Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (3 page)

We woke up the next morning and hitched a ride to the Ford dealership in town to see if they could tow my car in. I had had a Toyota for years, but this time when I was in the market for a car, I’d bought a Ford Taurus, because the union workers who supported Jim wouldn’t be happy if they saw me driving a vehicle that wasn’t made in the U.S.A. by union labor. This was the first of many concessions I would make for the campaign—or “the cause,” as I called it.

At the dealer’s we learned how dangerous the roads were, especially where we’d had our accident. A few days earlier, a driver had been killed there. That helped keep everything in perspective. I was grateful that neither Jim nor I had been hurt. I made arrangements to have the car towed while we set off in the slushy snow in search of breakfast. We were grungy but hungry. Afterward we walked up and down the main street, where Jim met a couple, formerly from New Jersey, who recognized him and wanted to chat. Then we went back to the Ford dealer, only to learn that although my Taurus looked all right on the outside, there was a significant amount of damage. Since the storm had paralyzed the region, it would take several days for the parts to come. I was resigned to the fact that I would have to go back to New Jersey without the car.

WHAT WOULD MY PARENTS
say? They didn’t even know where I’d gone. Although I was in my early thirties, I still lived at home with them and would remain there until Jim and I married. This was not unusual for a daughter from a traditional and close-knit Portuguese Catholic family. Guys often left home and moved to their own place, but not the girls. My brother Paul hadn’t moved out until he got married to Elvie when he was twenty-four or twenty-five, although my other brother, Rick, had moved out during college when he was twenty-one or twenty-two and single. Still, daughters typically lived at home until they were ready to establish their own home with their husband. My going away with Jim was not something my mother and father would have approved of. But it was not something they forbade either. It wouldn’t have worked anyhow. In public I had always been quiet and self-contained—in school, in Girl Scouts, with my neighborhood friends—but in my family I had always been seen as someone who had a mind of her own and would give you a piece of it with very little prompting. I was “determined” if they liked what I was doing and “stubborn” or “headstrong” if they didn’t.

By the time I was nineteen and had my first serious boyfriend, my parents and I had tacitly adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. I lived my own life, and I came and went as I pleased, but I was always careful to let them know when to expect me so they wouldn’t worry. My parents didn’t pry, or at least not too much, and I kept my private life private. I was deeply involved with my family, well mannered and respectful like many first-generation daughters of immigrants, but I was a contemporary American woman as well. So I had told them that I was going to spend the weekend with a friend. Jim and I had gone away before, but I never told my mom and dad that I was going with him, except when we went to Newport with Jimmy and Lori Kennedy.

All the signs on this trip seemed to be pointing me one way—in the direction of home—but in the end Jim and I opted to head for Montreal by train. We got a lift to the Plattsburgh station, which looked like something from an old black-and-white movie, with its worn wooden benches and old-fashioned cash register. There was none of the hustle and bustle of Newark, New York City, or Washington, D.C., just a woman in a corner selling homemade goods—jams, cookies, and crocheted doilies.

At the time of our car accident, we were about an hour’s drive from Montreal, but the train ride would take several hours. By now I was really anxious to get there, and by midafternoon we did. Compared to the motel barracks of the night before, our hotel in Montreal was a palace—a room with a hot shower, thick carpeting, and a soft, inviting mattress. No need for socks in this city, or any other article of clothing, for that matter; so in the spirit of the Valentine’s weekend, we began our celebration in the most intimate setting. I may have been a Catholic, but I wasn’t a nun, and I was happy to share this passionate weekend with Jim.

Now, I’m not the type to kiss and tell, and it goes against my nature to be so blunt, but there is something I need to address if only to get it out of the way. So let me say outright that on this occasion, as on many others, the sex was good. There was nothing in this moment, or in any other—and believe me, I have revisited them—that in any way made me question whether Jim was drawn to me in the way that I was drawn to him. What more can I say, except to add that for the rest of this story, at the onset of any intimate moments, the scene will fade to black.

Once we’d settled in, Jim started to comb the telephone directories to find his friend Christian, a buddy from college.

“Why do you have to call now?” I asked. “I thought we were going to dinner alone.”

“We will go to dinner alone, but we already lost a day, and I would really like to see him. It’s been years.”

I wasn’t going to argue with him, but I wasn’t happy. Meanwhile, Jim located Christian’s phone number, called, and made plans for us to meet him later. Still, we had a fun afternoon exploring and shopping. When evening came, I put on the black velvet skirt and top and the pashmina wrap—a soft salmon color—and I took my emerald pendant out of my handbag and put it on. Before we left for dinner at the hotel’s restaurant, Jim gazed at me silently for several seconds. “You look so beautiful,” he said. He took the pendant in his hand and said, “It looks great against the black velvet.” I could see his pleasure in his eyes, and also tenderness, warmth, and love.

I leaned toward him and kissed him.

At the restaurant I scanned the menu to see what I would order—the steak looked good, or maybe the sea bass. But when I tried to put the menu back on the table, it wouldn’t lie flat. I didn’t think much of it as I lifted up the menu again . . . and that’s when I saw the little white box at my place setting, centered between my knife and fork.

“Go on,” said Jim. “Open it. Just open it.”

I stared at him. “Isn’t there anything you want to ask me?”

Jim looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I opened the box. Inside was a dazzling diamond ring.

I stared at it speechlessly.

“Well,” said Jim with a big smile. “This is a pretty significant ring. Aren’t you going to say something? What do you think?”

“Yes!” I said, answering the question he hadn’t really asked. We leaned across the table to kiss each other. Call me romantic, call me old-fashioned, but I really wanted Jim to propose to me, to
ask
me to marry him. I didn’t expect him to get down on one knee, but I did want him to dot the
i
’s and cross the
t
’s. But still, I was very happy.

Jim took my hand to look at the ring.

“Do you really like it?” he asked.

I did. I thought it was beautiful, just what I would have picked myself. I stretched out my left arm to admire the diamond glittering on my finger. It was a round center stone with a smaller baguette diamond on each side. “It’s perfect,” I told him.

Jim was exuberant when we met up with Christian and his girlfriend later in the evening. “We just got engaged,” he said. I was thrilled that he’d now put it into words. It was the next-best thing to a proposal. Meanwhile the two were delighted to be sharing this moment with us. Christian’s girlfriend said to Jim, “Wow, you’re getting married for the second time, and Christian hasn’t even been married once.”

“How do you feel?” Jim asked me on the way back to the hotel.

“Happy and excited,” I said.

“And?”

“Maybe a little nervous,” I admitted.

The next day, Sunday, Jim again made plans for us to spend time with Christian and his girlfriend. That evening we headed home by train to New Jersey.

Looking back, in light of everything that came to pass, our engagement had a flinch to it, the feel of a pulled punch. It felt like less than a wholehearted impulse on his part. Was it Lori as Jim’s messenger? Jim’s wish to bring Teddy along? The life-altering question I answered without his quite asking it? Jim’s need to bring his college buddy into our circle, not once but twice? All of them, perhaps.

If Jim and I had gone on to have a marriage in which we grew in comfort and intimacy, those moments of feeling something withheld probably wouldn’t have stayed with me. But I felt that something wasn’t right, even though almost everything I noticed was, on its own, too small to be significant. So I let those moments remain insignificant, not mentioning them at all when I came back to New Jersey, eager to tell my friends and family that Jim and I were now engaged. What was in the forefront was that I was a very happy woman. I was marrying a man I loved and admired, a man whose vision and values I shared.

2. JERSEY GIRL

IN THE SUMMER OF
2002, Bruce Springsteen released a new album called
The Rising
, and Jim and I were invited to the early-morning launch on the beach at Asbury Park, picked because it was the Boss’s hometown. The event was covered by the
Today
show. Standing on the beach with Jim and me, Matt Lauer and Katie Couric interviewed us, and one of the questions they asked each of us was what our favorite Bruce song was.

Jim’s answer was immediate. “Born to Run,” he said, which didn’t surprise me or anyone else there. My answer was immediate too. “Jersey Girl,” written by Tom Waits, but also sung by Springsteen and released the summer I was fourteen. I’m very much a Jersey Girl—and proud of it. Yes, I know that New Jersey—like Peoria or Keokuk—has its mockers. I know all the jokes about “the bridge-and-tunnel crowd” and “Joisey” and, thanks to
The Sopranos
, my state being the center of Mafia life. But the bridge-and-tunnel crowd are my people, and, as I always tell my friends from east of the Hudson, no one needs a passport to visit.

If I have all the fervor of the convert, it’s because I’m not entirely a product of the Garden State. Not only wasn’t I born in New Jersey, I wasn’t even born in this country. My birthplace was Coimbra, an ancient city in Portugal famous for its Roman ruins and the country’s most elite university. Coimbra is known as the cradle of kings, and its inhabitants are said to have the most admired and prestigious accent. “Oh, excuse me,” friends will tease when I offer my unsolicited advice about their Portuguese pronunciation or word choice. “
You
were born in Coimbra.”

Actually, I was the only member of my immediate family to be born not only in Coimbra but in a hospital, a result of the fact that my mother went into premature labor with me, her first child, and had to be rushed to the nearest medical center. As far back as anybody can remember, my parents and their families had lived in Pocarica, fifteen miles to the east. With its electricity and indoor plumbing, Pocarica was a town determined to be modern. But it would have been considered undeveloped by American standards. Few residents had cars; almost no one, except the wealthiest, had a TV; and children, including my two brothers, were generally born at home, with a midwife at the bedside.

I was eight by the time we settled in the States. I guess that’s why my memories of Portugal are like snapshots: I recall a battery-operated toy—chickens pecking at rice—that I received for my fourth birthday; the cod my mother made on Christmas Eve, which I loved, and the octopus, which I didn’t; the presents we got on Epiphany, January 6, from Pai Natal; the brand-new refrigerator we bought to replace our icebox, one of the first in a working-class household in our town; my father and my grandfather playing their instruments in our town’s marching band; a dead snake that appeared to come back to life as it slithered off the end of the stick I was carrying, leaving me with an enduring fear of snakes; the parish priest coming to visit our house at Easter; my classroom in Portugal, and the time the teacher slapped
my
hand with a ruler because she said another girl had copied off my paper during a test.

Among my most vivid and pleasurable memories, though, is one of a day at the beach, the sand so hot you had to dance your way to the refreshingly cold water and waves. It was on the Portuguese shore, where we rented a house for the summer with my grandmother, and it was the start of my lifelong love of the ocean, because as Bruce Springsteen sings in “Jersey Girl,” “. . . down the shore everything’s all right.”

But those are memories born of a child’s keyhole view of the world, without the benefit of a larger understanding. The truth is, things were tough in Portugal during the sixties and seventies. Good jobs were scarce, and it was not unusual for a man to support his family by doing a stint as a guest worker, living abroad for most of the year, returning home annually for a visit. One of my uncles worked in France, and another (my mother’s brother) actually emigrated to the United States. My father considered working in Germany so that he could send home some much-needed money, but my mother put her foot down, and that was the end of that. He ended up working in a German-owned chemical company the next town over, while my mother contributed to the family’s income with her own business delivering fish to customers on her bicycle.

The strained economy, I later learned, occurred during the dictatorship of António Salazar, who ruled Portugal for thirty-five years. He had a stroke in 1968 and was succeeded by Marcelo Caetano, who didn’t make things any better. I remember a secret political meeting at my parents’ house during my early childhood. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I somehow knew not to talk about it outside the family. A few years later, in 1974, there was a bloodless revolution, which resulted in greater freedoms for all of us. I don’t remember much of that, only that it was known as the Carnation Revolution because the people offered red carnations to the military while urging them—successfully, as it turns out—not to resist the revolutionaries.