My Summer With George (13 page)

During dinner—which I have to admit was delicious, full of things I’d never heard of before, like kielbasa, gołumbki, and jellied pigs feet—the men joined the women in talking about a host of people I didn’t know. The entire family was passionately interested in the smallest details about these people—what kind of car the husband drove, where they spent their vacations, where they were going for Thanksgiving dinner, and how many children they had. After dinner, the men stood up and walked straight back into the front room without the slightest shame. They went back to the glass box, leaving the mess for the women to clean up, as if the women were their servants. I had never seen this kind of behavior before, except at Jerry’s house last night. It never happened in our family: we all helped, Jerry along with the rest of us. But not here. Jerry went into the living room with the men, and Delia into the kitchen with the women. The pressure was on me to go into the kitchen too, and for once I did the right thing—and spent the next hour simmering in outrage, listening in furious silence to the stupid conversation as I dried dish after dish.

Finally, the women went into the sunroom to gossip some more about some more people I didn’t know. I would have given anything for a book. There were no books downstairs, so I sneaked upstairs to look around. I found a bookcase in a narrow hall leading to two small bedrooms and pulled out one strange title after another, until I found one whose cover claimed it was a best-seller. It was by a man called James Branch Cabell, unknown to me. I went into the bathroom and locked the door. But soon enough, someone had to use the toilet. Hiding the book under my sweater, I darted out and into one of the tiny bedrooms. There I happily remained until Delia came up and found me. She was shocked and angry. She said this was a rude way to repay her parents’ hospitality. She was very hurt and I felt terrible because she’d been so kind to me. She seemed to have forgiven me by the time I went back to school, but I vowed not to spend another Thanksgiving that way. Little did I know.

I looked forward to Christmas and being with my sisters, who, unlike Delia, shared some of my badness. After all, they had not scrupled to drive Audrey out of the apartment. Their rooms were small, but each of them had her own, unlike at home. We had our old problem—four young women sharing a single bathroom—but remained good-natured, making jokes. Having been in Manhattan for almost six months, Merry and Tina acted like sophisticates, showing their greenhorn sister the great city, but it was soon obvious that they didn’t know the famous sites any better than I did. How could they? Their New York was a place where you took the bus or subway to work, walked down the block to the supermarket for food for dinner, cleaned up after dinner, straightened up the apartment, washed your clothes, set your hair, and did your nails. There was no glamour in their lives. So they too were awed by the huge Christmas tree and the skating rink and the fancy restaurant at Rockefeller Center. I determined—I took a silent vow—that someday I would eat there. We rode the Staten Island ferry and went to the Empire State Building and walked down Fifth Avenue (in those days a great fashion street), passing Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and the grand, forbidding public library at Forty-second Street.

On the weekend, we went to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas show, featuring the Rockettes; just standing in line for two hours on a street broader and busier than any I’d ever seen before this week was enough to thrill me. We went to Chinatown for dinner, and I found the food, which I had never had before, odd but delicious; and to Little Italy, where I was introduced to pizza and saw many kinds of what we used to call spaghetti (my mother’s came from a can) but they called pasta. Along with the Urtnowskis’ Thanksgiving dinner, these meals were my first encounter with real food, which I had never known could be so delicious.

I knew I was supposed to admire Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and Saint John the Divine and Grant’s Tomb, but I didn’t. What I loved was wandering through Greenwich Village. We stopped in a little Italian café to have some very strong coffee served in tiny cups. And one night my sisters and their friends took me to a place called Nick’s, where they drank beer and I drank Coke and we listened to Dixieland jazz. We heard Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman, and Bobby Hackett playing “At Sundown” and “California, Here I Come,” in ways I could hardly recognize. The music was full of joy and humor, yet profoundly sad at the same time. I fell in love with it. That was the best night of my entire life.

I went back to school inspired: I had seen a brave new world, and now I knew what I wanted in life. That visit was the start of my New York dream, my first vision of how I wanted to live—not a life you settle for and endure, like poor Momma’s, but a desirable life. When I finished college, I would go to Manhattan. I would get a wonderful, interesting job and my own apartment and eat every night in Little Italy or Chinatown. I didn’t yet know what kind of job, but I figured I was smart enough (I held my own at Mount Holyoke); I was used to hard work; and I was determined. Everything in my culture assured me that these were the prerequisites for success.

It was strange seeing all my sisters with boyfriends. Merry and Tina had never had boyfriends before. I was seventeen and a sophomore in college, but I’d never been out on a date. My sisters’ boyfriends, who had accompanied us to the Village and taken us to our Chinese and Italian dinners, were fun. These boys—well, I guess they were really men—seemed lighter-hearted, easier and jokier than girls…or, at least, than my sisters and me. There were no boys at Mount Holyoke, but the school held teas and parties, inviting boys from Harvard, Brown, and Yale. I didn’t go to them. I said boys bored me, but the truth was, I was frightened and shy. I knew my clothes were not right; I didn’t know how to dance. But after New York, I began to think it might be fun to meet boys, and I decided to attend a tea.

Before risking it, I broke into my bank account and took out a hundred dollars. Early one Saturday, I took the bus to Boston and went to Filene’s Basement and bought a turquoise dress that looked like silk but wasn’t, a black wool coat, and black ballet slippers. The dress was in the current style, the New Look, which was wildly popular—long and slim, with a peplum. But my shoes were not stylish: the New Look required platform heels, which made me teeter like a drunk on ice, and I couldn’t walk in them.

The first tea of the season was for Harvard boys. I entered the room with my roommate, Irmgard. The girls all wore dresses like mine (thank heavens!) and heels, with white gloves. I was mortified: not only were my shoes wrong, but I didn’t have white gloves. I wanted to turn around and leave, but Irmgard tugged on my arm. There really was tea, served from huge silver pots by two ladies with blue hair, sitting on couches at opposite sides of the room. You had to stand in line and wait, and then they asked you, Sugar? One lump or two? Cream or lemon?—things like that. I didn’t know what to ask for, so I got what Irmgard had, tea with cream and sugar, and I hated it. But of course, no one would know if you didn’t drink it.

The boys were all at one end of the room, wearing suits and ties. The two camps looked each other over and tentatively began negotiations—a process eased by a few people who knew each other already. In time, everyone was coupled, talking volubly. I ended up with a boy whose father manufactured automobiles. Buicks, I think. When he told me his father made cars, I thought he meant he worked on an assembly line, and I was surprised. I didn’t think men who worked on assembly lines could afford Harvard. I thought maybe this boy was a scholarship student, like me, which made me feel easier with him. But I must have said something wrong, because the boy—I recall to this day that his name was Darnton (which didn’t seem the name an assembly line worker would have chosen)—gave me an angry, supercilious look and said, what did I think, that his father was a mechanic or something? On the contrary, he said, his father was the head of it. The company that made the cars. The boy seemed to think this made him irresistible and almost divine, as if he was literally a prince. I was mortified at my faux pas and also by his manner. I hadn’t encountered arrogance like this before. I started to feel dizzy and needed to go back to my room and lie down. But the boy was right about his irresistibility: the moment I left him, three girls moved in on him.

I don’t know if such social events still occur. I doubt it; I think there are almost no single-sex schools now. Young people are much easier with each other and freer about—well, the word no one uttered in those days: sex. But my dizziness, which recurred at every coed social event I attended, arose from the tension induced in me by the ambient conflict between two different agendas, neither of which I understood or shared. I say this with the benefit of hindsight; I didn’t understand it then. My agenda was fairly simple—to find a boy to have fun with the way my sisters seemed to have fun with their boyfriends. But that was not the dominant agenda of the room.

As I now know, the girls were looking for love, marriage, and happiness ever after—i.e., Prince Charming. The boys were looking for nooky. Moreover, as I also now know, this doesn’t really change over the years. Some women may have periods in their lives when they, too, seek nooky, but the chances are they are hoping the nooky turns out to be attached to a Prince Charming who can become or replace a worn-out Prince husband or lover. And some men do reach a point where they allow themselves to acknowledge their yearning for happiness ever after and consider finding it in someone who is less than a perfect ten, maybe even less than a seven. But that’s rare in heterosexual men.

At school, really rich girls and boys acted as if they had absolute rights. Girls seemed to expect lots of spending money; cashmere sweaters, pearls, and at least one fur jacket; to be picked up and driven around; and to feel taken care of—luxuriously if possible. Boys seemed to expect to own things, and every boy I met at Mount Holyoke transformed his experience into possession. Whether it was something he had done, like skiing or visits to England; or somebody or something he knew, like an author or mathematics; or something he really
did
own, like a car, everything was entered into some mysterious budget, in which a certain score denoted a winner.

In fact, the boys
had
done things—they had skied, sailed, played tennis or golf, traveled abroad. But so had the girls—my roommate had even ridden in steeplechases—who didn’t treat the things they had done as possessions, items in a great scorekeeping, the way the boys did. Boys bragged about everything—their skiing, their sailing, their tennis, even their drinking. All of this overwhelmed me. Between my ignorance of the manners expected at such events and the paucity of my wardrobe and my pocketbook, I was uncomfortable enough to make excuses on the few occasions when a boy invited me to his school to a dance or to a football weekend.

The upshot was, I didn’t learn anything about romance in college.

As the summer of my sophomore year approached, my siblings spent considerable time on the telephone, discussing my future. I, happily immersed in physics and French and Renaissance literature, was unaware of this until Susan called me one evening and told me it had been decided that I would spend the summer with Jerry.

I balked. I had not found Bridgeport even faintly interesting. Why couldn’t I stay with my sisters in Manhattan? Or get a job as a waitress in a summer resort? Susan said there was no room for me in the Manhattan apartment, I could certainly see that: it was one thing to bunk in for ten days, but three months would strain things. And sure I could get a job at a resort, but it was already May. You had to have a job like that sewed up by spring: had I done that? I had to confess I had passively done nothing, leaving worries about my future to others. I liked Delia, didn’t I? Susan argued. And Jerry wanted me to come. Jerry really loved me. Well, that silenced me. Because I loved Jerry too. So I packed my things and Jerry came and got me, and when he hugged me hello, I thought again how sweet he was. But he never talked, so spending time with him was difficult.

Delia worked in an insurance company. She didn’t seem to mind my living with them. I suspected she was actually grateful for a little conversation, but she said she was grateful for my help with the cooking and the marketing and the dishes and the cleaning. Jerry left all the housework to her, just as if she didn’t have a job. I couldn’t believe this man was my sweet-natured brother, who had been so obliging to my mother. Not that he wasn’t sweet to Delia; he was. He just never lifted a finger to help in the house.

Beyond that, he never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. He had bought a television set, and like Delia’s brothers and father, all he liked to do at night was sit in front of it. It’s true he was always tired: the poor guy went to work at four in the morning and didn’t get home until afternoon. He’d take a nap, then flop in his new reclining chair and eat his dinner from a tray table in front of that blasted box. Apparently, he didn’t love his work: his skin had turned gray, and he acted distracted. But he was mesmerized by television.

Delia never complained about this, never got angry at him. I felt sorry for Delia, who was a truly good person. Of course, I also had a little contempt for her, because of my bad character. But I scrupulously followed their house rules. I never discussed Jerry with her beyond his preferences for dinner or sports shirts. I never brought up anything more serious about her than her weight or her hairdo or the new lamp she’d bought. I pretended to be a good person. I behaved as good people were supposed to in 1949.

One afternoon, though, I slipped. It was a beautiful Sunday, and Delia, who never got out, begged Jerry to take her for a drive to Westport or some other lovely place—she couldn’t drive. He was sullen and grudging; he didn’t say no, but he didn’t move. He hadn’t shaved and he looked like a bum. Seeing Delia’s crushed expression, I exploded. After all, he was my brother.

“Jesus, Jerry, what’s the matter with you? You look and act like a lazy bum!” I cried in exasperation. “You don’t want to do anything or go anyplace! You barely carry on a conversation! You’re a zombie! Delia works all week too, you know. She’d like to get out of the house on a Sunday!”