The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  Chapter Four

  WE TRIED TO keep our marriage secret, living separately for the next week, but then Daddy read about our vows in a New York law journal (all marriages performed in the state are a matter of public record). He called me at college and asked me to come home and explain myself. His voice sounded uncharacteristically cold over the phone. I caught the next train to Manhattan.

  When I arrived at the brownstone, my parents were in the living room waiting for me. Mama had her dark glasses on “to hide some of my wrinkles.” Daddy did not call out, as he usually did, to say, “Hey, baby, give your old man a kiss.” Instead he remained on the sofa, chain-smoking and drinking his first bourbon of the day (it was just after four p.m.).

  There they were—my parents. How I loved and feared them at that moment. They were a complicated couple, but in spite of their differences, they had a deep mutual respect for one another. Would Jason and I ever come close to being like them?

  No words were spoken for several tense moments. Daddy’s expression was drawn and haggard; he was in negotiations for Rita Hayworth’s divorce from Prince Aly Khan, so he’d been flying back and forth from Hollywood to New York to Paris. He just gazed at me as if he couldn’t believe what I’d done. He let Mama talk since she’d met Jason and had definite opinions on the subject.

  She hadn’t liked his eyes, she said. Disagreeable eyes, and she thought he’d been terribly rude the night they met. “He wouldn’t let go of my hand. It was the damnedest thing,” she told my father. “He set out to unnerve me.” And then she launched into a series of questions. “Where will you live? How will he support you? What about your college education?” I didn’t answer her questions, including the last: “Why did you do this to us? He is a nobody. And what about his family? The name Bean? Is he Protestant or Episcopalian? Is he German or English?”

  “Scotch Irish, Mama.”

  “If he’s part Irish he can’t be that bad,” my father tried to joke (Daddy’s middle name was Cavanaugh).

  And then Mama added, “You can’t possibly love this man!”

  “I do love him,” I assured them, although I was dimly becoming aware that I knew very little about love.

  Next my father spoke—between coughing fits. (He smoked three packs of Pall Malls a day; he was never without a cigarette burning between his nicotine-stained fingers.)

  He hoped I realized the seriousness of my actions. “You are too young to be married. You haven’t known this boy long enough. You are just a freshman in college. Did you consider any of this?” He finished with, “What were you planning to do about money?”

  I answered that I thought he might help us for a while.

  “Which is exactly what this Jason person thought,” Mama interjected icily. “He took one look at our beautiful brownstone and assumed your father was rich.”

  “Jason isn’t like that,” I protested.

  Mama shook her head and declared that she thought the marriage should be annulled—immediately.

  Daddy seemed to agree, until we had a meeting a couple of days later with my new husband in the office of the president of Sarah Lawrence College.

  HAROLD TAYLOR, AT age thirty-two the youngest college president in the country, had called the meeting. A vital, ebullient former philosophy professor from Canada, he had a funny, goofy grin, big white teeth, and rumpled dark hair. He loved to play tennis and drink; he loved to play jazz music on his clarinet. Two of his closest friends were Duke Ellington and the choreographer Agnes de Mille. And he counted Alger Hiss as an intimate.

  Dear Harold. Over the next two years I would periodically sneak into his office and pour out my heart to him about my marriage. He was always there for me. After college, we would become friends for the rest of his life.

  That morning he gave an impassioned speech directed at me, saying that I had made a choice—a commitment—to being Mrs. Jason Bean. He respected that, wanted to honor it, and as he reminded my parents, I was over eighteen. He hoped they would honor my commitment too.

  To my astonishment they agreed (although Daddy whispered in my ear, “You mustn’t marry in the Church”), and then the three adults turned to Jason and me to hear what we had to say.

  Jason just hung his head; for once he was speechless. He was dressed in an ill-fitting suit he’d borrowed from his brother. We gripped hands. Suddenly the enormity of what we’d done hit me in the pit of my stomach. How were we going to support ourselves? I hadn’t realized up until that moment that marriage was a responsibility and something quite profound. If this sounds crazy, and I suppose it does, I had never before truly weighed an action of mine. I just plunged into situations, experiences, adventures without ever considering the consequences.

  Before the meeting was over, Daddy repeated his request that I finish college; he would pay my tuition, but that was all. “Otherwise you kids are on your own.” Then he leaned over and shook Jason’s hand. “Good luck, my boy.” I believe those were the only words he ever uttered to my husband.

  Mama put her arms around me. I relaxed into her embrace, breathing in the delicious fragrance of Joy perfume. I expected her to say something loving and supportive, but instead she whispered in my ear, “Don’t you dare get pregnant. If you do, I swear I’ll take you to an abortionist myself.”

  SOON AFTER THE meeting at Harold’s office there was a feature in the Times and Herald Tribune newspapers: “Patricia Crum, daughter of attorney Bartley Crum, elopes in New York.” Mama had beautifully engraved cards printed at Tiffany’s, which she mailed to all her friends in New York and California. “Mr. and Mrs. Jason Bean at home at 236 East 68th Street,” which was of course a lie, since my husband and I never returned to the Sixty-Eighth Street brownstone together as a married couple.

  By now I’d moved my books and clothes from my dorm and Jason and I set up “housekeeping” (if you could call it that) in his ninety-five-year-old grandmother’s apartment in a fusty old Tudor-style building on Alger Court, a block away from the Bronxville train station.

  I hadn’t set foot in the place until Jason carried me over the threshold. What I saw was an actual shock to my system. A line of small dreary rooms were all in a row down a long hall connected by a soiled, wrinkled rug. Every piece of furniture in the “front parlor” was either brown or beige: the easy chairs, the falling-down sofa, the three lamps with cracking shades. There was a big, scarred coffee table by the TV set. No books. A pile of ancient Reader’s Digests stacked inside a dusty glass cabinet along with a Bible. My new home was in stark contrast to the beautiful townhouses and spacious apartments I’d grown up in, but I was too polite to voice my alarm.

  Jason explained hurriedly that we were to live in his room, as he led me by the hand to what had once been a maid’s room and before that had been used for storage. We were on the ground floor and sharing the space not only with Grandma Bean but with Jason’s older brother, Wally, a muscular, flat-faced man with a shaved head. He was a truck driver for Thomas’ English muffins. His wife, Faith, worked at a beauty parlor in Mount Vernon. She was plump and monosyllabic.

  I also discovered I would have to adjust to living with Grandma’s noisy collection of birds. Her aviary, located on the sun porch off our room, was filled with dozens of them (close to a hundred, according to Jason); some in cages, some on perches, all of them chirping and twittering from morning until night. There were parrots and macaws, lovebirds, hummingbirds, and quails, flapping their wings and screeching at one another. Grandma adored her “birdies,” as she called them; she was forever rolling around the aviary in her wheelchair, talking to them, laughing with them.

  She and Jason took care of them together. “And now you can help me,” he said when he brought me to the aviary for the first time to introduce me to his favorite, a green parrot who said, “Hi—hi-hi,” whenever anyone came to visit. “You can feed ’em, clean the cages. It gets stinky if we don’t do it a couple of times a week. Grandma doesn’t have the strength anymore, but now you’re here.”
He patted my butt.

  I didn’t like birds. I was frightened of them, but I told him I thought they were terrific. He was pleased because he said birds had always been a big part of his life. “I like ’em better than people,” he told me jovially. “And you will too. Maybe you’ll want a bird of your own someday.”

  I told him quickly, “Not yet.” I had too much to do. My homework and dance assignments, and the first thing I wanted to do was make our bedroom livable. I bought some pretty plants and a new spread for the lumpy bed as well as some colorful pillows. But there was still the fading wallpaper decorated with brown swans. I wanted to tear it off, but Jason said no.

  We tried to figure out how we could possibly exist in such a small space. Jason’s two leaky fish tanks took up a lot of room. The water sloshed and gurgled in those glass containers, the fish flickering through their rippling ghostly prisons. They never slept; no matter what time it was, I could always watch them. They kept darting back and forth, circling about the shells Jason had once collected on Cape Cod. It was mesmerizing, but then I’d stop looking at them and wonder how I could get rid of the smell of turpentine. Jason had set up his easel and his paints near the door. And where could I work? I finally had to write my class papers perched on our bed.

  Even so, I was ridiculously happy for a couple of weeks. I loved being married, I told myself; I loved being a wife even though Jason was already bossing me around: “Gimme my coffee . . . get me a beer!”

  I obediently became his servant. I’d seen Mama serve Daddy his drinks—wasn’t serving part of a woman’s role? (I forgot that Daddy often brought Mama her breakfast on a tray.) I especially enjoyed sleeping next to Jason’s warm, hairy body, whispering confidences to him in the dead of night, our legs entwined. He’d murmur, “You will always be mine,” and my heart would melt.

  On Valentine’s Day he gave me a beautiful card signed “Je t’adore.”

  But reality soon set in. I began to realize Jason was, to put it mildly, not a very nice person. In fact, he was self-involved, hypercritical, and bad-tempered. He’d rage at me for not cleaning the toilet; he’d criticize me for being “spoiled rotten” because I’d thrown a dress over the fish tank or left my shoes for him to trip over on the floor.

  Until I got married, a maid had always picked up my clothes for me. When an outfit needed pressing, someone did it for me. Sheets and towels were always sent to Madame Paulette’s. Now for the first time in my life I was shopping at the A&P and my sister-in-law was teaching me how to use a Laundromat.

  Rather than resenting it, I took all of it as a challenge. I felt as if I was on a crazy adventure. Not all of it was pleasant, but I took it as a learning experience. I had a lot to learn, I was realizing. Up till now I’d lived a rarefied existence. Part of me had wanted to escape, wanted a change—wanted to explore a different reality.

  I’d been raised to be polite. I didn’t like to offend people. So although I found my new family gross and was appalled by the way they lived, in such apathy and squalor, I never told Jason how I felt. I never said anything to anybody. At first I welcomed all the changes in my life.

  I did miss my brother. He hadn’t contacted me since my marriage. Would we no longer be in touch? I couldn’t bear the thought. He’d always been there to focus me and occasionally pass judgment on what I was doing. I shuddered to think what he’d say if he saw me at Alger Court lugging out the garbage or filling water dishes for screeching birds. I could just hear him chuckle and say to me in our secret language, “You are behaving like a character out of Charles Dickens.”

  OUR MARRIAGE QUICKLY settled into a routine. I would rise at seven and brew a pot of coffee and carry a mug of it in to Jason, who was lolling in bed listening to the radio. Then I would feed the birds as quickly as I could before making breakfast for everybody—everybody meaning Grandma, Wally, and Faith (Jason didn’t eat breakfast).

  It was best for me to cook since not only did I enjoy cooking but I quickly learned that nobody in the Bean family could cook. Faith was especially relieved when I took over in the kitchen, because she couldn’t even boil water and existed solely on junk food.

  I had learned to cook when I was a little girl. Cooking was in fact the only thing I knew I could do well, and for a while—don’t ask me why—I cooked up a storm for my new family. In the mornings I would alternate pancakes with French toast or scrambled eggs and sausages. For dinner I made fish soups and roast lamb in garlic marinade. I broiled chicken in lemon and olive oil. I baked apple crumb pies and angel cake topped with caramel frosting.

  The Beans were impressed, and they weren’t easily impressed. They were phlegmatic—“down in the dumps,” was the way Faith put it. They all suffered from a low-grade depression and seemed to find joy in nothing. And they weren’t especially articulate, either.

  I tried not to let their bleak moods get to me. In the beginning these didn’t. Mainly because I was so frantically busy. As soon as breakfast was done and the dishes were washed, I was out the door and trudging up the hill to my classes at Sarah Lawrence.

  I felt very grown up as I strode around campus. Losing my virginity gave me a brief cachet. Some of my classmates hovered around me whispering, “How does it feel to have an orgasm? Are you wearing a diaphragm? Do you want to get pregnant?” When they reached the questions “Do you get along with your in-laws?” or “Where will you finally be living, in another apartment or a house?” I’d put them off. Some of them even dropped by my new home hoping I’d ask them in, but I never did.

  I could never let my friends see the inside of Alger Court. Although I was constantly helping Faith dust, sweep, mop, and vacuum, the place always looked faintly grimy. It was the apartment of a very old lady, and that’s what Grandma Bean was. She’d celebrated her ninety-sixth birthday the day I moved in.

  LAUREEN MCLAUGHLIN BEAN had been born in St. Louis, Missouri, on January 18, 1857. She rarely spoke and often seemed to be in a trance. She was a tiny thing, almost bald. Most of her hair had fallen out, so she resembled a wizened old man. Her fine dark eyes had sunk so far back in her head I couldn’t tell if she could see or not. She had terrible coughing fits. Whenever she stopped coughing, she’d want to see her birds.

  We would all take turns wheeling her out to her aviary, a place alive with humming and cheeping and flapping of wings. She’d stay on that porch for hours, greeting her favorites: “Hello, Gypsy!” (her parrot), “Hey, hey, Madame Dominique!” (one of her doves).

  Otherwise, she remained in her room, listening to her radio most of the day. She wasn’t senile. She must have known her grandsons hoped to be remembered in her will. Grandma Bean owned two apartment houses in Yonkers and a building in St. Louis. “Grandma is loaded,” Jason said. He assumed he would inherit the bulk of her estate, but I wasn’t so sure.

  Relatives kept appearing at the door—long-lost cousins, nephews, aunts. Grandma briefly held court, but she would tire quickly, so nobody stayed very long. Faith said, “They’re coming to see if she’s ready to croak.” But so far, frail as she was, she seemed to be in pretty good health.

  Once after a large group of Beans and McLaughlins had left, I helped her get into bed and she murmured to me, “Everyone thinks they’re gonna get something from me, but they are mistaken. I won’t leave my money to people.” It dawned on me that she might leave her money for the care and feeding of her birds. (But I kept that supposition to myself.)

  She did seem especially fond of Jason. He flirted with her and wheeled her around and around very fast in her wheelchair because she liked getting dizzy. Every week she scribbled out a check for Jason’s expenses and for his classes at the Art Students League. He would promise he was going to paint her portrait. “Like Picasso painted Gertrude Stein.”

  “Who’s that, boy?” she questioned.

  SO FAR JASON had painted only one painting, of a bulbous female breast. The painting hung above our bed during our entire marriage. I assumed the breast belonged to a former girlfriend and
I kept at him to tell me who, until Wally finally informed me the painting was no more than a picture of a breast that Jason had torn from a Modern Photography magazine.

  But I couldn’t be sure, so I kept on asking. Jason would just chuckle, “Ain’t talking,” but then he’d brag that he’d slept with maybe a hundred women, “and I’m not counting the whores I picked up on Forty-Second Street or the chorus gal I smoked pot with near the Yonkers Freeway.” His heavy-lidded eyes would twinkle merrily because he thought he was making me jealous.

  I secretly liked the idea of Jason as grand seducer. Believing he was a great lover intensified our sex life for a while. And believing that I had a kind of sexual power over him made me feel briefly secure. I had a hypnotic sense of fullness and strength from being selfless. I was beginning to realize that female power might best be expressed by giving oneself away with abandon.

  Naturally during those first weeks of marriage we made love constantly. Sometimes I’d roll toward him with a kind of stunned sensation as if I’d been drawn to him by some force outside myself. I would look at him and wonder what it was like to be him. I kept trying to find out.

  We would kiss and kiss until our mouths grew raw. Then Jason would turn me over facedown. I never told him what I wanted in bed. I would lie there passively. Jason insisted “doggy style” was the best, so I complied obediently—as well as I could—although I hated him ramming into me from behind. Whenever he did this to me, my whole system seemed to reverberate like a gong. Even my teeth throbbed. It was a relief to be turned over on my back and plugged to the brim with him sliding in and out and in and out again.

  Then love became a strained searching toward a muffled center. I would begin to feel wanton and fastidious and swooning all at once, and when it was finished, a sharp, brief note of disappointment would fill my being and often I would begin to sob.

  Jason would comfort me by offering a lit cigarette and then talking baby talk. “So’s oo hurt, li’l baby?” And I’d answer, “No, I’s not hurt.”