We Never Told Read online

  I knew no one there. Feeling ashamed of not living in a house, ashamed of having a messed up family, I watched in a kind of fog as everyone else hugged and jumped up and down with happiness at being reunited after summer vacation. Many of the girls were exceptionally pretty and everyone seemed well-scrubbed. One of the best looking girls parked her red MG sportscar in the school parking lot. The license plate was her name, Bonnie. I felt inferior to everyone I saw in the halls. I was from a broken home. All the teachers would know this. It must surely be on my “record.” If I got good grades, they’d say isn’t it remarkable considering she’s from a broken home. If I failed every subject, they’d say what could you expect? She’s from a broken home.

  After two lonely weeks of walking the halls shrunken in on myself, I returned the textbooks saying to the various teachers, “I’m not coming back.” I explained nothing, left the teachers confused. Their bewilderment felt like a brief victory over grownups.

  My mother was furious but I didn’t care. She didn’t have to go there. The teachers were not better than others I’d had, especially the math teacher who didn’t explain anything. Joan and I trudged up Popham Road, took one bus to Eastchester then changed to another bus that dropped us in front of New Rochelle High School, a beautiful gothic structure edged by lakes where geese and swans lived.

  It was a comfort to be with friends I’d known since grammar school in that big building with its wide, steep staircases. When asked why I’d missed the opening week, I said we moved to Scarsdale and no one asked why. Life, it seemed, was somewhat back to normal.

  One morning during homeroom, I was summoned to the principal’s office. The principal was a terrifying woman, more male than female. Big and square with a muscular neck, she wore a belt that ended in two balls dangling below her stomach. It was embarrassing to be singled out by the homeroom teacher who said, “Take your books.”

  When I opened the principal’s door, I saw my mother sitting in a chair, her face both frightened and defiant, her eyes swinging with apprehension. The broad-shouldered principal was not sitting at her desk but standing as if eager to end this meeting. My sister’s face was drenched in tears. In our family, crying was like going to the bathroom. You never did it in front of anyone. You closed the door and hoped no one would hear the sounds. So this display of open sobbing in front of a stranger made my heart leap. Joan said, “She’s unenrolled us. We can’t go here anymore.”

  “What?”

  “We can’t go here anymore. She’s unenrolled us.”

  “She can’t do that.”

  “Yes,” Joan sobbed, “she can.”

  “Your mother,” the principal said in a way that meant it was useless to argue, “has custody. It is her wish that you both attend Scarsdale High.”

  “But we don’t want to!” Joan said in a desperate voice.

  “I’m doing this for your own good,” Mother said. “It is a far better school. You will meet a much better class of people.” She didn’t see the principal bristle when she said Scarsdale was a better school.

  “The principal of New Rochelle High,” the principal said, “does not have the authority to go against a mother’s wishes. Go clean out your lockers. Now, please.”

  Carrying our gym clothes and notebooks, we stepped out into bright September sunshine and walked to the parking lot where the Thunderbird waited. That my mother could just walk in and extract us from school meant that all accepted rules of behavior no longer applied. That very day, I’d heard the most delightfully foul curse. Someone in the hall said it. I shouted at my mother, “If shit could roll, you’d be a big wheel!”

  She ignored me and we all got into the car. Sitting at the leather steering wheel, she adjusted her sunglasses, backed out of the parking space, and drove onto North Avenue. I knew people in all the neighborhoods we passed, Ellen in a brick house near the cottage where Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, Donna in one of the new ranch houses on the other side of North Avenue, and Susie in a Tudor house on Trenor Drive with a boxer dog that sprang at Joan once for no reason. My mother kept herself very still, looked ahead through the windshield, but her aura was trembling.

  When she came to a red light on North Avenue, I poked Joan in the shoulder and gestured to the door. She opened the door, our mother cried out in surprise and tried to grab Joan’s skirt and I thrust the front seat forward and was sorry to slam into my mother’s arm as I scrambled out of the cramped back seat. We ran liked pursued thieves along the sidewalk then ducked into an opening in the hedges that bordered the Wykagyl Country Club and raced across the golf course. Doubled over, we sucked in air with such urgency we squeaked. We could see the back of our house, no maid at the kitchen window watching for us with lunch waiting. It never entered our heads that we wouldn’t be able to get inside. The house had never been locked against us. We tried the back door, front door, side door. “Daddy will know what to do,” Joan said. We counted the change in our book bags and had just enough for two train tickets.

  If we were heading into the pandemonium of Calcutta, we couldn’t have been more apprehensive though we’d been to Manhattan more than any of our suburban friends. We met Grandma and Grandpa Greenstone at the Waldorf Astoria when they disembarked from the Queen Mary. We saw everything on Broadway appropriate for children, South Pacific, Fanny, Oklahoma, Carousel, Charley’s Aunt. But we had never gone into the city alone. There were crazy people rummaging in trash barrels, dogs’ doo on the sidewalks, panhandlers with anguished faces, streets going every which way, crowds coming up from the subway all at once like schools of fish, ambulances shrieking, and taxis honking.

  At Grand Central Station, all corridors led to the central rotunda with a vaulted ceiling. We used up our money on the train tickets so we couldn’t take a cab nor were we savvy enough to flag one down or nervy enough to tell a grown up man where to take us. We asked a policeman for directions and found, after a few block’s walk, the chaos of Times Square dominated by the Camel cigarette billboard, a man’s huge face with a hole for a mouth that emitted smoke rings that fell for a few beats then broke apart over the traffic below. Billboards everywhere that blinked and danced as spellbinding as fireworks. The Pepsi Cola sign had a real waterfall on top of a building. Joan and I stood gawking at the signs for Admiral television, Bond two-trouser suits, Budweiser, Chevrolet. We had seen Times Square many times but never without holding a parent’s hand.

  1540 Broadway, a sixteen-story office building, known as the Loews State Building was Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s headquarters. Hollywood was just a pretty face; New York was the heart and lungs of the movie business. We knew that Clark Gable’s paycheck was signed in the building we entered, and that every movie produced at the studio in California had to first be approved by executives in New York. It was a relief to be inside the lobby, out of reach of the chaos in Times Square. When we told the elevator man that we wanted to go to Seymour Adler’s office, he let us off on a high floor that felt exclusive because of the hush. “Turn left,” he said and clattered the brass gate shut with a white-gloved hand.

  We entered a large waiting room with many chairs and walls covered in glossy stills from various MGM movies, Gene Kelly clicking his heels in the air from Singing in the Rain, Judy Garland in pigtails from the Wizard of Oz, Elizabeth Taylor as a child petting Lassie. A secretary typing at a desk, gray hair held severely back from her face, looked up over half glasses. We had never been to this office. “I’ll be dipped,” the secretary said. “You must be Joan and Sonya.” We knew her name too because she had been with Seymour for twenty years and he sometimes mentioned her. “Was he expecting you?” she asked. We just stood there. “He’s not here.” We hadn’t thought of that possibility. What would we do? Where would we go? We didn’t have a dime between us. “Don’t worry,” Bernice said. “He’ll be back. Wait for him in there.” She pointed to an open door on the other side of the waiting room.

  His office had the feel of a gentleman’s club, Oriental rug and forest green
leather. From the window I looked down on the clogged streets of Times Square, the windowsill speckled with white and gray pigeon poop. Sixteen stories up, we could hear the traffic and though it was stimulating to look out over the activity, I understood why my father fled to the country most weekends, took Joan and me walking on country roads in Connecticut, where we could pause to appreciate red barns and Holsteins grazing.

  The walls of his office were decorated with autographed portraits of movie stars arranged salon-style from floor to ceiling: Couldn’t have done it without you, Franchot Tone. Thank you for your confidence in me, Dean Stockwell. To Sy with gratitude, Walter Pidgeon. Lionel Barrymore’s signature was across a photo with his arm around Seymour’s shoulder. On a large desk were the framed school portraits of Joan and me, each of us smiling with a mouth full of steel against a watery blue background. “Why does he have this picture of me?” I said to Joan, “I look hideous.”

  “You? Look at the one of me!”

  Compared to the celebrities framed on the wall, we were painfully real, with our poodle cuts and smiles forced by the school photographer, who had no talent for lighting. We waited then got bored waiting. “Let’s borrow some money from Bernice,” I whispered, “go see a movie.”

  Joan and I walked across Times Square just in time to see The Bad Seed. The credits were rolling as our eyes adjusted, and we took our seats among the few people sitting in the dark in the middle of the day. On the screen, an angelic-looking eight-year-old with blond pigtails was beating a boy to death with her toe shoes. She dumped his body off a pier into the ocean. This murder was justified because the boy won the penmanship medal that she thought she deserved. When the handyman in her building became suspicious of her, she murdered him. She pushed an old lady in a wheelchair down some stairs. I had said shit in front of my mother but Patty McCormack, the star, was bad with a capital B!

  Seymour Adler strode out of his office when he heard us return to the waiting room and beckoned for us to join him. Impeccably dressed in a navy pin-striped three-piece suit, his posture straight, he flicked his eyes toward Bernice as a warning to Joan and me that we were not to let anything personal spill out in front of her. He closed the door to his office and listened to our tale of being taken out of school. Bad-mouthing someone’s mother was against his rules but the effort to stifle disapproval of his ex-wife seemed to propel him across the room, where he grabbed his scarf from a coat rack, flung it around his neck, and gestured for Joan and me to follow him. “You have to pay back Bernice,” I whispered running after him. “She lent us money for the movie.” Coiled around his anger, he didn’t even say goodbye to Bernice, just strode with us to Grand Central Station and sat reading Variety, or pretending to, during the thirty-minute train ride. His Pontiac was parked at the New Rochelle train station. We drove without speaking down North Avenue, then onto the leafy street where our house, dark at all the windows, stood forlorn in its emptiness.

  The phone was ringing when we entered the house, a shrill blast that echoed through the hollow rooms. We knew who it was. Joan and I left the matter to our father and went to the living room to wait. The divorce had sucked the life out of the house. The furniture was still in place but there were gaps, things missing like the brass samovar on the hearth and the china plates that once were displayed in the breakfront. There were indentations in the carpet where the piano used to be. The green sofa was still there and so was Rinso, our white cat, who leapt up and settled on my lap. My father insisted upon custody of Rinso, said it was for the cat’s own good but I thought it was because without Rinso the house would be just too empty. My father said an apartment was no life for a cat, especially not for one used to hunting in the woods. He had moved the television set from the den into the living room so he could watch in front of the fireplace. I winced thinking of my father sitting alone watching The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights.

  We heard Seymour slam down the phone. Almost shivering with fury, he came into the living room with his bow tie yanked loose, the top button of his shirt open. “Do we have to go home?”

  “You’ll stay here.”

  “Can we go to New Rochelle High?”

  He didn’t know. The court would decide. For more than a week, we were in limbo at his house. I enjoyed the naughtiness of missing school, but I was bored and I worried about falling behind. I was proud of being a good student and had always liked school better than home. My father’s lawyer, Clement Monroe, thought we did have the right to go to New Rochelle High because our father was still a resident. However, we had now missed enough school to be declared truants so our case had to be decided in children’s court. There was a court especially for children?

  The Municipal Court House of New Rochelle was a limestone fortress with Greek pillars in front and a heavy door with iron hinges. Long monotonous corridors were lined with benches. There were policemen in the halls and lawyers with bulging briefcases. People sat on the benches slumped and vacant.

  We had become slumped and vacant by the time a young man approached, said he was the judge’s aide, and asked us to follow him. My father said he’d wait in the corridor for his lawyer. Joan and I were ushered into a small unimpressive office with a wall of bookshelves, no window, and an insignificant desk. Mother was sitting in there with her lawyer. Her face lit up when she saw Joan and me. She sprang to her feet. She hadn’t seen us for more than a week and hurried to embrace us. We turned our backs. I pretended to examine the books on the shelf. My mother’s lawyer, a big-chested man, six feet tall, a Bullmastiff, a champion of weak women, rose from his chair to intimidate me with his physique. Known for getting generous settlements out of reluctant husbands, Saul Ruben said, “Say hello to your mother, young lady.”

  I was finished respecting adults. Adults were supposed to be taking care of me but they weren’t. They had dragged me into court like a juvenile delinquent. The adults I knew were acting childishly and here was one more of them, the schoolyard bully. “You can’t tell me what to do,” I said. “You’re not my father.”

  “You say hello to your mother. Don’t you know your mother is doing this for you? Don’t you know she has your best interest at heart? Don’t you know she only wants the best for you? What’s the matter with you? You’re lucky to have such a mother.”

  “Saul, that’s enough,” she whispered.

  He moved in too close to me, towered over me and glared down into my face. I had never been physically threatened by a man before, had never felt the superiority of masculine strength. The men I knew, my father’s friends, some of my teachers, my orthodontist, treated me in a rather courtly way as if there was something attractive about me that merited deference. Saul Ruben saw nothing appealing in me, and my heart leapt into my throat as I saw the color come into his face. “Say hello to your mother.”

  My mother whispered, “That’s enough, Saul.”

  I heard Joan say, “You’re not the boss of her.”

  Puffing up, he turned his attention from me to Joan, who was now standing next to me. “How dare you speak to me like that,” he said.

  My mother said, “Saul, Saul. Please,” and put a steadying hand on his arm.

  He seemed dying to engage with me, to do battle with the fourteen-year-old girl he saw before him whose wrists he could have snapped with one hand, but the door opened and Clement Monroe came in with my father. Clement Monroe was tall but stooped, as if he carried the world’s sorrows on his shoulders. He bowed to Joan and me in an apologetic way that acknowledged our innocence in the face of these degrading proceedings. He moved with my father to the back of the office and there they stood in a corner whispering. It was disconcerting to see my parents acting like strangers, both of them needing bodyguards. They’d been married for eighteen years and now they couldn’t look at each other. No outside force, no tornado, avalanche, or witch working at her cauldron had turned them into enemies. They did it themselves.

  I got tired of standing so I sat in the nearest chair, the one
behind the desk. I sat in it swiveling back and forth while the adults whispered to each other. We waited and waited. Then the door opened, and a nondescript middle-aged woman dressed in a rather shabby suit came in. I thought she was going to tell us how much longer we were going to have to wait for the judge. Her eyes widened when she saw me. “Young lady,” she said, “when you become a judge you can sit in the judge’s chair.” I didn’t know what she was talking about. Why was she talking to me in such a rude voice? I just sat there bewildered. “Get up!” she said. “Leave this room at once.” Was she the judge? A woman judge? I didn’t know there were such things. “Get out!” she said. “These are my chambers, and you are to leave at once.”

  On fire with embarrassment, I glanced at my mother who looked like a scared bunny. She could not protect me. I was motherless. Joan, in a show of solidarity, left the judge’s chambers with me. Covered with shame, I sat on one of the corridor benches and Joan sat down next to me. I suspected that the judge, like Saul Ruben, saw herself as a person mandated tto pick up the disciplinary slack of soft parents, as if it was her job to sculpt the next generation. If the parents were too weak to do it, she’d pitch in. I sat next to my sister, fuming about the limitations of adults despite their being in charge of everything. I was not a girl who needed to be screamed at. I would never turn my back on my mother for frivolous reasons. I didn’t greet her when I saw her in the judge’s chambers because she had mistreated me. She was expecting too much of her daughters. Bad enough to be turned out of our house but then to force us to leave our friends, that was too much. She was working out some idea of bettering us, an idea generated by snobbishness. I thought she should just listen to us and hear what we needed at this time. Nor was I a girl who delighted in being rebellious. I didn’t know it was the judge’s chair. I’d never met a judge before. I’d never been in court before. The judge had been unjust. I felt some innocence drop off of me.