It was very hot and I was beginning to get tired. More time had slipped by than I had budgeted for the first day. I decided to go back to the hotel, have a swim in the pool, eat dinner, then read until bedtime. I walked back to the lane and just as I got to the gate, a car turned into what had been the entrance to the MacWerters’ driveway. I hailed the driver, who stopped. I came to his open window. “Excuse me, sir, do you live on this farm now?”
The man was about forty-five, well-dressed, and looked me up and down. “Are you Mr. Higgins?”
“No, my name is Zelinsky. I’m just visiting. Why did you think I was Mr. Higgins?”
The man tilted his head toward my old gate. “That farm belongs to a Mr. Joshua Higgins. I’ve lived here two years and I’ve never met him. I’m told he’s old, difficult, and bought the farm just to spite his wife. Apparently he’s owned it for a long time. It’s a huge place. He has someone who raises his tobacco and a little alfalfa. Other than that, no one farms the land.”
“Are you a farmer?”
The man laughed. “I’m an executive with IBM. I work in Lexington. Someone else works my land. I just enjoy it.”
“Do you know the name MacWerter?”
“I came here from Albany, New York. I wouldn’t know anyone you’re looking for.”
That was disappointing, but not unexpected. I got in the car and drove to my hotel.
Three hours later I had finished my swim, eaten dinner, purchased a bottle of my favorite Kentucky bourbon, filled my bucket with crushed ice, and relaxed with a book and bourbon on the rocks. About ten o’clock I wearied of reading and decided to retire early. But when the lights went out, my brain refused to take the hint. I was so lonesome. “Nora, I used to believe in ghosts. I wish you would show up. I’ll speak hillbilly to you if you will. That’s a promise, Nora.”
Her spoken name brought memories. We met in my second year of graduate school at NYU. I was living on a stipend that kept me poverty-stricken. Then, a windfall! My parents, who had always struggled financially, were now doing well and had sent me a one-hundred-dollar birthday gift. To celebrate, I went to a bar in Greenwich Village. After the bartender poured my drink, I discovered I had forgotten to add the money to my wallet. I was a dollar short and trying to placate a screaming barkeep. Suddenly an arm materialized from behind me, slammed a dollar on the bar, and a woman’s voice said to the bartender, “There’s your dollar, jerk. Now shut the hell up!”
That was my introduction to Nora Epstein. For the rest of the evening we wandered Greenwich Village and talked. Nora was twenty-two, a senior at NYU, about five-foot-five with a pretty face, black hair, large dark eyes, and a breathtaking figure. She was also fun, the only joy I had encountered in New York. I hated the city. I considered it dirty, vulgar, loud, violent, overpriced, and inhospitable. Yet Nora was a New Yorker, and she was joy.
We had been seeing each other for about a month when she offered to make us dinner. My kitchen was a disaster. The refrigerator leaked and only one burner operated on the grungy gas stove. My cooking utensils were an iron skillet, two pots with loose handles, and a pasta strainer. In the “silverware drawer” were two knives, two forks, and one spoon. But I had four plates, four bowls, three regular glasses, and, for some reason, a champagne glass.
Into this stark culinary landscape came Nora, bearing groceries. Steaks, potatoes, dinner rolls, the makings for a salad, and the crowning touch—a bottle of red wine. I can still remember her initial reaction when she saw the kitchen.
“Oy vey!”
We feasted, laughing and talking across from one another, our meal teetering at times on the peeling vinyl top of my unstable card table. When we were together, cold, hard, New York City warmed and softened.
After dinner we drank the rest of the wine as we danced to music from the radio. Somewhere during “Stars Fell on Alabama,” we kissed. Then we kissed some more. And then we slowly danced into the bedroom where we gently disrobed each other, slipped between the sheets, and made tender, passionate love. A half hour after we finished, we made love again. This time even more passionate, and with a bit more abandon. Then we talked and stroked each other. My God, her body was beautiful. Eventually we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
A siren outside the hotel brought me back to the present. I got up, poured myself another shot of bourbon, then went back to bed. Soon I returned to my reverie. I thought about waking up that Sunday morning after a perfect night. I was in love and desperate to whisper it to Nora, but I was terrified. We had known each other such a short time and I wasn’t sure how deep her feelings went for me.
I worried that if I got serious too soon, I might lose her. How could she know how she felt in one month? But then, what did I know about Nora? We had talked at length about literature, politics, philosophy, Judaism, and a little about me. We hardly ever talked about Nora. When I told her I was born in Kentucky, she retorted that no Jew was ever born in Kentucky! I was either the second coming of Christ or lying. I stared at her sweet face. God, I loved her! While I was getting back into bed, she woke up. She smiled and stretched like a beautiful cat. “Good morning, sweet prince.”
“G . . . good morning,” I stammered. “Want some breakfast . . . or are you too tired?”
Nora laughed as I realized the double entendre. I could feel my face turn scarlet.
She giggled. “I am tired, but it’s the sweetest tired I’ve ever been. Come here.”
I was happy to enter her arms, and even happier to hear at our climactic moment, “I love you, Samuel . . . I love you, Samuel,” partly smothered by kissing lips and gasps for breath and my own voice, which shouted, “I love you too . . . I love you, Nora!”
I was engaged! Sort of.
A few days later, I met Mr. and Mrs. Epstein. Both were teachers in the New York City public school system, both children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, both political liberals, and neither had ever been to Indiana, the state where we bought our farm after leaving Kentucky. Dinner brought many questions about how a Jewish boy wound up on farms in Kentucky and Indiana, all of which I answered clumsily. I left their home that night feeling they would have been more comfortable if their daughter were seeing a New Yorker, but the fact that I was in graduate school and Jewish gave me a leg up, even if I was a barbarian.
In mid-June of the year Nora and I met, I bought an ancient Chevy and drove my fiancée from Brooklyn, the city of homes and churches, to Crawfordsville, Indiana. It was during that trip that I was to learn that living with Nora would never be dull.
We were traveling through the heartland when she saw a bumper sticker that read:
She screamed. I almost wrecked the Chevy. She could not believe Republicans actually existed and that she was now “surrounded.”
Nora knew nothing about a farm and her reactions to agrarian life were fun to watch. One night, she came upon Dad decapitating the main course for our dinner. Her later description of the event, including the chickens flopping around with blood flying from their headless necks, would have made Kafka faint. She did not eat the chicken.
She learned where veal comes from and I, a lover of veal scaloppini, could never again order it in her presence.
When one of our cows went into heat she asked my always practical father if he would put the cow and bull in the barn so they could have privacy. My parents talked about that every time we visited.
In the end, however, my entire family loved the bubbly, happy, ever curious, and always enthusiastic Nora. She was everything my parents wanted for their son, more than I ever dreamed would fall in love with me, and she sent a buzz through my high school classmates that the Kentucky hick had a gorgeous New York girlfriend. Jennifer Walding, one of our school’s cheerleaders and the sexual fantasy of every Harlan Jeffords High male, actually crossed the street to speak to me! And to meet Nora, of course, who I suddenly realized was more beautiful than the now widening belle of HJH.
A year later Nora and I were married in a reform shul two blocks from the Epsteins’ Brooklyn home and “only one subway change” from where my own mother had been raised. The barefoot boy from the Kentucky hills, naked except for his Levi’s, now met the man he had become, tuxedoed and yarmulke-clad, standing in front of a Brooklyn rabbi.
It took me four more years to get my doctorate. Nora made our living doing social work for the city and I added a little money as a teaching assistant. Then I had a bit of luck. Leland-May College, a venerated little Ivy League clone set in an idyllic New Hampshire town, was looking for a junior faculty member with a background in Victorian literature. They were offering a year as an instructor, following which they would decide whether to offer a tenure-track position. A year later I joined the Leland-May faculty with a mediocre salary, one suit, two ties, two pairs of shoes, and a very happy young wife.
It was getting cold in the hotel room. I turned down the air-conditioning and sat on the edge of the bed. I got my wallet off the nightstand and hunted through the pictures until I found one of Nora and me. It had been taken shortly after we moved to New Hampshire. I took a sip of my drink and gazed at the picture, then put my thumb over her image. I felt as though I ceased to exist. I put the wallet back on the nightstand, turned off the light, and tried to sleep.
I couldn’t. The early years at Leland-May rolled through my mind. I’d finish work, change into running shorts, put my teaching materials and clothes into a suitcase, and jog the three miles home. Nora and I would play a set or two of tennis in the summer, make dinner together, eat, and then make love, sweet and gentle or wild and crazy. We were so happy.
Except for once a week. Once a week we would get together with another faculty couple for an evening out. Nora looked forward to these forays, but I didn’t. I tired of hearing about colleagues’ wealthy families and the wonderful universities that multiple generations of their kin had attended. During my recruitment I was required to give my complete biography and it became known that I had been raised on a farm. Also, that I would become the first of Leland-May’s Jewish-sharecropper professors. Negative comments about scholarship students’ backgrounds bothered me, and I heard a lot of them when I ate lunch at the faculty club.
“You know, Samuel, if the O’Brian kid doesn’t make it here, he can always tend bar for his father. There’s something to say for being a Boston Southey.”
I brought my lunch after a few faculty club lunches and ate in my office. I never told those stories to Nora.
And then there was the research my colleagues were publishing. A reworking of previously plowed ground, fodder used to swell their curriculum vitae for advancement purposes. Their work rarely took on difficult issues, which in retrospect was not my affair. Yet I found the self-serving mediocrity intolerable. I said nothing at the time, but I put a lot of effort into making the kids I taught think, instead of just parrot back my ideas.
And the academic backbiting. One of the couples we socialized with most frequently was James Northwich (of the Philadelphia Northwiches) and his wife, Deanna. James was older than I and had just made tenure. All tenured faculty sat on the tenure-track committee, and James immediately began wielding his power to its fullest extent. For example, one of the qualifications for tenure at L-M was punctuality. It was obviously meant by the authors of the document as a means of dealing with chronic offenders. You always knew the candidates James didn’t like because he would comb the file for evidence of noncompliance. If he found anything that could be so construed, he would write a letter to that point and have it incorporated in the applicant’s permanent file—regardless of whether tenure was offered! It quickly became known to the junior faculty that James Northwich was not a man to be crossed if you wanted to make tenure. Nora liked Jim and Deanna, so I said nothing to her about the situation and suffered through our evenings with the couple.
For the most part, I spent as little time with the faculty and administration as possible, choosing instead to concentrate on my teaching and budding research.
Nora, without knowledge of the facts, considered my colleagues to be “normal.” A little arrogant perhaps, but not bad people. “You,” she said, “are too judgmental.” As a consequence of my being “judgmental” we had few real friends, just acquaintances.
Nora knew some of the things that had happened to me and my family the last three years we sharecropped, because Dad would answer her questions about our years in Kentucky (although he did it in his own political fashion to protect me). As a consequence of Dad’s disclosures, Nora wanted me to return to Kentucky and “exorcise my demons,” which she felt were the cause of my solitary ways.
I didn’t think I had any demons. I had put Kentucky behind me and saw no reason to dredge it up. Besides, Nora could never tell me why I should go back, only that she thought “my problems” lay in Kentucky and a return visit would benefit me.
I didn’t think I needed benefiting. What the hell, I didn’t hate my colleagues, I just didn’t think they were all that much. I couldn’t relate to them. They weren’t bad people. They were just . . . different from me. So much so that I felt uncomfortable around them. Somehow our ways of looking at things were not the same, and I had a right to my way of life! I was happy with my work. I was happy with Nora. We had each other and that was all I needed.
Then again, I hadn’t had a real friend since Fred and Lonnie. I missed them, especially Fred. Lonnie and I had been friends but Fred and I had been best friends. At one point, I decided to go back and see him, but a lot of time had gone by and I wasn’t sure he’d be all that happy to see me again. Somehow, I never got around to making the trip.
The clock on my nightstand said it was after three. I swallowed the remainder of the whiskey in my glass and got further under the covers. Nora had been gone over a year now. Somehow, the core of my soul had been buried with my love and what remained was a purposeless shell. Did she know that I would feel this way? Was that the reason she made me promise to return to Kentucky after her death . . . to find a reason for living?