by Susan Isaacs
“John, do you think if the German losses—”
He cut me off. “Tell me what you said to Ed about Willkie.”
“For God’s sake!”
“Linda, this is important.”
“Why?” He just crossed his arms. “Okay. What I basically said was the best thing about Willkie was his hair, and he was a me-too candidate, and that his program was pretty much lifted from the Democrats’ platform.” John’s mouth tightened. He was across the room, so I couldn’t tell if it was with annoyance or anger. “Listen: Mr. Leland—Ed’s seen my FBI papers. He must know I’m a Democrat.”
“Christ.”
“It’s not like I’m a Nazi or a prostitute. For God’s sake, my father was a sausagemaker who lost his job in the Depression. What am I supposed to do—be a cheerleader for Herbert Hoover?”
“You’re supposed to have the sense not to alienate one of the most important men in the country.”
“Alienate him? He was having a good time talking to me.”
“He was being courteous.”
“No! He was being amused. Listen: He doesn’t need another person to bend over backward not to offend him. The line’s probably ten miles long.”
“I’m not suggesting you be a sycophant…someone given to false flattery. But there’s absolutely no need to be so damned direct.”
“Why not? My pal Ed thinks I’m a breath of fresh air.”
John leaned forward. His hair fell into his eyes, and he shook his head to get it off his forehead. “Can’t you begin to understand the awkwardness of the situation?”
“Yes.” He sat back. So I leaned forward. “He’s your former father-in-law.”
“That’s right.”
“And he’s probably heard an earful about you from Nan, and you, being a gentleman, of course, can’t defend yourself. You can’t tell him that his daughter’s an immature, spoiled—”
“Enough! We’re not talking about Nan.”
“Sure we are! When we’re talking about Ed, we’re talking about Nan. For God’s sake, let’s clear the air, John. Take an objective look at her. Forget her morals. Think about her character. She doesn’t have any. She’s a two-bit little sneak.”
He stood up and roared at me: “Don’t you dare talk about her!”
I found myself roaring back. “I am sick and tired of tippytoeing around every damn time the name of one of the Lelands comes up. She was an adultress. Don’t you get it? And for all her class, she didn’t have the guts to come to you and say, ‘Listen: I’ve made a mistake marrying you.’ She betrayed you instead, and you talk about her like she was a saint!” John turned and stalked off toward the bedroom. I rushed after him, almost running to keep up. “And Edward Leland…” I was breathing hard. “You carry on like he’s God himself. He’s not. He’s a man.”
John turned to me in the corridor just outside the bedroom. “Edward Leland is everything I could ever hope to be.”
“Like honorable.”
“Yes.”
“And brave.”
“Yes.”
“How about scary-looking? Do you think if you took a land mine in the face he’d finally have respect for you? Why is this man so important to you?”
It took a long time before he was able to answer. “It’s not the sort of thing you’d understand.”
“Try me.”
“I care about excellence. Do you understand that? I care about decency, fair play.”
“So do I.” He shook his head, like saying, You don’t get it. “Listen: I have a great idea. If you’re so crazy about decency, why not practice it on me?”
“Did it ever occur to you, Linda, that despite all the self-effacing noises you make, you are monumentally self-centered? We cannot have one discussion without your saying, ‘I want more! I demand more!’”
“John,” I began, “all I want is to be treated like—”
“Like Nan. I’m truly sorry, but I can’t accommodate you. You aren’t Nan. But I believe I am treating you decently and fairly. I’m trying, Linda. I’m doing the best I can.”
“But I want better. I know you’re capable of so much more. If you’d only—”
“Please don’t hold on to those kinds of hopes. This is not…this is not a love match. It has nothing to do with you. It’s me. I’m the one who can’t…Linda, you can’t get blood from a stone.”
13
During the bleakest days of the Depression, in 1931, the sausage plant closed down for nearly a year, and my father had no job. My salary, fifteen dollars a week, was all we had, and so we’d alternate: one week food, coal, doctor bills; one week mortgage money. But by March it was clear we couldn’t keep up the payments, and sure enough, a foreclosure notice came in the mail.
My father sat on the couch, his face in his hands, his shoulders heaving, the letter on the cushion beside him. I stood in the hallway, not knowing what to say, when my mother slipped past me, brushed the notice off the couch and sat down beside him.
“Bad news, Herm?”
“They’re going to foreclose on the house, Betty.”
I don’t think she understood what he meant, but she understood how he felt. She put her arms around him, spoke to him so gently I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and then kissed him until he finally stopped crying.
She took his hand. “Everything’ll be fine, Herm.”
“Betty, honey—”
She turned his hand over and examined his palm. “Ooh! I see lots of good things. Lookit here, how the line kinda turns right. You know what that means? Money!” My father laughed. “No kidding. Money. A long trip. And a beaver coat. Ha-ha, go ahead and laugh. You’ll see!”
My father kissed the top of her head, then her forehead, and when he took her in his arms, I’d walked away.
My mother had been quite a fortuneteller, though. Okay, no beaver coat, no trip. But money: The plant reopened and my father went back to work.
I bet anything he never forgot how much she believed in him and in the luck of their marriage. And I never forgot what it was like to look at an ordinary, down-on-their-luck middle-aged couple and be able to feel, across the room, the depth and power of true love.
So I knew what the real thing was, and I knew I didn’t have it. But at least I had a lot: a handsome, educated husband, a spacious apartment not more than thirty-five steps from Park Avenue, all the newspapers I could read and all the sex I could desire. My husband didn’t drink, gamble, beat me or womanize; he just didn’t love me.
But by a little more than a month after we’d been married, in late October 1940, I’d come to understand that John couldn’t really love anyone. Well, except for the Lelands, and maybe he didn’t even love them. He idolized or idealized them. This may not have been an electrifying news flash to anyone else, but one chilly Thursday night, it came to me like a shock.
It was about ten-thirty. I’d snuck up into the office at seven. John’s new secretary, Anna—an older woman with a thick German accent, a gray, chopped-up Dutchboy haircut and glowing, slightly demented blue eyes, so she looked as if she was suffering from a mild case of whatever Hitler had—was not a bad secretary.
“But she’s so slow,” John said, almost an apology. He sat on the edge of what once had been my desk.
“I don’t mind. Honest.” I put my fingers back on the home line of the typewriter and peered at the steno pad. I’d begun transcribing the ton of letters he’d been dictating to me for the last three and a half hours. “It gives me something to do.”
“Would you rather be doing this than…” He paused and shifted so he almost sat on Anna’s pencil cup; I pulled it out from under him in time. “…than being a housewife?” Not counting the Are you, Do you, Can I questions he asked during sex, this was the most personal question he’d ever asked me.
“I’d rather be married to you.” He didn’t look thrilled, but he didn’t look unthrilled, either: just neutral, as if I’d stated the obvious and he was waiting for more. “But it’s some
times a little—you know—boring. There’s not much to do.” I went on, “at least not till the baby comes. Especially if you’ve got my streak of German efficiency, you can get through the housework in—oh—an hour. Except on Tuesdays, when I iron your shirts—and what’s that, an extra thirty minutes? And how long does it take to make a pork chop presentable? I’ve got a lot of free time.”
“You don’t like all that leisure?”
“No. I know it sounds ungrateful, but I’m becoming too well-informed. I mean, I know the exact route of the invasion of Rumania and what the German army ate for lunch on October 7. I practically know the color of Antonescu’s socks.” (I also knew that on that same day, the Germans ordered all the Jews in occupied France to register with the authorities. For what? I’d asked myself. But I knew it wasn’t a census to satisfy curiosity. The German military mind was purposeful; it didn’t make casual inquiries.)
“Look, Linda,” John began. But then he stopped.
“What? Oh, come on. I know something’s on your mind.”
“It’s not a particularly good idea for you to be seen here.”
“I’m your wife. Make believe I came by to say hello, or to drop off a pot roast sandwich so you wouldn’t be hungry.”
“I don’t mean in the office itself. I mean here.” He patted the desk.
“You mean it would be bad for morale if someone saw me doing your secretary’s work?” He nodded. “But Anna’s bad for your morale. She can’t do it all.” He nodded again. “Oh! Okay, I get it. You want me to say, ‘Poor John, you’re under so much pressure. Why don’t you bring a typewriter with a German keyboard home, so I can help you in all my free time?”
“Yes.” He smiled a little. “That’s what I want you to say.”
“Okay. I’ve said it. But you know, it would have been easier if you’d just come out and asked me.”
John sighed and gazed up at the ceiling for a second, looking for patience. He found it. “All right. Let’s leave now. Take the pad, and then you can arrange for a typewriter tomorrow.” He seemed so pleased at having handed over the details of his life to a more efficient secretary that, as he was helping me on with my coat, he said, “Let’s go out for dinner. I know a little French place that stays open late.”
Everyone at the little French place knew John, although they clearly had not been expecting me. The headwaiter bowed, though, did the merest twiddle of his mustache and said, “Bon soir, mademoiselle.” To my real surprise, John corrected him: “Madame Berringer.” Give the French credit: They fall apart in battle, but they’re imperturbable when it comes to affairs of the heart—or lower down. “Ah, Madame Berringer!” he said as he started to lead us to a table, and went into something fancy in French, which I assumed meant: Welcome to my humble abode, although, for all I knew, it could have meant: I see Monsieur Berringer knocked you up and had to marry you. He held out a chair for me. I prayed he wouldn’t kiss my hand. He didn’t.
He and John had a complicated French discussion then, and John turned to me. Apparently, it all boiled down to: Does Madame want chicken: I said, Sure, fine, and the man wriggled his mustache for a second and then left.
“I didn’t know you could speak French,” I said.
“Not as well as German, but I can manage.”
“Anything else I don’t know about you?” I watched him put his napkin on his lap and straighten out his silverware. “I mean, anything you want to tell me.”
“Well, no other languages. I’d like to learn Italian someday.”
“Tell me about your parents.”
He peered around the restaurant. There was only one other couple, older. The woman was wearing a corsage. Then he studied a mural on the wall to his left. It was Paris, I guess, because it had the Eiffel Tower right smack in the middle. The whole thing was kind of murky, so it was either Paris at dusk or the mural needed a good cleaning. “What about my parents?” he finally said.
“For starters, what were their names, what did your father do, did you have a happy childhood?”
“My father’s name was Charles. My mother’s was Julia.”
“So what were they like?” He shrugged. “What does”—I imitated his shrug—“mean? You don’t know, or you’re not talking?”
“I guess…it means I don’t really know. Honestly, I’m not trying to keep anything from you. It’s just that my parents were very quiet.”
“Did they ever say hi to you, or tell you to wear your galoshes?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“What did your father do?”
“He worked in a bank on Long Island. He was a vice-president, but not…it was just a title. If you sat in that particular chair for twenty-five years, they called you a vice-president, but he was essentially a glorified transfer clerk.”
“And your mother?”
“She stayed at home.”
“And did what? Scrubbed floors? Gave fancy tea parties?”
“Neither.” Another waiter came, opened a bottle of wine and poured some for John to taste. John nodded. The waiter finished pouring and then bowed, as if he was taking leave of Louis the Something. “My mother’s family was one of the first families in Port Washington,” John said. “They settled there in the early seventeen hundreds.” I waited. “They didn’t have money, but they had a lot of…pride.” He took several too-eager sips of wine.
“It doesn’t look like you think pride’s a plus.”
“Well, in my mother’s case…it’s as if her pride, her snobbery about her background, was her one and only character trait. I remember once—I was nine or ten—I broke my wrist in gym. We were climbing ropes, and I fell. They called her from school and she took me to the doctor’s. We were sitting there a long time. My wrist was getting more and more swollen.”
“It must have hurt like hell.”
“It did. And so finally I said, ‘Mother, could you ask how much longer it’s going to be?’ I mean, she was just sitting there, her hands clasped in her lap, looking straight ahead—not at me, not at my wrist, not even at a magazine. So she got up, and I heard her talking to the nurse or receptionist or whatever. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but all of a sudden she lost control. She raised her voice. Really raised it. ‘My family was living in this town while Dr. Russo’s family were still apes in Italy.’”
“Oh, God.”
“I just kept staring at my wrist. My fingers were starting to swell too. And I kept thinking she didn’t even flinch when she saw my wrist. She’d just spent an entire hour sitting next to me when I was in so much pain—and the only thing she could get worked up about was her lineage. A family tree, but so what? It was a tree that was completely undistinguished; the only thing to be said for it was that it was tenacious. It held on through the years—didn’t die out.”
This was not the moment to clue him in that he didn’t have to explain “tenacious.” “Did her tree cut any ice with your father?”
“I think so, when they first got married. He was from New Jersey somewhere, and came to Long Island to work in the bank. I got the impression he’d believed he was marrying into this great American family, a kind of Port Washington Adams clan. So they wound up being disappointed in each other. He never became a great financier; he stayed a bank clerk. The most interesting thing that ever happened to him was he got bald; I remember he used to touch the top of his head all the time, as if he couldn’t believe his hair had gone. So he was a disappointment to her. And she wasn’t the Junior League charmer he’d thought he was marrying. For all her airs, she wasn’t invited anywhere. She had no personality to speak of, no…” His voice faded as he looked straight at me.
“No what?” He couldn’t seem to come up with the word. “No class?” I asked.
“I suppose that’s it.”
“So she played gracious lady to an audience of none, and he pushed papers around.” He nodded. “How did you turn out so good?” I saw his expression. “Oh, come on! You know what I mean. So well. They must have
been smart, terrific-looking.”
“Well, my father was handsome…in a bland, clerkish way.”
“Which one had the brains?”
“Neither one of them, really.” He turned back to his wine.
“So what did you do for laughs as a kid?”
“Nothing special. I had friends to play ball with, but I never was, um, one of the boys. I was too serious for that. You see, I really liked school. More than liked it. I loved it. My mind came alive in high school.”
“Came alive?” Oh, come off it, I thought.
“You sound so contemptuous of education…like everyone I went to high school with.”
“And where are they now? you’re going to say. Mopping floors. Punching tickets on the Long Island Rail Road. Right?”
He smiled and said, “Right.” Then the waiter came with chicken pieces hanging around in a sauce with a lot of mushrooms and tiny onions. I tasted it.
“Hey,” I said, “this is great! I thought all that stuff about French food was a lot of bull, but—”
“I’m glad you like it.” I could have been chewing on the tablecloth, for all he noticed; he was staring at the mural of Paris again and chewing his bottom lip. His parents obviously weren’t his favorite subject.
“Your parents died in a car crash?”
“In ’29. A couple of weeks after Black Tuesday.”
“How did their death hit you?” He shrugged. “I know you didn’t say ‘Whoopee!’ But were you…shattered? stunned?”
“Well, obviously I hadn’t expected it, but really, I was in law school, and I’d hardly seen them since I started Columbia. I used to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas with friends’ families.”
“Your parents never said, ‘Hey, John, join us for candied yams’?”
“No.”
“Weren’t they hurt that you didn’t come home?”
“Hurt?” He looked so startled. I realized then that Mom and Pop Berringer weren’t the type to pick up the phone and croon a chorus of “Sonny Boy.” John refilled his wineglass, held it up to the light of the candle on the table and stared into its depths. That was obviously it for the Berringers.