The next morning, Barbara took off with him. When she returned several days later, she was flush with excitement. Though she didn’t come out and say it, I suspected she’d slept with him. I hoped it wasn’t her first time. The next day, we were heading to Venice, and he was supposed to meet us at the train station to return Barbara’s rental deposit. He’d dropped off the car himself.
“You know she’s never going to see that money,” Mary Sue whispered as we waited at the station.
I knew it. Barbara’s best friend knew it. But Barbara, even after he’d missed the appointed rendezvous by an hour, even after we’d missed our train, still didn’t know it.
“Maybe something’s happened to him,” she said. “Maybe he got into an accident.”
An hour passed, then another. Watching the dawning realization on Barbara’s face was excruciating. “He’s not coming, is he?” she cried. We all shook our heads no. “He took my money. It’s everything I have.”
We called the hotel, but the owner claimed he didn’t know his cousin’s name. Finally, we went to the police station. “One of your policemen stole money from me,” Barbara explained. She went through the whole story; by the time she was midway through, we’d attracted an audience of about a dozen policemen who couldn’t contain their laughter. None of them spoke much English, but having heard similar stories before, they didn’t need to. “Crook,” the police chief said. “Thief. Capisci?”
Barbara was devastated and hardly spoke for the rest of the trip. I couldn’t imagine possibly losing your virginity to a crook. It was bad enough losing your boyfriend to his father. We visited more churches, with their flickering candles, dank musty smells, and dark paintings of skewered martyrs. We ate plates of mediocre spaghetti carbonara, and then, finally, we returned to London, where Scott was waiting for me.
In mid-January, the miners went on strike, and for seven weeks we had intermittent power and electricity. It was thrillingly romantic. We ate our meals and read D. H. Lawrence by candlelight. After one of my teachers read a paper I’d written on Women in Love, he suggested I switch from theater to English. And so I decided to become a writer. Mostly, though, I was a woman in love. I lost my appetite and with all the walking we did, I also shed the extra fifteen pounds, plus another five. By the spring, I’d covered so much ground that the local cobbler couldn’t do any more repairs on my crumbling granny boots. “These old girls have had a good run,” he said, “but they’re totally knackered.” Scott offered to buy me a new pair of shoes, so we went shopping together on Kensington High Street. He picked out a sensible pair of knockoff Hush Puppies.
“I really like these,” he said.
“You mean, for you?”
“No, for you. You need a comfortable pair of walking shoes. Besides, I was getting pretty sick of those granny boots.”
“I’d die before I’d wear these,” I said.
This escalated into a huge fight. I started to cry, and he walked out of the store, and the salesman, looking uncomfortable, said, “Do you want the shoes or not?” I told him to put them away and I waited for Scott to return. Twenty minutes went by, and no Scott. I couldn’t believe he’d leave me in a discount shoe store. Finally, he came back and I was so nervous about losing him that I apologized and let him buy me the $12 knockoff Hush Puppies. They were rust suede—the same color as his shoes. We were a perfect match.
With the school year about to end, Scott hatched a plan to keep us together for the summer. His father was president of a publishing company, and I was offered a temporary job at one of his magazines. His parents agreed to let me stay with them in their New York apartment. What could be more perfect than that? According to my parents, lots of things, starting with a job in Andover. This precipitated a flurry of letters in which I pleaded my case as ardently as Portia in The Merchant of Venice. In response to their concern that I was becoming too dependent on Scott, I wrote, “I am not depending on him for my livelihood, only my happiness, and if wanting happiness counts as an offense, then I, along with the whole human race, plead ‘Guilty!’” Letting me live in New York with my Jewish boyfriend was clearly preferable to reading any more of my letters, so they ultimately gave in.
When I arrived back home, however, my mother quickly made it clear she was not happy. “You should have never left Catholic University,” she said. “You’ve become unchaste and immoral.”
I pulled out my precious beat-up granny boots, intending to store them in a safe place. My mother told me to throw them out. “They’re filthy and falling apart,” she said.
“I fell in love in these boots,” I said.
“Well, they look it,” she replied.
My mother hated clutter and was famous for tossing things away, even things she wanted to keep, like her diamond engagement ring. “I just want to pitch and chuck everything,” she’d say when she was in a spring-cleaning mode that encompassed all seasons. Bumpa cringed whenever she walked past his room and hid his valuables on the top shelf of his closet, above his wooden roller and magic liniment. I placed my granny boots in a plastic bag and asked him if I could store them in his closet.
By the time I was ready to leave for New York, my mother wasn’t speaking to me, and I was totally distraught, torn between seeking her approval and wanting independence. Nancy, who was ten, pleaded with me to stay. “You’re always leaving us,” she said. “I hardly know you.” Emily sided with me. If I returned for the summer, she’d have to room with Nancy, but she also thought Scott was adorable and how could I possibly not want to be with him?
My father and Bumpa drove me to the train station. They weren’t thrilled with me either, but didn’t say anything. I felt as if I’d let everybody down, but it was a job. In New York . . .
Scott was waiting for me in the lobby of his building when I stepped out of the cab. As I gave him a shy kiss in front of the doorman, he muttered something about “complications.” While we were falling in love, his parents were falling out of it, and his father wanted a divorce. “He’s left my mother for someone else,” he explained. “She’s a secretary at the company.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Old,” he said. “Thirty-five.” His parents, like mine, were in their early fifties.
Scott assured me everything was fine. His father had already moved out and his mother was coping fairly well. The apartment, which was on Sutton Place, was beautiful, with a water view and modern art on the walls. It smelled of cigarettes and something else—alcohol? His mother was in the kitchen crying while doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. I noticed a half-empty bottle of Scotch on the counter. After I gave her the box of Russell Stover chocolates I’d bought as a hostess gift, she showed me to my room, which was next to hers. In a gravelly voice, she kept referring to her husband as “that bastard” or alternately “that shit.” Sometimes he was the “shit-bastard.” She was a genius at profanity combination.
As I unpacked my bag, I told myself that maybe I’d caught her on a bad day. But there were no good days. It was sad, because even at her worst, she was beautiful and brilliant; she’d wanted to be a sculptor but had devoted her life to her husband. Now she was bitter and resentful. Whether she’d always been that way, or if her husband’s infidelity had brought out those qualities, I couldn’t tell. But without the “bastard” around, she took out her frustrations on her son, whose only crime was being young and in love.
I didn’t fare much better. One day, eyeing a magenta peasant blouse I’d bought at Bloomingdale’s, she said, “Black is a better color for you.” Though she was in mourning for her life, and I was freshly in love, her unhappiness was contagious. At night I’d hear her crying in her room, and I’d want to cry too.
After Scott and his mother got into a major fight, we decamped to his father’s apartment on Beekman Place. It had even better views of the river, and Greta Garbo lived around the corner. I was in real estat
e heaven, but I missed our life in London. We began to argue. One evening, after too much wine, I brought up what his mother had said about his father, that for a publisher, it was strange that he didn’t own any books. Scott didn’t read much either. I saw a disturbing pattern. Things escalated, and I ran into the bathroom, slamming the door so hard we couldn’t open it. The super had to take the door off the hinge. I was dressed only in a towel. The next day, his father told us the building management wanted us out. We repacked our bags and returned to Sutton Place, where his mother didn’t even look up from the crossword puzzle.
That night, Scott reminded me that in a couple of days he’d be leaving for two weeks to take a Red Cross lifesaving course in New Hampshire. He’d mentioned it earlier, but I’d conveniently blocked it out. He explained that his father thought it was important to have something to fall back on, in case he didn’t make it as a composer. “And lifeguard is your next-best option?” I shouted. Later, when Scott said good-bye, I thought he looked less like Roger Daltry and more like his father.
With Scott gone, his mother and I hardly spoke to each other, although by then we had a big thing in common: Our men had abandoned us. She downed Scotch, while I drowned in self-pity. I bought a knockoff Saint Laurent suit in my new favorite color—black. She arranged a face-lift. At night, I’d walk across the street and sit in the same romantic spot Woody Allen would later make famous in Manhattan. With the lights of the 59th Street Bridge glittering overhead, I’d stare into the East River and imagine jumping into it. Scott would have to live with the guilt of knowing that while he’d been administering CPR to an inflatable dummy, I’d drowned off the coast of Sutton Place.
Somehow I made it through the rest of August, while Scott earned his lifesaving certificate. Before we returned to Tufts for senior year, I bought a pair of platforms at Alexander’s department store. They looked nothing like my granny boots and I towered over Scott.
After graduation, Scott stayed in Boston to study jazz, while I wrote for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune before moving to New York to get a master’s degree in Cinema Studies at NYU. We decided that the separation would be good for us, though we agreed not to date other people. I lived with two other women on East 9th Street, where we paid $500 a month for a six-room apartment with two massive terraces in a doorman building. With another NYU film student, I’d go to the Bleecker Street Cinema or the Little Carnegie, sitting through weeklong festivals of Bergman and Buñuel films. We thought nothing of seeing a double feature of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, and then catching the latest Antonioni or Bertolucci. Everybody was taking about “cinema” in those days, and in Manhattan alone, there were dozens of art houses and revival theaters, most of which are now closed.
When Scott finished school in Boston, he moved back to New York, where we rented a studio on East 58th Street, not far from his mother’s apartment. I lied and told my mother I was living alone. I don’t think she believed me, but unless I initiated the phone calls, I rarely heard from her. It was not an easy time. Some of the tenants staged a rent strike to protest lack of services, and in retaliation, the landlord shut off the power and electricity. What had been romantic in London was dreadful in New York, where we were no longer carefree students with unlimited theater tickets but publishing drones at Scott’s father’s company. Scott worked as an editorial assistant at a music magazine, while I proofread hotel descriptions for a travel directory, sharing a cubbyhole with a young woman who wanted to be an artist and spent her evenings creating tiny dollhouses.
Several evenings a week, to break up the monotony and to escape my cold, dark apartment, I took jazz at Alvin Ailey. I was a total klutz, but the class attracted interesting people. Vogue had recently published a controversial Deborah Turbeville photograph showing a group of models in a bathhouse that suggested a concentration camp. One of the models was in my dance class, and I loved her frizzy hair, so I got a perm. Another model in my class was wearing a pair of Earth shoes, which a Danish yoga instructor had created after noticing the perfect posture of the Brazilian aborigines. Attributing their alignment to walking barefoot in sand, she constructed a shoe with a negative heel that elongated the spine. My Earth shoe phase lasted until Scott’s mother said, “What the hell are you wearing on your feet?” As for the frizzy hair, I was stuck with it.
The 1970s offered a wide diversity of shoe styles, from negative heels to six-inch glitter platforms. With the women’s movement raising the issue of sexism, shoes made a political statement, with some feminists associating high heels with the male-dominated view of women as sex objects. Rather than capitulate to society’s attempts to keep women immobile, they opted for Earth Shoes, combat boots, or sensible walking shoes. At the same time, other women, even those who identified with feminism, embraced platforms and Charles Jourdan’s sexy “cigarette” heels.
Women were being pulled in several different directions, as evidenced in Scott’s own family. His mother, an ardent liberal, began working at Planned Parenthood, while his stepmother focused on decorating her new Park Avenue apartment in shades of white and cream. The ultimate shiksa—a word I’d recently added to my growing Yiddish vocabulary—she was blond, cute, and athletic, with a passion for Lotte Berk workouts, do-it-yourself découpage, and Karl Lagerfeld in his Chloé period.
Right before Christmas, Scott’s father invited us to the holiday party he was throwing for his publishing friends. Knowing I was interested in getting a writing job, he urged me to make the rounds and introduce myself. As I’ve always done when I’m nervous, I went shoe shopping, this time at B. Altman, which was located on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, a few blocks from the publishing company. It was the only place I had a charge card. First I picked out a simple jewel-neck sweater in black, a black A-line skirt, and a pair of black pumps. The shoes reminded me of the ones Jackie Kennedy had worn to JFK’s funeral and suddenly I had the terrible thought that I, too, would be wearing the shoes to a funeral.
The next morning, waking up at six A.M., I nudged Scott and told him to hold me. “Something terrible is going to happen,” I said. A few minutes later, I received a call from my father telling me that Bumpa had suffered a massive heart attack the day before. He’d made pancakes for the family, and after finishing up the dishes, he’d climbed back into bed and died. The last time I’d seen him was over the Thanksgiving holiday. He and my father had driven me to the train station, and after they walked me to the platform, I kissed them both good-bye. My father didn’t look back, but Bumpa turned around and we waved to each other. I walked a few feet and turned around again. Bumpa did the same thing. It was one of those freeze-frame moments you never forget.
I immediately flew home to Boston, where my father met me at the Eastern Airlines terminal. In an uncharacteristic show of intimacy, he put his arm around me, which made me feel even worse. Things were obviously very bad. We drove to Andover just as the snow was beginning to fall. It would soon turn into one of the biggest blizzards in Boston’s history, with a snowfall of eighteen inches. The wake was held at Lungren Funeral Home, not far from Reinhold’s, which was now closed. With all the snow, I couldn’t wear my new black pumps and after trying to squeeze into an extra pair of Nancy’s rubber boots, I remembered my granny boots in Bumpa’s closet. They were still there. The sheets had been stripped from Bumpa’s bed, but other than that, everything looked the same. I sat down on the bed and laced up my boots. Several of the hooks were broken and I had to knot one of the ties. I thought of the riderless horse at JFK’s funeral, with the boots turned backward in the stirrups. My “first love” boots had now become my funeral boots.
The blizzard kept most people away from the wake, so we had a lot of time to spend with Bumpa in his open coffin. Nancy poked him to make sure he wasn’t playing a trick on us. “Nancy, you stop that!” my mother said. Nancy sat back down in one of the many empty chairs lining the room.
At the funeral mass, the priest kept calling Bumpa by t
he wrong name, extolling his brave combat service when he’d been a merchant marine on a luxury liner. “This is ridiculous,” I whispered to my mother, who quickly hushed me up. The undertakers hadn’t been sure if they’d be able to dig a hole in the frozen ground, and we didn’t know until the last moment if the burial would take place. After the funeral, we finally got the go-ahead and drove to the cemetery, which was located across train tracks, adjacent to a gravel pit and bus depot. In my granny boots, I trudged up the hill to where Bumpa was buried next to his wife. My mother was too distraught to comfort us. She’d gotten into an argument with her father the morning he died and blamed herself for his death.
“He was too young,” she said.
“He was eighty-six,” I reminded her. “It was his time.” But she insisted it was the wrong time and that she could have saved him, and since he was her father and not mine, I couldn’t possibly understand.
“Did they at least take him out feetfirst? That’s what he always said he wanted.”
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