. Nothing. Months later Shirley has real news. “Jean is getting married in October, did you get an invitation?” “Not yet. Who is she marrying? I haven’t heard from her lately. We used to eat lunch every week, but lately we’ve both been so busy…. I’m doing technical service now and I go out of town and to our labs quite often. Maybe I’ve missed her calls…” She has been promoted to an executive job, the second woman in her company, and her name is painted on the door of her office. She cannot mention that; flaunting success is bad manners. “But my assistant would have made sure I got a message…” Pretty lame. Jean has not called, never calls again. “Jean’s engaged to that stocky fellow she’s been seeing – the biologist in the health department,” Shirley says. “They’re going to live in Queens, too, in Rego Park, I think, not far from her brother Michael, and even Stewart. It’s funny; they all wound up in Queens.” What is funny? It is where all the new apartment houses are being built. Ruth is not invited to Jean’s wedding. She is alone, completely rejected, with only her mother for comfort while they try to puzzle out what has happened. She cries and cries. But it is no use. All over, and inexplicable. She does not stop mourning for years, never gets over it. Never. Her friends, the other Friday night girls and the house plan group, are marrying, too. Starting in 1944 and then in 1945 and 1946, most of them become Mrs. Something and they even begin having babies. There are showers and baby showers, and still Ruthie is alone, at home with her mother. She has an idea. She wants to live alone, take her own apartment. Her mother will not hear of it. “Why do you want to live alone? We get along well; you can save money. Girls don’t leave home until they get married. When you get married, you can leave.” How can she argue? No one else she knows lives alone. She is saving money, she has tailored suits now from Altman’s and Lord and Taylor, even Bergdorf Goodman. She wears hats and gloves to work, and tries to look like a young lady executive, still an improbability. She is the only woman invited to the company’s technical planning sessions at the nearby Chemists’ Club, and marvels at her acceptance. After a morning of meetings, she dashes to the ladies room – there is one in an obscure corner – when the President of the company stops her. “You can’t go into the bar. They don’t permit women.” “Not the bar. I was going to the ladies’ room. Is that ok?” she asks, facetiously. He is taken aback. Jokey women are not in his sights. In fact, his main business with the women in the company is with the other female executive, in charge now of personnel. His mistress. No matter. She is a success at work, promoted again – the first real woman executive in the firm, rewarded because she learns fast, takes work home, seeks responsibility. And, like many young, unsophisticated women, she is grateful to be seduced into a real affair with an older, married man. “My wife is in psychoanalysis now and it’s so hard for us to talk. Besides, I love you,” he says. He is handsome, very smart, and knows everything that a man brought up rich should know. That is good for her. She learns from him – about restaurants, about chamber music, about allowing yourself to be warm and giving where there is no commitment. She knows his weaknesses, his childhood hurts, especially when his mother died, his politics, and about his family. He really talks to her, unlike any man she has ever dated. The artificiality and stiff protocol of the boy-girl relationship begins to dissolve in affection and understanding. “I thought you’d like this book for your birthday.” How clever of him. Books are her favorite gifts. This one is Toynbee’s A Study of History, the one-volume condensation of the first six volumes. Everything it says about the rise of civilizations and about their decline in the elites’ imitation of the tastes and propensities of the internal proletariat is striking. She tries to talk to him about Toynbee, but no, with a family, and work, and his own politics, he has not read it. No matter. He loves her, and they even enjoy sparring intellectually. They read the Herald Tribune together, work on technical problems and visit the company’s labs together. Ruthie likes warmth and intimacy, likes sex. But if you ask her later, “How is it?” she does not know. The very way people forget trauma, she forgets “how it is.” As if forgetting erases the experience and the guilt (of being a nice girl and doing “not nice” things). The only thing she retains about their sexual encounters is the recollection of his visits during her vacation at a cottage upstate, where a jealous little cat tries to share their activities. She is so fond of him that it does not matter when she realizes after a while that she is not his first girlfriend, that his wife’s psychoanalysis is not a reason, that he likes women and a safe adventure. No matter. They are real friends. She even gains a bit of courage. This man is fine and from an upper class milieu. He talks to her, loves her. That means something, she thinks. Her mother is disgusted, “Why do you need to have an affair with an older, married man? Is that all you can get?” “He’s very nice, very nice to me. I’m very fond of him. I like looking at the shape of his head; I like talking to him. There’s no real harm. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt him or his family and neither would he.” But she is learning more about the world. Their affair lasts several years, ending affectionately when she takes another job. Even so, they have lunch frequently, and retain a lifelong respect for each other. She shifts to another kind of work where she is amazed at more success, still unable to understand why Michael vanished from her life without a word even after they talked about getting married. Still unable to understand Jean’s estrangement as well. Unable to talk to anyone but her mother, soldiering on with life, often without a date, staying home in pajamas on weekends, not even bathing, reading all of Saturday and Sunday without getting dressed. Depression then is about economics, not emotion. “You’re a young girl. You’re pretty. You should be going out. Why aren’t you going out?” Her mother does not know what to say; she is worried, and can do nothing for Ruth or with her. Books tell her everything and spare her any risk. Reading is her drug, her salvation, her key to the world. But there are a few friends, and they have friends; and she meets a few people who come to visit, one of them Peter, a sloppy, good-natured guy. It is three years later, time! Ruth’s mother is pushing hard, “Girls get married. What is the matter with you?” “Nothing, except I am heartbroken.” She cannot say that. Too melodramatic, no matter how true.
| ||||
| ||||
