Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  Wendy and Abby became closer than they might have, bonded by their feelings of being outsiders.

  They understood that the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters emphasized academic excellence but hadn’t quite grasped the way the schools perpetuated class preservation. There was an unstated expectation that students would form the old-boy and old-girl networks that would, after graduation, become advantageous connections in business, academia, politics, and high society. Mount Holyoke did have a long history of social responsibility—the school graduated its first African-American student in 1883. Yet diversity hadn’t advanced past tokenism. In 1967 there were a handful of African Americans—eighteen “Negro” freshmen out of a class of 486—and not many Jews. The latter fact was unsettling to Wendy, who’d been surrounded by Jews throughout her education.

  The college was more traditional than any school she had attended. Abby had already become politicized and was beginning to develop a strong feminist point of view. She found the idea of Gracious Living ridiculous.

  The two girls, united by alienation, responded in very different ways. Abby, the future academic, took refuge in her studies. Wendy, the future playwright, entertained the other “misfits” who gathered in her room to listen to her vast record collection of Broadway show tunes and eat and talk. She seemed to live in her flannel nightgown and never to comb her hair. Everything became grist for a funny story, even her grades, which were the worst she’d ever had, C’s and D’s, even in the subjects she liked, English and history.

  She made it all seem like a lark. When she and Abby took zoology together, they invented songs to help them memorize things. In the middle of the night, Abby watched Wendy tap-dance the sixteen functions of the liver (with a nod to Mrs. Janovsky, her dance teacher at Ethical Culture).

  Abby was in awe of Wendy’s sophistication. For Abby, a girl from Staten Island, Manhattan was the celestial city and Wendy lived there. She knew rare things. In her nimble way, she dropped references that were foreign to Abby: the music of Benjamin Britten, the medieval mystery Play of Daniel. Despite the frustrations she’d caused her teachers at Calhoun, Exeter, and Andover, Wendy had been paying attention.

  It never occurred to Abby that her roommate was seriously struggling. Wendy joked about her bad grades, but she didn’t seem that upset. Only once did Abby glimpse real distress, when Wendy got back a paper she’d labored over, an analysis of the William Faulkner short story “The Bear.” After all her hard work, she received a D.

  Abby also didn’t notice they were drifting apart. In the spring they decided to room together again sophomore year. One day, without telling Abby why, Wendy said she’d changed her mind. She would be living in Pearson Annex, with a group of their friends from 1837. Abby was hurt and perplexed.

  More than thirty years would pass before Abby learned the reason Wendy had reneged. The celebrated playwright had recently published a collection of essays, Shiksa Goddess, and sent the book to her former roommate, with whom she’d stayed in touch over the years. Abby had remained true to her academic interests. She earned her Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard and was a professor at the University of Michigan, in psychology and women’s studies, as well as the director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

  Too busy to read Wendy’s book when it arrived, she then forgot about it for several months.

  One day she remembered Shiksa Goddess. She was about halfway through when she began to read the opening paragraph in an essay called “Women Beware Women.”

  “Women are the worst,” Wendy wrote. “I will rot in hell for saying that. My toes will gnarl inward into tiny hooves, and I’ll never dare to get another pedicure. All right. All right. Women are kind, decent, nurturing, the best friends women could ever have—until they’re not. Then women can be the absolute worst.”

  Abby continued until she reached page 117 of the book, the middle of the essay. She stopped abruptly, feeling the years vanish. Once again she was a freshman at Mount Holyoke, wondering what she’d done to upset Wendy.

  Two sentences explained everything.

  “I moved out on my college roommate at a time when she thought we were the closest of friends,” wrote Wendy. “She was too smart; I was flunking.”

  Then Abby realized how hard it must have been for Wendy to admit how bad she’d felt about her grades. Her nonchalance had been an act.

  Abby called Wendy and apologized for taking so long to get to the book. She added, “Wendy, I didn’t know you had something in there about us.”

  Wendy laughed and said, “I wondered if you’d ever notice.”

  Soon after they’d met, Abby had become aware of what she thought of as Wendy’s “precocity worship.” She often mentioned that Sandy and Bruce had entered Michigan when they were sixteen. Franny and Zooey came up in conversation more than once, Wendy consciously comparing her family to J. D. Salinger’s fictional whiz kids. She told Abby how much she admired Bruce, who was a senior at Michigan, heading for Harvard Law School in the fall, and only twenty years old. He was the executive editor of the Michigan Daily and had his own column called “Publick Occurrences,” after the independent newspaper published in Boston in 1690 and shut down by the British after one edition.

  He and Sandy were the smart ones, Wendy said. She couldn’t measure up to them.

  Wendy depended on her sisters, frequently calling them to chat. Staying in touch required some effort in the era before cell phones and e-mail. In conversations with her roommate, Wendy was reverent toward Sandy, reciting her achievements as a woman executive, in awe of her independence, talent, toughness—the sum of which spelled success. Toward Georgette, Wendy was affectionate but critical of her conventional path. Sandy represented accomplishment, Georgette represented family happiness. Wendy said she felt pulled in both directions, but it was Sandy whom she idolized.

  Abby had gotten a hint of the family’s complexity during the World Youth Forum trip. There were those strange postcards from Lola—“Eating and thinking of you,”—which were funny and affectionate in one way, needling in another.

  Wendy helped the long train and bus rides pass effortlessly, with her humorous tales of Lola and Morris and her siblings. She referred to another brother, Abner, who was sick and had been sent away. Wendy called him a “family secret.” She said she didn’t understand why he had essentially been obliterated by the family, who never referred to him. Abby saw that Wendy was troubled by this, but she didn’t press for details, and none were offered.

  When the girls returned from Europe, before college began, Abby visited Wendy at her apartment and met Lola and Morris. Abby felt she had stepped inside a vaudeville routine. There was no food in the house; Lola was always going off to dance class. Even their Thanksgiving meal was ordered in. The Wassersteins were different from Abby’s parents, a lawyer father and a housewife mother.

  Nothing about their behavior helped Abby understand Wendy’s focus on her siblings’ achievements—not at the time. “Morris was very, very sweet,” said Abby. “It was very hard to get past sweet. He was a very lovely man who was very loving.” Lola seemed more critical, Abby observed, but she found Wendy’s mother “more strange than driven.”

  Camilla Peach, the head of hall for the 1837 dorm, was not amused by Wendy. In her evaluation she noted:

  Responsibility toward work in hall—poor

  Offices held in hall—none

  Qualities of leadership observed—none

  “Wendy is a problem,” Mrs. Peach wrote. “She is unkempt to say the least. Defiant when spoken to. I understand she’s very bright. Her cooperation in the Hall is nil.”

  Mrs. Peach understood something about Wendy that other people missed. Wendy was defiant, though she usually couched her rebellion, as she did her unhappiness, in stories and jokes.

  She also ate, ravenously, a simultaneous thumbing of the nose at Mrs. Peach and Lola. At Gracious Living, when other girls would eat daintily, mindful of squeezing into those silver lamé dresses,
Wendy would wolf down two or three entire lemon meringue tarts, to the house mother’s dismay.

  Camilla Peach became a character in Uncommon Women and Others, Wendy’s fictionalized account of her Mount Holyoke years. Mrs. Peach became Mrs. Plumm, the housemother at the unnamed girls’ college where the play takes place.

  Mrs. Plumm appears in an early scene. She introduces herself and welcomes the girls to tea.

  “Dear, take your feet off the table,” she says, before continuing. “The tea fund was established by Lucy Valerie Bingsbee, class of 1906, after whom a Vermont orchid bog was recently dedicated by Governor Hoff at The Lucy Valerie Bingsbee Wildflower Sanctuary. I think you girls will find tea here very comfy. I knew Lucy. I never cared for her much.”

  Wendy came to appreciate both Mount Holyoke and Camilla Peach. She wrote to a friend, a few years after graduation, “Although I hated the reality of Mount Holyoke, recently I’ve become much more attached to the idea of it; the warmth, intelligence, and I guess (ha-ha) sincerity.”

  One of the people Wendy confided in during that troubling year was James Kaplan.

  Before school started, the woman he was pursuing over the summer had made it clear she wasn’t interested in him. He called Wendy and invited her to a football game at Yale, where he was a freshman. He was cautious; they kept things platonic. He was reserved, an understated young man, who tended to wear dark slacks and white shirts. Wendy gently mocked his reticence, referring to him as “Captain Charisma” when she discussed him with her girlfriends.

  Wendy had an excuse to visit New Haven anyway; Georgette, Albert and their baby daughter, Tajlei, lived in Hamden, Connecticut, a short drive from Yale.

  James was a safe confidant—close enough yet also distant. Wendy regaled him with stories of triumph and misery. She told him about scandalizing Mrs. Peach with her meringue-tart-eating escapades. She confessed that she was failing English and didn’t know what she was doing at Mount Holyoke.

  Her weight ballooned. Wendy told James she went to a therapist, who told her, unhelpfully, “You are what you eat.”

  James showed his affection for people by giving them nicknames. Wendy became “Dots,” for her freckles, and then “Wemp” or “Wempell,” his misreading of a letter Wendy showed him from Susan Gordis—an old friend from Ethical Culture. Susan called Wendy “Wendella,” a mock Yiddishism. James became a sympathetic audience for Wendy’s stories, mostly via the telephone, in conversations cut short by the lines that formed at the dorm pay phones.

  By spring he’d become passionately involved elsewhere: Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for the Democratic Party nomination against the incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson. McCarthy had been gathering momentum since announcing his candidacy in November. He was running on a platform to end the war in Vietnam, a cause that struck a deep chord with young men facing the draft. His unofficial slogan became “Clean for Gene,” referring to the college boys who shaved their beards and cut their hair to win votes for their progressive candidate from more conservative voters.

  James was having his own freshman disillusionment at Yale. He felt trapped, unable to leave college or face induction into the army. He joined the campaign for McCarthy in New Hampshire, where the candidate’s strong showing in March—42 percent of the vote to 49 percent for Johnson—indicated the divisiveness caused by the war. When Johnson pulled out of the race on March 31, the antiwar forces grew stronger and more determined to win. By then James was enrolled at Yale but was working almost full-time on the McCarthy campaign. He spent most of the spring in Wisconsin and, after that, Indiana, going door-to-door, working the phones, caught up in the exhilarating promise of changing the world.

  He had no time to worry about Wendy and her revolt against Gracious Living. The concerns of campus life seemed meager compared with the weighty issues he was confronting on the campaign trail.

  Midway through Wendy’s freshman year, politics had finally begun percolating at Mount Holyoke. In February a new editorial board had taken over the Mount Holyoke News and changed the name to Choragos. In an impassioned announcement, the new editorial board explained:

  We are changing from passive reporters to active initiators of change with the goal of improvement. We no longer view our role solely as a mere commentator, a transmitter of information about what is already happening here. Rather we see ourselves in a leader’s position, as an active force, an innovator. We will be talking about what could, and perhaps should, be happening here.

  Thus the name News, with its connotations of reporting only what is already being done by others, has become ill-fitted to our purposes. Choragos, the leader of the chorus in Greek drama, the one who asks questions and provokes discussion, is more in keeping with our new self image. . . .

  At the end of April, for Fathers’ Weekend, the Mount Holyoke College Dramatic Club staged a production of Lysistrata, the ancient Greek antiwar farce by Aristophanes, in which women refuse to have sex with their husbands until they end the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. Wendy was distraught because she’d been cast as a fat Corinthian woman. Instead of suffering the indignity, she dropped out of the play.

  Visiting parents had their own problems with the Dramatic Club version of the play, performed in the amphitheater on a beautiful spring afternoon. Philippa Goold, a Latin and Greek professor who had been consulted for the production, suggested that the male actors brought in from Amherst wear balloon phalluses for comic effect. A recent arrival to the United States from Rhodesia (later to become Zimbabwe), she was surprised by the puritanical response to this bit of burlesque humor.

  “The production was something of a disaster,” she said. “It was 1968, and I thought anything would go. The parents were hideously upset. That’s all I remember, is being dreadfully embarrassed afterward because everyone didn’t take to it with the enthusiasm and joie de vivre I thought it would be greeted with.”

  This letter from an undergraduate student appeared in Choragos:

  As I see it, the weekend was intended to please fathers and show them their annual $3,000 is going for a good purpose. I see no reason to prove our broadmindedness and freedom at the cost of shocking our fathers. My father has requested that I leave Mount Holyoke (and I am a junior).

  On the other hand, Lorraine Garnett’s father thought the play was hilarious. A working-class Italian American, he was unusual in the stuffy crowd of businessmen and professionals.

  Lorraine, one of Wendy’s dormmates, was hardly a radical, nor was she part of Wendy’s crowd of misfits. Yet Wendy chose to live with Lorraine and her friends when her roommate Abby’s good grades became too much of a burden for her to bear.

  Their friendship developed a new dimension in May, when the Democratic National Committee offered free airplane tickets to students to campaign for McCarthy before the Indiana primary. Lorraine decided to go with some other girls from her dorm. Wendy went along.

  Lorraine was struck by how innocent Wendy could seem, even though she was a savvy Manhattanite. Wendy was younger than most of them, thanks to Ethical Culture’s having advanced her a grade. She turned seventeen the fall of freshman year and still seemed like a high-school kid. Lorraine felt protective toward her.

  The Mount Holyoke “Clean for Gene” campaigners had a grand adventure. A Smith College alumna invited them to camp out in her house. They canvassed the area and attended a big rally where Robert Kennedy spoke. They felt themselves to be in the middle of enormous change, when anything could happen. Indiana was swarming with East Coast students. So it wasn’t that unusual that Wendy saw James Kaplan there. The encounter was brief, just long enough to say hello.

  By the end of freshman year, Wendy was eager for the familiar tumult of home.

  Bruce was getting married on June 30, 1968, to his college sweetheart, Laura Lynne Killin, known as Lynne, who worked on the school newspaper with him. Bruce was overweight and slovenly, but Lynne was drawn to his personality and his power, already on exhibit at the Michigan Daily.

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p; Her plan was to work for a while, save some money for a down payment on an apartment, and then start having children. “I wanted 2.5 kids, an English sheepdog, a vegetable and herb garden with a few roses,” she said. It was 1968. Lynne was part of the transitional generation, when an educated woman’s ambition didn’t have to include conquering the world.

  Neither family was happy, because they were young—Bruce was twenty—and because he was Jewish, she was Presbyterian.

  Lynne had considered converting to Judaism in high school. On a church retreat, she’d had an epiphany: she didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. When she raised the matter with her parents, they objected, and she relented. When she and Bruce decided to marry, however, she became Jewish—not an easy process, requiring prolonged study with a rabbi.

  A therapist would tell her that part of her attraction to Bruce was her desire to be married to his family. She adored Lola and loved Morris and Wendy. As an outsider she escaped Lola’s criticism and felt only the warmth and engagement.

  They married in her parents’ living room, in Larchmont, an affluent suburb of New York. Bruce’s family joined them on their honeymoon, at Lake Mohonk, just south of the Catskills, the same area where Bruce and Wendy used to play explorers in “Bruceania.”

  That summer Wendy continued to think about James and what their future would be, if any. She’d been glad to see him in Indiana but didn’t know if they had a relationship or not, or if that’s what she wanted.

  For him, politics had become everything. The stakes, he felt, were literally life and death. Exhausted and emotionally wrung out, he was devastated when Robert Kennedy won the important California primary in June, knocking McCarthy out of the race, only to immediately confront the shock of Kennedy’s assassination, right after his acceptance speech. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot two months earlier. Nothing about James’s contained world on the Upper East Side or in New Haven made sense.