Wreathed (6 page)

And that’s where I saw Sheldon Berkman for the first time. He wasn’t tall, and he wasn’t all that good-looking, and you could tell he would be bald before he was thirty, but he wasn’t like any of the other boys there. Most of them had these strong, ropy muscles from football or baseball. Not Sheldon. He was a swimmer, and he had a swimmer’s build. You watch the Olympics, so you know what I’m talking about. Powerful shoulders. Trim build, not an ounce of fat anywhere. His chest was this V-shape that just tapered right down into his trunks. And they wore very tight trunks in those days. Not the repulsive things they wear now, but they still didn’t leave much to the imagination.

And I imagined. I had such an imagination in those days. Of course, your generation doesn’t have to imagine anything anymore, but that’s what we had to work with and it was quite enjoyable, for a while, anyway.

Sheldon noticed me too. But he didn’t have the nerve to ask me out himself, so he used Frank as a g0-between. Frank made the mistake of telling me about it, and of course, I said yes. So the next weekend I was home, we went out. Sheldon had this decrepit old Chrysler, and he took me to the Cherry Hill Mall to see
Mutiny on the Bounty
. We sat there in that darkened theater, and the whole time we were there, listening to Marlon Brando’s phony English accent, he never tried one time to put his hand on me. It was terribly disappointing. I think he was nervous dating a prep-school girl; either that, or he didn’t have a lot of experience around girls of any sort. Or Frank put the fear of God into him. I never did find out, not that it mattered.

We went on a couple of dates after that, and never moved past holding hands, so I decided to take action. The next time I was home was over Thanksgiving. My best friend at prep school was named Deanna Ellis—now, she was a hippie, that one. She went to Berkeley and ended up in a commune in Oregon. Anyway, I told her how frustrating the whole thing was getting to be with Sheldon. Her parents lived in Merion Township, and they had this huge house, very secluded. Her parents were taking the family to Hilton Head for Thanksgiving. She gave me the directions and a spare key.

So, the day after Thanksgiving, I told Sheldon that I wanted to go out for pizza. I talked him into driving over into Philly to a dive on Broad Street. We had a couple of slices and a Coke, and it was all very innocent and boring. We walked out of the pizza place, and I kissed him, and he kissed me back, which is what I wanted, of course, because that let me steal his car keys right out of his pocket. I told you, the girls I went to school with were not a good lot, and that’s a skill I’d picked up. I got in the driver’s seat. Sheldon’s car was a lot like he was—not particularly attractive, but very powerful under the hood, if you know what I mean. Anyway, he got in the car. He didn’t ask any questions, not even when I didn’t head back to New Jersey right away. We had a nice, quiet drive, all the way to Lower Merion.

I didn’t say anything when we got there. I just got out of the car and tossed him his keys back. Then I unlocked the front door and checked to make sure that the house was empty—no maids or anything, I mean. I didn’t one time think about what would happen if he drove away, because I knew he wouldn’t. I was never a swimsuit model or anything like that, but I had a tight skirt and a good figure and there wasn’t any way that Sheldon Berkman wasn’t following me into that house.

He didn’t keep me waiting long. I heard him slam the passenger door shut, and then I saw him walk up the steps and shut the front door behind him.

“Nice house,” he said.

“It’s my friend’s. She says nice things about the couch in the rec room.” In fact, the couch in the rec room had been a big factor in Sandra’s parents sending her to an all-girls’ school, but I didn’t feel the need to explain that at the moment. I wasn’t feeling anything but a weightless anticipation.

“Is that a fact,” he said.

“It folds out into a bed. Come on, let me show you.”

“Stop it,” I said. “Just stop it. Now. Please. I am begging you.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re going to get all prudish on me, Wendy. That’s not like you.”

“This is making me extremely uncomfortable,” I said. “I mean, for God’s sake, Mother, I don’t need the play-by-play, that’s all. I get it. You let Sheldon Berkman get in your pants over Thanksgiving weekend in 1962. Stipulated. That doesn’t explain why you’re dragging me down to Cape May for his funeral fifty years later.”

“If you want an explanation, then let me finish the story.”

“Finish the story, by all means,” I said. “I just don’t want to hear the sordid details.”

“The sordid details make the story interesting.”

I knew my mother had a sexual past, obviously. I knew Sheldon had been in love with her. On an intellectual level, I could understand that they’d had a physical relationship. But all I could hear in my head was
squick squick squick squick squick.
“Mother. Please. Just give it a rest. For the love of God.”

She sighed one of those signature Emily Thornhill sighs, this one signaling exasperation with a thin overlay of parental affection. “All right then. Where was I?”

That should have been the end of it, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t think that the relationship would go anywhere. Sheldon wasn’t my idea of long-term boyfriend material, never mind husband material. And the worst part of it was that he wasn’t discreet. He bragged to his friends about it, and of course that got back to my brother, and he popped Sheldon in the eye. I hoped it was worth it for him.

My parents were out of their minds over the whole thing, of course. It wasn’t anything personal towards Sheldon, you understand. They were just being horrible old-money snobs about the whole thing, just because Sheldon’s father owned a janitorial services company. They thought Grandfather Borden would disapprove. Of course, he disapproved of everything, so I don’t know why they bothered. Anyway, it didn’t matter. My parents told me I couldn’t see him again. They thought that would solve the problem, but of course it just made Sheldon that much more attractive to me. Forbidden fruit, you understand.

Today, you would sit your children down and talk with them and explain to them why you didn’t approve of who they were dating, the way we did when you wanted to take that smarmy Carruthers boy to your prom. Keep your eyes on the road, dear.

Of course, that would never happen in my generation, because it would have been awkward. So my parents decided to drag us all down to Daytona Beach over Christmas break. The idea was that I was supposed to find another boy to drool over and forget about Sheldon. It didn’t work, of course. I spent the whole time writing love letters to Sheldon. I have no idea if he got them, but I hope he did, because they were steaming hot.

So my parents took things to the next level. They told me they were sending me to a finishing school in Montreal to learn French. I locked myself in my room and cried for three days. When I came out, they told me that they’d had a change of heart, and I could keep going to school in Philadelphia, but I had to promise not to see Sheldon again. I said yes, of course, but I kept seeing Sheldon behind their backs anyway.

Of course, nothing good ever lasts. Sheldon graduated from high school and got a job at the soup factory in Camden. I spent the summer in Europe and went back to prep school, looking for someone who was better husband material. Our relationship had collapsed naturally, without hurting anybody.

I turned eighteen in October of 1963. My parents threw me a surprise party at our house. They’d hired caterers, of course, and it just so happened that the caterer was a friend of Sheldon’s parents, and he let Sheldon work as one of the servers. And in the middle of the party, as bold as you please, Sheldon managed to sneak us both into a closet, and he told me his plan.

He explained that since I was eighteen now, it was legal for us to get married. His caterer friend owned a vacation house in Cape May, and knew a minister at one of the churches down there. Sheldon had talked to the minister, and he had agreed to marry us, if we could make it down there. Sheldon’s plan was that we would leave the party, drive straight down to Cape May, get married as quick as we could, and have a honeymoon at the vacation house.

I remember standing there in that closet, listening as he told me how much he loved me, and how much he wanted us to spend the rest of our lives together. I never knew that I loved Sheldon. I liked him, of course, and even though I know you don’t want to hear about the sex, it was fantastic. I had told him I loved him a hundred times, but I had never really felt passion for him before. But it was the first time I had ever felt anything that deeply, that completely. I told him I would run away with him, and it felt right. It felt perfect. We left the party and drove down to Cape May. We sent our parents a postcard so they wouldn’t worry.

“So why didn’t you go through with it?” I asked.

“Oh, but we did.”

“You are kidding,” I said.

“Oh, no.”

“In the last thirty years,” I said, “I have never once been told that you were married before. It’s absolutely unbelievable that you are telling me this now, after not saying a single word about it before.”

“It wasn’t any of your business before, and anyway, it all happened long before you were born. And if you had asked me, I would have told you.”

I felt as though a large chunk of my past had suddenly come loose, the way that cargo comes loose in an airplane hold and crashes through the bulkheads and causes a crash. I had to calm myself down and concentrate on my driving. If I didn’t know a basic fact like my mother having been married before, what else didn’t I know?

“Please at least tell me you didn’t have kids,” I said. “I mean, I don’t have any older half brothers or sisters out there, do I?” The thought made me feel strange and disoriented, like I had suddenly realized that I had a third arm that I hadn’t noticed before.

“No, and thank goodness for that. Pregnancy would have made things much more difficult, and things were already difficult enough. Mother and Father turned up the same day they got the postcard in the mail. They were furious, but once Sheldon showed them the wedding license, there wasn’t anything they could do after that.”

“Grandmother Borden must have been angry enough to roast you over a slow fire,” I said. The entire Borden family was known for its longevity and its irritability, which meant that it produced a remarkable proportion of miserable old bats. Grandmother Borden had been a typical example; she’d had her final stroke while screaming at a Puerto Rican aide at her nursing home because she hadn’t made the bed with hospital corners.

“Well, I’m sure she would have liked to. Fortunately, Father got her calmed down by the time that we came back, and she just found other ways to take her revenge out on me. But they put a brave face on it; they had to. So we went back to Cherry Hill, and my parents even threw us a reception. It was paltry compared to the bash that they threw when your Aunt Paula got married, but I didn’t care.”

“I want to make sure I understand this. What I have been told, my entire life, is that you and Dad met in college.”

“Did your father tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“He told you lots of things, sweetheart, but not all of them were true. That one was only half true. Yes, he was at Penn when I was at Bryn Mawr, but I never once gave him a second look. His face was spotty, and his hair was greasy, and he was dating this obnoxious twit who ended up married to an even more obnoxious federal circuit court judge—a Reagan appointee, of course. I didn’t date your father until years later, after college, after we’d both had a chance to grow up a little.”

“I want to make sure I understand what you’re telling me. This man, Sheldon Berkman, whose funeral we’re going to, he was your ex-husband, and you never once told me or anyone else about him until just now.”

“You never asked, dear.”

“I read the obituary you sent. It said he had been pining for you all these years. I thought he was still hung up on his high school sweetheart. But he wasn’t, was he? He really was rejected by the one true love of his life.”

Mother threw back her head and laughed. It was a truly appalling sound, a cross between a cackle and the last ding-dong of doom echoing against the last worthless rock. “Good Lord above, Wendy,” she said, when she finally came up for air. “You’re not seriously telling me you
believed
everything in that obituary, are you?”

Chapter 8

I pulled the car over at the service station on the Atlantic City Expressway, ostensibly to get coffee and gas but mostly to give myself a break from listening to my mother. My mother, who had until now been perfectly willing to let me think that she hadn’t ever been married to anybody other than my father.

I tried hard to remember what I’d been told about how my parents had started dating. I knew it had something to do with the McGovern campaign, but the details were hazy. They’d gotten married in 1974, ten years before I was born. I never once suspected that there had been someone else for either of them.

They hadn’t lied to me, exactly. They just hadn’t told me everything. And I couldn’t blame them. If I ever have children, I won’t tell them one thing about any of the guys I have dated. Hearing the story of my mother and Sheldon Berkman was incredibly weird, though, like wearing someone else’s eyeglasses, or waking up in the wrong apartment wearing somebody else’s T-shirt. Not that I have done that last part. At least not recently.

It did explain why Mother wanted to go to Sheldon’s funeral, unless it didn’t. She’d been married to Sheldon, at least briefly. He’d won her, at least for a while, and lost her, and wanted her back. If he hadn’t been lying about it, of course. But that just explained why he wanted her there. It didn’t explain why she felt she had to be there—or why she felt she had to shanghai me into driving down here with her.

As horrible as it sounds, I was absurdly relieved that Sheldon had died. As awkward as it was going to be to go to his funeral, I couldn’t imagine how awkward it would be to meet him in person. It was the one positive aspect, I thought, that had come from the whole experience, although it couldn’t have seemed that way to poor Sheldon, of course.