I always encourage student therapists to enter personal therapy. “Your own ‘self’ is your major instrument. Learn all you can about it. Don’t let your blind spots get in the way of understanding your patients or empathizing with them.” And, yet, I’ve been so closely bonded to one woman since I was fifteen years old and thereafter so wrapped in my large family that I often wonder whether I can truly enter the world of a person who goes through life alone.
I often think of my years before Marilyn in harsh black and white: the color seeped in after she entered my life. I remember our first meeting with preternatural clarity. I was in the tenth grade of Roosevelt High School and had been living in my new neighborhood for about six months. One Saturday in the early evening after I had spent a couple of hours gambling at the bowling alley, Louie Rosenthal, one of my bowling chums, told me there was a party nearby at Marilyn Koenick’s house and suggested we go. I was shy and not very keen on parties, and I didn’t know Marilyn, who was in ninth grade, a half-semester behind me, but, as I had no other plans, I agreed to go.
Her home was a modest brick row house, identical to every other house on Fourth Street between Farragut and Gallatin, with a few steps leading to a small front porch. As we approached it we saw a large bolus of kids our age gathered at the stairs and on the small porch, trying to get into the front door. I, socially avoidant as I was, immediately spun around and began to walk home, but my ever-resourceful chum, Louie, grabbed my arm, pointed to the front window facing the porch, and suggested we raise it and crawl in. I followed him through the window, and we made our way through the throng to the vestibule, where, at the absolute center of the milling crowd, stood a very petite, very cute, vivacious girl with long, light brown hair, holding court. “That’s her, the short one, that’s Marilyn Koenick,” Louie said as he moved into the next room to find himself a drink. Now, as I said, I was generally very shy, but that night I astounded myself and, instead of turning back and retreating through the window, I pushed through the crowd and made my way to the hostess. When I got to her I had no idea what to say and simply blurted out, “Hi, I’m Irv Yalom and I just crawled in through your window.” I don’t recall what else we said before her attention was diverted by others, but I do know I was a goner: I was drawn to her like a nail to a magnet and had an immediate feeling, no, more than a feeling, a conviction, that she was going to play a crucial role in my life.
I nervously phoned her the following day, my first phone call to a girl, and invited her to see a movie. It was to be my first date. What did we talk about? I remember her telling me she had recently stayed up all night reading Gone with the Wind and had to miss school the following day. I found that so lovable I could hardly see straight. We were both readers and immediately fell into endless discussions of books. For some reason she seemed very interested in my dedication to biography at the central library. Who on earth would have ever thought my A–Z biography venture would come in so handy? We each suggested books for the other—I was on a John Steinbeck binge at the time and she was reading books I had never considered—Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I enjoyed James Farrell, she, Jane Austen, and we both loved Thomas Wolfe—sometimes we read the most melodious passages from Look Homeward, Angel, out loud to one another. After only a few dates, I bet my cousin Jay thirty dollars that I would marry her. He paid up on my wedding day!
What was it about her? As I write this memoir and reacquaint myself with my younger self and realize what a mess I was and how much I moaned throughout my life about not having had a mentor, it is suddenly dawning upon me: I did have a mentor! It was Marilyn. My unconscious grasped that she was uniquely suited for the task of civilizing and elevating me. Her family history was similar enough to mine for me to feel at home with her, but differed in just the right ways. Her parents were also immigrants from Eastern Europe, but were a quarter-or a half-generation ahead of mine and had had some secular education. Her father had arrived as a teenager, but not in such dire economic straits as mine. He had an education, he was a romantic, he loved the opera, and he traveled throughout the country like his hero, Walt Whitman, working at a variety of menial tasks to support himself. After marrying Celia, Marilyn’s mother, a beautiful, sweet woman who had grown up in Krakow and possessed not a trace of my mother’s anger and coarseness, he opened a grocery store that we learned, years after we met, was only one block from my father’s store! I must have walked or biked by that small DGS (district grocery store) hundreds of times. But her father had had the foresight not to submit his family to living in that turbulent, unsafe, impoverished neighborhood, so Marilyn had grown up in a modest but safe middle-class neighborhood and almost never set foot in her father’s store.
Our parents met many times after we started dating, and paradoxically, her parents developed great respect for mine. Her father was aware that my father was a highly successful businessman, and he perceived, correctly, that my mother had a sharp, insightful mind and was really the driving force behind my father’s success. Unfortunately, Marilyn’s father died when I was twenty-two, and I never had the opportunity to know him well, though he did take me to my first opera (Die Fledermaus).
Marilyn was half a year behind me in school, and in those days there were graduation ceremonies both in February and in June. A few months after meeting her I attended her February graduation from McFarland Junior High (which was next door to my high school) and listened in awe as Marilyn, with remarkable poise, delivered the valedictory address. Oh, how I admired and loved that girl!
We were inseparable all through high school and ate lunch together every day, and without fail, we saw one another every weekend. We had such a strong, shared devotion to literature that our other divergent interests seemed of little consequence. She had, very early, fallen in love with the French language, literature, and culture, whereas I preferred the sciences. I managed to accomplish the rather extraordinary feat of mispronouncing every French word I ever saw or heard, while she, for her part, could see only her own eyelashes when she gazed through my microscope. We both loved our English classes and, unlike other students in the school, were oddly entranced by the reading assignments: The Scarlet Letter, Silas Marner, and The Return of the Native.
One day in high school, all afternoon classes were canceled so that the entire school could attend a showing of the 1946 British film Great Expectations. We sat next to one another and held hands. The film remains one of our all-time favorites; over the decades, we’ve probably alluded to it a hundred times. It opened up the world of Dickens for me, and before long I had devoured every book Dickens had written. I’ve reread them many times since then. Years later, when I lectured and traveled a great deal in the United States and Great Britain, I fell into the habit of visiting used book stores and buying Dickens first editions. It remains the only thing I ever collected.
Marilyn, even then, was so adorable, intelligent, and socially skilled that she won over all her teachers. In those years I was many things, but no one would in their wildest dream have thought of me as adorable. I was a good student and excelled in the sciences and also in English, where Miss Davis regularly increased my unpopularity by praising my compositions and posting them on the bulletin board. Unfortunately, in the twelfth grade I was switched to Miss McCauley, the other English teacher, who was also Marilyn’s teacher and prized her greatly. One day in the hall she saw me leaning over Marilyn’s locker chatting with her and thenceforth referred to me as a “Locker Cowboy.” She never forgave me for courting Marilyn, and I had no chance in my classes with her. She was wont to make scathing and ridiculing comments about my written assignments. She mocked me for my stiff performance as a messenger in the class reading of King Lear. Recently two of my children, looking through old papers in our closet, came across a rhapsodic piece I had written about baseball that Miss McCauley had graded C+, and they were outraged that she had mercilessly marked my pages with such comments as “foolish!” or “such enthusiasm about such trivia.” And, mind you, I was writing about such giants as Jolting Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, King Kong Keller, Smokey Joe Page, and “Old Reliable” Tommy Henrich.
I never lose sight of my great fortune of having had Marilyn in my life since I was fifteen. She elevated my thoughts, prodded my ambition, and offered me a model of grace, generosity, and commitment to a life of the mind. So thank you, Louie, wherever you are. Thank you so much for helping me crawl through that window.