Sarah had assumed, not from anything he’d said but more from his cool and worldly manner, that Benjamin was experienced with women. But in their first couplings, he seemed almost as new to it as she was and it was some time before they lost their reticence with each other. And though she couldn’t quite understand why sex was supposed to be such a big deal, and even back then, even on those feverish nights, with the windows wide and the clamor of the street and of their own heated blood, couldn’t match Benjamin’s relentless hunger for it, she nevertheless had an almost giddy sense of relief and liberation.
It was in early July that she took him for the first time up to Bedford for the weekend to meet her parents, who by now knew about him and were curious. They had no idea, of course, that when their daughter stayed overnight in the city, as she increasingly did, she wasn’t, as she claimed, staying with a friend from Wellesley. She had already told Benjamin enough about them to make him a little apprehensive. He had his hair cut specially for the occasion—which Sarah took as an act of devotion—and even wore a sports coat (though not a necktie) for dinner, which didn’t quite do the trick for her mother, who was later overheard describing him as “charming, if a little Bohemian.”
Sarah’s father tried to camouflage his disdain for any college that wasn’t Ivy League behind an overly enthusiastic interest in the University of Kansas where Benjamin had graduated before going on to Syracuse. Dinner was like an interview for a job. Her father knew as much about architecture as Benjamin knew about corporate finance but had obviously done some sly homework. While Sarah and her mother ate in silence, he cross-examined the poor guy for a full twenty minutes about Werner Seligmann, a Harvard professor who had just moved to Syracuse and would, in the years that followed, transform the place. Fortunately, Benjamin was already a fan and passed the test with ease. And although he probably lost a few points later by bumping into her mother as he tiptoed half-naked from Sarah’s room, he made up for it the next morning by being thrashed for the first time by his future father-in-law on the tennis court.
They were joined for Sunday lunch by two couples who lived nearby. Both had young children who took to Benjamin as if they had known him all their lives. He teased them gently and played the fool and soon had them in fits of giggles. They wouldn’t leave him alone. Many men of his age could do this, Sarah knew, but what struck her was how he was also able to talk with them, even about serious things and entirely on their level, without any trace of condescension. Her mother caught her staring at him and Sarah could see from the knowing smile that her intentions had been read.
They were married, sumptuously, in Bedford in the summer of Sarah’s graduation from Wellesley. And never once, during those heady preceding months nor for many years after, did she falter from that first impression she had formed of him the night they met. She loved almost everything about him. His gentleness, his wit, his generosity, the way he sought her opinions and cared about what she thought and said and did. The way he would sit her down with a cup of tea if she had a problem and let her tell him all about it, without trying to solve it for her. She loved his passion for his work and was convinced that if there were any justice in the world, one day he would achieve great things.
Their interests didn’t exactly coincide but they each seemed equally open to the things the other cherished. He read mostly nonfiction but she soon had him reading novels—Jane Austen and Henry James, as well as Updike and Bellow and Roth—and gave him a crash course in classical music. For a while he became almost obsessed with Mozart opera. She would never forget the tears streaming down his cheeks at the Met as they listened to the famous serenade duet in Cosi fan tutte. In turn, he took her to see obscure European movies by directors she had barely heard of, like Herzog and Fassbinder. And he played her all his Miles Davis and Neil Young records and took her to dark downtown dives to hear obscure punk bands so uniformly dreadful she felt like weeping too.
They seemed so closely in tune, so much a part of each other, that sometimes Sarah found it hard to know exactly where she ended and he began. Occasionally she worried that she was too malleable, that without realizing it, she was being quietly dismantled and remodeled. When they went shopping for clothes or for food or furniture or when they were redecorating the apartment, it was Benjamin’s taste that nearly always prevailed. Not, however, against her will. She was only too happy to go along with it because, generally, she didn’t know what she wanted and he always did. Confronted with a dozen different shapes of wineglass or twenty shades of blue, she would feel bewildered or her eyes would glaze over. Perhaps it simply didn’t matter enough to her. And anyhow, she would justify, knowing about these things, having views about texture and color and shape was Benjamin’s job, was in his very nature.
She knew this wasn’t how it was with most couples. A lot of men were only too relieved to cede such decisions to women. And there was no doubt, Benjamin did have a tendency to want to control things. She remembered reading about such people once, when she took a psychology class at Wellesley. Their wish to control things often stemmed from a deep-seated insecurity, a worry that if they didn’t appear decisive and keep tabs on everything, then chaos would erupt and overwhelm them. Perhaps Benjamin had some mild version of this. If so, Sarah was happy to live with it. It wasn’t as if he was a bully. And, frankly, it was often a relief.
He could be moody too, and difficult, especially when things weren’t going well with his work. And there was a restlessness about him that probably should have worried her more than it did. And if they argued (which wasn’t often and thus all the more upsetting when they did), he could be cruel and seemed to find it hard to apologize or forgive. They were both quick and clever with words but his tongue was the sharper and even when it was his fault he had a way of twisting things around so that it was she who ended up saying sorry.
In those early years, their worst arguments were about her parents. Perhaps inevitably, Benjamin carried a chip about them and resented being dependent on her trust money while he finished up at Syracuse and struggled through three cruel and tedious years of internship finally to qualify as a registered, penniless architect. He started referring to the house in Bedford as “the Country Club” and, in company, would sometimes joke that the key to success for an architect was to marry money. But Sarah knew such comments were preemptive and aimed at himself, not her.
The truth was that she disliked their reliance on her parents’ money almost as much as he did. It made her feel redundant, as if it didn’t matter if she made a success of her life or a hopeless mess. After college she was offered a job with the same company for which she had fetched coffee but because the initial contact had been her father’s, not hers, she turned it down. Instead, she applied for and surprised herself by landing a research job with a TV company that made arts documentaries.
Her first project was a series for PBS about great American writers. Unfortunately, to qualify, they all had to be dead. So instead of her current heroes, Roth and Bellow and Updike, it was the usual high-school lineup of Melville and Twain and Scott Fitzgerald. The producer, a patronizing Englishman who wore white buckskin shoes and a toupee, said the reasons for this had to do with “budget and copyright and so forth,” in a tone that suggested Sarah shouldn’t trouble her pretty head about it. The alternatives she suggested were all dismissed. Henry James was too effeminate, Poe and Bierce too crazy, Hemingway too macho. Her quip that Edith Wharton was presumably too female didn’t do her career prospects any good at all.
The money was derisory but at least she was earning it herself. She had always been a fast learner and within a couple of years was working for twice the salary with a younger, much trendier company in SoHo, producing a series of her own, this time about writers who were still alive, though in one case the interview was so stilted and boring she suspected he might have just been very well embalmed.
The life she and Benjamin led in their tiny rented apartment on the edge of Greenwich Village was frugal b
ut happy. By now he was working for Dawlish & Drewe, a stuffy but sizable firm that did mostly small-scale industrial and commercial projects. He earned only a little more than she did and the work was routine, but he was soon getting himself noticed. He was one of the best draftsmen and model-makers in the office and found himself much in demand for presentations.
What made it fun was working alongside a bright and talented young architect who had been hired straight out of Columbia the previous fall. Short, dark, and (except for his polished dome of a head) excessively hairy, with mischievous black eyes and a brain as sharp as his dress sense, Martin Ingram had the kind of creative flair and ambition that were wasted on the likes of Dawlish & Drewe. His sense of humor was even more wicked than Benjamin’s and at their adjoining desks they did cruel impersonations of the fussy, bow-tied Adrian Dawlish and the other senior partners. They became close friends and were soon plotting their escape to set up a partnership of their own.
Martin had grown up in Nassau County, in the town of Syosset, a name that for Sarah had only negative connotations. She had been taken there once as a child to visit a place called the Lollipop Farm, where she had been bitten by a goat, eaten too many lollipops, and thrown up all over the backseat of her mother’s new car. For Martin, however, Syosset was pure, golden, apple-pie America, the kind of place where people never locked their doors and always helped their neighbors. He couldn’t wait to get back there. He and his considerably taller wife, Beth—a commercial real estate agent with a loud voice and frizzy red hair, a woman Sarah tried hard to like—had it all figured out. When, at a date apparently already diaried, they had children, they were going to decamp to Syosset.
On the evening that the master plan was revealed (at least, to Sarah), the four of them were eating take-out pizza at the round glass table in the Ingrams’ apartment, which was in a classier neighborhood than theirs and a lot bigger, though, in Sarah’s opinion, way overdesigned. Martin and Beth suddenly started going on about Syosset, extolling its virtues to Sarah in a way that for a while had her puzzled.
Among countless other assets, the place apparently had good schools, cleaner air, less crime, a brand-new public library, and a great deli called Bahnhof’s on Jackson Avenue. Furthermore, Martin assured her, there were no longer any biting goats. Lollipop Farm had closed down in 1967. More to the point, he said—and this was when Sarah began to see where this was all heading—there was a dearth of decent local architects, thus plenty of potential for the embryonic ICA—Ingram Cooper Associates. The names had to be that way around, Martin said, since there was already a CIA.
“So do we get to move out there too?” Sarah said brightly. She was only joking, but from the pause that followed and from the look on Benjamin’s face she could see that was exactly what he had in mind.
“Well, it’s something we should talk about,” he said.
“Oh, right. And when shall we do that?”
They did little else for weeks. And it escalated into a full-blown fight. It emerged that he had already done a tour of the place with Martin and that he liked what he saw. He could imagine them living there, he said. Sarah accused him of concealing all this from her and of being a chauvinist for assuming his career should come first and for thinking he could decide where they lived. She didn’t want to live in the suburbs, she said. Maybe it was just the slightly scornful way she uttered the word, but he accused her, for the first time, of being a Westchester County snob and it so infuriated her that she didn’t speak to him for three days. A frost settled that neither of them seemed willing or able to thaw. They didn’t touch each other for more than a month.
On a sunny Saturday morning in early spring, sullenly shunting a cart along the aisles of an uptown nursery where they had come to buy plants for their two square yards of roof terrace, Benjamin suddenly stopped and picked up a clematis.
“This one’s for you,” he said. He was smiling oddly, but for a moment she thought he was being genuinely friendly, that perhaps it was a peace offering. Then she saw the label. The name of the variety was Arctic Queen.
They got over their disagreement about where they would live. But this incidental act of spite lingered in Sarah’s heart. It was the first time he had accused her of being frigid and it shocked and hurt her.
Abbie was born eighteen months later. And two years after that, in the same month that Ingram Cooper Associates got its first proper commission, along came Josh. For each birth, Sarah organized her work so that she could take a few months off. Her career, if not exactly booming, was progressing well enough. One documentary had led to another. A film she made about David Hockney’s joined-up photographs was even nominated for an Emmy. They were now living on the Upper West Side, in another rented apartment, more comfortable and spacious than their old Amsterdam love nest. But with two small children and a full-time babysitter they could barely afford, it was still cramped and less than perfect. Every morning Benjamin climbed into their old Volvo station wagon and slogged out through the traffic to Syosset.
True to schedule, Martin and Beth and their two young sons, born just ten months apart, were already living there, with Ingram Cooper Associates and its growing team housed in a long, glass-roofed studio set among the maples in their spacious backyard. And by Abbie’s fourth birthday the Coopers had decided to join them. With a loan secured (despite Benjamin’s reluctance) by Sarah’s trust fund, they bought a small white clapboard house not far from the Ingrams’ and a few months later put down a deposit on a gently sloping, wooded acre at the edge of town, upon which Benjamin would build them a fine house to his own design.
Sarah would later find it hard to pinpoint the moment she warmed to the idea of the move. It was more a process of attrition, a growing unease about bringing up her children in Manhattan. Unlike Abbie, Josh was not an easy child. He was a magnet for any passing virus. After a terrifying weekend when he was unable to breathe and turned blue and they had to rush him to the hospital, he was diagnosed with asthma. He was a timid and clingy boy, unsuited to the rush and clamor of the city. He screamed for an hour every morning when she left for work. And after their babysitter found him too hard to handle and quit, Sarah started turning down work to spend more time at home.
On summer weekends at Martin and Beth’s, barbecuing under the trees and meeting their neighbors and watching Abbie and Josh run free and safe and happy with the other kids, Sarah came to believe that if she was going to become more of a full-time mother, this might not be such a bad place to do it.
The issue that clinched it—and over which Benjamin and her father had their first serious falling-out—was education. Although ICA was doing well, it wasn’t yielding enough to pay the fees of fancy Manhattan private schools. Her parents had reacted with a sort of condescending incredulity when Sarah first told them of the plan to move. Long Island, as far as her father was concerned, might be a good enough place to park a yacht, but it certainly wasn’t somewhere one should choose to live. He had never been to Syosset but didn’t need to in order to know the sort of place it was. And the fact that his daughter and grandchildren were being forced to migrate there was the long-anticipated proof of Benjamin’s inability to provide for them properly. If they wanted to move out of the city, why not come up to Bedford?
In what turned out to be a last-ditch attempt to preempt the move, he took them to lunch at his club, a fusty place in which women had only marginally higher status than an ill-trained gundog. Benjamin’s ego was already bruised and bristling before they so much as sat down. It was ninety degrees outside and he had turned up in an open-neck shirt only to be forced at the door to borrow a necktie and a blazer that was several sizes too big and smelled of cigar smoke. With more enthusiasm than she yet truly felt, Sarah had been telling her father all about the house they would build. He heard her out in silence, chewing grimly on his lamb chops.
“And the schools out there are amazing,” she concluded.
He peered at her over his half-moon horn-rims.
<
br /> “You’re going to put Abbie and Josh through the public school system?”
“Yes.”
“I’m astounded.”
“Well, George,” Benjamin said genially. “It was good enough for me.”
Her father turned slowly and looked at him.
“Was it?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Was it good enough for you? I’m simply asking. I mean, I’m not meaning to be disrespectful. I’m sure the education you received was as good as the town of . . . I’m sorry, I forget . . .”
“Abilene.”
“. . . could provide. But have you ever thought what you might be doing today if your parents had been able to send you somewhere better?”
It was so stunningly rude, Benjamin looked at Sarah and grinned. Oblivious, her father went on.
“Let’s give them the best possible start in life, shall we? I’ll pay.”
Benjamin stood up.
“Thank you, George, but you won’t. They’re my children—and Sarah’s, of course—and we’ll do with them what we think best. Now, I’m sorry, but I have to go earn some money.”
It was a tense moment but Sarah would always admire him for the resolute but dignified restraint with which he handled it and many similar occasions to come.
Life in the suburbs turned out to be better than Sarah felt she had any right to expect. The house Benjamin eventually built for them, in three separate stages, was exquisite. And around it, letting the trees and rocks already there dictate its design, Sarah created the garden it deserved. The children thrived. Whether it was Saturday morning soccer or horseback riding, the school play or summer camp in the Adirondacks, Abbie was always the effortless star.