My Latest Grievance, page 11
“How could you even ask?” said my father.
“Because he’s management. You hate management. And she’s your ex-wife, who’s getting more famous by the minute.”
“Do unto others . . . ,” said my father.
“Innocent until proven guilty,” said my mother.
Even those who weren’t majoring in the rumor, as I was, saw tête-à-têtes and penetrating eye contact in the dining hall, spoons stirring coffee dreamily in a manner that would make any reasonable eyewitness conclude that no due process was going to save the jobs of these Ten Commandments scofflaws.
Within a week, one manifestation of the alleged affair worked its way into my immediate family: Dr. Woodbury signed up to audit the seemingly irresistible Criminology and Penology.
No one had told me until I heard it at breakfast from a sociology major, obliging me to circle back to our apartment. “You think it’s a coincidence?” I demanded, standing at the foot of my parents’ bed. “Can you still say with a straight face that nothing’s going on?” Aviva sat up, her quilt clamped under her armpits—she and David slept in the nude—to announce that it was not a fait accompli. Dr. Woodbury had visited one class, hardly what one would call auditing. In fact, she’d appeal his regular attendance on the grounds that his managerial presence and note-taking constituted a form of intimidation.
I said, “This isn’t about intimidating you. This is about two students playing footsy.”
“Let’s be logical,” my father said. “If two people were having an affair, especially in this hothouse environment, would they advertise it by auditing the same course?”
My mother turned to him and said quietly, “Although, you’d have to admit, if these two are having an affair, the audacity is fascinating. He’s acting like a male peacock, strutting as if it’s a fulltime job and his raison d’être. I’m just wondering: What does he have to prove?”
“Why else would he want to audit a course that’s already half over?” I asked.
“His stated objective is some kind of three-pronged plan to rub elbows with students—in the classroom, in the dining hall, and by coaching a team,” my mother explained.
“And he just happened to pick your class?”
“As I said: to harass me.”
“To harass us,” my father corrected.
“What’s his Ph.D. in?” I asked.
“Classics,” said my mother.
I had been going to suggest that he sharpen his classroom skills by teaching, but there was a problem with his field: We didn’t offer Classics at Dewing. Our Math and English departments had only recently dropped the modifier “Business.” Psychology and Sociology in those days pretty much represented the school’s conversion from clerical to intellectual. I asked my father, “Do you agree with her? That it’s harassment rather than his crush on Laura Lee?”
He said, with a blush that went down his neck and with a truly dorky chuckle, “I was thinking it was because he has a crush on your mother!”
What daughter wants to see her parents in bed, knowing they don’t wear pajamas, knowing that as soon as she leaves for school they’ll have sex because it was Tuesday and their intertwined schedules gave them the morning off?
“We thought you’d already left for school,” said my mother.
“Aren’t you going to miss the bus?” asked my father.
“Yes. And if you had a car, you could drive me.”
“Don’t be bratty,” said my mother.
“Did they sit together?” I asked.
My mother said, “So far, in the one class he attended, no, they did not.”
I said, “It’s not a coed school. Maybe you could get rid of him on the grounds that he’s disturbing the class’s chemistry.”
My father said, “We’re keeping out of it. In our position, you pick your battles.” I saw movement under the covers, the smaller foot nudging the larger one, a prod that induced him to ask, “Do you think it’s more important to continue this conversation, or more important that you get to school on time?”
More tedious psychology at work. I picked up my books and said, “You’re allowed to say, ‘Go. You’re late. You’ll miss the bus.’”
They smiled uncertainly. I said, “Never mind. You’re doing fine.”
I would have been enjoying our own As the College Turns with more relish if it hadn’t been for the female Woodburys. Their public faces grew painfully dignified, highly uncharacteristic of the snappish Marietta. I knew she was pushing me away, and I went along with it. It was best, I thought, and kinder if I pretended that the honeymoon was over, that Marietta had found me lacking as a cool girl’s friend. Mrs. Woodbury phased me out of the car-pool when rain turned to snow in November. As a transplant from the south, she explained, winter driving scared her. I said, “I understand completely. In fact, it’s better if I take the bus and get to school a little earlier.”
“Marietta likes to walk,” she said. “Even in bad weather.”
When the silver-mauve Cadillac passed me on its future trips to Brookline High, Marietta slouching in the front seat, I pretended to be engaged in animated popularity with whoever was standing next to me. Left on the curb, I could have waved somberly, but I thought it was the least I could do—to fake bus-stop contentment—for the victims of the humiliating campus romance I might have triggered.
We were losing Mrs. Woodbury to a lower and lower profile, sad for a college that had lived under a no-frills bachelor administration for a decade and a half. Mrs. Woodbury’s First Lady bearing didn’t disappear altogether, but it sagged. Where there had once been imported hors d’oeuvres on polished silver trays, now there were cubes of Jarlsburg alongside clumps of grapes. The strain of being cuckolded manifested itself in weight loss. She began to look drawn, then thin, then emaciated by the time the jig was up. We who were watching from the cavalier sidelines didn’t take the disturbance as seriously as we should have. What did we sixteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds know of true, debilitating distress? We onlookers had seen heartbreak of the televised and cinematic kind. Bad behavior was for watching and enjoying, for dissecting and disdaining. We were, for a long time, entertained.
What proved to be unique and publishable about the most famous affair in the history of the college—later my parents squeezed two papers out of the mess—was the willful indiscretion of the principals. Where was the classic sneaking around? The shame and the guilt? I still marvel over it today: that Laura Lee seemed proud of her conquest, and her paramour did his share of the preening. At sixteen, I thought someone like me, someone who didn’t need months and years of note-taking in order to draw a conclusion, should speak up. After all, who besides Mrs. Woodbury was going to confront the truth? And who among the faculty, for reasons of various past indiscretions, would want to throw the first stone?
With only a two-burner stove and limited cookware, we weren’t a family who entertained. Dinner parties were out of the question, but I thought, in the face of a campus crisis, we could put candles on the kitchen table and drag an extra chair in from the smoker.
I chose a Saturday on which my parents had an executive committee meeting of the Dewing Society of Professors, took the bus to Star Market, bought a good-sized chicken, some potatoes, some lettuce, and a pint of fancy ice cream.
David and Aviva weren’t pleased to hear that company was coming at seven, but I was firm: Yes, they were picking their battles and keeping their distance, but did they want to put themselves through another presidential search? Laura Lee needed a talking-to. Grandma would want us to step in. We could end up with someone with an anti-union animus, someone opposed to three people living in a dorm apartment meant for one.
“You should have asked us,” they said. “Don’t we run this family democratically?”
My parents dropped their worn leather satchels and flopped onto kitchen chairs. “Did you stop to think that we are hardly the two people Laura Lee would want to take advice from on the subject of the sacredness of marriage?” my father asked.
“Yes, I did. But who else is going to sit her down and tell the truth?”
“Which is what?” asked my mother.
“That he’ll wake up one morning embarrassed, and not only will he break up with her, but he’ll fire her. He won’t want her as a reminder, and his wife will insist they get rid of her.”
“Rather sophisticated analysis,” my mother said to my father. “And compassionate.”
“Astute, even,” he agreed.
“And then who will write her a reference? She’ll be back on the dole,” I pointed out. “Yours. I’ll have to go to Dewing because my tuition will go to alimony.”
“Gross exaggeration,” said my father.
“And she accepted this invitation of yours?” my mother asked.
I said, “Yes, she did. She seemed happy to be invited.”
“What are we serving?” my mother asked.
I told her that the man behind the meat counter at Star Market had told me how to roast a chicken and when to take it out of the oven. Did we own paprika?
“I could have told you how to cook a chicken,” my mother said.
“She’s roasted a lot of chickens in her day,” my father said proudly.
“It’s not that hard,” I said. “I think you could have showed me when I was, like, six.”
“I’m guessing your mother felt it would have been a sexist thing to do—to teach a daughter how to roast a chicken as if that were a mother’s duty and a daughter’s role.”
My mother nodded appreciatively. “Now I’m thinking that if we had had a son, we’d want him to know how to cook and iron and sew buttons on his shirts. Whereas with a daughter, we didn’t want to send the mixed message, ‘Strive and learn and achieve, but you won’t be a truly fulfilled woman unless you can roast the perfect chicken.’”
Blah blah blah. We, we, we. No wonder I was raising myself.
One three-pound chicken and one pint of mint chocolate chip does not stretch five ways. Laura Lee, my parents and I, and her uninvited dinner date, Father Ralph, wearing a navy blue blazer and an ascot at the neck of his perfectly ironed oxford blue shirt, politely ate the first course of chicken and the emergency backup of pot roast and succotash imported from Curran Hall.
A stranger’s presence made the discussion of anything substantive more difficult, so we talked about the downward spiral of his job. My parents adjusted happily. They debriefed Father Ralph with zeal, since his complaints were job-related. What was the Church analogue of tenure? What about seniority? Benefits? Retirement?
The problem, according to plain-clothed Ralph, was that the bishop maintained that his directives about hours, wages, and working conditions came from God.
I laughed, the only one. Father Ralph asked, “Why is that funny, child?”
“She wasn’t raised with any religion,” explained Laura Lee.
“I’m Jewish,” said Aviva. “And David is a nonpracticing Presbyterian.”
“We’re agnostic human secularists,” said my father.
I pointed at Laura Lee and my father, back and forth a few times for emphasis. “These two used to be married,” I heard myself say.
“I know,” said Father Ralph.
As my parents glared, I protested, “He’s a priest! He’s not allowed to repeat anything he hears in confession, right?”
“That’s right,” said Father Ralph.
“This is hardly confession,” said my mother.
“I’ve never understood what the big secret is,” said Laura Lee. “Modern people like us? It seems utterly Victorian.”
“Was it unilateral?” I asked.
“Was what unilateral?”
“The decision to keep it a secret?”
“More or less,” said my father.
“Your parents decided. I was the new girl in town,” said Laura Lee, “and they were the experts who believed that having an ex-wife on campus was going to be hard for you.”
I prodded the chicken carcass with the serving fork and was rewarded with a strand of dark meat. “Anyone want this?”
“It’s yours,” Laura Lee said. “I haven’t had much of an appetite lately.”
“It was delicious,” said Father Ralph.
“Why was it going to be hard for me?” I asked.
“Gossip,” said my mother. “You know this place is first and foremost a rumor mill.”
“But it’s not a rumor: They were married and now they’re not. He married you, and you had me. Isn’t that like every family in America?”
“Heaven forbid,” murmured Father Ralph.
We all looked at him. He said, “I didn’t mean that as a personal rebuke. I said it as a pre–Vatican II Catholic.”
“It wouldn’t have lasted,” said Laura Lee. “And this may be as good a time as any for me to say that I’ve made peace with the past. Frederica should know that her father and I would not be together today, even if Aviva hadn’t jump-started the process.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Children,” she said simply. “He wanted them and I couldn’t have them.”
“Laura Lee—” said my father.
“Couldn’t, wouldn’t . . . not much difference in the end if the woman doesn’t feel she’s equipped to be a mother,” said Laura Lee.
In normal families, that declaration would have been met with a self-conscious silence, whereas in mine, even in front of a celibate dinner guest and a minor, we had to explore its nuances.
“It wasn’t a question of infertility, was it?” my mother asked.
Laura Lee smiled. “Do you mean infrequency? Because I was starting to wonder if David was all that interested in me. Or women in general. Strictly from that point of view, it was almost a relief to know he was having an affair.”
Was this my fault? Had bringing up the divorce led us to this embarrassing topic? Or had I forgotten that all discussions around the Hatch table were embarrassing? I looked at Father Ralph. His expression was so purposefully neutral and pious that I had the urge to puncture it.
“Are you and Laura Lee dating?” I asked him.
No one gasped or scolded me. “Priests don’t date,” he said. “I think everyone knows that.”
“Ralph and I are just friends,” said Laura Lee.
“What about you and President Woodbury?” I asked her.
I half expected that she would sputter, “Dr. Woodbury and I? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But instead she answered, head held high and eyes glistening, “You four are the only friends I have in this city. It’s why I brought Ralph tonight, so we could talk. I mean, really talk. The way Frederica and I do.”
I had been sliding my chair away from the table, about to excuse myself as a mere teenager at the threshold of a seriously adult powwow, until my not-quite-stepmother fingered me as her number one confidante.
“Before you speak, please know that you’re putting us in a rather uncomfortable position,” my father began.
“Bullshit,” said Laura Lee. “You and your wife spend half your waking hours listening to other people’s problems. I’d like to know what goes on at Dewing that you don’t know about.”
“That’s true, Dad,” I said.
“Perhaps Dr. Hatch meant the uncomfortable position of listening to personal problems rather than personnel problems, which generally don’t involve the commission of mortal sins,” added Father Ralph.
His was just the right note of religious condescension to drive Aviva and David into the ally camp. Minus a gavel, my mother rapped her knuckles on the bare pine of the table. “Let’s hear from Laura Lee now,” she said.
15
All Ears
GRACE WOODBURY, Laura Lee repeated earnestly and pseudoscientifically, had been for the full term of the marriage—sorry, no other word—“frigid.” Hence, Eric’s inevitable turning to a woman who could offer him what he’d long been denied.
My mother said, “‘Frigid’ isn’t a medical diagnosis, Laura Lee. It’s a word that men use to describe their wives to their mistresses. I hope you didn’t believe him.”
Laura Lee asked, “Is it all right to speak in this vein in front of Frederica?”
I said, “They like it when every conversation contains a little sex education.”
Father Ralph said, “What a different world we live in now. My parents wouldn’t even spell the word ‘sex’ in front of us, let alone tolerate it coming from the mouth of one of their children.”
“It’s our fault,” said my mother. “We treat her like an equal, which backfires on a daily basis.”
“You should have had a bunch of kids,” I said. “Then we’d be an old-fashioned family with no back talk.”
“He grew up in a big Catholic family,” said Laura Lee.
“How big?” I asked.
“Eight children.”
“How many girls and how many boys?” I asked.
“She’s fascinated by big families,” my mother said.
Laura Lee smiled. “Only children. I was exactly the same way.”
“Where were you in the lineup?” I asked Father Ralph.
“Third child, oldest son.”
“And you know what that means,” said Laura Lee.
My mother said, “You’re Ralph Junior?”
“What I meant was he had virtually no choice except to become a priest. Nothing else would do for the oldest son of a devout family. Nothing made them prouder.”
“But what did the oldest son want to do?” asked my father.
“Me?” asked Father Ralph.
My father nodded.
“Please his parents. Not to mention his grandparents and two aunts who were nuns.”
“Didn’t you have a guidance counselor?” I asked.
“They were priests,” said Father Ralph. “I went to Catholic schools my whole life.”
Laura Lee, in a voice that managed to convey enough about him, asked if we had tea bags.
My father rose to fill the kettle and to clear the dinner plates.
“He never used to be a help around the house,” Laura Lee murmured.
