Just One Catch (45 page)

Joe's relationship with Erica had
never
been easy—in part, because she was too young to understand his humor. Once, while Shirley was out shopping, he stuck little Erica on the upper shelf of a bedroom closet to see if Shirley would notice the child was missing. The experience frightened and puzzled Erica. When she was older, he told her he was going to lock her out of the apartment unless she came home with pizza every time she went out. To her, this was not a game, especially as, for days, the threat remained imminent.

And in part, Joe stayed masked in front of his children. Mario Puzo often remarked on how important it was to Joe to maintain control of his feelings—so much so, he couldn't have fun, even with his kids. If he caught himself feeling happy, he'd pull a sullen face.

In her teens, Erica tried to understand him indirectly through her mother. Often, he seemed “grumpy, disaffected and blasé, casual, seemingly bored by his own accomplishments,” Erica said. But when she talked to Shirley, she glimpsed a different side of him. “When
Catch-22
came out, my mother told me, she and Dad would often jump into a cab late at night and ride around the city, just to look at all the bookstore windows filled with the red, white, and blue of his book jacket. He would giggle at the sight. There was a part of him, the poor boy from Coney Island, that had never stopped giggling. You just had to know how to read him.”

As for her: “[I]t took many years for me to be able to properly decode him, learn the language … recognize the love he deeply felt, couched in gravelly growls and R's that often leaned into guttural V's. Like examining some complex pointillistic painting, standing too close was merely distorting.”

Joe could not see Erica clearly, either. The happy baby who had charmed his mother, and given the old woman simple pleasures late in life, had become an individual with opinions, adult needs, and ambitions of her own. “[S]he is, I fear … dissolving into her surroundings right before my eyes,” Slocum says of
his
daughter. “She wants to be like other people her age. I cannot stop her; I cannot save her. Something happened to her.… Her uniqueness is fading.” The novel expresses every mother and father's lament: A child's growth augers prideful, painful losses for the parent.

Eventually, Erica learned to appreciate her father's nostalgia, fears of aging, and puzzlement. When
Something Happened
appeared in 1974, as she was about to graduate from NYU, she published her first piece, in
Harper's.
A response to the novel, it was entitled “It Sure Did.” She wrote:

What “happens” to Bob Slocum's children, that ineffable and awesome thing that he can neither explain nor undo, that change in his children that leaves him feeling so alone and so inept at human contact, is simply that his kids have grown up, have matured.… A terrible thing, this business of growing up, but it happens to the best of us.… [It] means adjusting yourself to the shortcomings of [your family], realizing their limitations and being glad that they are no more abundant than they are … and then going out into the world to transcend the disappointments.

This was hard-won wisdom. “Erica had a tough time with her father,” says Norman Barasch. “One time she told me he said to her, ‘You're not my daughter! You're not my daughter!' I was mad at him. I thought I couldn't be friends with someone who said something like that. And so we didn't talk for a while.” Erica's
Harper's
piece drew little praise from Joe—her defensiveness, the hurt beneath the insight, was hard to miss. He told Erica all he wanted was for her to follow a path of steady work and money.

Meanwhile, like Slocum, Joe saw himself in his son: another form of misperceiving a child. For the time being, it made for a relatively smooth surface: perhaps too
much
parental concern. Ted responded to music and language. He admired his father's war medals in a dresser drawer. He watched television and played with his dad's tape deck. He enjoyed trips to Coney Island with his father.

“I always felt I was a disappointment to him but, to be honest, I've always felt that way with most people,” Ted says. In part, he attributes this feeling to the family's noncommunicativeness. “He [n]ever mentioned his mother or father to me. And I felt strongly that I shouldn't ask,” Ted says.

He remembers “the year
Sergeant Pepper
came out, I went to summer camp in the Berkshires (I was very homesick). When I returned to New York, everything was fine for a few days. My Aunt Sylvia was supposed to visit us and have dinner one night. Well, that night the doorbell rings and someone, I think my sister, goes to get it and
that
very second is when my parents told me Sylvia's husband, Bernie, had passed away. While the door was being opened to let her in! I didn't really care for him but was stunned by the timing.… I can't help but laugh [now].… I can't explain why it's funny. It's just indicative of the family.”

Ted loved the family's summers on Fire Island; his memories of the place suggest he was an unusually sensitive child. One day, Joe “warned me there was going to be something called an eclipse and told me not to look at the sun. I was so frightened that during the eclipse I hid under my bed,” he says. On another occasion, “I was on the beach with a kite and Joe and I were flying it. All of a sudden the lifeguard (who seemed so old to me then but was probably sixteen) comes over and asks if he can hold the kite. I was reluctant. He kept asking nicely. Joe told me to hand the lifeguard the kite—everything would be okay. I was maybe six or seven but I
knew
something terrible would happen. I handed the lifeguard the kite and sure enough within six seconds the kite slipped out of his hands and was gone.”

Shirley's cousins recall hearing from her mother that Ted struggled with school, experienced behavioral and discipline problems, but they never met him. When pressed for details, Dottie insisted Ted was working through his troubles and Joe and Shirley were “good parents.” “Teddy—that was a mystery,” says Audrey Chestney. Ted confirms he didn't like school but prefers not to discuss that period of his life.

In
Now and Then,
Joe recalled taking Erica and Ted to Coney Island one day, along with George Mandel, Mario Puzo, and their kids. “The very qualities that had disappointed us in the past made Steeplechase now ideal for languid fathers in their forties,” Joe wrote. “It was clean, it was orderly, it was safe. While the children chased [one another] … gawking … enjoy[ing] themselves … the three of us could rest calmly on a bench and talk quietly.”

Before he left that day, Joe recognized the “passing of generations.” He remembered running up to weary older people as a kid and asking if he could take their remaining ride tickets. Now he was one of those old dodderers who would have gladly relinquished the goods.

He often felt tired. He struggled with his weight. He was approaching two hundred pounds and did not feel comfortable in his body. “He went to a health club called Al Roon's on Broadway in the 70's (I think men only), before joining the Y,” Ted recalls. “That Y is not around anymore … it was in the 60's on Broadway, I think. Lots of famous people went there [like the singer Paul Simon] and my father used to run around the small track. (It was something like five hundred times around to make a mile.) This was before there were dozens of gyms all over the place.”

Joe noticed Shirley—still, as Erica said, a glamorous woman—fighting to adjust to middle age. She did not like to undress in front of him in the light. She felt self-conscious about the red marks her girdles left on her flesh. Sometimes she drank a little wine in the evenings—never too much, but if a day had been particularly tense, with chores, children, misunderstandings with Joe, it did not take much to make her irritable or, more rarely, sorry for herself. Dolores Karl saw she was discomfited by Joe's growing celebrity and the attention it brought him from women. In public, Joe always kidded about the adjustments necessary in a long marriage. “Neither one of us has ever had a divorce. We're beginning to think there's something wrong with us,” he told one interviewer. To another, he said, “Maybe we just don't quit easily. I know many people whose marriages have ended for reasons I don't think are serious enough. If everyone were to end a marriage because of disappointments or dissatisfactions or moods or temporary attractions, almost no marriage would survive.”

In
Something Happened
—certain sections of which Joe did not want to publish in magazines, fearing that, removed from the novel's context, they would embarrass Shirley—his narrator laments the loss of sexual novelty. Alternately, he cherishes and bemoans the infatuated tolerance that years of familiarity instill in a marriage. “I don't think my wife has learned how to lie to me yet. (My wife doesn't know how to flirt and doesn't know how to lie to me.) When she does have something she hopes to conceal, she remains silent about it and hopes I will not inquire,” says Bob Slocum. “I try to keep away from whatever I think she is trying to hide. I suspect she does the same for me (I suspect she knows a great deal more about me than she discloses). Our conversations, therefore, are largely about nothing, and frequently restrained.”

In another passage, Slocum recalls his wife “was always afraid” they'd be caught making love when they were young. “I didn't care,” he says. “I was a pretty hot kid once. I didn't care whether she enjoyed it or not; just as long as I got
mine
.” These days, “I often wish I were driven … by that same hectic mixture of blind ardor, haste, and tension,” he says. “Maybe that's what's missing.… I have more control and maturity now … but it isn't nearly as much fun anymore as it used to be with her, and I miss her greatly and love us both very deeply when I remember how we used to be.”

The family always found ways of displacing affection. Erica recalls “begging and nagging and driving my parents crazy about getting a puppy” when she was in high school. “One day Dad and Speed went to some pet shop on Queens Boulevard in Queens and Dad brought home a beagle named Lucy after ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.'” For a while, the family lavished love on the dog, but that didn't last. “Lucy only lived [a short while],” Erica says. “She fell over in the park one day and sprained her back, and the next thing she was paralyzed and in agony, and it was only going to keep getting worse.”

Work, though difficult, offered some consolation whenever Joe got to brooding about what was missing in his life. He fiddled with screenplays, writing with George Mandel; he filled cards with thematic possibilities for
Something Happened;
now and then, he spoke to movie people about the slow progress of turning
Catch-22
into a film. “[A]ctors ranging all the way from Wally Cox to Jack Lemmon, John Gielgud [and] Zero Mostel” contacted him, asking, “Don't you think I'm right for the part [of Yossarian]?” “Nobody else,” Joe would tell them. “You're just the guy I had in mind when I wrote it.”

“And I really believed it when I was saying it,” he said. “I don't know whether it was because I genuinely felt that
Catch-22
as a novel was so adaptable that any good actor could play it, or whether I was corrupt, more corrupt than I understood myself to be.”

During this period, Joe wrote, discarded, and rewrote drafts of a stage version of
Catch-22,
encouraged by Broadway producer David Merrick and actor Paul Newman, who urged him to work with the Actors Studio in New York. One of Joe's ideas was to have four actors and actresses speaking lines from the book and reciting passages from Shakespeare echoed in the novel. The more he pursued this thought, the more he entertained the possibility of staging
mis
readings of Shakespeare. Eventually, this tack led him to write an original play. He would call it
We Bombed in New Haven.

He rented an office with a few other people, “purportedly for writing reasons, but I'm not so sure,” Ted says. “[It] had an old-fashioned slot machine in it.” Over time, Joe “had several studios,” Ted recalls. “One was on 59th Street west of Broadway and Eighth Avenue. He also had one in the apartment complex west of Lincoln Center … rented from a man who taught French history at City College.”

After spending a morning in his studio, he dropped in on friends. Regularly, he met with Joan Goodman, an old pal from his NYU days. He'd stop to see Alice Denham, who had moved to a small apartment west of Central Park. “Welcome to the Uppa West Side!” he'd bellow, coming through the door. “[C]lassy joint. Very uptown. You getting rich modeling?”

She'd talk about the novel she was trying to sell. She wanted to quit being a photographer's model. She asked Joe if his editor would look at her manuscript. “I'm not sure S & S is into female books,” he told her, but he said he'd ask. Over drinks, he said it would be a “miracle” if Hollywood ever “stop[ped] diddling” and did
Catch-22.
But no matter. He'd gotten his money up front. “My charmed life is paved with green,” he'd say unconvincingly.

One day, after a couple of scotches, “Joe strong-armed my head [and pulled me] toward him,” Denham wrote. “I'm a young stud, baby,” he said, half-joking. “How come we never made out?”

“You're hitched,” she replied. She hated to admit he was too pudgy for her taste. She wrote, “I thought he deserved one good smack for fame,” so she gave him a “movie-star” kiss.

In 1967, Bobbs-Merrill accepted Denham's explicitly feminist novel,
My Darling from the Lions.
She contacted her male literary pals, hoping they'd blurb the book. They all declined. “I honestly can't believe my name would sell a single copy.… I'll keep an eye out for reviews,” William Gaddis wrote her. The most poignant passages in Denham's memoir concern her growing realization that her writer friends had never taken her seriously, had spent time with her because she was attractive and, for many of them, sexually available. “Why had I thought I was one of the gang … when I was the Second Sex?” she wrote.