Art of a Jewish Woman (15 page)

Edward

“I came by train for two days and a night,” Felice said, “and when I got off at Union Station it was dark. I couldn’t see where I was and the only address I had was the university, but it would be closed. I stayed the first night in a horrible hotel with prostitutes. I stuffed toilet paper in my ears to keep out the noise, and pushed the bed up to the door.”

The next day she found her way to Washington University Medical School and Dental School. In 1938 it was a smallish cluster of three- and four-story brick buildings on narrow Euclid Avenue behind the taller hospital buildings on Kingshighway across from Forest Park. The dental school stood out for its white brick, sooted gray from coal furnaces and nearby trains. The registrar directed Felice to a boarding house that was close by, and she began to work night and day on her courses.

She particularly needed the courses on prosthetics—making dentures, bridges, and crowns—but they were challenging because they were in English. Additionally, she resented prostethics, for which she had no skill. In France, stomatology training focused on diseases of the mouth and gums, extractions, and fillings. “It was maddening! Dentures were the work of technicians. My hands were good for pulling teeth but not for making replacements. Straw hands, they joked at home, because whenever I tried to fix something it became more broken.”

Not totally school-bound, she found her way to Mrs. Esther Krieger’s home. A businessman’s widow, Mrs. Krieger welcomed newly arrived immigrant and refugee Jewish students to her home on Friday nights for food, conversation with local students, advice and support. Her name resonated for Felice because a woman named Esther Kriger had been her family’s dressmaker in Szczuczyn. Mrs. Krieger also connected Felice up with the St. Louis Scholarship Foundation, and they supplemented the money from the Leopold Shepp Foundation with a few more hundred dollars.

Another benefit of going to Mrs. Krieger’s home was that she had arranged for St. Louis Symphony Orchestra season ticket holders to phone her when they weren’t going to use their seats so she could pass them on to her student visitors. This was how Felice came to be standing downtown on the corner of Market and 14th Streets, across from Kiel Auditorium, on a winter Saturday night in 1939. She was waiting for the bus to take her home after the concert. Edward Massie had been there too, with a girlfriend, and they were driving back to the West End when he saw Felice standing alone. She was slightly familiar to him, for he had gone to a few of Mrs. Krieger’s soirées. As chief resident with a gaggle of interns in tow, he had spoken with her while making rounds when she was hospitalized briefly with viral pneumonia.

Felice came down with her illness because, she believed, she hadn’t been eating enough for her scholarships only paid for two meals a day. Further, she kept the heat off to save money. Until she found out that there was a library open late, when it was cold she covered herself with bedding while sitting at her desk and shivered as she studied. Her study hours were much longer for her than for others because she wrote the lectures down in French while she listened to them. Then she would transcribe them back into English using the dictionary for every word she wasn’t sure about. She got a bad cold and started coughing, and when she went to the clinic they said, “You have pneumonia.” She didn’t believe them but told herself that she should follow their instructions.

They put her on a large ward with rows of beds for poor people, not in a private room. The ward for Negroes was across the hall. She realized then distinctly, for the first time, that everywhere she had lived except France things were always segregated—Jews and Poles, Arabs and Jews, Blacks and Whites. She thought to herself,
why can’t people just coexist? Why does the shade or color of skin or a different religion mean so much to people?
Lying in a hospital bed for a few days gave her time to think.

Edward, with his interns who were taking care of Felice, came to her bed once a day. He had just come back from a year of fellowship at Peter Brent Brigham Hospital at Harvard. Felice recalls, “He walked up in his long white coat with his students in tow in their white pants and short white jackets. Very handsome. He told them I had a viral pneumonia. I listened while he explained it to the students crowded around my bed. On the table next to my bed I had a few of my textbooks. He picked one up and asked me why I was reading them. I explained that I needed to get licensed in America. He told me I needed to rest, stop smoking, eat more, and turn up the heat in my room. I knew he was being compassionate, even if what he was asking was not possible.”

The next time he saw her, at the bus stop, he acted on impulse and asked his date if it was okay if they gave the girl a ride home so she wouldn’t have to stand in the dark. It was the last time Edward went out with that girl; Felice and Edward started seeing each other. My mother had found her man. He was the finest man she ever knew, she said. He had a sense of authority and of dignity, but he wasn’t pushy. He was kind and honest. He was good looking. He was intelligent and people looked up to him.

For Edward, born and bred in St. Louis of poor Russian immigrant parents with little education, Felice was an exotic beauty with a sense of style who brought him a breath of air from the wider world. The two had come together, each with qualities the other had been seeking, at a time that they both were ready for and needed each other.

Years later, when I was fighting with my mother over how I should dress or what seemed like her unreasonable, autocratic demands about keeping my room clean and the house neat, my father said, “She is the smartest woman in St. Louis, but she has been through a lot,” meaning cut her some slack when she is unreasonable; think of how lucky you are to have her.

Felice’s and Edward’s courtship was clouded because Edward’s mother, Rose, opposed it. In her mind, Felice’s English was poor, she had strange ideas about politics, her head was into godless philosophies, she had no family, she had no money, and she had no connections. Her son was an academic star, a doctor, and could have his pick, she fantasized, of the wealthiest Jewish girls in St. Louis. Edward’s girlfriend when he met Felice was one of these girls; she later moved beyond the city limits and started a horse breeding farm.

Rose was scraping by. Her late husband, Edward’s father, Nathan Massie (Americanized from Mazia) had played the clarinet in John Philip Souza’s band until he developed heart disease and needed to stop traveling. Then they bought a mom-and-pop corner grocery store on Clark Avenue in the inner city near Union Station. Nathan had passed away two years before Edward and Felice met. Edward’s older brother Joel was just starting out as an accountant. Rose was tired, looking for support, and wanted a daughter-in-law who would be an asset to her son’s career.

Perhaps Felice and Edward’s courtship would have been easier, and America would have felt less foreign, more hospitable to her, if Rose and Felice had become close. Perhaps Felice brought her ambivalence and competitiveness with her own mother, Bela, into the relationship with her mother-in-law. When Rose learned that Edward and Felice were engaged, she met her for lunch and said, “I know all about you. You are just a maid or something else.” She softened a little later and offered Felice $100 as a wedding present, and was shocked when Felice said she couldn’t accept it because Rose needed it more than she.

Since Rose herself had arrived in America at fourteen and gone to work immediately, she couldn’t understand Felice’s delight in literature and philosophy. But Edward basked in the culture, knowledge and excitement that his new girlfriend brought into his life; she had seen Paris and New York City; she introduced him to French cinema; and she was emotional. Edward had been nowhere except his one year in Boston as a student.

More than anything else, he was a Midwesterner—temperate, straightforward, quiet, unassuming, dutiful, and reliable. His friends were his brother and a few high school buddies. To them, travel meant going to “The Clubhouse,” their shack with screened-in porches on the Meramac River near its confluence with the Mississippi southwest of the city. His whole being had been focused on succeeding in medicine. He never read anything just for pleasure except the newspaper.

Medicine and science were his life and they gave him great pleasure. He attended undergraduate school at Washington University on a tuition grant, and his grades were so good that he was nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship but was turned down because he had no extracurricular activities except the track team, on which he didn’t star. He went straight on to medical school.

Shortly after they started dating, my mother flunked out of dental school. Making false teeth was just too much for her, and she threw up her hands in frustration. Maybe she had a mental block against false teeth because her mother had told her that Felice’s birth was responsible for her needing false teeth. Certainly her family’s fate in the impending cataclysm in Europe distracted her from school.

Felice knew about the voyage of the ship
St. Louis,
for the story was plastered on the front pages of the newspaper. Named for the 13
^th
Century saint known for piety and fairness among nations (not known for his decree expelling Jews from France), as was the city in which Felice had landed, the
St. Louis
had sailed from Hamburg, Germany on May 13, 1939. It had 937 Jewish refugees on board who thought they had escaped the Nazis. However, first Cuba and then the United States refused them landing and forced the liner back to Europe, where the passengers faced death. Felice had arrived in the nick of time; the British had sealed off Palestine and the United States accepted no more refugees until after the war.

Probably she sensed that her future lay with Edward, that she finally could let go of her father’s vision of dentistry as her source of security, and that Edward would earn enough money for both of them. For the present, however, there was no more scholarship money for her room, and she needed a job.

She polished up her governess credentials, and Esther Krieger introduced her to Julia Kogan, the grown sister of Carol Kogan, who was in her junior year at Mary Institute. It was an exclusive girls’ preparatory school, and Carol, like Cassie in New Haven, needed tutoring, but she also needed a lot more. She was depressive, and her parents, impatient to be free of child-raising responsibilities, had decamped to their second home in Florida. The father, a wealthy industrialist, hired Felice to move into their spacious apartment and be Carol’s companion for her last year in high school.

It was the fall of 1939, and at first my mother was enchanted. She was living in the stately Versailles Apartments on graceful Lindell Boulevard between Kingshighway and Euclid, one block from Forest Park. The vast expanse, developed for the 1904 World’s Fair, was larger than New York’s Central Park. On the corner of Lindell and Kingshighway was the famous Chase Hotel, where the Chase Club showcased the same stars as the Copacabana in New York, Chicago’s Palmer House, and the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles. Next door to the Chase, overlooking Portland Place and the park, stood the Park Plaza. Just completed in 1930, it was an elegant, gleaming white brick and concrete structure that rose gracefully to twenty-eight stories, making it the city’s first high-rise apartment building.

Felice had her own bathroom and room at the Versailles. A woman who did the cooking and cleaning also lived in the apartment. From her balcony she could reach out and touch the tops of the sycamore trees and see Forest Park and a children’s playground. But as regularly happened in her life, bitter circumstances infused the sweetness. Carol was severely emotionally ill. She scarcely ate, she felt too tired to do her homework, and she could barely put one foot before the other to get to school. Felice was really her psychiatric nurse. Carol’s situation and hers were a strange aberration of the normal. Carol was truly rich and felt depleted of everything, and even when poor Felice felt rich. She tried to plan things for them to do when she wasn’t in school, like going for walks in the park and outings to the symphony, the art museum, movies, ice skating, but it made Carol feel more depressed. Felice tried to make her more vital. Carol responded, “How can you do so many things?”

Felice would say, “It is normal to want to do things.”

She asked Edward for advice, and he said, “She needs to see a doctor to make sure her thyroid and blood sugar are okay.” Felice took Carol to an internist, and her tests were okay. Carol was very still. She showed no emotions. Everything was tied up inside her. Felice feared that she would kill herself and tried to get her to see the many possibilities life held. She knew the girl needed a psychiatrist, and Edward gave her the name of a prominent one, Conrad Sommer. Carol’s sister called every day to ask how she was doing, and Felice kept urging her to set an appointment for her sister with Conrad Sommer, but she never did. She kept saying that her family wanted to see if the Christmas visit with her parents in Miami would help.

Finally, Felice said, “Don’t call me anymore. Your calls are pointless.”

Julia got angry at her, said, “Don’t dare talk to me like that,” and threatened to fire her. Felice explained that she didn’t have anything new to report, that she wasn’t the psychiatrist Carol needed, and that she was too busy trying to be a companion and tutor for her sister, so it would be better if she called less frequently. She thought to herself,
they couldn’t fire me anyway. Where else would they find somebody to do what I’m doing?

During Christmas in Miami, when her parents were out for the evening, Carol took an overdose of pills from their medicine cabinet, lay down in her mother’s bed, and died. The next time Felice saw Edward, she was in tears about the girl’s death and the meanness of her family. She had seen many misfortunes, but this was the first time she had seen one like this
in
a family. She had two weeks to leave the apartment and no job. Edward took her hand and said he had a proposal.