Wendy and the Lost Boys (9 page)

Mrs. Peach understood something about Wendy that other people missed. Wendy
was
defiant, though she usually couched her rebellion, as she did her unhappiness, in stories and jokes.

She also ate, ravenously, a simultaneous thumbing of the nose at Mrs. Peach and Lola. At Gracious Living, when other girls would eat daintily, mindful of squeezing into those silver lamé dresses, Wendy would wolf down two or three entire lemon meringue tarts, to the house mother’s dismay.

Camilla Peach became a character in
Uncommon Women and Others,
Wendy’s fictionalized account of her Mount Holyoke years. Mrs. Peach became Mrs. Plumm, the housemother at the unnamed girls’ college where the play takes place.

Mrs. Plumm appears in an early scene. She introduces herself and welcomes the girls to tea.

“Dear, take your feet off the table,” she says, before continuing. “The tea fund was established by Lucy Valerie Bingsbee, class of 1906, after whom a Vermont orchid bog was recently dedicated by Governor Hoff at The Lucy Valerie Bingsbee Wildflower Sanctuary. I think you girls will find tea here very comfy. I knew Lucy. I never cared for her much.”

Wendy came to appreciate both Mount Holyoke and Camilla Peach. She wrote to a friend, a few years after graduation, “Although I hated the reality of Mount Holyoke, recently I’ve become much more attached to the idea of it; the warmth, intelligence, and I guess (ha-ha) sincerity.”

O
ne of the people Wendy confided in during that troubling year was James Kaplan.

Before school started, the woman he was pursuing over the summer had made it clear she wasn’t interested in him. He called Wendy and invited her to a football game at Yale, where he was a freshman. He was cautious; they kept things platonic. He was reserved, an understated young man, who tended to wear dark slacks and white shirts. Wendy gently mocked his reticence, referring to him as “Captain Charisma” when she discussed him with her girlfriends.

Wendy had an excuse to visit New Haven anyway; Georgette, Albert and their baby daughter, Tajlei, lived in Hamden, Connecticut, a short drive from Yale.

James was a safe confidant—close enough yet also distant. Wendy regaled him with stories of triumph and misery. She told him about scandalizing Mrs. Peach with her meringue-tart-eating escapades. She confessed that she was failing English and didn’t know what she was doing at Mount Holyoke.

Her weight ballooned. Wendy told James she went to a therapist, who told her, unhelpfully, “You are what you eat.”

James showed his affection for people by giving them nicknames. Wendy became “Dots,” for her freckles, and then “Wemp” or “Wempell,” his misreading of a letter Wendy showed him from Susan Gordis—an old friend from Ethical Culture. Susan called Wendy “Wendella,” a mock Yiddishism. James became a sympathetic audience for Wendy’s stories, mostly via the telephone, in conversations cut short by the lines that formed at the dorm pay phones.

By spring he’d become passionately involved elsewhere: Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for the Democratic Party nomination against the incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson. McCarthy had been gathering momentum since announcing his candidacy in November. He was running on a platform to end the war in Vietnam, a cause that struck a deep chord with young men facing the draft. His unofficial slogan became “Clean for Gene,” referring to the college boys who shaved their beards and cut their hair to win votes for their progressive candidate from more conservative voters.

James was having his own freshman disillusionment at Yale. He felt trapped, unable to leave college or face induction into the army. He joined the campaign for McCarthy in New Hampshire, where the candidate’s strong showing in March—42 percent of the vote to 49 percent for Johnson—indicated the divisiveness caused by the war. When Johnson pulled out of the race on March 31, the antiwar forces grew stronger and more determined to win. By then James was enrolled at Yale but was working almost full-time on the McCarthy campaign. He spent most of the spring in Wisconsin and, after that, Indiana, going door-to-door, working the phones, caught up in the exhilarating promise of changing the world.

He had no time to worry about Wendy and her revolt against Gracious Living. The concerns of campus life seemed meager compared with the weighty issues he was confronting on the campaign trail.

M
idway through Wendy’s freshman year, politics had finally begun percolating at Mount Holyoke. In February a new editorial board had taken over the
Mount Holyoke News
and changed the name to
Choragos.
In an impassioned announcement, the new editorial board explained:

We are changing from passive reporters to active initiators of change with the goal of improvement. We no longer view our role solely as a mere commentator, a transmitter of information about what is already happening here. Rather we see ourselves in a leader’s position, as an active force, an innovator. We will be talking about what could, and perhaps should, be happening here.

Thus the name News, with its connotations of reporting only what is already being done by others, has become ill-fitted to our purposes. Choragos, the leader of the chorus in Greek drama, the one who asks questions and provokes discussion, is more in keeping with our new self image. . . .

A
t the end of April, for Fathers’ Weekend, the Mount Holyoke College Dramatic Club staged a production of
Lysistrata,
the ancient Greek antiwar farce by Aristophanes, in which women refuse to have sex with their husbands until they end the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. Wendy was distraught because she’d been cast as a fat Corinthian woman. Instead of suffering the indignity, she dropped out of the play.

Visiting parents had their own problems with the Dramatic Club version of the play, performed in the amphitheater on a beautiful spring afternoon. Philippa Goold, a Latin and Greek professor who had been consulted for the production, suggested that the male actors brought in from Amherst wear balloon phalluses for comic effect. A recent arrival to the United States from Rhodesia (later to become Zimbabwe), she was surprised by the puritanical response to this bit of burlesque humor.

“The production was something of a disaster,” she said. “It was 1968, and I thought anything would go. The parents were hideously upset. That’s all I remember, is being dreadfully embarrassed afterward because everyone didn’t take to it with the enthusiasm and joie de vivre I thought it would be greeted with.”

This letter from an undergraduate student appeared in
Choragos:

As I see it, the weekend was intended to please fathers and show them their annual $3,000 is going for a good purpose. I see no reason to prove our broadmindedness and freedom at the cost of shocking our fathers. My father has requested that I leave Mount Holyoke (and I am a junior).

On the other hand, Lorraine Garnett’s father thought the play was hilarious. A working-class Italian American, he was unusual in the stuffy crowd of businessmen and professionals.

Lorraine, one of Wendy’s dormmates, was hardly a radical, nor was she part of Wendy’s crowd of misfits. Yet Wendy chose to live with Lorraine and her friends when her roommate Abby’s good grades became too much of a burden for her to bear.

Their friendship developed a new dimension in May, when the Democratic National Committee offered free airplane tickets to students to campaign for McCarthy before the Indiana primary. Lorraine decided to go with some other girls from her dorm. Wendy went along.

Lorraine was struck by how innocent Wendy could seem, even though she was a savvy Manhattanite. Wendy
was
younger than most of them, thanks to Ethical Culture’s having advanced her a grade. She turned seventeen the fall of freshman year and still seemed like a high-school kid. Lorraine felt protective toward her.

The Mount Holyoke “Clean for Gene” campaigners had a grand adventure. A Smith College alumna invited them to camp out in her house. They canvassed the area and attended a big rally where Robert Kennedy spoke. They felt themselves to be in the middle of enormous change, when anything could happen. Indiana was swarming with East Coast students. So it wasn’t that unusual that Wendy saw James Kaplan there. The encounter was brief, just long enough to say hello.

B
y the end of freshman year, Wendy was eager for the familiar tumult of home.

Bruce was getting married on June 30, 1968, to his college sweetheart, Laura Lynne Killin, known as Lynne, who worked on the school newspaper with him. Bruce was overweight and slovenly, but Lynne was drawn to his personality and his power, already on exhibit at the
Michigan Daily.

Her plan was to work for a while, save some money for a down payment on an apartment, and then start having children. “I wanted 2.5 kids, an English sheepdog, a vegetable and herb garden with a few roses,” she said. It was 1968. Lynne was part of the transitional generation, when an educated woman’s ambition didn’t have to include conquering the world.

Neither family was happy, because they were young—Bruce was twenty—and because he was Jewish, she was Presbyterian.

Lynne had considered converting to Judaism in high school. On a church retreat, she’d had an epiphany: she didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. When she raised the matter with her parents, they objected, and she relented. When she and Bruce decided to marry, however, she became Jewish—not an easy process, requiring prolonged study with a rabbi.

A therapist would tell her that part of her attraction to Bruce was her desire to be married to his family. She adored Lola and loved Morris and Wendy. As an outsider she escaped Lola’s criticism and felt only the warmth and engagement.

They married in her parents’ living room, in Larchmont, an affluent suburb of New York. Bruce’s family joined them on their honeymoon, at Lake Mohonk, just south of the Catskills, the same area where Bruce and Wendy used to play explorers in “Bruceania.”

T
hat summer Wendy continued to think about James and what their future would be, if any. She’d been glad to see him in Indiana but didn’t know if they had a relationship or not, or if that’s what she wanted.

For him, politics had become everything. The stakes, he felt, were literally life and death. Exhausted and emotionally wrung out, he was devastated when Robert Kennedy won the important California primary in June, knocking McCarthy out of the race, only to immediately confront the shock of Kennedy’s assassination, right after his acceptance speech. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot two months earlier. Nothing about James’s contained world on the Upper East Side or in New Haven made sense.

He felt immersed in madness. In August he and his college roommate traveled to Chicago for the melee called the Democratic National Convention. The city teemed with conventioneers, Yippies—the antiwar Youth International Party that specialized in street theater and public relations—and the Chicago police, who seemed intent on cracking as many heads as possible in the process of keeping the Yippies away from the convention.

James was at Grant Park when the Battle of Michigan Avenue erupted. The organizers of the rally at Grant Park had been issued a permit; the crowd was heavily weighted with youthful McCarthy supporters, like James, and middle-aged onlookers from the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where the conventioneers were staying. Mayor Richard Daley was hopped up on bluster and ego, driven to make it seem as though Chicago had things under control. He decided to crush the protesters, resulting in the spectacle of huge crowds of civilians being beaten by billy clubs and sprayed with tear gas.

When the political satirist Dick Gregory invited the demonstrators to come to his house on the South Side, James joined the vast, jostling parade until tanks blocked their way. He was stuck in Grant Park; his roommate had disappeared. When they found each other at McCarthy headquarters in the Hilton, his roommate told James that his mother had called, frantic, asking, “Is Jamey okay?”

Feeling defeated and worn, James returned to New York, not interested in joining his former McCarthy campaigners in their quixotic support for Paul O’Dwyer. O’Dwyer, the Democratic nominee for U.S. senator from New York, was a lifelong pacifist who had opposed U.S. involvement in World War II. He was running against the liberal Republican, the venerable Senator Jacob K. Javits, ready to serve his third term. O’Dwyer didn’t have a chance.

James was tired of lost causes. But he couldn’t say no to the friend who asked him to hand out O’Dwyer campaign buttons over Labor Day weekend. Walking uptown along Fifth Avenue, he bumped into Wendy, going the other way.

He thought she looked great. She had lost weight since he’d last seen her, and her freckles had multiplied over the summer. Hearing her sweet, high voice came as a balm after the terror and disappointments of the past months. As they talked, he felt human again. She seemed to understand what he was saying in a way other people didn’t. Her unrestrained giggle captured the absurdity of life, but without meanness.