I’m not sure exactly when I’ll be back in Boston. Mom plans to leave here in a few weeks, and then she will go back to Rutledge. It’s her plan to rent the house after the divorce and find a small apartment in New York. It will be very difficult for her to live in Rutledge with the shame of everyone knowing you left her for another woman. Well, that will pass, I suppose. Still, it will be better for her to be in New York, and maybe I’ll go back when she does, and try to help her find an apartment. Or maybe I’ll run up to San Francisco first to see my friend Barbara Duggan, who is back from Europe and who is now living with this very nice boy she met in London. Anyway, there are a lot of options open. Please call me out here to say hello, and at the same time, if there’s anything you might feel like saying to Mom, you could do it then. Shanti.
Your daughter,
April 20, 1971
Dear Lissie:
I’m sending this to you at the address you gave me when you called from San Francisco, and I’m hoping you’re still out there with Barbara and haven’t yet started east. I am writing to tell you that the lawyers feel a settlement won’t be reached until next month sometime, but at least your mother and I have agreed that one of us will go down immediately afterward to Haiti or the Dominican Republic for what is virtually an overnight decree.
Considering the fact that Joanna and I plan to get married as soon after that as we can (we’re hoping it will be June sometime), I really think it is time you met. Do you think you will be back by the first of May? We would love to have you spend the weekend with us. Please say yes, Lissie, as this is very important to me.
Love,
May 6, 1971
Dear Dad,
I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch with you, especially about your invitation to come see you last week, but there were things I had to work out, and I decided to come here to Boston instead, which has always been a city that’s been good to me, and try to make some sense of what has happened to my life. I do have a life of my own, you know, and whereas I can understand how important it must have seemed to you for me to meet the woman you plan to marry, it was a bit more important that I come here instead to work out my own future, which has been thrown into such a turmoil by changes I had no part in making, just as Mom’s future has been.
Mom told me on the phone last week that she expects to be signing the separation agreement on the twentieth, and will be going down to Haiti that weekend to get the divorce. She tells me this is the way she wants it, her going down there instead of you. I guess this is her way of taking the curse off the shame you have caused her. Well, this seems a pretty abrupt way of ending a twenty-year marriage, don’t you think, Dad? I still hope you know what you’re doing with your own life and with the lives of those who love you deeply.
I don’t think I’ll be coming down to New York anytime soon, though I may be going to Rutledge to spend some time with Mom after she gets back from Haiti. I have a feeling she is going to need me. Please do not hesitate to write to me at the address on the envelope, which is where I expect to be for the next couple of months. I want you to know that I love you and think about you often. Keep the good faith.
Your daughter,
P.S. The address is Sparky’s new one. I am still living with him. I know you never liked him, Dad, but I want you to know that I plan to continue our relationship. He is the most meaningful person in my life just now.
It wasn’t until the beginning of June that she went to meet the woman her father was about to marry. She went to the New York apartment only because the wedding had been set for the end of the month, and she knew she would have to attend, and felt it might be less awkward if she met Joanna Berkowitz beforehand. Otherwise, she had no interest whatever in the woman her father had chosen to replace her mother.
Late afternoon sunlight reflected in the upper-story windows of the brownstones as she walked up East Sixty-fifth Street, searching for the address her father had given her on the phone two days earlier. She was wearing a wide flapping tent dress printed with a paisley design, and knee-length red socks tucked into workman’s high-topped shoes. When she’d left Boston early this morning, her landlady said, “You look like Katrinka, miss.” She didn’t know who Katrinka was, but the landlady was smiling so she took it for a compliment.
She found the address in the middle of the block, a three-story brownstone with green drapes showing in the ground-floor windows. She took a deep breath, climbed the front steps to a door the same color as the drapes, and rang the brass bell set into the frame. She could hear nothing beyond the thick front door. She rang the bell again, and almost before she took her finger off the pushbutton, the door jerked open.
The woman standing there, smiling out at her, was truly beautiful, taller even than Lissie was, with straight blond hair falling to her shoulders and framing an oval face with lovely blue eyes and a patrician nose sprinkled with freckles that spilled over onto one cheek. Extending both hands to her, smiling radiantly, she said, “Lissie? Please come in,” and took Lissie’s hand between both her own, and urged her gently into a living room dominated by a huge fireplace. Her father was sitting in a chair near the hearth. He got to his feet at once. Smiling, he came toward Lissie.
They hugged. He kissed her on the cheek, she returned his kisses. They hugged again. She broke away gently and he went to hang her shoulder bag on a wall peg inside the front door. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion, her father turning from where he’d hung the bag, June sunlight streaming through the frosted glass panel above the front door, touching his face and his hands, his words coming from his mouth as though at a wrong speed on a broken turntable, he was asking her if she wanted anything to drink and the woman behind him, the beautiful woman named Joanna was saying Lissie might prefer some pot instead, would you like some pot, Liss?
“No, thanks,” Lissie said.
“Something to drink then?” her father said.
“If you have some Scotch...”
“Yes, sure.”
“With a little soda.”
As her father went out to mix the drink, she marveled that only a moment ago this beautiful woman with whom she was now alone had offered her grass! Did her father smoke grass in the privacy of his little Blond Bimbo’s boudoir? That was what her mother called Joanna: “Your father’s Little Blond Bimbo.”
“How was the weather up in Boston?” Joanna asked.
“Hot,” Lissie said. Oh, great, she thought, we’re going to talk about the weather. “This is a nice place,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Have you got the whole house, or what?”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “Dining room, kitchen and guest room on the second floor, our bedroom on the third.”