My Summer With George by Marilyn French

  It was really intolerable.

  I sat on the chaise, sat so still I must have looked paralyzed. My hot heart, hotter body, felt familiar. You’d think I’d been in love often. Had I? As far as I could remember, I’d been in love with three of the four men I’d married, and with a few I didn’t marry. Yet all my marriages had had bitter endings except the one that wasn’t based in love. After all, when a loved man dies, it feels as bitter as his leaving you for someone else. I remember weeping to Molly after Mark died that I would never fall in love again, that I couldn’t bear being hurt that way again.

  And here I was.

  But in love was one thing; full of romantic delusions was another. I had no memory of such things, even from my adolescence. I never lolled in my room as a teenager, modeling new hairstyles in the mirror while the radio played one lovesick song after another. Tina and I didn’t even have a radio in our room—although I must admit the radio played constantly in the kitchen where we worked, and it offered strictly romantic music. That’s all there was in the forties, and it was enough for us: we loved Peggy Lee and June Christie, Frank Sinatra and Dick Haymes, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. The popular music of my era was all of unrequited love, lost love, broken hearts. It was steeped in nostalgia, as if, young as we were, we were already doomed to lose whatever love we found—as if loss of love was preordained.

  But my first experience of so-called love and marriage was far from romantic. Comparing my actual romantic life with the romantic books I wrote was laughable. A joke.

  After Mother’s funeral, after Merry and Tina went to New York with Susan, and Jerry went back to Bridgeport, I took a job at the doughnut shop—which was far less demanding than working in Mother’s bakery. In fact, the doughnut shop was luxurious by comparison. I worked eight hours a day, five days a week, and when my shift ended, I enjoyed the long walk home, knowing I was free to read or study or listen to the radio, that I didn’t still have to knead dough or ice cakes or decorate cookies or scrub down the porch. I was much alone that summer and often lay in bed wide awake, thrilled and terrified by the new sensation of having a room to myself and being alone in a big house. But being alone, being free, opened my mind to think about things I had never considered before.

  Mother had had to mortgage the house when Father got sick. This upset her so much, it changed her posture: she never stood quite straight again. Like people in former ages, her family had prided itself on never being in debt, and she never stopped worrying about making the mortgage payment every month. It was more important to her even than food, which is why we so often had cake for dinner. And before she died, she had paid the mortgage off. It came to me that, sick as she was, she delayed her death until she could burn that note. I hated thinking this. I wished she’d kept herself alive to be with us and see us grow and enjoy us, not to pay off a mortgage—even though I know she did it for us.

  This kind of thinking reinforced my already bad character: contrary to everything I’d been taught by my schooling or by the culture around me, I came to believe that self-sacrifice was worthless and oppressive, and selfishness a positive good. No matter how I turned our history over in my mind, I could not reach any other conclusion.

  I kept such ideas to myself. I felt my sisters would have found them—and me—monstrous. Jerry would probably have stopped speaking to me. They all worshiped Mother and spoke of her as a saint. They would have pointed out, as Susan did, teary-eyed, that Mother’s worry and conscientiousness was responsible for our each getting $2,500 when the house was sold, that she had provided a head start for us, to set out in life. I wanted to tell them that I’d rather have had Momma. But I didn’t. Depressed as she was, Momma had been the only solid thing in my life. I missed her more than my sisters did, because I had had less anger at her than they (not that they admitted, or maybe even realized, it). I could love her because I’d gotten out of the bakery.

  Jerry had used some of his inheritance to buy a car, and he returned several times over the summer, to clean out the house and the piled-up junk in the basement and garage. He took the few decent pieces of furniture back with him, saying he’d keep them until we had our own places and could claim what we wanted.

  After the house was sold, I wrote the teachers at Millington High and told them about my inheritance, offering, in all gratitude, to repay them and relinquish future help. But they wrote back that I was now an orphan and in a most vulnerable position. So they would continue the monthly allowance, suggesting I put what they called my “tiny nest egg” in the bank. I was a little insulted at their calling a sum purchased by my mother’s lifeblood a tiny nest egg; it didn’t seem tiny to me. But I was also relieved. I thanked them and justified the situation by reminding myself that even with their help I had to work. I had to supplement their generous allowance in a time when textbooks cost as much as twelve dollars and a pair of shoes twenty dollars!

  At the end of August, the family gathered again, at Jerry’s wedding to Delia Urtnowski. The house had been sold and almost emptied, and my sisters had rid Susan’s apartment of its last roommate and were happily lodged together in New York, all with secretarial jobs. In the middle of September, I packed my bags. Jerry came back to Millington to see me off—he was such a sweetheart! After taking me to the train station, he would put the last bits of furniture out for the trash collectors and lock up the house for the final time. Alone, I boarded the train for Boston, where I would get the bus to school. I went back holding myself very still: I felt that moving fast or hard would break something delicate inside me.

  At school, I became even more aloof and superior than I had been. Everyone was used to me that way and ignored it. The truth was, I always felt like a spy—a mole—at Mount Holyoke. I was constantly expecting to be discovered for what I was: a person who knew nothing. Most of my classmates came from well-to-do or even rich families. I had nothing in common with them, and I knew they looked down on my manners and my clothes. I could tell. I felt vulnerable being so much younger than everyone else, such a baby: I had started college at an immature sixteen to everyone else’s eighteen. I was still babyish compared to the others. And now I felt utterly alone in the world.

  But I wasn’t. My family worried about me, and called or wrote regularly. They all invited me for holidays. It was decided that I’d go to Jerry’s for Thanksgiving and spend Christmas in New York. Jerry even came to pick me up and drive me to his house.

  Jerry and Delia had a five-room apartment on the second floor of a three-story clapboard house, which they entered by an outdoor wooden staircase. Delia called the second bedroom her sewing room; there I slept comfortably on a daybed, sharing the bathroom with only two other people—a luxury for me. Delia and Jerry were sweet and generous, but Bridgeport was boring. So was Delia’s family, with whom we spent Thanksgiving. In addition to Delia’s parents, there were her two brothers and their wives and kids, her sister and her husband and children. The women cooked all day long. In our family, we never really celebrated Thanksgiving; cooking was what we did on workdays, so on holidays we opened cans of Spam, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and peas to approximate the traditional meal. I was nearly thirty before I learned that some people enjoy cooking. The men sat in the Urtnowskis’ little living room—they called it the front room—crowded around a box with a glass front called television. It was boring too; it showed women on skates pushing each other around and fat men wrestling.

  During dinner—which I have to admit was delicious, full of things I’d never heard of before, like kielbasa, gołumbki, and jellied pigs feet—the men joined the women in talking about a host of people I didn’t know. The entire family was passionately interested in the smallest details about these people—what kind of car the husband drove, where they spent their vacations, where they were going for Thanksgiving dinner, and how many children they had. After dinner, the men stood up and walked straight back into the front room without the slightest shame. They went back to the glass box, leaving the mess for
the women to clean up, as if the women were their servants. I had never seen this kind of behavior before, except at Jerry’s house last night. It never happened in our family: we all helped, Jerry along with the rest of us. But not here. Jerry went into the living room with the men, and Delia into the kitchen with the women. The pressure was on me to go into the kitchen too, and for once I did the right thing—and spent the next hour simmering in outrage, listening in furious silence to the stupid conversation as I dried dish after dish.

  Finally, the women went into the sunroom to gossip some more about some more people I didn’t know. I would have given anything for a book. There were no books downstairs, so I sneaked upstairs to look around. I found a bookcase in a narrow hall leading to two small bedrooms and pulled out one strange title after another, until I found one whose cover claimed it was a best-seller. It was by a man called James Branch Cabell, unknown to me. I went into the bathroom and locked the door. But soon enough, someone had to use the toilet. Hiding the book under my sweater, I darted out and into one of the tiny bedrooms. There I happily remained until Delia came up and found me. She was shocked and angry. She said this was a rude way to repay her parents’ hospitality. She was very hurt and I felt terrible because she’d been so kind to me. She seemed to have forgiven me by the time I went back to school, but I vowed not to spend another Thanksgiving that way. Little did I know.

  I looked forward to Christmas and being with my sisters, who, unlike Delia, shared some of my badness. After all, they had not scrupled to drive Audrey out of the apartment. Their rooms were small, but each of them had her own, unlike at home. We had our old problem—four young women sharing a single bathroom—but remained good-natured, making jokes. Having been in Manhattan for almost six months, Merry and Tina acted like sophisticates, showing their greenhorn sister the great city, but it was soon obvious that they didn’t know the famous sites any better than I did. How could they? Their New York was a place where you took the bus or subway to work, walked down the block to the supermarket for food for dinner, cleaned up after dinner, straightened up the apartment, washed your clothes, set your hair, and did your nails. There was no glamour in their lives. So they too were awed by the huge Christmas tree and the skating rink and the fancy restaurant at Rockefeller Center. I determined—I took a silent vow—that someday I would eat there. We rode the Staten Island ferry and went to the Empire State Building and walked down Fifth Avenue (in those days a great fashion street), passing Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and the grand, forbidding public library at Forty-second Street.

  On the weekend, we went to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas show, featuring the Rockettes; just standing in line for two hours on a street broader and busier than any I’d ever seen before this week was enough to thrill me. We went to Chinatown for dinner, and I found the food, which I had never had before, odd but delicious; and to Little Italy, where I was introduced to pizza and saw many kinds of what we used to call spaghetti (my mother’s came from a can) but they called pasta. Along with the Urtnowskis’ Thanksgiving dinner, these meals were my first encounter with real food, which I had never known could be so delicious.

  I knew I was supposed to admire Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and Saint John the Divine and Grant’s Tomb, but I didn’t. What I loved was wandering through Greenwich Village. We stopped in a little Italian café to have some very strong coffee served in tiny cups. And one night my sisters and their friends took me to a place called Nick’s, where they drank beer and I drank Coke and we listened to Dixieland jazz. We heard Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman, and Bobby Hackett playing “At Sundown” and “California, Here I Come,” in ways I could hardly recognize. The music was full of joy and humor, yet profoundly sad at the same time. I fell in love with it. That was the best night of my entire life.

  I went back to school inspired: I had seen a brave new world, and now I knew what I wanted in life. That visit was the start of my New York dream, my first vision of how I wanted to live—not a life you settle for and endure, like poor Momma’s, but a desirable life. When I finished college, I would go to Manhattan. I would get a wonderful, interesting job and my own apartment and eat every night in Little Italy or Chinatown. I didn’t yet know what kind of job, but I figured I was smart enough (I held my own at Mount Holyoke); I was used to hard work; and I was determined. Everything in my culture assured me that these were the prerequisites for success.

  It was strange seeing all my sisters with boyfriends. Merry and Tina had never had boyfriends before. I was seventeen and a sophomore in college, but I’d never been out on a date. My sisters’ boyfriends, who had accompanied us to the Village and taken us to our Chinese and Italian dinners, were fun. These boys—well, I guess they were really men—seemed lighter-hearted, easier and jokier than girls…or, at least, than my sisters and me. There were no boys at Mount Holyoke, but the school held teas and parties, inviting boys from Harvard, Brown, and Yale. I didn’t go to them. I said boys bored me, but the truth was, I was frightened and shy. I knew my clothes were not right; I didn’t know how to dance. But after New York, I began to think it might be fun to meet boys, and I decided to attend a tea.

  Before risking it, I broke into my bank account and took out a hundred dollars. Early one Saturday, I took the bus to Boston and went to Filene’s Basement and bought a turquoise dress that looked like silk but wasn’t, a black wool coat, and black ballet slippers. The dress was in the current style, the New Look, which was wildly popular—long and slim, with a peplum. But my shoes were not stylish: the New Look required platform heels, which made me teeter like a drunk on ice, and I couldn’t walk in them.

  The first tea of the season was for Harvard boys. I entered the room with my roommate, Irmgard. The girls all wore dresses like mine (thank heavens!) and heels, with white gloves. I was mortified: not only were my shoes wrong, but I didn’t have white gloves. I wanted to turn around and leave, but Irmgard tugged on my arm. There really was tea, served from huge silver pots by two ladies with blue hair, sitting on couches at opposite sides of the room. You had to stand in line and wait, and then they asked you, Sugar? One lump or two? Cream or lemon?—things like that. I didn’t know what to ask for, so I got what Irmgard had, tea with cream and sugar, and I hated it. But of course, no one would know if you didn’t drink it.

  The boys were all at one end of the room, wearing suits and ties. The two camps looked each other over and tentatively began negotiations—a process eased by a few people who knew each other already. In time, everyone was coupled, talking volubly. I ended up with a boy whose father manufactured automobiles. Buicks, I think. When he told me his father made cars, I thought he meant he worked on an assembly line, and I was surprised. I didn’t think men who worked on assembly lines could afford Harvard. I thought maybe this boy was a scholarship student, like me, which made me feel easier with him. But I must have said something wrong, because the boy—I recall to this day that his name was Darnton (which didn’t seem the name an assembly line worker would have chosen)—gave me an angry, supercilious look and said, what did I think, that his father was a mechanic or something? On the contrary, he said, his father was the head of it. The company that made the cars. The boy seemed to think this made him irresistible and almost divine, as if he was literally a prince. I was mortified at my faux pas and also by his manner. I hadn’t encountered arrogance like this before. I started to feel dizzy and needed to go back to my room and lie down. But the boy was right about his irresistibility: the moment I left him, three girls moved in on him.

  I don’t know if such social events still occur. I doubt it; I think there are almost no single-sex schools now. Young people are much easier with each other and freer about—well, the word no one uttered in those days: sex. But my dizziness, which recurred at every coed social event I attended, arose from the tension induced in me by the ambient conflict between two different agendas, neither of which I understood or shared. I say this with the benefit of hindsight; I didn’t understand it then. My agen
da was fairly simple—to find a boy to have fun with the way my sisters seemed to have fun with their boyfriends. But that was not the dominant agenda of the room.

  As I now know, the girls were looking for love, marriage, and happiness ever after—i.e., Prince Charming. The boys were looking for nooky. Moreover, as I also now know, this doesn’t really change over the years. Some women may have periods in their lives when they, too, seek nooky, but the chances are they are hoping the nooky turns out to be attached to a Prince Charming who can become or replace a worn-out Prince husband or lover. And some men do reach a point where they allow themselves to acknowledge their yearning for happiness ever after and consider finding it in someone who is less than a perfect ten, maybe even less than a seven. But that’s rare in heterosexual men.

  At school, really rich girls and boys acted as if they had absolute rights. Girls seemed to expect lots of spending money; cashmere sweaters, pearls, and at least one fur jacket; to be picked up and driven around; and to feel taken care of—luxuriously if possible. Boys seemed to expect to own things, and every boy I met at Mount Holyoke transformed his experience into possession. Whether it was something he had done, like skiing or visits to England; or somebody or something he knew, like an author or mathematics; or something he really did own, like a car, everything was entered into some mysterious budget, in which a certain score denoted a winner.

  In fact, the boys had done things—they had skied, sailed, played tennis or golf, traveled abroad. But so had the girls—my roommate had even ridden in steeplechases—who didn’t treat the things they had done as possessions, items in a great scorekeeping, the way the boys did. Boys bragged about everything—their skiing, their sailing, their tennis, even their drinking. All of this overwhelmed me. Between my ignorance of the manners expected at such events and the paucity of my wardrobe and my pocketbook, I was uncomfortable enough to make excuses on the few occasions when a boy invited me to his school to a dance or to a football weekend.