At the end of each day, after all the patients had been seen, I would go into Dr. Gold’s office, settle in across from his desk, and we’d talk. We discussed everything from politics to philosophy to books we both loved. I found that this man I admired and respected wanted very much to hear my opinions on all sorts of things. I was even more surprised to find that he liked to share himself with me.
He spoke of his time as a Navy medical officer in the Second World War, when he had made the landing in Normandy on one of the first LSTs (amphibious ships designed to deploy troops and tanks directly onto the shore). He told me of his panic and terror when the boat in front of him was blasted out of the water. Fresh corpses lashed against the side of his LST as the men tried to steer their way carefully toward the hell of the German guns on the shore. He returned from the war a pacifist.
He talked about his impoverished childhood on the Lower East Side and how he had struggled to leave it behind. He remained ashamed of his poor, immigrant Jewish upbringing and the anti-Semitism it led him to experience until late in his life. He had gotten himself out of the ghetto physically, but it was still very much a part of who he was.
He also graphically described his experience as a resident at Bellevue Hospital. Victims of self-abortion were so common at Bellevue that the night shift came to be called the “midnight express.” Women would start the process by inserting foreign devices into their cervixes at home; when they started to bleed, they came to the emergency room, where physicians would perform a procedure called dilation and curettage, scraping tissue from the uterus—essentially an abortion. Abortion was never openly discussed during my childhood, but I’d heard of a situation like this once before, when I was about ten. I overheard my parents’ discussion of a Philadelphia physician whose patient died while he was performing an illegal procedure. To cover for himself, he cut her up in pieces and put her remains down the drain.
Dr. Gold was interested in my history, too. He recognized my intelligence, and when he learned I didn’t plan to go to college, he began a gentle, supportive campaign to convince me to apply. After a few months of our talks I agreed to send in an application. I ascribed to the Socratic view that an unexamined life was not worth living, and I thought that studying psychology would give me the chance to continue examining mine. My therapist had connections at NYU and was able to help me register for three nonmatriculating classes. I got all As and was accepted as a full-time student.
I’d report on my classes to Dr. Gold during our talks, and I came to cherish these times as our personal oasis. Thrown together from different worlds and generations, we found a common safe harbor—he from his grinding responsibilities, I from my eternal state of longing and aloneness.
Our time together in the evenings was interrupted by his wife calling to find out exactly when to expect him so she could have dinner on the table. As the office assistant, it was my job to answer the phone. “It’s your wife,” I would say, forcing indifference as I gradually came to resent her intrusion. But Dr. Gold slowly began to extend the hour, bit by bit, so we would have more time to finish our discussions.
And then the Saturday ritual began. After the morning office hours I would either go out for sandwiches or he would take me to a local diner, where we would have lunch together before he went on his hospital rounds. “You need at least one good meal a week,” he would say.
My feelings began to grow beyond admiration and respect. I would imagine his hands gently touching my hair, moving over my face. My work became a way to surround myself with him even when he was absent. One Sunday afternoon I took sheets of EKG results with me to the beach, organizing them in neat piles on my towel and filing them into carefully marked folders while a friend from college lay next to me, tanning in the sun.
I was dating young men at the time, but they bored me. Dr. Gold was powerful, sophisticated, intelligent, handsome, and warm. He was twenty-eight years older than me, and I wanted him to want me.
He started to tease me with double entendres, nuanced sexual asides that I couldn’t help but savor and read into. He began looking at me in a slightly different way, and I responded in kind. Being limited to an unattractive white uniform, I managed to accessorize with high black boots and black lingerie that was slightly visible through the fabric. I caught his gazes, though our eyes would never connect directly. We were professional with each other as we worked side by side, but an unspoken attraction was deepening between us.
My second summer working in the office, I planned a trip to Europe with three friends of mine. We would go to Monaco and Italy and drive through the south of France, staying at student hostels along the way.
Dr. Gold and his wife always spent August in Cannes with two other couples. They stayed at the five-star Carlton Hotel, which was right on the beach and teemed with celebrities and jet-setters. Before we closed the office for the summer, he had told me to come by the hotel while I was in Cannes so that he and his wife could treat me to an exclusive French dinner.
To my inexperienced eyes the Carlton Hotel was a palace. I was overwhelmed with the decor, shops, fashionable people, and ambience of money. When I arrived, I was met by Mrs. Gold, who greeted me warmly. We ate a gourmet dinner at a restaurant high in the mountains overlooking the sparkling lights of the Riviera, and I was invited to join them at the hotel beach the next afternoon. I did, and we sunned ourselves while I desperately tried to concentrate on the Hermann Hesse novel I had brought along. Suddenly Dr. Gold became extremely upset. He was missing $500 in cash that had been in his pocket before lunch. He demanded to see the concierge of the hotel, who advised him to go into town and report it to the police.
Dr. Gold did not speak French, and there were no English-speaking policemen in the station. I spoke French almost fluently, so I volunteered to accompany Dr. Gold into the village and act as his translator. We drove into the picturesque town with its designer shops and cobblestoned streets and found the small police station at the corner of the square. I informed the magistrate of the theft and translated our conversation for Dr. Gold. Now our roles were reversed: I was the expert, assisting Dr. Gold in a new and strange environment. I saw him looking at me with appreciation. The police report was taken down, and after the magistrate assured us of their intention to investigate, we left the station.
Afterwards we had a coffee at one of the small outdoor cafés along the main square. As we sat quietly smoking and drinking, things changed forever between us. We were finally alone together, not in a small office or diner in Queens, but on the French Riviera. Nothing was done, nothing was said. But there in the South of France with Dr. Gold, images of the way our lives could be began taking shape.
One year later, on the last night in his office before he left once again for his August vacation, we became lovers.
DR. GOLD—Marty, as I began to call him—and I had been having an affair for two months when my father began to get chest pains. He was working as a salesman for a company that required him to carry a thirty-pound case. My mother convinced him to make an appointment to see Marty. I developed his chart, took his height, weight, and blood pressure, did an EKG on him, had him undress, and left him alone for the examination. Later in the consultation I stood behind my father when Marty told him that the pains he was having were due to angina. “You’re a good candidate for a heart attack,” he told my father. “Don’t carry that case, it is too heavy for you. You must change your life.”
My parents decided to get a second opinion; Marty’s honest prognosis and the radical changes he recommended seemed impossible. How does one follow a dictum, “You must change your life,” when the life you are living is all that you know?
The second doctor gave my parents the answer they wanted to hear. This time the EKG was normal; the physician did not find anything potentially problematic with my father’s health, and he saw no reason why my father could not go on making sales calls with that thirty-pound case.
Two weeks later, I received a call from
my uncle early in the morning telling me that my father was very ill and I was needed at home immediately. My heart sank. I rose from the bed that also served as a couch in my first studio apartment in LeFrak City, dressed quickly, and made the twenty-minute drive down Queens Boulevard to my parents’ apartment.
I opened the door to find my mother frantically vacuuming back and forth, back and forth over the same small piece of orange carpet in the living room. I recalled that she had also been vacuuming the day we heard on the radio that John F. Kennedy had been killed.
She looked at me with the terror and helplessness that always seemed to be brimming just beneath her surface. Her eyes were unseeing and frantic.
“Mommy,” I said.
She kept vacuuming. I walked slowly to her, gently took the machine from her hands, and turned it off.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “They say he is in the hospital—what happened? Do you know what happened?
“Let’s call the hospital and find out.”
My mother followed me into the small kitchen and I picked up the wall phone. It was early April, and as I looked out the kitchen window at the familiar row houses and trees, it occurred to me that every spring from then on would be different.
I reached the hospital, somewhere in Western Pennsylvania where my father had gone a couple of days earlier on a business trip.
“Who are you calling about please?” asked the voice on the other end of the phone.
“I am Jack Hoffman’s daughter,” I said, struggling to control my anxiety.
A pause—a time period impossible to measure.
“Oh,” the voice said, “I’m terribly sorry, but Mr. Hoffman passed away sometime last night.”
I hung up the phone and turned to my mother. “He’s dead. Daddy is dead.”
Her white face contorted in pain as she howled in a kind of primal scream.
In that moment we became unequal in grief. I was the one to tell my mother the news, and I was the one to comfort her. That night I slept in my parents’ bed, my mother clinging to me desperately, crying for my father.
I had moved out of their house just two weeks before. I was twenty-four years old, struggling to be on my own and to get away from that eternal triangle. My mother came to my apartment a few weeks after my father’s death and angrily told me that I was responsible for it. She said I had betrayed him by moving out, that the loss had killed him. Her words cut me deeply. My mother and relatives pressured me to move back in with her, but I resisted the pull of that dark place.
The week of shivah was spent at my parents’ apartment. The presentation case my father had carried was still there, and I took it and carried it purposefully toward the garbage chute in the hallway. I was just about to throw the damn thing away when one of my uncles stopped me. He was afraid that if I destroyed it, the company would have to be paid. I was furious, feeling absolutely powerless, unable even to take out my rage upon this black box, this pathetic surrogate.
I was in my parents’ bedroom with my mother when Marty walked in to pay his respects. She moved easily into his arms for comfort when he bent to embrace her. I left the apartment with him that afternoon.
Driving down Queens Boulevard I didn’t notice the red lights or the blur of moving objects around me. I only knew I was in a safe harbor sitting beside him. He stopped at one of our favorite diners and over a cup of chicken soup told me what a gift it was for my father to have gone so quickly, never conscious of his life slipping away. As a doctor he had seen so many different endings; this was one of the better ones, he assured me. His words were a small comfort in an ocean of pain.
AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH, there was no money for me to go to NYU. I transferred to Queens College and took on two more part-time jobs in addition to my position in Marty’s office to pay for my education. Taking out student loans eased some of the financial burden, but the responsibilities of being on my own and the fact that I was always the oldest student in the class put me on a very different trajectory than my classmates. I rarely had time to involve myself in the social life of the college, so focused was I on my work, studies, and newly found love.
I was always somewhat removed from the collective reality. After the Kent State massacre, Queens College students were conducting sit-ins, protesting from the tops of buildings, and cutting classes to demonstrate. In my Psychology of Personality class, which was held in a large theater-like room, a student boldly walked up to the professor while he was lecturing. Taking the microphone from his hands—“liberating” it, as he declared—he began to order the rest of us to march out of class, to act! Trembling with excited rage, he pointed outside, where students had created a cemetery on the lawn with four stones signifying the students who had been murdered.
Our professor told the class that we could all leave to act on our principles, but we must also understand that principles had consequences; no one who left would receive a grade for the year’s course.
There was a pause, and then a great commotion ensued as everyone stood and headed to the door. They filed outside until I was the only one left seated in the room. I believed the professor when he told us there were consequences to actions, and I made the calculation that going to graduate school was more important than joining the group at that moment. I was wrong—I could have joined and lost nothing. The grades for that semester were calculated on a pass/fail system that term, and everyone was given a pass.
The incident left me disgusted with the lack of authenticity of the political activism at Queens, especially after the murders of those students. Rather than holding them accountable for their act, the college administration reinforced the notion that politics was theater—you could engage in it and lose nothing. Only in the United States was radical political action diminished this way. French intellectual history values the consecrated heretic. In the Soviet Union, writers who were viewed as threats to state authority were sent to the gulag. But at Queens College, you could cut classes all you wanted, call it politics, and cruise through your final grade.
The experience taught me the danger of expecting support from people who did not expect to lose anything by their engagement with radical politics but loved to act as if they did. Even then I knew that it is really only when one can get past one’s own fear and situationally transcend self-interest that one can gain courage to take risks and perhaps make a difference.
I did get a whiff of real activism—feminist activism—while I was at Queens. Anaïs Nin visited the campus and read to a group of literature and psychology students from her diary. I recall a small, elegant woman with long gray hair tied tightly in a bun, porcelain skin, and bright blue eyes, an icon of a bygone era. Later, Florynce Kennedy spoke about lesbianism and abortion, giving the class one of her famous lines: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” I was amazed and impressed by her bold language and her strong anti-establishment critique. It was thrilling to hear that kind of unbound language from the podium. Her brand of intellectual engagement was far more compelling to me than empty sit-ins ever were.
THE EXTERNAL POLITICAL WORLD soon began to affect life at Marty’s office, too. In November 1970 the New York Times reported that “a dramatic liberalization of public attitudes and practices regarding abortions appears to be sweeping the country.” The Title X Family Planning program, designed to provide women with access to contraceptive services, supplies, and information, was enacted in 1970 as part of the Public Health Service Act. By 1971 over half the people questioned in opinion polls favored legalizing abortion. Thanks in part to the work of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), lawyers who had previously emphasized the effect of unconstitutionally vague language on medical practitioners began to argue on behalf of women’s right to decide when to have a child. Organizations that had been working to reform abortion laws changed their goals, strategies, and often their names to reflect the new movement for repeal of all state abortion statutes.
&
nbsp; A referendum in the state of Washington repealed that state’s abortion laws, and three more states, including New York, followed suit. In February 1971 the American Bar Association officially supported a woman’s right to choose abortion up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, and in December that year the Supreme Court heard the first round of oral arguments in Roe v. Wade.
In the two and a half years between July 1970, when New York’s new abortion law took effect, and January 1973, when the Supreme Court’s Roe decision legalized the procedure everywhere, 350,000 women came to New York for an abortion, including 19,000 Floridians; 30,000 each from Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois; and thousands more from Canada. By the end of 1971, 61 percent of the abortions performed in New York were on out-of-state residents.1
In the New York medical world, this political and social sea change brought about a flurry of activity among health clinics and private practices that wanted to help meet the new demands for abortions. Referral networks were set up all over the country by the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health (CRASH), one of the first and largest New York abortion clinics; the Clergy Consultation Center; and representatives of Eastern Women’s Center to help women travel to New York to receive services. Cars and limos were sent to meet and greet patients at the airports. Eastern and CRASH “doing” up to three hundred patients a day was not unusual. New York City was soon declared the abortion capital of the nation.
Like others, Marty and his colleague, Dr. Leo Orris, saw the change in New York’s abortion law as a historic opportunity. They were both founding physicians of the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York (HIP), the first not-for-profit HMO founded to provide low-cost comprehensive health services on the East Coast. HIP had twenty-eight medical groups throughout the city, and Marty and Dr. Orris felt strongly that as the major health care provider in New York, HIP should be at the forefront in providing abortions.
Intimate Wars Page 4