One of Mimi’s happiest childhood memories was of vacationing in Ocean City, New Jersey. During a bad time in her life she had lived in a home for abandoned children in Camden. Every summer the children, eighteen or twenty of them, were taken to Ocean City for a one-week vacation. After the drabness of Camden and the home, the Atlantic seaside was paradise.
Mimi remembered it as a place of wonder with its boardwalk and big, white frame houses, its rolling surf, endless oceanic sky, and its huge merry-go-round. The children from the home got passes to ride free in the afternoon when paying customers were few. Now, in the summer of 1949, she wanted to revisit those memories with me. She had a job in Washington that entitled her to one week of vacation pay. I was entitled to two. Why didn’t we take a week together in Ocean City? I would love it. The air so clean, the sea so beautiful, the nights so soft…
I was not enthusiastic. For one thing, someone had misinformed me about Ocean City, telling me the whole town was little more than a summer-long Christian revival meeting, and I was in a stage of life where I believed it was impossible to have a good time without engaging in sin.
The more serious consideration was my mother. This was the fourth year that Mimi and I had been going together, but my mother still had faint hopes that I might come to my senses and take up with a woman who would be a social asset to a man struggling to amount to something. Mimi, with her tenth-grade education and hard-knock wisdom about the world, was not a woman my mother could visualize presiding in elegant drawing rooms. If Mimi and I took a vacation together, my mother would give way to either despair or fury. Such were the agonies a grown man, almost twenty-four years old, had to endure as the price for living at home. My enthusiasm for Ocean City was low.
On the other hand…
There was always the other hand in this tension between Mimi and my mother. Was I grown-up or still a child? Once asked, the question could have only one answer. I told Mimi Ocean City was a wonderful idea, and we planned to go during the last week of July.
Then some old friends offered a chance to vacation at Provincetown on Cape Cod. George, now a psychiatric resident at Seton Institute in Baltimore, was the author of this plan. By pooling money, four of us could afford a two-week rental at Captain Jack’s Wharf, a briny collection of apartments that was the Bohemian essence of Provincetown, George said. Leo Flashman, the former News-Letter editor who now worked in the family furniture store, would go, and so would Phil Lebovitz, a mutual friend of ours since high-school days. The beauty part was that Lebo, as Phil was universally known, could get his father’s car. Besides eliminating the expense of bus and train tickets, this would also make it easier to pursue loose women once we were camped at Captain Jack’s. I agreed to chip in for one week in Provincetown, then go down to New Jersey and spend the second week with Mimi.
Nobody had warned me against the seductive charms of Cape Cod. After three or four days, I was bewitched by the Provincetown life. Sunny days on the great beach, martinis at sundown listening to New York musicians play Rodgers and Hart in the road-houses, lobster dinners, sleek girls everywhere looking so inviting, though they always turned out to be looking for men with more money and less innocence than we could offer.
The prospect of leaving the Cape after just one week angered me. Was I not a free and independent man? Why should I feel obliged to give up this vision of the artist’s life and tramp off to a New Jersey resort infested with Christians in every conceivable stage of prayer? Oh yes, I was fond of Mimi, she was a nice girl, but perhaps my mother was right, and even if she wasn’t, I had a right to lead my own life, didn’t I?
On July 24, before Mimi could leave for Ocean City, I wrote to her in Washington.
“Darling, I’ve got so much to tell you that I hardly know where to begin.
I’ve completely fallen in love with this place. I’m having a wonderful time doing practically nothing.”
After this cheery opening, I shifted gears:
“I suppose I should tell you what to you will be—I hope—the bad news. I think I will stick out my whole vacation here instead of coming down to Ocean City at the end of the week. There are several reasons for that decision, but the most cogent is—”
I talked about “prohibitive costs,” then assured her that I was sensitive to the disappointment my sudden change of plan would cause her.
“I can imagine perfectly well how this all strikes you, and I’m partly glad that you like me so much that it comes as a blow to you—but partly sad because you probably won’t sympathize with me. First, let me say that I love you very much…”
No, she surely would not sympathize with me. Maybe if I could make her understand my need for inner peace, she would not be too terribly angry.
“I don’t know how to describe the sense of release and relief that has settled over me during this past week. It’s as if all the anxieties, drives and urges that normally keep me on edge were shucked off. The whole idea of returning to Baltimore, the family and the Sun is completely abhorrent and here I feel a terrific independence—and, I admit, a terrific irresponsibility. I just sit in the sun and vegetate and eat and sleep and think…”
This was becoming a very hard letter to write. But how could I tell Mimi that after the elegant pleasures of Provincetown the prospect of Ocean City with hymn-singing on the night air was intolerable. Maybe it was best simply to talk about love.
“I want to see you as soon as possible when I return. I need you in the worst way and have so much that I want to try to tell you.”
That wasn’t going to work either. She was going to be furious, no doubt about it.
“I hope you aren’t angry with me for not dropping by O. City—though I suppose you will be momentarily. If you can restrain your hostile impulses for a few days, you can confront me with them and we can settle accounts—I love you—.”
The letter went on for seven pages before I finally gave up and closed by saying, “I hope you enjoy your vacation as much as I am enjoying mine.”
Ordinary people did not use the long-distance telephone casually in 1949, so I knew there was trouble when Mimi phoned from Washington. I expected her to attack me for breaking my promise and spoiling her vacation, so was startled when she began by saying she was phoning to say good-bye.
Quietly, she informed me the company she worked for was transferring her to Texas. Since she had to leave immediately, we would never see each other again. Before departing, she wanted to tell me one last time how deeply she loved me.
I was flabbergasted. The company she worked for was the Willmark Agency. Its operatives’ work was mainly shopping, in the course of which they checked the quality of service in client stores and whether sales clerks were robbing the till. It was small-pay, minimum-skill labor. As I absorbed the shock of hearing about her departure, I slowly realized Willmark was unlikely to underwrite the cost of moving one of its shoppers from Washington to Texas when it could readily find thousands of Texans ready to take the job. I told her I didn’t believe the Texas story, not for a minute. Why didn’t she grow up and stop playing games? I urged her to go on to Ocean City and have a good vacation. We would see each other in a week and compare notes.
She asked how I could be so callous, so cold, so selfish. I said Texas or no Texas, selfish or unselfish, I was staying in Provincetown another week, and that was that. Asserting myself felt wonderful for perhaps five minutes. Then I was abruptly smitten with bad conscience. How could I have been so callous, so cold, so selfish? Overwhelmed with self-loathing and remorse, I immediately decided to sacrifice Provincetown and go through with our plan for Ocean City. I ran back to the telephone to tell her of her good luck, but the switchboard that took her messages said she was out of touch.
Headed for Washington, I left Provincetown hastily and got to New York in midafternoon. At Penn Station I phoned Provincetown to learn if Mimi had phoned again. Leo said she was there at that very moment, very tired, angry to find me gone, and puzzled about what to do next. I was equally puzzled, but Leo with his talent for being sensible suggested getting her on the afternoon boat to Boston. There she could get a train to New York. I should check into the Hotel Pennsylvania, adjacent to Penn Station, book a room for Mimi, who would be arriving exhausted long after midnight, then leave together next morning for Ocean City.
We did ride the train south together next day, but not to Ocean City. I had spent most of my vacation pay in Provincetown and on New York hotel rooms. Mimi had spent all hers on travel. So much for her Ocean City vacation. I got off the train in Baltimore, she went on to Washington.
People still communicated by mail in those days. It was the twilight of the letter-writing age. Soon the telephone would replace the mail as the means by which people spoke to each other when apart, and everything would be forgotten before it was half spoken. When people still wrote letters, however, forgetting could be hard; letters were a record for posterity. They could make you wince years later, could make you realize that youth was not all glory, but was also comical, cruel, and insufferable. My letter to Mimi the week after the vacation fiasco started generously:
“I feel pretty guilty about hurting you as badly as I did and about being so damned selfish with my own vacation that I ruined yours. You’re right—I can’t rationalize that behavior—it was rotten of me and I secretly feel very bad about it.”
Two paragraphs later, tired of guilt, I criticized her “adolescent behavior” in the Ocean City affair and urged her to “bounce back a little bit older and wiser for the experience, a little bit more of a woman and a little bit less of a scatterbrained adolescent.”
In my next week’s letter I gave her more specific thoughts on how she might improve herself:
“I think it will be good experience for you to toughen yourself to self-reliance. Emerson has a fine essay by that very title, and you would do well to study it and apply yourself. Well, here I am giving you advice in a snotty tone of voice, which is not at all what I want to sound like…”
After this, the letter became almost human, lapsing into small news of people she knew. It was the kind of letter people who felt close to each other used to write long ago to remain close when they were separated:
“This is Sunday night in the Sun office, concluding another week of exciting developments on the home, business and social fronts, and I must bring you up to date on what is happening here. I have just returned from covering a television broadcast upstairs. The story was about a radioactive frog, and it took the last ounce of my waning wit to think of a hundred words to pour into the news story mold…”
Long afterward, when I tried to make sense of my bad behavior and those terrible letters of mine, I saw that Mimi and I, though we didn’t realize it, were practicing being married. The broken promises, the angry scenes, the ultimatums, the patronizing lectures, the sudden onsets of panic about loss of freedom were all elements of what marriage would involve for people as young as we were. They were the routine stuff of Hollywood’s romantic comedies on which we had both grown up.
Those movies always ended with Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Ginger Rogers, Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, and Katharine Hepburn getting married to Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Fredric March, Robert Montgomery, Fred MacMurray, James Stewart, Fred Astaire, or Melvyn Douglas. What was happening between the two of us was basic Hollywood romantic comedy, which could have only one possible conclusion. Mimi and I had another adventure or two ahead of us before the plot was completed at the altar in the spring of 1950 when she was not quite twenty-three years old and I was twenty-four.
The altar was chosen by my mother. It was in a small, sedate Lutheran church near Marydell Road to which she was temporarily dedicated. Shortly after our wedding, the pastor began expressing views on trans-substantiation that outraged my mother, though I had never known her to have the smallest interest in the matter until then, and she went back to her beloved Papa’s Methodists. In early 1950, though, her loyalty to Lutheranism was still strong enough to persuade the pastor to overlook Mimi’s and my indifference to Lutheran creed and perform the marriage.
He asked only that Mimi and I come for a private chat before the ceremony. He was scarcely older than we were and probably far less experienced in romance and disillusion, considering that Mimi and I were starting the fifth year of our courtship.
Gingerly, he broached the subject of sex to point out that marriages were often imperiled because young people, innocent of the sexual mysteries, were psychologically unprepared for the complexities and difficulties of carnal love. Sex was not easily discussed among strangers in 1950. Stammering and blushing, but determined to do his duty, the young pastor seemed bent on leaving Mimi and me just as embarrassed as he was. Hoping to ease him into more comfortable waters, I told him I had read excellent books on the subject, and Mimi and I jointly assured him that we were fully aware of where babies came from.
We were married on a rain-drenched Saturday in March. Mimi had come over from Washington the night before and spent the night with Aunt Sister and Uncle Harold, who showed her the family snapshot album and entertained her with stories about the old-time Bakers of Morrisonville, Virginia, and about my father, who had died in 1930 when he was only thirty-three years old. Aunt Sister was the only daughter in that generation of thirteen children. She and her husband, Harold, had always been especially fond of my sister Doris and me, and had liked Mimi from their first meeting.
Mimi and I had both bought new suits to be married in. Hers was a beige gabardine with a tightly fitted jacket and narrow skirt. She wore a dark blue hat with pale pink flowers and a veil. What a lovely spectacle she was when I first saw her at the altar. I was probably not so dazzling, though I had tried. My new suit was a blue woolen double-breasted from The Hub, with heavily padded shoulders and lapels five inches wide.
After the ceremony we went back to Marydell Road for the reception my mother had prepared. Going all out to fulfill his duties as best man, George had borrowed his father’s car and drove us to Penn Station to catch the train to New York, where we were booked into the Commodore Hotel for a four-day honeymoon that would just about exhaust our capital. All the way north we sat in the coach watching the rain beat against the window and studying the reflections of ourselves in our wedding finery.
When the train finally deposited us in the vast steel cavern of Penn Station in New York, I was shy about going immediately to the hotel and facing a desk clerk. Suppose he demanded proof that we were actually married. Though we had documentary evidence, it would reveal that we had just been married this very day, and he would recognize us as newlyweds. Of course I knew all this was silly, but silly things could be worrisome, too. So I suggested we have some railroad station food to strengthen ourselves for the journey to the hotel, and Mimi agreed. When we were seated in the Savarin restaurant, however, I was dismayed by the menu prices and suggested we limit ourselves to coffee and blueberry pie.
When the room clerk at the Commodore heard my name and called a bellboy to take us upstairs without further interrogation, waves of gratitude and relief washed through me. From there on, my fear of being humiliatingly exposed to all Manhattan as a newly married man gave way to another kind of despair: New York made me feel that I was hemorrhaging money. Mimi, whose free-spending ways were obviously going to create severe tests for our married happiness, insisted on going to the theater to see Ethel Waters in The Member of the Wedding and the Kurt Weill musical Lost in the Stars. I ruled out a third play as an extravagance, but agreed to the more modest costs of movie tickets for The Third Man, which was playing in Times Square.
Still, even though we avoided using room service and ate a lot of our meals in the hotel coffee shop, it was obvious that staying all four days would send us back to Baltimore bankrupt. Mimi was agreeable when I suggested we cut the honeymoon short by a day and use the money instead to help furnish our apartment back home.
The apartment was two rooms and a narrow kitchen in the second-floor rear of a stately gray stone house on West Monument Street, just a block off Mount Vernon Place. The rent was fifty-five dollars a month. With about two hundred dollars, which we had for furniture, Leo Flashman had provided two good armchairs, a daybed that could pass for a couch, two lamps, and a small rug. My mother, who was on the verge of buying new bedroom furniture for Marydell Road, gave us a battered double bed and a table she had moved around with her since leaving New Jersey in 1937.
Since I didn’t know how to drive, Bill Gresham, who boasted of great experience driving trucks, volunteered to move the furniture from Marydell Road to Monument Street in a rental pickup truck. He arrived with the truck and a brutal hangover, and I soon realized that the boasts about his truck-driving skills had been hollow bluster. With much jerking, stalling, and cursing of the clutch, he got the truck under way, and we roared along for a mile or so with bedsprings and frame bouncing up and down in the back. Then at the foot of West Baltimore Street, where there was a ninety-degree turn on a downhill grade, Bill decided that he could take the truck through it without wasting any energy by applying brakes.
The truck did not quite turn over, but the terrible clatter behind told me we had left a lot of bedding in the middle of West Baltimore Street. Bill, who was not hearing as well as I was, kept his foot on the gas pedal until I screamed for him to stop and back up. By then, oncoming traffic was already running over the bed boards.
All this had been done before the wedding, and our apartment was waiting when we returned from New York. The financial situation was even grimmer than I had realized. The Sun had recently boosted my salary to seventy dollars a week, but before the wedding cake had dried out, Mimi gave me crushing news. She had unpaid department store bills in Washington amounting to $451.17. These were spread among six stores, and each of the six had a credit manager who was demanding immediate payment as the price for not blackening our reputations throughout the capitalistic world.
Asking me to come up with $451.17 was comical. They might as well have asked me to pay the European war debt. When Mimi mentioned the existence of these bills, I asked how she could bear to run up such astronomical debt without becoming depressed. Didn’t she realize that on her Willmark salary she would never have been able to liquidate such debt? No, she said, that hadn’t crossed her mind. She had thought that sooner or later something would turn up to help her pay them.
Like a poor, miserable, overworked husband who would have to devote the rest of his life to paying for her extravagant ways? I asked.
She urged me not to start feeling sorry for myself. Everybody had problems. Why let them get you down?
Why let them get you down? My whole life was now mortgaged to the demands of six vicious, bill-collecting credit managers, who were promising to destroy me, and I should not let that sort of thing get me down? What kind of life did she think I had led all my life anyhow? Did she think it was the wastrel’s, ne’er-do-well, spendthrift life, easy come, easy go, Mama’s rich and Papa don’t care? Was that the kind of life she thought I had lived? Was it the kind of life she thought I proposed to live now that I was married? Well, if so, she had better have another think because…
So went our first quarrel, a model for a thousand to come, all of them about money, which was so terribly important to me, but so ridiculously unimportant to the Sun. We finally paid off all six department stores by doling out five dollars apiece some months and as much as ten dollars and fifteen dollars apiece toward the end of the year.
By that time, it was urgent to get the old bills paid because we were piling up new bills, including some I hadn’t anticipated when we were having a zany time carrying on like crazy young things in Hollywood romances. After three months of marriage, Mimi was pregnant, and one year and five days after our wedding, we were parents and more desperately broke than ever.