My Husband and My Wives

by Charles Rowan Beye

  I was contracted to teach five courses a term, a schedule not uncommon in the forties and fifties, but a workload at which present-day academics would faint (and we are not even talking about preparation and grading). My main effort was a lecture course in classical civilization, Greece in the fall, Rome in the spring. For decades the department had traditionally emphasized history and archaeology, and far more students enrolled in classical civilization than in courses in Greek or Latin. On paper that may sound like a high-minded academic decision, but the reality was that ancient language courses were difficult (despite the fact that before Vatican II every Catholic boy of whatever intellect was forced to master one or both), and the girls shunned them. A lecture course, however, which emphasized art, literature, and archaeology, along with the history, would be easy enough for most anybody, and, if taught in a fashion that was amusing and colorful (read: lots of slides), would prove popular as well, and thus a breadwinner for the department. By the mid-fifties as the classics profession nationwide was beginning to look nervously at declining enrollments, the more realistic department chairs knew enough to move away from language instruction with schemes to ward off administrators pushing budget cuts. The Wheaton tradition of archaeology and history put them well ahead of the curve.

  It was essential, therefore, that the successful candidate for the job be able to teach this course, and Dow, the historian, was the natural guarantor of this credential. As it was, I knew next to nothing about ancient history; I had not studied it much as an undergraduate and never as a graduate student. Since I had done no work with Dow (beyond hemming and hawing on the ridiculous subject of the putative dissertation that he had dreamed up for me), he had no experience of my complete ignorance of the subject. As he was intent upon keeping the Wheaton College position in his control, and with no other more likely candidate on the horizon, he prudently did not investigate, or perhaps he didn’t care. Needless to say, I did next to no preparation over the summer months beyond checking some serious tomes out of Widener Library and occasionally inspecting their titles as they sat on my desk. Consequently, the first few months of my teaching career were extraordinary for the effort at preparation.

  Every night I read the requisite pages of J. B. Bury’s A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, turned them into an outline or script, took advantage of the many times I had acted in plays to memorize my spiel more or less, and did the same with H. J. Rose’s A Handbook of Greek Literature. I’d like to say, continuing the actor/theater metaphor, that I went out there as just another hoofer and came back a star, or whatever it was that Warner Baxter said to Ruby Keeler. The fact of the matter is that I bombed; in the enrollment for the second term over half the students elected not to continue. It was a stunning rejection and well deserved. I was just reciting the “facts” of Greek civilization. My predecessor Ted had built that course up from nothing in three years to the popularity that I in three months had annihilated. I knew from hearing him that his anecdotes and gossip from the professional world of classics were both amusing and charming. He brought that raconteur’s skill into the classroom and combined it with a seasoned teacher’s disinclination to grade hard in a general education lecture course. I was too rigid, far too serious. As he said to me years later, when discussing the matter, I was a Protestant and he was a Catholic; there was no hint of absolution either for me or for my students in my classes. I am sure that my personal tragedy did not loosen me up either. Luckily my chair was sympathetic to the neophyte’s dilemma, and the administration renewed my contract, so I had the chance to learn from my mistakes.

  While I was involved in this disaster, my life in Cambridge took on pleasing complications. This came about through the machinations of another Harvard graduate student named Mark whom I had met a year earlier and with whom I had had a desultory sexual relationship all the previous summer. After Mary’s death most people my age avoided me. Only ten years after the war, and they seemed to have forgotten that young people can die too, that men can lose spouses. I was lucky to have Bill’s family out in Concord to visit. Even better, his younger brother Freddy came to live with me in Cambridge to avoid having to live in his Harvard dorm or to commute; it was ideal for me having someone never home but always a psychic presence. But Mark was forever urging me to marry again. “You were so happy married,” he would remind me. He himself was planning to marry, so the subject was never far from his mind, although one might think that two men lying naked in bed together would not be onto that topic. He brought up his classmate in the school of architecture, a woman named Penny Pendleton, who as a matter of fact had introduced him to Mary and me, since she lived in our old building. We had met her at a sherry party in the apartment of our neighbor Joan, no doubt making one of our over-the-top flamboyant entrances. At least Penny had been suitably dazzled, for I know that she wrote her mother after that night—I saw the letter years later—confessing that she had “met the man I want to marry, but he is already taken.” Now I was free again, but I had no interest, not even in making it with a man.

  But Mark was persistent. It became October, and he organized a potluck supper mostly with architecture students. This would be easy, since almost none of them knew me and my sad story. Penny, of course, was there; she flashed me a deeply sympathetic look as she entered but said nothing. After dinner I offered to drive her home. She asked me in for a drink, and somehow we were disrobing within half an hour. I cannot believe that we had expressed ourselves at the dinner table; how did we move so rapidly into the erotics? I do know that a few weeks before Mary died, we had all been at Joan’s wedding, in fact we had all helped out, since it was a small affair that Joan herself arranged. In the car coming back I was sufficiently drunk to give Penny, who was sitting next to me, a kiss or two, but I cannot believe that this was any invitation then or later. True enough, Penny nursed a great crush on me. And I? Well, for someone who had found so much of his definition in sexual intercourse, perhaps I responded to the message of availability with a deep yearning for the security “doing it” would bring. This night I looked down at her as she lay in bed to announce—rather sternly, as I recall—that I had been having homosexual relationships since I was fourteen or fifteen, that I had always been attracted to men. It was important to me that this was clear. Penny did not seem to register any great emotion at this revelation, but then she was usually a mask. We did not make love, however, because I turned out to be impotent. She reacted as though this were a natural consequence of my emotional state, but I was horrified and shocked. The hyper-virility of teenage sex does not prepare one for the sexual miscues, inadequacies, and failures of the adult male. The next night I went over to Mark’s and astonished us both by throwing myself on him, not stopping until I had satisfied myself into exhaustion. By rights that should have finished me off for a bit, but the very next night I returned to Penny’s bed. Was I there for more than to demonstrate that everything was in working order?

  Nevertheless, that evening established us as a couple. I had known Penny as a neighbor and friendly face at parties. Suddenly we were lovers. We were certainly perfectly matched for hours of intercourse, just as we were able to match each other martini for martini, a drink to which Penny introduced me. It is amazing to me in retrospect that I, who am in essence a male who lusts after other males, could not get enough of our coupling together, nights, afternoons, mornings, whenever we had a chance moment, wherever. The bedroom is the obvious place, but I remember on a weekend with friends our taking a canoe out on a lake and bringing it ashore on a small island, where we suddenly lay down on the grass and I pumped away into her, and at the end muffling our orgasmic groans and shouts. Sound carries so well across a lake, and we did not want our picnicking friends to think that murder was being committed. The intensity of our sexual relationship provoked me simplemindedly to tell, not ask, Penny that we should marry. And, she, ever the mask, always silent, did not disagree. But did she ever agree? Well, I guess at the altar she gave
a positive response to the question posed by the minister.

  What a strange courtship. I was so clearly manic, and I am sure Mary’s death had put me over the top. In retrospect I wonder if Penny was clinically depressed; as a personality she could be so wan, so quiet. In the beginning it was restful, she seemed so easy to dominate after my experience of Mary’s powerful presence. But behind the mask I uncovered a fierceness. She had a twin brother with whom she was in constant competition, and by extension with all males. He studied engineering; she would be an architect—engineering, so to speak, with style, flair, and imagination, and yet a profession that is to this day notoriously dominated by males. She was determined to break through the conventions of polite female behavior that her proper mother and a succession of boarding schools had tried to instill in her; it was from her lips that I heard for the second time in my life the word “fuck.” She had lost her virginity young, as she was quick to tell me. For a college student of the fifties she was very promiscuous. She told our daughters, as I learned later, that she much resented the sexual freedom of males. Completely comfortable with one-night stands, she could have been a gay male. It seemed that she had worked her way through all the grad students in the architecture studios, but when I met them I noticed that they did not give her lingering looks, which made me believe that there had never been much of a relationship with any of them. But sleeping with everyone in your circle is a great way to exert a kind of control and establish a presence through the group. I always thought her sex drive was partly fueled by her insecurity about speaking. Sex was her means of establishing contact; the quiet person came alive. I responded with all the pent-up frustration that grief and sexual denial fueled in me. She could not have been more different from Mary. Slightly dark when tan, sallow otherwise, she was tall, lean, had the body of an adolescent boy, slim-hipped, with breasts that needed no support until motherhood and breast-feeding changed her shape. She was like Mary, I imagine, in that she thought she was the perfect match in sexual freedom with a man who had been sleeping with males since he was fourteen.

  She was delighted that I had no parents with whom she would have to deal. The previous summer she had in fact met Mary’s parents when they visited Mary and me in Cambridge, so that difficult hurdle had already been passed. In our inchoate fantasies of our impending wedding and honeymoon, I had in mind a visit to Iowa to show her off to friends, and that would necessarily involve the difficult visit to Ames. But in the immediate future I had to meet her parents, about whom she had told me very little. On almost any personal subject she believed in the motto “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” As so many of the more affluent preppy Harvardians of the time, Penny affected the style of dressing shabby; she seemed always to be in her oldest clothes, drab skirts threadbare from years of wear, frayed tennis sneakers. Since she drove an old Buick, which she used, she said, for visiting her parents on “the farm” in New Hampshire, we two Iowans, who were familiar with a farming population that drove Buicks because they rode high and were less likely to be damaged in the ruts on farm roads, assumed that Penny was a poor scholarship student from a family scratching out a living on the hard New England soil. Thus, when I was prepared to be gracious and not condescend, I was surprised to be ushered into the presence of a magnificently dressed, handsome, commanding white-haired gentleman with a cane whom she introduced as her father, the Admiral. And there beside him with all the appropriate diamonds and strands of pearls was her elegant white-haired mother. So this was the dear old farm couple down from the country, where, as I learned later, they lived in a restored eighteenth-century farmhouse on several hundred acres that had been in Penny’s mother’s family for six generations.

  Penny was my introduction into modernity and the imperatives of style. The one subject on which she was articulate was architecture; she did not simply talk, she lectured. Having taken Sigfried Giedion’s course at the School of Design and almost memorized his Space, Time & Architecture, she was ready to comment on any architectural feature she came upon. It made for the most exhilarating strolls through cities. Walter Gropius was her teacher and god; I discovered the Bauhaus and everything it implied. The affectionate tour she gave me of Gropius’s Graduate Center dorm and dining hall at Harvard and the Saarinen buildings at MIT completely shook up my aesthetic assumptions. I, who prided myself on the professional association of one of my uncles in Oak Park with Frank Lloyd Wright, discovered that I knew nothing about anything. I will never forget our first visits to New York together as she took me through the architecture galleries at MoMA, then out on the town to see the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Bank on Forty-third and Fifth Avenue, the Seagram Building, Lever House, and the other gems of the time. My allegiance to classical antiquity and its restatement in the Italian Renaissance had to be rethought in Penny’s observations about the inherent classical aesthetics of modernism and minimalism. Talking art and architecture with Penny was an explosive expansion of my aesthetic sensibility that was another side to all the sex and the martinis. It was a delirium from which we never thought to wake up, but somehow through it all Penny finished the term and got her degree, and I read my students’ exams and turned in the grades.

  And then we were married, June 16, 1955, a scant nine and a half months after Mary’s death. No one mentioned the fact, except Mary’s parents, who sent what I read as genuine love and encouragement in their congratulations. Penny’s parents were not at all enthusiastic, first that I was a widower—they were horrified that Penny chose to wear something relatively somber with a black belt to the rehearsal dinner in memory of Mary—and then I have to think that the Admiral, who had a lot of experience with males in close proximity, scented the perfume in the underwear, so to speak; the more manic I became, the more fruitcake was my performance, and the mounting stresses of the buildup to the wedding had me dancing in the air. The historic church in Deerfield, New Hampshire, followed by a reception under a large tent on the farm, would have satisfied my mother’s every snobbish yearning. As we left the church, Penny caught her heel in the threshold, breaking it off, and so had to hobble on my arm to the car waiting to take us away. After the reception we drove to nearby Concord to change clothes, and in getting into the apartment where they were laid out, she tripped on a sharp object, cutting herself deeply enough to require emergency suturing and an anti-tetanus shot at the local ER. A week later in Minneapolis, after I fainted on the dance floor, they diagnosed me sick enough with mononucleosis that Penny was encouraged to do all the driving back to Massachusetts. Those are the scenes that an Ingmar Bergman would have foregrounded in his film of a doomed marriage. If not that, then a shot of our friend Joan’s jaw dropping in shock when she cried out, “You’re kidding!” after we proudly informed her that we were getting married.

  But did I love her? Looking back, at eighty, I would say that this was the deepest, most complicated relationship of my life. Years after our divorce, whenever we met I was always agitated and troubled; there was something deeply moving there. Love? Guilt? Frustration? Yearning? Annoyance? At the outset we were more engaged with each other than I have ever been with anyone before or since. We were drunk on the sex, drunk on the martinis, of a mind that you cannot have ecstasy without two people like us, just as there is no martini without gin and vermouth. It is odd that Penny, who was reared on upper-middle-class notions of married life, who had bought a trousseau (at her mother’s insistence), who had bridesmaids, who wrote thank-you notes on specially prepared stationery, who had struggled to finish her degree work before the wedding so that she could go out to get an architectural job after we married, was utterly indifferent to the wedding, went through the paces because of her mother, whom she despised for her attitude; but what is worse, she recognized that I, supposedly the man from the bohemian life who was going to rescue her from her mediocrity, was just as hung up on the wedding as anyone. In fact, while Penny had slaved to finish her coursework, she had delegated me to negotiate with her mother on the wedding details. I
t was odd, and so gay, and I am sure Admiral Pendleton in the background marked it all the time, that the prospective mother-in-law and son-in-law sat together by the hour in the Cambridge apartment I still shared with Freddy talking of which champagne, what kinds of hors d’oeuvres, flowers, caterers, what car to use driving away from the church, on and on and on. It was a Martha Stewart moment avant la lettre.

  I began my second year of teaching as a married man again. Penny and I took over the apartment where I had been living with Freddy, and she proceeded to give a more minimalist line to the interiors. There was a racket of sawing and hammering, but not much she could do in the rented ground floor of an old Victorian. More important, she got a job, and then discovered she was pregnant when she missed her period two months in a row. We were frightened; this was unexpected—more than that, not even imagined. In 1956 nobody we knew was having babies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It must be said: not at all wanted. And yet Penny’s pregnancy gave me a glow of pride, such a sense of accomplishment that it was hard to remember that my part in all this was simply a split-second orgasm. Did this demonstrate that underneath it all I did not think myself a man? But that now, if I were to stand in the great shower of life among all those naked fellows with the water coursing down their torsos and dripping off their extended penises, I would finally be one of them, because I would have fathered a child?