“It wasn’t,” he said honestly. “But I’ve had some time to think about it. Working for my dad, I have the inside track, and can get ahead a lot faster than I would somewhere else. The money is good, and if I want to get married and start a family, I’m going to need a solid base and salary I can count on.” She looked even more startled then. “I have job security with him,” he said and then laughed. “At least I know he won’t fire me.”
“Since when are you planning to ‘get married and start a family’? Did I miss something? Are you in love?”
“I’ve been seeing Emily again.” He continued to avoid his friend’s eyes. She knew him too well. She felt as though aliens had kidnapped him since she’d seen him at school.
“I thought you were through with her last summer, or the summer before, or wanted to be. What happened? Has she gotten more exciting since you graduated?” Meredith knew that she had hung on forever, with his family’s encouragement, and Ted’s own weakness for her when he went home. He was happy she was easy, willing, and right next door. She was familiar, and infatuated with him, but not much else. He’d always told Meredith he’d never been in love with her, and he still wasn’t. According to Ted’s descriptions of her, she had nothing to recommend her except cute girl-next-door looks and a family with a lot of money, like his own. And she wanted a husband and kids to complete the picture. Ted didn’t. The thought of getting married panicked him and filled him with dread, but he didn’t want to tell Merrie that.
“She’s really a great girl, and she’s crazy about me. And my parents think she’d make a terrific wife, and we’d be a perfect couple.” He gave Meredith the party line, but she wasn’t buying it, at least not based on what she heard, and read between the lines.
“Why do you need a wife? You’re twenty-three years old.” It was a question she’d asked herself when her mother talked about her getting married. She felt too young, and there were so many other things she wanted to do, instead of getting tied down. They had a lifetime ahead of them, and a decade to find the right person, at the right time when they were older and had tasted more of life.
“My parents got married when they graduated,” he said, as though that justified it, but it didn’t to her.
“So did mine. I’d rather be single forever than have my mother’s life, playing bridge three times a week and doing everything my father says. She never questions anything. I don’t think she’s had an independent thought in her entire life. She’s like an appendage of my father’s, like another arm. She went to college, for Chrissake. There must be more to her than that.” But Meredith hadn’t seen evidence of it in all the years she could remember.
“My parents think I’ll have a better career if I’m married and settled down. Customers trust married bankers more than single ones. It’s statistically proven.”
“But you don’t want to be a banker,” she reminded him.
“Now I think I do. My father and I have talked about it a lot, and I think he’s right. And I’d rather be in Greenwich at our bank than in the cutthroat banking world in New York.” It was abundantly clear to Meredith, from everything Ted was saying, that he was taking the easy way out on every front. Working for his father at the family bank, living in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a sleepy bedroom community of rich people who had known their family for years, marrying a girl his parents approved of and had picked out for him as the perfect banker’s wife. Their fathers were best friends and played golf together. Their mothers had gone to school together. And Emily hadn’t even gone to college. Meredith wondered if she had a brain.
“Do you love her?” Meredith asked him, as he ordered a second tequila. Meredith was looking upset for him, as much so as he should have been himself, and running for his life.
“I think I do love her. She’s awfully cute, and devoted to me.”
“How long does ‘cute’ last?” she asked him, angry at his parents for brainwashing him, and at Ted for letting them.
“Long enough. My parents are still together. No one in my family has ever gotten divorced.”
“Ted, don’t rush into this. Think about it. You can work for your dad, you can always quit if you want to. But don’t rush into marriage with a girl you always said you didn’t love, and only ‘think’ you love now. You deserve so much better than that, like someone you’re crazy about, and an exciting life. She may bore you to death in five or ten years, and then what will you do?”
“We want to have kids,” he said firmly. She felt more than ever as though aliens had stolen her friend and replaced him with a robot that said everything he’d been programmed to, but didn’t really feel.
“Now? We’re kids ourselves. That’s ridiculous. What’s the hurry?”
“My parents were the age I am now when they had me,” he said smugly, and Meredith wanted to scream.
“Stop that. That was them. This is you. The world has changed since the war, and it’s changing faster than ever. It’s 1958, not 1935, when they got married.”
“Maybe change isn’t a good thing. Maybe the old ways were best.”
She groaned when he said it. “You sound like my father,” she said, seriously unnerved as she finished her second drink and was feeling a little tipsy. She hated what he was saying, and about to do to his life.
“Not everyone’s as brave as you are, Merrie. You’re out there looking for challenges and mountains to climb. I’m not a mountain climber. I want an easier road than that,” he said honestly.
“Don’t sell your soul for that easier road, Ted. You’ll pay a high price for it in the end. It may not be as easy as it looks,” married to a woman he didn’t love, working for his father in a job he hated.
“You may pay a higher price for the things you’re willing to take on.”
She knew that was true, but it was worth it to her. “It’s what I want to do. I don’t want to end up like my mother, without an independent thought in my head, living in the shadow of someone else, with nothing I can be proud of.”
“Emily is a very pretty girl. I’ll be proud to have her as my wife.”
Meredith wanted to cry listening to him, and felt as though she had lost her friend. The funny, silly, scattered, disorganized guy who said he wanted a better life than his parents had and wanted to enjoy life. What he was describing did not sound like living to her. It sounded like death, at twenty-three.
“Well, don’t rush into anything. Think about it. You can do anything you want.”
“No, I can’t,” he said, looking somber for a moment, and more like himself. “My father will only help me financially if I work for him at the bank, and marry someone he approves of. And they like Emily a lot.” His eyes looked like he was dreaming.
“Because she’s convenient for them, but maybe not so convenient for you in the long run. I’m begging you, don’t sell yourself short, and think about this seriously before you do anything crazy, or that you’ll regret later on.”
“I told you, I’m not as brave as you are. Sometimes you just have to do what makes the most sense. We’re grown-ups now. It can’t just be about fun.” She could hear his father’s voice. As he said it, he ordered another drink, but Meredith didn’t. It was his third tequila after the gin and tonic. She’d had enough and felt overwhelmingly sad for him.
“Your happiness is what makes the most sense to me. You don’t have to be brave. Just don’t throw yourself off a cliff.”
“I think she’ll make me happy,” he said, slurring his words a little, and then he laughed and looked at Meredith intently. “If you’d ever fallen for me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d be following you around, doing all the crazy things you do.”
But she realized now more than ever that he would never have been happy doing that. He didn’t care about the same things she did. He wanted an easy life, in his familiar world, staying in the womb forever with the g
irl next door. Meredith was a revolutionary at heart, and a gladiator. She was no girl next door, which was why she and Ted had never wound up together, and it never would have worked. She saw that more than ever now. Ted was desperate to sell out and take no risks. But the path he was choosing was far more dangerous and intricate. He was willing to let Emily and his parents bury him alive.
“You’d have hated sharing my life,” she told him honestly, “and your parents would never let you marry someone like me. And I don’t want to get married anyway. I have too much else to do.” She looked pensive as she said it. Fighting the good fight for the underprivileged and persecuted was not compatible with being married to a banker in Greenwich, trapped in the life his parents wanted for him. She felt suffocated just thinking about it.
“You’ll probably marry some wild guy someday, that no one will approve of or understand.” He was wistful as he said it.
“Maybe, or no one. Whichever suits me better.”
“What’s happening with Seth and Claudia, by the way?” He hadn’t been in touch with Claudia since they left school two months before. He’d been busy at home, negotiating with his father and making plans. “Are they getting married?”
Meredith shook her head in answer, with a sad expression. “He broke up with her. His parents went crazy when he told them about her, so he ended it. She was devastated.”
Ted looked shocked, he hadn’t expected that to happen. “Why?” The obvious hadn’t occurred to him.
“Because she’s Jewish. They formally forbade him to marry her and said they’d never see him again. He didn’t want to lose his family, so he dumped her.”
“Is she okay?”
“No. But she will be. She’s lost more than that before. But it was very hard on her. She really loved him. And probably will for a long time.”
He looked sobered by what Meredith had told him. They ordered hamburgers for dinner. And afterward, he gazed at her seriously.
“Thank you for everything you said. You’re the smartest woman I know. I just don’t know if I have the balls you believe I do. What my dad is suggesting would be easy and makes a lot of sense.” He was trying to justify it to himself. “As long as I don’t think about it.”
“It may be harder than you think.”
They hugged outside P.J. Clarke’s and promised to have dinner again soon. But she wondered if they would. If he sold out and did what his father wanted, she wasn’t sure Ted would be able to face her again. After she left him, she hoped that something she had said had sunk in, and that wouldn’t be the case. She didn’t want to lose a friend, but she had a feeling that she already had.
* * *
—
She told Claudia about her dinner with Ted the next day when she called her on Long Island, and Claudia felt sorry for him too. Neither Ted nor Seth had the guts to stand up for themselves.
“That’s what’s going to happen to Seth. He’ll wind up marrying some girl his parents pick for him, with a colonel or a general father, who’ll be happy to have a husband who’s career army and goes to church, just like them. I don’t think Seth or Ted will be happy with those solutions, but it takes more courage than they’ve got to marry someone like me,” Claudia said sadly. “Even if I’d converted, I wouldn’t have been good enough for them.”
Meredith suspected it might be true, although she knew Claudia genuinely loved him.
“Would you have married him if he asked you to convert?” Meredith asked, and Claudia thought about it for a minute.
“Probably not. I thought about it once or twice, but I couldn’t do that to the memory of my parents, given the way they died. All I really wanted was for our children to be Jewish. I couldn’t have deprived them of Jewish grandchildren, even if they’re not here anymore.”
“That might have been a deal breaker for him too.”
“Maybe. But we never got that far with his parents.”
They talked about Ted again then, and hoped he didn’t marry Emily, since he didn’t love her. But so many people they knew, particularly women, just followed in their parents’ footsteps and assumed it would be enough. It wouldn’t have been enough for Meredith, she was sure of that. And Claudia didn’t think it would be either. She would prefer to marry someone Jewish, but she wanted more than her parents’ staid and limited life. She expected more of herself. And she couldn’t settle for someone she didn’t love.
She said she hadn’t heard back from any newspapers yet about a job, but it was too soon. She had been relaxing and spending time with her sisters on Long Island and trying not to think of Seth, which she did all the time, and wondered what he was doing and if he missed her. When the phone rang, she still hoped it was him, and her heart skipped a beat, she told Meredith. But she knew he would never call again. He was being the good son and doing what they wanted, even if it meant giving up the woman he loved forever. She was trying to make her peace with it, which was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
* * *
—
Meredith worked all summer, doing menial jobs at the ACLU. She was hungry to do real legal work, and relieved when Claudia came back at the end of August, so they could have dinner together and hang out on weekends. Claudia had had responses from two newspapers by then, and was excited about one of them. John Hay Whitney, the multimillionaire Wall Street investor, had bought the previously conservative New York Herald Tribune only months before. His declared intention was to turn it into a more modern newspaper, “without hypocrisy,” as he put it, and he was looking for young people with fresh points of view to help turn it around.
Claudia had received a letter from a senior editor who wanted to see her right after Labor Day. She had been reading the Herald Tribune diligently ever since she’d heard from him, and liked everything she saw. They were taking bold positions and trying out new approaches to reporting the news, and it seemed like an exciting place to work. She could hardly wait for her interview, and Meredith was excited for her. It was a lot more interesting than her job at the ACLU, and she almost wondered if she should try to interview there too, but she didn’t want to steal Claudia’s thunder, or crowd her. Claudia had wanted to become a writer and journalist ever since they’d met. And Meredith was biding her time till law school. She was planning to apply for the following year.
Three days after Claudia got back to town, Governor Faubus was in the news in Little Rock again. In order to avoid desegregating the schools as he’d been ordered to, he closed all four public high schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, for the entire school year, pending a public vote for or against integration of the schools. In the meantime, high school students were left with no school to attend, and had to take correspondence classes or move elsewhere in the country to continue their education. The hastily organized public vote supported his position against integration, and there was a huge outcry across the country over his stance, which was counter to the federal government’s ruling in favor of desegregation.
The Herald Tribune was still buzzing with it when Claudia went for her interview, and she almost jumped over the desk and kissed the senior editor when he hired her on the spot. He assigned her to cover minor society news for a start. She called Meredith as soon as she left the paper and got home, and Meredith was thrilled for her. Claudia sounded infused with new life and hope as soon as she got the job.
“Did you tell your parents yet?” Meredith asked. Things had been lively at the ACLU all week too, over the scandalous closing of the Little Rock high schools, but they still only had her doing filing in the New York office.
“No, I just got home five minutes ago.”
Claudia told them at dinner that night, and their reaction was lukewarm. The Herald Tribune was a respectable paper, but more than anything, they still wished Claudia would give up the idea of working. She didn’t need to work, and they were more than willing to indulge her and su
pport her, as they did their other daughters. But Claudia felt she had to give something back to the world, and writing for a newspaper and honing her writing skills until she felt ready to write a book seemed the best way to do it. They didn’t understand it, but by the end of the evening, they’d conceded, and her father teased her about being a newspaperwoman now.
She felt incredibly grown up when she reported for work two days later, in a navy blue suit her mother had bought her at Bergdorf’s, with a small discreet hat, a white silk blouse, and navy high heels. She was assigned to the society desk as a junior editorial assistant, and given a tiny cubicle the size of a broom closet, but she loved every minute of it. Her career as a writer and journalist was on its way.
To counter the monotony of her own job at the ACLU, Meredith applied to Columbia Law School in October, for the following September. She told her father, who continued to growl about it, but he was relieved that she hadn’t been sent on any revolutionary assignments for the ACLU. The job had proven to be tamer than Meredith had hoped, and less ominous than he’d feared. And she had a full year ahead of her to meet someone and get married, even if she was accepted by Columbia Law School for the following year.
But the person she met for dinner most often was Claudia, and they shared their dreams and thoughts about their budding careers, although they were both off to a slow start.
Meredith was nothing more than a low-level file clerk and errand girl at the ACLU, and Claudia had just covered a bridge tournament at the Colony Club, a staunch social club for blue-blooded society women. It was an event that no one wanted to cover, so she got the assignment. And three days later, she read in the New York Times society section that Ted was engaged to Emily. He had sold his soul to the devil after all. She called Meredith and told her. The news depressed them both.
Claudia was set to cover another bridge tournament two days later. And that time, she got a reprieve at the last minute when one of the assistant editors got sick. The ailing editor was supposed to cover a story for the Sunday magazine, not the newspaper, to interview a young movie producer who had recently made a documentary film about Hitler’s Germany and the Holocaust that included interviews with survivors and real newsreel footage. The film had supposedly been very creatively done and was considered shocking, but had been well reviewed. It was one of those films that informed the public of important details and kept the memory of what had happened fresh and alive. She wanted to see the film before she met the producer, but had to finish another assignment that day and didn’t have time. It was going to be her first interview, and she felt nervous and unprepared, and the subject of his film was not an easy one for her.
The Good Fight Page 11