Thanks to friends, and maybe to the fact that as a kid I’d learned to read as if my life depended on it, I didn’t miss a single day of class and got straight A’s that semester. Later that fall, I found a beautiful, sunny apartment on the top floor of an old Victorian parish house behind a church in Concord center. It was flooded with light no matter the time of day from the tall, thin pairs of arched windows, north, south, east, and west, constructed to mirror the church’s arched windows. Morning and evening carillon from the church bells next door was like the cowbells to and from green pastures I listened to as a little girl in Cornish. The apartment cost too much money but my mom had called and said, “Take it, there are times in your life having a beautiful place to live is more important than being sensible,” and she sent me the extra money. She also didn’t make me feel like an idiot for being blindsided by a man.
When the shock wore off and I had a little time to think, I realized that, given the kinds of terrible things people do to each other, I had gotten off easy. All my ex-husband took was money; he never hurt my feelings. By disappearing, he also gave me a chance to start over.
29
A Mind in Port
GOING TO BRANDEIS was one of the best decisions I’ve made, or perhaps I should more modestly and accurately say, one of the best pieces of luck that has come my way. It was, in hindsight, as important to my sanity and growth and life as choosing, albeit unsaid, in seventh grade, to live in my body rather than to renounce it and stay a two-dimensional ten forever. As seventh grade was a discovery and a celebration of life in the body, Brandeis was a discovery and celebration of the life of the mind. My own mind, not somebody else’s. It was clear from the moment I set foot in the classroom and looked at the requirements of each class, each major, each degree, that Brandeis was totally committed to graduating educated students, people who knew how to think for themselves, and not simply regurgitate a reflection of the teacher’s point of view on an exam. I always had the feeling that students were there to learn, and that learning was a valued, respected activity. An education was something intrinsically valued rather than looked at merely as a means to an end, or in terms of what “product” they or we produced. Although we were well prepared to go on to jobs or further education when we graduated, we weren’t narrowly “pre” anything—pre-med, pre-law, and so on.
The extraordinary thing to me at the time, which I must say makes a lot of sense to me now that I’m twenty years older and a mother, is that this was not accomplished by letting students act like little pre-adults and do their own thing. There were (and I hope still are) requirements that made even an older student such as me chafe at the bit: Why did I need to take an art class, a biology class, an English class, distributives across the spectrum of learning? And not one of these required distributives was a “rocks for jocks” class. They were the real thing. The “name” professors, the big guys and gals with the big salaries and reputations and books, were the ones teaching the freshman classes. The best was not saved for an elite of graduate seminars and senior concentrators. You got their best whether you wanted it or not. The big professors graded their own papers and exams, were available for conference hours whenever you or they thought you needed it. They helped their graduate students learn to be good teachers rather than treating them as cost-effective substitutions for themselves so they could get on with the business of publishing. I am, of course, particularly sensitive to feeling as though I am interrupting somebody’s work. There, I felt as though I was their work. And, boy, were we expected to work in return. I think that when teachers invest their time and energy in you, they have higher expectations of excellence, and a higher right to demand it. The “phony” quotient on the Salinger scale, in my experience at least, was subzero.
I can’t help but think that the roots of Brandeis University influence the way it regards the cultivation of the mind. It was founded by people of the Diaspora, people fleeing Hitler, people deeply aware that the things of true value are those that can be carried with you in your mind. The ups and downs of life can take away everything else in an instant. Being broadly educated leaves you less vulnerable to the changes life throws your way in bad times, and open to a hell of a lot more fun in good times. Take my friend and former basketball and softball teammate Margie, for example. She is a biochemist and can tell you some fascinating things about her research work, but she can also tell you some equally fascinating things about her vacation trips to Rome and Greece where she pursues an interest in ancient art and ruins that she was introduced to in an art class she was “forced” to take freshman year. My friend Wayne, one of the youngest recipients of a Ph.D. in economics and politics, currently a senior member of the World Bank, writes plays and teaches ancient Greek theater and philosophy in his “spare” time. These are professionals you don’t dread having your best friend marry or being seated next to at a dinner.
I don’t mean to say that Brandeis has never graduated what my father calls “a narrow-minded bore, a mindless follower,” or someone who’d jump out the window at the first layoff, but it sure didn’t encourage it. This was brought home to me perhaps most poignantly at the time in a history seminar in which two of my classmates were graduate students from the People’s Republic of China. The culture clash was astonishing, and a priceless education to the entire class. Each of us would, at some point, read out loud to the class a paper we’d written. When it was their turn to present their papers, the Chinese scholars reported to the class what everyone and his grandmother had said about a particular question. But when asked what do you think, they showed blank or confused stares, even after a year of being encouraged to do so. Some of the Americans’ papers were short on roots—what others had thought before them—and, with the hubris of youth, proudly reinvented the wheel. We were sent back to the books, of course, but the excitement, the growth, the life of the mind, though pruned, was vigorous.
At the end of the school year my leave of absence from work was up, and I went back to work at the garage for the summer. It was good to be back, but sad, too, as I suspected it would be for the last time. I decided at the end of the summer to cut the cord and risk college full-time. That December, it was my basketball teammates, rather than my workmates this time, who threw me a birthday party. My friend and favorite sender of rude birthday cards, Margie, was in charge of decorating the cake. The frosting was green and in big bold neon letters it said Happy Quarter of a Century! (I guess twenty-five seems old when you’re nineteen or so.) It was pretty great. I’m looking forward to what she comes up with for my fiftieth.
DURING THE SUMMER between my sophomore and junior years, I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend some time alone with my maternal grandmother. She invited me to come with her to Aspen to attend a round-table seminar chaired by Mortimer Adler at The Aspen Institute. The reading list was right up my alley, a continuation of my Brandeis introduction to what Adler calls Great Ideas, from Aristotle to Zoroaster. (Well, I made up the Z part; Zoroaster wasn’t on the list, but I liked the sound of it; I think the list ended with T for de Tocqueville on Democracy in America.) These seminars provided senior members of management—heads of Fortune 500 companies, as well as labor leaders and a mix of people from the arts and government (plus two students, myself and a local high school student)—the opportunity to examine rigorously their assumptions and beliefs about the proper conduct of men and nations. I truly can’t think of a few weeks better spent. It was particularly moving to see how much the experience meant to some very successful heads of companies who had come up through the engineering route and had never had the opportunity to do this kind of work and reading and thinking. But this was no touchy-feely group; Adler was more like a drill sergeant in his rigor and intolerance of sloppy thinking, and like an old judge in his fairness in hearing different points of view. I shall never forget sitting up at night with my grandmother, each of us in a twin bed, preparing the next day’s reading. It is an especially precious memory as she was di
agnosed with inoperable cancer a month later and died shortly after Christmas that year.
One morning after I had been arguing a labor point of view on a subject, with some success, in seminar, one of the observers, an older man with broad shoulders and big hands, walked up to me, shook my hand, and said, “Well, now, who are you, and how do you know anything about trade unions?” and invited me to lunch with him and his wife. He said he was Jim Callaghan, and when someone called him Mr. Prime Minister, I suddenly realized that the nice chap to his right was also a bodyguard. We corresponded off and on for some years, and he and his wife invited me to tea at the House of Commons and asked if I might like to come to England and work for him as an intern after I graduated. I declined with regrets, because I’d been accepted to a master’s program in management studies at Oxford University and had decided to do that instead.
What impressed me the most, however, was not the excitement of the House of Commons, but what I observed in a quiet moment during a dinner at Aspen. Someone was giving an after-dinner talk, and Mr. Callaghan and his wife, Audrey, were seated across the table from me, dutifully listening, as I’m sure they’ve done many thousands of times. Their chairs were turned slightly toward the speaker so Mrs. Callaghan’s back was toward her husband. I watched as he gently traced with his forefinger a little pattern on her back, almost absentmindedly, the way you reach for someone you love in your sleep. I’ll never forget it. And the way he spoke of her volunteer work at a London hospital with the respect of a statesman, putting her first. What a marvelous thing it is to meet someone who truly loves and respects his wife and in old age still reaches for her quietly, a sanctuary in the midst of a madding crowd.
WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER DIED, she was kind enough to leave me sufficient funds that I didn’t have to worry about making a living for several years, and I was able to attend to my studies at Brandeis and, later, at Oxford with some peace of mind. It also permitted me during my junior year to do an unpaid internship with a labor lawyer with whom I’d worked on asbestosis prevention back at the Edison. I loved studying the law, but being a lawyer was another thing, seeing what they actually did most of their working hours. What a gift to find out what you don’t want to do before you commit yourself.
Another thing my grandmother’s generosity enabled me to do was to afford to go to therapy more often. I sat my mother down after my grandmother’s funeral and basically bullied her, shamelessly I might add, into seeking psychotherapy for herself. Good move on both parts. She has gone on to write books, earn her Ph.D., and make a real career for herself. She has also learned to be a good grandmother to her grandchildren. My aunt said of my mother, “I don’t know how she lived with Sonny all those years. He never should have married. She should be very proud of herself, making a successful career as she’s done, it can’t have been easy.”
MY SENIOR YEAR OF COLLEGE was a struggle. I had won a scholarship to support my senior thesis research, on the history of the passage of the first Workman’s Compensation Act in 1897. It enabled me to spend the summer in London, working at the British Museum Library and the archives of the Trades Union Congress. I had come back with some pretty thrilling stuff (to me, anyway, and to my advisers) and wanted to do justice to the material. I also had a full load of classes. My intellect stayed intact, I could still study, but I was in big trouble. I did not blank out as of old; this was trouble of a different color. I had begun to suffer from perceptual hallucinations. I was fully conscious that the physical sensations I was experiencing were not real—the library floor would feel as if it were pitching and roiling, and I felt as if I were trying to stand and walk in a wave-tossed canoe, or the stairs would suddenly appear to be two inches from my face and then ten feet below me—but as in a nightmare where you know you are dreaming but can’t make it stop, I was helpless. Often when I went to the library to study, I was hallucinating so badly I had to have a friend help me to my desk. It wasn’t pink elephants and that sort of thing, what happened were major perceptual distortions such that I couldn’t figure out where I was in relation to anything else. It was rather like walking along a sidewalk in the dusk and suddenly stepping off a curb when you don’t expect it and your body isn’t prepared to make the automatic adjustments it makes based on signals telling it where it is in relation to the environment. Chartless.
It wasn’t just at school that this happened. My friends took me out to the movies for a little rest and relaxation. I enjoyed the movie, but when the lights came on, I realized that I had absolutely no idea how to maneuver my body out of the theater. I knew I was in my seat, I could see the exit sign, but I simply could not put the two together and spatially orient myself. I sat in my seat sobbing, “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know how to get out of here or where to go.” They led me out by the hand and got me in the car. The ride back to my apartment was terrible. I looked out the window at once-familiar streets, totally disoriented, scared, crying. All I could say was I don’t know where I am, but what I meant was I didn’t know where I was in relation to anything else. I knew full well I was in the car with my friends, the approximate time, date and year, who is the president of the United States—all those other questions they ask you at the admitting desk. It was I who was out of plumb with the world.
I don’t know why this started happening, whether it was the pressure, or perhaps the fear that the end was in sight, and I didn’t, as yet, know where I would go or what I would do after college. Breakups are always hell on me. Toward the end of the year, at crunch time when I was trying to finish my senior thesis and take five other classes at the same time, it got so bad that I couldn’t drive at all. The road and my car just wouldn’t line up in my mind. My friends Ted, Mitchell, Margie, Wayne, and Rachel took turns driving me home to my apartment each night and often stayed the night curled up next to me on my bed, then drove me back the next day. I loved my classes and my work and wept thinking it all might be taken away from me by mental illness or breakdown. But everyone around me—my teachers, especially Professor Touster and Professor Barraclough, my friends, my doctor—was fighting as hard as I was for me to hang in there. I’m so, so grateful.
When I went up to the podium several times during graduation ceremonies to receive various awards I’d won, I knew exactly whom to thank. They were sitting in a row clapping and cheering, separating my parents at either end, my peacekeeping troops, to whom I owed my survival and success, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude.
30
“Rowing in Eden”
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!
—Emily Dickinson
DREAMING SPIRES. In the fall of 1982, I went up to Oxford. I was a graduate student at Trinity College, Oxford, and had a beautiful bed-sitting room above Blackwell’s Bookstore overlooking the Sheldonian Theatre. From my desk or my bed alcove I looked out onto the dome of the Sheldonian and its wonderful gargoyles standing guard. Church bells from every college rang out across the city each evening calling students home for supper. Mornings, I walked past horses in a green and dewy pasture, a shortcut on the way to the Centre for Management Studies just outside the city proper. Afternoons, I studied, had tea with friends, played lawn tennis, went punting on the river (once), and took long walks through college meadows and gardens safely enclosed behind medieval stone gates.
Unfortunately, I was also throwing away precious amounts of time with my old false friend bulimia again. This problem, however, vanished into thin air the moment my body met a body in a green English meadow. He was a tall, dark, and very handsome New Yorker (half-Jewish, half-Spaniard) who was studying economics at Magdalen College. He had a reputation, well earned I believe, for being rather a Don Juan—going from pretty señorita to señorita in rapid succession. Girls didn’t seem to mind his reputation; in fact, they pursued him. Not this girl. Our first month of “dating” consisted of study dates in the college library, after which I’d walk him to the Trinity gate, in full view of th
e porters’ lodge (the guardians of the gate and protectors of the students inside), and bid him good-night. He invited me to a black-tie dinner held at his college, and I was surprised at the looks of curiosity, and occasionally outright hostility, I received from his group of male friends who hung out together in the M.C.R. (graduate student lounge) encouraging one another’s avoidance of work. (To be fair, it is quite hard for many students to handle the amount of independence one is given with regard to one’s work at Oxford. There is almost nothing in the way of external pressure and accountability to help you get your thesis written.) One of his friends even asked me, quite bluntly, what I had done to him! It was a bit of a betrayal to the boys to get started on one’s work, and, I think, they quite missed the vicarious pleasure of the exploits of their handsome companion.
For the next two years we were inseparable. Even when I went to San Francisco for spring break to see the city and stay with my mother, who was living there at the time, I received letters from Marc every day, sometimes twice a day. No one had ever reached out to me that way before, held my hand in his across oceans. I began to trust in the solidity of his presence, that he wouldn’t, like de Daumier-Smith’s fickle joy, seep through my fingers in the morning and be gone. Often, this solidity could take on a mule-like obstinance that drove me crazy, which, in turn, drove him crazy. “You’re so picky,” he’d say like a solid plow-horse to an obnoxiously skittish, neurotic thoroughbred. Traveling together was a source of constant friction and passionate, stupid arguments over accommodations, driving, radio volume, temperature controls, where to eat, and what to do. But at Oxford, “Rowing in Eden,” the lion lay down with the lamb, and most of the time, it was lovely. His college rooms were in an old mill house where C. S. Lewis once lived, behind Magdalen College, down a lane in a field of flowers by a stream. His bedroom was directly over a small waterfall where, on occasion that spring, I was awakened in the morning by the sound of a pair of swans and their eight little cygnets who made their home beneath the old mill.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 44