At the age of sixteen, an eleventh-grader, she had run away from her family’s home in Elmira-a runaway, that got me too. I’d never met a real one before. What did her father do? “Everything. Nothing. Handyman. Night watchman. Who remembers any more?” Her mother? “Kept house. Drank. Oh, Christ, Peter, I forgot them long ago. And they, me.” She ran off from Elmira to become-of course, an actress…but of all places, to Rochester. “What did I know?” she said, dismissing her innocence with a wave of the hand; a dead issue, that innocence. In Rochester she met Mezik (“married the brute-and then met his buddy”), and after three years of frustration with the second-raters in the local avant-garde theater group, switched to art school to become-an abstract painter. Following her divorce, she gave up painting-and the painter whose mistress she had become during her separation from Mezik and who had broken his “promise” to help get her in with his dealer in Detroit-and took harpsichord lessons while waiting on tables in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a town she’d heard had fewer types like Mezik in residence. There, just twenty-one, she married Walker of the Brattle Theater; five long years followed, of him and his Harvard boys. By the time we met, she had already tried wood sculpture in Greenwich Village (her teacher’s wife was fiercely jealous of her, so she dropped it) and was back “in the theater,” temporarily “in the production end”-that is, taking tickets and ushering at an off-Broadway theater on Christopher Street.
As I say, I believed all these reversals and recoveries, all this movement of hers, to be evidence of a game, audacious, and determined little spirit; and it was, it was. So too did this mess of history argue for a certain instability and lack of focus in her life. On the other hand, there was so much focus to my own, and always had been, that Maureen’s chaotic, daredevil background had a decidedly exotic and romantic appeal. She had been around-and around. I liked that idea; I hadn’t been anywhere really, not quite yet.
She was also something of a rough customer, and that was new to me too. At the time I took up with Maureen, I had for nearly a year been having a passionate affair with a college girl named Dina Dornbusch, a senior at Sarah Lawrence and the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Long Island. She was an ambitious literature and language major, and we met when she came to my basement apartment, along with four other coeds and a Mademoiselle editor, to interview me about my work. I had just gotten out of the army, and my “work” at the time consisted only of the six short stories that had been published in the quarterlies while I had been stationed in Frankfurt; that they had been read by these awed young girls was very nice to know. I already knew of course that they had been read with interest by New York book publishers and literary agents, for their numerous letters of inquiry had reached me in Germany, and upon returning to the U.S. after my discharge, I had chosen an agent and subsequently signed a publisher’s contract that provided me with a modest advance for the novel I was writing. But that I had, while serving as a draftee in Germany, achieved enough “fame” for these girls to settle on me as the young American writer they wished to interview for a feature in the magazine, well, needless to say, that opened up a fantasy or two in my head. To be sure, I talked to them about Flaubert, about Salinger, about Mann, about my experiences in Germany and how I thought I might put them to use in fiction, but nonetheless I was wondering throughout how to get the girl with the marvelous legs and the earnest questions to stay behind when the others left.
Oh, why did I forsake Dina Dombusch-for Maureen! Shall I tell you? Because Dina was still in college writing papers on “the technical perfection” of “Lycidas.” Because Dina listened to me so intently, was so much my student, taking my opinions for her own. Because Dina’s father gave us front-row seats to Broadway musicals that we had to go to see for fear of offending him. Because-yes, this is true, too; incredible, but true-because when Dina came in to visit me from school, practically all we did, from the moment she stepped into the doorway, was fuck. In short, because she was rich, pretty, protected, smart, sexy, adoring, young, vibrant, clever, confident, ambitious-that’s why I gave her up for Maureen! She was a girl still, who had just about everything. I, I decided at twenty-five, was beyond “that.” I wanted something called “a woman.”
At twenty-nine, with two unhappy marriages behind her, with no rich, doting father, no gorgeous clothes, and no future, Maureen seemed to me to have earned all that was implied by that noun; she was certainly the first person of her sex I had ever known intimately to be so completely adrift and on her own. “I’ve always been more or less in business for myself,” she’d told me at the party where we’d met-straight, unsentimental talk, and I liked it. With Dina, everybody seemed always to be in business for her. Likewise with myself.
Prior to Maureen, the closest I had come to a girl who had known real upheaval in her life was Grete, the student nurse in Frankfurt, whose family had been driven from Pomerania by the advancing Russian army. I used to be fascinated by whatever she could tell me about her experience of the war, but that turned out to be next to nothing. Only a child of eight when the war ended, all she could remember of it was living in the country with her brothers and sisters and her mother, on a farm where they had eggs to eat, animals to play with, and spelling and arithmetic to learn in the village school. She remembered that when the family, in flight in the spring of ‘45, finally ran into the American army, a GI had given her an orange; and on the farm sometimes, when the children were being particularly noisy, her mother used to put her hands up to her ears and say, “Children, quiet, quiet, you sound like a bunch of Jews.” But that was as much contact as she seemed to have had with the catastrophe of the century. This did not make it so simple for me as one might think, nor did I in turn make it easy for Grete. Our affair frequently bewildered her because of my moodiness, and when she then appeared to be innocent of what it was that had made me sullen or short-tempered, I became even more difficult. Of course, she had been only eight when the European war ended-nonetheless, I could never really believe that she was simply a big, sweet, good-natured, commonsensical eighteen-year-old girl who did not care very much that I was a dark Jew and she a blonde Aryan. This suspiciousness, and my self-conscious struggle with it, turned up in the affair between the two young lovers depicted in A Jewish Father.
What I liked, you see, was something taxing in my love affairs, something problematical and puzzling to keep the imagination going even while I was away from my books; I liked most being with young women who gave me something to think about, and not necessarily because we talked together about “ideas.”
So, Maureen was a rough customer-I thought about that. I wondered if I was “up”-nice word-to someone with her history and determination. It would seem by the way I hung in there that I decided that I at least ought to be. I had been up to Grete and the problems she raised for me, had I not? Why back away from difficulties, or disorder, or even turbulence-what was there to be afraid of? I honestly didn’t know.
Besides, for a very long time, the overwhelming difficulty-Maureen’s helplessness-was largely obscured by the fight in her and by the way in which she cast herself as the victim always of charlatans and ingrates, rather than as a person who hadn’t the faintest idea of the relationship of beginning, middle, and end. When she fought me, I was at first so busy fighting back I didn’t have time to see her defiance as the measure of her ineptitude and desperation. Till Maureen I had never even fought a man in anger-with my hands, that is; but I was much more combative at twenty-five than I am now and learned quickly enough how to disarm her of her favorite weapon, the spike of a high-heeled shoe. Eventually I came to realize that not even a good shaking such as parents administer to recalcitrant children was sufficient to stop her once she was on the warpath-it required a slap in the face to do that. “Just like Mezik!” screamed Maureen, dropping dramatically to the floor to cower before my violence (and pretending as best she could that it did not give her pleasure to have uncovered the brute in the high-minded young artist).