In one of the boxes, I also find an envelope containing all the photographs of themselves that the girls enclose (at my father’s request), along with their little apologies—that their nose is too big, their legs are too fat, or they didn’t have any better pictures lying around.
Occasionally someone writes something about black people. One girl whom he dated on and off for a year or so tells him how she tried to talk to some Negroes after reading a James Baldwin story. “However it was a flop because they were Ethiopian nobility, extremely blasé, feeling not at all oppressed because they were black.” Another girl who is working for a few months in the Virgin Islands describes the black men who “creep all over...most of them act as tho’ they just let go of the limbs of a banana tree...” And then she adds, “One nice thing, most of the Negroes walk like you except for the ones who are pregnant which is about 95%.” My father is apparently undeterred by her observations, because her next letter responds to his urging her to come home for Christmas.
I read through every last one. I like best those letters written during courtship, especially the ones where the women reflect on their most recent rendezvous with my father. How courageous these young women seem! As Joyce Johnson describes in Minor Characters, her memoir about the Beats in the 1950s, “[Sex] was the area of ultimate adventure, where you would dare or not dare.” The girls who write my father seem amazed by their own boldness, especially when recounted from the calm distance of their dorm rooms or childhood bedrooms, for those still living at home. They share their feelings with the guilelessness and vulnerability of children, as if through the experience they have been born anew.
One girl tells my father that she has always felt less feminine than other girls because she is big-boned. She writes: “So it made me so happy when you picked me up in your arms for a moment and lifted me off my feet.” Another girl says how glad she is that my father is a writer, because then she can always keep him near, reading his words or imagining what he would say if they were walking together. Yet another girl writes about the “numinous quality” of their lovemaking and of her gratitude to my dad for introducing her to sensual pleasures that she’d begun to believe didn’t really exist.
From the women’s letters comes some suggestion of my father’s end of the conversation. He writes to them about their clothing styles and their figures—their “quattrocento” beauty or their scrubbed midwestern faces; one girl has “sturdy Israeli knees.” He fits them into categories: whether they are “sleepers” (which I gather means that they are good to actually sleep next to) or have the qualities of wholesomeness that make them “Pure Food and Drug Act” types. Sometimes he corrects them—their use of certain words or their grammar, or scolds them about the books that they are or are not reading. He signs off his letters with “affection,” or occasionally with “love”; there’s the ironic “you know what comes here,” or an old favorite, “pornographic kisses.”
It’s obvious too that my father often cautions them, in between seducing them, that they will never be the only one. Sometimes he offers that he hasn’t graduated yet from “charm school” and therefore isn’t ready to settle down. Other times he’s more frank, saying that he tends to lose desire for a girl when he becomes too friendly with her. Some of the women respond to his warnings with bravado, insisting that they knew all along that this was the score and they like it better that way too. Others confess their worry that they’re going to be hurt, as if this confession will protect them. Few, however, seem to have actually taken my father at his word. For many, he is the first man they have slept with, and they imagine that this offering has earned them the right to expect something in return—to be the one who is the exception to the rule.
And so the second most frequent type of letter is the bitter reexamination of the relationship in the wake of its end. Now the girls let loose their resentment about having their looks, clothing, and taste in literature critiqued. They confess to chafing at my father’s corrections and constant lecturing about books, art, and life. Sometimes they revisit the scene of their seduction, which strikes them in hindsight as calculated and formulaic. One woman accuses him of following the same program with all his conquests:
1. mood talk
2. favorite little bar
3. present Journey to the End of the Night (maybe you have 100s of them)
4. do it with clothes on
5. do it with clothes off
(As far as I can tell, she was right, although it’s hard to imagine Céline’s misanthropic tale of a French doctor during World War I as a successful tool for seduction.) These former girlfriends denounce my father as shallow and callous for his inability to settle on a single woman. They describe feeling tricked, betrayed.
My father appears to have answered these letters too, for some of the women write next to offer their forgiveness, and a few of them turn into true friends. They begin writing with news of their next love affairs, and counseling my father on his own. To some my father confides that he is growing bored with his own routine. In 1960, around the time of his fortieth birthday, he begins to write about wanting to get married, to this one or that one perhaps, but to someone sometime soon.
“As a bachelor, Sundays were lonely,” my father later wrote, “and I began to wish for children around.” Actually he was lonely much of the time—or so he confided to his women friends—despite all his female companionship and his friends down at the San Remo. He began to question, in the guise of the narrator of his novel-in-progress, whether spending one’s day reading and thinking constituted a real life. One of the character’s friends who gets married, has a child, and moves to Kew Gardens tells him: “This is how it goes: your life is there and you live it. You don’t read it in a book or take a walk through it or dream it, and you don’t think it up either—it’s there.” In his notes for the book, my father imagined the story would drive toward a “terrific nostalgia for normalcy.” Perhaps if he himself lived a more ordinary life, he’d be able to let go of his crippling perfectionism and finally finish his novel.
He shared with Ernest his vision of family life. He imagined a house in the country and a wife who played the piano. He’d be writing in his study, with the soft sounds of piano music and children’s laughter floating up the stairs. In 1961 letters from a twenty-three-year-old dancer named Sandy Nelson began to appear. To the shock of almost everyone who knew him, my father could be domesticated after all. But some of his friends, Ernest in particular, weren’t ready to give up their favorite perennial bachelor.
In many ways my mother was a perfect match for my father. She was his type, thin and blond (and played the piano), and while my father described himself as a metaphorical orphan, my mother was a literal one. Both her parents were dead by the time she was twenty years old, and she was estranged—emotionally at least—from her brother, Brook, and sister, Barbara. They didn’t approve of her pursuit of modern dance. When she told them how in class one day Martha Graham had put her hands on her shoulders and told her she was a dancer, Brook had scoffed: She has to say those things. It’s good for business.
It was January 1961. My mother was riding the uptown Lexington Avenue subway to Grand Central after getting out of class at the New School when an attractive man started talking with her. Telling the story of meeting my father now, my mother shrugs and says, “We grabbed the same pole.” It was no accident. My father spotted my mother leaving the New School—her dancer figure caught his eye—and he followed her to the station. Watching her pose on the subway steps, as she stretched out her calves, which were tight from a dance class that morning, he made up his mind to ask her out.
My father introduced himself as a professor at the New School. On hearing his name, my mother remembered running across his offering in the course catalog: something about popular culture that sounded rather lightweight. But he was handsome and charming, and she had some time before catching a train back to Westchester, where she had grown up and was now living. So when my fat
her asked her to join him for a drink, she agreed.
Over martinis at the Vanderbilt Hotel, my mother’s impression of her date improved. She learned that my father played in a regular volleyball game up at Columbia University with a former religion professor of hers. And he was an intimate of Greenwich Village, which was a world apart from the one my mother had grown up around, the one that her siblings still frequented—drinks at the Stork Club, dinners at ‘21,’ husbands who bought their wives mink coats and played golf at the country club. My mother told my father that she’d just returned from a year in Europe and was hoping to move to the Village too.
My father was impressed by my mother’s Nordic beauty and glamorous past, her old-fashioned innocence and sophisticated poise. She had such confidence in her ability to recognize what was fine and beautiful in life—the best churches in Europe, the right cut of steak, the kind of dress that best suited her figure. She’d performed a nightclub act in cabarets in Europe, where she was obliged afterward to faire la salle, or dance with the male customers. At the Jockey Club in Paris, she’d sold more glasses of champagne than any other girl. But she also knew how to knit woolen caps and sew buttons on jackets and refinish furniture. Perhaps with my mother in his life, the ordinary could be extraordinary. After dating for five or six months, he asked her to marry him, and she said yes.
My father was seventeen years older than my mother, but she’d never thought to ask about his age. (He often lied about it anyway.) Nor did she know anything about his family background. Such autobiographical inquiries were considered square in the Village. Anyway, she wasn’t eager to divulge her own past, although it had been haunting her more and more, because at the heart of my mother’s story lay a secret tragedy too.
When she was nineteen, her father was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. At the start of her junior year, my mother transferred from Mount Holyoke College, in Massachusetts, to the Juilliard School of Dance, in New York City, to be closer to her parents, who lived just outside the city. A month after her classes began, her father died in their dining room, in a hospital bed that occupied the place where the dinner table usually stood.
My mother had been a religion major at Mount Holyoke, where she’d met her boyfriend, a Dartmouth graduate who was studying to become a minister. She leaned on him now, their shared interest in faith giving her great comfort. She’d just turned twenty, and she began to hope that this boy would ask her to be his bride.
Over Christmas break my mother was having dinner in the room where her father had recently died when someone knocked on the front door. It was her boyfriend’s fraternity brother. He had come to tell my mother that the young man she loved was dead, killed in a car accident outside of London. As my mother listened to this news, she smiled slightly, a gallows grin, and then she started to weep.
In the months that followed, my mother felt that she and her mother were drifting apart in their separate pools of grief. My mother proposed that they take a trip together to Norway, where some cousins lived. The second day in Oslo, they picked up a rental car—a squat convertible. My mother, who always drove on long car rides, slid behind the wheel for the three-hour trip to their relatives’ house.
The weather was mild and clear, and so they put the top down to better enjoy the view of mountains and fjords. My mother came upon a truck lumbering down the highway. With no cars approaching, she accelerated and moved into the passing lane. But just then the truck driver pulled out to pass an even slower-moving truck in front of him. He didn’t see the little car in his side-view mirror.
For years the thought that if only she had beeped would torture my mother. It would play over and over in her brain, disturbing her sleep and her waking hours too, as if the repetition and intensity of this regret could one day burst a hole in time through which she could reach back, press the palm of her hand against the center of the car’s wheel, and sound that horn at last.
My mother veered off the side of the road, and the car flipped. She and her mother were thrown through the air. After a minute my mother stood up, stunned and shaken but uninjured. Other cars had pulled over, and a man was hurrying toward her. My mother could see her mother lying in the grass twenty feet away, but this man had caught her in his arms and she couldn’t move. In his accented English, he was saying: She is dead. She is dead. My grandmother had had a fatal heart attack in the air. On the edge of the roadway, standing in this stranger’s arms, my mother began to scream.
The police took her to the station, where they nicked her ear for the blood alcohol test that was customary in all traffic accidents. My mother hadn’t been drinking, but this cut made her feel marked with blame. At the airport, waiting for her flight back to New York, she caught people looking at her, knowing that she’d been in an accident.
My mother’s sister and her best friend went to JFK to meet her. They didn’t recognize her at first as she walked down the corridor from the plane. Her blond hair, which she normally wore long around her shoulders, was pulled back into a tight bun. She was carrying a large red shopping bag, and my aunt remembers thinking it odd that my mother had the time or inclination to go shopping. And then Barbara, and my mother’s friend too, noticed the bulky square shape of the bag’s contents and realized that what my mother was carrying—what in fact had rested between her feet for the last seven hours—was the ashes of her mother’s body.
My mother never cried about the loss. Not once that anyone witnessed. And that’s the end of the story, as my mother’s friend and her sister tell it. But at night my mother began to have dreams that made her afraid to go to sleep. Sometimes, during the daytime hours, she would burst into tears or begin to tremble for no apparent reason. Today she would be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome. A therapist might help her to revisit the scene of her mother’s death so they could understand together that it wasn’t her fault. My mother would have the support of psychotropic drugs and a community of other people who’d also suffered great losses. She’d be encouraged to talk about her feelings.
In the late 1950s, however, that wasn’t how things were done. Back then people suggested having a drink if you were feeling anxious, taking a pill if you couldn’t sleep. So my mother had a drink. She took a pill. And it worked, for a while at least.
It was my father who first gave my mother the sleeping pills; he struggled with insomnia himself. When she began staying overnight at his place on West Tenth Street—there was no one to tell her not to—and he saw how much trouble she was having falling asleep, he offered her some pills from his supply. The summer after they became engaged, my father went off to Europe to “exhaust the last of his romantic restlessness,” and my mother, left alone in his apartment, started taking the pills every night.
During their two months apart, my parents wrote to each other almost daily. In her letters my mother attributes her insomnia and bouts of depression and anxiety to her frustration about the progress of her dance career. She tells my father that she is counting on their marriage to provide the strength and stability that she needs so badly in her life. For my father’s part, he confides: “I rely on you with all my heart to make me happy and productive.” They write to each other of their “infinitely romantic domestic plans.”
In my father’s absence, my mother had been turning his bachelor pad into a home. She found an old wooden rocking chair that she spent her evenings restoring with wax and furniture stain. She made curtains for the windows, bought a GE steam iron to press their clothes, hung a small chalkboard in the kitchen on which to note things to pick up at the store—all of which, recounted in my mother’s letters to him, filled my father with delight.
This trip, he predicts in one letter, will be his last experience of loneliness. When he looks at her picture, he writes, tears well up in his eyes, something that happens to him about once every ten years. “It’s not really because I miss you though, but because you make me so happy and I never expected to be happy that way. I feel more like a bride than a husband,
if you can understand that, because I’m so unused to this tenderness.”
My mother rescued my father from his role of being a spectator on the world and enticed him to participate in the everyday dramas of real life, while he became, she writes, “the object of my affections—my salvation, my inspiration—all that and more.”
I’m surprised and touched by the abundance of genuine romantic feeling in my parents’ correspondence. It’s hard to believe that all my father’s years of bachelorhood hadn’t corrupted his store of affection, and all my mother’s tragedies hadn’t scarred over her ability to love. They put so much hope into each other, they had so much riding on the success of this union, that I find myself worrying for them, even as I know how everything turns out.
My father hadn’t returned from Europe before cracks began appearing in their snow-globe vision of the future. For starters, my mother’s siblings disapproved of the match: Sandy was too young and too naive for my father. She would get hurt; he would never make her happy. What did he do for a living anyway? They wondered if he was after my mother’s money. She was living off a small trust from their parents’ estate, but she was due to inherit a much larger sum after their grandmother’s death, which was looking rather imminent.
My uncle Brook went so far as hiring a private detective to investigate my father, which was something that had been done to Brook himself by the father of a girl that he’d been dating. But my father’s report—as my mother never tires of saying—came back spotless, which makes me wonder about the skill of this private eye. He didn’t even turn up the information about my dad’s racial background. That piece of news my mother would learn from his friends.
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