Compromising Positions

by Susan Isaacs

  “You mean your Ph.D.?” she asked, in such tones of awe that I knew I had said precisely the right thing.

  “Yes. The uses and abuses of freedom of the press.” I watched that sink in. She nodded and looked serious. “Actually, it would be an absolute boon to my work if I could interview some of the members of your family, some of your brother-in-law’s friends, to get their attitudes, their reactions to all the newspaper publicity. Anonymously, of course. But,” I allowed graciously, “that might be too much of an interference.” She didn’t agree, so I kept on talking. “Of course, selfishly, it would make a brilliant illustrative chapter, seeing how an egomaniacal press has the power to destroy a decent, moral American family.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Brenda. “I guess you could interview me. And I could ask Norma. But I don’t know how Dicky, my husband, would feel. I mean, there’s been so much attention, and he’s very upset about it.”

  “That’s totally understandable. But you might want to tell him that I could present the proper credentials and give him a signed statement guaranteeing anonymity.”

  “Well, I could talk to him.”

  “Wonderful. Just a second.” I ran to Cookie’s desk in the locker room and grabbed a pencil and gym schedule before she had time to intimidate me. I scurried back to the lounge. “Here,” I said to Brenda, scribbling on the paper, “my phone number. Call me any time. And just let me add one thing. I certainly don’t want to pressure you, but do you know what your cooperation would do?” She looked at me questioningly. I decided she was just bright enough to realize that she was somehow inferior to other people, but not clever enough to remedy the situation. “Your cooperation, your views, would become part of the historical record, a vivid example that scholars and journalists could study in decades to come.”

  “I see,” she replied. Actually, one of the reasons I hadn’t written my dissertation was the feeling that two years of work on a book that, if I was extraordinarily lucky, about twenty people would read, was just not worth it. “I’ll speak to Dicky tonight and call you tomorrow or Wednesday. Is that okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. I wanted to leave then and call Dr. Ramsey, my advisor, and ask for a letter saying that yes, indeed, Judith Singer was a doctoral candidate at New York University. “I would appreciate anything you can do. And,” I added, standing up, “I really enjoyed chatting with you.”

  Brenda smiled and reclined on the chaise. Her eyes closed, and I guessed either the meeting had been trying for her or else it was her usual nap time. Back in the locker room, I mused on how deliciously clever I was. Now I could ask all the questions I wanted to. Beautiful! However, by the time I dressed, I decided that I was incredibly foolish, impossibly dense. Norma and/or Dicky would see through my fiction, laugh at my request. And if they didn’t, if they agreed to talk to me, what could I gain? And what if word of this venture got back to Bob? And what about Ramsey? Would he write a letter for me? Would he then expect, in twenty-five days or less, a completed dissertation on the banking community’s influence on monetary policy in 1932-1933?

  In my car I peered into the rear-view mirror. The sauna notwithstanding, my face was no longer young and dewy fresh. What did I have to lose? My virginity, my independence, my career were gone. Bob wouldn’t move out over this. Who else would make his breakfast and iron his shirts? The skin around my eyes was thinning, preparing a fertile field for a crop of wrinkles. I readjusted the mirror and drove home.

  With a half hour to spare before Joey’s bus arrived, I called Dr. Ramsey. He sounded pleased to hear from me and asked pointedly if I had at last realized the error of my ways.

  “I never said I was abandoning my dissertation forever,” I reminded him. “I just needed a little time off to raise a couple of children.”

  “My dear Mrs. Singer, I have seen more fine minds apply for a leave of absence to raise a couple of tykes or to work for a year or two in their family’s business. They never return. They go limp under the burden of materialism, and in Academe, a bell tolls for another lost soul.”

  “Well, I may yet be saved. With your help, of course. Could you possibly send me a letter saying I’m a doctoral candidate? Once the weather gets warm, I may drive up to Hyde Park, and I need some credentials before I can examine any of the papers.”

  “Why wait for spring, Mrs. Singer? Put on a warm sweater and a pair of galoshes and go now.”

  “Well, I’ll need your letter first.”

  “It will be posted within the hour.”

  I replaced the receiver and hugged myself, but not from joy. I felt terribly cold. How rotten, deceiving Dr. Ramsey to further my little game. Now I’d have to finish my dissertation just to prove my sincerity. And, I thought, rubbing my icy hands together, I really didn’t want to. Not at all. If I could spend the rest of my life in seminars, reading, talking about American history, I would be deeply satisfied. But I had no desire to teach, no taste at all for intradepartmental warfare. Yet I had to do something. In four or five years Kate and Joey would no longer suffice as an excuse for housewifery. Then what could I tell people who asked me what I did? “Oh, I read a lot and polish silver.”

  Ah, but clothed in a doctorate, I could simply say, “I teach.” And when they asked me what grade, I’d just smile and say, “At the university level.” Bob would introduce me as his wife, Dr. Singer. Kate would finally have a good role model, and Joey would view women as professionals and marry a doctor or a lawyer and share the housework with her. And with my own salary, I could pay a housekeeper, order my groceries on the phone, trade in the station wagon for a pale yellow MG.

  In keeping with my new image as a competent human being in control of her life, I made a slenderizing lunch of cottage cheese and grapefruit sections. Naturally, when Joey came home, he refused even to consider it. I gave him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We shared half a box of Mallomars for dessert.

  By evening, I had diagnosed myself as a manic-depressive. I would turn myself in to a quiet sanitarium in upstate New York for four or five years of lithium treatment.

  Bob asked: “Is anything wrong? You’re so quiet.”

  “No. Just tired, I guess.” Feeling came in great waves. I grew giddy at the prospect of really talking to the Fleckstein family, depressed at the thought of having to write my dissertation, and inconsolable at the idea of not writing it, of continuing my life as it was. Fortunately, the phone rang at nine o’clock and a soft voice asked: “Is this Judith Singer?”

  Brenda Dunck! I assured her that it was and, trying to sound casual, asked how she was.

  “Fine, thank you. The reason I’m calling is what we talked about today. You know? Well, I spoke with my husband, and he said I could talk to you if he could listen in and if he could look at what you write to make sure everything’s okay. Is that okay?”

  “Terrific,” I boomed, and then slipping back into my cultured voice, added: “Would your husband be willing to sit for an interview?”

  If Dicky refused, then my chances of talking to Norma and the family’s friends would be nil.

  “He said sure, but he doesn’t have much to say. I mean, he said he wasn’t surprised at what the newspapers printed because they’re in business to sell papers.”

  “Well, that’s an intriguing perspective in itself,” I commented. “I’d like to go into that. What causes a person to become cynical? Or to be so realistic, if you look at it from another angle?” I knew that I was trying to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, but at this point, I needed all the alchemy I could get.

  “By the way, what school are you going to for your Ph.D.?”

  “NYU.”

  “Oh.” Brenda sounded disappointed.

  I remembered with whom I was dealing. “It’s known for its history department. I was tempted to go to Harvard, but then everyone would have assumed all I could get was second best.”

  “Oh, you were right,” she assured me. We agreed to meet the next evening at eight, at their house. I
trotted downstairs and rapped on the door of Bob’s darkroom.

  “Are you going to come home for dinner tomorrow night?”

  “Judith, what do you want from me?” he called from behind the closed door. “I’m up to my ass in work, the goddamn phone never stops ringing. Look, I made it home tonight. Do you think I like working twelve hours a day? Do you think that’s my idea of fun?”

  “I know, darling,” I cooed through the door, trying to sound loving. “But I have to get away from the kids for a couple of hours. Maybe do some shopping or go to the movies with someone if her husband is working late. Would you mind if I got a sitter?”

  “No. Go ahead.” My Christlike sweetness, my gracious refusal to throw down the gauntlet and call him a neurotic, work-addicted bastard who richly deserved the massive coronary he was striving for, paid off. It generally did.

  “Maybe I’ll take myself out to dinner,” I called.

  “Wonderful, Judith. It will do you good.” He sounded so relieved. “Is there anything else?”

  “No. I’m going up to do the dishes, and I’ll probably go right to bed after that.”

  “Good. Fine. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  When the dishes were finished, I locked myself in the bathroom for an hour of hydrotherapy. The bathroom was the best room in the house, having been built by the previous owner, Sol Slutsky, the Sultan of Plumbing Supplies. Sol may have liked red flocked wallpaper in the dining room, gold-flecked mirrored walls in the living room, but, bless him, he had taste in bathrooms. We gutted every room in the house except the baths. Ours was huge, a shimmering marvel of sea green tile with what Sol had called “all the options.” A toilet with a flush more silent than a January dawn, a sunken bathtub big enough for two, a glassed-in shower that converted to a steam room at the twist of a knob, and a bidet; Mrs. Sol—I think her name was Henrietta—had warned me against the bidet, whispering as we toured the house that it would dry up my insides like a prune.

  Now, sitting on it, feeling the fountain of lukewarm water rising inside me, I contemplated waiting up for Bob and telling him the truth. “I need a baby sitter because I have to go out and investigate a murder,” I would tell him.

  “Are you crazy?” he would yell. Or if he were in a more relaxed mood: “Why are we paying taxes, Judith? Don’t you think the police have a right to their job?” He would not understand.

  In the shower, the steaming water from six spigots spraying my body, I began to relax, to grow mellow, to feel even a bit of compassion for Bob. I knew he hadn’t been happy in years, hadn’t been happy, in fact, from the day he joined his family’s business. He alone had been the holdout, the sensitive Singer too fine, too pure, to join the P.R. game. For years he had held high his well-molded chin and staunchly refused to hear his parents’ pleas. And then one night, coming home late after a Dostoevski seminar, he told me he would join Singer Associates. “But only for a year. Just to show them it wouldn’t work out.”

  “But you know it won’t work. Why do you have to prove it to them? Let them learn to accept you. It’s their problem, not yours.”

  “Look. It’s just for a year, and I’ll make a small fortune and then we’ll take six months and go to Europe. It’ll be okay.”

  It was okay. Okay for Singer Associates. Bob was gifted. His press releases were gems. He was the most talented flack since Aaron fronted for Moses. So he stayed. We never went to Europe, because his clients would be lost if he were away for more than a week. We bought our house. He joined the City Athletic Club, and began referring to his former doctoral advisor as an “intellectual masturbator.” For three years I urged him to quit. He would say, “Soon, soon.” And then, finally, he said, “No. I like it. And Judith...” I looked at him. “I haven’t heard you complaining about having to live on eighty thousand a year.” Away from clients, he rarely laughed aloud. He hardly ever read a book. On weekends, he’d take his camera and photograph leaves and flowers, then spend hours in a darkroom enlarging the petals until they ceased to be petals of flowers and became giant membranes. And in all the years, I had never had the courage to ask him if he was unhappy with what he had become. Maybe he was happy, in his own way. Maybe it was me, feeling uncomfortable because the man I was living with was not the man I married.

  I turned off the shower and wrapped my hair in a large, soft towel. Perhaps Bob’s implicit message was right: I never had it so good. Surely, all the women who flocked to Fleckstein must have been unhappier than I. Why else would they thumb their noses at their husbands and put out for old Bruce? Or was I the truly unhappy one, so dispirited that I lacked the juice to find an alternative to the hollow man who was my husband?

  I opened the door and saw Bob lying in bed. He peered at me, large-breasted, long-legged, not perfect, but not bad.

  “Hi,” I said.

  His eyes ranged all over my body. “Judith, don’t tell me you haven’t gained weight. I can see it in your waist.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Duncks’ house was in an area called Shorecrest, an enclave about a quarter of a mile square, featuring three types of houses: a split-level, something called a splanch—an unfortunate marriage of a ranch and a split-level—and a colonial model. Dicky and Brenda had opted for tradition and selected the colonial model. Their mailbox was embossed with a vicious-looking eagle clenching arrows in one talon and their address, a gilt number 14, in the other.

  “Hi, hon,” said Dicky as he opened the door, his thin goatee jerking upward as he smiled. “Good to see you.” He was dressed for breakfast at a Dartmouth reunion: khaki slacks, a properly bled madras shirt, penny loafers without socks. He had captured the elusive essence of WASPdom, I thought. Almost. On his left hand, he wore the optional but acceptable plain gold wedding band, but on his right ring finger was a large gold ring with his initials, R.D., in a sort of Chinese scrollwork design, a tiny diamond twinkling between the two letters. His Bar Mitzvah ring.

  “Hi. I’m Judith Singer.”

  “Sure. I remember you from the funeral. Come in. Make yourself at home.” That was difficult. He led me into a living room stuffed with reproductions of colonial American furniture. Five or six chairs, a hutch with lots of tiny drawers, a large couch with spindle legs, a spinning wheel, all in the same gleaming maple finish. The walls and chairs were covered in a red and blue fabric that, at a glance, seemed to be embossed with a minuscule print of apothecary jars and randomly scattered scenes of Mount Vernon.

  “Sorry,” I said, tripping over a small footstool.

  “That’s all right.” It was Brenda, dressed in a red lounging robe, sitting in a New England rocking chair. I hadn’t seen her. A stellar beginning to my detective career. “Would you like coffee?”

  “Yes, please.” When she had disappeared into the kitchen, I opened an old attaché case of Bob’s and took out a notebook and a pen. I was sitting on a ladderback chair, about a foot away from Dicky. I handed him Ramsey’s letter, which had arrived in that day’s mail. “Here are my credentials.”

  “Thanks.” He read it slowly, his lips moving with each word. I noticed he was rubbing the NYU crest between his fingers. Was he checking out the paper because he was in the printing business, or was he, by a laying on of hands, trying to feel if I were for real?

  “Gee. Pretty as a picture and a brain besides,” he said, smiling. I smiled back. Words were not coming.

  “Are you going to take notes?” he asked, glancing at the notebook. “Because if you are, just write that ole Dicky Dunck thinks newspapers are full of bull doody, and you can quote me. Oh,” he hesitated, “pardon my French.”

  “That’s all right. I’d love to quote you, but I won’t.” He peered at me curiously. “You see,” I explained, “I want you to feel free to express yourself as openly as possible, and I think that’s best done anonymously. Of course, if you want your name to be used...”

  “To tell you the truth, darling,” a
nd he said “darling” in an easy, unaffectionate Garment Center way, “dolling,” and he lowered his voice a little, “I’d just as soon not see the Dunck family name in print again. Except on a stock certificate. Right?” He chuckled twice, in triads, his laughter going up a half note with each new chuckle.

  I smiled again, a very self-conscious smile, feeling my upper lip curling under with numbness. “Right,” I agreed.

  “I mean, a lot of local folks know that Norma is my sister, but ever since all this newspaper publicity, everyone in the whole world knows that a Dunck is involved in this mess. Really, sweetheart, was it necessary to call Norma ‘the former Norma Dunck’? Geez, everybody knows her as Norma Fleckstein. I mean, she’s not one of those women’s libbers who use two names all the time.”

  I slowly wrote “hostile abt use of Dunck name” in my notebook just to kill thirty seconds.

  “Here’s coffee,” announced Brenda suddenly. The thick blue carpet that stretched from wall to wall had muffled her entrance. She set a tray down on the oversize seat of the spinning wheel; it was their coffee table. We stood, bending low, to put sugar and cream in our coffee.

  “Well,” I said a moment later, picking up my notebook, “whom shall I interview first?” No takers. “How about you, Brenda?”

  “All right.” The light from a pair of pewter sconces gleamed on her black hair. It was pulled back into a bun, like a pioneer woman, except that a pioneer woman could not have achieved the intense ebony of Number 46, Clairol Midnight Black.

  “As I explained, I’m trying to explore First Amendment privileges vis-à-vis the individual’s right to privacy inherent in Anglo-Saxon common law.” That sentence, if it could be captured and recycled, could fertilize every front lawn in Shorehaven for the next ten years. Dicky and Brenda looked at me and nodded seriously. “But I want more than a dry recital of legal doctrine and constitutional history. I want humanity: human feelings, human emotions.”