by Marge Piercy
I believe Robert was pleased with me. We were closer during the couple of years we lived there than we had been previously, or would be in the future. I found the novelty of behaving as a middle-class housewife somewhat entertaining. I worked my way through Julia Child and began to collect other cookbooks, as I still do, although my tastes these days are more for peasant than haute cuisine, and I cook mostly Mediterranean. I discovered a gift for cooking, an ability to grasp the fundamentals of a recipe, then to vary it and make it my own. I do not do a great many things well. I’ve never been able to muster the energy or discipline to play seriously at cards, chess, computer games. I think basically the peasant in me wants a product to emerge if I spend my time and energy on an operation. It can be a stew or a mousse, a poem or a story, a row of hollyhocks or a cabbage patch, but I want product. I loved to go to Haymarket and the North End and shop for good meat, the freshest artichokes and the crispest greens.
Our apartment was pleasant, although never fancy. No place I have lived has ever been elegant. The furniture is old and comfortable. Rugs provide the glamour. My infatuation with carpets began with an Oriental we purchased at a Sunday house sale. I still have it, in my office. We began collecting interesting items of decor, a few of them from Robert’s time in the Pacific.
Robert had been working for IBM after college and had gotten engaged to a young woman with whom he seemed to have a rather chilly relationship. At one point, he felt bored, irritated, trapped—as had happened just before I met him. He had thrown up his job and set off to journey around the world. During the next year and a half, he spent time in Tahiti, New Caledonia, Borneo, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia. Not long into his wandering, he joined another young man, Scotty, who rapidly became his best friend. They traveled together for a year and a half until finally Robert was recalled home by his fiancée, who demanded that their relationship be resolved, and also by a letter telling him about a new computer company. It would be run by computer types, not business types, and there would be great freedom of hours, of lifestyle. They would take only work they agreed was interesting.
Scotty continued his journey through Indochina, spending some months in Vietnam in 1962. He wrote long letters about the American presence and why he felt the Viet Cong had the allegiance of most ordinary people, especially in the countryside. He determined for Robert and me an early and continuing opposition to that war. Scotty went on to Japan. In photos, the two men resembled each other, both small, wiry, wearing glasses, with brown hair and a similar expression of guarded curiosity. Scotty had been the perfect companion for Robert.
Robert broke up with his fiancée and went to work for the new computer company, which he hoped would be more compatible with his creativity than IBM had been. They promised him freedom and that he could take leaves of absence between projects when he desired.
In Japan, Scotty began learning Japanese in an intensive course and studied Zen with a monk. He urged Robert to bring me and join him in Japan, which Robert planned to do the following spring. I am sure I was no more real to Scotty than he was to me, but he was very important to Robert, who viewed him as his other, better self. Scotty’s letters came regularly, keeping us posted on his progress with Japanese kanji and Zen. I would never be the ideal traveling companion that Scotty had been—up for anything, ready to sleep on the deck of a junk or roll up in a sleeping bag in a doorway, ready to slog into the jungle and be sucked by leeches, ready to eat anything at any time and try to like it. Going to Japan to be with Scotty was not negotiable.
The worst aspect of that time in Brookline was being invisible as a writer. I can’t forget the despair and hopelessness of those years, but I never stopped writing. My friends from college seemed to be leaping forward. Victor and Padma were hooked up with The New Yorker; David Newman was working for Esquire. Eric got his Ph.D. and went to work for IBM. Nadine, however, was locked up in a mental ward again.
I believed in myself, even if I was a minority of one. I had space and time to write, and I finished the third draft of the novel I had been working on, wrote a great deal of poetry that slowly but surely was getting published. I found the apartment luxurious—all that space only for me and Arofa during weekdays. She sat with me while I wrote, although at this stage of her life, she was too young and rambunctious to be the perfect writer’s cat she would grow into. I played with her, rough and tumble games, games of skill, of leaping and climbing and chasing. We often took her with us when we went out socially. When we climbed Mount Monadnock, she climbed it with us, on her leash. No wonder she was a bright cat: she had the equipment and constant stimulating experiences.
The apartment, full of colorful Indian cottons and oak furniture, felt warm and open. We continued the study of wines we had begun in California. In those days, this was an easy matter. It was possible to drink great Bordeaux and great Burgundies for five to seven dollars a bottle. We found hundred-year-old prephylloxera Madeiras at four to five dollars a bottle. Our social life as a couple was typical of the times. Wives made elaborate dinners, husbands mixed and poured drinks and talked shop. My interest was more in the planning and preparing of the meal than it was in what transpired after the guests arrived.
In spite of not having a job, I did not write as rapidly as I had in San Francisco. I did not work weekends, because we often went off on excursions or entertained or were entertained. Guests came to stay with us. Gourmet cooking and shopping for it took time. All of this was interesting, but I kept having the sense I was not getting done what I should. I carefully resumed the discipline I found in San Francisco, and every day I worked for several hours straight. I was sure if I knew other writers and could exchange work with them, I would write faster and better. I sent writing through the mail to friends in New York and Ann Arbor, but their feedback could take months to reach me. I was convinced I needed closer stimulation.
Early in 1963 Henry—at whose apartment we had met in Chicago—arrived to visit and then to stay indefinitely with his younger wife, Sylvia. Before they arrived, I was excited and happy. I wrote thirty letters trying futilely to find Henry a job in the Boston area. He had been working for the post office but wanted to resume teaching English. I was delighted at the prospect of dealing with another writer regularly and having someone to exchange poems with, doing mutual critiques. Whatever I had lacked in Chicago, I did belong to a group of writers. Here nobody understood what I did or took an interest.
Henry arrived coldly angry with me. If I had admitted to being unhappy with Robert, he would have accepted the marriage, but I was absorbed in my life, narrow as it was. My poetry was rapidly improving, and so was my fiction. I was gradually learning to do more of what I wished I could. I just needed feedback.
He liked best to have long late-night sessions probing motives and rehashing Chicago. “You’ve sold out,” he told me. “Sold out for bourgeois comfort. You’re a kept woman.” He jabbed at me, smoking cigarette after cigarette, stubbing the butts into ashtrays soon overflowing, into glasses and cups. Since he was also being “kept” by Robert at the moment, this hardly seemed fair.
“You live by the clock. You want to write us into your social calendar.”
“I can’t write a novel in odd moments. I have to put in hours every day.”
He felt that my authentic self was the poor, needy and lonely woman he had been drawn to in Chicago, and this new competent and disciplined self was inauthentic. Since I pretty well liked bourgeois comfort, that accusation made me uneasy, but when I married Robert, he was deeply in debt and his prospects were wobbly and uncertain. I had little motivation to rehash Chicago. I was aware I had kept my burgeoning affair with Robert secret from Henry, that I had not been open or honest. I felt I had escaped Chicago with what I needed, the base of a good relationship, and there was little I wanted to subject to Henry’s revision.
“You have shut all uncertainties out of your life.” He thundered at me like an Old Testament prophet, like Ezra. Repent Ye Whore of Baby
lon. “You don’t care about anybody else now.”
Sylvia did not like me any more than she had in Chicago. However I spoke with her was wrong. I said the wrong words, used the wrong tone, ignored her or patronized her or pushed myself on her. She was in a difficult position—she was years younger than any of us, much less educated and experienced and dropped into a strange town where she knew no one except her brother, whom Robert had brought into the computer company as a trainee.
The situation with them grew tense. “You’re fooling yourself,” Henry said. “Love? You don’t feel love for him.” I had to be pining for Henry, and if I contradicted him, it was because I was in a state of denial. Sylvia was sure I wanted Henry. I had been close to Henry and dependent on him in Chicago. I had never loved him as I did Robert, but there was no way to convince him of that. I was rather annoyed that I had to try, daily, nightly, endlessly. He kept saying, “You’re suppressing your true feelings.”
My true feelings were that I was tired of cooking for them, cleaning up after them, having them in my space, experiencing their lack of respect for my work time and my need to concentrate. My true feelings were close to a desire for strangulation. This was the period when my zeal for housework dissolved and it has never returned. Finally I said to Robert that I was going to New York to stay with Vic and Padma Perera, and I wouldn’t come back until the Chicago party had decamped. I took the next train to New York. Vic was a Guatemalan Jew and Padma was from India, but both wrote in English and were heavily involved with The New Yorker. I took the train to see them regularly, but this time was openended, and they were a little nonplussed. Robert called me forty-eight hours later to tell me Henry and Sylvia had cleared out. I was sorry I had lost a friend, but I was desperate for privacy, tired of being psychoanalyzed by an amateur and sick of being a target.
In July we went up to Maine for a total eclipse of the sun that we viewed from Great Moose Lake. Robert found the Maine woods boring—too much the same—but the eclipse moved both of us. I found it magical and holy. The extraordinary darkness with the effect of sunset all around, the whooshing in the trees, all lodged in my deepest imagination. That image of the sun occluded but with its mane of corona flaming out has asserted itself in my poetry several times. I can close my eyes and see it. I know a woman who pursues eclipses. She has enough money to go to as many as she pleases. I am not sure if I would do that, if I could. That experience feels so vivid and complete to me, I don’t want anything to compare it to.
I am one of those people who remember exactly where they were when John Kennedy was assassinated, partly because of what followed. We were both home packing, for we were about to spend Thanksgiving with Robert’s older brother, a statistician working in Schenectady in upstate New York. Then we were to see a friend of mine from Michigan, Eric, with whom I had edited the college literary magazine. Now he was working for IBM in Poughkeepsie, so he and Robert had more in common than most of my literary friends. We were stunned by the news. We didn’t own a TV, but the woman across the hall did, and we watched the news on her set.
We drove to Schenectady with the car radio on, scarcely able to believe what had happened. I had worked on Kennedy’s campaign in Chicago and had been struck by his impact on a crowd and the electricity that came with him into a room. I had mixed feelings about him as a president. I had found the Cuban missile crisis terrifying—machismo out of control—and I didn’t think he was doing what he could on civil rights. I was appalled by our Vietnam policy. But I surely preferred him to Nixon 100 percent. It was one thing to have mixed reviews on his presidency and quite another to accept his assassination. It was a turning point in modern American political history, assassination as a recall device or a way of preventing someone with whom you disagreed from continuing or gaining power.
We arrived at his brother’s house in a state of mild shock. Sandy was about ten inches taller than Robert and treated him with an air of jocular contempt that set my teeth on edge. We were walking in with our luggage when Sandy said, “Hey, isn’t that too bad about your friend Scotty. What a huge accident.”
That was how we learned that Scotty, along with several hundred Japanese, had been killed in a hideous railroad accident, when a crack express had cut right through a local train carrying commuters. There were two Americans among the six hundred or so killed, and Scotty was one of them. It had been on television.
I don’t believe there was any malice in Robert’s brother, only a lack of empathy, an inability to understand that Scotty and Robert had been intensely close and that Robert cared for him very deeply. Robert went into emotional shock, a zombie numbness I found terrifying. I had to get him out of there. He did not sleep at all but lay rigid that night in a kind of catatonia.
We spent the next couple of days in Eric’s small Poughkeepsie apartment or in bars. We drank a lot and finally Robert was able to talk about Scotty. Scotty and Kennedy were somehow confounded into a dead martyr. Everything was changed for Robert, even as everything seemed to change in American politics. He was never able to cry, but finally he was able to talk. In my memory there is no snow but the light is gray, the wind is raw and always it is overcast and dank. All the bars we drank in blend into one dim hole where we cram into a booth. Eric was gentle and understanding to Robert. The days felt interminable and all I could do was hold him when he let me and try to get him to express his grief.
That winter we went to Ann Arbor and talked with political friends about Vietnam and the situation in the country. Afro-American friends were optimistic about Johnson, but I was less persuaded. I had been going to Ann Arbor a couple of times a year, but this time Robert went with me, because Scotty’s death had made him feel he should do something political. My friends were starting Students for a Democratic Society, which grew into the largest and most visible antiwar and New Left group in the country—although at the time none of them knew that was what they were doing.
Ever since Scotty’s death, Robert had been talking about going on an extended trip. He abandoned the idea of Japan. I suggested Greece. I was fascinated by Greek mythology, both the more conventional approaches and Jane Harrison’s study of the chthonic elements. I am still an archaeology buff. In December, we began learning demotic Greek with the intention of leaving in the spring. I knew enough about Greek culture and politics to know that we had to learn demotic, not the artificial “purified” Katharevousa that was never the language of ordinary people. In January, Robert booked tickets on a Greek ocean liner sailing out of Boston, the Vassiliki Frederiki. We had a small private cabin well inside—not even a porthole. We were scheduled to depart in March.
Two weeks after Robert bought the tickets, we had a phone call from his mother. His father had met with an accident. He took the commuter train every day between Yonkers and Manhattan. That particular day while returning, he had dozed off. He wakened as the train was in the Yonkers station and leaped out of his seat. The train was already beginning to pull out as he jumped off. He fell beneath the train and struck his head. As he lay unconscious, a second train ran over him and severed his legs.
I got on better with his father, the vice president of an engineering company, than I did with his mother, a housewife who had been a grade-school teacher until she had children. I could talk opera with the father. One of my Chicago boyfriends had been enamored of opera. We had gone to Turandot together and to Don Giovanni and La Bohème. We saw Robert’s parents a few times a year, usually for an evening when we were in New York. It has always been the case that I have found the fathers of my husbands easier to please than their mothers. Although in general I get along with women better than with men, the same dynamic doesn’t apply with in-laws. My fathers-in-law would get a twinkle in their eyes with me and there was always some rapport.
We drove to New York at once. Robert’s father lay in the hospital bed, gray-faced, legless and in a coma, his head completely bandaged. Robert spoke to the doctors. He had enough scientific background—as did I—to understan
d that his father’s brain had been largely destroyed, and he could not possibly regain meaningful consciousness. Robert’s mother refused to accept this. She was buoyed up by stories of people who awoke from comas after days or months, and one of the nurses encouraged her belief. Robert found the sight of his helpless father being kept in a vegetative state on machines close to intolerable. Robert was at odds with his mother and the rest of his family, as was I, because we understood that his father was already gone.
Robert began to say to me that he was going to Greece regardless of what happened. He insisted we continue studying Greek and making preparations. We would leave our apartment as it was. One of his colleagues would take Arofa. We were leaving on the Vassiliki Frederiki as scheduled. I foresaw a terrible collision between Robert and his mother. It was fortunate for Robert that his father died just before we were to sail.
Every few years, in the time I was with Robert, he would grow seriously and vehemently unhappy with his situation. Often he dropped relationships completely, dropped projects, groups, commitments. Sometimes he left a job. Sometimes he left a city or a state or the country. It was his way of dealing with expectations that could not be met, with disappointments, with an intolerable feeling of being trapped. I would think twice now about going off for an indefinite period of time and leaving any animal in someone else’s care, but I understood little then of how seriously a cat can take the departure of its person. Arofa was only a year and a month old when we left, and we assumed she would easily adjust to the people she was staying with.
Greece was my idea, and I liked it much better than Robert did. For the first time in his life, he developed serious allergies. He would not be free of them while we were together. I thought it might have something to do with being unable to mourn his father, whom he would not discuss. That was only a cheap guess. We had been close in Brookline, but in Greece, we were often distant. He was constantly comparing traveling with me to his backpack adventures with Scotty. Those had been realistically narrated to me when I first met him, but by now, they shone with the radiance of loss. The disagreements and discomforts vanished into the mythology of the perfect companion—which I was not. I liked comfort more than he did. I spoke Greek better and more readily. I could explain to the Greek peasants and shepherds and fishermen what I did—a poet was comprehensible. A systems analyst was not explicable in demotic Greek or probably in any form of Greek in 1964, and he often felt alienated. My knowledge of the mythology, history and archaeology made the landscape, ruins and artifacts meaningful. I had been dreaming the Mediterranean since I was sixteen. He was largely indifferent to the landscape, and increasingly to me.