Double Play

Bobby

One of my most vivid memories is of my mother screaming for my father. His name was Gus and when she needed him she would elongate that single syllable in a way hard to describe. The emergency was rarely dire. She would scream for my father if there was a mouse, or if the dog threw up, or if something started to boil over on the stove, or the car wouldn’t start, or a zipper got stuck, or a window wouldn’t close, or a door wouldn’t open. He was always calm when he responded and always able to correct the thing and allow my mother to go right back to being what she was most of the time, which is to say bossy and full of herself. Often wrong, my father would sometimes remark, but never uncertain.

I always enjoyed these moments of my father’s domestic heroism, because so much of the time my mother was everywhere telling everyone what to do. And he was letting her as if he didn’t mind.

They had been married sixteen years in 1947 and I don’t recall ever seeing them fight. They would annoy one another occasionally. She would raise her finger and speak forcefully. He would turn and walk away with no expression. But the door would close very firmly behind him. It was unwise to make my mother mad. She didn’t get over it easily and would sulk and sigh for days.

My father went to work each morning in his suit and came home each evening. He would take off his suit jacket and his tie, roll back his cuffs, and have a drink while supper was cooking. We would eat at the kitchen table and both of them were attentive to what I had to say.

When I was small, and they went out together on Saturday nights, and my mother came home, bubbling with laughter and smelling deliciously of perfume and cocktails, she would sit on my bed, while my father took the babysitter home, and tell me what they’d done. At those moments she seemed unutterably glamorous and I felt deeply lucky that she was my mother.

By the time I was fifteen, I believe I knew one person who had been divorced, the mother of a friend, who I felt must feel deeply ashamed. I was always startled to hear any reference to it. Divorce happened in Hollywood. And it didn’t seem to matter. Filtered through the gossip prism, no hint of genuine feeling was attached to it. I knew nothing of adultery. I knew it existed because there was a commandment against it. But in practical terms it was impossible that someone’s wife, or mother, would have sexual intercourse with another man outside of marriage. Married sex was difficult enough.

For all of us, though some of us must have seen evidence to the contrary, it was assumed that marriage was a happy condition that lasted a lifetime.

And I never knew anyone who wasn’t eager to have his turn at it.