We took a cab from the Marion fifteen or so blocks to his apartment on Louisiana Street, a quiet block backing onto the governor’s mansion. David Goldstein was his name. He had a large studio apartment, sparsely furnished—a couple of upholstered chairs, a small table for dining, a foldaway double bed in the closet—and uncluttered. No television set, but a stereo, lots of books, on the table and on the floor. He asked if I’d like him to open a bottle of wine, or if I would prefer a coke or something else.
We drank two bottles of wine and, seated far from each other, talked straight through until six the next morning. He had less than ten months to go on his military hitch; he had been drafted. He worked as a typist at the recruiting station on Main Street and 3rd. We talked about our backgrounds, our families. He was from Chicago, Jewish, had gone, he said, to Columbia College in New York City. He never asked me if I had gone to college. He told me that he wanted to be a writer, but was embarrassed to say this to most people because he hadn’t in fact published anything. He asked me what my ambition for myself was. I mumbled something about a peaceful and worry-free life. Truth is that I hadn’t had time to think about my ambition; nor had any man ever asked me about it before.
As the sun was coming up, I brought up the subject of my boys, and how I had lost custody of them. He told me that he couldn’t imagine anything worse, and said it in a way that made me believe he meant it. When I began to cry, he walked across the room, gave me his clean handkerchief, then returned to his chair.
Except for the owner of Jimmy’s in Norfolk, a brute called Lou Silverman, I had never known a Jew. I certainly had never met anyone like David Goldstein. At 6:30 a.m. he said that he had better shower and get ready for work at the recruiting station, where he had to report at 8:00 a.m. If I wished to sleep in his apartment before going off to work myself, he said that would be fine. He set the alarm for me for 10:30 a.m. He made no moves on me, none whatsoever. I wondered if he might be queer.
David called me during my lunch shift at the Garhole to say that he was knocked out from no sleep and probably going to fall asleep as soon as he got off work, but if I were free one night later in the week he’d like to take me to dinner. We agreed to meet on Wednesday, my night off, at McGeary’s, a BBQ restaurant on 12th and Main Street, at 6:30.
At dinner David asked me when I was next to see my kids and, if I didn’t mind, he would like to join me. I said that I was planning to go up to Batesville on Sunday afternoon. He said he’d borrow a friend’s car and drive me up there. I was hesitant, wasn’t sure how the Willises would look upon my arriving with another man, especially someone like David, but in the end I said sure, why not? He picked me up that Sunday morning in a green Ford. We drove the ninety miles to Batesville, talking mostly about his family who, he said, were Jewish and very middle class. He asked me lots of questions about how Van had been able to take my kids away from me. He was of course no lawyer, but he said he didn’t think such a thing would have been possible in Chicago courts.
I explained to Edna that I had brought a friend along to meet Donald and Allen, and to my relief she didn’t give me a hard time about it. David turned out to be great with them. He called Donald Monsieur Canard explaining that canard was French for duck, and that of course the world’s most famous Donald was Donald Duck. Allen he called “Allsy.” He played tag with them. He tried to teach the six-year-old Donald to catch. They really went for him. For the first time in all my meetings with my kids since I lost custody of them I did not leave them with a heavy heart.
When David dropped me off at Dottie’s, I was nervous about inviting him in. My sister’s life, with her squalid love affair, her naturally unhappy husband, and her two kids, the younger of whom was a genuine brat, was a mess. The house, on the far east side of Little Rock, was ramshackle, a badly painted business with a slightly falling-in porch. I could see a look of critical disappointment as he looked at the place upon dropping me off. “We have to find you a better place to live,” he said, after I kissed him on the cheek and got out of the car.
I should tell you that until now David and I had not slept together. So he must have been more than a little surprised when I showed up at his apartment the next night, after work, at 11:00 p.m. with a suitcase containing all my clothes and cosmetics.
“You said I needed to find a better place to live,” I told him, standing in his doorway. “And I think I know of one. With you.”
“Welcome home,” he said, and took my suitcase.
The first thing that impressed me about David was how unpossessive he was, even after we had begun sleeping together. Working at the Garhole, I kept odd hours, yet if I happened to come in at one or two in the morning—sometimes I would unwind after work at an afterhours club downtown—he never asked where I had been or with whom. Nor did he ask me to share his rent. In some ways, he was the ideal boyfriend: always there when I wanted him, but never insisting that I be there.
David seemed to have a lot going on in his life. He was always reading or tapping away on his portable typewriter. He published an article, his first, in a small New York magazine, which pleased him a lot, though, he told me, it paid him all of twenty-five dollars. He never asked me to read it. Every Sunday he drove me up to see my kids.
One day David told me that, through an acquaintance of his on the Arkansas Gazette named Jerry Neil, he had arranged for us to see a lawyer in Batesville to get regular visitation rights for me, so that I wouldn’t be under sufferance of Van’s parents. The lawyer, Herbert Samson, was able to persuade the court to give me two weekends per month visitation, and a full month in the summer. I was very happy. I don’t know how much the lawyer charged. David paid the bill, and told me that I could pay him back later, which of course I never did.
Maybe I should be put up for chairwoman of the Unplanned Parenthood Association, but one morning not long after this I woke to discover myself with morning sickness, which in my mind could mean only one thing: pregnancy. I used a diaphragm, but something or other about it obviously didn’t work. I faced the prospect of telling David that he was about to be a father, and without the least certainty about how he would take it.
Credit where credit is due, he took it well. He didn’t do the stupid thing and ask if I were sure the baby was his, which it was. He didn’t suggest my looking into getting an abortion. He only asked me if I was certain I was pregnant. I told him I knew my body and there could be no mistake. “We’ll get married,” he said, “as soon as possible.” Then he added: “My father will of course disown me, but maybe not forever.”
“What for?” I asked.
“For marrying a gentile,” he said. “No one in our family has ever done so.”
“Is he that religious?” I asked.
“He’s an atheist,” David said, “but that doesn’t matter. It’s complicated. I’ll explain it to you some day.” He never did.
We bought our two silver wedding rings from a small Jewish man named Kleiderman, who had a modest shop on Main Street and 6th. That same day we drove over to city hall and were married by a justice of the peace, a kindly man who took a few minutes out to lecture us on the sacredness of marriage. I was touched by what he said, and so I think was David. When we came out of city hall, married, he had a parking ticket. Not, some might say, a good omen. And yet my marriage to David lasted almost nine years, much longer than either of my first two marriages.
In the fourth month of my pregnancy, we drove to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where David was formally discharged from the Army. As he predicted, his father did disown him, though David stayed in touch with his mother, who eventually convinced his father to forgive him. We moved into a furnished apartment in a dump of a building called the Sherwin Arms on the far north side of Chicago, a block or so from Sheridan Road. David got a job working on a trade magazine, and I spent my days walking the few blocks down to Lake Michigan, and drinking coffee in a little shop under the El.
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sp; David was getting up at 4:30 a.m. to write. He was having some success. Magazines, none of which I’d ever heard of, began to publish his articles and reviews of books. I didn’t have much luck reading what he wrote, though whether I did or not didn’t seem to bother him. He was ambitious. I had never been with, or for that matter before now even met, an ambitious man.
The Goldsteins treated me decently enough. Yet I couldn’t help feel that they had something else in mind for their only son than a twice-divorced woman with two children. They never questioned me about my past, which, in modified form, David had filled them in on. Only after our son—my third son—Richard was born did we begin to see more of David’s family. Despite their courtesy to me, I couldn’t help feeling an outsider among them. One day I heard my mother-in-law, on the phone, tell a friend that “My goya comes to clean on Wednesday”—David had filled me in on twenty or so words of Yiddish—and I thought, your other goya is here right now in your kitchen.
Richard was born with the help of a man named David Turow, who believed in induced labor, and delivered my son and five other kids on the same Tuesday. He must have golfed on the other afternoons. David said that in the waiting room the expectant fathers had a pool going on whose child would arrive in what order.
Based on his recent publications, David had been offered a job in New York on a small political magazine. He talked with me about it, but I could sense that he had already made up his mind to take it. And so we moved to New York. Because of the expense of Manhattan, he found us an apartment in a new building in Flushing, in Queens, and soon after I became pregnant with my fourth child. We had no health insurance, and so we joined an HMO in Jamaica, Queens, where I saw a quite nutty OB-Gyno doctor, Ephraim Berlin. I heard that soon after my fourth son, Joel, was born, they had to drag Dr. Berlin off the premises of the hospital. What I’m getting at is that none of the births of my sons—and a fifth would turn up twelve years later—was an occasion for joyousness.
While we were living in New York, my first two sons, Donald and Allen, arrived for my summer visitation. Van, still in the Navy, now was living in Balston Spa in upstate New York. He had meanwhile remarried, to a woman from Louisiana, and when my boys arrived they were not in good shape. Under some questioning from David and me, we discovered that they were being badly mistreated by their stepmother, Allen especially. She locked him in closets and used to spank him with a hairbrush. The clothes she had sent with them were unpressed and barely clean. Donald’s glasses were held together with Scotch tape.
“These kids aren’t going back,” David announced. He said that we were going to be in a custody fight for the boys. He told me that from the time he first met me he sensed a dark sad hole in my life because I did not live with my children, and that this was the perfect time to fill in that hole. My first husband’s monstrous second wife had given us that chance.
At great expense—three thousand dollars, a lot of money in those days—we won. Donald and Allen came to live with us. Us included Richard and his baby brother Edward. David at this time was twenty-six, I was twenty-seven. Life with four young boys in New York was, in David’s word, “crushing,” and he decided that we would all do better to move back to Little Rock, where he thought he could get a job on the Arkansas Gazette.
I boarded a Greyhound bus with my four kids, and the plan was for David to follow a month later. He needed to give proper notice at his job and to close up our apartment in Flushing, where the lease would be up in less than thirty days. I was to find a house to rent, and there was enough money for me to hire a nanny to watch the kids.
Back in Little Rock, I found myself stepping out on David. I would go down to the Garhole, as a customer now, and, along with an old friend, Linda Ferguson who went to high school with me, we would pick up younger men. All my cheating were one-night stands.
I can hear you asking why would you cheat on a man who had saved your children for you? Was the problem sex? Did you feel neglected? Was he cruel to you in any way? None of these things apply.
I know this is going to sound weird but I cheated on David because I didn’t want to feel beholden to him for returning my older boys to me. I cheated on him because I needed to prove to myself that I was bound to no one. I cheated on him for his fucking saintliness. David thought he was rescuing me, but he was wrong. He never really understood how important my freedom is to me, and until then neither did I.
We lived in Little Rock for two years. David wrote editorials for the Arkansas Gazette. He wrote a piece on poverty in America for The Atlantic magazine that got him the job of director of the anti-poverty program in Pulaski County, which included Little Rock, North Little Rock, and the surrounding area. The year was 1964, the time of the civil rights movement. All sorts of young people from New York, working summers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were popping into and out of our house. David was conspiring to try to get them money for their projects.
A year or so later we moved to Chicago, where, through a man named Harry Ashmore, David got a job at Encyclopedia Britannica. He bought a house in a suburb called Berwyn. Even though there weren’t any Jews, he moved us to Berwyn because two of my cousins, Pat and Shirley, my father’s brother Archy’s daughters, lived there. Archy had come up to Chicago after the war, and worked for General Electric in Cicero. David thought it might be more comfortable for me to have these cousins nearby. He must have sensed that our marriage was coming apart. I don’t know how much he really loved me. I do know that David hated failure, and among his hatreds a failed marriage scored high.
David was always telling me how smart I was, and at one point he suggested that I enroll in college. But where was I to find the patience at this point to sit in classrooms with kids fifteen years younger than me answering dopey questions and writing hopeless papers? I signed up for secretarial school, but lasted less than a month. My patience was growing less the older I got. Mostly I shopped, looking for antiques in second-hand furniture shops. Some days I would find myself at the Anti-Cruelty Society, from which twice I brought home dogs, one a storybook mutt named Luv, another time a large collie left by a young man who had to go off to Vietnam. We kept Luv, but David insisted I take back the collie.
I had all my sons, I had a lovely house, I had a successful husband, I had my cousins living nearby, but none of it did the trick. I began going out evenings, at first telling David I was visiting friends I had met at Anti-Cruelty. I don’t think he believed me from the first, and he certainly didn’t when I would return home at four in the morning. Once I told him that my mother was ill, and I needed to be with her for a week or so after she returned home from breast-cancer surgery. In fact, I used the ten days to drive down to New Orleans, and called him from there, telling him that my parents’ phone was out of order.
It was the late 1960s and feminism was in the air. I can’t say that I bought all the ideas bopping around about the suppression of women, the hopelessness of being a wife and mother, and the rest, but it did strengthen me in my decision to leave David. When we finally sat down to work out the details, he suggested that I take Donald and Allen and leave Richard and Joel, his own kids, with him.
“You take all four children,” I said, “or it’s no deal. Otherwise I’ll take all four and have you pay alimony and child support.” I knew how David’s conscience worked. He couldn’t bear the idea of living away from his sons. He agreed. I promised not to ask him for any alimony. He bought me a new yellow Volkswagen and gave me two thousand dollars. The plan was that he would get a divorce in Chicago on the grounds of desertion. Which was fine with me. I wanted only to get the hell away.
“Away” meant New Orleans, which I had enjoyed during my ten days there. New Orleans was southern but without any of the dreary Baptist unforgivingness hanging over it. I found a small apartment in the French Quarter and took a job as a chambermaid in a place on Chartres Street. I didn’t mind the work and it felt good to be alon
e. I suppose I should say that I missed my kids, but I didn’t, at least not much. I sometimes wondered if they missed me. In later years I neglected to ask.
Ziggy Watkins, my fourth husband, was a musician, a clarinet player. I say “was”; I suppose he still is. I met him one night at Pat O’Brien’s, where he was playing. He was large, like I mean 280 lbs large. Also a drinker, rum and coke his specialty, though he didn’t really need the coke, unless it was cocaine, for which he also had a powerful taste. Ziggy used to describe himself as a “happy cat,” which he was when he wasn’t drunk, which was most every evening. I see I forgot to mention that Ziggy was black. A white woman marrying a black man in those days still carried a certain shock factor. We’d been together maybe six weeks, when he said he wanted to marry me.
“Know it, sweet baby,” he told me. “We good together. Let’s make it deal permanent.”
Ziggy was part of the inner circle of musicians in New Orleans. He taught me a lot of things, too, about music and drugs and blacks and New Orleans. He could be very seductive.
Only after we married did I learn that Ziggy, when fully tanked up, didn’t mind hitting women. I also learned that faithfulness to one woman was not an idea with any interest for him. Our marriage lasted less than eight months, when we had what Ziggy called a black divorce. “You cuts out the middleman,” Ziggy explained. In other words, no lawyers. A black divorce is when a husband closes the door and never returns. The only difference in my case is that the black divorce occurred when a white woman, me, closed the door and never returned. I never mentioned my marriage to Ziggy to anyone, and until now nobody knows anything about it. Of all my marriages, it was the most stupid. I can’t even explain it to myself.
With the help of fifteen hundred dollars from David I left New Orleans for Las Vegas. A terrible place, but one with lots of work available. I was able to get a job first at a dry cleaner, then not long after I found a better one working the buffet at Caesar’s Palace, refilling and cleaning up the food display after the attacks upon it by depressed gamblers, gluttons, and assorted freeloaders. I began playing a little blackjack myself in other casinos and found I wasn’t too bad at it, some nights taking home a couple hundred bucks or so.
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