Arnie had a heart attack. Walter Bernstein’s brother was his doctor. The minute Dr. Bernstein told me, I hated him—“the doctor.” I resented him. He could have prevented this. “Save him,” I told him. Arnie was in a hospital on Long Island. I took our car and drove there. I have no sense of direction; I don’t know how I got there. When I did, I sat in a chair opposite the bed and stared at Arnie. I had no words. None. After a couple of hours, he said, “Go home.” How intolerable those visits must have been for him. To have to deal, in his precarious health, with someone like me—inadequate and shell-shocked. I knew I couldn’t drive out by myself anymore without rearranging life at home, with anxious children who needed me. I was fine with that. I had a language with them, feelings, motherliness, normality. I was real. I had none of that with Arnie. I did not know how to talk or what to say.
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Until Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, there was no real art coming out of the USSR. The Soviets made movies with happy peasants singing on tractors. Great composers were being reprimanded for not writing music for the masses. Only the ballet was left alone. The people loved the classics. Swan Lake was safe.
I learned not to express these opinions to Arnie, since they made him furious. “You don’t understand,” he’d say. He would reprimand me in front of company in our living room for joking about something he considered sacred. I felt shamed, minimized. When I tried to talk to him about the way he made me feel, he would go to his room and slam the door. I would write boring three-page letters trying to pour out my heart, as close to Marxism as I could get. They would be slid back under the door, where I waited. Sometimes with small grammatical corrections, but always, “Unless you can write me in acceptable terms, don’t write!” That, of course, meant with a knowledge of Marxist philosophy. I tried rereading Marx, but I didn’t know what I was reading or how to apply it.
Eventually, I stopped talking and started painting. I had a lot to get out of my system. Because Fremo was a painter, there had always been art in my life. I’m a good second-rate painter, and painting became a necessary passion for me. I did an ink and watercolor of a woman, her back to the viewer, sitting at a small square table in the middle of a room. There was a Persian rug on the floor. The windows and door were too high on the walls to be reached.
I knew I needed help. I started going to Dr. Austin, a psychiatrist. I was beginning to disassociate. I’d find myself staring out the kitchen window, startled when Arnie entered, when anybody entered. The children and Dinah were a life force; so was teaching. When I wasn’t connected to them, I felt myself floating in a balloon that would rise, unmoored over the city, out, out into the unknown. What I was most afraid of was causing Arnie to have another heart attack, of causing his death by some unthinking, thoughtless act of mine.
When Arnie came home from the hospital, he was worried about working, about his health, about money. Seesaw had closed. My teaching money was just enough to pay Vi. We both felt the pressure.