Now pushing seventy, Dad was tired, defeated from the skirmishes and all-out battles with my older sister. He seemed loath to get involved with raising another teenage daughter, so César stepped into the breach and began acting as my de facto father.
My mother found a kindred soul, someone in whom she could confide her worries about me and my schoolwork, my friends, and now, my emerging romantic life. The two conferred at length and came back with the firm answer: no.
It didn’t matter that Henry’s father was going to be driving us. The answer was still no.
Finally, as the entire evening risked being torpedoed, Henry’s mother personally intervened. She promised that she would accompany us; both she and her husband would take us to the school dance, she assured Mom. Mrs. Finkelstein was so gracious and persuasive that Edith found herself saying yes even as I contemplated the prospect of going out with a boy and meeting his father and his mother all on the same night. I had never gone out with a boy before. The years that I had spent dreaming of Maurice, plotting ways to earn his love, had resulted in … nothing.
Yet here I had gone off to a dance and ended up being asked on a date after one evening.
Growing up certainly had its advantages.
In the days prior to the dance, I walked up and down Eighteenth Avenue, anxiously combing the stores with Edith in tow. Somehow, the bargain shops I’d always found so abundant seemed inadequate for the occasion, and I wandered restlessly from one to the other. I had no idea how to dress for a first date. Provocatively? Demurely? The Saturday of the dance, I finally settled on a pale blue flowered dress that was rather prim. It had long sleeves and a small white collar and it grazed my knee so that I looked the picture of modesty.
That evening, as I put the final touches on my outfit, I could feel my mother and brother inspecting me. Edith looked a bit wistful. I probably hadn’t seemed grown up to her until that night, when I left to go to the dance with Henry Finkelstein, both his parents waiting for us as promised in the car downstairs, even as his dad curiously eyed our simple two-family house.
After I left, Mom sat down and penned a letter to my sister.
Dear Suzette:
One hour ago, they came to pick her up—this little young man, as tall as Loulou, who is now taller than me, his mother, so beautiful, so chic, and his father, too—he’s a doctor in Manhattan with the most stunning car imaginable. Loulou, what a little devil… With each invitation she receives, César and I have to come up with a new wardrobe for her.
Henry Finkelstein and I didn’t dance much that night. Mostly we wandered around the grounds of Poly Prep, a vast campus of ponds and rolling brooks and wooded enclaves in between stately old buildings. It was hard to believe we were in Brooklyn. There was a dreamlike quality to our walk, and I had trouble focusing on what Henry was saying. He was clearly overjoyed to be showing off his school; the campus was more than twenty-five acres, he boasted.
Finally we reached one of his favorite buildings—the gym where he said he was studying wrestling. I must have looked surprised—he was so slight, not much taller or heavier than I was. It was a special kind of wrestling class Poly offered, “For ninety-eight-pound weaklings,” he volunteered. We walked round and round a large room in the basement that had mats spread out all over the floor; on the wall were vintage black-and-white pictures of student wrestlers from years gone by. I peered at the pictures intently, as if seeing them was the point of the evening. I wasn’t really sure what to do.
The dance over, his parents drove me home and that was that.
It had been a perfectly amiable evening, but to my secret relief, I never heard from Henry Finkelstein again. It would have been agonizing to ask Mom if I could see him again, to seek César’s permission.
And that is how my first relationship with a boy ended—before it had even begun.
We weren’t prepared for the perils of a Park Slope winter, which somehow felt colder than cosseted Bensonhurst. Neither Mom nor I knew how to dress properly for our daily expeditions to Lincoln Place and Grand Army Plaza—the glacial subway stations, the walk through wide-open thoroughfares buffeted by wind. I, at least, had a knitted scarf and a hat. But Edith insisted on wearing the same little nylon kerchief she used in synagogue to cover her head, and that she’d purchased for ten or twenty cents from Woolworth’s. She had a collection of these kerchiefs in a drawer at home, and on extremely cold days, she simply wrapped another, identical one around her neck and ventured outside; I wondered how those two flimsy swatches of fabric could offer her any protection.
She had recently bought a long woolen coat that came down to her ankles. It was too big, more bulky than warm really, but it was of that dreamy shade of blue she fancied above all other colors, bleu royale, with gold buttons. After she kissed me goodbye, I would watch her run, a small thin figure in an impossibly large coat racing, racing to get to her job.
There was a perk that came with life in the Catalog Department: All the latest books crossed her desk, the books that drew the critics’ attention and were the talk of literary New York. It was her job to help make sure they were sorted and processed to be divvied up among Brooklyn’s vast network of sixty branches. She’d consult the massive tomes of National Union Catalog, published by the Library of Congress, to figure out the edition of a particular work. She mastered the Dewey decimal system and learned how to search through the four volumes of Dewey Decimal Classification. She was at ease using the many bilingual dictionaries on her desk, her facility in languages coming to her rescue. She’d also type up the little catalog cards that made a book an official part of the library system.
She was amazed at the range of works she was handling—not simply recent bestsellers but, for example, a 1950 edition of The Complete Works of Homer, The Iliad, or The Secret of the Hittites: The Discovery of an Ancient Empire, published in 1956, the year I was born, or Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbinders in Suspense, out since 1967.
She approached even the most menial task with relish. As she cataloged a volume of poems by Pushkin, for instance, she’d find herself reading it and taking notes. She might have been running the entire Brooklyn Public Library, she was so passionate about her work.
One evening Mom came home raving about a young author named Philip Roth who had published a splendid novel. She had been reading Portnoy’s Complaint on her coffee breaks and found it “très risqué,” she said with a chuckle, as she handed me a copy, “mais formidable.” Another time, it was a new novelist, Joyce Carol Oates, who caught her eye. At home, she talked and talked about Joyce Carol Oates and wouldn’t rest until I’d promised to read Expensive People.
Once I started it, I was horrified yet I couldn’t put it down. It was a novel about a child who kills his mother and confesses to the crime, but no one in his affluent, well-heeled little town believes him.
At last, Mom felt connected to the world of literature she had coveted and that had eluded her most of her life. Not since Cairo and her work with the pasha’s wife had she enjoyed the literary companionship she now found every single day at the Catalog Department of the Brooklyn Public Library.
Berkeley was ruled by a charming, elegant, and utterly dictatorial headmistress named Mary Sue Miller. Mrs. Miller was personable but rather terrifying. It was her first year and she had grand hopes for Berkeley, to liberalize it and bring it to a new era. But that didn’t stop her from looking after the teensiest details or enforcing its ancient rules. She cultivated us, got to know us one by one. In that sense she was very different from the principals at my elementary school and junior high—cold, distant figures who sat closeted in their offices, emerging only for assembly or graduation. I had the sense that Mrs. Miller knew my particular strengths and my flaws. I didn’t think she liked me very much.
When Wendy appeared in school in culottes, Mrs. Miller promptly sent her home for violating the dress code. She was constantly on patrol, and I noticed her walking down the hallways and darting in and out of classrooms. She
wielded absolute control over every aspect of the school and of our lives.
Or so it seemed at first.
By my second semester, events outside were being felt within our little classroom. I wasn’t sure anyone—even the formidable Mrs. Miller—was really in control. Fashion was changing, music was changing, the culture and even the mood of America was changing; and with the mounting anger over the Vietnam War, there was nothing sedate about what was taking place.
Betsy Raze, one of the brainiest girls in the class—and the most outspoken—arrived one day in a see-through blouse and no bra.
Technically, I suppose, she hadn’t violated the dress code, which didn’t have a clause about bras or gauzy blouses. To our amazement and hers, she got away with it. She wore the blouse again and again, sometimes with a short frosted brunette wig she fancied, and always with high heels, so that she appeared considerably older than her fourteen years.
The feminist movement was reaching a critical point. Traditional ideas about marriage and children were under siege and a new bestseller, The Population Bomb, was causing a stir at Berkeley, where even the head of the lower school raved about it. The book, by Paul Ehrlich, made dire predictions about what would happen if people had too many children and urged drastic action, including sterilization, to restrict the size of families to no more than one or two kids. I remembered how excited I’d been over these ideas years back at the Shield of Young David, and Marlene’s contemptuous reaction.
Marlene was now married to a handsome Israeli named Avi. She and her husband had settled in Brooklyn, not far from the Syrian community of our childhood, with hopes of starting a family. I felt a million miles away from her—part of a new world, a world that was drastically different from the one she and I had once inhabited behind the divider.
When Berkeley decided to hold another dance, the rules that had tied us up in knots months earlier seemed antiquated … irrelevant.
Since our first mixer, pants with flared legs had replaced skirts and dresses for formal occasions. The dance was held in the gym, a large unsightly room that wasn’t at all elegant or gracious like the assembly hall we’d used for the fall mixer. When I walked in wearing my demure little pale blue dress—the one from my date with Henry Finkelstein—I felt awkward and uncomfortable.
The music had also changed—it was much louder, much harsher. Psychedelic rock and heavy metal had replaced the more melodious sounds of earlier in the year, the Fifth Dimension and Jay and the Americans swept aside by Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix and Janice Joplin, and I found the new rhythms—the revolution that Woodstock had wrought and that had finally reached us at 181 Lincoln Place—unpleasant and discordant.
A few of my classmates were smoking. I felt disoriented by the music, the atmosphere, the couples that had suddenly formed all around me. I didn’t see Mrs. Miller anywhere and for once, I missed her, missed the order she imposed wherever she went.
I left without mingling with a single boy from Poly Prep or any other private school. I wanted only to be back in my room with my Charles Aznavour records, or listening to Dalida with Mom.
And suddenly, a social movement that I’d supported ardently from afar, that had seemed appealing from the vantage point of the women’s section in my small synagogue, began to seem frightening and disquieting. The more strident and militant women sounded, the more freedoms they embraced, the more I wanted to retreat. But retreat to where? Even this elite private girls’ school was turning out to be as turbulent as every other corner of American society at the dawn of the 1970s.
It was as if the world no longer had any safe harbors or women’s sections or dividers.
Literally so, as I learned the day I went back to visit the Shield of Young David. I wanted to see for myself what had happened since its sudden closure several months earlier—if anyone had taken it over. I managed to enter the deserted building through a side door that had remained unlocked. Downstairs, in my old Hebrew school, the classrooms were still there, untouched, eerily silent. I made my way to the basement and a room that had haunted my childhood. It was usually locked, but once or twice my friends and I had been able to sneak in, always amazed by the sight of what looked like a swimming pool. It was actually an old ritual bath—a mikveh—where married women were supposed to go once a month and immerse themselves in a symbolic act of renewal, a process that made them “pure” again.
The room scared us, my friends and me, and we’d stayed away from it as children, not really understanding its purpose. Now, with the door left ajar, I decided to peek in. The lights were out; the water had been drained; there was refuse at the bottom of the pool. The room looked otherworldly, as if there still lurked the ghosts of bathers who had gone over the years to be purified of the sin of being female.
Finally and with some trepidation, I made my way up the familiar staircase to the sanctuary. It looked completely forlorn. The chairs were gone; the Holy Ark was gone, the bookcases that lined the wall had been emptied of all their books—no more copies of The Kiddush Cup That Cried, or Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s attack on Darwin’s theory of evolution.
And the women’s section—it, too, was gone.
The wooden partitions had all been torn down; stray pieces were scattered in the back. The sanctuary was open and airy, but, alas, no one was there to enjoy it. Once upon a time, I realized, the mere thought of those dreaded barriers coming down would have filled me with glee. But I felt strangely desolate seeing the divider reduced to dozens of pieces of wood, ready for the trash. I wished that I could gather them and hold on to them.
When Miss Benson announced that Berkeley would be staging Ring ’Round the Moon, a play by Jean Anouilh, it seemed natural I should audition: The drama teacher herself urged me to read for her. But I didn’t dare get my hopes up—I expected that all the major roles would go to upper-class girls. To my surprise, when the cast was posted a few days later, there was my name at the top. I had been given the plum role of Isabelle, the lovely young ingenue.
I hadn’t been so excited since my last acting stint as Haman, the Evil One, in my temple’s Purim spiel.
This was the major production of the year—boys from Poly Prep were going to play the male parts.
Miss Benson made it clear she believed in me: I was going to be a star. But rehearsals would take place after school and could last well into the night. Our parents had to give their explicit permission for us to be in the show. When Mom heard about the late sessions—with boys, no less—alarms went off. Once again, she huddled with my brother; the two decided that no, I could not accept the part, it simply wouldn’t be safe.
I couldn’t seem to argue with either my mom or César about their decision. They weren’t budging, and nothing I said had any impact.
I didn’t have the courage to defy them.
My mother was enjoying her newfound authority. With César supporting and guiding her, she displayed a stern side I hadn’t seen very often. I realized that I missed my father’s involvement in my life. Despite his legendary toughness, I had always considered Leon to be fair, and he tended to be mild with me. But he was in retreat now, the Invisible Man. Nothing any of us were doing—me in my high school agonies, Isaac away in college, Suzette off to Miami, Edith working—seemed to matter much to him anymore.
Mom’s refusal to let me star in the play took the school aback. In an extraordinary step, Mrs. Miller sent her a letter urging her to allow me to join the production. She even promised that I and the other girls would be escorted to the subway every evening by the Poly boys. It was to no avail. No one, not even the headmistress, seemed to have any influence on my mother. Another girl—a sophomore—was tapped for the lead.
I was so crushed I refused to see the play.
In the weeks that followed, my mood, my entire outlook, seemed to change—I felt restless and agitated. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be at Berkeley anymore. While I still got along famously with teachers like Miss Benson, I clashed with others. I had testy relations
hips in French class and gym, where I found the teachers to be martinets. I bristled when I dealt with anyone who struck me as bossy—which, of course, didn’t serve me in good stead with that ultimate boss, the headmistress.
I now skipped gym class whenever I could. We had moved on from fencing and archery and badminton to field hockey and exercises on uneven parallel bars and pommel horses that I hated. I’d pretend to be sick and spend the period in the infirmary, being comforted by the school nurse, who allowed me to lie down and go to sleep.
Even my English teacher, Mr. Gardine, noted how much I had changed. He told Mom that I “could do better work.”
Despite my recent ennui, I had thrived at Berkeley. I was much more assertive than I had been in public school. Emboldened by the As I was receiving along with all the encouraging comments from faculty, I was outspoken and overly confident, with emphatic opinions on every subject on earth, including subjects about which I knew nothing. I secretly felt superior to everyone around me.
Mr. Gardine tried to rein me in, telling me again and again I was too opinionated and self-absorbed and intolerant of others.
It was to no avail.
I had always done well in small, sheltered environments, and Berkeley had brought me back to the way I’d been in the women’s section—supremely sure of myself, an Egyptian princess in Brooklyn.
One day, my mom was summoned to the school for a meeting with Mrs. Miller.
“Your daughter is arrogant,” the headmistress told her. Edith was taken aback—she didn’t know what to say, but her instinct was to apologize immediately and profusely on my behalf. When she came home, she seemed terribly upset and called me into the kitchen. As she fixed herself some Turkish coffee, she began quizzing me on what I could possibly have said or done to make such a poor impression on la directrice.
The Arrogant Years Page 19