“My God, Rue. You need to see a doctor,” said Pete.
Tom just stood there, so Pete took me to a doctor, who gave me medication for a severe bladder infection. What a good feeling, having a man take care of me. I was ashamed for Pete and Carlin to see that Tom didn’t care, but Pete (who was just a kid!) reminded me how a real man behaves. Years later, I saw Pete’s production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas on Broadway, with Carlin, now his wife, in the lead, and when I was in Hollywood working on a TV series, Pete and I had lunch at The Farmers’ Market. When I reminded him of that day he had come to my aid, he made light of it. He and Carlin are superior people. And wasn’t their beautiful daughter, Mary Stuart Masterson, wonderful in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes?
Summer drew to a close. We went back to Ardmore, but the Alley offered Tom a year’s Equity contract as a member of the company, so he whisked back to Houston. Alone. It was late August. I was eight months pregnant. I hadn’t told Mother what was going on, but it was consuming me. She took me to the drive-in to see The Ten Commandments, and even husky Charlton Heston—who couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag—didn’t distract me. As he stomped his sandaled way down Mount Sinai, all I could think was, Rue, thou art abandoned.
Pacing my parents’ house in turmoil, I decided, “I should be with my husband!” Taking the bit between my teeth, I joined Tom in Houston. He let me know I was about as welcome as a bullfrog in the pickle barrel. He was living with another couple in cramped quarters, so I was assigned a sofa to sleep on. The first night, Tom made love to me on that sofa and I fell asleep feeling bittersweet. The next night, I crept over to him, kneeling on the floor in all my hugeness.
“Tom, what is it you want?” I asked. “Please tell me.”
Looking up at the ceiling, he said quietly, “I want a career and lots of money.”
Well, you damn fool, I thought. That’s exactly what I can provide. But I didn’t say that.
Instead, I said, “Okay. I’ll call Mother to pick me up in Dallas tomorrow.”
I spent the last month of my pregnancy on tranquilizers, alone in that house thirteen telephone poles past the standpipe north of town. While Mother and Bill worked, I walked and walked, around the house, around the yard, talking to the baby in my belly, telling him how much I loved him, singing to him, saying, “Daddy loves you. He’ll come to his senses.” I crocheted more booties, jackets, and caps. I also developed a persistent ache in my right side, which remained a mystery until 1982, when I almost died from undiagnosed gallbladder deterioration.
Tuesday, October 1, opening day of the 1958 World Series, my aunt Peggy stopped by Ardmore on a car trip with her two little daughters. I’d been having labor cramps since nine in the morning, and around five in the afternoon, I was sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter when I felt a strange sensation.
“Oh, great grannies, Eddi-Rue!” cried Aunt Peggy. “Your water’s broken!”
Oh. Well…goodness, I thought. Now what do I do? Peggy left. Mother came home from work, we had dinner, and I went to bed, but around nine, I woke Mother and told her the cramps were unbearable. She took me to the hospital, where they said I was in the second stage of labor.
“I want to call Tom,” I told Mother around eleven. “The curtain must be down by now.”
I went to a pay phone in the hallway, filled with emotion. Oh, God, his voice.
“Tom?” I said. “I’m at the hospital. The baby’s coming.”
A little pause on the other end of the line. Then: “No kidding.”
I went back to the labor room, but they made Mother stay in the lobby. The nurses said they couldn’t give me any medication because (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) I wasn’t yet nine months pregnant, right? I tried using the breathing technique I’d been practicing, but it didn’t help. At one in the morning, a nurse came in and gave me a shot of something in my hip. For the next six hours, I writhed in agony, trying to get away from that excruciating, unbearable pain, begging the nurses who stood guard on either side of the bed, “Please, kill me!”
“Now, now, don’t act like that. Lie down! Be a good girl!” They kept pushing me down until—finally—after what seemed a lifetime, someone said, “Roll over. You’re going to delivery. The doctor’s on his way.”
I obediently rolled over. Then I was in another room with very bright lights, where I fell unconscious. That was a little after seven in the morning. They tell me that my son, my darling baby, made his appearance at 7:25 A.M. on Wednesday, October 2. I woke up in yet another room, the pain gone, everything looking white and swimmy. Someone placed a bundle in my arms and, with my blurred eyesight, I vaguely made out a little white face with a bright red triangular nose. Oh, my God, I thought. I’ve given birth to a freak, and they’re afraid to tell me.
After they took him away, I began to cry and I couldn’t stop. All that day, all that night, all the next day, I kept crying. My eyesight cleared, and I could see that I had a beautiful little boy whom the entire nursing staff praised as the prettiest baby in the place, and I loved him completely. But I couldn’t stop crying. And I couldn’t fall asleep.
“You’ve got to get control of yourself,” the worried doctor told me.
“Doctor,” I confided through tears, “I want to nurse my baby, but there’s—”
“Oh, I already gave you a shot to dry up the milk,” he said. “Nursing ruins the shape of the breasts.”
How ’bout them good ol’ days, huh? The tears kept flooding. At eleven o’clock Thursday night—some forty hours after Mark was born—I was told that my husband wanted to see me. Mother had driven him up from Dallas, and through my tears I saw her standing in the doorway as Tom rushed in and threw himself over me.
“Oh, Rue! I made a terrible mistake!” he cried. “Can you ever forgive me? I love you!”
“Tom…of course! Of course I forgive you. I love you, too.”
I decided to name my beautiful new baby Mark Thomas Bish, and I fell asleep, thinking, It’s like a fairy tale! A miracle! I can’t believe it! The next morning, Tom came by early. Mother was going to drive him to Dallas to catch a plane back to Houston. But then I noticed…
“Tom, why aren’t you wearing your wedding band?” I asked.
“Oh, baby,” he said, turning to the window, his back to me. “Don’t be a drag.”
CHAPTER SIX
“When tumbling down a mountainside, endeavor not to land on your head.”
—DAME EDITH EVANS
I recently read a fascinating book about sociopaths, who are a lot more common in our society than we’d like to think. They’re regular butcher, baker, candlestick maker types who walk through life with a sort of emotional color blindness that renders them incapable of compassion. It’s estimated that one in twenty-five people suffers from this congenital inability to empathize or otherwise give a flea fart about anyone other than themselves. One in five people in prison, which is like a day spa for sociopaths who need to work on their methodology.
My God, I thought when I read that, maybe Tom was a sociopath. Then again, maybe he was just a putz. But if he was, he was a putz of pathological proportions.
During my “lying in” week at the hospital and over the next five weeks or so at my parents’ house, I sent Tom photos of Mark and letters chronicling our baby’s remarkable progress and asking Tom when we could join him in Houston. Nary a word back. I did, however, receive a letter from Norman. He’d been drafted and was stationed at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver. What a gift that letter was! I was truly a wreck, my self-esteem down around my ankles, way too pale and thin. (Hard to imagine being too thin.) But someone still found me worthwhile. And not just any someone! Remarkable, eccentric, inimitable Norman Hartweg.
Sitting there on the bed, watching Mark sleep, I suddenly realized what a zombie I’d been, and between caring for Mark, Norm’s letters, and the natural recalibration of hormones, I started to feel human again, thinking, Oh—why, this is me! I’d forgotten this person. Aft
er six weeks of not hearing from Tom, I wrote him, saying if he wanted Mark and me to join him, he should keep the snapshots of Mark, and if he wanted a divorce, he could simply return the snapshots. Those snapshots came flying up to Ardmore like cannonballs. No letter. Not even a bar or two of “So Long, So Long.” Nothing.
I started divorce proceedings with Judge Caldwell, who advised me to sever all claims Tom could possibly have in any future custody disputes by cutting him loose with no monetary demands. Mother—who’d once lobbied for that courteous Tom Bish—urged me to take this advice. I’d never intended to ask Tom for help anyway, and of course, Tom jumped on the “no joint custody, no support” deal. The divorce would be final in six months, in mid-May. So there I was. Broke. Wildly in love with my miraculous baby boy but stuck living with my parents in Ardmore, Oklahoma. None of this had in any way derailed my burning resolve to launch an acting career in New York, but my plans for world domination were set back more than a week.
I decided to set up a dancing and acting school that would include African-American kids, who weren’t allowed in any other dance school in segregated Ardmore. I went to the black high school and invited everyone to a demo class at their community center. About a dozen kids signed up for dance. I did the same at the white community center and got five for dance, six for acting. Bill put up a ballet barre in the living room of a rental house. I couldn’t afford a pianist, but I had classical, jazz, and pop records and a turntable. I was in business! Sadly, as soon as white parents learned their kids were in a dance class with black kids, they pulled their children out. Oh, well. I still had some talented students and was enjoying teaching.
This was the year of the movie The Defiant Ones, starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as two escaped convicts who were handcuffed together. When I went to the Tivoli Theater to see it, there was a sign in the lobby, COLORED UPSTAIRS, with a big arrow pointing up the stairs. So up the stairs I went and settled into an aisle seat. Pretty soon, a little usherette came over and said, “Miss, you can’t sit up here.”
“I have to sit up here,” I replied. “I’ll get sick if I sit downstairs.”
She argued a few minutes, then went away. People coughed uncomfortably and turned to look at me. An assistant manager came and firmly told me I had to sit downstairs, but I stuck to my guns. I wasn’t lying. It truly would’ve made me sick to go along with that segregation shit. But a few months later, when my little group of dancers appeared on a program my mother hosted for a beauticians’ convention, I took them to the soda bar for refreshments afterward and the counterman wouldn’t serve them. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the manager to listen to reason, and my kids had to go home without their after-performance treat.
That was Ardmore, Oklahoma, 1958.
For the dancing and acting school recital, I rented the YMCA auditorium, and parents, white and black, came in and rather self-consciously sat down at random. I peeked through the curtain, saw a salt-and-pepper audience, and felt great. After the recital, the black mothers gave me a handkerchief shower backstage. I still have most of those lovely hankies neatly folded in a wooden box.
“Miss Rue,” they told me, “we never thought it would work, but it did, thanks to you.”
I don’t know when I’ve been more touched. And not one of those families owed me a single penny. Three white families stiffed me for the last month’s classes. I even drove to their houses to collect but never got a red cent.
By Christmas, Mark was eating baby food like a trouper. Everyone found him adorable. I danced and sang with him and loved him so much it hurt. I saved every penny I was earning, eager for the two of us to have a place of our own. My parents had their own ideas about how he should be raised, and it bothered me when Mother picked him up, saying, “Come to Mother, sweetheart.” I chronicled each amazing accomplishment in Mark’s baby book and in long letters to Norman. We wrote to each other almost daily, and his letters were saving my sanity.
Another word to the wise: Don’t fall in love with someone through the mail! We write with our left brain but feel emotion with our right. Nonetheless, Norman and I proceeded to rush in where angels fear to tiptoe. He came to Ardmore on Christmas leave. Army training had buffed up his slight build to go with his warm brown eyes and quick grin. He looked great. And he was terrific with Mark. He’d always gotten on well with kids, doing magic tricks, making them laugh. We decided we wanted to be together. I wrote the Xavier Cugat ballroom studio in Denver, applying for a job, and they said I could start teaching in April.
“Eddi-Rue,” said Mother, taking me aside one day, “if you’re going to live in the same city as Norman, I want you to marry him.”
“We’ve been talking about it, Mother,” I said, embarrassed by her implication.
When the doctor who delivered Mark fitted me with a diaphragm, I realized it was an open secret that there were only eight months between my wedding and Mark’s birth, but we didn’t talk about such things. This was the fifties. Repressed, uptight, Father Knows Best. The prevailing ideology was: Nice girls don’t have sex before marriage. And Mother was brought up twenty years ahead of that by strict Southern Baptists, so you can imagine what she thought.
“I want you to marry him,” she said firmly.
Wait! What are those magic words? Oh, yes. Let me think it over!
“All right, Mother,” I said.
Late in April, I loaded up an old car that my folks gave me (what, to be honest, would I have done without them?) and, leaving Mark with Mother, drove thirteen hours straight to a little house Norm had rented in Aurora, a Denver suburb. Although my divorce from Tom wouldn’t be final for another month, Norm and I were married (sort of) within a day or two by a justice of the peace, with the justice’s wife as our only witness. We didn’t have a wedding band. We borrowed hers. I wore a fitted gray suit, and the lady took a Polaroid of us. I still have it.
We look happy.
Much like smiling travelers waving from the deck of the departing Titanic.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“The curtain rises. A frog is on the center of the stage.
Frog: I don’t think I’ll go to school today.
Curtain.”
—BENNET CERF’S SON, JONATHAN, AGE EIGHT
Jonathan had the right idea. But since I set myself this task, I reckon I have to go to school today—though I must say, I did consider quoting Lady Macbeth, Act V, Scene l, descending the stair with her taper: “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” It’s much easier to write about the dastardly things done to you than the dastardly things you did to others. And I was about to become Queen of the Dastards. If I can get through this episode without turning to drink, I’ll deserve…well, I’ll deserve a drink! You might deserve one, too.
Mother brought Mark to Aurora. It was springtime. Birds were chirping. Mark was happy, Norm was happy, and I was—well, I was “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” I couldn’t stop thinking about Tom. I was married to my dearest friend, whom I loved, but I was still infected with that old virus, weak with that fever.
One day I went to a pay phone and called Tom’s mother.
“Forget him,” she told me right off the bat.
He’d gone off to Mexico and married somebody he’d met in—oh, God, I think she said Las Vegas. Devastating. The end of the world. One would think I’d get the message.
Earth to Rue: You married an asshole!
Rue to Earth: Sorry, all circuits are busy. Please, hang up and dial again in thirty years.
And then the “Gotcha!” Devil played an awful trick on Norm and me. Married less than a week, dear Private Hartweg was walking along, passed a general, and neglected to salute. A general! He was restricted to base for a month. Couldn’t come home at all. We needed this like a hog needs a sidesaddle. I was allowed to visit Norm at the recreation center, where he was in charge of entertainment, and I occasionally took Mark along, but we didn’t dare interrupt his duties. He was in enough hot water. We just
watched him pass by from time to time, carrying things.
Norman got his pal Darren Rogers, a gifted poet and short-story writer, to babysit in exchange for the use of a typewriter. Darren was tall, slender, blond, with a sharp, focused brain and articulate tongue. Before he was drafted, he had been part of the Beat Generation of writers and painters in Venice, California. Their illustrious leader, Lawrence Lipton, whose best-selling book The Beat Generation truly defined that place and time, thought Darren was an especially promising writer. So did I. And he was so gentle with Mark, I felt secure leaving my precious son in his care. I’d come home after two or three hours at the rec hall, and Darren would read me what he’d written that night. I found him fascinating. I’d never met anyone like him.
Are you thinking, Uh-oh? You should be. Can you bear with me? Can I bear with me? This is the really hard-to-tell part, so I’m just going to plow ahead, devil take the hindmost.
“I believe in open marriages,” Norman had always told me. “If one of the partners finds someone else desirable, it should be okay to explore that.”
“I disagree,” I always told him. “Married partners should remain faithful.”
But to my alarm, I began to feel something more than friendship for Darren. One night, I came home to find Darren asleep on our bed.
He woke up and said, “Why are you looking at me like that?”
I hesitantly confessed my feelings. He admitted he was interested in me, too. But I was his friend’s wife. For half an hour, we struggled with it, our desire sparking, glowing, growing.
Norm thinks it’s all right, I told myself.
But I don’t think it’s all right, myself told me.
What if the Baptists are right, and I’m thrown in a lake of fire?
My First Five Husbands Page 7