I spun in circles. I cried an ocean. I spun some more.
* * *
—
To be fair, it wasn’t just my parents who disapproved of Bertrand. Every friend who had ever cared about me worried aloud for my happiness. He wasn’t free to love me. Marcelle’s hand wouldn’t be forced, no matter how he promised he could change her mind. That I stayed even so gave off the general impression that I was extorting myself like a low-rent geisha. I’d become a cautionary tale.
When Bertrand and I finally broke free from each other, I went home to lick my wounds, but quickly realized my mistake.
“What are you up to with your life, Marty?” my father railed. “Experience shouldn’t be a dirty word, but it seems to be with you.”
“Don’t be unfair, Daddy. I’m going to get back to my book now. I want to write. You know that. It’s all I’ve ever really wanted.”
“So write,” he’d said bloodlessly. We were in his study, and I couldn’t help feeling as though I were one of his patients waiting for the worst sort of pronouncement. I sat in front of his heavy, orderly desk, while behind his straight shoulders medical dictionaries and texts and the other books he’d read and loved all his life sat lined up on their shelves like a custom-made firing squad. “Write, and do it now instead of capitalizing on your nice figure and your pretty hair. Stop being so charming.”
The sting of his words made me dizzy. My ears rang. “If I am charming it’s your fault and Mother’s.”
“You’re just afraid to be lonely.”
I stared at him, feeling hurt and angry but most of all sad. Sad that I couldn’t dare tell him he might be right. At that very moment, there was already another suitor waiting in the wings, though I hadn’t confessed it to anyone. And he was married, too.
“You need to learn to live with yourself, not others,” he went on. “That’s the difficult part. When you learn to accept your own nature, it will start to feel peaceful, not frantic. Maybe then you’ll stop throwing yourself at such terrible choices.”
“I don’t have any problem with how I’m behaving,” I told him, though that wasn’t true. I actually couldn’t seem to help myself. “I’m not asking for advice.”
“No, you’re not. I’m aware of that.” He turned away, looking out the window. It was autumn, and the sycamores on our street were tawny and unspoiled, as only nature seemed to manage. They glowed. When he gazed back at me, he said, “You’re collecting people because you need their opinion about you. It’s not pretty to watch.”
“Don’t watch, then,” I had said, and then left before I could scream everything I felt. That I hated his blinding scrutiny. That I loved him so much my guts felt twisted with it. That I was lost and afraid. That I was trying with all I had, though that never, ever seemed to be enough.
3
The next day and all that week, my mother and I went to the hospital to see how much better Father was doing. His eyes weren’t hooded anymore, and the surgery had unburdened him, lifting away dread and secrecy as well as pain.
Now that the tide had turned, I felt lighter, too. He would heal and strengthen, returning to his own patients. He would live. But I was also aware of a small inner voice whispering that our battle over my character would continue as before. It wasn’t that I wanted him to die. That thought would have been beyond imagining. But I had wanted something to be simpler between us, finally.
Instead, my mother found it necessary to tell him about Fields and the house in Connecticut. Even from his hospital bed, he began to pressure me to return home, brandishing words like inappropriate and selfish and childish. He meant to hold up a mirror, not a hammer. But I felt only blows.
I finally made it clear to him—and Mother, too—that I was going back east to do what I had been doing no matter what they thought; that I didn’t see at all how I was hurting anyone. He’d gripped the sides of the hospital bed, then, and pulled himself taller and straighter. I saw the effort that took and felt weak with it.
“Marty, there are two kinds of women,” he said. “And for now, at least. Well, for now you are the other kind.”
I don’t remember what I said in return, only that I couldn’t imagine ever forgiving him. Pierced and small, my head full of wasps, I raced home to pack my things and found the next train east.
Once on board, I headed straight for the club car. It was filled with businessmen, exactly the type I knew my father would warn me against. Even my being there, ordering a martini and slipping off my coat, he would say, would mean I was asking to be picked up.
I ordered a whiskey and soda as St. Louis dropped away, and it wasn’t long at all before a man in a Brooks Brothers shirt and knit tie came and sat across from me.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“I have a drink, thanks.”
“Let me get that one, then. Or you can have one for each hand.”
“Sounds messy.”
He smiled. “We can fetch you a towel. Where are you headed?”
“New York.”
“City girl, eh?”
“Trying to be.” I didn’t want to say more or explain myself, not to him.
He had a pinkish, compressed-looking face, though his shirt was handsome. His shoes were cordovan with a high sheen, and he wore a thick, burnished wedding band, not that it mattered. I wanted nothing at all from him, only the distraction of this single moment.
When the steward brought my second drink, it wobbled on the narrow table and threatened to spill until I drank it, quickly, on the heels of the first. He was in bonds, he said. I don’t remember what else we talked about, except that he bred greyhounds. Later, somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, he compared me to one of those slender, flighty dogs and then tried to kiss me.
I had gone out to the lavatory and he had followed, as if I’d given a sign. I hadn’t, but his nearness was all right for the moment, for how it pushed other things away. As his shoulders held me to the shuddering wall of the passageway, I closed my eyes, tasting the insides of his mouth, green olives and pure alcohol. But then he began to move heavily, his breath loud. His stomach pressed into mine as he grabbed for my waist, then my breasts.
“Say, what’s this all about?” he asked when I stopped him.
“I just like kissing.”
“You’re a funny girl.” He looked puzzled and a little annoyed. “Why are you here with me anyway?”
I’m not with you, I thought to myself, feeling the liquor I’d drunk surge through me like smoke. “No reason. I’m happy, that’s all.”
“You don’t seem happy. In fact, you look about as sad as anyone I’ve ever seen. That’s why I noticed you.”
A porter came through, carefully keeping his eyes straight ahead, trying to be invisible. I stepped back, feeling hot and seen through anyway. I thought of my father. “Do you think there are two kinds of girls?” I asked the man when the porter had moved on.
“I don’t know. The world’s a big place. Seems to me there are probably more than two kinds of everything.” He eyed me curiously for a moment. “Say, what are you playing at?”
“Just shut up,” I told him.
“What?”
“You can kiss me again, but please, please shut up.”
* * *
—
The next morning, I crept out of my Pullman berth and looked both ways as furtively as some kind of spy. I didn’t know where the bonds man was and didn’t want to know. It was challenging enough to slink all the way to the other end of the train with only myself to answer to. I roiled with small flashbacks, clever things I’d said for effect, where his hands had gone on my body, and mine on his. Keats would help, I hoped, and buried myself in my book all that day, my head swimming a lot at first, and then less and less as my nerves settled and my memory grew a thicker skin.
On the train pushed, and when
we finally arrived at Penn Station, I stepped out into the cold afternoon air that was cleaner and colder than anything in St. Louis, because it allowed for more. None of these marvelous people knew or expected anything of me. I could be whomever I chose. I could burn my candle at both ends if I wanted, or right from the center, or I could throw the damned thing away.
I had arranged to stay with an old girlfriend for a week or two before returning to Connecticut. She lived on Grove Street, in a little walk-up in the West Village, and had hidden a key for me in her philodendron. I’d forgotten completely that I’d given my mother the address. Forgotten everything by then but the way my cheeks stung, chapped, and how good it was to be moving on my own steam. But just through the front door, on my girlfriend’s rickety yard-sale table, another cable lay waiting for me.
While I’d been in the middle of Pennsylvania in a stranger’s arms, my father’s heart had failed. He had died in his sleep.
OH, MARTY. I’M SORRY YOU DIDN’T HAVE A CHANCE TO SAY GOODBYE. PLEASE COME HOME.
4
Over the next twelve months I think I aged twelve years. I lived like a maiden aunt at the top of the stairs, seeing no one but my family, and guessing about the world only when it trickled through in newspapers. The hermit’s life might have been good for writing if I’d felt less awful about my father’s final words to me, and less stricken by the reality of his death. I’d been wrong, I now knew, to think his going might solve anything for me, and even more wrong to have wished for it, for even a single second.
I wanted him back in a howling way. I needed to make things right, to forgive and be forgiven, which amounted to the same impossible thing. I needed time to prove to him that my character was only a little bent and raw at its edges, and that I could yet make him proud of me. But clocks don’t turn backward. I was having a hard time believing they turned forward, either. At least from where I stood.
My brother Alfred had taken time off from school and come to live at home, too, for a time. We ate all our meals together in the kitchen and listened to the radio after dinner in our bed slippers. By day I was trying to write something new, but primarily I gnawed on pencils and stared out the window, and waited to see what my mother might need.
She was being brave, as brave as anyone ever could be, but my father had been her North Star just as firmly as she’d always been mine. One day, I went to post a letter and found her standing still at the bottom of the stairs. It was nearly the dinner hour and the light was blue. It tipped sideways, throwing shadows on the door as she stood there, and when it came to me why, my heart cracked for her. She was listening for his key in the lock. Waiting for her kiss.
I went to her and took her in my arms. She was still as air, thin enough to blow away.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said against my shoulder. “I keep wondering who I should be now.”
“Can I help?”
“You’ve already done so much. I know you’d rather be off somewhere being gay and free.”
“I’m happy to stay.”
It was partially the truth. I would have given anything to make something easier for her, but being home was also like living in a mausoleum, or behind glass. I couldn’t breathe except shallowly most days, and then there was her face, full of a misery that unstitched me. For thirty-five years she’d been a wife. Who could stand that kind of emptiness and reversal? Who could avoid it, except to love no one and live alone?
* * *
—
After a while, I began to write again, and also to hunt for someone to publish The Trouble I’ve Seen. I sent the book to multiple publishing houses, and then bit my nails down to nothing as the rejections began to trickle in, my hopes dissolving like teaspoons of sugar in water. Finally, I decided I had to do something else or chew off my own paws, and began to look for journalism jobs out east. I wallpapered Manhattan with energetic letters and my résumé, such as it was. After a deluge of no-thank-yous, Time magazine agreed to let me do a trial story for them. I was determined to win them over, and killed myself, working twelve hours a day for a full week. The piece was personal as well as newsy and gripping, I thought. It was about a trip to Mississippi that Bertrand and I had once taken from New York in a rented car, and how we’d come terrifyingly close to witnessing a lynching.
The writing overtook me. I poured everything into the piece, but when I’d finished and sent it on and then spent a week pacing, desperate to have this job and no other, the Time editor sent his regrets by mail in a single discouraging paragraph. The tone was wrong for them, somehow too serious and also not serious enough. He hoped I would try again at some point, when I had more experience behind me.
“I don’t understand,” I complained to my mother. “Too serious and not? How is that even possible?”
“Maybe he just means you have more to learn. That’s not a bad thing.”
“I could have learned there. I don’t see why not.”
“Maybe if you set your sights a bit lower, you can work your way up and try them again,” she offered.
“Who has time? I want to be in the middle of something wonderful already. I can work hard. I don’t mind that.”
She looked at me gently, seeming to weigh her words carefully, and then said, “Beginnings are important, too, darling. You should be patient with life.”
“That might be easier if something were actually going well. Who knows where I’ll find work now, and my novel’s at a complete standstill.” I meant the new book I’d recently begun, about the pacifist French couple and their noble adventures. I was doing the work, dutifully writing my scenes and working through the dialogue, though mostly it seemed as if the story had nothing to do with me, but had only followed me home one day, like a stray. “My characters feel like strangers, and I don’t know how to get closer,” I went on. “Maybe if I could be in France now, or walk the famous battlefields of the Great War, or only sit and think, looking at the Seine.”
“Why shouldn’t you, then?”
“Don’t be silly. I’ll go another time.” I meant to reassure her, but I saw immediately that she was upset. She felt she was standing in my way.
“You can’t give up your plans for me, or your freedom. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”
“I’m not staying here because I feel sorry for you. This isn’t about duty.”
“Let’s call it love, then. But love can grow heavy, too. You need to live your own life.”
“I know,” I said, and I did. But as I hugged her hard, feeling her goodness pass through me like a transfusion, I realized I had no idea which direction to face looking for that life.
* * *
—
Winter turned slowly to spring that year. I winced from room to room, smoking too much and staying up late, and sleeping some days until one or two. And then I heard from an editor at William Morrow who was offering to take a chance on The Trouble I’ve Seen. The advance he held out was shockingly small. He also made it clear both by letter and by phone that he didn’t believe the book would sell well, if at all. All of this was hard to hear, but at least the book would see daylight. I accepted, gratefully, hoping to prove the editor wrong, and also wishing to God I could share my news with my father.
I felt terribly small now when I remembered how angry I’d been with him, how I’d spat and seethed under his scrutiny. Maybe he’d been too hard on me, or maybe he’d only meant to help shape me, or challenge me to rise while there was still time. All I knew was that, where all the rage and rebellion had been, I felt only a yawning emptiness. Somehow, my mother’s words—“I keep wondering who I should be now”—had attached themselves to me, too. I didn’t know what came next or how to find it.
Finally I told my mother I was thinking of considering Europe again.
“I was hoping you’d change your mind,” she said. “Think of it as a work cure. Go and thr
ow yourself into this book.” She may as well have said, Please figure out who you are. And hurry.
* * *
—
I sailed that June of 1936, heading first for England and then France, both of which had shrunk and faded since I’d last been in Europe, not two years before. Unemployment was rampant and tensions high. In Paris, labor strikes were shutting down the city, so I moved on to Germany to begin my research in earnest. That’s how I came to stand outside the Weltkriegsbibliothek, watching Nazi soldiers march and posture, trying to terrify, while most of the city cowered, as if under a terrible spell.
Hitler’s influence had been swelling gradually, but at a distance from my life. Now I saw all sorts of things in a new relief. Conflict and tumult bubbled. An alarming number of Europe’s countries—Greece and Portugal, Hungary and Lithuania and Poland—were under military rule, or in the thrall of dictatorships. Spain was the only place that was even trying to push back. A newly elected democratic government was trying to break essential ground. But then Franco struck.
It wasn’t a surprise at all, I remember thinking, as I read about the coup in Nazi newspapers. The signs had been looming, tiptoeing blackly forward. But that didn’t make it all any less horrifying. I went back to Paris, wanting to bury my head and focus on my book, but that was like racing a shadow. The strikes were still on, and half the restaurants were closed. There were riots in the Parc des Princes as French Communists tried to assert themselves and the Fascists pushed back. All of France seemed vulnerable to me now. Frighteningly close to the maw of a dragon.
I ran home, arriving just after the release of The Trouble I’ve Seen. Somehow, the book was not only selling but also receiving wide and glowing reviews. I had expected nothing, and could scarcely believe it. The Boston Evening Transcript called my writing “fearless.” The New York Herald Tribune ran a full-length feature review with my picture, and described the book in rapturous terms from start to finish. Lewis Gannett, in his syndicated books column, said my writing burned with “stinging poetry,” and predicted mine would be one of his favorite reads of the year.