My Husband and My Wives

by Charles Rowan Beye

  This was not an easy time for Penny. She had given herself over completely to establishing herself as an architect in the Boston area. But before that she plunged into the qualifying examinations for board certification; they are many, they require study and memorization, and it is normal to fail parts of them more than once. Once she had worked herself past this enormous hurdle, she immediately was given more serious work. As I said before, this is very definitely still a man’s profession, and women who enter it have to perform twice as well in order to be judged the male’s equivalent. Initially she did minor detail work on several buildings near major highways in the Boston area, so that we could amuse ourselves as a family by driving along and pointing out, “That’s one of Mom’s buildings,” even if she had only worked on realigning all the restrooms when the new code for the handicapped required special measurements for wheelchair access.

  A year earlier in January 1970, Penny had endured extreme physical and mental anguish when she barely survived an automobile accident. She was in the process of driving a dinner guest back to his motel when she skidded on the ice and the car went into a tree. She was not wearing a seat belt and the steering wheel on impact did severe damage to several of her internal organs. Luckily her passenger survived with only minor injuries. During the week when the doctors could not guarantee her survival, and I with the help of our student live-in kept the children calm with the illusion that their mother’s accident was minor, I worried over the morality of this lie, if she did indeed die without their seeing her. (They told us at noon that Daddy had broken his leg in an accident, they came to pick us up from school at three with the news that he was dead.) The hospital sent her home at the start of what turned out to be an enormous blizzard, which eventually killed the power, so we sat by candlelight in the kitchen with the oven door to the gas-fueled stove opened, a cozy family scene in some respects, everyone so thankful that she was alive and we were all safe. The event, like the death of her father in 1964, seemed to change Penny in a significant way: she began to treasure and assign value to the days of her life, or so I imagined from gauging a new sharpness and urgency in her remarks. Her life was ready for major change; she was back in a city where she was positioned to live life to the full, which had certainly not been possible during the decade of suburban living. She recuperated very slowly, but it was uneventful. As soon as she could in April she was back to work as busy as ever.

  In the late summer of that same year, she suffered the sudden loss of her twin brother to an unexpected heart attack at age thirty-nine. Her brother’s death came with a peculiar circumstance. On the day he died we were on our way to Maine to visit our younger son, who was enrolled in an athletic camp there. We had spent the night at the farm alone, because Penny’s mother was on the Cape at the moment. Curiously Penny took it into her head to call her brother, something she almost never did, and in fact after giving the idea a second thought she changed her mind. In the morning as we were about to leave, Penny complained of chest pains, and since they continued I wanted to stop at a clinic on our way north, which she refused to do. At noon the pains stopped. By four we were back at the farm, where her mother greeted us with, “Penny, Brian’s dead.” He had come in to work that morning complaining of chest pains, and his secretary had finally convinced him to go down to the company infirmary, where they quickly summoned an ambulance to take him to the hospital, and he was dead on arrival at noon. He had been alone at home the night before because his wife and children were with her parents. I begged Penny to go to her doctor for an EKG. The tests showed no problem, but we were interested to hear the doctor say that there were data for the supernatural experiences of twins, which he himself could not imagine trying to account for. Penny, who had trouble expressing herself on mundanities, was never able to go into murkier matters unless she was quite liquored up, so I cannot imagine what she was feeling.

  Since I wanted to feel free to travel during the upcoming year abroad, I offered a recently graduated student couple who wanted a year abroad a chance to stay with us, junior chaperones for the children, now ages ten, eleven, thirteen, and fourteen. I did not plan on hiring a cook, since I felt supremely confident at turning out the meals as I was now doing for us at home in Brookline. I loved shopping; the washing and the cleaning were shared by me and the student couple. It was rather slapdash, but we all managed to laugh a lot, and with a little exertion everything seemed to go along just fine. It was only years later that my sons confessed to sneaking out nights to go to a nearby jazz club; as far as I knew they were asleep in their rooms after doing their homework. The children went to the Overseas School of Rome as the boys had on our previous visit, while the student couple found jobs to occupy their days and get into the Roman scene; and I occasionally paid a visit to the library at the American Academy so as to justify the fact that I was a professor on official leave.

  I was working on the manuscript of Ancient Greek Literature and Society for Doubleday, so I had plenty to read and to study at my desk in the marchesa’s apartment. I started my day out on the terrace off the kitchen drinking coffee, where I saluted the maids I could see on other terrazzi beating carpets and shaking dust mops. Naturally I was an object of furious curiosity in the neighborhood. Italian males cannot boil water, let alone tend to the household tasks. Here I was, il professore, a grand American academic, doing the kitchen work. It was a perversion of endless fascination for everyone on Via Bartolomeo Eustachio. I went out with my string bag to shop in the small stores and markets, where I would plan meals for the day. Much of the rest of the day I wandered the city of Rome serendipitously, encountering architectural and sculptural detail of extraordinary variety in every little street and alley. On weekends the family went to the miles of uninterrupted sandy beach at Sabaudia or from time to time in colder weather on trips to some site I thought might be interesting. My children claim to this day that our roaming throughout Italy during that year was fun, memorable, and educational. It has provided us with a strong bond of mutual interests that we can hold on to as a point of reference as they become middle-aged and preoccupied with the lives they themselves have created.

  The hours of two to four p.m. were riposo in those days in Rome before the European Union and its stock markets made the Mediterraneans change their style of life; the children were at school, and I returned to the empty, quiet apartment. There was a young man who frequently came for lunch and stayed to nap. He was a twenty-one-year-old mechanic whom I had met two years previously through friends on whose custom-built sports car he had worked. This unlikely relationship—he was Sicilian-born, and had no education beyond the age of twelve—was not just about sex. He was straight but very intelligent and very witty. We had met in 1970 at lunch at my friends’ apartment where we spoke in Italian because he was there, and I was startled by his admiration for my own wit, which he, incredibly enough, could grasp through the language barrier. He was patient and tolerant enough to make out my meaning through the barrage of my constant linguistic errors, and I realized that he too had a great sense of humor, and wanted some witty exchange to bounce back and forth. It was odd the way we clicked that day; here we were, these kindred spirits despite the enormous gap in age, class, and nationality. It was certainly helped by his great good looks, dark, Sicilian, and Arabic, and his attraction to the glamour so often attached to Americans in decades past. When he learned that I was staying on in Rome for a few days and was changing hotels, he offered to help me move my luggage. That, of course, precipitated a visit to my new hotel room and, as these things so often happen, I made a discreet pass at him, which he probably had anticipated. In any case, we began a relationship, very much that of the typical Mediterranean straight male who will offer his penis to be pleasured in whatever way the other fellow chooses, although this young man was good enough then to lie back so that I could pleasure myself with my body against his. This continued during my sabbatical year on endless weekday afternoons when he would arrive smelling of the strong
soap he had just used to wash the grease of the mechanic’s shop from his hands, and I would serve him some salad and pasta, the both of us jabbering away in some kind of intelligibility before moving on to my bed. I never felt the need for another male that entire year.

  How could I have spent time with him, I know people must ask. So ignorant that he questioned why President Kennedy had let himself in for assassination by visiting this foreign country, Texas; that he could ask, one day when we were in Piazza Navona, and I proposed our visiting Sant’Agnese to see the architecture of Borromini, if it was because this Borromini was an American. No, I liked the male smell of him, the rough, aggressive sureness of his movements, his intelligence, acuity, the kindness, the tenderness. His great passion was his late-model car, constantly polished, perfectly tuned, in which he delighted in taking me for rides outside of Rome. A favorite haunt was the end of the runway at Fiumicino, where we could stand and face jets thundering down and then lifting off over one’s head. But most of the time he simply worked hard at the BMW garage off the Piazza del Popolo and turned most of his earnings over to his family with whom he lived. Sometimes he returned in the evening to play cards with my children, who found him to be great company. He could have been an older brother. We were a very odd twosome, I know, but I truly enjoyed his company. One of our great pleasures that year was sitting at the back of the theater showing Pasolini’s Decameron, where all the characters speak in Neapolitan dialect, and his whispering a translation into Italian for me. It took us several viewings for me to get it right.

  Years later my younger daughter complained bitterly that my bringing her and her siblings to Europe upset the fabric of their social life in the United States, but I stick with my older daughter’s remark about Rome being the “vacation from life.” Penny hated going abroad for that reason, insisting that coming back to “real life” was too painful. She came for two weeks at Christmas, a glamorous time in Rome, where shops know how to dream up glitz, in the Piazza Navona especially, where the peasant shepherds came from the hills in their sheepskin outfits to play on their pipes while roaming about. I stayed back in the flat, ostensibly to write, so that Penny might have maximum time with the children alone. It vexed me when my mechanic friend met her and she invited him to join them all in the evening to go out to see the Christmas spectacles. He so obviously found her attractive, and she for whatever reason put on her charm. It was classic domestic farce with a special slant. If I had had more of a sense of humor about our marital predicament I could have relaxed and had a much better time.

  During the year abroad Penny had moved into an apartment so we could rent the large house to an academic family in Boston on sabbatical. As I learned after the fact, she had done so in order to live with a young man in his late twenties who had left his wife and baby child for this adventure. In January of my Roman year I flew to the States to deliver a triad of lectures in New York, and made a date with Penny, while her mother was in Florida, to spend a weekend on the farm, where we could do our income tax form, which we filed jointly. Afterward she drove me to the airport for my flight back to Rome and on the way tearfully told me the story of the young lover, and confessed her heartbreak and depression because he had decided to return to his wife for the baby’s sake. All laudable, all understandable, but all very sad, nonetheless. I comforted her as best I could with many a hug and squeeze, and then waved goodbye.

  Upon my return she seemed not to be able to face moving back. We formally separated, although at first she was afraid and cried out to me, “Don’t let me do this.” I lived with the children in the house until the following summer, when she moved in while I took a vacation in England. In London while staying with friends of our family I watched the interplay between the mother and her twelve-year-old daughter. In the previous winter when I was living alone with the children in Brookline, my older girl had descended for breakfast one day to announce that she had begun menstruation. I was horrified that she had not had her mother on hand for this significant moment of change in a woman’s life, although she had stilled my vaporings by putting her hand on my arm and murmuring, “Cool it, Dad.” With the memory of that while watching the mother and daughter, I thought over our situation. Our house was enormous, Penny and I had long since stopped sleeping in the same bed. We had the top floor, she in one room, me in the extra-large room accommodating both my desk and my bed, and a kind of sitting room in between. We had never thrown dishes at each other, snarled, or screamed. Why couldn’t we continue to live in the same house? True enough, she was involved with a man, and that might prove awkward. She would have to see him elsewhere, of course. I telephoned her and proposed a meeting for the two of us. We met and decided to fly to Québec City to discuss our life together. Again the man who would film the story of our marriage would have a brilliant piece of imagery. As we stood before the Delta check-in desk at Logan Airport, rather grimly fixated on walking across the minefields of the compact we were working on, there came into view a giant aircraft moving up and across the glass facade of the terminal to obscure the view of the runway lying behind. As we learned later, the plane we were to board had crashed on landing and the authorities had positioned that giant aircraft to block our view of the crash. Instantly, the large departures board read “Cancelled” next to our flight, and the ticket counter became a hive of activity as crew, staff, and clergy worked the crowd of relatives waiting for news. We gave up the idea of a flight and went back into Boston, looking across the divider at the empty lanes leading to Logan, kept empty for the ambulances, which now did not need to come; there were no survivors.

  The plane crash was certainly the image for our reunion. The first knotty problem was Penny’s lover, who was very much determined to remain on the scene. He was a man in his forties with whom Penny had had dealings as a client of her firm, who promptly complained of marital boredom and moved into her bed while nominally remaining husband-in-residence for his wife. He took to coming over, and as he was a pleasant enough, if dull fellow, I would invite him to dinner. A major problem was his wife, who evidently went berserk when he stayed out all night. She was enough aware of the situation that she knew Penny’s name, and, I guess, that she lived at home again. More than once, just when I was busy turning out breakfast treats for my children, I would get these frantic calls from her wanting to know where the guilty twosome was, and I would have to say I did not know and did not care, for which response I was treated to a shrill tirade on the perversity of a male who did not want to track his spouse. Oy!, as we used to say in Brookline. He was good with his hands, and I well remember him one evening resewing all the big leather buttons on my leather greatcoat, no small feat of manual dexterity. One evening as he sat waiting for Penny to return from work he hesitantly explored with me the possibility of his moving in with us, living together with Penny in her bedroom, and otherwise appearing as a roomer in the household. It would all be quite discreet, he claimed, because we had our suite of rooms on the floor above the children. I told him that I would find it impossibly frustrating because I found him sexually attractive, and such an arrangement would only work if he were to sleep with me as well from time to time. This man was as conventional as you could get, so I was surprised that he would even listen to such a suggestion, but he did, and he pondered, and then he said that he would have to try it out. Of course, I had quite forgotten my wife’s competitive streak. When he told her what we had discussed, she went into a frenzy of rage, so that was the end of that scheme and almost the end of the poor guy’s relationship with her.

  Penny in the fifteen or sixteen years of our marriage had always been repressed, demonstrative and overtly angry only when she had had enough to drink. Suddenly now that she was back in the house she grew openly sarcastic, frequently nasty. What bothered me was that she would lash out at me in front of the children. We had almost never before displayed animosity in front of them. This was a worrisome and ugly turn that I did not know how to stop or control. It is sad too that
the memory of us as a couple the children retain is this ugly one based on these last two years, which is really only a small fraction of our married life. Someone might say that the fundamental truth of the emotion of that final period was so compelling that everything else was naturally blotted out, yet I have to remember that when directly after my return from Rome we told the children that we planned to separate they were astounded, unable to imagine that we were even in disagreement, let alone marital shambles. Years later I decided that what made this mild-mannered, repressed, and basically decent woman behave that way was a fierce determination not to be, as she would see it, bullied by my over-the-top personality, cheerfulness, feigned or real, and relentless verbosity. She had had enough of that, no more Charlie center stage all the time. I have always thought it is a telling insight into her competitiveness that after her terrible accident she pursued a relationship with the man who had been with her in the wreck. He was a high school friend of mine, one of those many athletes with whom I’d both had sex and double-dated, who by chance had a business appointment in the Boston area, which was what brought him to our house for dinner and a chance to meet again as middle-aged men. Naturally, nothing was said, but I would imagine Penny intuited readily enough his and my relationship. He told me years later that Penny was determined to have a relationship with him—God knows he was a gorgeous wreck of his younger self—and more than once flew to the city where he lived to meet. He was clearly puzzled that he should be so attractive to her, but I am sure that the lure was that he had been with me so many times as a teenager.

  The continuing furor of our lives led me to suggest finally that we go to a marriage counselor. If asking Penny to move back home had been a mistake, this was certainly a very positive idea. Penny and I went to a therapist every Monday for two hours over the next two years. He had said at the beginning that while he hoped to be impartial, he was disposed to keeping a marriage together rather than see its dissolution. I thought him remarkably fair, Penny thought he was biased toward the male. I loved it that there was a third party to hear our replies to each other’s questions, and who was able to note more or less objectively when we were openly contradicting previous assertions, or even in the same session suddenly adopting opposite views. I was frightened to discover how angry Penny was, because I never felt that deep anger before, awed that her anger had been there and I was oblivious, guilty about how she felt I had undermined her, had betrayed her in the deepest emotional way. I thought I had been true to her in whatever way I could. I was always there, I was devoted to the family, to the household; my heart was in my home. She could never forgive me my sexual proclivities. I did not consider that negotiable. It was a given of me from the day we met. She blamed it for my loss of sexual interest in her, even though she was surrounded by middle-aged men who confided to her the same situation in their homes. She was in fact having an affair with a man her age who both could not leave his wife and could not stand her anymore. In the last six months of the second year of counseling she began to repeat herself frequently with the statement that I had “ruined” her life, and that I “must therefore pay.” At last I said, “For the sake of argument, all right, I have ruined your life. Now it is ruined, it cannot be unruined, so what am I to do?” “You must pay,” was all she could say, again and again. The awful truth was that she loved me, loved me in a way that I did not, could not, never had loved her, that she loved me at the beginning, and that her love went on even when she found the strength to feel contempt for me. When her mother said to me after we were divorced, “You took your laughter away,” she was talking of something else whether she understood or not.