Our fourth child was born the following November. Penny and I were never able to shed the guilt we felt at her birth, particularly when the infant was born with a condition that prevented her left eye from opening for three months. It seemed a mark of rebuke directed at our reluctant parenthood. We doubled our efforts to be exemplary parents and housekeepers, saved from descending into a truly destructive cycle of grimness by the natural effervescence with which my manic personality is endowed, not to mention the endless resort to good manners and the repression of true feeling that was a legacy of the homes from which we sprang. In order to supplement my meager salary I took a job at a local junior college teaching evening classes. Days were filled. Time set aside for class preparation, office hours, and grading seemed to soak up every empty space on my academic calendar not already blocked out for teaching. I looked nervously at the list of research projects I had set out for myself, knowing that I was not producing as much as a young man should. The moment I walked in the door at home I had three little ones clambering for my attention, eager to show me the results of whatever project they had achieved that day, and now there was a fourth who needed a bottle or there was a diaper to be changed. Penny greeted me with the kind of listless gesture of surrender that said, They’re all yours for a while, buddy. At least we had a student helper who put the children to bed and assisted with bedside reading, which gave us two beleaguered adults a quiet moment to have a drink before I had to hit the trail for the night teaching. I set off with a perfunctory kiss and Penny’s warning, “Watch the road,” a reminder of the time that I confessed to having fallen half-asleep at the wheel on the way home from the junior college.
The junior faculty at Stanford, who were all of them just as tired as we were, sought remedy in weekend drinking parties, sometimes with stand-up buffets to temper the effect of all the alcohol. One night we were among twenty or twenty-five standing in the living room of a house just around the corner from us, and then it was eight and no food had appeared, guests took note, sought out the hostess, and it turned out that she had just cracked mentally. In any case, she was sitting at a table in a little room off the kitchen playing solitaire and humming. The other women scurried to turn out the food that was there onto plates, and we all ate in a kind of drunken stupor, or was it a hushed something or other? It was so 1960s Palo Alto–Stanford young marrieds. One night at a cocktail party—and I remember this scene so vividly—I sat in a chair drunkenly staring at the equally intoxicated wife of an English Department colleague who was crawling on all fours under a large table nearby, at which point I blurted out to Ted, who sat next to me, “Penny bores me, Ted.” He took his big fat Irish finger, put it to my lips, and said sweetly and softly, “Don’t say that, don’t think that.” In retrospect it would all have been so much better if I had had a guy on the side. But where to find one? I was too tired even to care.
As winter turned into spring Ted invited me for drinks at a bar with some guy who worked in the library. He was a slim fellow about my age, who proceeded to get as tipsy as myself, as always seemed to happen in a bar with Ted. When I excused myself to go to the men’s room my new friend went with me. We stood side by side pissing away, and as we were finishing I reached over to take his penis in my hand and watched it grow stiff, while he stood there silent and acquiescent. Without a word we repacked our pants and joined Ted, who meanwhile had paid the bill and was heading out to his car. My friend agreed to drive me back to the faculty parking lot for my car. Once there, we began to kiss each other passionately, only interrupted by his moaning whisper, “I didn’t know this was going to happen.” I was so desperate for a man I felt I would explode and fell upon him as though it were a rape. I was out of my mind. Once we had finished, we pulled our clothes together, said a muffled farewell, and each drove off to his respective family.
On the way home I stopped for something Penny wanted in the nearby supermarket. I was still sufficiently drunk that I dropped everything to the floor at least once, and as I knelt to pick things up, I looked at the long aisle, the food products running along the shelves on each side of me, the unforgiving uniform lighting taking definition out of everything in my view, recognizing then a sensation of California that I would read a few years hence in the descriptions of the place by Joan Didion. Unaccountably I heard myself shout out in my brain as though I were Scarlett O’Hara: As God is my witness, I am going to go to Europe.
Well, someone up there heard me, because on the fifth of August I was on a plane for Athens. Days after my moment in the parking lot five students from my Beginning Greek class asked if I would tutor them through June and July so that they could advance through second year and start the third year in the fall. They were all bright as hell, motivated, each willing to pay me the ten dollars an hour that I asked. At $250 a week for eight weeks, this would give me $2,000, an enormous sum of money in those days. Then another student— indeed, I remembered him well as one of those boys from the Latin class who had gazed ardently at the youth in the tight, tight jeans—asked if I would consider tutoring him in August. When he mentioned that traveling with his father in Europe would prevent his studying with the other five, all I heard was the word “Europe.” Yes, I would tutor him, but we would have our lessons while traveling a month in Greece and a month in Italy. Like every other rich young kid, he had been to those places a million times, but he was happy with the idea of sitting about studying while I viewed the sights, and then having a lesson.
But what about my obligations at home? Our oldest child would celebrate his fifth birthday while I was gone. I encouraged Penny to take the children home to her parents in New Hampshire, but she refused. As a Navy child she had plenty of examples of women left with children while the husband was overseas—her own father during the war, for instance. She insisted that she would be fine. The guilt I feel to this day is mitigated by knowing that, as she confessed later to my daughters, since it was only the lack of money that kept her from walking out, she probably was entirely happy to have a life to herself for two months, to be a parent to her children without Mr. Overbearing Manic around the house.
Imagine being thirty-two years old, taking the first extended vacation since you were fifteen. Imagine having studied intensively the culture and history of ancient Greece and Rome since you were nineteen, having lectured on these subjects for the past seven years, and now you are visiting every major site of these peoples, looking at objects and architecture about which you have an immediate and intuitive understanding. Imagine that the young man with whom you are traveling turns out to be more intelligent than you had imagined, serious about studying the original Greek text of Homer’s Iliad and Herodotus’s Histories. Imagine spending the cool hours of the morning and the late afternoon visiting sites and museums while spending the midday lying about listening to the young man translate his prepared material and sight-read still further. I have rarely known a student to make such progress in the two months available; such was the agreeable impression made upon me that I can remember these forty-odd years later the passages of Greek that occasioned the most discussion. To this day I will come across marginalia in my Iliad text where I have indicated that the idea came from him.
When we first got our hotel room in Athens and were about to take our siesta, each in his underwear across the room from each other in his own bed, almost the first thing out of his mouth was a stammered—what was it? I have to call it a prepared speech—in which he politely rejected anything sexual in the two months ahead. I stifled my disappointment; after all, he was paying the bills, and I was his teacher. Imagine my delight when fifteen minutes later I watched him striding across the room with a tent pole pushing out his shorts. My God, he was so handsome, well built, and bursting with sexual energy. It was almost but not quite a love affair. Certainly it was the most extended, complex, complete physical relationship with another man that I had ever had up to that point. If he was a novice or insecure about many aspects of lovemaking, I was simply lacking
in experience, certainly recent experience, so what we were doing each day had a delicious tentative quality, a shared surprise at the pleasure and ecstasy of it all. It was not love because we did not want love with each other; he knew he was not ready for that, and I knew that I was already in enough of a danger zone with my emotions. In every other way it was bliss, not the least being the wicked pleasure every morning of watching the man at the hotel desk react to my young friend’s settling our bill rather than the older fellow he took to be the sugar daddy.
Needless to say, my return to Palo Alto was a shock. The French and Italians have a word for the psychological state; it is called “the reentry,” since it is their custom for the entire country to shut down, so to speak, while everyone takes an extended vacation. For me there was the sheer fright of giving up the young man, returning to all the domestic problems in my relationship with Penny. There was the added guilt that reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex while overseas brought to me. Being a woman in a patriarchal culture was bad, being the wife of such a demanding person was worse; how could she not be victimized? It made me sick to the stomach and sexually impotent. How could I deal with the guilt of my failure at sex? Did my two impossibly wonderful months with the young man call me home to gayness for once and for always? The months in Greece and Italy made me determined to find a way to spend a year in the Mediterranean lands with my whole family. That would be my redemption. Miraculously enough, it happened. Our departmental secretary showed me a brief mailing that she had tacked onto the office bulletin board. The Archaeological Institute of America announced the Olivia James Traveling Fellowship set up for travel in Greek lands for poets, artists, writers, scholars, anyone with a love of the ancient world.
This was the gift of a woman named Olivia James, who originally donated the money to the Smithsonian for the noble purpose I mentioned. The trustees of that institution, not thinking they had the competence to choose, handed it off to the Archaeological Institute. Of course, the archaeology establishment managed to convert it to their own purposes. The first holder of the fellowship was a man closely connected with the archaeological establishment, a resident at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, who got it from the AIA without competition so he could complete his architectural drawings of the Parthenon. So much for travel in Greek lands for poets, musicians, and that ilk! I was the second holder of the fellowship, and certainly its least likely, not being an archaeologist, historian, epigraphist, or practitioner of any of the hard-nosed disciplines the AIA loves. Who knows how my improbable appointment came about? My old boss at Wheaton speculated that since I had asked Sterling Dow, my dissertation director, who also happened to be a major figure in epigraphical circles, and Frank Brown, my old boss at Yale, a leading archaeologist, to write recommendations, I was shoo-in. Who could compete with those names?
My trip in the previous summer prejudiced me in favor of Rome as a place to settle my family while I was traveling around Greek lands. I had not counted on the rivalry between the American Academy in Rome and the American School in Athens; it is like the Red Sox and the Yankees, only more so, with trustees drawn from the Social Register. The clique around the American School insisted that I should live in Athens. But I had an argument when the American School establishment made their displeasure known. After all, in addition to the Greek mainland the Greeks had also settled the peninsula of Italy south of Rome and Sicily, as well as the area of Turkey. Were we to live in Istanbul?
Rome it was. We sailed for Genoa on Cunard’s Mauretania, a nine-day crossing. With the help of a friend I found an improbably grand apartment: ten large rooms with very high ceilings, furnished in pieces of real or fake eighteenth-century provenance, Persian carpets on the floor, a large children’s nursery, a maid’s room, pantry, kitchen, two terraces giving out to a view of gardens and fountains in the grounds on the floor below. If ever you see Bertolucci’s Il Conformista, watch for the scene where the protagonist goes to see his heroin-addicted mother in her grand Fascist villa. The camera pans along a street notorious during the Fascist era and one of the palaces on the street was where we lived on the second floor. A genuine marchesa was subletting the place while her husband pursued his diplomatic career. We hired a live-in cook from friends who were returning to the United States; engaged a capable, no-nonsense English girl who came out from London as au pair; and took on the gatekeeper’s sister, who did the cleaning when she wasn’t washing our mountains of dirty clothes in the bathroom tub. We had the travel grant, my parents-in-law gave us some money, I took some money from a small inheritance, and somehow it all worked in a thoroughly enchanted way. I traveled through Greece, Turkey, Sicily, and southern Italy, just as I promised. Sometimes I traveled with a Greek American student of mine who could talk to the people of Greece, sometimes Penny joined me, as when I went through Turkey, sometimes I went alone, as when I traveled through Sicily. We traveled together on small trips to see the art and architecture of Italy, then on a longer one later to France and England. My years of yearning and dreams were realized.
It took an enormous toll on our marriage. Traveling by ship with four very small children, establishing a family in a large apartment with live-in help—these are not idyllic adventures for everyone, especially when it requires some fluency in the Italian language. It was only much later I learned, in couples therapy when she finally felt free to speak her mind, how much Penny, who had been forcibly resettled every two years as a Navy child, truly disliked traveling. She hated our year in Rome because she had little talent for foreign languages, so managing our cook and cleaning help was a double nightmare of administration and translation. All the free time that having the help bestowed upon her was gone in her frustration at not being able to practice architecture with it; she did not want to walk the streets of Rome looking at pretty buildings and sit for espresso in piazzas and watch the people. Watching her husband move farther away in his manic enthusiasm for living abroad was already too much for her. At the beginning in the fall when I went off to Greece and Turkey I summoned her to join me and my traveling companion (completely platonic) in Izmir. She arrived, thinking, I imagine, that now was our chance to become the young lovers we had been at the start. At her arrival she handed on to me the heavy baggage of my guilt for my failure at lovemaking in recent years, my depression at seeing her sad, and yet gamely trying to pretend she was having a good time. All the joy of the experience of discovery and adventure that had filled me utterly in the previous weeks evaporated at seeing her grimly try to enjoy the party.
While we were living in Rome, Professor Otis wrote to inform me that he would not support me for tenure when the time came. I was in the first year of my second three-year contract at Stanford while on this leave. So I had two years to work out my immediate future. I immediately wrote to a friend at Boston University, the very same friend who had found us the wonderful Roman apartment, asking her to keep a lookout for anything coming up in the Boston area. After our migrations to unfamiliar locales, where we had had the usual agitation of integration, my instinct was to return to a place we knew. So far I had gotten jobs through personal intervention (Dow at Wheaton), luck combined with charm (Yale), and friendly persuasion (my friend Ted working on Otis). My friend wrote back to tell me that coincidentally she was leaving Boston University in two years’ time to move with her husband to Princeton (this time it was lucky coincidence). When we returned to California after the months of letters, I made a flight to Boston to talk with the administration at Boston University, and they invited me to join the faculty in September 1966 with the prospect of becoming the department head in the academic year 1967–68.
Did I discuss this move with Penny? Not really, but she agreed in the sense that she never said no. Perhaps, as an unwilling wanderer most of her life, she thought of Boston as home. She had attended Abbott Academy, a prep school north of the city, for three years, after which she had gone to college and graduate school on the north side of the Charles
River. Our year together in Rome, 1963–64, changed me forever; I fell in love with Rome hard. For those who do, they say when they are away from the city that they are “Romesick.” The year in Rome changed Penny as well. Because there was so much help with us in Rome, she as well as myself was free from the quotidian distraction of child care and housework, free to take long solitary walks through that incredibly beautiful city and think. I doubt that for Penny, frustrated in so many ways, those thoughts were pleasant, but the experience of being free of domestic chores made her more than ever determined to get outside the home. How could Boston not beckon to her, the city where she had first begun to have a career?
My Husband and My Wives Page 15