New York Echoes (6 page)

“A hostile
middle-class environment? Really, Hank. Long ago, we accepted your sexual
orientation.”

“It would be difficult
to explain,” Henry said.

Spencer was quick to
recognize the dismissive nature of his remark.

“Did we live under the
same roof? Or am I imagining things. Childhood begins at birth. Are you saying
you never had a happy moment when you were growing up? Your mother must be
turning over in her grave.” And his daughter? Would she too reveal that her
childhood was unhappy? Considering how this present incident had shattered him,
he resolved to avoid inquiring. A double whammy would be too terrible to bear.

He felt himself
wrestling with a rising rage, searching his son's face, wondering if this
person who sat in front of him, was, indeed, his real son, child of his loins,
recipient of his love and devotion. Or was he a stranger? At this moment, it
seemed so.

“I hadn't meant to be
hurtful, Dad. It doesn't mean that I don't love and respect you. Or that I
didn't love Mom. Would you rather I told you that I had a happy childhood?
Didn't you always teach us to tell the truth, no matter how much it hurt?”

“It cannot be the
truth. No way,” Spencer protested. “Why now? Why did you tell me now?” He
ignored the issue of hurt since he was too wounded to confront it.

“I can't answer that
question, Dad. It just came out. I guess I hadn't expected your reaction.”

“It shouldn't have
come as a surprise,” Spencer said bitterly. “What you're telling me is that
because we never really knew who or what you were, we robbed you of a happy
childhood. Is that it?”

“You're overreacting,
Dad. It was all so long ago. What does it matter now? Think happy thoughts.
You're going on a great trip. Why dwell on the past?”

He felt trapped by
disappointment. Getting his rage under control required a great force of will.
He studied his son's handsome face, looked into his eyes. What was he thinking?
He could feel no connection. Between them was merely empty space, a great gulf.

“So my well-burnished
image of a happy family was just delusion.” Spencer muttered.

“That may be too
strong an interpretation Dad,” his son said with some annoyance. He hailed the
waiter and ordered coffees, then turned to his father. “Let's drop the subject.
Its really of no importance now.”

Henry shrugged and
waved to someone across the room. It was obvious that to his son, this
revelation was a small thing, a passing blip on the screen of his life. It was merely
confirmation of what Spencer could no longer deny to himself. To Henry, he had
long ago entered the age of irrelevance. In this environment, this fancy
restaurant that validated his son's success, he was a stranger, an object of
condescension and charity.

His son had severed
himself years ago, holding on only to the rituals of family. His periodic calls
and e-mails and this little lunch were Henry's version of kindness, a painless
tribute to an ancient memory, reserved mostly for obligation and, perhaps, to
satisfy a tiny trill of guilt.

When the check came,
his son reached for his wallet, but Spencer stayed his hand and pulled out a
small wad of folded cash.

“Please, Dad, let me. New York is my town. You're my guest.”

“Thanks, Hank, but I'd
prefer it this way.”

Henry nodded.

“I get it. Once a dad,
a dad forever.”

“Nothing is forever,”
Spencer muttered, laying out the cash to pay the check.

“I want a divorce,”
Carol Goldstein said.

Charlie, her husband, had just returned
from one of his occasional foreign business trips. He was a lawyer dealing in
international trade. They had been married twenty years and their daughter,
Sharon, was away at college, a sophomore at Harvard.

“You can't be serious,” Charlie said,
trying to remain calm and summoning the mask of his lawyerly demeanor. In fact,
he was stunned. It was beyond his comprehension. He and Carol had been what he
believed was a sharing, compatible, and contented couple all of their married
life. He had never been unfaithful and there had been numerous opportunities.
She had combined a busy career with elements of traditional wifely chores.

Charlie was Jewish and
Carol an Episcopalian, an issue that had been bridged without major
complications years ago. To spare themselves and their parents any undue
tension, they had been married in Manhattan's city hall. Both sets of parents
were secular, although they had schooled their children to respect their
religious heritage. Charlie had gone to Hebrew school and been bar mitzvahed,
and Carol had attended church with her parents and observed Christian
holidays.   

The reason for their city hall ceremony
was that they did not want to confront the complications of a joint religious
ceremony and the painful rituals of merging relatives of different backgrounds
forced to celebrate an event that might be uncomfortable for some of them.
Nevertheless, acceptance came early, since such marriages were now commonplace
in the new age of diversity. They had met at a student cafeteria at Brown University, where Charlie had been a senior and Carol a sophomore.

“He could have been a Hawaiian,” Carol's
mother said in an offhand moment after imbibing too much champagne at a
welcoming dinner in the Greenwich, Connecticut, home of Carol's parents, Mr.
and Mrs. Clark, after they had returned from their short honeymoon in the
Berkshires. It was a tiny slip of the tongue and in conflict with the family's
Wasp tradition of reserve. When he was in the company of Carol's parents and
relatives, Charlie always felt an oddly forbidden sense of guilty pleasure in
the knowledge that he, the Jew boy from the old ghetto land, had absconded with
the heart and body of this “Blonde Goddess” sorority girl of legend and
entitlement.

Charlie's parents,
liberal and progressive to the core, wore a façade of complete acceptance. When
they slipped in front of Carol, it came in the form of a joke, as in an
occasional remark from Charlie's father that “shiksas made the best wives.”
Pure shtick, Charlie would say, laughing without any attempt at rebuke.
Charlie's mother, in a typically Jewish Burns and Allen riposte, would remark
that there was nothing more domestically satisfying than a nice Jewish husband
for any girl, especially a shiksa.

It was a case, they both agreed, in
which true love trumped tribal affiliations and outmoded irrelevant rituals. Of
course, Charlie knew he was irrevocably and inescapably branded a Jew by his
name and to some, his looks. He was comfortable with that. It was, after all,
who he was, and he had too much pride to reject the idea that he had sprung
from an ancient people who had survived centuries of persecution and pain. Just
because he was not into their God fantasies didn't mean that he didn't consider
himself a Jew. He could never reject such a notion and he made no effort to
hide his pedigree. Carol accepted it fully and completely and gave him no
reason to think otherwise. She hadn't converted, which was okay with Charlie.
There was no need to. She had equal pride in her Christian antecedents.

Nor did they feel any sense of
compromise. The world had changed and they were part of it. It never occurred
to him that he was watering down the faith and she never acknowledged any hint
or attitude that she had surrendered to an alien horde.

From the beginning,
Carol and Charlie had asserted that they would be aggressively
non-denominational and if they had children they would allow them to choose
what religion they wished to identify with or none at all. Nor was it an issue
between them. There was one small concession about identity that Carol had
adopted early on. She called herself Carol Clark Goldstein. It was the name she
used in business as an advertising executive and in her personal relationships.
Completely supportive, Charlie would always introduce her to strangers with her
three names.

Their social and
business circles consisted of people of all persuasions, political and
religious, and all skin tones and accents. The old boundaries of past
generations seemed extinct in their own, although occasionally a word or
gesture might hint of a mild imagined reaction in someone observing Carol when
they were introduced. Goldstein? Funny, you don't look Jewish. Later they would
chuckle over the observation.           

As for their daughter,
with a name like Goldstein how could she deny that her father was a Jew? In
fact, as she matured, she was rather proud of it, although she stayed on the
edge of any formal affiliations with Jewish groups and shrugged off those areas
still cordoned off by prejudice against Jews. She could not understand the
bigotry, the extent of which surprised her once she got to college, but she
didn't lose any sleep over it, thinking those who practiced such sentiments
were bigoted fools.    

Between Carol and
Charlie, they made a good living and had an apartment on the Upper East Side,
with appreciating art on their walls, a well-stocked library featuring
leather-bound sets that Charlie had lovingly collected, and a large dining room
that could seat fourteen. Carol entertained frequently, and to all appearances
they were a typical successful Manhattan couple with a wide circle of friends
and an accurate image of being a loving, compatible couple with a bright,
attractive, and devoted daughter. They were, indeed, and Charlie had no clue or
premonition that this image was about to implode.

“You can't be serious,” Charlie had
replied to the sudden pronouncement, after he had recovered his equilibrium.
Carol had chosen the moment right after Charlie had refreshed himself from the
long plane trip, had showered, and gotten into his pajamas and robe.

“I know this comes as a shock, Charlie.
I'm sorry, really sorry.”

Quite obviously, she had rehearsed this
necessary confrontation over and over again in her mind. Knowing her
intimately, he knew she needed to get this over with quickly, having made the
decision some time ago. This was not a situation that one activates without
long deliberation.

“Is there someone else?” Charlie asked,
opting to cut to the chase. What other reason could there be?

“Yes there is,” Carol admitted with
unflinching candor. It was as if she had predicted his responses and had
studied her lines.

“May I ask who?”

“John Fletcher, a business associate.
You've never met him.”

“For how long?” Charlie said, finally
feeling the blow, his voice constricting.

“More than a year.”

Charlie felt the blood rise. He knew his
face had flushed and that if he held out his arms, his hands would be shaking.
He had, of course, encountered defeats and disappointment in his life, but
nothing more cataclysmic than this. There was no game plan in his arsenal of
reactions. He was, quite literally, emotionally crushed. Worse, he felt
foolish. How could he have not known?

“The heart has its own agenda, Charlie,”
Carol said. She had, he decided, worked long and hard on finding that response.
How else to justify such a life-changing decision? Blame it on the unknown, the
profound mystery.

“No second thoughts?” he asked, taking
refuge in politeness. Although he desperately wanted to show his rage, he had
suddenly decided that such a reaction would imply weakness and loss of dignity,
something he could not bring himself to display in front of her. He had been
cuckolded. There was no other word for it. She had come to his bed after wallowing
in the embrace of her lover, the remains of his sperm in her body. The image
was beyond awful.

“And Sharon? Does she know?”

Carol nodded.

“You could have at least told me first,”
Charlie said, feeling all self-respect drained, his pride demolished. He sensed
the first tiny stirrings of hatred.

“I think it needed to be a
mother-daughter thing,” she shrugged.

She had worked that out as well, Charlie
thought, a ploy to gain sympathy and justify her betrayal of the child's
father. 

“We cried together.
She needs to talk with you. I told her that I would be telling you tonight. She
loves you, Charlie, and she needs us both.”

Apparently she had won her point.

“My God . . .” he began but he couldn't
go on.

It would soon be time to go to sleep,
and he found himself worried about the sleeping arrangements. Perhaps as a
distraction his mind began filling with the technicalities of separation and
divorce, domicile arrangements, property divisions, legal details. The turmoil
ahead seemed daunting.

“We have got to be civilized and
sensible about this, Charlie.”

Charlie shrugged. The “civilized and
sensible” cliché seemed the least important item on his emotional agenda. What
he really wanted to do was go into a dark room, shut the door, curl up in a
fetal position and go to sleep, forever if possible, to spare himself the
impending pain and agony.     

Following the long-standing tradition of
an amicable divorce, he moved into a hotel and, in time, into a small apartment
near his office. The meeting with his daughter had been fatherly, with no
bitter or hateful allusions to her mother's affair as anything more than a
natural event, merely a manifestation of a midlife crisis. He resisted any
temptation to characterize her mother in a way that would be emotionally
disturbing to his daughter.

In his loneliness and despair as he
tried to adjust to his new life, he had slowly begun to feel a growing rage,
which he was finding unable to keep under control. He tried to rationalize his
situation by ascribing it more to self-pity and merely a passing trauma that
time would eventually heal. But as the myriad details of separation and divorce
progressed, he was growing exceedingly less understanding. They had each hired
lawyers who diligently and expensively prepared documents and listed their
possessions and the details of their dispossession, about which he found
himself growing increasingly uncomfortable.

When they met they were polite and
proper, especially if their daughter was present. As time went on they met infrequently,
letting their lawyers deal with the details. Once or twice he had actually seen
Carol with her new lover, John Fletcher, noting that he was definitely cut from
a different cloth. Once they had met in a restaurant. Fletcher struck him as a
Waspy country club frat boy, straight featured and uncircumcised, a goy down to
his toenails. So she had receded back to her roots. He was certain of this
truth even as he smiled and shook the man's hand. At that moment, hatred for
Carol gushed over him like a tsunami.

It was a delayed action, and his lawyer
had advised him to resist recrimination, settle the matter, and go on with his
life. Of course, he agreed in principal, but he knew the so-called civilized
and sensible paradigm was totally shattered. He was becoming increasingly
pissed off. He had been screwed, betrayed by a conniving, deceptive, lying
bitch. The Blonde Goddess had morphed into the witch of the west and all points
of the compass.

Living in his one-bedroom, furnished
apartment while the lawyers worked out the division of property, he would often
think of her living in the lap of luxury in their once prized apartment, now
populated by her lover, the Wasp goy, sleeping in his bed, screwing his once
worshipped blonde goddess, handling his cherished leather-bound books, and
enjoying his appreciating art. It began to inflame him emotionally and, finally
defying his lawyer's good advice, he began to throw obstacles in the way of
what once was an amicable divorce procedure.

“I want all of my leather-bounds, most
of the artwork, half of the furniture and half of every fucking thing in the
apartment. I want half of everything down to every spoon, knife, and fork in
the silverware. I want the apartment sold immediately.”

“It's your nickel,” the lawyer told him,
an obvious reference to his fee.

“Exactly.”

His resistance was, at first, adamant.
Her lawyer, at Carol's behest, tried various strategies to compromise. Of
course, she had her own agenda regarding the possessions, some of which was
unreasonable as far as he was concerned. It was, he supposed, a typical
standoff. At one point his daughter intervened, urging both parents to make
peace for the sake of their own happiness. Her plea made sense, of course, and
he hated the idea of being the cause of any emotional pain to his beloved
daughter. Apparently Carol and her lover were planning to marry after their
divorce was final, another item to fuel his anger.

Finally, after months of wrangling, he
decided that it was self-defeating and ridiculously expensive to continue the
battle, and he carefully drew up lines of compromise, although on some issues,
particularly when it came to his books and some of the artwork, he was still
determined to hold the line. To achieve a final settlement, the lawyers arranged
a meeting in the boardroom of Carol's lawyer.

They sat at either side of the
conference table, icily polite. Despite his bubbling rage, he admitted to
himself that she did look quite beautiful and self-possessed. She had, after
all, found a companion with whom to share her life. He had not been successful
in this regard, although he had tried.