The Tell

by Linda I. Meyers

  The Gangsters

  Linda, mother, and gangster at the Laurel-in-the-Pines Hotel

  I’ve tried to conjure up the handoff so many times that I can no longer tell if it’s my imagination or a real memory. But here is one more piece of information to consider: my uncle Harry loved to regale me with stories of my father’s exploits. If you ask me, my uncle, always having lived on the straight and narrow, got a kick out of my father. When he told the stories, he sounded like he was bragging about the exploits of an adolescent son. One of his favorite stories was the one about the money in the vault. He particularly liked to tell it when I was present so I could recite my lines. My uncle, who went to City College and had perfect English, always told the story with an accent like a tough guy who was a dropout from Thomas Jefferson High School.

  “I come home on leave from the army … you know your father was 4F?” he would begin.

  “Don’t remind me,” I’d say.

  “Yeah, well I come home on leave, and your father says, ‘Come with me.’ He takes me to a bank. Opens a vault. What do you think is in the vault?”

  I answer with mock surprise, “The money?”

  “Right,” he confirms. “I ask him, ‘Georgie, what are you doing with this money?’ I don’t believe what I’m seeing. ‘How much do you have here?’

  “‘Count it,’ he tells me. I count it. You wouldn’t believe … he has a hundred thousand dollars sitting in that vault. Linda, do you know how much money a hundred thousand dollars was back then?”

  “A million dollars,” I say on cue.

  “That’s right.” A pause for effect. “A million dollars.” He smiles. “I’m telling you, your father opens this goddamn vault and shows me a million dollars. Can you believe …?” This is where Uncle Harry laughs with delight. “A million goddamn dollars. I ask, ‘Where the hell did you get this money?’ You know what he tells me? The black market. Which black market? What black market? I want to know what the hell he’s been doing. He tells me it don’t matter; he has to give it back anyway. ‘To who?’ I ask. He don’t tell me. He shows me all this money—tells me nothin’. That’s your father! I tell him to put some away for Linda’s college. Did he put it away? No. Did your father ever listen to me? No. If he’d listened to me …” And here, Uncle Harry goes off on a riff about his own accomplishments.

  After I went to my father’s apartment, found the pictures in the closet, and came back to the hospital, I told him in no uncertain terms that I no longer felt guilty for my existence. That it seems like I came in handy after all.

  “What do you mean, handy?” he wanted to know. “You always came in handy. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Do me a favor. Call the valet and tell them to get my car ready.”

  My husband George

  my name is linda

  The first time we went away with all five kids, George had rented a house on the beach on Fire Island. There is a picture of me sitting on the back steps. I’m in my nightgown, wearing George’s sweatshirt and holding a mug of coffee. I look like I’m posed for an ad, but it isn’t clear what I’m selling. I remember the smell of the salt air, the caw of the gulls, and the sound of the waves slapping on the shore. I was thirty-five with three little kids, and so much in love that I let the red flags fly in the wind and just enjoyed the breeze.

  It took George five years to ask me to marry him, which I thought was four too many. His proposal, when it did come, was more an explanation of benefits than a declaration of love. “You need health insurance, so we might as well,” he said.

  I squelched my longing for a more touching expression of his devotion and desire and immediately answered, “Yes.”

  He wanted a small, unassuming wedding, so we had the ceremony at the Rutgers chapel—I was in school there at the time, so the chapel was free. I wore a white suit with a pencil skirt and fitted jacket, something my mother would have approved of, or even worn herself. In the picture from the wedding, I’m standing under the chuppa. I am as thin as a shadow.

  I had only gotten out of the hospital two weeks before. Once each semester, because of scar tissue from an earlier surgery, my intestines tied up in a knot. I’d lie in a bed for a week with a tube down my nose into my stomach, and an IV in my arm, an intervention intended to relieve my stomach of its usual function, until it untwisted enough to do the job for which it was intended. Thirsty for real drink, I’d hallucinate egg creams and malteds while I waited until I could swallow food again. It was a forced vacation with no expectations and a relief from being on my own, taking care of the kids and the house, going to school three nights a week, and running back and forth to the city for auditions, but it left me weak and shaky.

  I was happy that George took charge of the wedding arrangements except for his decision that we marry on December 18th. I reminded him that date had already been claimed by my mother. I could not possibly marry on the anniversary of her suicide. George acquiesced and we set the date for December 17th instead. It was still closer then I would have liked but I was afraid to rock the boat so I let it go. He booked The Wooden Nickel, a neighborhood restaurant, for the luncheon reception. I chose to ignore the metaphor, and when he told me I simply said, “Fine.” We were twenty people in a small room with a long table; Grandma sat at one end, trying not to look at my father sitting with his new bride—the man and the woman she held responsible for her daughter’s suicide. It was a testament to Grandma’s love that she came at all, but she brought my mother’s ghost with her—an eerie presence that haunted the day.

  Before we married, I had tried to convince George that we should sell both our houses and start fresh in a neutral residence, where the kids and I wouldn’t feel like trespassers, and he and his kids wouldn’t feel like they were being invaded. George wasn’t having it. He said if I gave him the money I realized after the sale of my house—half went to Howard—he would add on extra rooms to accommodate us. As a consolation, he converted the poolroom that he had constructed for his sons, complete with swinging bar doors and Willy Nelson music, back into the living room it was meant to be.

  Despite the renovations, it was still the house he’d owned with his ex-wife, Barbara. She still had a key and squatting rights. Every Thursday afternoon she would open the door, walk in, and plop herself down on the easy chair in the den, where she would sit like a sentry and wait for her two children to emerge from their rooms to “spend quality time with their mother.” Most of the time, it was my son David who kept her company.

  When I balked at the intrusion, George patiently explained that the arrangement was part of their custody agreement, and didn’t I want his kids to maintain a relationship with their mother?

  Our money arrangement was also strange. The minimal amount Howard paid in child support became my allowance. It was meant to cover my personal needs—college tuition, clothes and sundries, haircuts. I had a separate telephone number so we could keep track of my phone expenses. Everything else required his okay. George was paying for all of my children’s expenses, so on what grounds could I possibly complain? And wasn’t he as rigid with himself as he was with me? Didn’t he write separate checks for every charge he made? When the bill came, he’d stuff the envelope with all the checks and mail it off.

  I thought all of this was a little crazy, but convinced myself that he would loosen up once I opened my practice and started contributing to the coffers—then money would no longer be the currency of our relationship, and we would achieve the closeness I longed for. In the meantime, I felt like a puppy in a crate—cute, but likely to chew on the furniture and mess up the rug. I was frustrated, but for the most part I cooperated. Until the wallpaper in our bedroom became the tipping point.

  “Did you notice, dear, in the mornings when the light comes through the blinds, how the gray stripes on the paper look like bars in a prison cell?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “I didn’t notice. It’s new wallpaper. Barbara redid the bedroom just before we separated.
It looks fine to me.”

  If Barbara’s decorating taste was dictated by her state of mind, then she and I had more in common than just having married the same man. I kept that thought to myself.

  Once I’d seen the bars, they wouldn’t go away, and each morning they became more pronounced.

  After two months of unanswered pleas, and on a day when no one was home, I went to the hardware store, rented a steamer, and carefully steamed every bar off the walls. Like peeling strips of dead skin off a sunburned arm, I delighted in lifting each panel of the wretched paper. When I was done, and the rough wallboard was exposed, I took purple and yellow magic markers and drew large, wild, forget-me-not flowers. Across the stems and in scrawling script I wrote, MY NAME IS LINDA.

  I poured a glass of red wine, perched in the middle of the bed and waited with pride and fear for George to come home and see my handiwork. I heard the car pull up in the driveway.

  “Lin,” he called.

  “In here,” I yelled, splashing the wine on the bed.

  He walked in, saw the walls, and said, “What the hell? What am I supposed to say, Linda?”

  “You could say ‘Thank you.’”

  He shook his head and left the room. I heard his briefcase slam down on the kitchen counter. The next morning when I awoke, the bars were gone, the sun cast shadows on beautiful purple and yellow flowers, and George still slept beside me. I was triumphant.

  Two weeks later I got his permission to repaper the walls. I picked a Ralph Lauren paisley print and bought a new duvet. He stubbornly would not admit he liked the change.

  Later, when I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s quintessential feminist story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I would realize that I was not the first woman to experience the wallpaper phenomenon.

  The need to sign my artwork and declare my identity had been instigated by two prior events, my first Director’s Council trip to Puerto Rico shortly after George and I had met, and my father’s precipitous name change when I was a teenager.

  The Director’s Council was a company perk for big producers. The packet for the trip had come in the mail before we left. Enclosed were two nametags—GEORGE and BARBARA. George, not trusting his rightful membership in the Council—for reasons that I would only understand later—insisted we adhere to the company rules of propriety. He was afraid of being ousted.

  “I’m technically still married,” he said.

  “I’m technically not Barbara,” I said.

  He hung the nametag around my neck, like a lei around a winning horse. I spent our time in Puerto Rico trying to remember to answer to my nametag name. Wasn’t it worth it to be on a beautiful island with my beloved? I asked myself. And hadn’t I on my honeymoon with Howard, paraded around an entire week answering to my new married name—a name that never in twelve years sounded right? So I was Barbara for three days. So what was the big deal?

  When I was in high school, my father—without consultation, overnight—changed our last name from Meyerowitz to Meyers. My mother figured he was running from the mob or the taxman. I figured he was running from my mother.

  “What does this mean?” I asked. “Should I drop the ‘owitz’ when I sign my name?”

  “Go ask your father,” she said.

  “Where is he?”

  “I should know?”

  I dropped the “owitz” then, and, later, when I divorced Howard, I went back to Meyers. When I married George, I stuck with Meyers. Though everything else in my life had changed, at least my name was the same, but inside I suffered an identity crisis.

  Three times a week I lay on my analyst’s couch, searching for an ego.

  “Who am I?” I asked.

  “Who do you want to be?” she answered.

  “A partner with the man I love and a strong, independent woman.”

  The women in my consciousness-raising group weren’t so sure I was on the right path. Sarah Schatz and Joyce Goldenberg had applauded the wallpaper action, but were gravely disturbed by the earlier nametag situation. I was called a traitor to the feminist cause. It was whispered that I should be asked to leave the group. Sarah Schatz stood up for me and said that my errant behavior was proof that I needed the group most of all. I remained, but I complained.

  “You don’t understand love,” I said.

  “You’re trading self for love,” someone said.

  “No, I’m enhancing self with love,” I said.

  Whenever I began a sentence with George says, I’d be interrupted.

  “What do you say?” they’d ask.

  That question flummoxed me, too—somewhere between the first date and the marriage, I had lost my own opinion.

  I put myself on fast forward and got my doctorate in clinical psychology in four years. I threw myself a big party at the house. Family, friends, and colleagues joined me in celebration. George gave me a kiss and a beautiful butterfly pin with gold wings. He was clearly proud of my accomplishment. My father gave me a hug, clinked a glass for attention, held up my arm in a triumphant salute.

  “My son, the doctor,” he proudly announced.

  Etienne, a fellow psych intern, having just met my husband and my father, took me aside and in an audible whisper said, “You’re living proof of the Oedipus conflict. Freud’s smiling in his grave. I mean look at them—both named George and they look like brothers. What’s the age difference between your father and George?”

  “Nine years,” I muttered.

  “And fifteen years between you and your husband, right?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So, nothing. Just saying.”

  Pompous little prick. I knew I shouldn’t have invited him. I walked away questioning if analysis three times a week was going to be enough.

  I opened an office on Nassau Street in Princeton—an old building populated with therapists. The office had a non-working fireplace—no fire, but it gave the room a lovely ambiance. I painted the woodwork a dark green and put up camel-colored wallpaper. When done, the room was stately and gave off an air of professional confidence I had yet to feel.

  It didn’t take long for me to have a full practice and a good income. I refused George’s allowance and started paying my own way. The more money I earned, the more chutzpah I got.

  On a Sunday when George came home, happy from his success on the paddleball court, I handed him a cup of coffee, leaned over, and gave him a kiss.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “It’s time to move,” I said. “I want to move to Princeton.”

  “Come on, Lin, don’t start. This house is fine. What do we have to move for? Each of the kids has their own room. You’ve repapered our bedroom.”

  “The kids are out of the house, and no matter what I’ve done to fix it up, it will always be your house with Barbara. I want us to start fresh. Please,” I said.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll think about it. Don’t push me.” He put the cup down and walked out of the kitchen.

  Weeks went by and he said nothing. I went to a realtor on my own and found a hundred-year-old colonial in Princeton—a quirky house, turned around on the property, the back of the house facing the street. The garden had pink rhododendrons as high as the first-floor windows, a wisteria vine so old and twisted that it had strangled the arbor it rested on. In June, a canopy of lavender blossoms crisscrossed the boughs of the trees, and a gnarled magnolia stood at the corner of the picket fence. I wished I’d grown up in this house.

  “You’re going to love it,” I promised. “At least come look.”

  George walked through the rooms, his eyes darting from one potential problem to another.

  “It’s beautiful isn’t it?” I prompted.

  “It’s going to need a lot of work,” he said.

  “But first tell me if you like it,” I said.

  “It’s going to be a fortune. Where’s the money supposed to come from?”

&nb
sp; “The stock market’s been good. I’m earning. We can do it. I promise.”

  Arm in arm, we walked around the neighborhood. George’s mouth was tight as he chewed on his mustache.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I like every house I see,” he said.

  “That’s great. Isn’t that great?”

  “No it’s not. The neighborhood is too rich,” he said.

  “Too rich for what?” I asked.

  “Too rich for me,” he answered.

  “George, we can afford this house,” I said. “You’ll see how it will become a fit. Just give it a chance.”

  I didn’t know till the last minute if George was going to go through with the sale. I knew by the arm he put around my shoulders and the hand that stroked my back that he wanted to please me, but he was frightened. For a man who only bought two-year-old Cadillacs—a compromise between his wish to both display and disguise his entitlement and his wealth—moving to Princeton was like sporting a brand new car. He sat across the table from the seller and the lawyers like a felon before a judge. In the end, he signed the contract, and we got the deed. He quickly took the papers, put them in his briefcase, shook hands all around, and led me out of the office.