Intimate Wars

by Merle Hoffman

  Leaving school at an early age prevented my father from achieving personal or professional actualization, but in his youth he dreamed of being a major league baseball player. He was good enough to be sent down to Florida to train in the minors, and eventually made it to the tryouts for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In the end he failed to make the cut. But my father had the Hoffman business gene, and by the time he married my mother, he owned a toy factory. After a fire destroyed the site and inventory, he spent the rest of his life working as a salesman for various companies.

  He was an extremely intelligent autodidact with a book of philosophy always by his bedside. We would share the stories of Sherlock Holmes and recite poetry together. He saw the contours of my fantasy life and entered them, while my mother never seemed to have the imagination or the psychological generosity to move enough out of her own reality to enter into mine.

  Beneath his gentleness I knew my father dealt with a deep-seated sadness and rage. He had violent nightmares that shook our household. I would wake up to the sounds of his loud wails and my mother running after him, screaming, “Jack, Jack, stop, stop!” Terrified, I’d pull the covers over my head, curl myself into a fetal position, and try to become as small as possible—invisible—so he would not come in and kill me. He never entered my room during those times, but as with the wave in my dream, there was always the fear of it.

  My mother told me that it was the memory of digging his brother’s grave that haunted him, but I never believed that was all of it. Perhaps he felt it was his own grave he had dug as well—his future, his dreams that went down into the red earth with his older brother.

  BOTH OF MY PARENTS were victims of the dreadful silencing that characterized the fifties. The collective socialization was so powerful that it could not be questioned, and my parents’ struggle to communicate and express their individual realities mirrored the political context of the time. Their repression was obvious to me even then. Our family had hired an African American woman named Jane to come to the house to clean once a week. As she went about her chores one afternoon, I asked her if she was grateful she hadn’t been alive in the eighteen hundreds, when she would have been a slave. My mother gasped with embarrassment, but I felt that as upsetting or surprising as my question might have been for Jane, my parents’ inability to even acknowledge that historical reality and how it was shaping the relationship at hand was infinitely worse. Anything they didn’t know how to handle was absorbed into the silence.

  School offered little relief from my isolation. On Valentine’s Day in the second grade I made as many cards as I could and addressed them all to myself, so that when the class went to the Valentine box to collect our love notes, I appeared to be far more popular than I was.

  During the solitary hours I spent in my bedroom I created ways to escape the silence through my rich fantasy life. There, I could be free from the boundaries of my physical self, my mother’s autocratic injunctions, and my father’s withdrawals. There I became queen, king, or knight, able to move and manipulate the world to my way of being. No one could touch me.

  This internal world of mine first sprang to life when my father took me to the movies to see Knights of the Round Table with Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner in 1954. I sat in the front row throwing kisses at Taylor while my father sat in the back chuckling. Alone in my room, I was Sir Lancelot, resplendent on a white caparisoned horse. I was Elizabeth I, exhorting her troops to fight the Spanish Armada at Tillbury, with the words, “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the stomach of a king.” I was Sir Gawain the Pure, searching for the Holy Grail. I stormed the ramparts as Joan of Arc, played by Ingrid Bergman, sword high, shouting, “Now is the time. This is the hour.” I rode with Amazon women, hair flowing wildly behind me as I drew my bow to strike. Unlimited by gender, I was Richard III and Henry V, defending their crowns in battle. I would set the scenes in my imagination and speak the lines aloud.

  The ancient Greek philosophers said that to “do philosophy” was to practice dying. Our apartment was blocks away from a large Christian cemetery, and whenever I could I would visit the tombstones, imagining the lives lived, trying to capture the reality of death. I had a feeling that I was a changeling, that I didn’t really belong to my time, place, or parents. Where were my troops, my courtiers, my enemies? My demons—anxiety and loneliness—became dragons to triumph over and slay.

  WHEN I WAS TEN, I discovered another way to break the silence of my childhood: music. It became my crucible, the stage upon which I played out all my competitive and ambitious drives. It was my family’s way of measuring intelligence, talent, and excellence.

  My cousin Marilyn embodied that excellence. She was the first child of my Uncle Harry, and displayed unusual musical talent from the age of two. She debuted at Carnegie Hall at eleven, and by her early teens she was an internationally famous violinist. When Marilyn played on the radio my parents and I would sit in the living room listening to the performance in rapt attention, my mother usually crying. Marilyn had the power to do that.

  Apart from the discipline her music demanded she was a wild child, never expected to conform to normal behavior. When we went out to dinner at a restaurant, she would pick up the food—big pieces of steak or chicken—in her hands and chew on it in total oblivion to the rules of etiquette. No one bothered to correct her because she was a “genius.”

  I witnessed and absorbed her aura of fame and talent and its accompanying field of exemption. The scene after her concerts was always fascinating. Marilyn would stand in the middle of a glittering group of admirers, smiling tentatively, surrounded by flowers. My father would always bring the largest and most beautiful bouquet. Uncle Harry would come over to us and say something about the fact that Marilyn was very unhappy; she was usually unsatisfied with her performances, and would mull over one passage or another that she felt she had not performed perfectly. Everyone around her praised her, but the only praise or judgment that really mattered was her own. It was a powerful lesson in the ways of the internally directed.

  I wanted what Marilyn had. I wanted to be able to do what I wanted when I wanted—to be the measure of all things, as it seemed that she was. So I focused my inchoate ambition and desire for recognition on becoming a great concert artist myself. After many months of asking, crying, and begging for a piano, my parents finally decided to get me an accordion.

  I hated that damn squeeze-box; it never felt serious. But I practiced and worked, and in a few months I showed a great deal of natural ability. After my teacher told my mother that it was time for me to get an adult-size accordion, she relented and bought me a piano.

  I knew I was very good at it early on. I finally had something special, something that enabled me to stand apart. My mother was not telling the neighbors that I was a genius yet, but I was determined to give her the opportunity. By this time our family had moved to Queens, New York, and after taking lessons there for a couple of years I applied to Chatham Square Music School, a special school to train concert artists. I was twelve when I applied and was accepted.

  CHATHAM WAS ON the Lower East Side, and the mix of harsh discipline and Eastern European atmosphere of the school gave me a feeling of being out of time and place when I was there. It was at Chatham that I learned to value criticism and discipline. In the master class only the best students were chosen to play for the maestro, Samuel Chotzinoff. The teachers could compete with each other through the performances of their students. On the day of my first performance, everyone was there: the students who were playing for the class, their parents, and the rest of the school. The atmosphere was tense and expectant as I played the piece I had prepared, the Chopin Waltz in C-sharp minor.

  Playing for Chotzinoff took a special kind of courage, as did all of the performances. It took the ability to believe in my own talent and trust my body, trust that my hands would obey me and fly across the keys, that my emotional and psychological states would translate through the music, that the sweat and anxiety woul
d not interfere with the mechanical process of playing, that the dryness in my mouth and the knot in my stomach could be controlled, and most of all, that my playing would be brilliant.

  MUSIC WAS A TEST for becoming: for creating, for competing, for seducing, for communicating, for loving, for longing, for greatness and acceptance. While I was studying to be a concert pianist I was also entering my teenage years. I was quite serious about my music, but I soon became aware that my teachers were beginning to look at other places besides my fingers.

  I was attractive. My teachers acknowledged it, and I knew the boys at school were attracted to me. I dressed in the style of the times, with a cinch belt, sweater sets, and felt skirts with poodles on them. Everyone wore these things, but not everybody looked the same in them. I enjoyed being sexual, balancing boldness and restraint. The strict conventions of the fifties fostered an atmosphere of anticipation, of going slowly, and I found a strong eroticism in that type of withholding. I discovered a sexual resource I had inherited just from being female: I possessed something that I could exploit, grant, or withhold.

  One Friday night in junior high I was invited to a coed party that was hosted by a group of girls from school. Since I was studying to be a concert pianist, my days consisted of getting up, going to school, coming home, and practicing for three or four hours every afternoon. When I was not practicing, I kept to myself and read Nietzsche and George Sand. My bedroom featured posters of Chopin and Liszt, while my classmates peopled theirs with Elvis and other rock stars. I didn’t have many friends, but I felt hopeful about the event that night.

  It was a costume party, so I wore my mother’s catsuit, a one-piece pedal pusher outfit with a black corduroy bottom and a leopard top. We all played spin the bottle and turned off the lights while the girls sat on the boys’ laps. It never went beyond necking and light petting, but somehow, by the end of the party, I had a developed a very bad reputation. The story that my top had been zipped all the way down and someone’s tongue had been in my mouth—major sexual sins of the time—spread throughout the school. My reality changed overnight from being generally accepted by my peers to being a pariah.

  I was filled with a sense of shame for something I had not done. All of a sudden the few friends I had became unfriendly at school and the phone stopped ringing. One day I went to a girlfriend’s house and knocked expectantly on the door, but her mother appeared instead. She stood at her half-opened screen door, blocking the view of my friend behind her, and said, “Go home. You are a bad influence. I never want you to have anything to do with my daughter.”

  I wanted to die as I stood on that stoop. But I turned around, head held high, and walked home, keeping the secret of my shame to myself. At school I was called a tramp, whore, and slut, all the nomenclature of sexual repression. The few friends I had didn’t protect me from those rumors. The bold stares, the faces turned away, and the laughter behind hands hurt just as much.

  These girls were parroting the traditional female party line that their parents had taught them: there were good girls, and there were bad girls. They were so easily led by this lie that their friendship and love could quickly turn to disdain and shunning. In a way, though, I understood. My own experiences with my parents had taught me how it felt to be powerless in the face of social conventions.

  All my life I have been a target for some reason or other. I’ve turned my ability to handle being singled out into a political attribute. Walking down a hall of people looking at me, knowing what they were thinking, knowing equally that it was not true, and keeping my head up, saying, “I will not show them I care”—it was a painful lesson. It trained me for what I confront now.

  I WAS SIXTEEN when my parents sent me to Indian Hill Music Camp for the summer. Set in the beautiful Berkshires, minutes away from Tanglewood, Indian Hill was a kind of adolescent Arcadia of the 1960s for talented young musicians, performers, and artists. Marjorie Mazia, second wife of Woody Guthrie, taught dance while I was there, and Arlo Guthrie fiddled away under the trees. An internationally famous concert pianist named Daniel Abrams was musical director for the summer.

  Danny, as we called him, was my piano instructor. When I played my Chopin Waltz in C-sharp minor during my first lesson with him, he told me it made him cry. There it was again, that emotional power, but now the energy of the music had translated into the realm of the erotic. It was the first time I felt the intensity of my own feelings for another, the sensation of not being able to breathe for the fluttering in my stomach, an unexpected inarticulateness in speech and action when he would sit next to me to explain a phrase, or pace behind me, listening, watching me play.

  As musical director for the summer program, he was to conduct the camp orchestra at the end of the season, a showcase of the most talented students at Indian Hill. He decided I should study the Mozart D minor Piano Concerto as my performance piece. I took two or three lessons with him each week and practiced for hours daily. In the afternoons we would sit together in two Adirondack chairs on the beautifully manicured lawn in front of the Victorian house where the campers lived for the summer. He would pick flowers and hand them to me while his wife, who worked in the administrative offices, looked on from her window.

  There was never any real contact; we merely touched hands. But the power of our connection was shattering for me, and everyone at camp saw it. My passion for Danny began spilling out, and he felt it, too. He spoke to me of his love, his desire to be with me, Mozart serving as the backdrop to our romance. Was this love or madness?

  The strength of my own feelings frightened me. When my parents came up on visiting day I told my father about the relationship. He was furious, and threatened to kill Danny. When he went to report Danny to the camp administrator, I was filled with a mixture of terror and relief. Now I could be safe from the intense feelings that were threatening to overwhelm me.

  After my father’s outburst, the scandal spilled into the open. It was complicated by accusations from the administration that I was sexually active with a close girlfriend with whom I bunked. We were affectionate with each other, as young girlfriends often are, but our touching was never sexual. Yet for these transgressions I was asked to leave the camp two weeks prior to the end of the season. I refused. I wanted to play the Mozart D minor with the orchestra, and I was not going to give that up. Danny stayed away from me except during rehearsals.

  A couple of days after the incident with my father, Danny’s wife, Sonia, approached me. We sat in her light brown VW on that dark, rainy afternoon and drove round and round the circular driveway. “He’s really not in love with you,” Sonia said calmly. “He doesn’t want to marry you. You’re very young, you’re just imagining all this.”

  I looked at her steadily. “No. Your husband is in love with me. He does want to marry me. But I will not marry him.” Nothing she could say would move me from what I knew to be the truth.

  At the final concert I played the Mozart D minor—brilliantly, to spite them all—with a cadenza that Danny had written especially for me. The transcendent emotional and sexual eroticism I felt that evening was amazing. Our music was all around me: his conducting, his gaze, my playing. Nothing before or after ever reached that particular romantic height.

  It was a long way down after that moment. I entered what would be the first of many depressions throughout my life. I slept a lot, ate little, and felt an overwhelming despair. I had experienced these soaring heights of emotion, accomplishment, and power, only to be brought low by scandal and rumor. It was middle school all over again. It seemed there was no exit for me, no one who could possibly understand. I could not communicate with my parents about my struggles, and I still didn’t have many friends in whom I could confide. Having dipped into Freud, I decided I needed to express the imaginative and demonic forces that beset me without the anxiety of being judged. I convinced my parents to take me to a therapist.

  I had always been told to restrain my intensity. My teachers had mocked my affairs with histor
y and gazed with gentle irony at my ego ideals. Now my first therapist, Dr. Stanley Rustin, whom I would go on to visit on and off for many years, described me as a “body of exposed nerves.” But unlike the others, he did not pathologize my passionate and artistic nature. He taught me to see it as a challenge and a gift. Our weekly sessions became a kind of pit stop for me, an oasis of quietude, reflection, and sympathy. With his help I gained more power over myself and my environment.

  AFTER THE SUMMER at Indian Hill, I attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. A young teacher, Jerome Charyn, was substituting for my English literature class. He had a French bohemian look that I loved: longish dark hair parted on the side, a compact body, and languorous eyes. We only had a few minutes of conversation that day. Then I didn’t see him for a couple of months.

  My classmates and I always ran down the hall from gym class; the gym was on a different floor from the lockers, and it was the only way to make it to the next class on time. One morning I was the first one out the door, as usual, a few feet in front of the rest of the roaring crowd. I glanced to my right into an open classroom door, and there was Jerome Charyn, standing and gesticulating a point to the class.

  I stopped dead, overwhelmed by my attraction, and called to him, “Hello . . . Hello . . .” But before he could answer me I was knocked to the ground by the rush of girls behind me. The blow was so forceful that I was taken to the emergency room at Harlem Hospital, where I had to have three stitches.

  Before long, Charyn and I began meeting in his apartment, or sometimes at the Cloisters, a good place for assignations. It was quiet there, with the sarcophogi and sculptures of the Saints, the Lady and the Unicorn looking impassively at our twentieth-century lust.