I damned the yacht club and damned myself. Joyce was a good woman playing a tricky hand of cards with great style but she did not need me or my pity. I had been patronising in my presumptions about her life.
‘We are so lucky,’ she kept saying. ‘So lucky.’
Paul and I waited for her daughter Kelly to come home from school. For Paul it was a quintessential American moment as we stood in front of a white picket fence waiting for the yellow school-bus to deposit the child home. She was a beautiful little thing as she stepped down, in a green tartan skirt with little straps over her shoulders. Her long hair was a glistening auburn. A very Irish-looking lass, who would not be out of place in a Dublin street.
‘From the first moment I met Alan I wanted a little girl with red hair,’ smiled Joyce, as mother and daughter hugged on the street corner. Ah, that gene pool selection thing to the fore. Kelly’s book bag was nearly as big as she was but she was proud of herself and stopped on the steps to let me take her picture.
‘We are so lucky,’ repeated Joyce and I believed it.
She packed up sandwiches for us for the inevitably difficult and worrying journey ahead. As we made our goodbyes, she suddenly said, ‘I didn’t know if you would stay for dinner — if we would get talking and forget the time.’
And I wished we had. I wished I was not such a restless traveller.
Footnote: My stomach has become a thirteenth Gladys and is leading an entirely independent life attached to my body. In America, the amount you eat on a daily basis just goes up and up. Statistically. Americans are now the fattest they have ever been. The fattest nation on earth.
CHAPTER 6
Lori — Gladys Ten
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
Mark Twain
The next Gladys, geographically speaking, was Lori and I must confess to something of a sigh of relief as we headed towards her. Lori and I had kept in touch and I already knew that she was not married and did not have three children. The others had been lovely but I was ripe for a change. Lori has been important in my life. She not only made my confirmation dress but also the full-length gown I wore to the Senior Prom in the summer of ‘72. I shouldn’t have gone to the prom at all. I was only a freshman but, on reflection, the aforementioned Stephen Benjamin was unlikely to get any other date so he asked me. I know the movies make such events very exciting but I have to confess I found the whole business rather tiresome. I think it was an early indication of my impatience with and lack of interest in heterosexual mating rituals. Rita, however, could not have been more excited about her invitation. I can’t recall who she was going out with at the time but I don’t think it was important. If our dates had known how far down the list of essential requirements for the dance they came they might never have turned up at all. Rita was a junior and going to the senior prom was something of a pinnacle in her rather heady dating career. She was determined to look better than the best and she was equally determined for me to take an interest. I don’t know why she chose me. I expect none of the others had the patience and I didn’t have the wherewithal to say no. Consequently she and I visited every dress shop in Westchester in search of the perfect gown. I didn’t bother to look in the shops for myself. I was a tiny little thing and everyone knew the only answer was to get Lori to make me a dress.
In the end Rita chose a flowery item with curious capped sleeves. I think it was constructed of entirely man-made fibres and it sparked and floated in equal measure. When she finally settled on it I didn’t say that I was fairly confident it was the first dress we had looked at a month previously.
The Gladyses made their lives in Sue and Anne’s house and it had been decided that all the members of the society going to the prom would depart from the one house. Sue was not going and was dressed in her usual outfit of jeans and green poncho. Her non-attendance at the event meant she was organising everyone else.
‘Okay, I have the camera. Now everybody has to get dressed in here, then I will call you and you can all come down the stairs for the Grand Descension. Sandra, get your feet off the bed.’
Lori and Leslie helped me get dressed in the long blue gown they had designed and made for me. Downstairs we could hear the boys arriving, one by one. Anne appeared in her gown, then Ginger and finally Rita in the much sought-after flowered item.
‘What do you think?’ she kept saying. ‘You think it will be okay?’
‘You look great.’ Everyone soothed her nerves and prepared to depart. Ginger looked lovely, Rita looked splendid, Anne looked like she’d rather be playing hockey and I looked like an overdressed team mascot.
‘Everybody ready?’ Sue called from the bottom of the stairs. It was quite embarrassing really. One by one she made each of us girls who had a date descend the stairs to orchestrated ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ until we reached the arms of our intended who handed us an orchid in a box. It was a traditional if entirely useless gift. This large, unattractive flower was to be pinned just below the left shoulder on your dress. My gown was of rather light cotton and the corsage caused something of a droop in my creation so that I appeared to have developed dropsy at an early age.
All the boys were wearing rented tuxedos in a variety of lurid colours but only one very wide form of lapel. Their shirts were ruffled and pinioned into place with velveteen bow ties. Stephen Benjamin was in pale blue. He hung his gift of a small ornamental garden on my left tit and leant forward to kiss me. I tried to keep my mouth shut partly because of my orthodontal braces and partly because I didn’t want him to kiss me. I was much shorter than my beau and the upshot of our awkward encounter was that he left a wet ring round my mouth, I got a sensation in my neck akin to whiplash and he got a small gash from the pin of my corsage. I don’t know if anyone else got injured; I was too busy trying to work out how many more kisses were part of the prom package. As it happens I had rather a busy evening.
The sports hall had been decorated’ with balloons and streamers. There was music, laughter, a faint smell of old gym shoes and a lurking danger of verrucas. All the girls had made a great effort. Like me and Rita, many of them had been to every dress shop in Westchester. lf only she and I had gone to another county for not one, not two but three other girls had bought precisely the same dress as Rita. I don’t remember much about the evening except that Ginger and I spent it trying to dance between Rita with her beau and any couple identically dressed. It wasn’t a great event. Stephen Benjamin did more of that kissing thing, Rita spent quite a lot of time in the powder room hiding, and my corsage seemed to be unique in having some kind of green-fly problem. The only positive thing was that no one had a dress like mine. I was wearing a Lori/Leslie original.
No one was surprised when Lori went into the dressmaking business for a living. It was only her family who were amazed that it involved the theatre. Lori is a passionate woman and the focus of her passion when I first knew her was entirely to do with the theatre. I have an abiding memory of her standing on the make-up counter backstage at school and scrawling across the wall of the dressing room, ‘Welcome to the theater — you fools, you’ll love it so! LA.’
Lori did not come from a family with a wide-ranging view of the world. Both sets of grandparents had emigrated to the United States from Italy in the 1920s. Her maternal grandfather had arrived with a wife and child, who both promptly succumbed to some New World fever and died. Meanwhile, her maternal grandmother had married in Italy and subsequently lost her husband. This made her a burden to her family so when the New York widower wrote for a new bride from the old country it was arranged that he could have the widow. It was an unhappy marriage, producing only Lori’s mother. I remember the grandmother, who, in her lifetime in the United States, learned not one word of English. After he retired the grandfather returned to the old country. He lived in a pensione in Rome but only lasted a month before he returned. It wasn’t, as Lori said, what he thought it would be.
Lori’s father was a haird
resser and her mother worked all through Lori’s years in high school because the family needed the money. The family was not rich, did not travel or go to the theatre, yet Lori would go on to see the world, work in professional theatre for many years and learn to speak both Italian and Thai. From her family, she said, she got ‘a good basis of ethics’ but everything else in her life came from elsewhere.
Lori lived in a much tougher neighbourhood than my parents had settled in. Their house was an alien world to me, in which her mother shrouded all the furniture in loose covers of clear plastic. Bill Cosby used to say kids with those backgrounds grew up to be either priests or killers, but Lori was unique. Coming from a life where doing well meant not getting arrested, she led the way in her family by going to college. I was, as Lori says, her first ‘international’ friend. My family opened a new world which she had never even heard of.
Over the years she and I have done some travelling together in Europe. Once we went in search of her distant relatives in Italy and spent a drunken lunch trying to communicate with twenty excitable Italian uncles, aunts and cousins using a Collins phrase-book and the limited English of the local Roman Catholic priest. Travelling, she said, was like a drug. The more I went, the more I wanted.’
Having been signed up for a play production class in her freshman year, Lori came under the spell of Regina, the drama teacher, and then the Gladys Society. When she left high school, she went to the University of Richmond in Virginia to study technical theatre. Before long she was the chief cutter/draper in the wardrobe department at the distinguished Cincinnati Playhouse. Then, after fifteen solid years of theatrical success, out of nowhere, Lori gave it all up and joined the Peace Corps. Actually, I don’t think it was out of nowhere. Even at a distance, I knew she had been getting restless for some time. The death of many gay theatre friends from Aids had hit her hard and she was looking for some new meaning in her life. She met a Russian émigré and they became friends. It fed into her desire to see more of the world.
Lori talked to a Peace Corps recruiter who persuaded her to apply. She couldn’t quite believe it. “‘Are you sure? I make little outfits.” What could they possibly want me for? So I applied and within two weeks I got a phone call because I had “special skills”! But you always knew that, didn’t you?’ she grinned at me.
The Peace Corps placed Lori in Jamaica as a sewing instructor but the environment didn’t suit her. She developed chronic asthma problems and came home. She was distraught. Determined to make her new life work, she had sold her car and got rid of her apartment. Now she had to live in a tent in a friend’s backyard because they all had pets and she suffers horribly from allergies. She decided to forget about the whole thing. Friends got her a job at the Folger Shakespeare Library Theater in Washington, DC.
‘But here’s the thing — the Peace Corps headquarters is also in DC. It became so clear to me that I needed to do this that I called them and the recruiter remembered me. She said she would try to see if she could get me another placement. A few days later she calls me and says “Do you want to go to Thailand?” I said “yes”. “Do you not want to think about this?” “No.” My parents thought I was insane. I had been rejected and now I was going again. But that is my personality. You persevere. I did two and a half years in Thailand and it was the best thing I have ever done.’
Lori returned, speaking fluent Thai (apparently she found it hard — ‘You have to be so girly’) and went straight off to graduate school. Today she is the Director of International Student Services at a New York college and still my friend.
We drove up to see her in her new life on campus. The college (founder and first president, Reverend Mother Mary) stands in the town of Purchase, twenty-eight miles north of Manhattan. My great ambition in life, once my children are up and grown, is to go back to university and I was thinking about education in America as we went. There is an extraordinary magazine in New York City, which you can pick up from a dispenser on any number of street corners. It is called The Learning Annexe and contains hundreds of classes which you can take to make yourself a better person. That month’s Holiday Issue was on ‘Love, Sex, Spirituality and Healing’ and there were some fantastic offers. There was, for example, Deepak Chopra, who, in one ‘incredible evening, will lead you on an inspiring, in-depth exploration into the world of consciousness and the mechanics of reality making’.
I loved this idea. I didn’t know what it meant but it could patently change your life for a mere $39. To be honest, I don’t know what reality making is. I would have thought reality either was or it wasn’t but Deepak made it sound like basket-weaving —once learned then always a skill at your fingertips.
As I travel the world what I find is how little I know. Consequently The Learning Annexe was sorely tempting. How thrilling to learn ‘How to Write a Book on ANYTHING in 3 Weeks … or Less’ or ‘How to Write a Hit Song and Make LOTS of Money’. It made me realise how much the experts have merely been blinding us with science when so many skills are so easily acquired. Where, for example, was ‘Instant Piano For Hopelessly Busy People’, when I was struggling the old-fashioned way with learning to read music? (‘In just one session you can learn enough secrets of the trade to give you years of enjoyment at the piano.’) I would have gone but I just didn’t have the time.
I got many things from my American childhood but an education was not one of them. The Native Americans no doubt knew more than I ever will and even a pilgrim adept at butchering a cow in the correct manner would be one up on my education. Today, learning is highly prized and everyone is expected to absorb a lot but, I suspect, to little purpose. Not just in America but generally. I went to university with girls who could split an atom without breaking a fingernail but had no idea how to wire a plug. It is the age of industrialised specialisation, which fails to equip us for real life.
The US Census provides a fascinating map about the state of American education today. The dark green bits on it show the states where more than 85 per cent of the people have a high-school diploma or higher qualification. The paler the colour, the less education per capita. Worryingly, Texas, home to a possible president at the time of writing, was practically white.
I think it should be compulsory that by the age of twenty-one everyone in this country has been made to leave the United States for at least a year.
Lori, Gladys Ten
Driving in America is odd. Any kind of distance is done on a highway or freeway from whose tarmacked surface you can see nothing of the area. Trees line the roads and travelling many miles gives you no sense of geography. It’s like driving with blinkers on. You emerge at your exit and the whole landscape can have changed without any warning.
Purchase is not that different from Mamaroneck and Larchmont. It is still part of Westchester County and you enter through similar wide, leafy streets. The college looks like any typical small-town American campus. There are many parking spaces surrounding vast green expanses of lawn leading up to an architecturally mixed bag of buildings. Students wander across the horizon in small groups. They walk slowly as all students seem to, having yet to grasp any concept of life being short.
Unlike Amityville, the naming of Purchase was rather straightforward. In 1661 Chief Shanarocke of the Siwanoy tribe (a branch of the Mohegans, in case you’re interested. I have lots more but you need to write to me) turned the land over to one John Budd of Southold, Long Island. John did what all those new people stuck for an enterprise seemed to do — he started a gristmill. I’m not entirely sure what you do with a gristmill but I do know that in the early days they were springing up all over the place. Anyone making gristmill starter kits must have made a fortune. This John Budd was so busy with his new mill that he forgot to register the land, which was rather critical.
About thirty years later, another Native American, Pathungo, reclaimed the land and passed it on to John Harrison of Flushing, Queens, in New York for forty pounds. This John did register the land and thus it became known as H
arrison’s ‘Purchase’.
The place went through various phases, including a rather golden era in the 1860s when Ben Holladay, the ‘Stagecoach King’, and his wife Ann tried to recreate the Wild West on the estate. They imported buffalo, elk, antelope and deer that rummaged about the place. They built rather a fine mansion but lost all their money in the first great stock market crash of 1873. The next people to take over the mansion, Whitelaw and Elizabeth Reid, were also rather jolly folk and were the first in Westchester to install both telephone and electric light. Unfortunately the place short-circuited and burnt down, which was sad, although presumably they were at least able to phone for help, which was good.
Undaunted, the Reids set about building a stone castle instead. It is the focus of the campus today. An extraordinary castellated affair with panelled rooms imported from an old chateau in Poissy, France, and bits and bobs of English history shipped in wholesale including some windows from a church in Salisbury. The former Catholic girls’ boarding school moved from New York City to the rolling hills of the 100-acre estate in 1951. Now the college is close enough to New York City to be attractive to students but far enough away from Manhattan to make their parents feel calm.
As Lori says, They send them to suburbia because they think it will be safe.’ No one I know has ever heard of the college although one of the Kennedys went there. One thousand three hundred undergraduates and one thousand graduates roam about in the shadow of Reid Castle busy being educated as ‘ethically and socially responsible leaders’. The Catholic heart of the place is apparent in the statuary and there are lots of dead nuns buried in the back. Since the 1970s, however, the place has been an ecumenical home to the liberal arts.
Lori is three years. older than me. She is a comfortably large woman with a vast chest which challenged the bra-sellers of Thailand.
Gladys Reunited Page 11