Inseparable
It was near twilight, the glossy time when you can’t imagine the lake is ever bright blue or its surface ever roughened by wind, or that the wind can blow so hard in one direction you can’t row against it. We were moving tranquilly, the prow of the old amber guide boat opening a path through black water, my father rowing, oars dipping one at a time, making the only sound in a silence so encompassing even occasional shouts from the shore seemed a form of quiet. He was wearing “ordinary clothes,” was dressed like the Yale man he was, as if these were the same faded khakis he’d worn in New Haven in 1939, the same Lacoste tennis shirt, gray-green Shetland sweater the worse for wear, and worn white sneakers. I was ten, or maybe eleven, and it began as a game: Poppy, tell me about your old girlfriends! I expected to hear again about “Lois,” whom he had dated in Seattle during the war, about whom my mother teased him mercilessly. He stopped rowing, let the boat glide, and told a story.
After the months in the New Zealand military hospital when he came home, my father found himself at parties with Jenny McKean, four years younger than he was, just nineteen, black hair to her shoulders curled under and so smooth that in photographs it looks polished. He had known her summers when he went to Rockmarge, and his parents and Jenny’s were in the same social group; the McKeans lived in Beverly, just miles away. Through her father, Quincy Adams Shaw McKean (“Shaw”), Jenny was descended from Thomas McKean, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, and Louis Agassiz, the scientist. Her mother, Margarett Sargent, a modernist painter and sculptor who had exhibited in New York, was one of the first in Boston to collect modernist art, a fourth cousin of the painter John Singer Sargent, and a granddaughter of Horatio Hollis Hunnewell, a Boston philanthropist and horticulturalist who’d made a fortune in railroads in the years after the Civil War. By the spring of 1943, when my father began to court Jenny McKean, her family had all but fallen apart. Her mother, who had always had extramarital affairs with both men and women, was an undiagnosed manic-depressive who drank to medicate herself, and she hadn’t had an exhibition in nearly a decade. Within two years she would enter a sanitarium, and within five she and Shaw would be divorced and Shaw married again.
My parents always said they first met at a dog show on the McKeans’ lawn and first noticed each other in a Vermont drugstore. By 1943, when my father was back from the Pacific and recuperating, Jenny was at Barnard in New York, and one night, when he met his old friend Cord Meyer for a drink, Jenny was Cord’s date. My father let his admiration be known by aiming a siphon bottle and shooting seltzer at her from across the table, all of them collapsing into laughter. Later he asked Cord if Jenny was his girl, and if not, he’d take her out. On their first date, my father took my mother to the St. Regis, where they danced to “I’m in Love with a Soldier Boy.” Later, in the darkness of the Kretchma, a Russian café on East Fourteenth Street, they talked and talked and talked. “If a man can tell someone else of his fear,” my father later wrote of that evening in a letter to their unborn child, “he lessens it.” As he lit Jenny McKean’s Chesterfield, his hand touched hers, and they fell in love.
“She was so beautiful,” he always said, repeating the story. During the summer of 1941, he’d known her as just a kid, one of “the younger set,” a group of friends who went to parties together; she’d been his friend Potter’s girl, and they’d all called her “Nutty Brown” because of her tan and because her navel, exposed by her fashionable two-piece bathing suit, reminded someone of a nut. Now she was almost twenty, so sophisticated my father was shocked when she told him she was only nineteen. In a newspaper photo, they smile for the photographer, sitting on the banquette at LaRue, a favorite bistro; she is wearing shiny black and white stripes, and he is in uniform. “Marine hero, Boston socialite,” reads the caption. The gunshot wound had healed enough for them to dance the fox-trot, and their long, searching conversations continued—his guilt at having killed Japanese soldiers, her shame about the mother who drank alone in a huge dark room hung with paintings of empty courtyards and white horses. “Everyone thought we were engaged,” my mother said. She was certain that after his leave my father would choose a post at the Marine training program in New Haven so they could spend weekends together. But sometime in early July, they went for a walk at Rockmarge, down the willow path to the ocean.
“All of a sudden he looked at me,” my mother remembered.
“I probably won’t see you so much this summer,” my father announced. “I’ve been posted to Seattle.” After he told her this, my mother cried for two days.
Telling me his version of the story that evening on the lake, my father seemed a bit embarrassed, certainly full of regret. “I wrote her about a girl I picked up in a bar in Minneapolis,” he said. “An awful girl. Everything Jenny wasn’t. Coarse, uncivilized, voluptuous, a tart.”
“He wrote to me in detail about a girl he picked up in a bar,” my mother said.
“I wrote your mother continually,” my father said, “until I got to Seattle, and then, after a while, I met Nona.”
Nona. I looked out across the lake. “Like the song?”
“Yes,” he said.
And then we both sang: “Nona is like a dream come true / So sweet and unaffected.” He told me more—about her family’s enormous house outside Seattle, about tennis games and weekend dinner parties, how he might have married her if she hadn’t been Catholic. An Episcopal priest, he explained, couldn’t have a Roman Catholic wife.
The next time I heard about Nona Clark was in the dining room of the Pierre Hotel in New York. Gami, my father’s mother, had taken us, my father and me, out to dinner at the beginning of my junior year in college. The waiters, in Raj costume, tried to feed us chicken curry. I think we all had lobster Newberg. I made some comment about a pretty blonde across the room looking at my father as if she knew him, and Gami, almost eighty, took up the teasing: “Yes,” she said gleefully, “and you went to the St. Regis to meet that woman from Seattle who telephoned. Went to meet her, even though you didn’t think you should!”
“That was after Nona Clark’s husband shot himself,” my father explained evenly. “She needed to talk.”
I imagined the scene: hotel bar, a beautiful woman with red hair—he’d told me she had red hair—dressed in mourning, soothed by conversation with a tall young man she’d known as a marine before both married others. I next heard about Nona not long afterward when Luke, my first serious boyfriend, was drafted and broke up with me before enlisting in the Marines, a choice inspired by my father. It was 1966, and the Vietnam War was just reaching the consciousness of students like me. I had “lost my virginity” to Luke the summer before in his Riverside Drive sublet. (Of course, I did not tell my father I had slept with Luke—marriage was a “sacrament,” premarital sex was a “sin.”) In his pastoral voice, my father reassured me: he’d married my mother even though he’d gone to Seattle before they were engaged; and even though he’d gone out seriously with Nona Clark, he found that he was still in love with my mother. Seattle had been a choice, he explained—he could have taught in the East to be “near Jenny,” but he needed “more life on his own.” Perhaps, he suggested, my boyfriend Luke also “needed freedom from all his burdens.” That my father considered my mother burdensome passed unquestioned into my mind, as did his characterization of me as part of what he called Luke’s “knapsack of stones.”
Planning a trip to Europe a year later, the summer before my senior year in college, I saw that I could pass through Geneva and asked my mother if she thought I could visit Nona Clark. The name had come up again, and with it the sense I had that night on the lake that I might finally come to know my father, though now it seems to me I also wanted to know something about my parents’ marriage. My mother encouraged me, but it must have been difficult. Nona’s name had come up again because, weeks before, she had come for a drink on her way through Washington. “We, I mean they, talked for an hour,” my mother said, reporting with sarcasm that she’d made a point of sitting next to Nona, whom she’d met only briefly twenty years earlier. Apparently Nona never turned to face her, looked only at my father, who sat across from her in the blue easy chair. She’d called my mother the next day and apologized—her neck had been stiff. To me, then, just twenty, “Nona Clark” was part of a distant past, but of course my father and Nona had been involved fewer than twenty-five years before, which I now understand is no time at all.
Nona was the only child of a lumber tycoon’s son who had married a Catholic and converted. Sheltered and adored at her family’s estate in the Highlands, Seattle’s version of Tuxedo Park, she made her debut both at home and in San Francisco and went East to Radcliffe. But the United States entered the war, trains were commandeered for soldiers, and she left college after her sophomore year. Soon the Pacific campaign brought West the pick of Harvard and Yale, including my father. All his life, Paul Moore had navigated New York and Boston parties where the same last names, and sometimes the same first ones, had turned up for generations. My father hadn’t had many girlfriends, and even though he was powerfully drawn to Jenny McKean, she was part of what he knew. From the way he said Nona Clark’s name, I could tell he considered her something else. “I’ve met,” he wrote his brother, Bill, “a typical girl of the Golden West.”
When she opened the door, I could smell her perfume. She was tall, a woman you would describe as willowy, with pale skin; her wavy red hair was not long, but not short either. We sat down immediately, and she leaned forward, her fragrance becoming more intense. “What about you?” she asked. I’d been to Florence, I told her, and she asked what I had seen. I said I’d seen the Brancacci Chapel, and she asked what I had liked about it. I talked to her about the size of the figures and about the expressiveness in the bodies of Adam and Eve, how they bent in shame leaving the garden. She asked if I’d seen Santa Maria Novella and I said yes, and if I’d liked the Uffizi, and whether I had gone to Siena. Eventually I asked how she met my father. “I met Paul at a party,” she said, “in Seattle.” And then she smiled, breaking into a wistful melodic laugh, rose from the sofa, escorted me to a small bedroom, and left me to unpack.
Halfway through the week, Nona took me to a cocktail party where everyone spoke French, or English with an international accent. Our host, Nona told me en route, was a prince from Liechtenstein whose family had suffered “tragic losses” in the war. The party was at his “cottage,” a substantial stone house on the outskirts of the city. The women wore silk suits and larger pieces of jewelry than I’d ever seen. The men were nothing like my father; they did not wear Brooks Brothers seersucker, and some of them had deftly trimmed mustaches. Nona introduced me as her friend from “the States,” and once in a while the man or woman who shook my hand was a count or countess, and “very rich,” Nona would later whisper. Nona was being courted by an international financier famously wanted by the United States government, and there he was, free to walk across the room, take her hand and kiss it. Since by then she had told me how sad she was about her husband’s suicide, I was surprised when I saw her sitting with the financier on the veranda, a loose silk blouse falling off one narrow shoulder as she leaned toward him, then threw back her head and laughed.
Another night, Nona took me out to dinner. We sat in the back of her big car as the chauffeur drove us along the lake and through the countryside to a small village, and up a narrow street to a tiny restaurant with white tablecloths, upholstered chairs, the smell of flowers in the air. Nona was greeted as “Madame,” I as “Mademoiselle.” I wore the slender lime linen dress with a hot pink welting that my grandmother had bought me in New York. Nona was dressed in silk, gray or off-white, and I remember, because it was the first time I’d seen them, that she wore stockings paler than her skin—when she crossed her legs, I could see her freckles. She spoke about the men at the party, exiles, international businessmen. Her move to Geneva had been an adventure, she said. “But by coming here I wasn’t escaping, you see. I was bringing my children to a totally new life—one that we could begin together, with our pain behind us.”
She did not speak of my father until the last morning at breakfast on the balcony overlooking the city, the lake, Mont Blanc. The sky was hazy and the air warm. An intermittent breeze lifted strands of her hair and the shoulders of her sea green dressing gown. She had a way of looking at me with such attention that I was completely at ease. “You remind me a great deal of your father,” she finally began. “The way we can talk. I remember so well talking to him—on those long summer days. He was a much better listener than most of the servicemen I met at the Officers’ Club. Seattle is so lovely in the summer, and that one was no exception, even though the war was on and many of us had lost people in the fighting. Paul was one of many soldiers in Seattle then. We saw each other for a little more than a year, I think. We were even a little in love. I’m sure marriage to Paul crossed my mind, but he never mentioned it, and there was the war. My mother, who was a grande dame of sorts and quite a difficult woman, liked him a great deal, and I think would have let me marry him even though he wasn’t Catholic. I don’t know whether she was more impressed with his mother’s Cleveland connections or his father’s large interest in the American Can Company. But marriage certainly wasn’t my primary concern, and most certainly wasn’t his.
“We talked about books,” Nona continued, “about Auden and Eliot. About the war and about our families. He never talked about Jenny although I knew there had been other girls—that there were other girls in the East. We played tennis, went sailing, swam, danced, went to parties.” Nona barely paused as she told the story, as if by telling it she might regain who she had been before she married, before her husband’s suicide altered her experience of life. “I remember,” she continued, “sailing out to a little island we had off the mainland and taking a picnic and I remember a drunken songfest in a police station.” And then she stopped talking and looked at me. My hands were on the table between us, and she took one of them. “Look, you can see the mountains rather clearer now; that’s where I take the children skiing in the winter. You must come with us sometime. I’ll give you a winter holiday.”
I was being invited to look at my father in relation to a woman other than my mother. My father and Nona, dressed in tennis clothes, for instance. Picnicking and reading poetry to each other. They liked to talk, Nona said. He had said that, too. I did not report what my father had said that night on the lake, that he might have married Nona had she not been Catholic.
“Your father was very cruel to me,” Nona continued. “I remember when he left. He was so happy that the war was over and that all the killing might stop. He wrote for quite a while, letters from Idaho, Chicago, and from New York after he got back. How he cared for me and missed me. But after about two weeks the letters stopped and I got a telegram: SORT OF SUDDEN. MARRIED JENNY MCKEAN STOP. I remember how I felt. I could not believe that Paul would do such a thing. There had really been no warning. My mother was fit to be tied. She thought it was absolutely inexcusable. I didn’t know how to defend him to her, and I don’t remember exactly what happened. I could hardly forgive him right then and there, but I will thank him for sparing my finding out from the newspaper.”
My father a two-timer? My father one of those boys who suddenly break up with you? Never call again? What was I, his twenty-year-old daughter, to make of this information? What could I do to keep the story at a distance? Fiction. In the creative writing class I took the year after that summer in Europe, I wrote a short story using the events as I’d gleaned them from my parents, the events as I recount them here. But it contains no analysis or reflection. The instructor, who liked the story very much, also remarked that he found it “painful,” but I didn’t think about it that way. The occasional spats I’d witnessed between my parents had left no dent in my ideal, and Nona, after all, was part of my father’s past and now, for me, a shimmering intimation, a private dream.
When I got back from Nona and Switzerland, it was August, and I went straight to the Adirondacks, bringing presents from Europe. I earnestly reported to my father the details of my visit with his old girlfriend, how movingly she’d talked about her husband’s suicide. I did not tell him how much he’d hurt her, and I did not consider what my infatuation with Nona Clark might have reawakened in my mother, who was the same as she always was, buoyant, radiant, curious, given to the sardonic remark. In fact, everything was the same, all of us around the table, the shouting and joking and laughing, my father rowing across the lake or taking one of us for a sail, the family game of prisoner’s base as darkness fell. It would be decades before I learned that the pain in my parents’ marriage had nothing to do with another woman, that my mother’s response to Nona Clark’s stiff neck drew on something she knew nothing of, something sadder and more serious than jealous pique at the rudeness of her husband’s wartime sweetheart.
When my parents married, my mother had a twenty-one-inch waist. The first time she told me this, she was pregnant, lying on a pale pink bed at Rockmarge. Out the big window the willows along the ocean path were moving in the afternoon breeze, my father’s father in summer whites was walking across a lawn so vast it curved downward like the edge of the world, and the sunlight was doubled in its brightness because the ocean shone it back. My great-grandmother’s house was the white of creamy chalk and too big to count the rooms of, so huge and grand that after she died no one in the family could afford to live in it, and so it was torn down, the oceanfront land sold off in pieces.
But the day my mother told me the measurement of her bridal waist, the house was still intact, and when I remember how she said it—“I had a twenty-one-inch waist when I got married”—I can see her young. She has grown to her full height, five foot nine, and carries herself with slight awkwardness, as if such tall slenderness might throw her off-balance. It was this precarious girl whom Benny Bradlee wanted to kiss when he took her to see Now, Voyager, but whom Bobby Potter kissed first. Evenings the summer she was fifty years old and dying, Ben and some of the others who had kissed her at the movies, now powerful men, came and sat with her on her porch in Washington, still making her laugh, still wanting her irony and the quiet way she listened and questioned once you got her attention.
When my mother was four, her mother stood her in front of George Luks, the Ashcan School painter, who made a portrait of her that looked like a Spanish infanta. Almost as soon as she could walk, she would dance even without music, spinning, laughing, spinning, and, when she stopped, drop to the floor and look up to see paintings whirling, the faux Italian furniture rising to the ceiling, edges of light falling out of kilter through the tall windows. They called her Dizzy. At twelve, she turned solemn, and soon after that, beautiful. By the time my mother became beautiful, her mother was almost always in bed in the room at the end of the long hallway, rousing herself for an infrequent meal or gin disguised in a teapot delivered on a tray. My mother talked less about her mother’s drinking than about her inadequacy. “Mama never behaves as a wife to Papa. But then again she never has.” It went without saying that “Mama” was hardly a mother either.
Once, in a letter to my father, my mother drew a cartoon of a family dinner in the paneled dining room at Prides, the big house where she grew up north of Boston, which was not far from Rockmarge. First she drew a rectangle, in the center of which she printed TABLE. Around the table, instead of stick figures, she wrote little blocks of narrative for each of her family. At one end sat “Mama in tears at table.” From “Mama in tears,” a penciled arrow swooped across the drawing and out a portal labeled DOOR. Also tugged from the table by departing arrows were her brother Shaw, sixteen, whose shouts had caused Margarett’s outburst, and her sister Margie, who collapsed into tears and followed her mother out, which in turn caused Shaw to weep and also leave the table. “Papa” did not cry but rushed out “to comfort Margie.” “Jenny” remained “stationary” and “tearless,” her only company the maid, “in and out with more food continually.”
As soon as she could, my mother fled to boarding school in Virginia, to the Madeira School. When she did come home, she sat with her father in the library talking hour after hour about what to do about her mother. Her sister, just a year older, escaped into a life my mother was too shy for. While Margie modeled, posing as a “socialite” smoking Camels for magazine ads, Jenny put on red-framed glasses and read. When she wasn’t reading, she was at the stables wearing a tweed riding jacket with velvet lapels, a hard black hat, and jodhpurs tight at her knees. She laughed with the stablemen, mucked stalls, and threw the shiny smooth saddle onto her own mare. Before boarding school, she’d been a champion rider; a newspaper pictured her then, holding Me Too by the bridle, a silver prize cup in the other hand. My mother was a middle child, between her sister and twin brothers—Me too! she must have thought as she galloped the field close to the sea. When her horse took the jumps, she held her seat so easily she was sure she was flying.
After Madeira, she went to Vassar where she got A’s until the morning she woke up unable to see. My mother always took her glasses off to have her picture taken, so there’s no evidence she had bad eyes. When I think of her then, the Vassar hallway is dark, it’s night, she is alone in her room, and all over are stacks of the books she’s tried to lose herself in. The blinding illness never got a name, and it took a year to get her sight back, not to feel the pain in her head like fists pushing from behind the eyes. She was still recovering, rooming in New York with Ben Bradlee’s sister, Connie, when Paul Moore returned from Guadalcanal the spring of 1943.
They became inseparable, nights in the city, weekends away. It was sweet for my father to bring a girl home to Hollow Hill, to the slate-roofed country house built just after his parents’ marriage, white stain sloughing from its brick walls so they become pink, clipped hedge, pruned shade trees, lawns just turning green again. The Moores had horses and dogs and played family games of croquet. Cocktails were in a library walled with my grandfather’s leather-bound Scott and Tennyson, Browning and Keats, where he sat, taciturn in an armchair placed like a throne, its back to the center window, and where my grandmother, dressed for dinner in a long velvet skirt, made cheerful, pliant conversation. How sweet to show Jenny the rock garden, the roses, the house he’d so missed. The bullet had my name on it, but I guess they spelled it wrong. Now, with his girl, he climbed the stairs to his childhood room with its four-poster and the sailfish he’d caught in Florida mounted above the fireplace, then he ushered her to the guest room where the bed had a mirror headboard. There he kissed Jenny McKean in the midst of his mother’s antiques and colorful decor, so different from the dark Italianate solemnity of the house she’d grown up in. “I love all the luxury,” she wrote him.
Years later, when my father was married to Brenda and no longer romantic about his marriage to my mother, his tender sympathy vanished and he began to tell stories of her ambivalence and extreme emotion. As always he was a vivid storyteller. At his parents’ house after their engagement, in the room with the mirrored headboard, my mother sits at the dressing table, a mirrored vanity painted with deer and trees. She is quietly looking at herself, making sure her hair is smooth. Giving her nose and cheeks another rush of powder, moistening her lips with one more swish of raven red. My father has his dinner jacket on. “Come on, Jenny, it’s time to go downstairs.” She continues to sit, pushing a coil of hair into place, looking at her face from the right, from the left, cursing to herself that she wears glasses, deciding not to wear them, that it’s not so important to see. Suddenly she begins to cry and my father doesn’t know why. He’d bought her a gold dress for their engagement party in Boston the week before, and her proper grandmother had let her know she disapproved, but “Jenny, you looked beautiful, everyone said so,” he now reassures her. She can’t stop crying, and he gets a little frightened. Finally my mother says she simply can’t face all the people downstairs, and, to my father’s astonishment, when he puts his arms around her, she hits him hard, with her fists. When my father told me this story in the early 1980s, his voice driven by blame and judgment, I didn’t understand why, more than a decade after my mother’s death, in the bloom of his new marriage, his retrospect had no compassion for her.
My mother kept scrapbooks, and after my father died, I knew I would return to them. But I was surprised, going to Bank Street when the house was being taken apart, to learn that he had saved wartime letters. I was even more surprised at how many there were. Hundreds, enough to overflow one box into another, and another. Bound into packets with string. I first saw them at Bank Street, dusty, the August after my father died, and later, taking inventory at Stonington, I found more, in frayed shoe boxes stacked in old liquor cartons. My father’s letters home from battle, more than a hundred pages; letters between my parents, from Seattle and later, nearly two thousand pages. Eventually all of them ended up tidily Xeroxed, and I had my set bound at a copy shop. It was in these volumes that I began to look for the beginning of the story of my parents’ marriage unrevised by the decades, commentary that introduces them in their early twenties, between the beginning of their romance in the spring of 1943, through the conversation on the willow walk and my father’s year in Seattle, up to my birth in late 1945.
New York, 1943. The Katharine Dunham dancers, Paul Robeson’s Othello, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! A “set” of friends with last names like Aldrich, Cutler, Fowler, Whitman, and Potter. My mother’s prose fairly clatters with high heels and stylish suits, and I can hear the talk: an exclamatory rush of endearments—“darling,” “dear”—a particular manipulation of the pitch of voice and vowel, an aversion to the direct expression of emotion. I remember these people as tall, as well dressed, as possessing esprit in the use of language and gesture. Those who haven’t died are now very handsome people in their eighties, faded images of the younger selves who vividly enter my imagination as I read the letters. Engagements announced, babies born, leaves given and withheld, casualties, deaths, so many deaths—a war widow, friend of all of them, whom no one can console. The fighting is so part of their lives that in the letters it seems at a remove, but also present, insistent.
When my father left for Seattle the morning after the encounter on the willow walk, he sent my mother flowers. “They meant so much,” she wrote. “They are nectar to the nostrils and reach my navel.” My mother was sitting at her desk in New York. She wanted to apologize. “I might not have showed too much character . . . I am sorry to have interrupted you by humming, to have acted so violently physically as well as mentally . . . I am so really sorry that I made it so hard for you to say goodbye, and hard for myself.” My father had tried to kiss her goodbye and she had become “violent.” Think of her, barely twenty, the daughter of that mother, a mother who once, my mother confided in a letter to my father, stumbling toward her drunk, threw a telephone receiver, by mistake hitting my mother, breaking the skin on her lip, leaving her mouth bruised and bleeding. Take all that into account when you read what she writes: “I wanted to hurt you—anyone . . . I thought of writing you a letter and saying ‘Steer away from women, Paul, you might break someone else’s heart.’”
“There was a fault of ignorance on my side, a fault of naïveté on yours,” my father replied. “Perhaps they went together. Perhaps I was ignorant of your naïveté and you of my ignorance.”
For my mother, though, “the hurt remains physical,” and she tells my father everything. Of flirting “like a wild thing” with Davy Challinor, a former beau whom they both knew—listening with him to “waltzes in a music store booth—yesterday drinking mint juleps at the Stork and teadancing—not to see if I could get out of myself again, but to see if it would soothe the raw edges.” She has “no regrets,” she writes, but her bravado is stiff with pain. She envies my father, in a new place “where listening to ‘I’m in love with a soldier boy’ will not make your throat dry . . .”
Eventually my father admitted that before he left, he’d felt nothing for her at all; that he had not missed her the week he spent in Washington, but that on the train West, the countryside flying past, he’d realized he felt “less alone” with her than with “anyone I have ever known.” And then, plaintively, “Forgive me Jen, will you?” My mother countered that he “felt nothing” because “as the days went by, my weakness made you strong, I needed you more than you needed me and so the magic for you was gone. But still for me the magic persists . . .” In response, my father accused her of being “subjective & inverted & rather unhealthy.” He didn’t mean to sound “stuffy,” he wrote, but seriously, “there’s no point in worrying the scar tissue.”
My mother responded with memories: “the weekend at your house and family bridge and the mirrored headboard for the first time—And Sunday night when we read aloud flower catalogues and you looked so rumpled and young and boyish in your blue shirt and you seemed clumsy like I was, and I wanted you so badly . . .” And then, when they were at her family’s at Prides, “unexplainably, it happened . . . as if there were a string from one end of my body to the other and the string broke and every part of me was flooded with something warm and exciting and true.” No wonder my father chose Seattle over New Haven. No wonder he wrote my mother that she was naïve. The downstairs guest room at Prides, its walls blue French silk with a silvery jacquard, was called the Silk Room. In letters after they reconcile, they will refer to what they did there as “silkrooming.”
In the last years of her life, my mother became a writer and published The People on Second Street, a memoir about our years in Jersey City. When she knew she might die, she began another book, about her childhood and her marriage; in the weeks before her death, she burned much of her writing, but not a passage in which she described herself as having “an intense sexual drive.” She made the admission as if it were an affliction, a deformity, something she had always contended with. It was there already when, at twenty, she wrote my father: “I was just going too fast and you got scared.”