1592409245 (N) by Patricia Morrisroe

Author:Patricia Morrisroe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-25T22:00:00+00:00

Scott and I moved out of our cold-water flat into a one-bedroom on the corner of Bleecker and 10th streets. He composed songs on his upright piano, while I wrote the lyrics. I fantasized that we’d become a famous songwriting team, like Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager. When we weren’t going to jazz clubs, we’d have dinner with his father and stepmother at dimly lit Third Avenue restaurants with great hamburgers and lots of red wine.

One afternoon in midsummer, we were invited to see their new country home in Dutchess County. A classic white colonial on Quaker Hill, it was across the way from where the globe-trotting journalist Lowell Thomas lived. Thomas had traveled with T. E. Lawrence during World War I and had helped create the legend of Lawrence of Arabia.

Scott’s stepmother had collaborated with her decorator to make the house look artfully quaint, as if generations of one family had lived there and had passed down their prized heirlooms. Though the house was deeded with “lake rights,” the lake commission, in a move Scott’s father attributed to anti-Semitism, rescinded them, and he threatened to file a complaint with the state’s Human Rights Commission. In all the years I’d known Scott, I’d never heard anyone mention Judaism, and his father’s second wife was a Presbyterian. Nevertheless, Scott’s father expected us to go to the lake to “take a stand.” As someone who’d spent her summers at the seashore, I hated lakes, particularly ones in disputed waters.

“I think I’m just going to stay behind,” I told Scott.

“You can’t,” he said. “My father wants everybody there.”

We all piled into the car, including Scott’s nine-year-old stepsister, who was blond and looked just like her mother. Reaching the lake, we put down our blanket on the gravelly sand, while the other families gave us the WASP cold shoulder. Nobody smiled, waved, or even acknowledged our existence. Finally, Scott’s father announced, “Let’s go swimming!” Everybody turned around, and I imagined them saying, “Here come the Jews!” Technically, there were only two Jews, but I immediately felt guilty making that distinction. “Isn’t this great?” Scott’s father said as we mimed having fun. I fantasized that Scott, with his lifesaving certificate, would rescue a little platinum-haired kid, and the family would be so grateful they’d cede the lake rights. But we were the only ones in the water because it wasn’t even 70 degrees outside. There were people on the beach wearing Fair Isle sweaters. When the modest sun slipped behind the trees and I had goose bumps the size of eggs, we finally walked out of the lake, picked up the blanket, and drove back to the house.

“Why would your father want to go to a lake where he wasn’t wanted?” I asked Scott on the way home. He shrugged and turned up the car radio. As usual, his mother had the most succinct answer: “Because the stupid shithead bastard wants to be a WASP.”

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