My Husband and My Wives by Charles Rowan Beye

Author:Charles Rowan Beye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FIVE

“BE NICE TO EACH OTHER”

October 14, 1972. We are setting off for a neighbor’s bar mitzvah thinking ourselves to be very European after our year in Rome, myself especially imagining I could pass for Fellini, but at the temple the mother of the bar mitzvah boy will exclaim, “The one goyish family we invite, and they arrive looking like they just walked out of some shtetl!” (Jon Wagner)

By 1967 we were living in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburban part of greater Boston, in a large Edwardian house (sometimes I like to say mansion), with our children sleeping in four bedrooms on the second floor and we in a suite on the third. At my urging Penny had gone back to work, at first nervously and tentatively part-time. This was an enormous challenge to her, ten years dormant, away from new ideas and techniques while living in the barren, empty lands of suburbia. I had been adamant that she network through her former classmates still in the Boston area, despite their obvious head start on her in the profession. (“Do not be nervous, do not be embarrassed.”) She found some studio work, then got into a much more serious full-time job when I guaranteed to do the housework, shopping, all that sort of thing, with the abundant assistance of a cleaning woman who came in the afternoons and acted as chaperone on days when I could not make it home. In the days before she did so radical a revisionist rethinking of our life together, Penny used to say quite fervently, “I have to thank you for pushing me; I never would have had the nerve to do it myself.”

From our house in Brookline I could walk to work, and the children, we thought, would prosper intellectually because, according to the superintendent of schools, the school in the neighborhood into which we had moved had a student body that was over ninety-five percent Jewish. I was now the chairman of the department, but I kept a very large office on the third floor of our house and directed most of my operations from there, relying on my efficient secretary to hold the fort at the university. (I had discovered that, if you keep your office door closed and appear at only very specific moments, you can function perfectly well from the home, sort of like the performance of the Wizard of Oz behind the screen.) We had a large front hall flanked by a dining room and a living room, small parlors, a butler’s pantry, and a huge kitchen, enough space that I indulged my love of parties by inviting people to dinner as a kind of reflex, strangers, old friends, my children’s friends, always a weird mix, over which I presided, shouting and laughing in my usual manic fashion. It was nothing to me to have a sit-down dinner for twenty people twice a week. Nor, for that matter, to cook up a batch of pastries for the kids when they came home from school.

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