We Never Told Page 16

  Marv Bernstein invited Mother and me to dinner. Meeting the children was a serious step in the advancement of second marriages. My mother, nervous in her silk dress and high heels, looked at me with her critical eye, appraised my value. I understood the importance of this meeting and resented that she doubted my ability to charm Marv Bernstein. Middle-aged men were invariably delighted by young women. I was being enlisted to close the deal, and I had yet to hear her say she loved him, admired him, or even liked him. By the time the cab dropped us in front of his building, I had a headache.

  We were not the only ones in the marble and chrome lobby of his building waiting for the elevator. There were several men. “It’s so strange,” my mother said wistfully in the elevator after the other passengers got out, “having men look at your daughter rather than at you.”

  Marv opened his door and I saw a modest, nondescript man whose face brightened at the sight of my mother and who brought me close for a chaste kiss on my cheek telling me how much he was looking forward to meeting me. He invited us into an apartment that was exactly my taste. A wall of windows high above Lake Shore Drive showed small rectangles of light from windows all over Chicago. His airy apartment was furnished in Danish modern with abstract paintings on the wall and a Jean Arp bronze sculpture on a pedestal in one corner. When my mother said on the phone that he imported baskets, I imagined a practical person who made sure homemakers had containers for their potpourri. I never imagined that baskets could be works of art. His collection from Africa, Cambodia, Japan, and India was arranged in a pleasing way around the room, some flat like plates, some tall enough to hold umbrellas, some with lids, most with geometric designs and exciting colors.

  He asked if I would like something to drink, wine or soda, and my mother said she’d get it in a voice that was so fawning I hardly recognized it. Was she playing the role of the step-and-fetch-it wife? Is that what she thought he wanted?

  My head hurt so much I wasn’t sure how I’d make it through the evening. The pain made me squint. Soon I’d have to sit through a meal at a fancy restaurant so I said, “Do you have Bufferin or anything like that?” He said, “Sit next to me. I can get rid of your headache.” He had the calm quality of a domestic man, one meant to live with the same wife forever.

  I sat down next to Marv and he put his thumbs on my temples and pressed hard. “This usually does it,” he said. There was no sexual energy in his touch but I found it uncomfortable to be so close to a stranger, our thighs almost touching. He pressed hard on the sides of my head, a method that must have worked for someone else, maybe his dead wife. Were there months of trying to relieve her pain? After a few minutes, I lied and said, “Thank you, that really helped. Thank you so much.” He moved from me, was not a man who insisted. But before we went out, he disappeared for a minute, then returned with a bottle of Bufferin and a glass of water. He held them toward me in a questioning way, asking if relief was still needed. I put my palm out flat. He gave me two pills, waited while I tossed them back with a gulp of water, then carried the medicine away without a word.

  Now I noticed the framed photograph of Marv and a woman I assumed was his wife. They had their arms around each other and were smiling at the camera in a relaxed way that suggested they were intimate with the photographer, maybe their daughter. The wife had a pleasant face but was overweight. I wondered if Violet was the most beautiful woman he’d ever been with.

  At an expensive restaurant, I sat across from him and my mother and had to keep seeing myself in the mirror behind them. It had become reflexive for me to primp in front of mirrors, to find faults to correct in what was supposed to be a flawless presentation. I allowed myself a few peeks and saw eyelids half closed from the pain of the headache and strands of hair that had come loose from my ponytail. I could see not only the fronts of Marv and Mother but the back of their heads too. Marv was bald on top, had gray hair cut very short above his white shirt collar. My mother’s hair was pulled back into a Spanish-style bun. She seemed on tip toe, straining to be lighthearted and attractive. I’d been taught that there was nothing more attractive to a man than a good listener, so I asked Marv questions about himself. I was only mildly interested in who he was. He could have been anybody so long as he had enough funds to get my mother out from under the humiliation of depending upon her father. I said, “Really?” and, “That’s so interesting.” Marv told me that his daughter Amy was out of school and working as a buyer at Marshall Field. “A buyer?” I said.

  “She buys jewelry,” Marv said, “works closely with jewelry designers, some of them exclusive to Marshall Fields, and she goes to trade fairs and wholesale showrooms to select merchandize that she thinks her customers will like.”

  “What a great job!” I said while thinking, poor girl her mother’s dead.

  “Yes, very competitive. They had a lot of applicants.”

  “How do you get a job like that?”

  “It requires a genuine passion for the product,” Marv said. “She always loved jewelry even when she was a little girl.”

  “But what do you have to study?”

  “She majored in economics.”

  “That’s a requirement at my school. I had to take it freshman year. I didn’t know what the teacher was talking about half the time.”

  “That probably wasn’t your fault,” Marv said. “If you didn’t understand, then the teacher wasn’t doing a very good job.”

  “That’s what I thought, but everyone kept telling me about how much stuff she’s published.”

  “She wasn’t so great for you.”

  “That’s what I thought. She only paid attention to the girls who understood immediately. Your daughter must be really smart to understand Keynesian fiscal policy.”

  “Yes. She is.” He said this so sweetly I felt off balance for a second. Some lucky girls, apparently, had fathers who were proud of them.

  I held up my wine glass and said, “To Amy.” He smiled and we clicked goblets. Ping!

  My mother said, “It’s just costume.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not valuable jewelry. It’s just costume, plastic and rhinestone, that sort of thing. She doesn’t buy fine jewelry,” Mother said. “Now my father, he’s the one who knows jewelry.”

  “Costume jewelry is popular now,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s always been popular. If you can’t afford real, you buy costume.”

  “And what about you,” Marv said to me. “What do you plan to do after college?”

  “Me? I don’t know. I think I’m supposed to be married.”

  “That shouldn’t be any problem,” he said.

  “But it is a problem. I don’t want to get married.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Don’t be silly,” my mother said. “Of course, you’ll get married.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s inevitable.”

  “When you meet the right person,” Marv said looking adoringly at Violet, showering her with light, “you’ll change your mind.”

  My mother responded by saying in a coy voice, “Well, thank you kind sir.”

  Several weeks later, when I was back at school delighting in Trollope, the intercom buzzed, which meant I had a phone call. I assumed it was Dick Boyce but it was my mother phoning to say Marv proposed. She was engaged. “The wedding will be at the end of August at the Drake Hotel.” I was so happy, I told everyone. “My mother’s engaged! My mother’s engaged!”

  The weather grew warm, sophomore year ended, Dick Boyce returned to Minnesota to work in his father’s hardware store, and I flew to Chicago to work as a switchboard operator at Greenstone Enterprises. Through plate glass windows, I watched chemists in white lab coats peer at gauges on steel vats. There was a steady hum of machinery. Grandpa’s office was a wood-paneled room dominated by his portrait, an oil painting of him in a three-piece suit holding a cigar. Though he had retired and now Uncle Alan was president, Grandpa still went to work every day. The limo parked at the ent
rance, Jordan opened the back door, Grandpa got out, and the two old men, stiff from sitting, went into the building.

  I was trained at the switchboard by Lois who could recognize a person’s voice after hearing it once. I clamped earphones on my head and stuck plugs in appropriate console holes. When a light blinked, I stuck a plug in the hole and said, “Good Morning, Greenstone Enterprises,” if it was before noon. If another light blinked at the same time I said, “Good morning, Greenstone Enterprises, thank you for holding,” never wasting time by asking if it was okay to put them on hold. Then I stuck the latest plug in and said the same thing and went back to the first one and said, “Thank you,” and “May I ask who’s calling?” Lights popped on continually and I had to manage three, four plugs at once. Lois never had to ask who’s calling. She said, “Thank you Mr. so and so,” and was never wrong and could do that if the person had called only once. It was as if she heard the whole person in the voice. Sometimes, her husband phoned and she chatted with him. Other times she yanked out my plug so I couldn’t hear the call. Then she spoke in a dramatically formal way and hinted that she wasn’t alone, so that’s how I knew she was cheating on her husband.

  At noon I ate in the lunchroom with the secretaries, women in their forties and fifties who told such lewd stories I couldn’t believe my ears, how they screamed when their husbands made them come. They mimicked the noises they made and everyone laughed except me. I’d never heard older women talk like that. I didn’t even know sex could be a topic of conversation. At school we seldom talked about sex except to describe someone as a good kisser. We all knew about Dr. Adams in Pennsylvania. Girls returned by bus to the dorm after their appointment, hemorrhaged, and hurried to the college infirmary. I was one of the only girls on my hall who hadn’t had an abortion. My guardian angel must have been looking out for me because Dick Boyce and I were not always careful.

  At her apartment in Chicago, my mother was on the phone with the florist and chef. She selected table linen and place cards. She listened to musicians’ tapes and chose a harp player. The event had to be subdued because his family and friends would necessarily be thinking of his dead wife. Mother bought clothes for the honeymoon cruise. Sometimes she complained about Marv’s daughter. “I don’t know why he takes her side all the time,” she said. “We come to a decision, she objects, and that’s the end of it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “I wanted roses, she says why spend so much money when tulips are just as pretty and he says tulips really are just as pretty and that’s the end of the discussion.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “I don’t care one way or the other about her. I’m not marrying her.”

  “You’re going to be her step mother. Do you think she likes you?”

  “She wouldn’t like anyone her father marries.”

  “And it’s not as if she’s going to live with you.”

  “Exactly. She doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”

  Joan’s summer job was in New York. She was marking the price on underwear at Alexander’s, a discount department store. A new shipment came in and she made a mistake, marked the underpants ten cents rather than $1.10. “Can you believe it,” she laughed on the phone to me. “I didn’t set the stamp thing correctly. The whole shipment of underpants went out to the table marked ten cents! It was like locusts descended. The customers cleaned off the table in a second.”

  “Did you get fired?”

  “Of course!”

  Both of us were in the wedding and so was Marv’s daughter. We could choose our own dresses so long as they were the color of the swatch Mother sent us. My sister, with her excellent color sense, matched her outfit to the swatch exactly, saw the matching as the most important part of the assignment. She showed us her wedding outfit, pale blue pantaloons with a low crotch like a Turkish pasha might wear, a soft yellow blouse with pale blue embroidery on peasant sleeves and a brown leather vest. She was especially proud of this outfit because she got all the pieces at a second-hand store for almost no money. Mother insisted that Joan buy a proper dress. “She wants me to look like some suburban moron,” Joan said.

  “Just wear whatever she wants then throw it out later.”

  “But that’s such a waste of money!”

  “What do you care? You’re not paying for it.”

  “It’s still a waste of money.”

  “No, it isn’t. The point isn’t the garment. The point is to make Mommy happy.”

  “Well, it’s pretty dumb to get happy over throwing away perfectly good pasha pants and that blouse happens to be beautiful, for your information. That’s an ancient Aztec design.”

  Neither of us had ever met Marv’s daughter. “I thought it would be fun to get pizza together one night,” Mother said, “but his daughter can’t be bothered to find the time.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Every time Marv asks her to join us, she makes some excuse.”

  “Do you think maybe she doesn’t like you?” I thought this question was straightforward but saw by my mother’s startled face that it was tactless. I tried again. “Did she ever say she doesn’t want him to marry you?”

  “Oh, yes. All the time.”

  “Why?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “What did she say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Thinks I’m after his money.” I wanted to say, “But you are, aren’t you?” She was almost fifty and was used to cashmere and Egyptian cotton sheets. She was accustomed to living in spacious well-furnished rooms. How easy for Marv’s daughter to feel superior, a girl with a college education. On the other hand, if his daughter was anything like him, warm and down to earth, she would want a more doting person than Mother was able to be.

  By the end of the summer, the wedding was off. “I’m not going to marry a man who’s under the thumb of his daughter. She bosses him around. He can’t stand up to her. When you marry a man, you marry his family.”

  “You broke your engagement?”

  “He’s just an overgrown baby.”

  “So you aren’t going to marry him?”

  “I certainly am not. I don’t need a girl like that in my life.”

  I was disappointed but was also impressed that she felt optimistic enough to reject a bird in the hand. She would begin again, meet someone else, maybe a tycoon of industry, maybe a famous surgeon, maybe a man with a yacht. Her friends at Highland Acres Country Club were probably already on the hunt.

  But instead of waiting to be introduced to someone else, she announced that she intended to go around the world. She wanted to see the pyramids in Egypt, the temples in Kyoto, the heather in Scotland. She sold her apartment in Chicago and put all of her belongings into storage.

  The airmail letters I took out of my college mailbox as the snow fell, as the snow melted, as the crocus stuck up their caps too soon, as I studied for exams then rested then studied for more exams, then wrote papers, handed them in, and wrote more papers, had postmarks from Cairo, Sydney, Casablanca, Tel Aviv, Paris. The letters might as well have been written in Chinese. I couldn’t read a word of the scribble. Her brain had been scrambled when her kindergarten teacher tied her left hand behind her back so she would become a righty. Her unintelligible handwriting was not her fault, but that didn’t make it less frustrating. I took the letters personally, understood them as teases, each one saying here I am but you can’t have me. I crumpled them and did angry slam-dunks. My letters to various American Express offices complained that I couldn’t read her letters. By the end of my senior year, I received a letter I could read, typed on my mother’s new portable Olivetti.

  She was in Florence, Italy, living in a tower on the estate of an elderly Contessa. Mother introduced herself as an American sculptor who needed a quiet place to work. At the top of a narrow stone staircase was her studio and bedroom that overlooked topiary gardens. From large
sacks of clay my mother dug out wet wads and smacked them on a board and punched out the air bubbles. She twisted wire armatures into human forms and set them on pedestals with swivel tops. She loved the feel of her wooden tools used for carving, smoothing, digging. She had pliers and hammers. When she finished a piece of sculpture, she carried it to a foundry near the Ponte Vecchio where it was cast in bronze. She wrote that she liked her single bed because there wasn’t room in it for anyone else.

  The Contessa befriended her, invited her for tea and they sat in the villa surrounded by furnishings that had been in the Contessa’s family for generations, a dark wood coffee table with fat ankles, a floor lamp with a shade made of fringes, an Empire sofa upholstered in velvet, a large armoire so antique the silver had come off the edges of the mirror. The peacock blue velvet drapery with heavy swags could not keep out the cold so the Contessa was always swathed in shawls.

  My mother knew nothing about my life except what I wrote in letters, and I knew nothing about hers except what she wrote, how the man who cast her sculptures praised her work and gave her a good price, how she hoped “one fine day” to show her work at galleries in Chicago and New York. I imagined her strolling through the streets of Florence, happy that she could now justify her life. Art critics would praise her and collectors would line up to buy her work. Her friends from Highland Acres Country Club and her parents and her sister and brother would understand at last why she couldn’t become a leisure lady hosting gracious dinner parties. She was an artist.