Back Then (6 page)

I worked hard at Wellesley, often falling asleep at my desk, and came up, for all the studying, with only the vaguest sense of accomplishment; most of the work seemed like busywork. I had learned how to write competently enough at Brearley and there I was, in freshman English, diagramming sentences. Mrs. Holmes, our young—and slightly distracted—teacher, demonstrated for us on the blackboard, turning a sentence into a kind of pictograph, with boxes above and below a middle line, and this, she explained, was supposed to help you recognize the assorted parts of speech. For what reason were we being asked to do this? If I knew that the subordinate clause went below the middle line, would that help me write a more fluid or arresting sentence? I doubted it. A substitute teacher came into the classroom one morning looking very sad and announced that Mrs. Holmes's husband had died over the weekend. How could that be? She was so young. A couple of weeks later Mrs. Holmes returned, looking very sad but went briskly on with the business at hand: diagramming more sentences. I daydreamed, watching through the window as the leaves of autumn turned from green to yellow to pink and orange—for a city girl, an alien sight.

I sat high up in an amphitheater listening to a balding professor of psychology gallop through the history of this relatively new academic discipline while two hundred or so freshmen and a sprinkling of sophomores took notes and tried to keep up with him. The teacher, a virulent baseball fan, talked more about the “Sox” and “the Series” than he did about Sigmund Freud. The professor was openly skeptical of any mind science that could not be verified by some instrument other than the mind itself and favored those experimenters who fiddled around with graphs and microscopes. I learned, in his class, to memorize quickly and think shallowly.

When I wasn't mooning about my boyfriend, Bert, back in New York, I was aware my brain was capable of doing new things. Inside my head were unpopped kernels; each time one of these new things heated sufficiently, a kernel would pop. But it wasn't until I took a couple of classes offered by the English department that I discovered I liked reading plays, novels, and poems far more than textbooks; by the end of my sophomore year I had decided to major in English.

Wellesley College was a ghetto designed to protect young ladies from the evils of city and/or modern life. Plentiful were the rules: no men—including brother and father—were allowed above the first floor of the dormitories. The nearest movie house was in the next town over, Wellesley Hills. The nearest bar was Ken's Roadhouse, far away, within reach only by car. There was no staying out overnight unless your parents sent a letter to the administration with specific dates and addresses: “My daughter Jane will be staying with thcoe Merriweather Cabots at 102 Beacon Street the night of April twelfth; she will return to the campus the following day.” You were allotted three late nights (until eleven-thirty) per month. But since the Wellesley campus was so far from Boston, and the last bus left there at ten-thirty, the only condition under which it seemed sensible to use them was if your boyfriend had a car. Most didn't. Drinking was verboten. During my sophomore year, when seven girls were discovered in a dorm room sharing one can of beer, all seven were suspended for two weeks. Sex? It was never mentioned by the authorities, even as occasional rumors of abortion riffled through the student population the way chicken pox did every spring.

Generally trusting me not to get into serious trouble, my parents had never laid down parietal rules. So I would have found Wellesley's multiple proscriptions laughable, if they hadn't reflected a basic mistrust of its students. Deans in charge acted as if, were we to be given a drop or two of freedom, we would immediately become unwed mothers, drug addicts, or prostitutes. The mistrust was misguided: the girls I lived and went to classes with were, for the most part, strictly brought up and determined not to offend anyone, especially those in authority. One night, when eight of us walked out of the dining hall because we were being served creamed canned asparagus on toast for dinner the third time that month, we were severely scolded by a dean, made to feel shame, and ordered never to do anything remotely like that again. We figured that if we did try it again we would, like the beer drinkers, be suspended.

After a summer traveling in Europe, I was certain that returning to Wellesley for my junior year would be like going back not so much in time as in age; I would become a little girl again. I was a ripe nineteen, swelling with focused desire and indistinct ambition. I had no fear of the psychic dark or unknown, wanted to meet as many men as I possibly could, although not sure I would ever meet anyone I wanted to eat breakfast with for the rest of my life; I was fickle as a rabbit. Mildred McIntosh, who had been headmistress at Brearley while I was there, was the new dean of Barnard College—I wrote to her in August and asked if Barnard could possibly take me as a commuting student starting in September. I received a prompt “of course.”

Once enrolled, I elected almost nothing but courses offered by the English department, bowing to requirements in science by taking geology, which I found unexpectedly fascinating: “New York is built upon Manhattan schist.” My parents acted as if I were not a daughter, but a houseguest, almost never questioning me about my extracurricular activities or imposing a curfew. I had the feeling, although she never said it outright, that my mother—whom I never called anything but “Mother”—would make life extremely difficult for me if I spent the entire night away from home, and I was willing to go along with this restriction, my part of the bargain for her attaching me to a very long leash. If she or my father (who was too busy to focus on my comings and goings) suspected I was trying out assorted partners and styles, that I spent most of my time in the Village hanging out with men identified in the press as hipsters, she kept her misgivings to herself, the two of us—again tacitly—recognizing that had she made a fuss and started a list of rules for me to follow, I would have disregarded them in the same way that I disregarded my father's middle-class attitudes toward money, class, and social status—all of which I found definitely not to my taste.

Rapture! I gamboled through Barnard, a garden of scholastic flowers, brilliant teachers—most of them female—courses that turned you inside out. You were permitted to take a course in your major across the street at Columbia if a similar course was not offered at Barnard. At Columbia, in an enormous amphitheater, Mark Van Doren delivered a series of lectures on the Hero, one of the first theme-driven courses. Marjorie Hope Nicholson, a large woman who wore long, voluminous, eggplant-colored dresses and looked like the Duchess in
Alice in Wonderland,
lectured for a semester on eighteenth-century criticism. I ate this up like a starving gourmand. Senior year, infected by Nicholson, I wrote an honors thesis on eighteenth-century satire, a project that grew out of an honors seminar given by Eleanor Rosenberg, a soft-spoken middle-aged woman with no particularly striking trait other than her mind.

At
Barnard I found friends of a libertarian spirit almost entirely nonexistent in the Wellesley student population. Most of my friends had, like me, transferred from other schools, drawn to New York for the same reason people have gravitated to provocative cities ever since Nineveh rose from the desert. I met Linda Schapiro in a class on William Blake. Linda had a powerful personality, mostly expressed by strong features, impeccable posture, and an air of certainty. One whiff of it and my mother, always concerned that I was too fragile to stand up for myself, warned me to avoid Linda, whom she seemed to think wanted to possess me, not as a lover but as a demon. Linda's boyfriend, Artie Collins, a Columbia student, worked part-time as a soda jerk at Schrafft's on Times Square. Saturday nights Linda and I would go to a movie and then head over to Schrafft's, where we sat at the counter and consumed ice cream sodas made for us by Artie, with extra scoops of ice cream. He wore a paper hat shaped like a boat and an apron tied around his waist. Linda was not only an honors student but she'd also had a short story accepted by
Mademoiselle
during her senior year. After weeks of squabbling with the magazine's fiction editor over whether or not to leave one of Linda's characters with an unshaven armpit, it finally came down to this: remove the hair or we won't publish your story. Mortified at having to cave, Linda removed the hair.

Anna-Maria Vendelos was South American, fullblown and lush like a tropical forest, with Marilyn Monroe curves, dark hair, a full mouth, a fluid south-of-the-border accent. Her boyfriend, Stanley, was a large, messy-looking, lumbering person somewhat her senior neither handsome nor sexy, but he obviously had something that satisfied Anna-Maria. None of her friends knew exactly what Stanley did for a living. He had published a few poems in literary magazines and at one point, down on his luck, sold some of his books to Anna-Maria's friends. I bought a Wallace Stevens first edition from him. Anna-Maria was smitten with Stanley and he, we thought, with her, but not long after we graduated I found out from someone who knew them both that Stanley had been and was still carrying on with Stella Adler, a former actress, known as much for her love of the flesh as for her acting classes.

The star of our small circle—we had not the slightest doubt that we were the hippest girls on campus—was Francine du Plessix, a girl so strikingly beautiful that she had modeled for
Vogue
, wearing a smart suit. Her aristocrat French father had died flying over Spain during its civil war. Her mother was a white Russian, Tatiana, who designed hats for Saks Fifth Avenue. Tatiana's husband, Alexander Lieberman, was art director for Condé Nast publications.

Francine was a transfer from Bryn Mawr, had been born and raised in France, and was both savvy and intellectually gifted. She seemed to me flawless, with the kind of social poise most people don't slip into until they're pushing middle age. Her mother and stepfather gave frequent parties, studded with stars like Salvador Dalí and John Gunther. The older folks stayed mainly in the living room of their house in the east seventies, while Francine and her friends hung out in the library, on whose shelves were clustered a selection of the world's priciest art books, most of them French and Swiss. During one party I watched, open-mouthed, as one of our friends lifted a small book from a shelf and slipped it into his pocket as casually as if it were a shell he'd found on the beach. Aware of being observed during the heist, he shrugged and met my eyes, making me an accomplice. Then he came over to me and explained, “They'll never miss it.”

We—Francine, Linda, Anna-Maria, a girl named Vera, and I—decided that we were just short of spectacular, miles smarter than our classmates, more worldly, capable of more fun and more profundity. Armed with a sense of our own superiority, we persuaded our English professor, Barry Ulanov, to tutor us once a week in the late afternoon, on the writing of poetry. We met every week for a year, at the end of which we produced a pamphlet of poems, published at Barnard's expense. Each of us contributed her favorite three poems. The best of the best were by Francine, who showed a genuine flair, while the rest of us had composed competent but uninspired verse. When I showed this little book to my father he said, “People would just as soon sit on a tack as read poetry,” having, no doubt, learned his lesson when, as a young press agent, he himself had contributed to a slight book of poems, called
The Broadway Anthology
. During our senior year Francine won the Putnam prize, given annually to the creative writer the English faculty deemed most worthy. You couldn't envy or begrudge Francine her success: she was too generous, lovable.

Lovable: men turned to jelly in her presence. It was a joke among the rest of us. She would meet a man and within a week or two he was her heart's slave. At least three men confided to me that they were insanely in love with her and would do anything to make her love them back. Could I help them? I told them, “Get in line.” Once or twice she passed one along to me; I was pale compared to Francine, and they soon lost interest.

Francine invited me to midday Thanksgiving dinner the year we graduated. I arrived at her house in time to see the cook, looking somewhat familiar and wearing an apron over a black cocktail dress, emerge from the ground-floor kitchen, carrying a silver platter on which sat a glistening turkey. “Marlene has prepared our dinner,” Francine told me as I took off my coat. The cook was Marlene Dietrich. “This is my friend,
Ahn
,” Francine said, introducing us. Dietrich gave me the briefest once-over and then, having failed to acknowledge me in any other discernible way, proceeded upstairs to the dining room with her burden. “Don't mind Marlene,” Francine said, “she's a bit rude. But she has a kind heart. Cooking is her passion.” I remained unconvinced: Dietrich continued to ignore me throughout the feast. I was upset by her rudeness. Could she, a German and probably anti-Semitic, have known that I was Jewish? But that didn't make sense: her host, Francine's stepfather, was not only Jewish but also had a Jewish nose. In my parents' house the famous were, if anything, oversolicitous to the little girl whose house they had been invited to: movie stars Madeleine Carroll and Edward G. Robinson, publisher Bennett Cerf, and others whose names blossomed regularly in the gossip columns of Walter Winchell and Leonard Lyons (some of them planted there by my father). They made a fuss over the bashful child with long braids and polished shoes, who was thrilled and detached at the same time, feeling, too, that she was just another ornament in her father's house, like one of his pieces of statuary or a painting. The fact that Marlene had acted as if she were royalty and I a filthy street urchin only underscored what I had long suspected, namely that celebrities are long on charm when they want something, short on grace when they don't. The turkey was delicious.