Letters To My Mother

by Rebecca Heath

  “Do you remember the first time we went sailing on Sturmvogel, when I told you that talking about San Francisco brought back unhappy memories?”

  He nodded.

  “In 1944 my father was on a battleship in the South Pacific. For several months Mother and I lived in a hotel in San Francisco, just off Union Square. During the war you weren’t allowed to remain in a hotel for more than a few days because they needed the space for servicemen, but the manager liked Mother and let us stay. It never occurred to Mother that I should be in school; she went out every night with a group of naval officers and other unattached wives, got back in the early hours of the morning and slept until noon. I didn’t have any toys or books, just one Porky Pig comic book that I read until it fell apart and some perfume bottles I played with as though they were dolls. Sometimes … Mother brought one of her friends back to the room for the night. I was too young to understand, of course. I’d wake up in a rage and accuse her of being drunk. She and the man would laugh at me and Mother would say she wasn’t drunk, just inebriated, only she was too d-drunk to p-pronounce it. You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”

  “How old were you then, dear?”

  “S-seven.”

  David’s face was grim. “Kate, I’m terribly sorry about what I said. Something happened today which upset me a great deal. I shouldn’t have taken my frustrations out on you.”

  “Something to do with me?”

  “No.”

  I waited for him to explain, but he didn’t. I wiped away my tears and finished the last of the hors d’oeuvres. David tilted the tray toward him for a better look and saw the platter was empty. Our eyes met and he smiled.

  “Don’t they feed you at the residence hall?”

  “I was too excited to eat dinner; I only had a small salad.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “The main course was chili con carne, very spicy; I couldn’t inflict that on you.” I knew what he was thinking and tried to keep from blushing.

  “Are you still hungry?”

  “Well… yes.”

  “How would you like to go some place for a gigantic hamburger with lettuce, mayonnaise, pickles and French fries – but no onions?”

  Dear David, he had the gift of turning my tears to laughter. Under the table I felt his hand reach for mine and I clasped it tightly.

  We drove around the university district for some time before finding an open restaurant, and we entered just as the last customers were leaving. The waitress was a nursing student from Austin Hall. She glanced at me with a flicker of recognition and then turned her full attention to David.

  “Are you still serving dinner?”

  “We stopped serving dinner at eleven, but I can get you something from the grill.” She handed us a couple of menus.

  David studied the list. “You’re having a hamburger?”

  “Yes, please, with everything on top but onions. And coffee.”

  He read the selections aloud, half to himself. “A roast beef sandwich sounds good; no, I had roast beef for dinner. I think I’ll order a hamburger, too.”

  “Roast beef for dinner.” His words went through me like a knife. I imagined the four of them at the table, his wife bustling back and forth to the kitchen, bringing mashed potatoes and gravy to the dining room, the children talking about school and David carving the meat. I felt a surge of resentment for this part of David’s life in which I was a perpetual stranger. David must have caught my expression of dismay.

  “Is something wrong?”

  I debated whether to tell him. “When you mentioned having roast beef for dinner it reminded me you have another existence besides the one we share. I know I should get used to the idea, but I can’t help being a bit jealous.” I told him how I pictured his family at the dinner table.

  “Yes, I had roast beef for dinner,” David said sarcastically. "My daughter went out with her boyfriend about five. My son … is staying overnight at a friend’s house, and my wife went to some faculty wives’ meeting. It was a Swanson’s TV dinner. I heated it myself, watched the news on television, and got ready to meet you. If you’re suffering guilt pangs over luring me away from my warm family life, you’re wasting a perfectly good emotion.”

  “Your wife really wanted to attend a meeting rather than go to a concert with you?”

  “I told you I invited her. She’s never heard of Segovia, and furthermore doesn’t care she’s never heard of Segovia. She doesn’t like classical music.”

  “What if she’d accepted?”

  David shrugged his shoulders. “Then I would have taken her, of course. It was a calculated risk, but the odds were in my favor.”

  Whenever he spoke about his wife, David’s voice was edged with bitterness; his remark made me uneasy, but curiosity prompted me to continue.

  “Does it hurt you to talk about your marriage? If it does, I won’t ask any more questions.”

  “Not particularly. It’s ancient history. You won’t be peeling scabs off fresh wounds as I did when I asked about your mother. Mine healed years ago. What do you want to know?”

  “Everything and nothing. Part of me wants to know all about you and part of me doesn’t. What’s your wife’s name? You’ve never said.”

  “Arlene.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “We met at a dance when I was in graduate school at Harvard. My roommate knew one of her brothers, and he introduced us.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Arlene’s father was – still is – a policeman in Boston. I guess you’d say her family is lower middle class, what my more affluent Bostonian friends used to call 'lace curtain Irish.' She was nineteen when we met, the same age as you are now, which hardly seems possible. Arlene was far more mature than you. Now, don’t look at me that way. I realize you’ve traveled more than Arlene, had probably read more books by the age of five than Arlene has in her entire life, and you’re better educated, but the fact remains she was incomparably more experienced; that’s not necessarily a compliment, you know.

  “Was she a student, too?”

  “No, Arlene went to work right out of high school as a file clerk for an insurance company in Boston. When we met she was sharing an apartment with two other girls.”

  “Was she attractive?”

  David considered his answer for a moment. “Not so much facially, perhaps … you wouldn’t have thought so anyway. But from a man’s point of view she was … well, sexy. Arlene was popular and vivacious and I was flattered she paid attention to me. She seemed quite sophisticated to the bumbling young pedant I was then. I wasn’t a virgin, but I wasn’t very experienced, either.”

  “Was she? A virgin, I mean.”

  “Arlene? God no!”

  “Were you in love with each other?”

  “It wasn’t a question of love for either of us; it was just a physical thing. We’d go dancing or to the movies and then over to her apartment for a couple of hours. At the risk of sounding like an outrageous snob, Arlene wasn’t the sort of girl someone from my background would marry but, to make a long story short, she became pregnant, and I did marry her.”

  I remembered Frank’s speculation. “How old were you?”

  “When I got married? Twenty-four.”

  I did a quick calculation. “But Frank told me one of your children is 18; if you were 24 when you were married 18 or so years ago, how can you be 47 now?”

  David’s answer had the same edge of bitterness I’d noted before. “Because I’ve been married 23 years, not 18. Arlene lied to me; she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “What!” I stared at him in astonishment. “If Arlene wasn’t in love with you why on earth did she trap you into marriage?”

  “Arlene may not be brilliant, but she does possess a sort of animal cunning. She was ambitious and willing to gamble I’d be a success; I was her ticket to the upper middle class.”

  “Why didn’t you get a divorce?”

  “In Massachusetts? On
what grounds? After we got married, Arlene told me she’d had a miscarriage. I suspected she was lying since she had no symptoms which were apparent to me and I never received any medical bills, but we’d been intimate enough times so that … well, she could have been pregnant. I felt like a fool; I was a fool. She finally told me the truth several years later - she claimed she’d thought she was pregnant, but I know she was lying - and by then she was expecting our son, so divorce was out of the question. Anyway, Arlene is a Catholic and we had a big church wedding, as she wished. She would never have consented to a divorce in the past and,” David looked straight at me, “she never will in the future.” I got the message.

  “What happened after you were married?”

  “I received my Ph.D. and we moved to a big house in Seattle with wall-to-wall carpeting, an all-electric kitchen, two cars in the garage and not a blade of crabgrass in the lawn.”

  “And lived happily ever after?”

  “Outwardly. Being a complete materialist, I suppose Arlene is reasonably happy. Her only interests are her current possessions and her anticipated possessions. If she mimeographed an inventory of everything we own plus everything I’ve promised to buy her, and distributed the list to her friends, she’d never need to open her mouth again. Arlene’s greatly impressed by my academic status, but it’s never occurred to her the flesh and blood professor she’s married to might want a little tenderness. My wife doesn’t think of sex as an expression of love or even animal passion; sex is a commodity she doles out in return for something. It’s like being in bed with a vending machine; I deposit my coins and Arlene gives me a few minutes – a very few minutes – of her time. God! That isn’t what I want. The strange thing is I’ve never been unfaithful to her … can you believe it after 23 years of that? I’m no saint; I’ve had the desire and I’ve had the opportunity, but somehow the two never coincided. So far as Arlene is concerned, my only functions are to give her an allowance, make the house payments and confer status on her. She’s indifferent to everything most precious to me – my work, books, sailing, music, everything. The worst part is our children aren’t much different. I’ve told you how I idolized my father, and I always assumed I’d have the same relationship with my own children. Well, I don’t. I don’t know whether to blame peer group culture, television, the schools, myself, all the above … or what. This is a terrible thing for a father to say, but they’re so … banal. I’ve tried to share my life with them, take them sailing, take them hiking, anything, but they’re simply not interested. They regard me as a superannuated dinosaur; they’re utterly bored by me and everything about me.”

  “Watch.” David took his napkin, tore two strips from the paper and held them in front of me, an inch apart. “If you blow between the strips, what will happen?”

  “They’ll fly apart, of course.”

  “Try it.”

  I blew and the strips swung together. “Wow! What made them do that?”

  “It’s a demonstration of Bernoulli’s Principle, the law of physics that explains why birds and airplanes are able to fly. Moving air exerts less pressure than still air, so when you blew between the strips, the greater pressure on the outside pushed them together, just like the passage of air over a plane’s wing causes the wing to lift. Papa showed this to me when I was about eight. His demonstration excited me so much that I ran through the house performing the experiment for everyone – my mother, my little brother – who was too young to care – and the servants – who weren’t interested, either, but I was on fire. That sudden moment of understanding, that epiphany, is something I’ve never forgotten; Kate, it’s what I live for as a scientist, and when Michael was born I could hardly wait for the day when I could evoke the same sense of wonder in him. It never came.” David shook his head. “Maybe I’m not a good teacher.”

  “Frank says you’re an outstanding teacher.”

  David stopped for a moment as if considering his words. “I told you earlier my son is spending the night at a friend’s house; that’s not true. I didn’t want to spoil our evening by bringing this up, but it doesn’t matter now. I want to tell you. Michael was arrested for shoplifting this afternoon.”

  “Oh, David!”

  “Arlene called me at the office right after you left. He and another boy stole some tools from a hardware store. One of the clerks spotted them and phoned the police. Michael’s spending the night at Juvenile Hall.”

  David passed his hand over his face. “I can’t express how I feel. What he did wasn’t merely dishonest, it was stupid, so incredibly stupid! If he came from a broken home, or a background which tolerated that sort of behavior, maybe I could understand, but …”

  “Do you think his problems have anything to do with us?”

  “No! And if I thought you were going start blaming yourself I wouldn’t have told you. A boy doesn’t steal because his father goes sailing on Saturdays.

  “Did you go to the police station?”

  “I drove home, picked up Arlene and we went together. She was screaming and carrying on a great deal, not that I blame her. She says everything’s my fault, I haven’t been a good father. I’ve tried, Kate, believe me, I’ve tried.” David’s voice broke. “He’s such a cocky kid; I want to love him, but he just spits in my face.”

  “David, I’ve been wondering about something. When you sailed to Alaska last year … by yourself…did you go off and leave your wife and children here in Seattle?” This question had been gnawing on me for some time.

  “I know what you’re thinking. I wouldn’t do that. Arlene spends every summer back in Boston with her family. She takes Marcia and Michael with her.”

  “What’s your daughter like?”

  “Marcia’s a pretty girl, too pretty. We never had any trouble with her until three years ago. Then she discovered boys and it’s been a constant fight ever since. The current boyfriend is nineteen; he dropped out of high school when he was a junior and hasn’t held a steady job since. But he’s good looking. Oh, yes, I’m assured on the highest authority this clod’s a real prize. It’s not enough that Marcy’s with him almost every evening. She’s started skipping school, too. A few weeks ago I went to the counselor to discuss her failing grades and he asked me how I expected her to do well when she’s never in class. I inquired what he meant and he showed me a whole sheaf of notes – notes for the dentist, notes for the doctor, notes she’d been sick. They were all signed with my name, but the handwriting wasn’t mine.”

  David stared down at the table.

  “How old is she?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Fifteen. When I was fifteen, we were living in Winnetka, Illinois, in a remodeled coach house on the shore of Lake Michigan. I entered New Trier High School as a junior in the middle of the year, a shy, lonely girl, awed by my wealthy classmates with their sports cars and cashmere sweaters. A short time after I started school, a neighbor’s daughter told me I’d never be accepted by the other students if I continued to wear white ankle socks and carry a zippered binder. I was stunned. If my classmates were that shallow I wasn’t interested in making friends with them, so I continued wearing white socks and carrying a zippered binder and retreated even farther into my shell. Marcy’s existence was light years away from anything I could imagine.

  “Why do you let her go out with him if you don’t approve?”

  “I have a choice? I can’t very well clap Marcy in leg-irons and shackle her to the wall. I tried forbidding her to go out; she locked her bedroom door and climbed out the window. I found them a couple blocks from our house … in the back seat of his car. You’re only four years older than she is … oh, God!”

  David turned away abruptly and I realized he didn’t want me to see he was on the verge of tears.

  “Well, there you have it,” he said, draining the last of the coffee from his cup, “the true life story of L. David Rosenau, Ph.D., probably a different version from the one you read in The Biography of American Scholars. Trite, isn’t it – mid
dle-aged, white Jewish male suffering menopausal feelings of despondency and alienation.”

  “I reached across the table and took his hand. “David, can we go to Sturmvogel?”

  “Now? I’m afraid there's no time. We’d have to start back as soon as we got to the marina.”

  “I mean can we stay there overnight?”

  David looked at me for a moment in surprise. “I’m sure my story’s affecting, but you don’t need to offer me physical therapy.”

  I realized he wanted to treat my remark as a joke, but I persisted.

  “Kate, we can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can think of a hundred good reasons. For starters, you signed out at the desk. If you’re not back by two or so, the housemother will call the police and there will be hell to pay when you do return. I can see the headlines now, ‘Missing Coed Found on Professor’s Yacht.'”

  “I’ve already thought of that. You can take me back, I’ll sign in, change my clothes and then leave without signing the register. No one checks. Please say yes; I can’t bear saying goodbye to you, not tonight.”

  David sighed. “My dear girl, hasn’t it occurred to you I have to go home?”

  I looked down at the table, feeling foolish. It hadn’t occurred to me. We dropped the subject and David drove me back to Blaine Hall. We said goodnight near the entrance, in the shadow of a towering rhododendron. David put his arms around me and pressed me close against him.

  “This evening turned out rather differently from what I planned. I can’t say it hasn’t been stressful, but it’s good to stick a knife in an abscess now and then to let the wound drain. Sometimes … I wish I could take an eraser and wipe the slate clean, cross out the last 25 years and start over.”

  “I’m glad you can’t”

  “Because?”

  “Twenty-five years ago I wasn’t even born.”

  David stepped back, as if getting ready to leave.

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?” I asked, surprised at my boldness.