Back Then Page 7

  Bert. I was in my senior year at Brearley when we met at a party. He was twenty-five and a devout Jew. A buyer in the management training program at Macy’s department store, Bert was a Yalie and a former marine who had been through boot camp at Parris Island as well as some shooting action that he never talked about. Bert lived with his mother and brother in a two-room apartment in the east fifties, a “good” address. The only two windows in this place gave out on a filthy air shaft; it was in constant dusk. Bert’s mother, a fragile neurasthenic, slept on a fold-out couch in one room, the two men in twin beds in the other. The kitchen was a hot plate, a tiny refrigerator, and a sink. Although on their uppers, they pretended to be rich; Bert’s mother was desperate for him to marry a girl with money. His brother, Andrew, also a veteran of the war in Europe, suffered from mild shell shock and was unemployable.

  “Bert,” Wellesley, 1948.

  Bert wasn’t merely handsome; he had the gloomy good looks of an actor playing a doomed prince, and not necessarily a Jewish prince; he could have passed for the offspring of almost anything but Asian or Nordic lineage. He wore flannels and tweeds, cordovan shoes, black knit ties. His thick shiny hair was so black it was blue, like Prince Valiant’s. I was in love with him chiefly because of the way he looked and because his melancholy suggested—mistakenly—both depth and an inquisitive, playful mind. Claiming to be protecting my virginity, he insisted we have oral sex.

  Bert wrote catchy song lyrics that he and Andrew sang while a third man, a friend, accompanied them on the guitar and also sang. They were better than “amateur” but never seemed able to find the right door to open, the door leading to the garden of worldly success. I went away to Wellesley and languished there for an entire semester, writing to Bert every day. Letters from him came back in a tiny, exact hand, stuffed with new lyrics. I talked to him several times a week from the pay phone on the ground floor of the off-campus house where I lived with twelve other freshman. My romance with Bert occupied a good deal of talking space in this mandatory family. An ex-marine, an older man, his gorgeous picture on my bureau, sitting on a stone wall somewhere, looking seductively at the photographer. To most of my “sisters,” few of whom had gone out with anyone more exciting than the boy next door in Kentucky, Tennessee, California, Texas, Bert was an exotic.

  Sometimes Bert made me feel terrible and I couldn’t understand why, since we were in love. He told me I was too fat; he called my father a tyrant; he scolded me for the absence of religion in my life; he criticized exuberance and repeatedly told me to stop acting like a baby. His piety was a constant surprise because he was so intent on climbing the social ladder that led to largely Christian territory. How could he be a Jew and be accepted by those who lived there at the same time? Once he took me to Sabbath services in a cramped East Side synagogue off Lexington Avenue, where I sat with the women. The arms of the rabbi’s wife were covered with black silky hair, like a man’s; I couldn’t take my eyes off her arm where she had draped it over the pew in front of me.

  Agreeing with most of Bert’s estimates of my worth, my family, my appearance, and my failure to act more maturely, I was determined to transform myself into the girl he seemed to think I could be—without ever asking him what about me didn’t need fixing. He said we should get engaged and I agreed, liking the sound of it. “I’m engaged to be married.” After Bert paid me a weekend visit—in a borrowed car—my housemates—without being asked—told me I was much too cheerful and nice for him; they said he was gloomy and possessive, a grouch. It was pointed out to me that during the two and a half days he was there I hardly said a word. “He’s a jerk, you deserve better,” they told me. I was sure they didn’t know what they were talking about, they hadn’t, as I had, bothered to unpeel the top layer and see the wondrous person that lay beneath.

  When it came to Bert, my parents made no attempt to hide their distaste. My mother said, “He sulks,” “He’s a nar-sist.” My father said, “He won’t look me in the eye. He’s shifty-eyed.” There were things they could have added aloud but which they transmitted silently, such as Bert was poor and worse: he was a Russian Jew. Having convinced themselves that Bert was the ghost of Henry James’s Morris Townsend, with his greedy eyes on the heiress’s fortune, they declared a covert war on my romance.

  One night after we had been going together long enough for my parents to realize that Bert wasn’t simply another of my two-week flings, he phoned me at Wellesley, an expense he saved for emergencies. “Your father is having me investigated. He must be crazy. What does he think I am—a criminal?”

  I wanted to tell him he was mistaken but I couldn’t; it sounded like authentic Edward Bernays. This was my father, who often picked up the downstairs extension and listened in on my phone conversations. Bert complained that his boss had told him a man had been sniffing around Macy’s, asking questions about Bert. A friend in the Yale alumni office reported roughly the same thing. It sounded as if my father might actually believe that Bert was an impostor. In his deliberate and languid way Bert was burning like a tiger whose meal has just been snatched from under his nose.

  “That’s just my father,” I said. “He thinks ravening animals are after me.”

  “You’re making a joke of something terribly serious. . . .”

  I told him that my father was relatively harmless, that he might root like a pig after truffles but that he would always stop short of violence. Bert insisted that he had already done violence—“to you, Anne. Don’t you see how he’s questioning your judgment and your relationship with me? He doesn’t trust you to think straight. Anyone with half a brain will tell you he’s doing violence to your character—and pulling you down to some awful, mindless level. I don’t know why you let him do that to you. . . .”

  I started to cry. “I didn’t know he was going to do that,” I said. “And anyway, I couldn’t have stopped him. . . .”

  “And I don’t know why I keep seeing you under these circumstances. . . .” Not one to take things lightly, Bert sounded like a tired old man.

  “Then why do you?” I could hardly get the words past my tears.

  “God only knows,” he said. “I guess because you have a nice smile.”

  When I challenged my father his admission was buried under a mountain of excuses: “You don’t know anything about Bert.” Not true. “I always check up on their background when I meet someone I know nothing about.” Also not true. “You said he lives in Midtown in the fifties. I don’t see how he can manage that on his salary.” That was true enough—if you hadn’t seen the size of the apartment he lived in. I was disgusted.

  My father’s operative found nothing to pin on Bert; in fact, everything he had told me about his history turned out to be true. Yet having failed to get the goods on Bert, my parents persisted to demonstrate their contempt. My mother’s face grew blotchy when she talked about him, my father’s went pale with malice. They snarled whenever they had to say his name.

  They cooked up an alternate strategy to pry us apart; my mother was its messenger. “Annie dear, Dr. Kubie would like to see you.”

  “Who’s Dr. Kubie? What does he want to see me for?”

  “Dr. Lawrence Kubie—he’s a psychoanalyst—one of the most respected in the field. He’s a member of the Institute. He knew Eddie’s uncle.”

  “But there’s nothing wrong with me,” I said, “Why would I want to see a headshrinker?” Then it hit me. “I suppose this is about Bert.” Reams of undelivered dialogue remained inside my head.

  “As a matter of fact—”

  “You already talked to this doctor person about me—”

  “Maybe I should have asked you before talking to him,” she said, her apology somewhat disarming me. But the idea of chatting with Dr. Kubie was about as attractive as having a molar pulled without Novocain. If I paid him a visit I would, in one sense, be admitting I needed help. It wasn’t hard to guess what they were up to: the doctor, under orders from my parents, would try to sever me, the swimm
er, from Bert, the shark.

  Bert didn’t want me to have anything to do with Dr. Kubie. He said my parents had overstepped all reasonable bounds. “They had me investigated as if I was a crook or a scam artist,” he said. “They despise me. They’ll do anything to get you to stop seeing me. You mustn’t listen to them.”

  I reminded Bert I was only eighteen and living at home; it wasn’t as if I had adult freedom. “Don’t worry,” I told him. He frowned terribly, took out his wallet of tobacco, stuffed the bowl of his pipe with it, and then lit up, dragging out the procedure to fill a couple of minutes. “Will you ever grow up, Anne?”

  Over Bert’s objections, I made an appointment, agreeing to go mainly because I was positive I could resist any attempts to separate me from the man I was in love with. Dr. Kubie’s office was in the seventies between Park and Lexington, a choice suite of rooms. He opened the door himself. He was wearing heavy, black-rimmed glasses and a dormant smile—I figured the name of Freud had preceded me like a red carpet. “Come in come in,” he said, with more enthusiasm than the situation called for.

  We sat down and he began to ask me questions, some of them reasonable, others that struck me as crazy: When had I begun to menstruate? How did I feel about becoming a woman? How did my parents get along? Did I think they were faithful to each other? Had I ever wanted to be a boy? How many boyfriends had I had? Had I had sex with any of them? Had I ever met my great uncle? I tried to answer the way I thought he wanted the answers to go. It was like being onstage in a play, not having thoroughly learned your lines. I was anxious and creative. I told him, for instance, that I’d had sex with a cousin when I was eleven, which was a lie—we had only considered it. I told him that I had run away from home—also a lie; I had considered this too but had been too scared to try it. He didn’t take notes but stared at me, as if that would help him bore into my psyche, and sat perfectly still, a heavy presence with the focus of a gold miner on a suggestive hillside.

  “Now suppose you tell me about this young man of yours.”

  I told him Bert worked at Macy’s and that my parents didn’t like him. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?

  “Why do you think you’re here?” Was the man hard of hearing?

  “Because my parents are scared to death I might marry someone they don’t like. They think Bert’s bad for me.”

  “This is not about your mother and father; it’s about you. Is he bad for you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you think they think he is?”

  “Because he doesn’t have any money and he’s a Russian Jew. He also goes to services every Saturday. We aren’t observant at all. My father doesn’t believe in religion.” I thought this remark halfway witty, but Dr. Kubie didn’t pick up on it.

  He wanted to know if Bert was Orthodox. “Do you think your parents are snobs? And that’s the reason they want him out of your life?”

  “Yes. That’s part of it. I honestly don’t know the rest—why they hate him so much.”

  “That’s a pity,” he said. For a moment he looked as if he too had forgotten his lines. Then he asked me if we had ever made love, except he called it “sexual intercourse.”

  I shook my head. He raised his eyebrows, a cliché of surprise. “How old did you say you were?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Why haven’t you? You say the two of you are in love.”

  “Only one of my friends has had sex, as far as I know,” I said. I realized that this was about as useful as telling him that our dog had recently been run over by a taxi.

  “Don’t you think it’s about time you gave it a try?”

  I was so stunned that my thoughts were wiped out. My mouth fell open.

  “There’s no reason to be afraid,” he went on, “there are ways of preventing conception, you know.” He said this as his smile stopped being latent and became manifest. Something about it made me want to turn away; it was a lustful smile, and was not so much about his wanting to have sex with me as it was his vision of my coupling with Bert and causing trouble at home, deliberately making mischief, or else why encourage me to break the rules?

  “Yes, I definitely think you and your young man should go off together for a weekend say, spend a night or two at a nice inn somewhere in the country. Bucks County is lovely.” He paused, waiting for me to say something, and when I didn’t he went on. “I mean it. Get away from parental eyes and ears. See how you feel about each other in a different setting. Does he have a car?”

  I told him Bert didn’t have a car but that he could probably borrow one. Dr. Kubie repeated his proposal. “I think it will be a splendid test. You will think about it, won’t you? And after you’ve gone on this little trip I hope you’ll give me a call and let me know how it turned out. You’re a big girl, Anne, you have a right to your own life.”

  It wasn’t often that I had a chance to catch up with my parents, who always seemed to be at least a couple of yards ahead of me. When, with sprinting heart and poorly concealed glee, I told my mother that Dr. Kubie had suggested an illicit weekend, she refused to believe me. “No, really,” I said. “It’s true. He thinks Bert and I ought to go away for a romantic weekend somewhere.”

  I might have been telling my mother that I had been instructed to dismember the cat and roast it on a spit for dinner. She went to look for my father, who was sitting at his desk, talking on the telephone. Patiently, she waited while I stood just outside the room, where I could hear them.

  Betrayed! My father shouted that he was going to get his lawyer to write a letter threatening Dr. Kubie with a malpractice suit. My mother used the word unconscionable. My father, still at the top of his voice, said. “And he knew my uncle!” I smiled in the dim hallway, marveling at the extent of the damage I had done.

  When I reported back to Bert, he permitted one of his rare smiles to emerge briefly, admitting that he never would have guessed. But in the end, he couldn’t get a car and, besides, the places where we would have liked to spend the weekend—Bucks County, somewhere green in Connecticut—were too expensive for him, and he refused to let me pick up the tab. So we visited a Yale friend, who had a house on Long Island, where we were shown to the same guest room. Saturday night we had oral sex, as we had done all along, because, as he told me solemnly soon after we met, he didn’t believe in “sex before marriage.”

  Thereafter, my parents acted as if the Dr. Kubie incident had never happened, and if they spoke to the doctor I never heard a word about what was said on either side; they may have been bellicose but they knew when to cut their losses.

  It wasn’t until Bert took me to his uncle’s jewelry store on Boston’s Washington Street to buy an engagement ring that I balked. Standing over the counter looking at the diamonds blinking expensively up at me, I was about to pick the one with the most sparkle when the blood drained from my head, my knees went soft, and the warmth of a swoon started to circulate. “I have to get some air,” I said, startling the uncle and eliciting one of Bert’s celebrated frowns. We made it to the elevator just in time for me to throw up on his shoes. If I was too stupid, while fully conscious, to acknowledge my own misgivings, my unconscious did it for me. I told Bert I was much too young to marry, hoping, by this fib, to save at least a small piece of face for him. He went berserk; in the end it took me weeks to escape. I think he needed my father-thetyrant’s moneyfamepower more than he needed me.

  Ian. I met Ian during Christmas break of my sophomore year at Wellesley. His maternal aunt, Janet Anstruther, was a writer (under the pen name Jan Struther) whose novel about life among the upper classes in wartime England had been made into a three-handkerchief, blockbuster movie of the same title, Mrs. Miniver. This fact—along with Janet’s acerbic style—impressed my mother, who had made friends with her after they were introduced at a fancy New York gathering. Janet had a nephew, my mother had me; phone numbers were exchanged, Ian called me, we agreed to meet. I was smitten at once; a British accent has a way of disarming the y
oung and naïve. Ian took me to dinner in a dusky Italian place in the Village near his apartment on Horatio Street. A nice touch, the Village apartment, suggesting a free spirit. Ian was as handsome as Bert though the mold he came out of was altogether different. Ian, another of whose aunts—on his father’s side—was a niece of Queen Victoria, was obviously the product of careful, aristocratic marriages. He had light hair, a thin, delicate nose, and a perfectly formed, mobile mouth. At the peak of each high cheekbone was a small patch of hair that he never shaved off; “bugger tufts,” he called them—all the men in his family apparently wore them as a badge of clannish pride. These tufts struck me as silly, I had to stop myself from saying “You forgot to shave those things,” but what did I know about the tribal customs of Scotland? He said he wore kilts back home in the Highlands, along with a tam, and a sporran, a small leather handbag that lay over his abdomen. His cousin was the much married duke of Argyll. An army captain during the war, Ian was private secretary to the British ambassador to the United Nations. This meant dark blue suits, subtly striped shirts of the softest Egyptian cotton, hair brushed to a sheen by the two-handed method favored by upper-class Brits. I felt I either had to dismiss the entire package as de trop or to fall in love with it.

  Ian was verbal, playful, slightly bookish, and he loved the United States. He loved New York, even its more dismal neighborhoods and its gritty atmosphere. He loved Massachusetts; in a rented car, we toured New England. He couldn’t seem to get over the road sign BEAR LEFT, preferring to read the verb as a noun, and pretty soon he gave me a private name: Bear. A thorough gent, who, surprisingly, did not try to bed me, he gave me the sense that I was no more than a cute American toy for him to play with, and that, for many reasons, he would never yearn for my heart—which I would gladly have torn from my chest and handed to him had he asked for it.

  Ian Anstruther in front of Inverary Castle, 1950.